Headhunters

As the job market has slid over the past 15 months, I have had a lot of newly unemployed friends contact me for referrals to great recruiters. At first, my response was, "A recruiter will only want to hear from you if s/he is actively working on an assignment for which you may be a perfect fit." Then the market worsened and my recruiter friends started asking me for referrals to companies that had open positions. So my advice to both groups became, "Great hunters always know how to think like their prey, which allows them to accurately predict where they will be and what will draw them in." This may be an odd metaphor, but it has been working so I decided to share it with everyone via my blog.

First, what drives a recruiter's behaviors? External recruiters live and die by their individual placements. They must find a great candidate, sell both the candidate and the employer on the match and then convince them to stay together for at least six to twelve months (recruiters rarely get paid if the person does not stay for a pre-determined length of time). Internal recruiters live and die by the quality and speed of placements because they must deal with the "customer" every day (i.e. they both work for the same company). Depending on how clever they are, they may rely on global job boards (not very clever) or they may reach out to a network of well-connected contacts in that industry (very clever). Greed-driven external recruiters will often spam a company with a ton of applicants hoping something will stick (aka spray and pray). Thoughtful ones will do a thorough job sourcing candidates via channels not usually used by internal recruiters and will do a nice pre-screen on the front end to make sure they are only sending a small number of highly-qualified and strong-fit candidates. Internal recruiters may spend a great deal of time only filling entry-level positions, which means they will be found at college job fairs. More valuable internal recruiters will spend that time at industry events, talking up the benefits of working for the company (to employees of competitor companies) and identifying fresh thinkers who may be delivering cutting-edge presentations.

Recruiters can also be found online. This is a great way to play "fly on the wall" and start to learn about the current recruiting market and techniques that recruiters use. (It is better to be easily found by a recruiter than to look desperate by sending your resume to hundreds of them directly - remember, unsolicited resumes from people who cannot be immediately beneficial will be tossed in the garbage.) Some of the places where recruiters are lurking include:

• RecruitingBlogs.com - as advertised, this is a warehouse of blogs and comments by both internal and external recruiters (you can quickly learn about fee splits, search basics, and other hot topics by poking around this site)
• ERE.net - this site is run by a media company and I believe that they cull the membership in order to promote the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership (for leaders of internal recruiting teams) and various conferences that they sponsor, but the members post great information and they have local groups that you can join
  
• NetworkedRecruiter.com - look for a group like this in your neighborhood because this is where the recruiters literally meet!

For the most part, you will find that good recruiters prefer someone who is a top performer and so they are looking for people who are still employed and who are a challenge to steal away from their company. They find those types of people by using creative Boolean searches on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networking sites. They look for evidence that the candidate is an expert and is valued by others (e.g. popular speaker or writer or referred by more than one person). They want to see some longevity on the candidate's resume (no job hoppers), which shows dedication to the employer and stability. Then, once the recruiter has found you, you had better be on top of your game and honest in all that you claim to have accomplished because the interviews have just begun...

Recruiting Videos

Visit YouTube.com and pull up Jeff Sass's video called "Work's A Beach!". He shot this with his phone before going into the office, downloaded it to YouTube, pushed it to Twitter while walking back to work, and had an interested candidate Twitter back before Jeff reached his desk. The person that wrote back was JC, and JC ended up earning the job (after properly being interviewed and such).

What is the lesson learned for your company?

The Sourcing Strategy and Plan

There have been several requests for additional information about how to build a sourcing strategy, specifically around tactics that have been successfully used to execute the part of the strategy that is typically called "birds of a feather flock together". Some recruiters recognize that one cannot discriminate and fear that looking for too many similar people will also result in a homogenous group of employees. The value of diversity can not be understated so let me make some points here:

• Employers should look for diversity not just in the traditional umbrella (e.g. sex, age, etc.), but also in thoughts, behaviors, and goals (not everyone can be the CEO)
  
• When filling key positions the competencies required to execute the activities that lead to realizing the performance objectives are more important than what someone looks like
• Write a great job profile that clearly markets the benefits of working for the company as well as the exciting opportunities and challenges that the selected person will face, include a list of the most critical competencies that candidates must have or are preferred
  

Clearly, you want to start with a robust employee referral program. If you selected great people then that is the group you want to continue to 'clone'. So, the question is, where are more people like this and how can you tap that market through this group? In today's world that is best done by having those employee leverage their social networking connections. The job profile can be forwarded by your employees to the people in their network whom they believe would represent them well if hired. You should also make finding the next great hire a lucrative event for your employees. Consider how much you would have to pay an external recruiter if they were to bring you the eventual hire...

