John Sullivan’s great article on innovative sourcing ideas should be read by everyone in recruiting. The essence: You need to be super creative to reach out to the best candidates - who by and large all are passive. This requires a shift in resources, from waiting for people to apply to reaching out and getting them interested. The implications of this shift in sourcing are huge.

I've been advocating the use of the iPod as a metaphor for better hiring practices. If you have an iPod, you know that it's much more than a music player. It's a complete, integrated music system. You can quickly download music and podcasts, burn CDs, and plug it into your car, home music system or Bose speaker set. You don't even have to read the instructions to do any of this stuff and get great music anytime, anywhere.

Engineers and software development managers are the toughest hiring managers in the world to deal with. But that's only if you exclude sales managers, marketing managers, company executives, operations people, customer service managers, functional VPs, and of course, financial people at all levels.

As I get ready for another great ER Expo in Boston (September 28-29, 2005) and a chance to meet old friends and make new ones, some big recruiting questions come to mind. Here’s probably the biggest:

If it wasn't for hiring managers, recruiting would be so easy. This is one of the conclusions drawn from my annual Recruiting and Hiring Challenges Survey 2005. Here are some other preliminary conclusions from the survey results:

You can't afford to do searches over again. After you've presented 3-5 solid, maybe even superior candidates, the worst thing a manager can say is, "Do you have any more candidates?" Preventing this is one of the reasons why you must be able to influence hiring managers at every step in the hiring process.

Recruiters must be able to influence hiring managers at every step in the hiring process. It starts when the job description is put together, it continues with the presentation of candidates, and ends with leading the candidate selection process. In the previous segment of this series the concept of taking performance-based job descriptions was presented. These differ from traditional job descriptions in that they describe what the person taking the job must do, or achieve, to be considered a successful hire. This allows for more accurate assessments and the ability to create a superior job match, a core principle involved in hiring top talent.

Influencing hiring managers is as important as influencing candidates. If hiring managers won't take your advice you shouldn't be a recruiter. The interviewing and assessment process is not a perfect science. So recruiters need to guide managers along, insuring that the best available candidate gets hired. You can't afford to spend your time showing hiring managers an endless stream of candidates until the perfect one magically appears. Or, until they're so worn down they can't tell the difference.