Archive

Facebook: A Powerful Corporate Recruiting Resource: In just about every business, the potential value of Facebook has been kicked around. Corporate recruiting is no different. There are 350 million users on this site – the most popular social networking platform on the web – and it’s still growing aggressively. So, the upside is only going to grow. Add to this the fact that there’s a robust application development community outside Facebook, which provides a steady stream of fresh, innovative thinking, and you can see the wide range of possibilities for professionals in our business.

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Three Characteristics of an Effective Corporate Recruiter: Introduction: For such a common discipline, the methods of evaluation are strangely varied. Most major companies have at least one corporate recruiter, but there is little consensus on how to decide whether the person playing that role is effective … which means figuring out how to define a “good” corporate recruiter becomes a murky affair at best.

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Five Ways to Supercharge Your Corporate Recruiting Practices: Corporate recruiters have always struggled to gain a seat at the strategic table. A support unit, it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to link what this department does to achieving company objectives. But, without an efficient corporate recruiting team that’s plugged into the needs of every aspect of the business, success can remain elusive.

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Three Characteristics of an Effective Corporate Recruiter: Deep Business Acumen: You may have been a corporate recruiter since Jimmy Carter occupied the oval office and know all the tricks to this sometimes difficult profession. But, if you’re a recruiter … who hasn’t adopted a business approach to your role … your days numbered. Business acumen is more important than ever before, especially with lean organizations that often leave hiring managers pressed for time. If you don’t have a strong knowledge of the industry and a broader view of where your industry fits into the broader business landscape in which you’re recruiting, expect your usefulness to be called into question fairly quickly.

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Generation Gap: The Looming Challenge: Today’s workforce is comprised of four generations, each of which has a distinct way of looking at the world and approaching its careers. Rapid advances in technology over the past 40 years have done more than change the tools of the office – they have fundamentally altered how people interact, which in turn has shaped worldviews. The gradual progression that preceded the PC revolution (and the internet revolution after it) is now a relic, and corporate recruiters and hiring managers will have to develop the skills necessary to connect with a variety of candidates who prefer specific styles and even use vastly different language.

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Four Ways to Improve New Product Launch Recruiting: New products require new talent. A venture into a product or service line can be fertile territory for sales and company value growth, but it can be risky. In addition to needing new capabilities – from research and development through sales, support and relationship management – you face competitive factors that weren’t an issue in the past. The most effective way to boost your odds of success while mitigating risk is to secure the best talent for your new product or service line.

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Generation Gap: Retirement Deferred: The old rules of interviewing are gone. Once upon a time, it was considered bad form not to send a “thank you” note after an interview. No self-respecting Baby Boomer would ever allow himself to forget this step. Yet, Generations X and Y don’t think in terms of paper any more, and the Millennials have been raised entirely on the internet. Further, even if they thought about sending a note, the world moves too quickly. Several rounds of interviewing may occur within the span of a few days, making it virtually impossible for a mailed letter or card to arrive before the next round of talks.

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Generation Gap: The Looming Challenge: Today’s workforce is comprised of four generations, each of which has a distinct way of looking at the world and approaching its careers. Rapid advances in technology over the past 40 years have done more than change the tools of the office – they have fundamentally altered how people interact, which in turn has shaped worldviews. The gradual progression that preceded the PC revolution (and the internet revolution after it) is now a relic, and corporate recruiters and hiring managers will have to develop the skills necessary to connect with a variety of candidates who prefer specific styles and even use vastly different language.

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Use “Accordion Capacity” to Handle Busy Periods: Every business area struggles to figure out just how many employees are enough. For corporate recruiters, usually required to operate lean, this can be particularly vexing. It’s possible to get temporary help to take the sting out of temporary surges in activity (e.g., sourcing for a special project or initiative), but the returns are usually compromised by the limited support they can provide and the time necessary to train them on internal processes and tools.

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Facebook: A Powerful Corporate Recruiting Resource: In just about every business, the potential value of Facebook has been kicked around. Corporate recruiting is no different. There are 350 million users on this site – the most popular social networking platform on the web – and it’s still growing aggressively. So, the upside is only going to grow. Add to this the fact that there’s a robust application development community outside Facebook, which provides a steady stream of fresh, innovative thinking, and you can see the wide range of possibilities for professionals in our business.

