However, sometimes the biggest changes can occur by simply changing the words we use both internally (within our departments) and externally (with our candidates/customers and hiring managers).  Many a book has been written about how changing words leads to changes in perception, performance and promotion.  For example:

What does the word “overwhelmed” represent?

• “I have little or no power at the office”
• “My problems are bigger than I am”
• “There’s no hope for relief and it will never change”

What would you be saying and thinking if you switched to saying “In Demand” instead?

• “I’m important”
• “I’m needed”
• “I’m choosing where to give my time and talents”
• “I’m proud”

Yes, words matter, so here is your 2010 Talent Acquisition Dictionary.  Start with this and see what changes come simply by changing the words you use every day.

Old: Pipeline
2010: Talent Pool
The word “pipeline” has been many a recruiter’s enemy.  Hiring managers consider a pipeline to mean a bucket of interview-ready candidates you simply toss a net into and pull out a never ending supply of candidate choices.  The word “pipeline” begs the question “who else do you have?” from a hiring manager.  A Talent Pool represents a group of people from which you may be able to find a candidate or two based on the quality of your ongoing relationship with them.

Old: CPH
2010: QOH
Cost-per-hire is a meaningless statistic to anyone who understands the nuances of recruiting.  What goes into this measurement is of great debate and a high CPH is not a bad thing if you are hiring key talent, just as a low CPH is not a good thing if you are keeping costs low at the expense of quality.  QOH is harder to measure but significantly more meaningful to the business.  Simply put, higher quality is better than lower quality regardless of price or time (which is coming next).  If you reward your recruiters on QOH instead of CPH the department will flourish.

Old: TTF (I told you it was coming!)
2010: ROH
Time-to-fill has run its course and is no longer (if it ever was) a meaningful measurement to anyone but a recruiter being measured on it.  ROH (Retention of Hire) actually means something to your business partners.  This should seem self evident yet when you talk about retention with recruiters they are very quick to point fingers at managers, culture etc. (all of which a good recruiter knows about and screens applicants for by the way!).  So let me put these in context; if my recruiters have a very low TTF and the “company” has a high turnover rate, why are we measuring TTF?  Any business person understands that taking longer to hire the RIGHT person (who stays, performs and is promoted) is significantly preferable to hiring the wrong person (who gets trained, complains and quits or is let go) faster.  Really?  You want to argue this one?

Old: Applicant (or Candidate)
2010: Customer
The world is flat.  No, I didn’t write it, but it’s true.  It’s also true that you no longer control your employer brand.  Sure, you can pay for awards (remember, I’ve spent 18 years in this business, I know what “branding” means in most recruiting organizations), publish logos from organizations on your career site and talk a great game, all the while, treating people applying for jobs, interviewing for jobs and even getting jobs like cows in a production dairy farm.  Guess what?  People talk, twitter, Facebook, blog, etc. at increasing rates and what are they talking about?  Your terrible “candidate” experience.  This one is simple – treat every “applicant” (cold call, networking call etc. for you sourcers out there) like a potential customer of your company and all the above is still true but the talk becomes positive.  Again, this one is a no brainer but way too many recruiting departments are “too busy” to attend to the applicant pools they attract and are hurting their companies – watch it, marketing will find out about this as will sales and the C-suite.

And the final entry for today:

Old: Customer (is the hiring manager)
2010: Customer (is the candidate)
In any process development or improvement methodology (I use Tatham) the first step is to define the customer.  Same holds true when you start a business – “who is your customer?” is a fundamental step 1.  Step 2 is that you CAN NOT have more than one customer!  So if you have an existing recruiting process with the “customer” defined as your hiring managers – you cannot be successful in recruiting top talent.  This is a simple fact that, once explored with an open mind, becomes obvious.  Now let me calm your nerves and tell you that I built my career in Corporate America so I understand the idea that recruiting supports the business units they are assigned to.  But let’s not confuse “support” with the definition of “customer”.  Yes, you support the Marketing group in their recruiting efforts but if the marketing team is your “customer” then you must have a process that revolves around their needs and wishes, even if those needs and wishes tie your recruiting efforts to the post. 

Ok, you need an example.  Here’s a poignant one from one of the most respected recruiting leaders in the country today.  At this person’s company, the Sr. Leadership was clamoring that they weren’t seeing enough candidates from one of their top competitors (company A) and the pressure was on for the whole recruiting staff to up the ante in pilfering this competitor of top talent.  However, my well respected colleague took the initiative to do some research and discovered that in the recent year, of the candidates from Company A that were presented, only 22% were actually hired.  And of those, 78% turned over in the first year!  So, if this recruiting leader allowed his department to serve the Hiring Manager as customer, his team would be viewed as a complete failure (especially using our new “words” above).  Serve the candidate as customer and align your hiring managers as partners and you’ll find more success than you can imagine.

