Seeking Out "Next Practices," the Next Generation of Best Practices

Improve your recruiting by developing a process for identifying next-generation best practices

Many in HR proclaim a desire to be more strategic, yet most doom themselves by not acting any differently than everyone else. A clear indication of this can be seen in the speed by which documented best practices are mimicked and improved. Benchmarking has become a common practice in the profession of recruiting, which most organizations use to identify what must be done to emulate those who do something better. Unfortunately, most stop there with emulation, and that may doom them to mediocrity forever.

The business world once moved at a significantly slower pace, a pace that made benchmarking and emulating best practices prudent activities. However, things no longer move so slowly! By the time firms benchmark a best practice today, the situation that warranted the development or implementation of the best practice might have changed or may no longer be present. Instead of systematizing an effort to consistently follow the leader and mimic the soon-to-be-obsolete practices of others, I recommend adopting a proactive approach, one in which you develop your own "next generation" of best practices. I call these "next practices."

Next Practice Development Is More Common in Other Business Functions

Next practice development isn't about making something more efficient; instead, it is about a fundamental transformation of the core business activity. For example, Apple has long been a participant in the computer industry, in which the core best practices are predominately focused on refinement of manufacturing technologies that enable computers to do more. While Apple could have easily jumped on the performance bandwagon, it instead opted to develop next practices in the areas of product packaging and service.

With the introduction of the iMac, Apple demonstrated that computers don't have to be beige and gray boxes. With the introduction of the iPod and iMusic service, Apple demonstrated that product companies can develop sustainable long-term relationships with consumers. It abandoned efforts to compete on the nature of performance, long a computer-industry challenge, and reinvented the game with best practices that were unique to its business.

Next Practices Help You Create the Future

Best practices only allow you to do what you are currently doing a little better, while next practices increase your organization's capability to do things that it could never have done before. By jumping a level up to next practices, you're taking a giant step in that you are actually creating your future recruiting capabilities, rather than relying on the innovation of others.

Examples of Next Practices

If you are not sure of the distinction between best and next practices, here are some examples in several HR areas:

Practice Area: College Recruiting

• Average practice: Visit the top schools within your state.
• Best practice: Visit the top 10 schools in the U.S.
• Next practice: Recruit remotely (without having to visit) from the best schools around the world.

Practice Area: Next Job Hiring

• Average practice: Hire individuals who have the skills that are currently needed by "this manager."
• Best practice: Hire individuals who have the skills for both this and the next-level-up job (that the individual will likely be promoted to in the next few years).
• Next practice: Hire individuals who can do both this and the next job but also have the capabilities of reskilling rapidly into skill and competency areas that have yet to be identified.

Practice Area: Global Hiring

• Average practice: Hire the best from India and China, and bring them to America.
• Best practice: Hire the best in India and China and then move operations to India and China.
• Next practice: Find the very best performers in every individual country around the world and let them work remotely in their home countries.

Practice Area: Recruiting Metrics

• Average practice: Cost per hire.
• Best practice: Measure quality of hire through performance appraisal scores.
• Next practice: Calculate the actual dollar impact on business results of each key hire.

Practice Area: Corporate Website

• Average practice: Post information on it, like it was a paper bulletin board.
• Best practice: Also include "sales" elements like streaming video and individual employee profiles.
• Next practice: Provide the capability to morph or mass-customize the information provided to visitors, so that it provides the right tailored information for this individual candidate, based on the background and interest profile he or she provided.

Practice Area: Recruiting Focus and Prioritization

• Average practice: Recruiters respond to all jobs equally.
• Best practice: Prioritize requisitions based on the potential business impact of that position.
• Next practice: In addition, assign recruiters, recruiting budget, and the appropriate sourcing approach, based on the actual success rates of recent hires in this targeted position.

Practice Area: Candidate Assessment

• Average practice: Conduct behavioral interviews with all candidates.
• Best practice: Add an online test as the first screen.
• Next practice: Replace the test with an online video simulation developed for this job, which both excites and more effectively assesses the candidate's skills, weaknesses, and capabilities.

The Process for Identifying Next Practices

Predicting which HR practices will become obsolete and what will be needed to supplant them in the future is obviously more difficult than merely calling up a great company and asking it what it's doing now. However, the impacts are significantly greater on the business, so it's definitely worth the effort.

The first step is to do some reading in the area of business change so that you can learn how to identify precursors to change points. Unfortunately, there are but a few authors who talk about what in business is known as "inflection points," where everything in a particular product line or industry changes. Start by reading Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove and the current best-seller, The World is Flat. Then, start reading forecasting articles in publications like BusinessWeek, Fortune, The Economist, Business 2.0, Workforce Management, and the McKinsey Quarterly. Individuals who might help you identify upcoming inflection points include individuals in product development, R&D, and strategic planning.

After you identify these inflection points where business will change dramatically, the next step is to identify which practices in recruiting and HR will no longer support the direction of the company post-change.

