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Use a "Skunk Works" Mentality to Rebuild Your Recruiting Programs

By Lou Adler, March 11, 2009

Are you ready, getting ready, planning on getting ready, or waiting for some direction?

While most companies are struggling and profoundly reducing their recruiting expenditures, there are a few who have established a below-the-radar "skunk works" to get ahead of the competition as soon as the downturn bottoms out.

Here's the rationale to justify getting ready right now. At the first sign of an uptick the marginally employed will head into the market full bore. There will be some good people in this group. Once the uptick is for real, there will be another bigger wave of people entering the market who see their careers now going sideways, but are waiting for some reasons to start looking. There will be some really great people in this group. You need to figure out now how to attract them.

Since it takes about 3-4 months for any online and search engine optimized sourcing effort to have real impact, you need to start way ahead of time to put the programs in motion. Companies that attract these "on the margin" people first will have a huge win, because they won't be available again for another year or two.

In parallel you need to start building an inventory of talent to support a just-in-time (JIT) hiring program. People who are warmed up and waiting for your jobs to open up offer forward-looking companies an opportunity to lock up talent before the competition knows what's going on.

To pull off these types of programs, you'll need a "skunk works" mentality and a progressive attitude. With this in mind, here's what I predict as the next big sourcing opportunities to get started on:
 
Skunk Works Projects for the Upcoming Hiring Recovery

1. Begin stockpiling talent to create a JIT hiring process. There are some great people who are now open to discuss future opportunities 6-12 months down the road, but who are unwilling to move right away. Why not begin these conversations immediately? Then when the recovery begins in earnest you'll be able to instantly reach out to these people with something solid. Since these are prospects and you're not discussing open requisitions, there is less reporting required, too. Stockpiling represents the future of sourcing, since soon everyone will be known by everyone else. Then, whoever has the biggest database of pre-qualified and warm prospects will have a huge competitive advantage.
   
   
2. Put your passive candidate networking efforts on steroids. The key to expanding your passive candidate pool is to be able to get 2-3 pre-qualified referrals from any name you find on LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, JigSaw, or Facebook. Done properly, you'll tap into the new "hidden passive candidate" pool. These are the people who aren't listed on these sites and who don't have old resumes online somewhere. (Check out our free networking training events and these articles for more on this topic.)  
   
   
3. Implement "req-less" recruiting. What's the likelihood that some world-class person with exactly the right skill set is going to stumble on your boring ad and apply? You stand a better chance (20-to-1, or more!) by combining all like jobs into micro sites (a.k.a. talent hubs) that have been search engine optimized to be found by those either looking on Google via a content search or through some type of contextual matching. Using requisitions to source talent is comparable to posting an ad in the classifieds. Think of all of the money you'll save by going "req-less."  (Here are some articles on how to get started.)
   
   
4. Begin preparing a multi-stakeholder job analysis to attract top talent in one-off industries. When top people ask you to describe the job opportunity, do they ask about skills and experience requirements, or about the work they'll be doing? A multi-stakeholder job analysis defines all aspects of the job from a 360° perspective. By describing and combining everyone's needs – the hiring manager, compensation, OD, the hiring team, HR, the recruiter, the sourcer, and most importantly, the candidate's – into one document, you establish a different framework to source, attract, and assess candidates. Even better, when you use the performance expectations as the primary assessment and selection tool, you'll discover some top performing people who have successfully done comparable work in slightly different industries. (Contact us if you'd like help in preparing a multi-stakeholder job analysis.)
   
   
5. Use LinkedIn and virtual network events to leverage your ERP. People who are referred by your current employees should represent 50-60% of all of your future hires. But rather than wait for these people to give you names of average referrals to wade through, have them open up their LinkedIn network and tell you about the best people listed. Then contact these people and ask them if they want to be in your prospect pool. Then get them to give you some of the best people in their LinkedIn network, too! This will give you enough people to build a ready stockpile of future talent. If you want to instantly fill the prospect pool, consider a Shaker Recruitment Advertising virtual networking event. For a pretty low cost you can run a full-day online event for every job class with traffic driven by your employees inviting everyone they know. (Contact us if you'd like a tour of a Shaker virtual networking event.)
   
   
6. Add "Managerial Fit" and "Job Fit" to your assessment process to reduce turnover, improve performance, and increase job satisfaction. The primary reasons otherwise competent people leave a job or underperform are lack of motivation to do the work required or problems working with their supervisor. Over the past few months we've worked with Profiles International to develop an online assessment tool to identify these types of potential problems. Eliminating these "misfits" is one sure way to improve your hiring results. (Check out these articles and contact us if you'd like to learn more about this new assessment idea.)
   
   
7. Implement a recruiter development program. Recruiting pre-2009 will not be the same as post-2009. If your recruiting team is not leading the charge to implement the changes required your company is being held back. We've developed a multi-level benchmarking program to determine the quality of your team in comparison to the best in the business. Email us if you'd like to learn where your recruiting team stands and what you need to do to get them into the top ranks.   (Here's an article describing the key factors affecting recruiter performance.)
   
   
8. Implement a sequenced sourcing channel strategy program. If you can post a $25 ad on Craigslist and hire a top J2EE developer, do it! However, if this doesn't work you might want to post a creative ad on Dice and use a pay-per-click sponsored search through SimplyHired to make sure the best people find it and apply. This will cost about $300. If this doesn't work, you might want to start calling your current employees to get referrals. This will cost about $2,500 including the referral bonus. If this doesn't work, you might want to put the assignment out to contingency search, which will cost about $15,000. If you plan to hire 20 or more J2EE developers create a talent hub to drive your costs down to $500 to $1,000 per hire and reduce your time-to-fill to one week. What this all means is that you need to have a pre-planned and sequenced sourcing strategy for every one of your job families. This way you can maintain quality while reducing time-to-fill and cost/hire to the absolute minimum. (Contact us if you'd like a free evaluation of how well your company is performing on this front.)  

There will be a rebound. Sometime. Those who use the time between now and then to upgrade their core sourcing and recruiting processes will have a distinct advantage over those that are now sticking their heads in the sand. A few skunk works projects like those described here might be just the thing to get your company focused on the future. It might do wonders for your career, too.