Ok, now simply try using some of these new words in your meetings, discussions and plans in your department and the change that so inspired dread in you as you read the pundits’ advice will come much easier this year.

But today, I’ll be using the idiomatic definition as defined in Wikipedia:

The term has been adopted into a general metaphor, where “silver bullet” refers to any straightforward solution perceived to have extreme effectiveness. The phrase typically appears with an expectation that some new technology or practice will easily cure a major prevailing problem.

This is a fitting definition for folks in recruiting departments across the world.  I’ve not run into a Recruiter or Sourcer this year who didn’t look at every technology as a “silver bullet”.   First the internet, then Google, Linkedin, and now social networking – you name it and chances are that the hopes and fears of recruiters will have rested on it at one time. 

I’m not sure why our profession is always in search of “silver bullets”.  I wonder if surgeons are always looking for a silver bullet – that technology or practice that will miraculously make their jobs easy and stress free?  Maybe construction folks thought the pneumatic nail gun was their “silver bullet” – after all, no hammering – hooray!  No nail pouches around my waist? YES! Finally, my job will be a breeze.  And then on Monday, they are back to crawling around 2×4 beams in freezing weather and they finally realize “hey, my job is hard – sure this new tool makes one part of it easier but overall, my job is hard.”  There are no silver bullets in recruiting.  Recruiting is hard work.

I believe that recruiting should be hard work.  Somewhere, with all the technology silver bullets we have at our disposal, the concept of recruiting being hard work got lost on many recruiters.  I know of “Recruiters” who harvest applicants from their ATS or simply get finalists referred to them by the hiring managers, process offers, put together hiring packets and move to the next one.  Recruiting?  I think not.  Somewhere we’ve blurred the lines of the verbs “recruiting” and “hiring”.  If you are taking pre-packaged applicants and simply moving them through a process to on boarding – you are NOT a recruiter, you are a staffing person or recruiting coordinator or some other version of an HR person.  Sure your job may be busy but it’s not hard.

A true recruiter works very hard for their money.  Not frantically hard like, “I’ve had to process over 20 offers this week” but rather emotionally hard like, “I spoke to my candidate’s husband last night and he grilled me on the career path his wife would have should she accept our SVP offer” or mentally hard like, “I cold called 27 candidates and got 25 “no’s” before I found my two candidates”.  Recruiting is and always will be a unique mix of art and science and those people who do it and do it well will attest to it being hard work. 

As always, the genesis of the movement to processing rather than recruiting lies solely in what the organization measures and rewards in their staff.  What you measure you promote.  Measuring and rewarding recruiters on time-to-fill, number of hires made in a year etc. drive processing.  To drive recruiting, you need to measure and reward things like quality-of-hire, retention and business impact of hires.

Measuring quality-of-hire, retention and business impact of hires is “hard” you say?  No Silver Bullets – I told you, recruiting (and managing recruiters) is hard work!

For those of you living in a cave for the greater part of this decade, “unfriend” is what you do on Facebook to remove a connection to someone else; you “unfriend” them. 

If you had money invested with Bernie Madoff – you probably “unfriended” him this year.

Sarah Palin probably “unfriended” Levi Johnston this year – you get the drift.

What strikes me is that to “unfriend” someone from your network is probably the rudest thing you can do in social networking.  Unfriend on Facebook and “unfollow” on Twitter mean that you originally wanted to be connected to this person and now find that connection so negative that you are dis-inviting them from your life.

OUCH!

So not only is our WOTY (word of the year) a really negative one, it shines a light on the whole social networking/public facing world the internet has created.  One in which we scamper like chipmunks to “friend” everyone we ever knew (and a bunch we don’t know but who know someone who knows someone we know or had dinner once with someone who knows someone we knew in college – Jeez!)  C’mon people.  Is this really the way of the future?

The internet lives we lead today have so completely removed us from relationships that we now do stuff to each other on the internet we’d NEVER do to each other in person.  And through this layer of protection, we now have created words that never existed to describe how rude we can be to each other.

Seriously, here’s a glaring example; you are having a Thanksgiving Dinner party and one of your friends asks if they can invite someone they know to dinner at your house.  This person shows up and drinks all your good scotch, eats the last dark meat and sucks whipped cream from the can – you are disgusted.  But do you ask this person to LEAVE?  No, you don’t, you wouldn’t.  You’d be gracious, you’d be kind and you’d never see that person again.  You’d talk about it and probably laugh about it later.

