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Adler's Wild and Crazy Economic Recovery Plan

By Lou Adler, April 8, 2009

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:  

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1. Be strategic. Tactics don't drive strategies, so adopting the latest fad as a strategy is misguided. At best, it will produce nothing more than a short-lived victory. Worse, it takes your efforts away from what really needs to be done. Remember: when business conditions change, company strategies need an equal and corresponding change just to stay even. Consider this prediction: employee referral programs and talent pools will be the core drivers for sourcing in a few years, and the idea of posting individual requisitions will be as quaint as the classified ads of yesteryear. To address these changes, a top-down recruiting and sourcing strategy will be essential as the economy recovers and shifting demographics again dominate the scene. A clue to how well you're doing: you know you're in trouble when you're reacting to most events. This is the classic indicator that organizations are tactically, rather than strategically, driven.
   
   
2. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. Time will be the new metric once the third world war for talent begins in earnest later this year. Getting active candidates as soon as they raise their hands will represent a competitive advantage. This will be more acute in the early stages of the recovery when the pent-up demand for new jobs results in an onrush of entrants into the job market. If you were there, you know it will be like the Oklahoma land rush of 1889.
   
   The major agencies have already begun positioning themselves to attract this talent by optimizing their recruitment advertising and making sure their postings are found first when anyone Googles for a job. (To test this out conduct a search with the terms “jobs,” a job title, and the name of the city in it.) Third-party recruiters know that if they get to the best people before their corporate clients do, their businesses will be booming again. There is no reason why a corporate recruiting department can't beat them to the punch! Email me if you'd like to find out how.
   
   
3. Build a Just-in-Time inventory system for talent. In the near future, most positions will be filled by pinging your proprietary database of high-quality talent. The idea of posting a req and trying to find people in real time will be as archaic as a gasoline-only V8 engine. If you have enough good people in your database, you'll be able to fill positions more quickly and at much lower cost. Prospects will be driven to this database using search engine optimized talent hubs and talent communities. These allow req-less recruiting to be the order of the day, with individual reqs only posted for unique or low-volume positions. Aggregators will drive traffic directly to your career site, rather than using job boards as go-betweens. A robust CRM system will be needed to nurture the database and offer candidates a chance to express interest when an appropriate career opportunity becomes available.
   
   
4. Prepare a hiring forecast for core positions. One could contend that detailed workforce planning is unnecessary if the prospect database is current, big, and getting bigger. However, some type of basic workforce planning is needed to drive the focus of your prospect generating efforts. Scott Pitasky, Microsoft's VP of Talent, made a critical observation at ERE's 2009 Expo that highlights the need for some reasonable level of workforce planning. He pointed out that if you're growing by just 7% per year, and your attrition is also 7% per year, you'll need to replace 50% of your current workforce in three years. Based on this, you need to evaluate your company's core hiring needs over the next few years based on reasonable growth forecasts and an assumption that attrition will return to normal levels in the next year. Also, take into account that the pent-up demand for new jobs will put everyone with a marginal job into the market once the recovery starts. This spike will affect everyone and you should expect a feeding frenzy later this year and early next year.

5. Overhaul your employee referral program (ERP). It seems reasonable to predict that 90% of people you'll be hiring are either known by one of your current employees or in your prospect database. (Assign the other 10% to a strike force in-house recruiting team using Broadlook, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and maybe Twitter.) At least half of the 90% should be a result of putting your ERP on steroids. I gave a few webinars on how to use LinkedIn to find fellow employees you don't know and demonstrated how to get them to not only give you the names of the best people they've ever worked with, but also how to have them seek out other top people they only knew slightly. The idea here is that you want good people as soon as they enter the job market to call your employees first. Getting people first is the new mantra of recruiting, aka the early-bird sourcing strategy. Email me if you'd like to find out how to make your ERP a talent-feeding network.
   
   
6. Upgrade your recruiting skills. In the new war for talent, I predict that recruiting skills will be more important than sourcing skills. It is now easy to get names of candidates. It's not so easy to get names of good candidates, and it's even harder to get good people to call you back and give you more names of other good people. And even if you're successful at this, you still need to recruit and close these people before they're lost to the competition. We've developed a 10-factor recruiter benchmark that highlights the most important skills/competencies a corporate or agency recruiter needs to possess to be effective in the upcoming third world war for talent.

7. Get your hiring managers trained. At best, everything described above represents only 50% of the hiring process. The other 50% seems to be overlooked - the hiring managers who define the job, interview the candidates, and decide whom to hire. So if your hiring managers and those on the selection team are less than competent, then that's the type of people you'll be hiring. Hiring training is not interview training. Hiring managers need to know how to define the real job, use the interview to position their jobs as compelling career opportunities, work with recruiters, meet candidates on an exploratory basis, demonstrate their leadership and managerial capabilities to candidates, and accurately assess a candidate's ability to perform all of the necessary work at reasonably high levels. If your managers can't do this, they need to attend our Performance-based Hiring for Managers program or something similar. It only takes two questions to accurately assess competency, but it's what the manager does with this information that determines if you'll hire the person. Letting your hiring managers make critical selection decisions on gut feelings puts your company at risk both from a legal perspective, but more importantly from a business and competitive standpoint.

While you might disagree with the some of the specific ideas presented here, there is no question that you must be strategic, proactive, and forward-looking. You will not have time to do this once the recovery begins in earnest. This means rebuilding your recruiting team, developing workforce plans, implementing new sourcing programs, upgrading your technology, and training your hiring managers. If you have not yet started now on these programs, it might just be too late.