Issue #5 — March 2008

In This Issue:

• Recruiting In a More Challenging Environment: Five Strategies Every Recruiter Should Consider
• If You Don't Know What You're Looking For, You'll Never Find It
• Executive Commentary: Defining "Quality" in Recruiting

Previous Issues:

• February 2007
• April 2007
• July 2007
• November 2007

Recruiting In a More Challenging Environment:
Five Strategies Every Recruiter Should Consider

Recruiters today face many new challenges, challenges that didn't exist a few years ago. An unstable economy. Ongoing baby-boomer retirement and the impending shortfall of jobs. A major shift in what candidates value from employers – and what it takes to hire them. All of these issues – and more – confront recruiters today, so they need new recruiting tools and strategies to continue to meet their organizations' needs.

What are you doing to make yourself a better recruiter this year? We wanted to know, so we talked to many of you – the best-of-the-best recruiters today. We heard many examples of innovative recruiting approaches and thought we'd share some with you.

Here are five tips you can use to help you continue to attract and hire top talent:

1. Highlight and promote employer branding. Remember, it's all about differentiation. Successful recruiters today are promoting company strengths and what they can offer to employees that differentiate them from other employers. For example, this is your chance to promote your company's values, culture, or other strengths.
2. Demonstrate corporate social responsibility. Related to employer branding is the idea of demonstrating that your company is committed to corporate social responsibility. Showing that you're a good citizen – whether it's offering paid time off for volunteering, highlighting your reduce-reuse-recycle programs, or contributing to social causes – goes a long way to finding top talent. This is especially important for attracting millennial-generation employees.
3. Change your approach with innovative recruiting tools. Gone are the days of just placing job ads to fill positions. Top talent is becoming harder to find and candidates are using new ways to find jobs. To succeed, recruiters need to rethink traditional recruiting methods and embrace new tools, such as LinkedIn, user groups, and other social-networking methods.
4. Revisit referral networks. We heard that many of you are re-investing in your referral networks. This is especially critical in this economy; apprehensive employees and passive job employees tap into their networks to quell rumors or uncover new opportunities. If you have a good story to tell, share it among your network as a way to attract top talent. Also, be sure to communicate this same message to your employees, so they can act as ambassadors and help spread the word.
5. Promote a culture of performance. Finally, if your organization has a culture of performance, don't be shy in letting candidates know. For example, companies that have already implemented a pay-for-performance culture have a distinct advantage in finding top talent. High performers want to work for companies where their contributions will be rewarded, so promoting a performance-based culture will help you attract the best candidates.

Thank you for sharing your insight, tips, and best practices, and we hope that these strategies will help you become more effective, and productive this year.

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If You Don't Know What You're Looking For, You'll Never Find It

It's all about performance. Over the past four or five years, I have seen a steady increase in organizations spending time and effort to define and measure employee performance. As the economy heads into a recession and profits are under scrutiny, this will become even more important. No organization can afford people who do not contribute and who cannot perform consistently at a high level.

But, what is often lacking is a connection between employee performance and the traits recruiters look for in candidates. Many recruiters just take the generic job description and base their interviews and selection on competencies that may not be aligned with the reality of the position. Defining great performance and tying it back into the competencies, skills, and traits that candidates have is essential.

If you are serious about finding the best people with the most talent to recommend for hire, here are the five steps you have to take:

1. Identify and Measure. First of all, we have to work harder than we do at identifying and measuring the low, middle, and high performers. We need to establish indicators of success and of high performance for each position we recruit for. Indicators could be the number of sales made in a month, the number of reports written that resulted in consulting assignments, the amount of revenue their group has generated, and so forth.
2. Develop Profiles. Once we have the indicators or criteria determined, we can work with managers to develop profiles of the high performers in each group. We can look for commonalities and traits during the screening and interviewing process that predict success. These could be competencies, activities they engage in, work methods, or processes.

   For example, several years ago, a firm was hiring technicians to repair precision-manufacturing equipment. By using the process described above, it was able to identify several skills that led to success. It learned that people leaving the armed services who had been trained as mechanics had the highest success rate. Then, the company focused its recruiting on exiting service personnel.

