This would imply that during recessions there are fewer good people actively looking and it’s tougher to get the best passive consider to even discuss your career opportunity. If this is the case, one could conclude that the bulk of the people who are looking during economic downturns tend to be those who are unemployed or marginally employed.

Since this group does not represent the best-of-the-best, you’ll need to rethink your entire sourcing strategy to make sure it’s targeting the people you want to hire. Here’s a short video describing how good people enter the job market. Now here’s a quick test to determine how well you’re doing: if you’re seeing less good people than last year using the same sourcing techniques, stop using them!

However, if you do find a few good people, regardless of how you’re finding them, expect these candidates to have more objections and concerns than usual. And the better the candidate, the more objections the person has. So, if you can’t smoothly and professionally handle objections, you won’t be placing many top performers.

Here are some ideas on how to deal with some common objections. They’re more prevalent with the economy on shaky ground. The theme behind them all is to reveal very little information about your assignment until you have a complete understanding of the candidate’s background. By withholding information, you’ll gain candidate interest. This is the key to applicant control.

Handling Common Early Stage Objections

1. What’s the compensation? When someone asks, don’t tell! Say, “Before I tell you that, I’d like you to think about the best jobs you’ve ever held, those that gave you the most personal satisfaction. Were the reasons they were the best due to the amount of money you were making or due to the work you were doing?” (PAUSE and wait for an answer.) “Now, if the job I’m representing offered you a chance to maximize your personal satisfaction plus offered a competitive compensation, wouldn’t it make sense to at least discuss it for 5-10 minutes?” Most people will say yes.
2. First, tell me about the job. You must never tell the person about the job, even the actual title, until you have conducted a quick work history review. Start the conversation by asking your prospect if she’d be open to discuss an opportunity if it were clearly superior to what she’s doing now. Most people will say yes, then immediately say “Great. Could you please give me a quick overview of your background, and I’ll then give you a quick overview of the job. If it seems mutually interesting we can schedule some time to talk in-depth.” You have applicant control when the person says yes. You lose it if your job is less appealing than the one the person has now. By having the candidate talk first, you can look for potential areas where your job is bigger. If not, you’ll have developed a relationship with the candidate that will allow you to ask for referrals.
3. I’m not interested. If anyone says this, you’ve violated a fundamental law of recruiting – the candidate must tell you about their background before you tell them about the job (see Point 2). To recover from this faux pas, say, “That’s exactly why you should consider this job.” Just the fact that it’s illogical helps gain the person’s attention. Follow up by asking, “Are you aware that you just made a major career decision using minor information?” Describe a few strategic nuggets about your job that make it worthy of a short discussion. Something like your company has just invested in a start-up to exploit a new market opportunity, so growth should skyrocket over the next few years, would be a good example of how to get someone to talk a few minutes. Here’s a YouTube video podcast describing my “Magic Bus Theory of Recruiting” which will provide you some insight on how to better handle the “I’m not interested” objection.
4. I don’t like the company. If your company is struggling, or has received some bad press, you’ll need to conduct some preventive PR to offset the recruiting damage. Describe the impact the person could have in restoring the company’s image. It’s also possible the company’s reputation is based on old info, and a turn-around has begun. In this case, make sure you have some real evidence you can use to offset the negative beliefs. As you begin these damage-control efforts, make sure you understand the candidate’s concern and then ask, “If we can demonstrate that your concerns while true in the past have been rectified, would you be open to explore an opportunity with our company?” Of course, then you have to prove your case, but at least you’re moving the process forward.
5. I don’t have time to talk. Calmly say, “Let me rephrase my question then. If the job opportunity I’m representing is clearly superior to what you’re doing today, would you have some time later today to discuss it on a very exploratory basis?” (This is an example, of the “close upon a concern” solution selling technique.) If the person says “no” to your suggestion, something else is really the issue, not lack of time. It could be you gave away too much information when you initially described your reason for calling.
6. I’m happy where I am. When confronted with a happy camper, say something like, “That’s great. You’re the first person I spoke with this week who actually said that to me. Most people nowadays are just hanging around due to the bad economy. Is this really the situation for you?” Then dialogue with the person a bit to understand if she is really happy, or if it was just a brush-off. Then ask, “Under the possibility that if the situation I’m representing is clearly superior to your current job on (causes of happiness), would you at least be open to explore it for a 5-10 minutes.” Then conduct a mini-work history review as part of the phone screen.

You can’t afford to accept these negative responses without a formal rebuttal. This is the only way you’ll be able to find enough candidates to fill your requirements. All good candidates have concerns. It’s the recruiter’s job to ferret them out and address them properly.

While you won’t overcome them all, you’ll probably recover at least 50% of the candidates you would have formerly lost. And if the techniques are done properly you’ll probably wind up with some great candidates for future assignments and plenty of referrals for your current ones.

Collectively they add up to a business process for hiring top people. While Performance-based Hiring provides a simplified high-level summary of these, it’s in the details and execution that will ultimately determine your personal success.

Following are the six core aspects of hiring top talent. A couple of key themes stand out. First, offer and recruit the best people based on career growth if you want to attract the best on a consistent basis. Second, allow people to just look and explore, rather than require them to apply for a job. This prevents them from opting out before you even see them.

If you can address these two issues, you are well on your way to hiring top people every time.

Six Steps for Hiring the Best People Every Time

1. Offer WOW! jobs. Traditional job descriptions listing skills, qualifications, and experience are not marketing tools or predictors of job success. These lists must be diminished in importance. In their place, job descriptions must emphasize what the person will do, learn, and become. As part of this, clearly describe the impact the person can make. From a marketing standpoint, don’t use internal, non-descriptive titles. “Not-for Profit CEO – Back to the Future” was a title we used to find the head of a major charity. In the ad, we described the five-year impact the person would have on the inner city. For bank tellers to fill a mid-day shift we added the tagline “Are You a Desperate Housewife?”
2. Make it about careers, not compensation. The ad copy must clearly emphasize the challenges in the job, the impact the person can make on the company, and some of the growth opportunities. For example, “Help us launch a new Blue Tooth line” is far more compelling than “Must have five years of product marketing experience.” When recruiters first contact candidates – whether they’re active or passive – the emphasis must clearly be on getting the candidate to evaluate your opportunities as career moves, not just as another job for more money or one closer to home. This will help ease the negotiating process and minimize the threat of counter-offers and competitive offers.
3. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. It’s a Web 2.0 world and this means a complete understanding of search engine marketing techniques. Part of this is writing compelling jobs ads that are easily found. From a more advanced perspective, recognize that top performers don’t enter the job-hunting market ready to hunt and peck for a job that matches their skills and experience. Instead, they tip-toe into the market, first contacting former associates and doing some top-down industry and company research. If this is fruitless, they then expand their search efforts through aggressive networking and Googling for jobs. Sourcing programs need to target these early entrants by positioning ads in the right places and proactively expanding employee referral programs to ensure that the best people contact your employees first.
4. Provide candidates multiple opportunities to “just look” rather than buy. Most company hiring processes and career websites are designed based on the premise that candidates are ready to apply for a specific job. This is a flawed premise. The best people, especially the early entrants, are just looking and comparing options. To accommodate these people, recruiters must not push the process too fast, managers must be willing to talk or meet with candidates on an exploratory basis, and career websites need to allow candidates to chat with a recruiter in real time and look at groups of jobs, rather than specific requisitions.
5. Make the interview your secret weapon. Here’s something that will shock you - the primary purpose of the interview is to recruit the candidate, not assess competency! However, done properly you’ll more accurately assess candidate competency and motivation than ever before, but this is a secondary effect. Part of this means using the interview to look for voids and gaps in the candidate’s background, with the expectation that your job will fulfill them. For example, if the candidate hasn’t managed as large a team, or handled a comparable project, or had the exposure your job provides, these voids become learning opportunities and more important than compensation as reasons to accept your position. Obviously, if the gaps are too big, the candidate is unqualified for the job, and if the gaps aren’t sufficient, the job isn’t a worthy move.
6. Use a multi-factor decision tool to negotiate the offer, fight off the competition and prevent counter-offers. Recruiting is not something done at the end of the interview, it starts with first contact. Part of this is suggesting to the candidate on first contact that she should evaluate your opportunity as a career move. During the interview this is reinforced by presenting voids in the candidate’s background as potential learning experiences. While it’s important for companies to judge candidates across multiple factors, it’s equally important for candidates to evaluate different job opportunities across multiple factors as well. Some of these include learning, growth opportunities, compensation, quality of the hiring manager and the team, job match, visibility, cultural fit and work/life balance. This can be formalized by sending the candidate a multi-factor decision form comparing your job with all others he’s considering, including his current position. As long as your job represents a positive long term career move, your job will often win out without compensation being the dominant criteria.

Of course, there are more steps to the process than what’s mentioned here. Regardless, the key to making the end-to-end process work is to step back and understand the unique needs of top performers. This high-level view also allows the integration between the steps to be designed into the process at the beginning rather than as after-thoughts.