It's important to remember there are almost always precursors or warning signs that alert you to upcoming inflection points. These precursors are alerts that recruiting and HR must prepare for change by beginning to develop the appropriate next practice so that HR is adapting its own next practices at the same time and speed as the rest of the business. For example, if product design implemented changes to dramatically reduce time-to-market so that products were introduced once a quarter rather than once a year, workforce allocation models would obviously need to change. Speed of hiring might need to increase to match the firm's increased speed of product development.

Other approaches you might consider include reading CEO speeches and articles written by key industry thought leaders who have a track record of forecasting inflection points. Look for individuals who think outside the box and are consistently unhappy with current approaches.

The next stage of the process involves setting aside some time to think about the future. This thinking can be stimulated with if–then and what–if exercises that focus on what might soon become obsolete. Part of the process should also be to develop rules that prohibit looking at solutions that can only help you improve by 5-10%. Next-practice thinking, in essence, demands that you reject all solutions that don't allow you to improve by a quantum amount of, say, 25%. This quantum improvement rate is the key differentiator between best practices and next practices. If you want to make a quantum jump in business or recruiting, you simply must have to have tools and strategies that allow you to make a 25-50% improvement, all within a relatively short period of time. If you are really bold, just assume that every process must improve by, say, 25% (at the same rate of change in your company's product line) each and every year.

You can also seek out any developing next practices by networking with only the top firms that have been in the forefront of developing previous next practices. Instead of asking about current best practices, ask them what practices they are considering or developing for the future. Of course, they will be reluctant to share future plans, so you'll need to have done your own thinking and propose a trade of your next practice for theirs. Incidentally, you can't do this with 99% of the firms in your industry because most firms have never developed a process to begin thinking about next practices.

The final step, if your budget allows, is to consult with out-of-the-box thought leaders to help validate your thinking. Efforts should be made to network with individuals who have demonstrated their ability to accurately predict inflection points and the related next practices in recruiting and HR. Thought leaders like Kevin Wheeler, Michael McNeal, Michael Homula, Dan Hilbert, and even myself come to mind. Sometimes, these individuals can shock your team into thinking ahead.

Conclusion

If you want to become a leader in developing next practices, the first thing you need is courage. Think of all the sea captains who told Columbus he was nuts about his next practice! It takes tremendous courage to constantly argue that your firm's best practices could ever become obsolete. Another wise move is to commit yourself to becoming an expert in business change, so that you can begin to identify the precursors to business change. Finally, develop a mindset that assumes that every major practice is holding back your firm and the recruiting function. However, if you are satisfied with a 3% rate of change, don't bother with next-practice thinking. It's only for those that want to be first every time and to win big! Any questions?

http://www.ere.net/articles/db/CE230AEF1D754B8B8D5138917A95BC2E.asp

College Recruiting 2010, Part 2

Are you trying to attract Generation Y using the methods of the past?

In Part 1 of this article series, I discussed how Generation Y (or the "Millenniums") views the world differently than do Generation Xers or the Baby Boomers. In particular, they are more comfortable with technology and with using it to build and carry on relationships and communicate.

Technology Pervades Their Lives

Professors use the Internet to conduct classes, carry on discussions, collect homework, and assign research. Tools such as Friendster and LinkedIn offer ways to find friends, get dates, and meet like-minded people.

Websites such as MySpace offer this generation a place to express their creativity and build friendships. Virtually 100 percent of this generation has a cell phone, and a majority has an iPod or other MP3 player. They are the most technically capable and technically empowered generation to have ever lived. Their primary source of entertainment and information comes from the Internet.

How They Want To Be Recruited

I know that recent surveys by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, as well as other institutions, have indicated that current college students want face-to-face recruiting and to meet recruiters and hiring managers on campus. The implication is that they do not want to be recruited by technology. My belief is that the students who answered the survey may have been giving the answers they think recruiters want.

Many of my own students have told me that they know recruiters are not comfortable using technology, and many believe they will lower their chances of finding a job if they don't go to information sessions and sign up for interviews at the career placement center.

On the other hand, many students also are hungry for the depth of information and the interaction that a well-designed website can offer. Retailology, the Federated Department Store recruiting website, is an example. It attracts thousands of interested students and is a major source of candidates. Likewise, the websites at Deloitte and Enterprise are powerful tools for recruiting college students and recent graduates. In fact, every company that I have talked to that has a good recruiting website says that it attracts excellent students in significant numbers.

The problem is that most of us are more comfortable doing what we've always done and we delude ourselves that this is also what the students want. Students are coached by well-meaning but out-of-date parents, and obviously will embrace whatever they see is going to get them a job.

One of the students I spoke with said, "If they want me to come to an interview, I'll go. I just want a job. But if they offered me an opportunity to interview virtually, I would do it. My biggest fear is that if I don't actually get to talk face to face, I may not really be considered."

