As you know the best people typically don’t look for new opportunities the same way as everyone else does.  For one thing they’re looking for careers, not lateral transfers, and they find them largely through some type of networking effort.  This suggests a massive shift away from generic job boards to new tools for networking including the implementation of an aggressive employee referral program.  It also implies using a different approach for closing that gets candidates to consider the long- and short-term factors in balance before making any decision.

As you know I suggest using the 10-factor talent scorecard to measure quality of hire on a pre-hire and post-hire basis. This form is available for members of the Recruiter’s Wall network to download. Using it is based the on the concept described in my book, Hire With Your Head (John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2007), suggesting that in order to maximize assessment accuracy, candidates need to be assessed against real job needs. This way,10-factor talent scorecard rankings pre- and post-hire are directly comparable.

The Basics of Hiring ROI

Caution: you are about to enter the zone of the CFO. Tread carefully. Bring your green eyeshade and calculator. However, if you master this information, you’ll be able to calculate the ROI for your current hiring processes and any new hiring initiative imaginable. Beware though, if it turns out that the ROI of your current hiring process is less than 25%, you’re in big trouble. On the other hand, if any proposed new program is over 100% you’ll be able to get instant CFO approval and a high-five, along with the check. But don’t be seduced, any new hiring programs might not work as promised if the economy recovers anytime soon. Then you’ll just be scrambling to stay even.

To see the importance of calculating hiring ROI, just multiply the number of people you’re forecasting to hire in the next 12 months by their average compensation. This is probably a big number. For example, if you’re planning on hiring a group consisting of college grads, experienced techies, and a bunch of customer service reps, you’re probably looking at an average compensation of $65,000. If you’re hiring 1,000 of these folks, this means you’ll be spending $65 million on new hires in the next 12 months, and if you’re going to hire 100 you’ll be spending $6.5 million.

Over the past few months I've been making some not-so-bold predictions about the demise of job boards and the rise of the "hub and spoke" sourcing model for finding a better class of active candidates. Rather than repeat the prognostication here, I'd suggest that despite the shift to this new and improved sourcing model, in the long run it might not really matter.

Can Your Company Hire A-level Talent?

Every company wants to hire the best people, but most haven't figured out how to do it consistently and across the board. Here's a short checklist of prerequisites. Rank yourself on a 1-5 scale to see where you stand, with 5 being the best and 1 being worse than pretty bad. If you don't score at least 35-40 on this 10-factor survey, you've got your work cut out for you. After you've finished this assessment, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you'd like to find out how to get started right away on hiring A-level talent every time.

A few months ago I predicted the recovery would begin in July 2009. I was lambasted as some wild-eyed hippie, smoking something illegal everywhere, except in California. Well, they were right about the stupid prediction part… it won't start until September. With that in mind, here are some things corporate recruiting departments and third-party recruiting firms need to do to get in shape:  

Dear President Obama,

Once the banking crisis gets solved, the next bottleneck that needs to be addressed is the woeful state of the government hiring process. If not addressed properly, it will cripple the economic stimulus package by putting a lid on job creation in both the public and private sectors.

Despite record unemployment, there is a severe supply shortage of skilled workers at the technical and trade levels. These are the jobs that drive the economy, allow the middle class to prosper, and minimize the swings in every economic cycle. Overall, it's estimated that $200 to $300 billion of government financed programs will be short-circuited by this hiring problem.

When I worked in the high tech field in the 1980s and 1990s, IBM was the biggest player in the industry.  They were the 800-pound gorilla in the room.  Their sales pitch went something like this.  "Buying IBM is safe."  "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."  "You'd have to be crazy to choose anybody else!"  Even if there were better systems and software on the market (and there absolutely were), for a long time IBM won the lion's share of the business because they convinced managers that buying anything but "Big Blue" was RISKY.  Their goal was simply to sow doubt and fear about their competitors.

Guy Kawasaki, who was at the time a famous product marketer at Apple, had the job of breaking through that barrier.  He would do outrageous things to shake up his competition.  He would send very expensive custom mailings to the product managers at IBM thanking them for their support of Apple.  These mailing weren't addressed directly to the product manager, but rather they were written as if they were being sent to all of Apple's customers, when, in fact, they only went to a few selected product managers at Apple's core competitors.  This would create havoc within the competition's marketing departments as they would try to invent even more expensive campaigns to counter what was perceived as a huge attack.  IBM wasted a lot of time, money, people, and resources chasing Guy's phantom promotions.  He would then focus his energy on activities that really made a difference with his customers and, not surprisingly, he won market share. Two lessons for Guy's antics:  first, focus on activities that really make a difference with your customer; second, be positive and project that positivity into your customer, markets, and candidates.

In Part I of this article, I made the contention that there were so many different people involved in the hiring process that consensus was impossible to reach. This included HR and OD, recruiters and sourcers, hiring managers and everyone on the hiring team, and lest we forget, the candidates themselves. In the government contractor hiring process this problem is made worse since the actual hiring manager is sometimes difficult to identify and recruiters tend to work off marginal job specs.

Here's a basic truism: the further the recruiter is from the hiring manager, the less effective he or she will be in finding top performers. It's pretty obvious that the better you know the hiring manager and the job you're representing, the more insightful and professional you'll be when sourcing, qualifying, and recruiting candidates.

Recruiters who aren't partners or closely aligned with their hiring manager clients regarding real job needs send in too many unqualified candidates and have little influence with them. Collectively, this makes it difficult to close the candidate, overcome basic concerns, and to even get referrals.