While converting the hiring process into a scalable business process is no easy task, it’s not nearly as hard as implementing any major companywide business initiative. If hiring the best is a company’s number-one strategic objective, then nothing is more important.

When filling a job order, most recruiters search through virtual stacks of resumes hoping one stands out, matching most of the skills and experiences listed on the job description. When calling a person, the recruiter attempts to gain this same information by first describing the job and then asking the person to describe his or her background. If there’s a fit, the selling process begins.

If you want to hire more top performers, this is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing.

A little understanding of human nature and solution selling offers some guidance on how to approach passive candidates and quickly get them more interested in what you have to offer. If you follow the instructions closely, you’ll even be able to get two to three great referrals on each call. You’ll want these, especially if you decide you’re not interested in pursuing the candidate.

In the last sentence, pay notice to who decides to move forward or not. It should be the recruiter, not the candidate. If you’re letting your candidates decide if they’re interested in your opportunity, you’re not recruiting, you’re just box-checking and order-taking. Making this decision is the first part of the applicant control process essential to good recruiting.

For the sake of brevity and making a point, let me narrow the passive candidate recruiting process down to two small, but critical, first steps. The first relates to a candidate saying they’re not interested in considering your opportunity, even before you’ve told them anything about it.

The second relates to those who don’t say “no” right away, but instead ask about the comp, title, and location.

I’m sure you would agree that getting past these two pivotal points will dramatically increase the number of top candidates you put into your pipeline.

Being familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will give you some of the insight you’ll need to address these candidate roadblocks. Abraham Maslow was a mid-20th century psychologist who studied the behavior of high-performing individuals. In a 1943 paper, he suggested that people make fundamental and predictable decisions based on different behavioral needs. These needs range from primitive, e.g., requiring water or food, to being completely fulfilled. He separated these states into five distinct levels and referred to them collectively as a hierarchy of needs.

The first level had to do with satisfying basic human needs including biological, food, and shelter. The second level related to fulfilling security needs like a steady income and healthcare. The third level addressed social needs like friendship, intimacy, and family. The fourth level covered esteem needs including achievement, self-respect, and confidence. Maslow referred to the fifth and highest level as self-actualization, growing and becoming as well-developed as possible. According to Maslow, one could not move to a higher level until the lower-level needs were met.

While Maslow has his distracters, and this is certainly not a complete summary, knowing this basic “needs concept” can be useful when a candidate says “show me the money” or something equivalent. Instead of responding, you might ask the candidate directly where she is on her hierarchy of needs scale.

This probably won’t work in such a direct fashion, but these two comparable questions might:

“Considering your current and past few positions, which one gave you the most sense of personal satisfaction?”

Pause and let the person respond. Then ask whether this satisfaction was due to the type of work or the amount of salary. Phrased properly, this can only be answered with something about the quality of the work, not the money being earned.

Unless the person never had a great job or never did anything worthwhile, the candidate will select a situation that addressed a higher order or self-fulfillment needs. With this as the setup go on to ask:

“Under this basis, wouldn’t it then make sense to talk just five to 10 minutes to determine whether the job I’m working on provides both satisfying work coupled with a competitive compensation?”

Done properly, don’t be surprised if 90% of your candidates agree. Of course, you’ll then need to prove your case, but at least you’ve started conversing on a positive note.

I call this the Maslow advance. When confronted with a recruiter or any cold-call from a salesperson, a person’s normal reaction is to say no or ask questions that allow them to get out of the conversation as rapidly as possible. Good recruiters know this.

To overcome this roadblock you’ll need to use some type of decision-shifting question that allows you to engage with the person in a brief-but-meaningful dialogue. As you begin the discussion, don’t provide much information about the job other than a vague title. The key here is to get the person to tell you first about her background. If you describe the job first, you risk the chance the candidate will respond with a “not interested.”

The reason I call this an advance and not a close has to do with the concept of SPIN Selling. Knowing SPIN Selling will also allow you to overcome the “not interested” hurdle.

SPIN Selling is a sales technique developed by Neil Rackham and thoroughly described in his 1988 book of the same title. SPIN refers to a four-step sales process relating to first understanding the situation (S), determining whether there is a problem (P), figuring out the implication (I) of the problem and situation, and asking a need-payoff (N) question to engage the person in another step.

Rackham refers to this step forward as an advance, as opposed to a close. In larger sales or influencing someone into making an important decision (like changing jobs), obtaining more information in a logical series of steps is the key to ultimate success. Good candidates, especially the passive ones, tend to be reluctant to move quickly, so it’s important to engage with them in a series of conversations and interviews sharing more and more critical career and job information at each step.

Another aspect of SPIN Selling is to avoid asking questions that can be answered by a “no” or “not interested.” So for next time, don’t ask the person if he’s interested in a senior firmware job; instead, ask if he’d be interested in exploring opportunities on a new state-of-the-art project your firm is launching. Then get the person to tell you a little about himself (understand the Situation), find out if the person is fully satisfied in his current role (is there a Problem), find out if there is anything in the short term likely to change this (determine the Implication), and then ask the person if he’d be open to talk for 20-30 minutes to see if one of the opportunities you have open would be more satisfying. Of course, the last question combined the Maslow advance with Rackham’s Need-payoff question.

If you forget to do this, and the candidate says “not interested,” you might want to try the “deer in the highlight” advance and say something like “that’s exactly why we should talk.” (I heard this on one of Brian Tracy’s Nightingale-Conant audio selling programs.) This will get the candidate’s attention.

If he doesn’t hang up, but in the dead silence that follows, suggest to the candidate that he just made a long-term decision with short-term data. Continue by suggesting that if it could be demonstrated that your open position represented a great long-term career move, wouldn’t it make sense to discuss it for five to 10 minutes, even if the title isn’t exactly perfect? At least 50% of people will agree to proceed on this basis.

Now, while Maslow and Rackham can keep you in the game, you won’t make the sale unless your job truly offers a better career move than others the candidate is considering. For this you’ll need to have a thorough understanding of real job needs and future opportunities for the firm you’re representing. In addition, you’ll need to use subsequent phone screen and interviews to probe for gaps and voids in the candidate’s background. In this way, the interview can be seen as the SPI part of SPIN selling, with the N the recruiting part.

For example, at the end of the interview, convert a gap in experience into a test of interest by asking the candidate if she’d be open to meet the hiring manager if the job offered significant learning even if the comp increase was modest.

A series of methodical advances like this is how you can use SPIN Selling techniques and an understanding of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to engage more top performers and make more hires. Recruiting is a form of highly sophisticated consultative selling. Unfortunately, too many recruiters try to use transactional selling techniques and wonder why their candidates aren’t interested.

This past week I spent time with a major recruitment advertising agency, a large direct marketing organization, and the top-performing office of one of the largest temp-to-perm employment agencies in the country.

These meetings revealed some trends that might help you develop your future recruiting strategies.

Trend One: The Merging of Sourcing and Consumer Marketing

The buzz in consumer advertising is narrowcasting. This basically means segmenting your customer base into narrow subsets (i.e., professional single women between 25 and 30 who live in the city) and pushing your advertising message to them using a variety of techniques.

Some of these include search engine optimization, organic search, behavioral marketing, the use of talent hubs and microsites, and pay-per-click. The key here is to make sure your advertising can be easily found by the right audience.

The implications of this for sourcing are pretty dramatic. On one level, it means that if a candidate uses a search engine to look for a job rather than a job board, your posting will appear in the first few postings. To pull this off you’ll need to be an expert at developing keywords. These are used as a part of the meta tags built into a web page.

However, in the race to the top of the listing the best keywords win and the best ones are not necessarily the obvious. This whole process is called search engine optimization and there’s more to it than just keywords, but its importance cannot be understated for the next evolution of recruitment advertising.

From what I can tell, the leaders here are Shaker Advertising from an advertising perspective, and Jobs2Web, from the technology side.

Regardless of how you go about it, if you want to hire top people in the future, expect to become an expert using search engines. Once you become an expert at figuring out how to get your boring ads found, you’ll be ready to convert all of these into compelling career messages.

These two steps will dramatically improve your ad results.

Next, combine all similar job postings into one common talent hub or microsite that’s easier to find, a lot less expensive, and even better, it will generate a larger pool of better candidates than all of the individual ads combined. (Email me if you’d like the marketing logic behind this).

Trend Two: Referrals Will Become the Primary Sourcing Channel for All Positions

In a recent Execunet survey, 70% of over 6,000 executives and executive recruiters indicated that networking would be the key to either finding a job or finding candidates, compared to 16% through online advertising.

While this would be expected at the executive level, our own 2007 survey of 800 corporate recruiters filling staff and mid-level positions indicated that networking and employee referrals represented about 35% to 40% of their hires.

This is about five points higher than last year, so not only is networking important, but the trend is up. LinkedIn has helped accelerate this trend, in combination with Facebook, MySpace, and some of the niche social networking sites.

