ERE.net

Too many recruiters rush the closing process, trying to push the candidate across the finish line before the race has even started. If you want to win the recruiting game, stop the Hail Mary’s.

Instead, consider successful recruiting more like a well-planned football drive, where time of possession is key. If you’re not into football analogies, the idea here is that top people don’t make critical career decisions on the first call or after the first interview. And if you try to push too hard to get a commitment you’ll drive the best away. This is equivalent to a turnover.

With a great football weekend ahead, here’s what it takes to turn a successful drive into a touchdown:

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You may know Steve Lavin from his broadcasts on ESPN or his former role as the head basketball coach at UCLA. Lavin recently spoke at the ERE Expo in Hollywood, Florida, sharing his anecdotes and wisdom with the audience. Although not a recruiter, his lessons rang true for everyone and there was much to take away from his game plan for overcoming life’s challenges.

Watch the highlights below.

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Organizations rapidly adjust headcount the moment orders slow. As early as last June, the statistics on Monster, CareerBuilder, and other job boards began to show a decline in postings and traffic. The number of jobs listed on corporate career sites also declined, indicating less demand.

I am not sure if recruiters noticed, but several analysts did. I recently read an analyst’s report that compared several high-tech companies on the number of open positions they had as an indicator of long-term earnings and profit.

Given that analysts are doing this, we should be, too. We should be very sensitive to what our own management is thinking, how orders are shaping up, what the sales team is projecting, and then adjusting our own efforts accordingly.

If you don’t have access to this information you have two ways to get it. First of all, go to your manager and ask him or her for help. They will hopefully share what they can with you or help you find it. Second, cultivate your own sources by making friends with someone in sales or another part of your organization where people have that “inside” information that gives you an early indication of how things are going.

With that information in hand, here are five specific actions you can take to increase the odds of surviving, and even thriving, in this down economy.

Action Item #1: Get in Shape

You can’t make much progress in building credibility with management until your own function is in good shape. Recruiters who saw the signs of a recession could have begun trimming the fat in their processes months ago. Get aligned with your management team and cut when they cut, slow down when they slow down, and show them you are aware and responsible.

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I passed my local library last night, and I took a few pictures of the display in the front window.

When the local library is pitching in to help people find jobs, I see it as a sign of the times.

What do you think?

Former CNN anchor Jan Hopkins presented an inspiring view of our economic struggles at the ERE Expo on October 29.

Although admitting that our current economic situation was unprecedented, Hopkins retained a positive outlook on the situation. Both looking to the past and to our future, she provides information on what has led our economy to the state it is in now, and what the recruiting industry must do to profit in these difficult times. Watch these highlights to learn more.
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ESPN’s Bruce Feldman’s new book “Meat Market” chronicles the business of recruiting in big-time college football, with a focus on Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron. In his talk with ERE, you may get ideas (including when he discusses “negative recruiting”) that can work in the corporate America.

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All-too-slim majorities of recruiters feel that their organizations view recruiting as strategic and valuable, according to data from the Recruiting Rountable.

The pie chart below shows the percentages of the 4,000 recruiters surveyed who said that “recruiting is viewed as a strategic priority at my organization.”

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For the next issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I asked business, econ, and finance professors what they expect out of the 2009 economy. They weren’t too cheery about the overall economy. But, when it came to the labor market, they suggested what recruiters already know: that the competition for top talent won’t let up much.

Here are some excerpts from that upcoming Journal.

From John Worrall, Rutgers University (pictured):

“My back-of-the-envelope guess is the unemployment rate will be North of 7% in 2009. Do I expect it to be at depression levels? No, I don’t.

I think HR managers will be deluding themselves if they think there will be less competition for talent simply because the unemployment rate is high. There’s a temptation to let people go during downturns — the stronger the downturn, the stronger the propensity for layoffs. They would be well-advised to consider carefully how much they have invested not just in key people but across the management spectrum. They’ve invested a ton in training formal and otherwise. That’s gone if they lose those people in a recession. They might not get them back.”

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In 1605 Joseph Jacobs wrote a story titled Dick Whittington’s Cat, about a boy who’s told about the great city of London where the streets are paved with gold. Eagerly he sets out, only to find that while London has a lot of opportunity, it isn’t quite the promised land he was told it was — and the streets are paved with dust. That parallels the experience of a lot of companies that have made their way to India in the hopes of tapping the vast pool of talent the country has to offer. As most have found setting up shop in India and hiring employees has major benefits, but also poses some significant challenges.

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A new technology platform, combining the functionality of Salesforce.com with Facebook, has opened the door for development of new referral and sourcing applications. The platform debuted at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com user and developer conference held in San Francisco earlier this month.

Jobs4MyFriends, a new Facebook application created by Appirio, is one of the first applications created on the new platform. It extends a company’s ability to use employee networks to generate referrals, according to Ryan Nichols, Appirio’s VP of product management.

Onboarding programs rank high on the list of HR programs that get little respect or attention. When managed well, onboarding programs can have a dramatic and measurable impact on employee productivity, retention, employment brand, service/product quality, workplace safety, and future hiring success.

