Issue #1 — February 2007

In This Issue:

• I Am Your Candidate
• Recruiting is Not Selling, and Other Misconceptions About the Most Important Part of Hiring
• A Very Modern Recruiter: 5 Essential Skills for Success
• Executive Commentary: Winning the Battle for Top Talent

I Am Your Candidate

I am not an expert at looking for work. If I was, you wouldn’t be interested in hiring me. People who are really good at looking for a job get their experience and expertise because they have to look for a job often. The very things that make me valuable to you make me an amateur job hunter.

I am looking for work for one of two reasons. Either my circumstances have changed unexpectedly or I am feeling frustrated with them. If I really liked my job and everything was rosy, I wouldn’t be looking for a job. I am looking because I need or want a change.

Looking for work is not much fun. No matter which position I am in (moving up or moving on), my self esteem is on the line. Time slows down and individual data points become rich with meaning. I am more self conscious now than I usually am.

I mine every transaction for signs of feedback. This is not difficult to understand. In times of transition, all people look for security in the places that routine once occupied. Because I am looking for work, my routine is disrupted. So, I hunt for evidence to use in navigating the new terrain.

I am drawn to situations that provide feedback. I am attracted to settings that allow me to quickly size up my potential for a fit. Graciousness, good manners and an appreciation of my circumstances always grab my attention. A clear “No” is very useful to me. Otherwise, I am left wondering.

Likewise, I always remember companies that didn’t have the time to say “thank you”. I am profoundly aware that some companies email me, asking for my resume with no intention of ever getting back to me. I really hate feeling like I have wasted my time. When you treat me like I am valuable, I remember. I don’t get much of that in the job hunt.

My family and friends are a part of my search. When I am anxiously awaiting the next step in the process, they are all tuned in. When I have information, good or bad, they are happy. When I am in the dark, they get very anxious. Your reputation spreads quickly throughout my network.

I do not know all of the details of my history at any given point in time. I’ve been reading the papers the last couple of years and am very nervous that I might make a mistake in dates or descriptions. It’s much easier for me if I can give you my information a piece at a time.

I really like it when you have a way to send a job to a friend. I use that feature to send job ads to my home email address. I am not always sure that it is okay to look for jobs at work. I am certain that I don’t want to apply for them from work.

I have heard about the idea of an employment brand. To me, that means what I think about your company as a place to work. No workplace is perfect. I would be happier knowing something about what it’s really like to work there than to be given an unrealistic picture. This means that people who tell me something a little negative about the company are more credible than those who pretend that everything is wonderful.

I am flawed, human and less certain than I’d like. I will shine in the right setting. I hope you will help me find that. I will treat you with the same respect you give to me.

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Recruiting is Not Selling, and Other Misconceptions
About the Most Important Part of Hiring

"Sure, luck means a lot in football. Not having a good quarterback is bad luck." - Don Shula

After you’ve made your offer, but before accepting it, your candidate is probably shopping it around, hoping to get something better. As soon as a candidate accepts your offer, the person gets buyer’s remorse, wondering if she made the right decision or left something on the table. Even if the person doesn’t have a better offer on the table, lack of conviction when resigning sets the stage for a counter-offer. Effective recruiting becomes the difference maker when you want to be sure more of your offers get accepted and stay closed.

Here are two fundamental recruiting principles. Violate them at your peril. First, never make a formal offer until it’s accepted. This way there’s no time for the candidate to shop it around. Second, provide your candidate a compelling future vision that overwhelms the past. This way there’s no chance of the person taking a counter-offer.

Implementing these rules is what recruiting is all about. As far as I’m concerned, recruiting is the most important part of the hiring process. Everything is a wasted effort if a top candidate doesn’t accept a reasonable offer. However, don’t worry, if you’ve prepared a performance profile when you took the assignment you’ve set the foundation for getting recruiting right. A performance profile is not a list of skills and qualifications. Instead it describes what the person must accomplish with the skills. For example, if you need a control systems engineer to design super efficient electro-mechanical valves, it’s better to say “lead the control systems design effort for a new state-of-the-art bio fuel facility,” rather than “must have five years of petrochemical experiences with pneumatic vales and a BSME.” One will attract the best, the other will turn them off. (Here’s an article you should read on how to prepare performance profiles if you’re not using these yet.)