At the employment agency referred to earlier, referrals were also a core part of their recruiting efforts. While this group was primarily placing hourly personnel in general laborer or office admin positions on temporary assignments, it seemed like at least 50% of their recruits were from referrals. More important, the emphasis was on getting even more referrals.

It’s a pretty safe bet to conclude that in the future, referrals and networking will be the primary means companies and third-party recruiters will use to find candidates at all levels. For recruiters and sourcers, this represents a critical shift.

Name generation is rapidly becoming the easy part, with the real skill being effectively cold calling candidates, recruiting them, and getting referrals. Since ZoomInfo is not an opt-in database of names, expect this to become a stronger basic resource tool for those who know how to pick up the phone, recruit, and network.

Trend Three: Increasing Reliance on Metrics, Forecasting, and Workforce Planning

I’ve seen more articles, webinars, and talks about workforce planning in the last few months than I’ve seen collectively over the past few years. This alone indicates interest and demand.

As narrowcasting becomes more prevalent, it will be even more important to plan a channel strategy and track the performance of each ad. Since this is how Internet advertising is priced, recruiting departments will soon be getting a real education on the impact and use of proper forecasting, performance tracking, and Web analytics.

The trend toward the increasing use of metrics and forecasting was clearly evident in ERE’s 2008 Leadership Award submittals. This year companies had to include metrics to prove their performance improvements. In fact, most of the winners and many of the proposals described the implementation of advanced process measurement and monitoring systems. This is a critical shift in approach and an important trend in converting recruiting activity from art to a predictable business process.

Trend Four: Recruiters Becoming Partners with Their Clients and Consultants to Their Candidates

Our 2008 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey revealed two big problems. The first was pretty obvious: 76% of the 775 respondents said it was becoming increasingly difficult to find enough top candidates.

The second problem was a bit unexpected: 59% of the respondents said their hiring manager clients were the real problem in recruiting top people. Some of the problems attributed to this nefarious group included lack of good assessment skills, over-reliance on skills and experiences to weed out people, lack of responsiveness, and an inability to recruit top performers.

Of course, these same managers feel that their recruiters don’t understand real job needs, they’re not presenting enough good people, and they’re not very good at assessing ability.

While this is a pretty big gap to bridge, our data suggests that this difference is narrowing. For example, I spoke with six recruiters at the temp agency and each one was top-notch. While each did things a bit differently, they had one thing in common: each was a true partner with all of the clients.

One told me her clients taught her how to weld and drive a forklift truck. Another told me about attending her client’s annual employee picnic. A third told me about visiting her client’s medical office just to find out what color scrubs were worn.

While being a partner means different things to different recruiters, one thing is certain, recruiters who are partners understand the job, the company, and the hiring manager’s real needs. They also send in fewer candidates per hire, have more influence in the decision, and get called to handle more search assignments.

Just based on the other recruiters I speak with every month, it appears that the idea of becoming a partner is becoming recognized as a critical aspect of becoming more productive.

As the demand for talent increases and the pool of traditional sourcing channels dry up, becoming a career consultant with your candidates becomes equally as important. Not only will you be a more effective recruiter and close more deals, you’ll also be rewarded with the best referrals.

Conclusion

While hiring top people is predicted to become even more challenging, those who alter their recruiting and sourcing practices based on these trends will be way ahead of the game. Start by using Web 2.0 and state-of-the-art advertising techniques to position your ads to be found, rewriting them emphasizing what’s in it for the candidate, not the skills required.

In parallel, work toward becoming a partner with your clients. This will give you the credibility you’ll need to network and get better referrals.

Then to get better faster and maintain a constant rate of improvement, prepare a rolling forecast of your hiring needs and monitor your performance weekly. This will give you the information you need to identify problems in real time and make the necessary changes as they occur.

The future is rapidly approaching. Taking these trends into account will help you get ready for it.

A good measure of recruiter performance is placements per month, with sendouts (interviews arranged with hiring managers) per month and sendouts per hire being the two key performance drivers for this.

For third-party recruiters, add fee per placement to obtain total billings per month as another critical performance measure.

Whether you’re a third-party or corporate recruiter, making more placements per month would be a good thing. With this goal in mind, here are 10 ways you can double your placements per month:

1. Make sure all of your candidates are interviewed. Part of the service level agreement with your clients should be that 100% of your candidates will be interviewed. To pull this off, develop a track record of only presenting strong candidates. Work toward this. If you deliver consistently here, you’ll be able to schedule the interview instantly through Outlook without your client even seeing the resume. Achieving this will eliminate all of the work involved in interviewing and screening candidates who are presented, but not seen.
2. Increase your cold voicemail return rate to passive candidates. You should be getting at least 50% to 75% of your voicemails returned. One of the best ways to achieve this is to only call people who have been referred to you where you can mention the referrer’s name. You’ll achieve a similar callback rate if you’re an industry expert or with a highly regarded and recognized search firm. Your productivity will soar when everyone calls you back.
3. Minimize the time spent talking to bad candidates. Even if they return your call, you shouldn’t be wasting your time calling people who aren’t any good. Work toward making 80% of your cold calls only to those people who have been referred to you and are considered top notch. Become great at networking and getting great referrals. If you can mention the name of the person who referred you to the candidate, this will increase your callback rate, too, so it’s a double win.
4. Don’t spend time reviewing resumes of under-performers. When searching or Googling a resume database, add in recognition or top performance keywords in your string to separate the good resumes from the bad. For example, the term “club” is typically found on the resumes of top salespeople and “laude” is found on the resumes of top under-grads. Every job has terms that indicate the person is a strong performer that would be included on the candidate’s resume. The terms can range from “patent” to “whitepaper” and from “award” to “GPA,” and to everything in between. Don’t waste precious hours reviewing resumes that can be easily eliminated with simple search strings.
5. Reduce the percentage of candidates who say “no” or “not interested” on first contact. Good recruiters are persistent and don’t take no for an answer until the candidate has enough information to accurately decide if your job is worth considering. The best recruiters go a step further and don’t ask questions that can be answered with a “no.” For example, asking someone if they’d be interested in exploring a situation that could potentially be a fast-track career in marketing is more likely to get a yes than asking the same person if she’d be interested in a senior marketing analyst role. Job knowledge, applicant control, and strong recruiting skills are critical here, and worth it if you want to increase your pool of strong candidates.
6. Reduce the rate of candidates who voluntarily opt-out of your interviewing process after meeting with the hiring manager. Top candidates are frequently underwhelmed after meeting their potential new boss and team. Top candidates are impressed when those on the hiring team are prepared, clearly understand real job needs, don’t oversell, and ask thorough and meaningful questions. Prep your clients if they’re not good interviewers, if they make emotional decisions, or don’t know how to recruit. Instruction in Performance-based Hiring can help here.
7. Prevent your clients from eliminating good candidates for bad reasons. Sometimes great people aren’t seen because they don’t have exactly the right background. More often, top people with the right background aren’t great at interviewing or selling themselves. Even more often, managers aren’t very good at assessing competency across all job needs. To prevent this wrongful elimination, become a better interviewer than your clients and intervene before the bad decision occurs. Here are some ideas on how to prevent this costly error: send a sample (e.g., product or presentation) of the candidate’s best work along with the resume, personally lead an initial panel interview and formal debriefing session, have your client conduct an exploratory phone screen before a formal interview, or provide some type of evidence (e.g., an award for something or recommendation) that can’t be easily refuted.
8. Prevent your best candidates from rejecting good offers for bad reasons, especially money. Sometimes top people get shortsighted, especially when first learning about an opportunity. Even during the interviewing process, people get hung up with the short-term issues, like comp, location, and job title, and decide to arbitrarily withdraw themselves from consideration. It’s important to get candidates to consider both the short- and long-term issues in balance. Some of the longer-term strategic issues include job growth, job stretch, degree of learning, the impact that can be made, and the overall upside potential of the job in comparison to others being considered. Early in the recruiting process, suggest that your opportunity should be examined on a multi-factor level balancing strategic and tactical issues collectively. This is how to convert your job into a career opportunity and increase the odds more top people will fully evaluate them on this basis.
9. Increase the number of top people who see your ads. If you’re using any form of advertising, make sure they’re found by the people you want to find them. The simplest way to see if your ads are even being seen is to see if you can find them using Google. For example, if your ad is for a warehouse supervisor in Atlanta, Google “warehouse supervisor jobs Atlanta” and see what boards and jobs show up. Then post your jobs on these boards. This process is called reverse engineering. Of course, you’ll want to be the top listing when you click on the board. The best short-term way to do this is use a sponsored search approach either on the board or with Google. The best people are now Googling for jobs, so regardless of how you get to the first-page listings, it will increase your flow of top people.
10. Increase the quality and response rate of your ads. If you’re not tracking the number of people who see your ad and the percent that apply, you’re wasting your money. The best way to increase the response rate (typically less than 10%) and the quality level is to write creative ads that emphasize what’s in it for the candidate, not the skills and experience requirements. If you position these great ads to be found (see point 9), you’ll increase the quantity and quality of the candidates by three to five times. Then if you screen the resumes using performance terms (see point 4) you won’t waste time looking at any of the bad resumes.