But today, we are accepting friend invitations, followers and LinkedIn connections from people we don’t know and some who we probably don’t want to know – all in the name of social networking.

“Old networking” used to be about a mutual exchange of value, either professionally or personally.  People  in your network mattered and there was benefit to having a network and being in one. 

Today, with our newest word of the year, I doubt the value of your network is much or that you consider adding value to your network (telling everyone on Facebook that you had a great cup of coffee is NOT adding value – no it’s not.) on a regular basis.

I think the Oxford Dictionary needs to come up with a new word for “networking” in today’s world.  One that actually describes what we are doing. Maybe “friendgathering” or “Followstalking” or “Linkifinity”.  She with the most connections wins.  Wins what?

Consider this.  We’ve lost our ability to communicate effectively face to face because we now do everything on the “net”.  We apply for jobs, we update our families, we find old friends (but don’t call), we send invitations, we send Christmas letters, we order pizza, we get educations etc, etc.

The Oxford Dictionary defines FRIEND as;

Friend:
-Noun
1. A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.

By doing all of our connecting electronically, aren’t we “unfriending” everyone?

I read an article on MSN Money that shows there are quiet but measurable signs things are getting better.  It’s an upgrade announcement of two major Executive Search Firms, Heidrick and Struggles and Korn Ferry International from “neutral” to “buy”.   This is based on a shift from a 0.6 decline in revenue in August to a 2.6 GAIN in revenue in September.  Another factor was the reduction in financial sector job losses from 40,000 last December to 2,300 in August to just 700 last month (Heidrick’s #1 segment). 

One of the analysts in the article made an interesting statement:

“Our view is that a resumption in executive turnover rekindles growth exiting a recession, which is spurred further by global economic growth in the second half of an expansion,”

So the takeaway is that the job hopping of executives (remember how prevalent it was in 2004-2006?) is a GREAT indicator that business is growing and jobs aren’t far behind.

Don’t be too upset if your CEO or CFO announce they are leaving the company.  It may simple be an indicator we are finally pulling out of this recession.

Yet this is the response I get most often (verbally, physically) when I ask recruiters about the candidate experience – especially the candidates who apply but are not qualified or have clearly applied for the wrong job.

But my answer is always “you need to” and apparently The Gallup organization agrees with me.  A 2008 study in The Gallup Management Journal (surveying a targeted U.S. sample of 1,376 adults aged 18 and over who were seeking a job – The sample consisted of those who are currently unemployed and seeking a job as well as those who are currently employed full time or part time and have searched for employment in the past six months) found that if you don’t care and aren’t treating all candidates like customers, you may be significantly harming your recruiting efforts.

Gallup’s findings include;

• 70% of job seekers gave feedback detailing at least one frustrating aspect of the process.
• Job applicants were most likely to mention frustrations regarding the lack of communication prospective employers demonstrated.
• half of job applicants who mention specific frustrations say these aggravations give them pause when considering the possibility of working for these prospective employers.

So why should you care about THIS?

Gallup asked the 72% of job seekers who shared the most frustrating aspect of their job search a follow-up question to gauge the impact it had on their opinion of the organization. Half of these prospective employees said the frustrations they mentioned made them question whether they wanted to work for the company. Thus, the frustrations of applicants are making it more difficult for companies to hire the talent they need.

So in Recruiter terms:  At at time when you are “building pipelines” and “establishing talent networks” at the front door, you are causing a significantly greater number of people to doubt you as an employer out the back door!!

Applicants’ relationships with prospective employers don’t stop once the interview process is complete or after they receive a note indicating that the company has already filled the position. An organization’s poor treatment of its job applicants is akin to failed customer service, and it can have a negative impact on the likelihood of a prospective employee — hired or not — to recommend the company as a place to try to work.

So for all of you who consider applicants a nuisance (after all, you ARE the social networking King/Queen – you’ll find your own candidates thank you) and have the “Who Cares?” attitude toward candidates – STOP IT.   Here are three easy steps to fix this problem – no excuses.

Start by caring about prospective employees as much as you do about your customers and current associates.  Never in the application process should someone from the hiring company put down an applicant or make the job seeker feel in any way that the organization does not care about them, regardless of whether they are a good fit.

Value applicants’ questions and concerns. Some organizations would say that because of the sheer volume of applicants and the resources needed for the process, there is simply not enough time to answer the inquiries they receive from prospective employees. But what if those organizations treated their customers the same way?