Let’s start with some fresh ideas about what recruiting is, and what it isn’t.

• Recruiting is not something you do at the end of the interview. It starts at the beginning of the hiring process, when you write the performance profile and post the compelling ad.
• Recruiting is more about buying than selling. If you sell too soon, you stop evaluating. If the job is compelling, candidates will sell you as they attempt to convince you why they’re qualified.
• Recruiting is more about consultative needs analysis than transactional selling. For the candidate, accepting an offer is a long term strategic career decision based on opportunity, not a short term tactical decision based on compensation. So don’t rush it.
• Recruiting and closing is not about compensation it’s about opportunity. If your job is no different than the competition, than all you have left is the money to offer. A good recruiter needs to convince the candidate that the offer should be based on the opportunity to grow, not who’s making the biggest offer.
• The best candidates will never make the decision alone. Part of the recruiting process is to provide the right information for the candidate to persuade others.
• The role of the hiring manager is more important than ever. Next to job fit and growth opportunity, candidates look at the quality of the hiring manager in deciding whether to accept one offer over another. This requires that managers be totally committed to hiring top talent and involved from beginning to end.

In the Beginning

Recruiting starts when you first contact the candidate, whether it’s a compelling written ad or verbal pitch. Recruiting then continues throughout the interviewing process from the first phone screen to the final interview. It does not begin after you’ve assessed the candidate and decided that you want to move forward. This is too late. Interviewing and recruiting must take place in tandem. The compelling nature of the opportunity must be presented up front. This way the best candidates join the initial pool of applicants hoping to be selected. If your online job descriptions emphasize skills and qualifications the best will not even apply. If your managers and recruiters don’t understand real job needs top candidates will opt-out of your hiring process long before you’re ready to make an offer.

While you need to start at the beginning with a compelling offer, don’t rush it. Just because you think you’ve found a hot candidate, don’t start selling within 15 minutes. Some managers think they can sell or charm a candidate into taking a job. This is not recruiting. This is selling in its worst form, representative of the classic used car salesman. This approach not only demeans the job and the hiring manager, but it also drives the best candidates away. And if they do stick around, you’ll wind up paying unnecessary compensation premiums. Recruiting is more about career counseling and solution selling. The key to recruiting: create a compelling opportunity, present it early and often, then make the candidate earn the right to have it.

To do this right the hiring manager needs a complete understanding of the job, a thorough knowledge of the candidate’s competency, the person’s short and long term career needs, and the compensation requirements. A balance among these competing issues is the key to bringing a fair deal together. This takes time and strong recruiting skills. Open and honest communication are prerequisites. None of this happens when you’re selling. Listening is more important than talking. Listen four times more than you talk to get recruiting right. Nowadays, anybody can find the names of top people. Getting them interested and hired takes great recruiting.

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The Very Modern Recruiter: 5 Essential Skills for Success

What does a modern recruiter need to be good at? Are the traditional skills of cold calling, screening resumes, conducting interviews and closing candidates enough, or does today’s recruiter need a different skill set?

After discussing this with recruiters, candidates and recruiting managers I believe that these traditional skills are changing and morphing into the five skills below.

Skill #1: Recruiters build relationships
Most important and on top of the pyramid of skills is the ability to find great people and build relationships with them. This is what all great recruiters do. Recruiters within organizations need to get out of the organization and get to know people at all levels and professions that might be useful to their firm. They need to utilize technology to help create the initial relationship, and then they need to leverage that by talking on the phone, sending frequent emails, having breakfast or lunch with possible candidates and by always asking one candidate to recommend a few more.