Fully implemented, you should be able to get 20% to 50% better on each of these factors. With this type of improvement, even if all of the factors don’t personally apply to what you do, you’ll still be able to become 100% better in a few months.

Collectively, this is how you move from being an average recruiter to a really good one. Now once you get 100% better do it again. This is how you become a great recruiter.

Much of the hiring process from sourcing to closing to onboarding has changed significantly over the past 20 years. Much hasn’t. And therein lies the problem.

In some cases we’re past Web 2.0, in other cases we’re still using stone-age techniques to find, recruit, and hire top performers.

One could contend that the Internet has been the reason we’ve lost the war for talent. Turnover has certainly increased, requiring companies to build large recruiting teams where only small ones existed before.

More candidates responded to more ads on the big boards, so robust candidate tracking systems needed to be developed to manage the 100-fold increase in applicant flow. Significantly more effort was required to separate the good from the bad, as well as meet legal standards. As the “me” generation emerged and the stigma of changing jobs became a non-issue, job mobility accelerated, adding to the list of challenges.

Collectively, total costs have increased dramatically while cost/hire has probably stayed about the same. And there are probably some less obvious adverse impacts caused by the Internet, but since it’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle, we’d better figure what to do with the mess we’re in.

Some solutions are emerging, but in situations like this it’s always best to see the big picture first. At a pretty high level, here are the eight steps most companies use to fill positions and a quick take on what’s changed and what hasn’t:

1. Open a requisition. Most companies still use traditional job descriptions emphasizing skills and experiences. These are useless for attracting anyone from Gen Y to the oldest of the baby boomers. Other than HR, who would actually market a product or service that emphasized the tech specs rather than the benefits for the customer? Skills- and experience-based job descriptions are like an albatross around your neck. Until you dump these, you’ll never find enough good candidates. (Here’s an article you might want to check out to discover the alternative.)
2. Source candidates. This has moved from newspaper ads to big job boards to search engine optimization, talent hubs, social networking, and beyond. This is the area where the biggest advance has been seen. Of course, if ads are still boring, the impact of many of these Web 2.0 advances has been compromised. Regardless, companies that have taken full advantage of these new Web sourcing tools have seen a positive impact. They have seen a huge impact if they’ve added in some creative consumer advertising ideas into the mix.
3. Qualify candidates. Other than adding in a pre-qualification assessment questionnaire, someone still needs to call prospects, qualify them, and get them interested. I’d even go so far as to suggest that the best people with multiple opportunities will eliminate themselves before succumbing to the impersonal online assessment. For example, on a consumer product/service level, how do you feel when you can’t talk with a live person about something, whether it’s important or trivial? Developing relationships up-front with top performers is a critical component of sourcing. Yet, in this area, companies have regressed dramatically as a result of using the Internet.
4. Manage candidate data. Tracking systems have helped manage the data, but have had little impact on improving quality of hire or recruiter productivity. So on this factor, I’d contend that technology has just kept us even. Barely.
5. Interview and assess candidates. Nothing has changed here. Most companies still use old-fashioned behavioral interviews that every candidate can fake, or managers still make important hiring decisions on gut feelings and emotions. While there are some new ideas out there, the HR department still seems to want to rely on stuff that was new in the 70s and 80s, but quite a bit outdated today. Here’s information on a unique two-question interviewing approach that can’t be faked.
6. Recruit and close candidates. It’s a new world out there, with counter-offers now considered appropriate, competitive offers the norm, and maximizing compensation part of the game. Unfortunately, most recruiters are still using old-fashioned transactional or unsophisticated selling techniques, with the candidates now calling the shots. Worse are managers who think selling or charming a candidate still works. As the supply for top candidates declines with increasing demand, more sophisticated solution and consultative selling techniques will be required. Yet most recruiting managers still think hiring a bunch of rookies or seasoned Lone Rangers to do their recruiting can be a scalable business process. Overall, the ability to recruit and close has been a net loss with too many recruiters doing their own thing.
7. Keep candidates closed. It’s not over until it’s over. Nowadays, it’s critical to maintain a formal bridging process between the time a candidate accepts an offer and the time the person shows up. This period is when buyer’s remorse sets in, the pressure of a counter-offer increases, and other hungry recruiters start poaching your semi-closed candidate. Overall, this is another net loss area. Few companies are addressing this critical in-between period in any formal way, leaving it up to the manager and recruiter to figure it out.
8. Onboarding new employees. Some positive strides have been made on this front. Whether it’s formal training or clarifying job expectations up-front and tying these to a formal performance management system, companies are recognizing the importance of minimizing turnover and increasing employee satisfaction.

Given this, it’s fair to say that since the dawn of the Internet, overall recruiting and hiring performance has gotten worse rather than better. Some companies have bucked the trend by taking advantage of better sourcing tools to gain a market share and big companies have been able to use the Internet to leverage their employer brand.

But since most companies have not modified their recruiting process in light of these changes, there are still many short-term opportunities available for those who want to quickly recover lost ground.

For example, there is a major shift now underway on how candidates look for jobs, bypassing the big boards and going directly to Google to search for jobs. Getting to the top of the organic and sponsored listings is now the key to sourcing success, and Jobs2Web.com seems to have found the magic formula. They clone a company’s website and search engine optimize each job posting to make sure it can be quickly found. On top of this, Jobs2Web offers RSS feeds and instant messaging to bring some level of relationships back into recruiting.

Another example: job board aggregators like SimplyHired, Indeed, and Juju, which offer candidates one-stop shopping with access to multiple job boards and career sites. Make sure you feed your jobs to these aggregators to increase your exposure, but pay extra to get to the top of the sponsored listings. It’s worth it if you select the right keywords.

SimplyHired seems to be pushing the envelope on positioning, pushing job ads to smaller niche sites and places where people are just starting to look. Juju seems to be going after simplicity and low cost. Timing and ad positioning like this are becoming more important factors in sourcing, so make sure you’re using these aggregators to get your postings found by the right people.

I’d suggest you shift much of your job board ad budget and reallocate it to the aggregators. It will be money well spent.

Few companies are up-to-speed here on some of these latest sourcing ideas, so this offers a great opportunity to quickly find more top performers. Jobs2Web and SimplyHired were both at the last ERE Expo, and if you didn’t connect with them, make sure you do right away.

While these tools will increase your candidate flow, you’ll still need to upgrade the rest of your recruiting processes to take full advantage of these approaches, but we’ll leave that for another day.

In a recent ERE article I made the case that a tipping point was close at hand for converting recruiting and sourcing into a scalable and systematic business process.

As a judge for ERE’s annual recruiting awards, and someone who has worked with companies around the world, I’m convinced that most recruiting leaders are starting to realize the need for consistent processes, workforce planning, metrics, demonstrated results, a consumer marketing-based approached to sourcing, trained recruiters, and the effective use of technology.

The justification for a tipping point is based on the idea that many companies are now implementing these types of integrated recruiting and hiring systems.

In the article, I suggested that one huge obstacle remained: getting hiring managers onboard. A few readers believed this could never be systemized, and recruiting would forever remain more art than science. This article will demonstrate otherwise.

Here are the typical problems with hiring managers as they relate to the recruiting and hiring process:

• They don’t want to spend time with their recruiting team.
• They often make interviewing mistakes.
• Many are not good at recruiting top performers.
• They over-rely on skills and qualifications before seeing candidates.
• They’re not willing to invest the time in exploratory meetings with passive candidates.
• They won’t prepare for the interview.

There are probably other items that could be added to the list that are equally relevant, but the idea is that unless hiring managers are better managed, end-to-end hiring results won’t improve. The question remains?does it take art on the part of the recruiter to work through these issues, or can science prevail?

My success as a full-time headhunter for 20 years was based on overcoming these identical hiring manager issues. But when the process I used to pull this off is studied, it’s pretty clear there was little art or magic to it; it was all science.

In 90% or more of the cases where I prevailed, despite these exact hiring manager challenges, with hundreds of different managers filling positions from entry-level to executive, the methodology was always the same. When others (hundreds, not a few) used the same methods, they also had similar and successful results. This is all science.

Test This Theory Yourself

I recommend that you try out the ideas described below on your next assignment to see whether you get better results.

First, stop using traditional skills-based job descriptions to attract and qualify candidates. Instead, ask the hiring manager what he’ll be telling the newly hired person what she’ll be doing on the day she starts. The list of tasks and expectations generated by this line of questioning is referred to as a performance profile in Performance-based Hiring lexicon.

An example best illustrates how this works and how it can be systematized throughout a company. About 10 years ago I conducted a VP Marketing search for a high-tech telecommunications company in the Silicon Valley. It was the first of many searches for this company. The CEO was unsure that I was qualified to handle the assignment, but he started the discussion by telling me the person selected had to have 5-10 years direct telecomm experience, a BSEE from a prestigious school, and must have an MBA from an Ivy League school. Then he asked me what experience I had finding this type of person.