As the profile is circulated in a viral method you will hit passive as well as active candidates. In your strategy you should clearly define the route you wish to go based on the timing and strategic nature of each hire. If you need someone fast you will need an active candidate. If the position is more strategic you will probably benefit from a more passive candidate. Those take longer to source and may require some research into professional associations, white papers, conference presentations, and other resource pools that indicate someone's expertise, philosophy, and methodology.

Also, don't forget to evaluate the value of each referral source as part of your plan. If you are doing a great job of screening candidates you should end up with a forced-ranking profile of each. Look retroactively at the source of each candidate to also force-rank the quality of each source. For example, if three of the top five candidates were sourced through employee connections on LinkedIn then LinkedIn should be a strategic priority and you should invest accordingly (e.g. pay for some employees to have account upgrades). If none of the top 50% of your candidates came from a specific job board then you should stop wasting time and resources on that board.

If you are shopping for an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to use in order to execute your strategy, look for a product that either closely matches the plan you have created or one that can be setup to follow your plan. If you want to incorporate the three strategies mentioned above, I suggest you look into Jobvite. A quick search of LinkedIn Answers about ATS's indicates that Jobvite is the preferred ATS that fully leverages social networking as well as source ratings.

One final point, The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs administers a number of laws and regulations. Make sure that your strategy (and your ATS, if you use one) complies with those laws.

Employee Referral Programs

Pro: Top performers should bring in other top performers because birds of a feather flock together.
Con: Not everyone is a top performer. Top performers may be unwilling to refer others because it would reflect poorly on them to bring in a poor performer. Poor performers will refer a lot of people just for a little extra money or to surround themselves with their friends at work.
Strategy: Ensure that employees know that anyone who gets referred is a reflection of the employee who made the referral. Actively request referrals from your top performers, especially when there is a specific opening you want them to help you fill. You may want to provide some meaningful financial incentive if a referred candidate is chosen and stays with the company for more than 90 days. If that same new hire is rated as a top performer at the end of the year you should give the referring employee an additional bonus.

Who owns finding new hires?

I work for Silver Hill Financial (http://www.silverhillfinancial.com), which is part of Bayview Lending Group. Bayview's HR team has a recruiting team. That team is a shared resource for the other two companies within BLG and other Bayview companies as well. Whenever a manager identifies the need for a new position or needs to replace an employee they seek approval from the company's leader and then call the recruiting team and ask for a search. However, most of the time that manager (as a leader of a specialized function) is probably better suited to find a pool of qualified candidates with experience in that function. Once they grasp this reality they often share the locations where the qualified candidates may be found and then ask for a search. However, this same manager is probably also the best person to reach out to their peers and network in order to attract the right candidates from the same locations that they just sent to the recruiting team. In fact, once a small group of suitable candidates have been recruited to apply this same manager is also probably the best person to interview the candidates in order to determine whether the candidates have the specialized knowledge and experience for the opening.

So, what value does the recruiting team add? They are experts in how to put this process together effectively - from sourcing to attracting to selecting. The members of the recruiting team help the manager figure out what he/she really needs. They help the manager realize which sources the manager's industry provides that probably include people that are interested in new opportunities. They help the manager position the opening and the company in a very attractive way in order to attract the best candidates. They even pay for ads and job postings as needed. Finally, they run all of the candidates through the initial screens before presenting a small group of potentially qualified candidates to the manager. They also offer to help the manager develop effective interview questions and other steps in the process.

Managers should NOT delegate all of the steps to anyone. They must take ownership in the sourcing, attracting, and selection of their team members. Otherwise, they cannot complain about what they end up with. They need to exercise their right to lead.