3. Find Them and Target Your Messages. The next task is to discover where these people are and what they enjoy doing. This is necessary so that you can target your advertising message and placement toward this audience. You can gather information from competitors, vendors, and suppliers about where good people may be located.

   You can certainly use your employee-referral program for the same purpose. And every time you actually find candidates with the right profile and skill set, ask them where more people like them are.

4. Build a Database. Collecting and capturing this information is critical. The knowledge you gradually accumulate is valuable and should be put into a database that can be shared with other recruiters. This is a form of knowledge management and, when properly done, it can save thousands of hours of work and bunches of money.
5. Decide Whether to Recruit or Develop. The final step in this process is to determine whether there are enough highly skilled people to recruit efficiently and economically.

   Sometimes, it is actually cheaper to develop people internally. The recruiting function must become a talent agency, which is something it has not been. Talent agencies recognize talent and develop it for strategic purposes. We, as recruiters, need to take our knowledge of what high performance looks like and then, using market knowledge and competitive intelligence, make a recommendation as to whether we should continue to try and recruit the people who have "it," or whether we should put together a development process.

The key is that recruiting is not only about finding talent, but it is also increasingly about developing it. If we are to move our profession upwards, these things I have described are what it is going to take.

Precision, measurement, quantification, and process rigor are elements I have been focusing on for some time now. Recruiting generally needs to improve in all of these, and now that economic times are getting tough, when could be a better time to start?

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Executive Commentary: Defining "Quality" in Recruiting

The focus on "quality of hire" in the recruiting process makes a lot of sense. Hiring managers know that meeting their business goals requires that they hire top-quality performers. And recruiters understand that they serve their organizations better when they deliver great candidates. They both need a recruiting process that that does more than gather and track resumes; it needs to help attract and hire top-quality people.

But putting the quality-of-hire concept into practice presents certain challenges:

• How do you define "top quality?"
• How will you recognize it?
• How is quality measured?
• Is quality measured consistently throughout the organization?
• How can you identify quality shortfalls in people and in the organization and develop appropriate measures to improve quality?

One proven way to address these issues is through competency models. Competencies define the skills, experience, knowledge, behavior, and attributes necessary for success. Competency models help to define the requirements for success in a particular job, a family of jobs, or within an entire organization.

Competencies provide a common vocabulary to describe "quality" across the organization. The most effective competency models are based on extensive experience and analysis of jobs and organizations.

How can competencies be used in the recruiting process to help an organization hire top-quality people?

• Competencies can help clearly define the criteria for success in a job. They provide an accurate yardstick against which to measure candidates. Those that meet or exceed the competencies specified for the job are more likely to succeed.
• Interview questions derived from competencies can be used effectively to elicit candidates' qualifications for a position. Using these questions, the interviewers are in a better position to accurately assess candidates.
• Competencies used in the recruiting process can provide a level playing field for all candidates. Assessment criteria can be consistent across all interviewers, and candidate evaluations would be more useful.

  They can also ensure greater consistency across the entire organization, so, for example, a company could be confident that mechanical engineers hired in Austin met the same standards as mechanical engineers hired in St. Louis.

• Competencies can be effective in identifying gaps in a candidate's qualifications. This is particularly useful in evaluating internal candidates. An internal candidate's competencies are likely to be assessed during periodic performance reviews. It is then possible to compare the candidate's known competencies against the competencies specified for success in a particular job.

  Identifying this competency gap makes it easier to direct the person to the most appropriate development resources to enhance their qualifications.

Competencies by themselves are not the secret to hiring top-quality talent. They need to be delivered as part of a comprehensive talent management process and solution.

Organizations need to build rich talent pools and develop and retain their internal talent. Recruiters need effective tools to quickly search for talent and match them against open positions, and they need the means to accurately identify the sources of the most qualified candidates. And the recruiting process must engage the hiring manager and ensure their close collaboration with the recruiter.

All of these elements together, along with effective competency models, are valuable to recruiting top quality talent.

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