I didn’t answer the question. Instead, I asked him to tell me why a top person as described would want this job. He was flustered, but putting a client on the defensive is a good thing to do to gain a slight edge.

Once I had some reasonable big-picture strategy, I then asked the CEO what he’d be telling candidates their primary role would be in achieving these company objectives. It took about 15 minutes to get a reasonable answer. He told me the VP Marketing would be responsible for preparing a five-year product roadmap, taking into account the company’s technical expertise, the evolution of the Internet, and the key competitors, constrained by available financial and technical resources.

I then asked if I could find a top performer who had accomplished something comparable, but didn’t have the Ivy League MBA and the exact background, if he’d a least meet the candidate for an interview. “Of course,” was his response.

As a result of this “aha,” we placed six senior-level executives with this firm over the next two years. In each case we used performance profiles, rather than job descriptions, to define the real job. Eliminating job descriptions is the first step in managing managers, and replacing art with science.

Interviews as a Way to Collect Evidence

The next aspect of better ways to manage managers is to convert the interview into something more than a popularity contest or an assessment of technical or intellectual brilliance. This starts by recognizing the superficiality of adding up a bunch of yes/no votes of interviewers who are unprepared and making narrowly based assessments.

Instead, have interviewers use the interview just to collect evidence, not make a judgment. As part of this, narrow the range of focus of each interviewer from evaluating everything to evaluating just a few things (e.g., technical competency, organizing work, or managing outside teams).

A deeper (rather than wider) focus will naturally increase accuracy. Then for the yes/no decision, don’t add up the votes. Instead, have the entire interviewing team formally share their evidence in a deliberative manner. Since every other important business decision is made this way, this is not too far-fetched an idea. (Here’s an article for more on this type of hiring decision-making approach.)

A short time ago, I had the opportunity to present this evidence-based candidate evaluation idea to a VP HR of a Fortune 1000 company. He thought it wouldn’t fly at his company, since managers wouldn’t support it. I then asked if his company had a formal expense reimbursement procedure and if his managers supported this. He gave me a puzzled look, and responded with an obvious “yeah, what’s your point?”

I then asked a more reasonable question regarding the formality of his company’s capital appropriation request policy and how non-budgeted business expenses get approved. His answer involved using a very formal procedure directed by the CFO.

My question to him, and to you, is obvious:

“If the CFO doesn’t need manager support to implement expense controls, why does the VP HR need their support to implement a policy far more important?the hiring of top talent?”

While support is nice to have, good systems and appropriate controls are sometimes needed to offset inappropriate behavior. You’ll also get the support you need if the rules are easy to use and help managers make better decisions. It just might not be right away.

Managing managers one-on-one is art, but managing them all can be science. It starts by implementing two simple procedures. The first is to eliminate job descriptions for hiring purposes and replace them with a clear definition of what the person taking the job needs to do to be considered successful.

The second is to eliminate the crude process of adding up a bunch of poorly considered yes/no votes and replace it with an evidence-based assessment process. To enforce it, also make managers responsible for the quality of their hiring decisions.

This is not art. It’s just common sense coupled with sound business practices. And if you track your hiring successes and mistakes and see improvements in both, you’ll get all the support you’ve ever wanted.

I’ve been a judge for the ERE awards for the past three years and have attended numerous recruiting conferences around the world. As part of this, I’ve seen great ideas come and go, and some not so great, somehow hang on. So I’m a bit cynical with most of the hype and the emergence of the next great hope.

However, something chilled me at this year’s ERE Expo in San Diego that hadn’t before. If you weren’t there, you missed something special. I was there, and even I missed it at first. It took awhile to register. While some of the presentations were great, some weren’t, but that’s not the point. What was special about this event was a sea change of ideas that collectively will hugely impact our business.

A tipping point relates to an idea whose time has come. This is the point when a critical mass is reached and there’s no turning back. Its own momentum will turn the tide and carry the day. For recruiting, I believe the tipping point occurred sometime in April 2008 at ERE’s Spring Expo. At least that’s when it was announced to the world, although only a few heard it at the time.

The tipping point I’m referring to is the moment in time when recruiting shifted from teenage angst to young adulthood, to when recruiting finally came of age. It’s when all of the tools, technology, and resources have begun to work in harmony to make the idea of hiring top people a scalable, sustainable, and consistent business process.

It’s the moment when a company can rely on its recruiting team to consistently deliver top performers for all essential positions. It’s the moment when the recruiting team became a strategic asset, rather than a tactical expense. It’s the moment when the recruiting team became a line function, rather than overhead. It’s the moment when the recruiting team became a profit center and began paying for itself. I believe that moment is now.

Few would argue with “consistently deliver strong candidates for all positions in a timely and cost effective manner” as the standard of performance for measuring a recruiting department’s effectiveness. Unless a company is an employer of choice, very few have met this target, but from a tipping point perspective many are on their way.

Interestingly, the tipping point’s arrival is not about some new tool, technique, or technology. What it is about is how all of the tools, techniques, and technologies have been used and integrated to make recruiting top talent look more like a business process than a group of independent, unregulated activities. Practical integration is the key, and while many factors attributed to this, a few stand out as critical.

Top Factors Pushing ‘Recruiting as a Business Process’ to the Tipping Point

1. Leadership. This is at the heart of the conversion from loose independent processes to a systematic business process for hiring top talent. A recruiting leader needs to pull everything together, set the vision, obtain the resources, ensure the commitment of the executive team, and then make it happen. Except for isolated instances, this was what was missing before April 2008, but what was clearly emerging as the theme at the Expo.
2. Change management. Implementing change despite the naysayers and non-participants requires commitment and persistence. It’s great to have the vision of how to do things right, but doing them is the difficult part. It’s time-consuming, often unsatisfying, and frequently scorned. Despite this, more and more recruiting teams are successfully pulling it off.
3. Metrics. Performance must be consistently measured against some standard in order to improve processes. This year, it was apparent that more companies were using metrics to demonstrate not only how they were doing, but also to prove what they were doing was working. Real-time metrics are at the core of every business process and recruiting is rapidly coming on-board.
4. Deliver results. Although there’s still a gap between line managers and the recruiting department, it’s closing, as more recruiting departments begin to deliver strong candidates on a consistent basis. Results that can be measured and observed are far more impressive than talk, and some impressive results were presented.
5. Proper use of technology. Whether it was using sophisticated CRM to manage a proprietary resume database, recruiting dashboards to track sourcing channel and recruiter performance, or modeling to predict workforce needs, sophisticated technology used properly was clearly evident. Even better, recruiting managers and executives were seeing the effective use of technology as part of the solution, not the total solution. This is a huge shift in thinking.
6. System-level perspective. While it wasn’t pronounced as such, many of those who submitted applications for the ERE awards program clearly demonstrated a system-level understanding of the hiring process. This means that there is better understanding that individual tools and techniques (ad postings, interviewing, cold calling, closing, etc.) are just subsets of a bigger and more complex hiring system. Getting these individual sub-systems to integrate with other sub-systems is critical to getting through the tipping point.
7. Workforce planning. While there has been much talk about this over the past few years, this year ERE offered a full-day, in-depth, pre-conference workshop on the topic. Whether you use a bottoms-up forecast or a predictive statistical model to predict your workforce needs, the important idea emerging from this is that you won’t be too successful unless you know who you’re going to be hiring over the next three to 12 months. Planning vs. reacting is certainly a critical step in getting past the tipping point.
8. Process consistency. While there is still some art left in recruiting, science and systems are taking over. This does not mean minimizing the importance of the one-on-one relationship, just that there are standardized “best practices” that all recruiters and sourcers need to use. This is no different from the idea that sales people need extensive training to sell sophisticated and complex products.
9. Segmentation is critical. The best are different than the rest. The baby boomers are looking for different things than the Ys and Xs. Advertising, sourcing, networking, interviewing, recruiting, and closing have to be customized to address these unique differences. While few are there yet, recognition of segmentation is an essential part of moving through and beyond the tipping point.

While these factors are clearly on the minds of recruiting and HR leaders, bringing hiring managers onboard seems to be problematic. No matter how effective the recruiting team is in delivering top-quality candidates, much of it is wasted effort if managers aren’t good at assessing competency or attracting top performers to work for them.

Whether it’s due to lack of training or lack of recognition on the manager’s part, ignoring this issue seems like negligence given all of the other initiatives and hard work involved in improving everything else.

Given this challenge, maybe April 2008 wasn’t the tipping point for the recruiting industry after all. But then again, maybe it was. April 2008 is as good a time as any.

O?ver sourc?ing syn?drome: the need to find more candidates than needed caused by inappropriately eliminating the good candidates you already have.