Make specific process changes to your hiring practices to convey respect and care for potential employees. Applicants crave communication from potential employers about the status of their job search, and organizations could eliminate much of job seekers’ frustrations by increasing the amount of real-time feedback they receive about their applications.

I recently spoke at Qualigence’s First Annual Recruitment “How To” Conference in Chicago about #3.  Not only is it possible but it’s happening at your competition right now!

Who Cares?  You Should.

And millionaires were made.

Today, we’ve seen a proliferation of niche job boards (to the tune of over 45,000 available) and the promise of the web (automate and create efficiency) has all but gone by the wayside.

Allow me to explain via example:
I have an Oracle DBA position I need to fill in Omaha, Nebraska. I’m going to pay this person $105K a year. Ready – go find them on the boards.

I have to search;
1. at least one BIG BOARD (my hiring manager wants to know I’m doing my job and if I’m not searching one, I’m failing according this dinosaur)
2. DICE – this is where the Techies live
3. The Ladders or 6-Figure jobs – I’m paying $105K remember?
4. Omahatechjobs.com – Don’t know if this exists but it probably does – you get the point
5. OracleDBAgurus.com – Ditto
6. my own network of DBA’s – none of whom are in Omaha nor want to relocate in November
7. yada yada yada

Get it? By creating access to the universe, the world wide web put talent at our fingertips. By carving it up into tiny chunks (and charging us to look at every chunk) the job board industry has accomplished three things;

A. Made a TON of money in the last 5-7 years – all from Corporate America’s recruiting budgets
B. Created a confusing and frustrating world for Job seekers
C. Reduced the efficiency of Corporate Recruiters (see example above)

Thanks!

But why has this happened? Basically it’s a technology issue. We are still using the same technology (keyword search and boolean search strings matching two really poorly written documents – resume and job description) that we used in 1995. Because if you have “too large of a database” of people, your technology can’t get you closer to the right person. Thus, you divide up the database into micro-chunks (over40jobs.com, mommyjobs.com etc.) and the simplistic technology we have can get you closer to the right population.

Capiche?

The “Yeah So” part.

SO, the solution to this unsustainable model is to remove the invisible barriers, the walls so to speak, put around the sub populations and use evlolved technology to do the parsing of talent.

The “Result” part.

The results would astounding;
1. Single place for Job Seeker to go to be found for a job by any company according to their personal desires and work styles.
2. Single place for recruiters to go to search and pull back “interview-ready” talent; pre-interested, pre-qualfied and perfect for the job you have today or will have tomorrow.
3. No more post and pray – searching becomes first action because it works.
4. Dramatically less cost to Recruiting Departments – DRAMATICALLY
5. Dramatically more efficiency and ROI or Recruiting Departments
6. Lots of niche job board owners in the database looking for jobs.

It’s time we put technology to use for Recruiting. Not the same technology re-branded or bundled into an “algorithm” but something really different, really simple and really NEW.

The name comes from the fact that there are some games where the sum of the player’s payoffs at the end of the game sum to zero. Poker is a good example. Imagine you and I play head’s up poker. If at the end of the night I’m up $20 then, by definition, you are down $20. Our payoffs, plus $20 and minus $20, sum to zero. The point being that in zero sum games my wins define your losses (and visa versa).

By the definition of this game, no rational individual could look at recruiting and hiring as a zero sum game – the fact of the matter is that there is enough talent in the marketplace so that everyone can have theirs.  My wins should not define your losses (and visa versa).

As a Recruiter, you may be rolling your eyes right now saying “no way Phil, I have to beat my competition for talent and steal what I need so they can’t have it”.  I’m sorry for your neanderthal view of the world.  It’s 2009 and evolved organizations realize that the power of WE is much stronger than the power of ME.

Or at least they are “saying” they do.

To truly understand this concept, you have to have an introduction to the term “open source”.  Originally coined to describe the phenomenon of formerly proprietary (read Zero Sum) software companies realizing the amazing technological and financial benefits of sharing openly their software code.  Now as a Recruiter, if you think you have a death grip on your candidates, it’s nothing compared to software developers of the late ’80’s and early ’90’s (before Open Source) as it was once thought that is you shared this information it would kill your business.

The opposite is actually true.

Through collaboration and open sharing of information all parties win.  Think of the iPhone and the thousands of applications being developed in basements around the world.  Couldn’t happen if Apple kept their source code under lock and key.  Apple is a great example of eliminating the zero sum game (we have to develop all iPhone apps) and in place of it – creating networks of sharing and mutual gain.

No, it’s not Utopian – it’s web 2.0. and beyond.  You may still be acting in a zero sum game mentality  in recruiting – this is why you struggle each day/week/month/year to recruit and retain the best employees.  You are limited in your ability to produce amazing results just like the software companies of yore were.

