Issue #6 — August 2008

In This Issue:

• Keeping The Pool Warm: Creating a Viable Talent Pipeline
• Attracting Top Talent: Alcon's Success in Hiring the "Cream of the Crop"
• Improve Your Career Site – and Recruiting Results – with Web 2.0 Tools
• Executive Commentary: Seize the Opportunity – Demand More from Your Recruiting System

Previous Issues:

March 2008  |  November 2007  |  July 2007  |   April 2007  |  February 2007

Keeping The Pool Warm: Creating a Viable Talent Pipeline

The intersection of three trends makes it both necessary and possible to identify future employees well in advance of their hiring date.

• Broad internet based search capacity makes it possible to know each future employee by name;
• Social networking tools make long-term, value based relationships possible; and,
• Shifting demographics make precision workforce planning a business requirement.

In other words, the employment market is changing fast. Success depends on defining, building and maintaining a labor supply. Failure to adapt has ugly consequences.

I recently met with a group of senior executives in the Steel Industry. The median age in their organizations is about 55. 60% of the organizations had no employees under the age of 35. All were having trouble attracting new workers.

None had a retention issue. That is a big part of the problem. Great retention in a slow growth industry makes it impossible to compete for new employees.

When you have bad organizational demographics, employee referral programs simply make things worse faster. The last thing these companies need is more of the same kinds of people they already have. Business longevity depends on having age diversity.

They cannot attract new workers because their cultures are full of old people, full of seniority and unfriendly to the young. In order to make room for new blood, they are going to have to let go of employees who are clogging the opportunity artery. Otherwise, the organizations will simply disappear in about 10 years. They have managed themselves into a corner that has no easy solutions.

Labor scarcity and competition are not theories. The Steel Industry's shortsighted recruitment practices threaten its very existence. Rather than a problem for high growth specialized businesses, demographics make talent pool development a critical skill set. There are straightforward methods and practices for developing and ensuring the long-term viability of a company specific labor supply.

The first challenge is getting your arms around five years worth of staffing requirements. This fundamental question is the heart of any viable workforce plan. Generating a rough estimate is simple; multiply current workforce numbers by target growth rates, account for attrition then allocate according to current category distributions.

Publish it. Someone will tell you how wrong you are. Count on that as a method for refining the estimate. From there, you need to acquire four names for each opening. Name generation, sometimes called "sourcing", is how you approach this task. When done, you will have a list of potential candidates for every forecast opening for the next five years. This is your talent supply.

And, it is where the hard work begins.

Managing the talent supply means constantly improving the quality of list while enhancing the relationship between pool members and the company. This "community development" process involves delivering a constant stream of value from the company. It requires getting to know the members well enough to become a part of their success.

Examples of approaches currently in use include:

• Networking events for members of the talent pool. Often there is an educational offering about the industry or a specific profession. Make them fun and create structure for participants.
• Newsletters and white papers distributed routinely to subsets of the pool. It is important to understand that a job opening is not an inherently interesting outreach tool. Value comes from things that help recipients succeed in their current environments. Make it a newsletter you'd like to get rather than one you want to send.
• Opportunities to participate in otherwise closed company events. Invite members of the pool to your celebrations and outings.

There are two essential elements of a good program: Routine and Value.

• Long term relationships with potential employees depend on consistency and predictability, Whether weekly, monthly or bi-monthly, do it regularly.
• Potential candidates must find value (on their terms, not yours) each time they interact with you or the company. The entire idea is to create a positive experience that makes your organization an attractive place.

Industrial era Recruiting approaches, with their complete lack of market anticipation, are incredibly wasteful. Like a goldfish surprised again by the plastic castle, investment and learning are impossible. Everything is always and forever new. Nothing is more expensive than a completely reactive approach.

Survival in these changing demographic times means using new methods. By developing real relationships with potential employees, well in advance of hiring, a sustainable competitive advantage develops. Hiring cycles shorten and transition issues decline.

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Attracting Top Talent: Alcon's Success in Hiring the "Cream of the Crop"

Let’s face it: a recruiter’s job isn’t getting any easier. We’ve always had to attract and hire top talent, talent that is absolutely critical to our organization’s success. But it is even more challenging today, thanks to a highly competitive environment where the job candidates hold all the cards.

At Alcon, we face this challenge each and every day. As the leader in eye care, we are committed to providing the highest quality eye care products, including treatments for eye diseases and other conditions. To do this effectively, we need to hire highly specialized – and highly sought-after – R&D scientists and other key employees. As you can imagine, this is not always easy.

However, we have had some success in this area. We’ve been able to hire good employees and our turnover rates continue to be very low.

So how do we do it? It’s a combination of three key factors: excelling in recruiting basics, promoting Alcon as a great place to work, and committing to a no-holds-barred recruiting approach when we go after top talent.

Recruiting best practices: Our team of recruiters is extremely effective at traditional recruiting best practices, such as networking, finding hidden talent, building talent tools, and being aggressive. At the same time, we are using newer approaches, such as social networking sites, blogs, and other Web 2.0 methods to help us find the right employees.

Alcon culture: Another area that really helps is our culture. Fortune Magazine has recognized us as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" for ten years in a row. This is a significant benefit when it comes to recruiting, and we’re at the point where people want to work for us. Our employees help this by being recruiters of talent as well.

While this may not be something you can change about your company overnight, try to promote the best examples of your organization’s culture and highlight how it can benefit prospective employees. Let your employees be your company’s best recruiters!