This article expands upon one I wrote recently on the serious topic of over-sourcing. If you’ve ever lost a good candidate because someone conducted an inaccurate interview, someone on the hiring team didn’t like the person’s personality, or a top candidate decided not to pursue your opportunity, you’ve experienced over-sourcing syndrome.

Sadly, the problem is not going away, or even getting better. It’s based on the idea that we (recruiters, recruiting managers, and HR leaders) spend far too much effort, training, money, and resources than necessary on sourcing.

There are many other hiring problems that need fixing that would eliminate the need for recruiters to find unnecessary extra candidates to complete assignments. It’s comparable to buying extra raw materials to deal with a scrap problem, rather than fixing the scrap problem.

When the hiring process is examined from an end-to-end perspective, at least half the problems in hiring good people can be attributed to bad job descriptions, incorrect assessments, managers who have no idea of how to recruit, and recruiters who have trouble influencing and closing top performers.

The remaining problems have to do with not finding enough top people. Solve this by using better advertising, better marketing, and better technology. Perhaps the most dramatic way to solve the problem is to become the top-performing company in your industry and get on one of Fortune magazine’s “Most Admired” or “Best Employee” lists.

Then you’ll have all the best candidates you need. The problem will then just be to screen out the bad ones. With an abundance of top people, it doesn’t matter if your scrap rate is high.

However, for most companies to even have a shot of becoming “Most Admired” for something, you’ll first need to improve your end-to-end hiring problems, rather than just focusing on the idea that seeing more candidates is the solution to your talent woes.

With this mind, let’s start by categorizing the causes of over-sourcing syndrome into these big buckets:

• The use of traditional job descriptions to attract, screen, assess, and recruit top performers.
• Problems associated with the hiring manager and the interviewing team.
• Anything related to less-than-stellar recruiter skills and capabilities.
• Technology-related challenges, especially ease-of-use.
• Administrative roadblocks like dumb comp rules and incorrect legal edicts.

I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I want to start this tirade with the idea that using job descriptions to recruit, source, assess and hire top performers is a complete waste of time.

Job descriptions that emphasize qualifications and experiences are useless and counter-productive on a number of levels.

First, top people who are fully qualified won’t apply, since there’s little incentive do the same work again, except for a big comp hit.

Second, using skills and experiences as a screen also automatically excludes great people from other industries with a different mix of comparable experiences. Making matters worse, most ads are hard to find and filled more with disqualifiers than attractors. Relying on a job description as the basis for advertising turns off the most highly qualified candidates.

Now consider high-potential, A-level, fast-track candidates. These are the exact people you want to see and hire, but based on the minimum qualifications listed in your ads, they’re not qualified, and are asked not to apply.

Even if they do apply, they’d be excluded by some recruiter or questionnaire because they didn’t have the “right” qualifications. While companies all say they want to see A-level candidates, their business processes, especially the over-reliance on skills-based job descriptions, prevents this from happening, other than on a by-exception basis. When skills are used as the basis for attracting and screening candidates, companies, by default, have set themselves up to exclude the best and only see average candidates.

So if you want to eliminate this humongous non-sourcing bottleneck, stop posting job descriptions where good people can see them. Instead, convert your job descriptions into performance profiles and these performance profiles into creative and compelling advertising. Here’s a group of articles that can help you do this.

While using job descriptions come up first in preventing companies from hiring enough top performers, second is hiring managers and the interviewing team. As proof, just imagine how many more placements you’d make if it weren’t for hiring managers. (FYI: this was facetious.)

Performance Profiles Can Encourage Good People to Apply

Here are just some of the ways that hiring managers and interviewing team members prevent companies from hiring good people:

• They over-rely on traditional job descriptions on who they’ll even see.
• They are unresponsive.
• They won’t spend time with the recruiter explaining real job needs.
• They are poor interviewers or have too narrow a focus.
• Much of their assessment is based on intuition, gut-feelings, personality, and favorite questions.
• They’re unimpressive and turn off good people.
• They don’t know how to use the interview to recruit top performers.
• Members of the interviewing team all describe the real job differently.

Getting managers to use a performance profile instead of a job description can minimize many of these problems. The key is to have managers first clearly describe what the person taking the job needs to do to be successful. Then force them to develop an employee value proposition (EVP) by asking, “Why would a top performer with all of the experiences listed want this job for the compensation package being offered?”

This totally changes the nature of the conversation when the recruiter takes the assignment. (Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to take the assignment.) Many managers will be more open to see a different mix of candidates as a result and they’ll be in a better position to assess and recruit them as well.

From what I can tell, managers can only assess candidates accurately when they understand the difference between the real job (the projects and typical tasks involved) and the job description.

In combination with the EVP, it gives them the foundation to present a compelling case to a top performer. The next step is to make sure everyone on the hiring team is singing from the same song sheet. Here are a few articles that help you work with hiring managers in converting job descriptions into something useful.

Curing over-sourcing syndrome starts by eliminating job descriptions, using performance profiles, and getting hiring managers to own the real job and EVP. These steps alone will solve half of your non-sourcing related sourcing problems. In subsequent over-sourcing articles I’ll provide some ideas on how to eliminate the rest.

The decline in available talent coupled with the increase in worldwide demand will not be solved by better sourcing alone. Even in a downturn, the demand for top talent is accelerating. Hiring the best is a multi-faceted problem that is getting more and more challenging.

From what I can tell, few HR and recruiting executives have fully grasped the scope of the problem, and even those who do are reluctant to tackle the problem head-on. To me, this might be the biggest non-sourcing problem of them all.

Top people cannot be interviewed the same way as everyone else. Although most recruiters and hiring managers know this, few know how to do it. It’s not about selling the job, charming the person, and over-talking. It’s about using the interview to get the candidate to sell you.

Let’s take one step back before moving two forward. It’s quite easy to figure out whether someone is totally a bad fit for your job. It’s almost as easy to determine whether someone’s a superstar. Just look at their resume, academics, and track record. Top performers win a lot of gold medals. So all you have to do to accurately assess them is to validate that they actually won them without taking steroids.

What’s not so easy is to assess everyone in between. Also not so easy is to keep the ones you want to hire excited about your job throughout the interview without boring them or having to give away the farm at the end.

To pull this off, let’s take one step forward by categorizing all interviewing mistakes into five common types:

1. The Unmotivated Hire. This is hiring someone who sounded good in the interview and who is reasonably competent, but not motivated to consistently do the work needed to be done. These are the people who need to be over-managed just to achieve average results.
2. The Partial Hire. This mistakes refers to a person who does parts of the job really well, but not all of them. For example, a hard-working developer who misses deadlines.
3. The Non-Hire. This covers all of those hiring mistakes associated with a top person being excluded because someone made a bad assessment. This typically happens when interviewers base their decisions on first impressions or some superficial, narrow, or flawed reason.
4. The Lost Opportunity Hire. These are the worst mistakes of them all. This refers to a great person who you probably would have hired, but who decided to voluntarily opt-out before an offer was made or declined your offer for some preventable reason.
5. The Wrongful Hire or Wrongful Non-Hire. Asking inappropriate or illegal questions causes lawsuits, especially from weak people who you didn’t hire. You’ll also get these from weak people you hire and then quickly fire. A structured objective interview where everyone asks the same questions and evaluates everyone the same way will eliminate this problem.

To prevent these problems, let’s take another step forward by recognizing that a good interview needs to accomplish more than just accurately assessing competency to do the work. This is especially true when you’re dealing with a top performer who has other opportunities and can opt out at any point. This is also the top person who will get a counter-offer and who will receive an offer with a bigger comp package elsewhere.

As part of the interview, consistently provide the person with evidence that your opportunity represents a fundamental career move, not just a salary jump. You can’t wait until the end of the interview to do this.

As we reengineer the assessment process, consider these points as the basic requirements of an effective interview:

1. To eliminate the lost opportunity non-hire, do two-thirds of your recruiting before you decide to make the candidate an offer. The candidate must leave each interview wowed by the job, and you must do this without the interviewer overselling and over-talking.
2. To prevent inflated offers, more competitive offers from other companies, and counter-offers, you need to ensure that the candidate evaluates the job based on the opportunity, not the compensation.
3. To prevent partial and unmotivated hires you need to accurately assess long-term competency and motivation across all job needs, not just a few core traits like technical and team skills.
4. To eliminate wrongful non-hires and non-hires you need to overcome biases and increase objectivity. To do this, you can’t be snowed by presentation, you cannot prematurely exclude good candidates who are temporarily nervous, and you must eliminate foolish, illegal, pet, and trick questions that have not been validated.
5. Another big objective is to get buy-in from everyone on the interviewing team (sourcers, recruiters, hiring managers, etc.) about your overall process; make sure everyone uses the same process.

Pulling this off starts by understanding my one-question interview. This is the question I developed back in the 80s to prevent my clients from excluding good people for bad reasons (like the above) and recruit them at the same time.