By harnessing the collective effort of an “open” recruiting system you will eventually hire better people faster and they’ll be higher quality than you are hiring today.

But beware.  There are companies who are trying to make you believe they are “sharing” candidates for the benefit of all.  Check under the hood of any “candidate exchange” or proprietary talent network opportunities.  If there are limitations (only people with certain ATS systems or only people associated with a particular company etc.) to who can participate in the program it can never be considered “OPEN” and is therefore a carefully hidden “Zero Sum Game”.

You’d never find a steer branded  “rocking H” wandering the stables at the “lazy M”.  A brand means something very REAL in livestock.  It means commitment.

And in Corporate life, a “brand” can mean commitment; commitment to quality, commitment to innovation, commitment to community etc.  

But come down another layer to the “employment brand” the whole subject gets pretty “squishy”. 

All of a sudden, the term “brand” means more of an aspiration than a commitment.  You would never see a steer not living up to it’s “brand” and rarely do you find a company not tied inextricably to it’s corporate brand but in “employment branding” there is way too much gray area.  But why?

The essence of employer branding is to attract talented individuals and ensure both they and existing employees identify with the organization – and its brand and mission –  to produce desired outcomes for organizations.

The discourse occurs when image triumphs over substance and what is publicly proclaimed is in conflict with reality.  Here, employees both tenured and new find the organization lacking in “brand” integrity.

So how do you avoid the “temporary tattoo” employer brand?  Simple.  Be real.  Inspect your brand; what keeps your star employees at your company and what attracts new ones?  What causes game changers to leave?  Do the analysis, be willing to be challenged and then set programs and culture changes to fix what is broken.  In short – live up to what your brand IS, not what you want it to be.  In the end you’ll attract and retain the talent you can and not the talent you think you should be.

Having lived through the first war for talent of the mid to late 90’s during the dot.com boom, I can tell you that we were hiring as fast and as furious as possible.  Companies were offering 6 month leases on Ferrari’s as signing bonuses and the “war” was on.  As employers, we literally battled at offer time against one another – upping the ante’ until one of us blinked and lost the candidate.  The emphasis was on closing candidates and building companies.

Fast forward to the recovery of 2010-2011 and you’ll see a very different recruitment scenario.  One based, not on fast and furious recruitment but one based on engagement of talent. 

We won’t be building companies at warp speed.  Most organizations will add strategically instead of rabidly. As recruiting departments we’ll be measured on how well we know our candidates, how we treat them in the application/interview process and how well our employment offers match the unique needs of each person we hire. 

Recruiting departments will no longer simply be measured on how many hires they made and how fast but on how many of these hires turn into game changers.  Your scorecard will reflect how many of your hires were promoted this year vs. last year and how many of your hires have been here how long. 

We are moving to “candidate engagement” teams – focused on developing relationships in advance of hiring needs, determining work preferences, styles and requirements and then hiring the right person into the right job.  Recruiters will be compensated on retention and performance of those individuals they hire and the line between Recruiter and Hiring Manager (you know, that line that you toss candidates over and then say “your decision now” and wash your hands and move on?) will forever be blurred as accountability for a new employee’s success will be shared between the two.

So to get a jump on the the new paradigm, you need to focus on engaging prospects and taking time to learn about them; hone your candidate experience for both interviewed and non-interviewed candidates and then create a “concierge experience” for anyone you interview – ensuring that, hired or not, they leave your process talking about how everyone they know should want to work for your company.

Today, my focus shifts to the Job Seeker.  Of all the reasons to focus on this population of people, none is more compelling than spending time with Recruiting departments and hearing some of the prevailing attitudes toward them.  Wow!  You’d think the job seeker was put on the earth to bog down and frustrate corporate recruiting departments.  I think your Marketing and Executive teams might have something to say about that!

The job seeker is inextricable tied to your corporate profits.  Follow me here; a job seeker applies to one of your jobs – why?  Probably for a myriad of reasons but one of them is always “money”.  I don’t hang with a lot of independently wealthy folks so everyone I know works for pay.  What do we do with that pay?  After taxes, we buy “stuff”.  Therefore, every job seeker is also a consumer, and a potential consumer of your company’s “stuff”.  Or not.

• 1 in 4 job seekers has been badly treated by a prospective employer.
• 53% of job seekers will not purchase products and services if they have been badly treated.
• 55% tell at least 3 people about their bad experience.

There are many ways a company can increase the positive feelings these job seekers have with their brand.

None is more important than simply acknowledging there is more to do and committing to doing it.