At the ERE Expo in San Diego, March 15-17, 2010, I’ll be describing what it takes to be a true corporate headhunter. This is a recruiter who can go head to head with his or her external rivals without compromising quality of hire or time to fill. To pull it off though, you’ll have to break some company rules and break from tradition. In the process you will probably aggravate your comp, compliance, legal, and I/O departments, at least at first. Hopefully, your recruiting manager will intercede and act as a buffer as you plow ahead making a positive contribution. 

Third-party recruiters have a huge competitive advantage over their corporate recruiter rivals. For one thing, they can cherry-pick their assignments and thus don’t have nearly as many assignments to work on. For another, they can market their best candidates to multiple clients.

The economic recovery will begin. Someday. Hopefully soon. You’ll know that day has arrived when most of the following occurs on a regular basis:

John Sullivan wrote a great piece on ERE a few months ago, titled Five Ugly Numbers You Can’t Ignore. John’s article pointed out public research indicating fundamental flaws with the interviewing and assessment process used by most companies.

Here are my quick answers regarding the impact Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI) has on improving quality of hire:

Let me start off this article by saying that I’ve been working with top candidates, top hiring managers, and top recruiters for the past 30 years. As a result of this we’ve developed training tools based on how top candidates make job change decisions, how top managers who can attract and recruit the best talent make their decisions, and how top recruiters out-produce their average peers by factors of 100-200% or more.  Many of these ideas, tools, and techniques are described in my book, Hire With Your Head (Third Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007).

When I started out as a recruiter, some 30 years ago, it was pretty clear that you could make more placements if you were a better interviewer than your hiring manager clients. Not only would all of your candidates be interviewed, but your best ones wouldn’t get tossed under the bus by superficial or narrow assessments, or if they possessed less-than-stellar presentation skills. This led to the development of the one-question performance-based interview.

Every company wants to hire the top 15%.  A few actually do – typically those with the big brass brands and compelling employee value propositions.  Those with a small wind or rhythm section can do pretty well, too, under the right circumstances.  For just about everyone else, there’s a feeling that getting to average is about all that can be expected.  Well strike up the music, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Over the past year, I’ve been making the case that the best people – the top-third of your future workforce – won’t look for jobs, nor decide which one to take, based on the primary sourcing processes you now use. Making matters worse, traditional behavioral and competency interviewing are not designed to differentiate between the best and least best of your fully-qualified candidates, even if you can find them. To address these issues, fundamental changes are required to improve the overall talent level of your company as the economy improves.

The financial gain of hiring A-level talent is probably 10-100 times the person’s compensation.

The financial cost of hiring a walking lawsuit is probably 10-100 times their compensation.

Assuming the duds and the stars represent 10% of your total hires, it’s what you do with the other 90% that really matters.