Over the years, it turned out this same questioning process also eliminated all of the other problems. In the last 20 years, I’ve introduced this question to more than 40,000 managers, and those who use it get exactly the results described. But try it out yourself; you’ve got nothing to lose, and you actually might make more placements. (As an added benefit it’s been legally, OFCCP, EEO, and OD/PhD vetted.)

The basic one-question interview process starts by asking the candidate to describe a major accomplishment in great depth. You typically need to spend 12 to 15 minutes on this accomplishment, peeling the onion, digging deep, looking for facts and details validating the accomplishment. As part of this you can’t accept generalities. To get more insight I also ask standard behavioral questions as part of this fact-finding, like give me some examples of where you had to influence others, deal with conflict, take the initiative or handle a tough challenge.

Collectively, these types of questions tie behaviors, skills, competency and motivation to a specific major task. But don’t stop with just one significant accomplishment question. By asking the candidate to describe other major accomplishments, a trend line of performance and consistency over an extended period of time soon reveals itself.

As part of the assessment process you can then compare these accomplishments to the real performance needs of the job. I refer to these real job needs as a performance profile. We use a formal 10-factor grid to assess and compare candidates using the evidence from these accomplishment-based questions.

With a slight modification, this basic accomplishment-based interview process can be used to recruit the candidate. One way is to add a compelling preface to the question to excite the candidate. For example, for a mid-level firmware developer on a Bluetooth project for a chip maker, start by describing the importance of your company’s Bluetooth effort and the impact the person in the role on the project’s success. With this one- to two-minute overview, then ask the person to describe his most significant comparable project. If the project is attractive the candidate will be very willing to describe the project in-depth and start to sell you on his worthiness. This is called a pull-toward preface used to excite the candidate.

You can also obtain a similar effect by pushing the person away or by slightly challenging the person’s experience. For example, after the person describes a major accomplishment, you might suggest that the new project is somewhat broader in scope than what the person has previously handled. Then go on to say that while you’re impressed with the accomplishment, you have concerns that the candidate might not be able to handle some critical aspects of the job, like team building and project planning.

Then ask the person to describe their most significant team and planning accomplishment so you can better understand their abilities in this area. The best people will push back and attempt to convince you they are qualified for this type of role.

A major aspect of interviewing top performers is to use the interview to look for voids and gaps in the candidate’s background that your job fulfills. As long as theses gaps are not too wide, this is how you convert a job into a career and how you stop making the offer largely about money.

By using the push-and-pull techniques, you get the candidate to sell you, rather than you having to sell the candidate. There’s a significant after-effect with this. Candidates are more confident when telling their family, advisors, and co-workers why they’re accepting your offer rather than any others, since they’ve had to sell themselves first.

While there are additional techniques you can use during the interview to close the candidate, the idea here is that a properly conducted interview must do much more than just assess competency. If the interview is too sterile or too superficial you’ll lose the best people for preventable reasons.

The push-and-pull in combination with the most significant accomplishment interviewing processes overcomes these problems. Not only will you be able to recruit more top people, you’ll also stop excluding good people for bad reasons, you’ll prevent non-hires, and you’ll stop hiring people who just talk a good game.

When viewed from this broader perspective, it’s apparent that most interviewers, recruiters, and hiring managers alike have little understanding of how to really interview, recruit, and hire top performers. Surprisingly, addressing these interviewing problems might actually eliminate the bulk of your sourcing challenges in the bargain.

Before we get to the future, a little history is in order. As part of the marketing for my retained executive search practice in the mid-1990s, I did consulting for dozens of mid-size companies through TEC (The Executive Committee) and YPO (Young Presidents Organization).

The primary focus of this work was the development of a strategic hiring plan that allowed companies to move from a loose entrepreneurial business to a more sustainable and well-run growing company. Pulling this off always required the CEO/founder to relinquish a major portion of his authority, the addition of a number of critical senior managers, and the implementation of scalable business processes for all core functions. As part of this, the independent free-wheelers had to either leave or join the team.

There is an obvious parallel here with how some corporate recruiting departments have transitioned into top-performing and highly productive business functions and others haven’t. Some more history: in the mid-1990s, corporate recruiting departments came into being. This started with the hiring of a few contract recruiters followed by expansion into full departments and the hiring of specialized sourcers and end-to-end recruiters. The goal at the time was to build an in-house search capability in order to reduce what seemed an enormous amount spent on external search fees.

The promise of the Internet was the catalyst for this, with the idea that candidate quality would increase, not suffer. On this measure it doesn’t seem like too many companies succeeded. Just one example: on a recent webinar (February 2008), I asked the 200+ attendees to describe their current major hiring challenges.

Following are some of the big ones. How many of these ring true for you?

1. Not enough quality candidates
2. Hiring managers not responsive
3. Getting top candidates just interested in interviewing is becoming more difficult
4. Compensation never seems to be enough
5. Too many unqualified candidates
6. Counter-offers being accepted at an increasing rate
7. Offers turned down more frequently
8. Trouble getting candidates to relocate
9. Advertising results are hit or miss
10. Technology hasn’t helped improve productivity

Surprisingly, these are the same challenges recruiters faced during the dot-com boom and bust, the pre-Internet days, the Clinton years, the Bush One years, and the Reagan years. Despite all of the technological advances, actual recruiting results have changed very little in the 30 or so years I’ve been in the recruiting industry.

Yet in the same time span, launching complex products from the idea phase to market has improved five to tenfold, distribution systems have evolved from hoping your product would arrive within a week or two to tracking its exact position anywhere in the world, and knowing a company’s current financial performance has gone from having to wait two to three weeks after the close of a month to real time.

In comparison, corporate recruiting seems to be stuck in a time warp. For a variety of reasons it’s still run as an entrepreneurial organization that hasn’t yet evolved into a well-functioning, predictable, and scalable business process.

Here are some of the stumbling blocks:

1. Lack of an end-to-end perspective. Hiring top performers requires the active engagement of sourcers, recruiters, hiring managers, and everyone on the interviewing team. Rarely does this team agree on actual job needs nor do they screen, interview, and evaluate candidates the same way. Each recruiter and sourcer does his or her own thing and even if a few are good, the lack of overall consistency prevents scalability. Some offers are professionally made, others are via an email or informal call. Collectively this results in too many unqualified candidates being seen, overlooking or incorrectly evaluating some fine people with many of the best opting-out somewhere along the way for preventable reasons. Common practices like this rank pretty low on the scale of efficiency when compared to a systematic business process. (Recruiting process articles.)
2. Little hiring manager accountability. No matter how effective a company’s recruiting and sourcing efforts are, it’s still up to the hiring manager to make the decision. So if you don’t get your hiring managers and everyone on the hiring team involved in interviewing, assessing, impressing, and recruiting, you’re building a bridge to nowhere. While many companies have gotten better on the front-end, the back-end is still problematic. The symptoms here are obvious: lack of understanding of real job needs, inability to accurately assess competency, overselling, under-listening, lack of preparation, lack of interest, using the lack-of-time excuse, under-whelmed candidates, and high-potential candidates turned away for superficial or emotional reasons. From what I’ve seen, about 20% of all managers understand the importance of hiring top talent and will put in the extra effort needed to pull it off. Another 20% will put in the effort with some urging, and another 20% require lots of guidance and enforcement. I’m not so sure the other 40% will ever get it right. Until hiring managers are totally committed to the concept that “hiring top talent is #1″ it will be an uphill battle. (Hiring manager articles.)
3. Technology not effectively utilized. Actually the ATS (applicant tracking system) vendors like Taleo and Kenexa, etc., are more than qualified to develop technology that dramatically increases recruiter and hiring manager productivity. The problem is not with the vendors, it’s with the buyers: the HR and recruiting leadership community. Most are very unsophisticated when it comes to understanding and using technology. Lack of guidance on the buyer’s side has caused the vendors to expend too much effort on solving the wrong problems. This is why technology is five years behind where it should be. One minor example: candidates should not still be using pull-down menus to search for jobs. Lack of progress on the technology front is why vendors like Jobs2Web.com and Indeed.com are needed to overcome existing inadequacies in most current systems. Recruiters exacerbate the problem by fighting, rather than embracing technology. Despite current flaws, existing technology can improve productivity when used properly. (Recruiting technology articles.)
4. Inadequate or inappropriate training. Just about every sales person selling a professional product or service must take and pass some type of formal training program. About 10 years ago, I was helping a major yellow page publisher hire sales people and learned that their entry-level telephone reps (a $25 thousand per year job) had to take three weeks of formal training just to learn how to take renewals. A complex system or service sale involving needs analysis and customized pricing requires significantly more training. Sales training is commonplace even when hiring experienced sales people selling similar products. Yet for recruiting, which involves career counseling, job analysis, the ability to accurately screen and assess people, market and competitive analysis, and the use of professional negotiating and closing techniques, companies leave the process to the discretion of each person hired. (Hiring manager and recruiting training articles.)
5. A weak or non-existent workforce planning process. A workforce plan is to recruiting as a sales plan is to sales as a product plan is to manufacturing and as a profit plan is to finance. In our most recent annual survey completed in December 2007, only 26% of the over 700 respondents indicated their companies used a sophisticated rolling forecast of hiring needs. A formal workforce planning process is a foundational step in making hiring top talent a systematic and scalable business process. This hiring forecast provides a means to effectively allocate recruiting resources. As I learned from my earlier consulting days, lack of effective planning and forecasting was one of the core reasons entrepreneurial companies had difficulty managing their growth. (More on workforce planning.)
6. Lack of effective leadership. While the above are important points to consider, the root cause of the problem is lack of leadership and direction at the HR and recruiting-management level. Someone always needs to take charge, champion the idea, create the vision and implement the solution. This requires the ability to secure and maintain executive-level commitment, the tenacity to implement complex cross-functional change despite resistance, and an understanding of the importance of strong scalable business processes, especially in the area of hiring top talent. Strong leadership is the one common characteristic I’ve observed in those companies that have successfully converted the idea that hiring top talent is not just a vision statement, but a repeatable, predictable, and scalable business process. (More on leadership.)