Develop 4G Websites

Most recruiting websites, whether aimed at college students or others, are simple and one-dimensional. They present information and, in the best cases, provide some broad information about careers, work experiences, and corporate culture. They may also collect information about candidates so that a recruiter can follow up. Among the best of these are those of Deloitte and Federated, as well as Boston Consulting Group.

These sites provide a wealth of information, but they don't actively attract college students. They rely on a student coming to them. They also do not offer interactivity that helps engage and lead a candidate through the process, and they do not provide any incentive to stay or return to the site.

The emerging fourth-generation websites do all of this. These sites are built more like an onion, with layers of information, rather than like an organizational chart with boxes and branches. There is an excellent white paper called "4G Web Strategy" available for free. This paper describes the concept of a fourth-generation website for a marketing firm. I believe it can be entirely adapted to recruiting.

By adding interactive processes, inviting candidates to give you permission to market to them, and when they meet basic qualifications inviting them into an "inner circle" or "tribe" of select candidates, you create an affiliation with your organization that can be expanded and grown over time. By getting a student into this inner circle early in her college career, you have the opportunity to use technology to inform and recruit her over several semesters. After that experience, it should be much easier to recruit them to a regular position.

Focus on Opportunities, not Careers

This is a generation that responds to variety and multitasking. These are young people who routinely (for good or bad) watch television, talk on their cell phones, do their homework, and chat with friends at the same time. One of the skills they have acquired over the years is the ability to process more than one channel at a time. They have also been occupied all the time with sports, school, hobbies, and other events. They expect to be stimulated and kept busy all the time. The biggest fear many of them have is that they will be bored.

When it comes to the workplace, they expect to be just as busy. A Starbucks barista is a good example. In one day they may work the cash register, make special drinks, arrange products in the shelves, help sell a customer a coffee maker, entertain customers, invite people to apply for jobs, and even do on-the-spot job interviews. Gen Y is attracted by this kind of diverse work experience. Even if the positions you have are more traditional, these young people respond to the possibility of transfers internally or the ability to acquire new skills through internal or external training programs.

These is much less focus on having a career — meaning a linear progression up the ranks — and instead a focus on developing a breadth of experience and a basket of skills.

Make Recruiting a Process, not an Event

Almost always, organizations approach recruiting as a one-time or "few-time" event. Recruiters advertise that they are coming to a particular campus, arrive, and hold a few info sessions (often dragging alumni along), set up short campus interviews, and then invite a handful for more extensive assessment. This has been the way it's done for the past 50 years.

The newer and more successful approach will be to establish an online relationship early in the student's studies. This might be done by offering professors opportunities to assign students to virtual projects or to gather information from a website you have prepared. Once they come to your website, you can ask for permission to send them information and, over several months, establish a relationship. The ideas discussed above for a 4G website are embodied in this process-approach to recruiting. The info sessions become online, interactive learning modules that can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can add blogs and chat rooms and create a place where students want to return often.

The campus interviews can still happen, but they'll be scheduled in advance by the students and can be preceded by a dinner or other more meaningful event, rather than an info session with free cheese.

Tomorrow's college recruiting is here today for those with the foresight and courage to be pioneers. Sure, it may take a while to convince students that you are serious and that this will really result in a job offer. But once you have convinced and hired a few, the doors will be open and you will beat anyone who is wasting time and energy on the old approaches.

http://www.ere.net/articles/db/27956979272140149961F2F163906C16.asp

Recruiting Lessons from the iPod

Why is the iPod such a phenomenon?

It's not because it looks neat or works well. Those things are just a small part of it. The real reason it's such a phenomenon is that it's more than a music player, it's a music system. In fact, it's a music business system far larger than itself. Get this: 4.8 million iPods were sold in the fourth quarter of 2004 alone. At this rate, soon everyone in the world will soon have one.

There are business, management, and especially recruiting lessons to be learned from the success of the iPod.

By being more than a music player, iPod has single-handedly changed the competitive landscape for both the music and the consumer electronics industries. Right now you can plug your iPod into your car, laptop, or your home theater system and find and play any music you want anytime, anywhere. As a result of the iPod, in a few years CDs and CD players will cease to exist.

Being more than a music player is the lesson to be learned here. Being a music system is why the iPod has been so wildly successful. Recruiters and recruiting tools need to be more than recruiters and recruiting tools, too. They have to be iPod-like.

Here's the definition of a business system from Word.net: "A group of independent but interrelated elements comprising a unified whole; example — 'a vast system of production and distribution and consumption keep the country going.'"

In the world of recruiters and recruiting, there is little interdependence similar to the iPod. There is no business system for recruiting. This is actually pretty shocking. Recruiters are all different, and they all use different sourcing, selection, and recruiting techniques. Managers are all different, and they all use different techniques for writing job descriptions, and interviewing and selecting candidates. Recruiting IT systems are different, and they're not too well integrated with the hiring process they're supposed to manage.

This lack of an interrelated whole is why just about every single hiring and recruiting initiative fails to meet expectations. It's why behavioral interviewing training programs don't work too well. It's why applicant tracking systems fall short. It's why the war for talent is still being fought.