Unfortunately, most onboarding programs are poorly designed and even more poorly executed. After years of researching and advising firms on developing best-practice programs, I have found that there are 15 key factors that can literally kill any chances of onboarding programs demonstrating a positive impact.

The Root of the Problem

Most corporate onboarding programs are designed from the HR administrator’s perspective. The goal and focus is to ease the administrative burden on HR and to drive compliance activities, not to ensure that new hires can reach expected levels of productivity in the shortest time frame possible.

As a result, most programs have boiled onboarding activities down to all but the bare bones of administration. Every new hire, transfer, or merged/acquired employee gets the same information, on the same timeline, via the same channel.

Doing so has made administering onboarding easy, cheap, generic, consistent, and utterly useless. The result is that most onboarding programs frustrate new hires and hiring managers.

While the concept behind onboarding is truly simple, delivering world-class onboarding is anything but easy and generic. If your current approach demonstrates any of the 15 onboarding program killers described below, you’re missing the mark and need to start over:

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Many execs put industry experience at the top of their criteria list for sales-management candidates.

“The successful applicant will have 10 years experience in the widget industry.”

Hogwash!

The end result of this approach is that companies hire the industry retreads.

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A C-level shakeup is underway at Zoom Information (profile; site), the parent of ZoomInfo, that appears linked to financial challenges at the business information search engine frequented by recruiters and marketers.

Sources tell us that Sam Zales, president and CEO of BuyerZone, a B2B supplier network and business lead generator, is reportedly about to be named president of ZoomInfo. He will replace Bryan Burdick, whose new role is unclear. The move has not been announced and neither Zales nor Burdick returned calls.

Burdick has been president at the company since April 2006, joining from Monster Worldwide where he was chief marketing officer - TMP. Zales has been with BuyerZone since 1999. He became president and CEO in July 2000. In 2006 BuyerZone was acquired by Reed Business Information.

Both BuyerZone and ZoomInfo are based in Waltham, Massachusetts, not far from Monster’s home in Maynard.

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Wharton Prof Peter Cappelli hit this one out of the park.

Although “I’m betting that this downturn will become nasty fast,” he says, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a recruiting department that could have too much time on its hands should be axed.

He argues that before recruiting-department pink-slips get printed, companies should:

• Figure out what the chances are that next year they’ll need recruiters who really know their company.
• Then calculate what it’ll cost to hire such recruiters next year if the company has laid off its critical recruiters and needs to start from scratch.
• Lastly, decide whether it might be better off just keeping who they’ve got.

It’s an exercise that could and should be done in another departments on the proverbial chopping block.

I thought that this week I would try something a bit different to spark a conversation and perhaps get some deeper understanding of issues we are all dealing with or probably will be soon.

Over the past almost two weeks I have been in Europe leading workshops, working with a few clients, and presenting to recruiters from Germany, France, the U.K., and The Netherlands. We all face the same issues. Some of these are generational differences, an aging workforce, lack of loyalty, difficulty to engage and attract new college graduates, the economic recession, and growing talent needs in some areas with meltdowns in others.

I picked out one challenging area: that of how to deal with diversity and the generations.

In a workshop I held a couple of days ago, one of the scenarios we grappled with was whether diversity is growing or lessening and the role generational differences play. I presented them with the following scenarios and asked them to discuss (argue?) and challenge each other on which of these is closer to their experience and belief.

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Recruiters who don’t communicate with recruiting source representatives are passing up opportunities to drive efficiencies up, and cost of hire down. That’s because many sources will organize recruiting events, publicize them, and connect recruiters with candidates free of charge.

Yet recruiting source representatives say they rarely hear from corporate recruiters, only receiving infrequent calls when a recruiter needs to fill an immediate opening.

Says Bev Principal, assistant director of student employment services at the Stanford University Career Development Center: “If I meet with a company representative during the summer, and receive information about its entire breadth of career opportunities, not just the immediate openings, I can pass that information along to students during career counseling sessions or I’ll remember to invite that company to participate in specific career events here on campus.”

Principal says she regularly e-mails students about recruiting events, and sends a monthly newsletter to engineering students. If she has information to share about an employer or its job opportunities, she passes it along.

John Weitzel, internship coordinator at El Camino College, says that employers are often disappointed in student turnout when they schedule a last-minute campus recruiting event. He starts promoting the retail holiday job fair, for example, when students first return to school in mid-August, and companies like FedEx and Disney set up campus recruiting visits a year in advance. FedEx is on the students’ radar screens because it recruits on campus every Monday.

“Not every student knows what they want to do when they finish school,” says Weitzel. “If I know Northrop Grumman has jobs other than engineering, like grant-writing and marketing, I can talk about those opportunities with students who seem suited for those careers.”

Even sources that provide experienced candidates can be better used through proactive planning. Olin King, site manager for the West Covina office of the California Employment Development Department, says that employees who lose their jobs due to offshoring receive special benefits and retraining, and he can sway them toward specific courses — if he knows local employers have hiring needs.

“We can set-up recruitment sessions, where we’ll line up the candidates and employers can come to our office to interview,” says King. “There are opportunities for employers to provide career advice to 300 experienced workers at our older and wiser seminars, which cater to job seekers 40 and older. We also bring education and employers together to fulfill specific needs in the community, but the only way to do that is through collaboration, and I just don’t hear from corporate recruiters.”

