Hiring the best is getting more and more competitive. To ensure you're hiring the strongest talent available you need to plan on offering them at least a 30% increase. However, this increase doesn't need to be all compensation. From what I can tell, more candidates are shopping their offers around and accepting counter-offers. If you find yourself in this squeeze-play, you'll need to reposition your offers as more than compensation.

Stalemate.

If every recruiter and every company builds compelling talent hubs, creates search engine optimized career sites, runs exciting ad campaigns, implements a proactive employee referral program and uses the latest name generating techniques, all you'll get are average results. With a finite supply of top people what else could you expect? Of course, if you do all of these things first, or better, you will get exceptional results for a short period of time, until diminishing returns sets in. However, there is still one weapon that is more important than all of the rest combined - that few companies use to their advantage - the hiring manager.

Use the idea of leveraging time to your advantage whenever a candidate decides to opt-out of your process - under the contention that your job is no better than others she's considering. Here's an example of how this scenario plays out.

If you don't have a MySpace page, get one so you can see how it works. Once you have the page start linking to all of your friends, then start adding other recruiters to your Friends List. If you go to MySpace find me via email (lou@adlerconcepts.com) and send me your link, so I can add you to my Friends List. Of course, that's not the point of this hot tip. Leveraging technology is the point.

I'll take Kevin Bacon's Six Degrees of Separation to a minor extreme, I suspect that with just the names on ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, or a simple Google search you are only one person removed from everyone in the country. (P.S. You can connect with me on LinkedIn using my email, lou@adlerconcepts.com. Everyone who buys my book can also connect with me and share advanced recruiting ideas like these on my Ning Recruiting Tactics site.)

There is good news and some bad news on the hiring front. First, I'll give the bad news. There are three big hiring mistakes many people are now making in greater numbers than ever before:

1. Hiring someone you shouldn't have. The person interviewed well, but underperformed once on the job.
2. Not hiring a great person because the person didn't interview well. Many top performers are not great interviewers. In fact, this might be the easiest person to hire since no one wants them.
3. Not attracting a great person who did interview well. Talented people who interview well are the hardest to recruit since everyone wants to hire them.

If you want to better understand a candidate's thinking, planning, and job-specific problem-solving skills, just ask this question: If you were to get this job, how would you go about solving this typical problem (describe the problem)?

1. Make sure everyone who has a vote knows the job. If an interviewer isn't sure of the real job, he'll overvalue his intuition, his perception of the job, and the candidate's first impression and communication skills to make the assessment. As a result the assessment will be about 50% accurate for a yes vote, and a bit worse on the no vote side. Interviewers need to know real job needs in order to have a chance of making the right hiring decision. I won't take an assignment unless everyone on the hiring team knows what the person taking the job needs to do to be successful. Neither should you. Preparing a performance profile with the hiring team will help.

When cold-calling passive candidates or searching for names, lists, and resumes on line, I make a point to maximize my time by only talking with high performers. This way, even if these people are not perfect for the assignment at hand, they know other top performers who are. Of course, to be a successful full-cycle recruiter you have to be very good at getting these top people to call you back, then recruiting them and then getting the referrals (we show you how to do this in Recruiter Boot Camp Online). To save time at the front end you must limit your calling to only top people. You can do this by adding recognition terms, honors, and awards into your online searches.

I've recently created a ning.com business networking site called Sourcing Strategy. You should join it if you want to hear about the latest techniques in Internet sourcing. We'll be using this site to share, discuss, and create some great new ways to attract top people to a company's career website. The most obvious "in your face" idea is the use of a business networking site like this one to find and recruit top talent. I suspect some recruiters are already calling other recruiters who post clever, practical, and innovative ideas. Those who philosophize and pontificate are quickly shunned.