Here are two examples of how recruiting managers and recruiters can use the iPod as a metaphor to become better managers and recruiters. The first one has to do with how to buy (or sell) recruiting software; the other with how to use the interview as part of a recruiting system and not just as an assessment tool.

Buying Recruiting Software

Buying or selling specialized recruiting software is narrow thinking. Selling a system-level solution is the key to making software work. This is the lesson of the iPod.

For example, as most of you know, name-generating software to find passive candidates is the new buzz. This could be using products that auto-scour the Internet to find passive candidates or using some type of social networking tool to get names from names.

Buying (or selling) something like this is a no-brainer for third-party retained recruiters, but a non-starter for their corporate counterparts. Names of passive candidates are the raw material of third-party recruiters, but useless for corporate recruiters unless an iPod-like business system solution is provided.

For name-generating software to work in the corporate market, the recruiting team must be reorganized; the product itself must be combined with automated techniques to contact the person; it must be integrated with the applicant tracking system; and specialized recruiter training should be provided. On a larger scale, every aspect of the corporate hiring process must be redesigned to handle passive candidates.

This is why a software-only, non-system solution won't work. Instead, software like this must be part of a interrelated business system consisting of the right people, the right processes, the right technology, and the right organizational structure. Evaluate your company's hiring system from this perspective. Does it resemble an iPod, or is it just a disconnected collection of CDs and MP3 players?

Interview as Part of a Recruiting System

Now let's consider the interview as part of a recruiting system rather than just a means to assess candidate competency. An interview must accomplish a number of objectives. In order of importance, here's my list of the real purpose of the interview:

1. Recruit top passive candidates.
2. Reduce interviewer bias and emotions.
3. Clearly explain jobs to create an "opportunity gap."
4. Assess candidate competency and motivation for the real job.
5. Reduce candidate nervousness.
6. Train candidates to give real information, not pre-scripted babble.
7. Negotiate a potential offer.
8. Demonstrate the professionalism and high standards of the company to every candidate.

When you consider the interview as part of a complete, iPod-like recruiting system rather than just a tool to assess competency, everything about how you conduct it changes. For one thing, you wouldn't ask a bunch of boring behavioral questions. For another you wouldn't be unprepared when you conduct it. You also wouldn't permit a person who hasn't been trained to interview a person and make some type of superficial judgment.

As you know, I like to ask candidates to describe their most significant accomplishments in great detail. This allows me to understand the type of work they've done and where they've excelled. By looking at the trend line of these accomplishments over time, you can observe consistency and growth. By comparing this information to the actual needs of the job, you can accurately assess job fit.

Here are two articles you can read to get you up to speed on this performance-based interviewing approach:

• The Best Interview Question of All Time
• Using the Two-Question Interview to Assess Executive Potential

Converting this type of performance-based interview into a recruiting system is the real key to its effectiveness. Here are some simple things you can do on your next interview to see the impact for yourself.

Rather than just ask the candidate to describe his or her most significant accomplishment, add this type of introduction:

This type of lead-in ties the importance of the job to a major company project. It makes the job more than just a software developer: it makes it strategic. Relating the job this way to a bigger project is referred to as job branding.

This recruiting introduction also includes a pull-towards question. It establishes a target that the candidate needs to reach in order for the person to be considered qualified. As a result, candidates tend to talk more in an attempt to sell the interviewer, rather than the interviewer having to sell the candidate.

The question itself creates an "opportunity gap." This is the difference between the candidate's current job and the opportunity represented by the new job. The bigger the opportunity gap, the less the candidate will need in terms of compensation. Creating an opportunity gap this way is far better than telling the candidate how great the job is. A pull-towards question like this is a simple way to modify the interview to make it accomplish multiple objectives.

The push-away is an even more effective approach. Try this after you learn a little about the candidate:

The person in this lead software development role will be interfacing with our top product marketing people and a few of our key customers. I'm a little concerned about your background in this regard. It seems that most of the people you've worked with in the past have been other developers or those in quality and operations. This job would really expose you to the new product phase of our business. Why don't you tell me about something you've accomplished where you've had to deal with these types of people?

Be careful when using this recruiting technique, and don't overdo it. However, by challenging the candidate this way you can create an even bigger opportunity gap. Candidates then have to defend their past experience and sell you even more. Of course, preparation is the key here. You must know the job and how to ask performance-based questions.

One cardinal rule of recruiting is to make the candidate earn the job. Never give it away. Using this type of pull-and-push questioning technique is how you convert a simple interviewing question into an iPod-like recruiting system.

The lesson to be learned from the iPod is to look at everything you do from a system level perspective. Interdependence is the key to success. Technology, process, people and organization must come together in order to make hiring top talent a systematic business process. Don't look at independent solutions. They have never worked, and never will. That's why we're still fighting the war for talent.

