Last week I met with a Director of Recruiting from a major Fortune 200 company in the Midwest. In a recent meeting with one of her top corporate executives, the executive made the comment that he finally considered the recruiting department "fixed." The Recruiting Director was so taken back by the comment that she didn't really know how to respond. She was genuinely troubled by his comment. What does he mean by "fixed"? Perhaps it was a backhanded compliment or maybe he meant "fixed" in the sense that he's crossed it off his to-do list?›ƒ?ªƒ?he's no longer worried about it. Perhaps he believes that because they recently installed a new ATS system, added two or three additional recruiters, and restructured their sourcing department, he doesn't really need to worry about it any more.

If you want to attract top people online, your ads need to be outrageous, compelling and found. To prove it we're launching our first annual outrageous ad writing contest. To win a fully-paid scholarship to Recruiter Boot Camp Online (a $1200 value!) you need to follow these guidelines on how to write and post ads that really pull in top people. We'll also award a second scholarship if you can get better results doing it a different way, but I personally wouldn't waste my time. With that said, here's the template we've used to write ads to successfully attract great candidates from entry-level to executive.

I spent the first half of the '90s working at GE. This was in Jack Welch's heyday: best practices, work-out, and management course from Harvard professors at the training center at Croton-on-Hudson (affectionately referred to as Camp GE.) It was a great experience, but there were a few things about GE's personnel policies that didn't really make sense. One of these was what we called the 10-80-10 policy.

Just about every corporate recruiter has too many requisitions to handle as effectively as possible. The problem is magnified when good candidates get excluded for dumb and preventable reasons, generally weak interviewing skills on the part of the hiring manager or a candidate who wasn't at his or her best. Sometimes good candidates are excluded before they're even seen because they don't have exactly the right background. Sometimes good candidates pull themselves out to of the process because the job doesn't seem interesting or the candidate didn't like the hiring manager. Few companies address these problems directly--instead they avoid them, focusing most of their energy and resources on hiring more recruiters or developing new sourcing ideas. This is comparable to buying more raw materials than necessary for a factory that has an excessive scrap rate rather than fixing the scrap problem.

There's a great article about recruiting in the September 2007 issue of Fast Company - "The Inevitability Of $300 Socks." Actually, it has nothing to do with recruiting unless you read between the lines. And what a great story is told between those lines! Chip and Dan Heath, the authors of the business best seller Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, make the point in their article that some basic products attain premium pricing when they're seen as ideas rather than mere commodities. The Heaths cite alcohol, jeans and spa treatments as idea-based products and oil changes and fax machines as idea-free. You obtain premium pricing and margins with idea-based products and basic market returns with basic commodities

Excerpted from the 3rd edition of Hire With Your Head (John Wiley and Sons, Inc. June, 2007)

After you've made an offer, but before accepting it, your candidate is probably shopping it around hoping to get something better. As soon as a candidate accepts your offer, the person gets buyer's remorse, wondering whether she made the right decision or left something on the table. Even if the person doesn't have a better offer on the table, lack of conviction when resigning sets the stage for a counteroffer. Effective recruiting becomes the difference maker when you want to ensure that more offers get accepted and stay closed.

Last week I traveled to Pennsylvania to conduct a Recruiter Boot Camp training class for a small recruiting firm in the backwoods of the Poconos. When I say the backwoods, I really mean up in the trees, out in the boonies, and completely isolated. I felt a little like I was entering into a real time warp. Just to give you a flavor for the group, it's like one big happy family. Monday nights and Wednesday nights are reserved for their regular pool tournament. They have a company team and some of them are apparently pretty good players. Tuesdays and Fridays are bowling nights. Thursday is of course date night. The CEO and founder graciously skipped her Wednesday evening at the pool table to join me for dinner.

Congratulations! You made it this far without being scared off by the title of this article! You were able to get past your initial feelings of 1) "What am I going to do without my weekly dose of fabulous hiring tips?"; 2) "e-Learning? What does that have to do with my role as a recruiter?" and 3) "Why does Lou keep letting Jason write articles?" and are now ready to learn more about one of the most important aspects of training and development today.