While implementing a business process for hiring top talent is no simple task, it’s less challenging than implementing an ERP system like SAP, or setting up a world-wide distribution system or merging two new companies together. If hiring top talent truly is a company’s #1 strategic objective, it should also be more important.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve worked with thousands of managers, executives, and recruiters. While many things have changed involving recruiting over these years, a few things have stayed the same. Here’s my short list of the best things I’ve learned about recruiting, sourcing, and hiring top talent that seem as true today as they did when I first started as a recruiter.

1. To hire a great person, you need a great job, a great company, or a great manager. If you have two of these, you’re pretty much guaranteed to consistently hire the best talent without much effort.
2. It’s never about the money. As long as your compensation is competitive, all you need to attract a great person is a great job that offers some stretch, short-term growth, and long-term opportunity. Of course, you need someone to personally make the case that it’s about the opportunity, not the money. Usually, this is a recruiter, but hiring managers or senior executives can do this, too.
3. It most cases, it takes a great recruiter to recruit great talent. This is especially true if it’s not obvious you have a great job or a great company or a great manager, or if there’s some core problem with the job. These are things like relocation, excessive competition, marginal compensation, or a bad company reputation.
4. Top people won’t work with unprofessional recruiters. By “work” I mean take their advice and counsel and refer other top performers. An unprofessional recruiter is someone who doesn’t know the job they’re representing, doesn’t personally know the hiring manager, and doesn’t have deep industry knowledge (e.g., compensation trends, competition, business conditions). You need to be a professional recruiter to overcome objections, have a constant source of high-quality, referred passive candidates, and to negotiate and close offers based on growth and opportunity instead of compensation.
5. Make the candidate earn the job. Recruiting isn’t selling. It’s a process of using the interview and screening process to understand the candidate’s motivating needs and to find gaps and voids in the candidate’s background that your job fulfills. Done properly, the candidate will attempt to convince you why he or she is qualified. Here’s an article that describes how to create this opportunity gap. Good recruiting is getting the candidate to sell you, not you selling the candidate. This is not too difficult if you understand real job needs and can position your opportunity as offering more stretch, challenge, and growth.
6. Consumer-based advertising works. Good people who are fully-employed in reasonable jobs sometimes get frustrated, demotivated, or itchy for something new. Under these times, they’ll begin to look for a new job casually, selectively, and cautiously. This starts by first networking with friends and associates, then with former associates. Sometimes they’ll look online, first at Google, then at some specialty or niche sites, and then at the career sites of a few well-known companies. Well-positioned and compelling advertising that can be found by people looking this way can snare a few top performers. Advertising that can’t be found that’s boring and filled with disqualifiers is a waste of money. You can’t use Wal-Mart advertising techniques to source Tiffany customers.
7. Don’t make cold calls, especially to unqualified candidates. If you’re recruiting passive candidates, 75% of your calls must be to highly-qualified people who have been personally referred to you. Not only will they call you back, but you also know they’re qualified. This alone will increase your productivity by more than 100%. Then you need to always get 2-3 highly qualified referrals from each of these people to develop a deep and growing network of talent. Networking and getting referrals is the key to successfully finding top-quality passive candidates. Cold calling random names should be limited to 25% of your direct sourcing efforts. Here are some networking articles with more information on how to do this.
8. Don’t take no for an answer. Good candidates, even those who apply to ads, start asking questions as soon as the recruiter calls. Based on what they hear, they make quick “no” decisions based on superficial information like compensation, location, title, and company. Recruiters need to overcome these easy dismissals with strong rebuttals and disarming techniques. The key here is to persist and not take no for an answer until the candidate has enough information to make an accurate no or yes decision. Even better: Only ask yes questions like “would you be open to discuss a new situation for a few minutes if the long-term opportunity was superior to anything you’re now considering?”
9. Maintain applicant control. From this moment forward, you need to banish the excuse “the candidate wasn’t interested in pursuing the opportunity” from your permitted reasons for losing a person. Recruiters should be determining if they’re interested in the candidate, not the other way around. This is the essence of applicant control. To pull it off, you must be confident, understand real job needs, quickly demonstrate your market and recruiting expertise, ask only yes questions, don’t take no for an answer, and have rebuttals for every question the candidate asks.
10. Quickly re-position the job as an opportunity move, not one based on compensation. As part of the applicant control process, you’ll need to suggest during the opening call that the decision to investigate your job opening should be based more on the short-term stretch and the long-growth opportunity, rather than the compensation. Quickly go on to say that as long as the compensation is competitive, faster growth will lead to dramatic future increases in compensation. This is how you excite top people with multiple opportunities to seriously evaluate what you have to offer. Of course, you’ll need to deliver on the promise if you ultimately expect to hire these people.
11. Stop using traditional job descriptions for recruiting and sourcing. There is too much subjectivity in the selection process when managers and interviewers assess a candidate on something other than competency and motivation to perform the real job. The root cause of this problem is the lack of understanding of the real job. The real job is what the person needs to accomplish to be considered successful. When everyone involved in the hiring decision (managers, interviewing team members, recruiters, and candidates) understands real job needs, fewer candidates are seen, more offers are accepted, and fewer hiring mistakes are made. Recruiters must get hiring managers to stop relying on traditional skills-based job descriptions to screen, source, and assess candidates and get them to focus on what the person must do to be successful. (Here are some articles on how to do this.)
12. Seek constant improvement by tracking your performance. For 20 years as a full-time recruiter, three sendouts per hire was my target for unique positions. Since I was always fee-based and provided a long guarantee, candidate quality had to be high. Over the years, I had to change my recruiting and sourcing techniques to maintain this target in the face of greater competition, in-house recruiters, more online tools, and tougher assignments. The lesson learned: To get better, select a performance target that puts you in the top 10-15% of all recruiters. Then, break this down into sub-targets like phone calls made per month, ad response rates, job board performance, number of referrals per call, and interviews scheduled per month. Start improving and tracking these until you achieve your hires-per-month goal. To maintain this target, track your activity per week and immediately jump on anything that’s headed south. For example, if you notice an increase in sendouts-per-hire or a decline in response to an ad that historically worked well, figure out the cause and make the necessary changes. Monitoring your performance this way forces you to stay current. If you’re not aggressively improving your recruiting skills in a world of increasing change, you’re paving a sure-fire road to mediocrity.

Some things change and some things don’t. Knowing the difference is the key to keeping your edge as a world-class recruiter. While nothing stated above is a new idea or is earth-shaking, collectively they do represent what it takes to be a great recruiter in today’s highly competitive world where the demand for talent greatly exceeds the supply. I don’t suspect that 10 or 20 years from now this list will be any different. However, I can guarantee how recruiters accomplish these tasks will change. That’s why implementing a program of continuous improvement is so important.

Lack of planning and poor execution are the two most common causes of failure, whether it’s fighting a war, launching any type of business initiative, or reallocating recruiting resources. When business conditions change, appropriate planning and reallocation of effort becomes even more important. When done properly, you’ll be able to anticipate problems before they cause too much damage. From a recruiting perspective, this planning needs to start by understanding the mindset of potential candidates while they contemplate switching jobs as economic conditions worsen.

In a slowing economy, consumers tighten their belts a bit, reduce discretionary spending, eat at home more often, and decide to take fewer investment and career risks. This is a natural reaction to a negative change in economic conditions. Typically, those who have lost their jobs or those in jeopardy of losing theirs get more aggressive hunting for something new. They also become less discriminating as the steady paycheck becomes more important than the future opportunity.

Those who are fully employed, but who are looking, become less active in the job market and wait for conditions to improve. Those with above-average jobs become reluctant to switch, since there will be little else available if the new job doesn’t work out. Under these conditions, the quality of active candidates responding to ads declines, and it takes increasing effort to attract passive candidates. Bear in mind that even if your company is not directly affected by the slowdown, your future candidates will be, since they all read the news.

Under current business conditions (Q1, 2008) here are some ideas you might wa