Now, if you want a glimpse at the future of creating a system for networking, go to the iMix section of iTunes. I just downloaded The Door's "Break on Through" on a Rock Classic iMix. You might want to listen to this one for some inspiration and other ideas on how to become a better recruiter.

http://www.ere.net/articles/db/93BB4CA202BA418AAF0787DBAB56DE94.asp

What's Your Hiring Strategy?

A primer on market-driven vs. process-driven approaches

In past ERE articles, I've used the amazing iPod story as a metaphor for developing recruiting systems. The iPod is not a music player. It is a fully functioning music system whose design was based on a market-driven product strategy.

From what I've seen, too many hiring processes are neither systematic nor driven by market needs. If you're not consistently finding enough top people, this is probably the underlying reason. So all efforts to "fix, patch and improve" or buy the latest cure-all technology will be disappointing. However, all this can change by implementing a formal, market-driven hiring strategy.

There are two types of hiring strategies: one market-driven, the other process-driven. If you're not finding enough top people, you've got the wrong one. Worse yet, if you haven't put together a hiring strategy in some type of planning meeting with your company's management team, you probably don't have one at all.

Whatever it is, your hiring strategy will affect your company's hiring results later this year, and into 2006 and beyond. Not having a comprehensive hiring strategy in place is the reason most companies haven't yet won the war for talent. In this article, I'd like to cover the basics of putting together a hiring strategy, and in the process let you figure out which one you have now.

A little background is in order. Every business has a strategy. When business conditions change, the strategy needs to change. From this strategy, comprehensive plans are made, resources are developed and deployed, and tactics are implemented. A market-driven strategy is based on customer needs, business conditions, the competitive landscape, and the state of the economy. Microsoft has a new search tool in development based on the success of Google. It also has an Xbox gaming strategy to use a PC as the core of a home-based entertainment and information center. These are both market-driven, growth-oriented and customer-focused strategies. Whether they'll be successful is another matter. But success is much more likely when products are designed based on customer wants, rather than on corporate rules.

A process-driven strategy is internally driven, based not on market needs but on past practices, rules, company policies, existing processes, and past investments. Here's an example. GM's new H3 Hummer was intended to be a smaller, lower cost, but still powerful version of the original. However, to save money and time, the company was forced to use an idle plant with a narrow body production line to manufacture this supposedly GM-saving vehicle. Unfortunately, to fit the new body, a low-powered V6 vs. V8 engine had to be used. In this case, past investment and existing processes overrode marketing and customer needs.

The H3 was a bold marketing idea compromised by process-driven strategies. When companies get bigger, bureaucracy sets in — with processes, procedures and policies dominating decision-making. Hiring strategies in most companies seem to have been developed from this mindset as well.

What's your company's hiring strategy? Is it innovative, based on market and customer-driven needs? Or is it boring and traditional, based on existing processes, governmental rules, and bureaucracy? An informal survey of over 100 companies in the Fortune 1000 that we took in the last few weeks revealed that over 90% of HR and recruiting leaders felt their hiring strategy was more inward focused and process-driven, rather than external and market-driven. This is scary, especially if you don't do anything about it. The flip side isn't: creating a market-driven hiring strategy is all you need to do to begin seeing improvements in your hiring results.

In a recent article I presented a sourcing plan approach to target active and passive candidates, based on how each group decided to look for new jobs. There were four big points made:

1. The more passive the candidate, the more effort is required to find and hire him or her.
2. When sourcing active candidates, the emphasis must be on the effective use of technology. When sourcing passive candidates, the emphasis must be more personal, which requires skilled recruiters and stronger hiring managers.
3. The factors affecting whether you should target active or passive candidates depend on supply versus demand, your employer brand, and the quality of the recruiting team.
4. Sourcing methods should be sequenced, starting with lower cost, high technology solutions, before you move on to higher cost, more personal one-on-one approaches.

Successfully implementing something like this depends on your hiring strategy. If it's process-driven, it won't work too well.

Here are some key differences between a market and process-driven hiring strategy.

In a market-driven hiring process, the candidate/customer is king. In the case of hiring, the primary customer is the candidate. The secondary customer is the hiring manager, and next is the recruiter. In a market-driven hiring strategy, everything is designed around the needs of the target audience.

For a quick gauge of this, just determine whether your processes and systems are designed to meet the needs of great people — or do candidates need to conform to your existing processes? If your processes were developed based largely on meeting government rules, company policy, comp and benefit guidance, and legal pronouncements, you probably have a process-driven hiring strategy. If your ATS or IT group decides how candidates need to apply, the website they'll see, and what information you can track, you probably have a process-driven hiring strategy. If your IT department has a bigger vote on what system to use than your recruiting department, you probably have a process-driven hiring strategy. Worse, you probably don't have any hiring strategy at all. Your company's hiring processes probably just evolved based on who had the loudest voice, not on some fundamental strategy.