First-class recruiting experience: When we do bring people in for interviews, we treat them to a first-class experience all the way. We realize that most of them can choose to work wherever they want, so we do everything we can to make them remember their visit to Alcon.

For example, if we have a candidate who is flying in, we pick them up at the airport, put them up at the best hotel, and generally treat them like royalty. We don’t let them worry about any of the details and go out of our way to accommodate them while they’re here.

While this may seem over the top, we’ve learned that we can’t afford NOT to employ this type of approach. For us, top talent is not something on our corporate wish list, it’s absolutely critical to our success. As a result, we go after the best talent as professionally and aggressively as we can.

When it comes to improving your recruiting efforts, and trying to hire specialized talent, try this approach. Be the best at recruiting best practices, promote your organization’s culture, and treat top talent like free-agent superstars. Chances are, this will help you in your effort to recruit and retain top talent – and improve your business results.

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Improve Your Career Site – and Recruiting Results – with Web 2.0 Tools

To hire and retain top talent, it isn't enough to just point candidates to a static career site anymore. Today, innovative companies are improving their approach – and their results – by incorporating Web 2.0 tools into their career sites.

Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as the use of Web technology that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. A Web 2.0 recruiting strategy is so effective because it offers all the advantages of social networking and delivers improved results. Instead of pushing a limited amount of information to candidates via a job posting or traditional career site, these tools enable companies to truly connect, educate, collaborate, or even create a community of candidates who are truly interested in your organization.

Ready to get started? Here are five Web 2.0 tools that you can incorporate into your recruiting efforts.

Blog. Consider creating a recruiting-focused blog on your site. You could use it to describe why candidates would want to work at your company, offer a message for the CEO, or give a "day in the life" of a typical employee. All of this engages candidates in a new and meaningful way and lets them interact with you or even provide valuable feedback.

Surveys and polls. You can further engage candidates by giving them a chance to respond to a survey question or related poll. This is effective at moving them into your talent pool, but it also helps you learn more about them, gauge their overall interest, and can even give you a way to begin to assess their overall competencies.

Audio, video, and podcasts. Remember, this is not your father's recruiting world, so you need to use all the tools at your disposal to differentiate yourself. Today's candidates are already accustomed to getting information in the way they prefer to get it, and increasingly this means media like video and audio podcasts. You can take advantage of this by offering audio and video messages, or creating podcasts about your company or specific job postings.

Employee testimonials. What better way to describe your company and the benefits of working there than with employee testimonials? Many companies are moving beyond static employee quotes by including interactive employee testimonials. Candidates can learn more by selecting an employee profile that best matches their interests – recent college grad, MBA, professional, or part-time, for example – and can view an interactive video to learn more.

Social networking sites. Finally, you can take advantage of the popularity of the social networking sites by posting your jobs on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and more. You can even use innovative approaches such as having employees post links to jobs on these sites and paying referrals for any candidates that come in this way.

To improve your recruiting process today, you need to go beyond the traditional corporate career site by offering candidates new and engaging ways to learn about your company. When used effectively, Web 2.0 recruiting tools can achieve all this and differentiate yourself from the competition – key steps to improving your recruiting results.

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Executive Commentary: Seize the Opportunity – Demand More
from Your Recruiting System

Progressive recruiting professionals recognize that while their current recruiting systems can deliver greater efficiency, they are unable to deliver significant strategic benefits that help the organization achieve its strategic goals. In particular, these automated recruiting systems don't do enough to attract and hire more qualified people into their organizations.

Current recruiting systems fall short in three significant ways:

1. They don't focus on attracting and hiring top-quality people. In particular, they are unable to measure the quality of candidates and new hires, and they cannot identify the most productive sources for top quality candidates.

2. They are not designed to be used by the hiring manager. They are unable to support the active participation of the hiring manager throughout the recruiting process, thereby diminishing the likelihood of a successful hire.

3. They are not delivered as part of a comprehensive talent management solution. The recruiting-only solutions are unable to help organizations to effectively address the most pressing strategic talent management challenges. Because they operate in a silo, they are unconnected to the performance, succession and development, and compensation functions.

Recruiters now have the unique opportunity to address drawbacks in their current recruiting solutions. As a result of contracts expiring and forced transitions due to vendor acquisitions, they can consider more strategic recruiting solutions.

For example they should examine recruiting solutions that let them measure the quality of hire, give hiring managers a central role in the recruiting process, and connect recruiting to other talent management functions.

Measure Quality: More strategic recruiting solutions provide a way for organizations to measure quality of hire in addition to improving efficiency. They do this by giving HR and staffing executives valuable analytics and key performance indicators that measure the quality of the new talent hired and the effectiveness of various talent sources.

Give Hiring Managers a Central Role: Effective, quality recruiting requires the active participation of hiring managers throughout the process. With the right recruiting solution, hiring managers can take a central role in specifying their hiring needs, defining selection criteria, identifying an ideal candidate, and providing feedback on candidates.

Deliver Recruiting as Part of a Comprehensive Solution: Finally, recruiting needs to be part of a comprehensive solution that spans all functions of talent management including recruiting, performance management, compensation management, succession planning, leadership development, employee engagement, and communications. Newer, more strategic solutions are built upon a common core of functions, a shared data model and a single user interface, eliminating "silos" between applications.

The opportunity is here. By selecting the right recruiting solution, HR and staffing executives can have more impact on their business and enhance their contribution to their organization's success.

To learn more about the potential of newer, more strategic recruiting solutions, download the new Authoria whitepaper, "Seize the Opportunity: Progressive HR and Staffing Executives Should Expect More From Their Recruiting Systems," today.

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