ManTech International needs information technology workers with security clearances and Inova Health System needs registered nurses; both companies are partnering with the Army Reserve as part of a new program that gives private-sector employers access to nearly 250,000 reserve personnel and 785,000 reserve retirees.

The Army Reserve Employer Partnership Program was launched in April, and 48 companies have signed agreements guaranteeing an interview to interested reservists, who are either beginning or ending their duty or who want to change careers. In exchange, the Army is providing training and in some cases even customizing the curriculum to meet the needs of private employers.

“A good example of how we’re adapting our training to help meet the hiring needs of private employers is what we’re doing with truck drivers,” says Col. Dianna Cleven, who manages the partnership initiative for the Army. “Army truck drivers drive under some pretty austere conditions, and we’re talking with the commercial licensing authorities to make sure Army drivers can pass the commercial certification test.”

After conferring with employers, the Army Reserve is focusing on providing additional training courses for careers and trades where candidates are in short supply. It’s even considering adapting its West Point leadership curriculum to provide private-sector managers who are also reservists with leadership training.

Cleven says that employers should expect and prepare for the reality that reservists will be called for duty, because the demand for their services is not expected to diminish anytime soon. Currently, active reservists can be called to serve 12 to 15 months once every five years.

As America honors its military veterans, there’s news about the difficulties some vets have finding a job. A CareerBuilder (profile; site) survey says 1-in-6 vets report spending six months job hunting after leaving the service. About 1-in-10 say it took them a year to land a job.

Of the 750 vets surveyed for the report, about 20 percent said the biggest challenge to getting hired is the difficulty employers have in understanding just how transferable military skills are. Some of the vets also said they were at a disadvantage because they lacked a college degree, good interviewing skills, or there was just a lack of appropriate jobs in their area.

However, the news isn’t as bleak as the survey might imply. Bill Scott, with military recruitment specialist Bradley-Morris (profile; site), told us, “In our view, we still see this market as strong for veterans.” The U.S. economy has slowed hiring generally, acknowledges Scott, the firm’s VP of marketing and business development. But there are ”many opportunities (for veterans). There are employers who want to hire veterans.”

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We ran a live video feed of the ERE Expo (join us for the next conference in the spring!) last week on our site, and lots of recruiters who could not be with us in person tuned in — at one point we had over 400 live viewers! I couldn’t be happier with the way that our little experiment was received, and we got some great suggestions from the viewers on how we can improve for the next time around.

The response got me thinking — why limit this to only the ERE Expo? There are plenty of great conferences and events in the industry that visitors to ERE.net would be interested in learning from.

Today, our friends at the Global Recruitment Conference will be holding their event in Amsterdam, and we’ll be streaming it live (with chat!) on our home page. They have a great agenda, so it should be fun and informative. Obviously, there will be a big time difference for those of us in the United States — the feed will begin at around 2:15 a.m. and go on until 11 a.m. Eastern time (see below for the full schedule.) This is less than ideal, but hey — this is live, and the show must go on!

Finally, here’s an offer to all of the other companies out there that produce conferences for recruiters. If you are up for it, we’ll gladly stream your event live on our home page! You’ll get the same treatment that we gave to ERE Expo. That’s exposure to the recruiting industry that most companies would kill for, and we’ll give it to you for free — all we’d ask is that you cover Brendan’s travel expenses so he can manage the cameras.

You’ll win because your event will front and center in ERE.net, and we’ve already seen how much buzz that generates in the industry and blogosphere. Visitors to ERE.net will win because they will have the opportunity to see a piece of event from afar. And when the recruiters who visit our site win, so do we.

Call me!

Here is the schedule for the next couple of days:

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Eleven Tril is the equivalent of 9.5 months of our Gross Domestic Product ($14.3 Tril a year), or 2 1/2 months of the world GDP! ($54 Tril). And while we are in the throws of a seemingly major recession, there will be a lot of jobs created.

Yes, $11 Tril has been or is planned to be injected mostly into the world banking system, starting with the Bear Stearns bailout in March, and more recently the $700 billion bailout bill passed by Congress. European central banks are contributing an estimated $2.8 Tril, and our own Federal Reserve some $5.6 Tril to offshore banks, mostly in “swaps” (our dollars for their currency) to unclog the world banking system which almost ground to a halt in early October. This will regenerate loaning ability, and letters and lines of credit. While Q4 might be the worst since 1980, this avalanche of money suggests a quick recovery starting in Q1 or Q2 of 2009.

A small percentage will go directly back to taxpayers in a second round of rebates, some to help 3 million subprime “victims” keep their homes. This has spawned a “cottage industry” of loan mitigation and modification services, sadly sometimes employing the same subprime brokers who orchestrated the crisis.

Eleven trillion is a lot of money, and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created, a lot of them in banks, regulatory authorities to monitor disbursements, and loan modification companies. Yes, many are being laid off, but many will find new jobs created by this massive flow of money.

My suggestion to fellow recruiters looking for new business? “Follow the money.”