In a market-driven hiring process, ads are compelling; job descriptions describe opportunities instead of simply listing them; candidates/customers can find the best jobs almost instantaneously; and they can apply in only a few minutes. Even if you use questionnaires, they are so compelling that people are excited when they fill them out. They are not barriers to entry; they are inducements to hang in there. After these great people apply in droves, the best can be instantly sorted to the top of the list in moments and called within hours.

Most companies aren't even thinking this way — let alone acting on it — but here's a real world example of a comparable customer-centric system design issue. Microsoft is contending that the Google way of searching is archaic, forcing searchers, like us, to open up poorly sorted and endless lists of potential hits in a manner (according to Microsoft) not very efficient. In their new search strategy, the best hits will hopefully sort themselves more accurately and be easier to open and read. That's the hype, anyway. It's probably similar to what Apple offers now in their new OS.

The point here is that this is what HR/recruiting technology vendors should and would do in a market-centric world. Technology vendors can't do this alone. They need to be pushed by their clients. If their clients — us — don't demand these market-driven changes, we can only blame ourselves for this lack of progress. If everyone in your company is not continuously thinking about these market-driven changes, your hiring strategy is probably process-driven.

Here's an idea. Talk to your ATS vendor and ask them to list the top five changes that will be implemented in their next revision. Then categorize these as process improvements or market-driven changes. This will clearly reveal whether your hiring strategy is market- or process-driven.

In a market-driven hiring process, recruiter and hiring manager needs would be fully met and designed into the system upfront. Recruiters shouldn't have to wade through hundreds of unqualified resumes to find a few hits. Nor should hiring managers have to select from a pool of least-worst candidates. Nor should they be forced to use cumbersome technology that has been designed by overzealous techies who haven't talked with real candidates, recruiters, and managers in years.

But don't blame the techies. They were forced to code processes that were designed by committees of so-called experts consisting of lawyers, government regulators, comp and benefit experts, and some OD guru. Of course, a few recruiters sat on the committee, frustrated, because no one listened to them anyway. In a market-driven hiring strategy, technology is optimized — based first on primary user needs. Compromises are then made based on available resources and system constraints. In a process-driven approach, users are given lip service and minor roles in defining functionality and designing user interfaces. The result is cumbersome technology that doesn't deliver as promised, with recruiters and hiring managers filling in the gaps with Excel spreadsheets and inputting more information than needed.

So what's your hiring strategy? Let's take a quick survey. Send me a short email of no more than three sentences. In the email, first state your hiring strategy. If it's process-driven, describe your biggest frustrations, and what you think needs to change. If it's marketing-driven, first justify it, and then describe how it happened. Your responses will probably look like this.

"Process driven. I spend too much time managing too many reqs, pushing paper, and handling lots of admin stuff. Our company needs to get every manager and executive committed to hiring better people."

"Market-driven. All candidates find the hiring process experience remarkable and positive. The executive team is committed to hiring the best and provides the resources to do it right."

Everything you do every day as a recruiter depends on your company's underlying hiring strategy. This must change first if you want to see lasting improvement in your company's ability to consistently hire top people. It's a goal worth fighting for.

There's a common complaint among company executives that HR/recruiting is not strategic enough. If your hiring processes evolved based on tactical choices and bureaucratic rules and regulations, they're right. Here's a chance to prove them wrong. Start thinking about putting together a market-driven hiring strategy. Everything you do from then on will change. Don't wait.

iPods and the Weakest Link in the Hiring Chain

Improving your process might start with hiring managers

I've been advocating the use of the iPod as a metaphor for better hiring practices. If you have an iPod, you know that it's much more than a music player. It's a complete, integrated music system. You can quickly download music and podcasts, burn CDs, and plug it into your car, home music system or Bose speaker set. You don't even have to read the instructions to do any of this stuff and get great music anytime, anywhere.

By comparison, most hiring processes resemble a group of independent activities that no one even thought about integrating. IT provides minimal support to the candidate tracking system, which only loosely ties to the HRIS. Managers, recruiters, and other interviewers assess candidates using different criteria, and many aren't very good at it anyway. In many companies, the selection process is less intense than the expense reimbursement policy. Competencies and behavior models are often in conflict, and they don't tie to the real performance requirements of the job anyway.

To make matters worse, candidates are treated as commodities, not potential future employees. This is apparent with poorly written advertising, difficulty in finding and applying for jobs, and a minimalist approach to candidate customer service when they do finally get involved. So if you're not finding enough top candidates, collectively this is probably the reason. No wonder third-party recruiters are having a field day.

If you were to prioritize every single hiring issue you have, and develop a project plan that would result in a completely integrated system in the next 12 months, where would you start first?

