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:

There was a great op-ed in a recent LA Times written by Jonah Goldberg, called Avatar and the Faith Myth. Mr. Goldberg, obviously a very educated person, at times complaining about the superficiality of the movie and at others describing the religious implications of the movie, both positive and negative, depending on your point of view of God vs. god. As for me, I thought it was great entertainment. I must have missed the religion connection, since all I noticed was that it was filled with great recruiting tips. 

Maximizing your use of time is the key to hiring more top performers. In a recent webinar with Jobs2Web, I described the sourcing sweet-spot. This is the point just before and just after a fully employed person decides to consider looking for another position. This time-frame represents the window of opportunity to hire the best passive candidates and early-birds with less effort and salary premiums than any other point.

Every vendor in the recruiting space touts their latest recruiting and sourcing tool as the next killer app. If you were there, you saw many of them at the last ERE Expo in Florida in September. As the economy recovers, there will be many more at ERE’s Expo 2010 in San Diego next March. Some of them will be superb and worthy of serious consideration.

Over the past few months, I’ve been tracking employee satisfaction vs. job hunting activity. Here’s the link so you can take the survey yourself, see the results, and forward it to others.

Regardless of how tepid the recovery, sometime in early 2010 the demand for hiring will pick up, exacerbated by an increase in involuntary turnover. Once this happens, panic will ensue, with everyone gearing up to hire the best people they can find, at the lowest cost possible, and in the shortest period of time. How you respond to this pickup will be based on whether you're a traditionalist or a Web 2.0 free radical.

Traditionalists are those companies who will respond to this increase in hiring by aggressively seeking candidates to fill these open positions using the latest niche sites, adding Facebook pages, expanding their social networks, pushing their ads to blogs and user groups, and adding Twitter feeds to their new crop of career pages. By itself this is a reactive approach, built on using silver bullet tactics. It's a form of the classic req-driven, "needle in the haystack" sourcing model. With a well-known employer brand, it actually might work. However, when you strip away the bells and whistles, it's based on the flawed premise that top people will respond to negative, boring, and exclusionary ads if you post them in enough places.

Fast forward to January 15, 2010. What are some of the hiring challenges you're now facing?

For many years companies have touted the power of Employee Referral Programs as a primary source for recruiting top candidates. This year at the ERE Expo in San Diego, one of Microsoft's top recruiting strategists announced that ERP programs didn't work at Microsoft. His conclusion was that Microsoft should focus their sourcing efforts on other sourcing channels. Personally, I was shocked with this revelation. It is entirely counter to what we experience with most of our customers. So, I decided to take a behind-the-scenes look at last year's ERE winner for the best ERP Program and get an update on what's happening today. Perhaps employee referral programs only work in booming economies and tight labor markets, and they completely fall to pieces in economic downturns. I had to know, so I called up Ron Bower, Director of Recruiting and Employee Relations at AmTrust Bank to get the inside scoop on their world class ERP program. They won the ERE award for the Best Employee Referral program in 2008. Stay tuned for some real life surprising "hard knock" lessons from a true ERP Champion.