Skill #2: Recruiters know the market
The competent recruiter is able to tell the hiring manager what the employment market looks like, what the supply of talent for a particular job is likely to be in her area and how difficult it will be to find and close on candidates. This knowledge has to be data-driven and can only be collected by vast reading, lots of discussion, the intelligent use of surveys and other data tools.

They also know the direction the market is moving for their client or organization. Are competitors laying people off? Is the market growing, shrinking, flat? This kind of information, combined with the ability to build relationships, can make an ineffective recruiting function very powerful.

Skill #3: Recruiters understand technology
Technology already dominates recruiting. Applicant tracking systems, HRIS systems, email, job boards, blogs, social networks, and recruiting web sites are all part of the technology equation. If the recruiter is not technically agile and informed, she cannot be successful in the long run. Great recruiters dominate the technology and learn how to make it do what they want.

Skill #4: Recruiters prove their value
Competent recruiters use metrics to put together business arguments for programs they initiate or for the systems they buy. They use facts, numbers and results to get what they want. They have a core set of metrics that show how they add value, raise quality, improve profits, or save money.

Skill #5: Recruiters sell and close candidates
In the end, a recruiter is as good as the number of candidates that she can close. To do this, she needs to be good at selling candidates and hiring managers. She needs to know how to overcome objections and turn negatives into positives. She needs to offer solutions, work out compromises, and in the end, make the hire happen.

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Executive Commentary: Winning the Battle for Top Talent

Recruiters have a tough task. The nation’s workforce is aging, key skills are in short supply, and global competition is shrinking the availability of high quality talent. Remarkably, though, many companies aren’t paying attention.In a recent study, the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) Workplace Forecast (June 2006) found that 51 percent of midsize employers and 23 percent of large employers are just becoming aware of this critical issue. All, however, will need to compete more aggressively in the market for talent.

Every CEO, manager and corporate investor knows that hiring the best people is critical to long term success. Yet, most still focus their staffing processes and resources on efficiency rather than quality. Measures such as time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, and turnover are often the only yardstick, when what matters most is attracting superior talent and how well new hires perform.

Focus on Quality

It is imperative that organizations prepare for the impending changes in the workforce talent pool. In this new environment, companies that can identify and attract candidates with the qualities that actually drive success in their organizations will command a powerful edge. If organizations are to focus their staffing efforts less on efficiency and more on quality of hire, several changes are essential. Organizations can make substantial improvements in their efforts to attract high quality talent by taking several critical steps:

• Closely involve hiring managers throughout the recruiting process
• Adopt processes and systems that facilitate effective communication and information sharing among hiring managers, recruiters, candidates, and talent communities, and
• Identify and focus on the attributes and metrics that enhance quality in job performance in addition to the traditional focus on efficiency in recruiting.

Measuring “quality of hire” and “best sources for quality candidates” will provide a more accurate assessment of success. These metrics explicitly relate the recruiting process to the performance of the new hire. And in this way, recruiting is assessed not just as a standalone function; it is viewed as an integral element of a broader strategy to drive positive business results.

Quality-of-hire affects organizational performance at every level, and ultimately, a company’s ability to compete.

A New Metric for Recruiting Success

To better understand the current approach to quality-of-hire and its role in talent management we recently surveyed 150 human resource executives. Our findings suggest that a significant trend is emerging in how businesses evaluate and track recruiting performance.

Two-thirds of the companies surveyed expressed dissatisfaction with their current approach to tracking and measuring recruiting performance. The good news is that nearly 70 percent of the companies surveyed identified improving quality-of-hire as “a business imperative.” And more than 80 percent of those who identified a timeframe for such improvement intend to focus on new measures within 12 months.

Authoria’s Recruiting Edge will bring you the insights and ideas you need to measure and improve the quality of the candidates you pursue and hire., I hope you enjoy the “Edge” and share it with friends and colleagues. Let us know your thoughts.

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