My vote is with hiring managers. They are the weakest link in the chain. We just completed our Recruiting and Hiring Challenges 2005 Survey (http://www.zoomera

http://www.ere.net/articles/db/DE3F21B4433642F2AFE70B8ED1082A78.asp

Sourcing in the Sweet Spot

What Apple's iPod system can teach you about sourcing

As I've mentioned in other articles, the iPod offers a great model for sourcing and recruiting. Three things stand out:

1. It's a system. The iPod is a fully integrated information system — not simply a standalone music player. In comparison, most corporate recruiting departments resemble a hodgepodge of different technologies, tools, competing processes, and poorly linked information channels.
2. It's strategic. Healthy businesses grow and change when strategy drives tactics. The iPod has metamorphosed Apple Computer. When tactics and processes drive strategy, companies languish and so does sourcing. Too many recruiting departments are driven by tactics, bureaucracy, and processes. For example, why do we still post boring job descriptions online?
3. It's customer- and market-driven. The iPod is compelling, easy to buy, simple to use — and fun. The sourcing processes at most companies treat potential employees as vendors. The processes are impersonal; jobs are hard to find; the marketing copy (a.k.a. the job description) is boring and exclusionary; the application process is demeaning; and the interviewing process is unprofessional.

To start addressing this imbalance, it's important to better understand the buying behavior of the people you want to attract. Then you can develop sourcing strategies and campaigns that target these people and address their needs. This is what being market and customer-driven means.

In my article The Sourcing Sweet Spot, four broad candidate pools were described. These had to do with how aggressive candidates were in seeking new jobs, what motivated them to look, and the quality of the candidates in each pool. Here's the quick take:

• Active candidates: This pool represents about 15% of the labor force. These are candidates who are actively looking full time. By definition, they need another job — either because they don't have one, or because the one they have is inferior. While there are some good candidates in this pool, the best are underrepresented. Most companies by default market to this pool.
• Less active candidates: This pool represents candidates on the margin. People in this group sometimes feel underemployed, underappreciated, or overworked. By definition they are fully employed, but on a bad day they might look for another job. The total size of this pool is about 15% to 20% of the labor force, and the best people are overrepresented in this pool. This is a big segment of the sourcing sweet spot, and you need to redesign your front- and back-end sourcing processes to market to it.
• Semi-passive candidates: These people are fully employed, but are open to being called to consider a better career opportunity. The best people are fully represented in this pool. However, the pool is huge, about 35% of the labor force. So who you call and what you say is key to success here.
• Passive candidates: These people don't want another job, so don't bother unless you can't find a strong person using less costly sourcing techniques. Passive candidates will only move for a combination of a far better job, a much stronger career opportunity, and a much richer compensation package. This pool represents the rest of the labor force, about 30% to 35%.

A comprehensive sourcing strategy in combination with a workforce plan is the lesson of the iPod. This needs to define the channels you'll use by job type, the development of advertising programs that meet the needs of those in the sweet spot, how the recruiting team will be organized, and the role hiring managers need to play.

Here are some sourcing channel ideas you might want to consider as part of increasing your effectiveness sourcing in the sweet spot.

Job Board Advertising

The key to success here is compelling ads that are easy to find, combined with an easy application process. This will capture the interest of less active candidates, who might only look for an hour or so every other month. Search engine optimization techniques need to be combined with web analytics to ensure that the best people find your ads and that the application process is designed to minimize the opt-out ratios. To quickly see how well you're doing here, put some of the keywords a top candidate would use to find a job into Yahoo! Search. If your jobs don't show up, you're not sourcing in the sweet spot.

Back-end processing is equally important here. You must be able to call the best people within 24 hours. This means that your candidate search engine must be able to separate the best from the rest, and your recruiters must be competent when calling. Of course, when they call, recruiters must get more referrals if the candidate is not a direct fit or if you have multiple openings. Equally important: The whole recruiting team must be doing this, not just a few.

Most companies complain that their job board advertising programs don't work too well. The reality is that most don't use this important channel to its fullest extent.

Semi-Passive Candidate Sourcing

There are a number of front-end keys to successfully sourcing and recruiting top people in this pool. First is having a compelling opportunity to offer. Top performers want not only a better job but also a better long-term career opportunity. Using a performance profile that clearly spells out the challenges and opportunities in the job is the key to success here. Getting names of hot candidates is next.

However, the most important part of this whole process is calling these people up, qualifying them, recruiting them, and getting more referrals. We'll leave this part to future articles, so for now let me just present a few important name-generating techniques:

• Employee referral programs. Ask your best people for the names of the best people they've worked with in the past. Then call and recruit these people and get more referrals. If you're not a phone wizard, then use Jobster. This is the next best thing — as long as you have a compelling job to describe in your email link. Without this, Jobster is just another wasted tool.
• Online tools. My favorites are ZoomInfo and LinkedIn. These are all you need to hire anyone — if you can get the person on the phone and get referrals. There are other social networking tools in this group, like Jigsaw, that should also be considered. If you have a great job, LinkedIn's new job referral system is worth evaluating. ZoomInfo has just released an email blaster, which is also pretty neat.
• Internet data-mining. Getting names this way is the stuff that made Shally Steckerl famous. You'll get some great names, but to make the techniques work, be prepared for extensive phone calling. Sometimes just getting the person on the phone is the challenge. Once on the phone, you must engage with the person and get pre-qualified referrals. This is the key to cold calling a list of names. You don't need to ever call everyone on the list. You must be able to get referrals and then work only those referrals that are "A" players. This way, you can restrict your phone calls to top tier people.
• Non-Internet name generating techniques. There are probably more great candidates not listed on the Internet than those who are. Getting these names requires a host of clever techniques, including competitive intelligence and advanced networking. I'll leave these techniques for future articles, but the point for now is that these techniques should be considered in combination with Internet data-mining.

If you want to hire more semi-passive candidates, you need to be great on the phone, be great at getting referrals, and have a truly compelling job to offer. Without these capabilities in place, it's best to restrict your in-house sourcing to a dramatic overhaul of your online and career website advertising programs and to enhancing your employee referral programs using tools like Jobster.

If you do have great jobs but don't have the in-house capability to target these semi-passive candidates, you might want to consider the use of recruiter networks like Hireability.com. Hireability.com offers a quick, low-cost way to obtain pre-qualified semi-passive candidates within days. There's no cost to check it out, and the fee is half of a typical contingency search.

Sourcing in the sweet spot is where the action is these days. Not only do you need to be there, but you also need to do it well. It starts with a sourcing strategy that's customer driven. This converts to a tactical plan based on the use of a series of sourcing channels that are designed to optimize candidate quality and time to hire. Higher cost options should only be used if quality declines. This way, you can get the best people at the lowest cost.

As part of all this, don't ignore the customer experience. Make sure the user interface is fun, compelling, and easy to use. Go out and get an iPod to put this all into proper perspective. In the long run, it will be the best sourcing investment you've every made.

http://www.ere.net/articles/db/00362D461F4B4F81A50736B2AF96DA03.asp

How to Use Advertising to Attract Top People

Job descriptions had better be well-written and convincing

Here's something you might want to consider whether you're hiring active, passive, or not-so active or not-so-passive candidates.

At some point in time, they will all read your job descriptions to decide if it's worth considering your open position. If the audience you're targeting either can't find this job easily or don't find it compelling if they do find it, you won't see as many good people as you should.

Don't be smug and assume that the candidates you're trying to hire won't read your ads. Even referred or passive candidates read your ads. Many even request them with the common retort, "Send me the job description and I'll see if I'm interested, or see if I know someone."

Since the job description is a primary marketing tool, it had better be well-written and convincing. On the business marketing side, these would be equivalent to the advertising copy, the flyer, or the product brochure.

Now, to throw another twist into the equation, these marketing documents need to reflect the different buying patterns of your audience. The copy itself needs to reflect how different groups (age, race, gender) respond to advertising. This affects the length of the ad, the media used to deliver it, and the words used.

Young people, for example, won't respond to the same message as a mid-career person — nor will they look in the same spots. Many women have different career aspirations than men, and they don't look in the same places. Diverse candidates are looking for different things than their non-minority peers, and passive candidates don't care about compensation (unless it's equity). Salespeople do. Since advertising is the front line of sourcing, you need to customize it to meet the varied needs of your target audience.

Here are some ideas to consider and things you can do right away to get started making your advertising more effective:

1. Stop using traditional job descriptions as the basis for your advertising. Not even the worst company in the country would consider using their product-specifications listing as their primary marketing copy as some HR/recruiting departments do. Online job descriptions should summarize the challenges and opportunities in the job in some type of flashy document or web page with a creative title and compelling copy. To get started, ask the hiring manager why a top person would want this job. Finish with, "What does a top person need to do to be considered successful?" Then start off your ads with the most compelling stuff.
2. Stop using a classified-ad mentality. In the olden days, newspaper classified ads didn't attract top people, except in the career journal sections. So why do we still use this old-style approach online and expect better results? The career journal section worked because it highlighted big jobs with creative ads and big titles and was read by up-and-comers on Sundays or on their rapid transit commute to work. The same concept can be applied today. The key is to target the up-and-comers, not the down-and-outers.
3. Make the job compelling. The best people take jobs based on this criteria and order: 1) the job stretch, 2) the quality of the hiring manager, 3) the quality of the team, 4) the importance of the job to the company, and 5) the compensation. Your advertising should clearly demonstrate the job stretch and importance to the company in the title and first paragraph. The up-and-comers in each group (age, race, gender, area of specialization) will decide whether to continue reading based mostly on what they read in the first 10 to 20 seconds.
4. Don't start with the part number. If your requisition number is the first thing people read after a boring title, the up-and-comers will have opted out long before they get to the really boring list of skills and requirements.
5. The first two lines are critical. Compare these two ads for a creative marketing person. Which one would be easiest to find, which one might you read, and which one would you apply to? Does one appeal more to different age groups or gender? How could you target it to a specific diversity group?

http://www.ere.net/articles/db/504B579A1F694E9BAF81AD9F17747E30.asp