Read the article >>

Four Ways to Improve New Product Launch Recruiting: New products require new talent. A venture into a product or service line can be fertile territory for sales and company value growth, but it can be risky. In addition to needing new capabilities – from research and development through sales, support and relationship management – you face competitive factors that weren’t an issue in the past. The most effective way to boost your odds of success while mitigating risk is to secure the best talent for your new product or service line.

Read the article >>

How Much Time Do You Spend with Your Hiring Managers?: Whatever the answer is, it probably isn’t enough. Corporate recruiters spend a disproportionate amount of their time engaged in administrative activities. This leads to hidden costs throughout the recruiting supply chain, but the impact is perhaps most profound when it comes to hiring manager relationships. After all, the hiring manager is best positioned to raise the profile of the corporate recruiting team within a company.

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Human Resources Procedures Never Caught up with the Web: A little over a decade ago, we were waiting for the entire corporate recruiting supply chain to change. Everything was going to become much, much easier, as our profession had announced its commitment to all things technological. The internet would make our lives easier. The entire sourcing and recruiting process would be made more efficient by job boards (as they were called at the time) and the ability for candidates to apply for jobs directly through company websites.

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Five Ways to Improve Your Time to Hire Performance: Time to hire is the metric that matters most, even if aspects of it are beyond your control. But, it’s what executives understand, so it isn’t going to go away. Since you’ll be held accountable to it, you need to find ways to improve your time to hire performance. In addition to cutting time to source and streamlining the offer letter and negotiation efforts, there are steps you can take to help your hiring managers respond more quickly. You’ll be influencing, not controlling, but in the long run, these tips can help you improve the overall performance of your company in attracting talent, which leads to a salient return on investment.

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As Job Market Seeks Recovery, Start Recruiting Now: So, what can we make of the talent market right now? A year ago, the situation was nothing short of dismal. Job cuts peaked in January 2009, according to the latest data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, with 241,729 layoffs announced – the largest one-month reduction since January 2002. And, the five months that followed continued to be severe. Since the start of the recession, 2.5 million positions have been cut, Challenger says, with 1.6 million of them coming between July 2008 and June 2009.

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Facebook: A Powerful Corporate Recruiting Resource: In just about every business, the potential value of Facebook has been kicked around. Corporate recruiting is no different. There are 350 million users on this site – the most popular social networking platform on the web – and it’s still growing aggressively. So, the upside is only going to grow. Add to this the fact that there’s a robust application development community outside Facebook, which provides a steady stream of fresh, innovative thinking, and you can see the wide range of possibilities for professionals in our business.

Read the article >>

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Accept It: You’ll Be Swamped with Resumes Forever (unless you do something different): Recessions tend to increase the number of resumes submitted per open req, and today’s unemployment levels tell part of the story. There are more people out of work, and they are chasing every opportunity. Layoffs and the ever-popular “do more with less” mandate have squeezed the survivors, causing job satisfaction to plummet. So, they’re looking for greener pastures, as well. When the job market turns, though, don’t expect this situation to change. Not only will an up-tick in hiring stimulate employee turnover, but the trend will continue long after we get the current job market dysfunction out of our systems. The reason is simple: job postings are everywhere.

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Take Corporate Recruiting out of the Electronic Graveyard: Are you tending an electronic graveyard for online resumes? This is the public perception of the application process. Job-seekers are lobbing as many resumes as they can, in the hopes of either finding a better job or removing themselves from the 10 percent of the workforce that is unemployed. The sheer volume this creates, unfortunately, is the cause of the job-hunters’ belief that most of those resumes will never get anywhere.

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Elevate the Corporate Recruiting Profile: For years, recruiters have labored in a certain level of obscurity. Occasionally, there is a high-priority hire that gets corporate recruiters a seat at the executive table, but it is fleeting. Once the offer has been accepted, they are again relegated to the daily strength management tasks that rarely garner the attention of a company’s top leaders. Yet, so much of what corporate recruiters do is crucial to the daily operation – and strategic advancement – of a company.

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Three Metrics that Matter: Measuring a Corporate Recruiter’s Success: For a corporate recruiter, the world is governed by performance metrics – even if you aren’t watching them. Hiring managers and company executives think in terms of whether their needs are filled, and these sentiments often come in the form of numbers: how long it took to fill an open position, the time needed to source resumes and how much it cost to bring a candidate in the door. To maximize the value of corporate recruiting to your company, you can adopt this framework and use it as the formula for demonstrating your contribution to the company’s success.

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Time to Hire vs. Time to Source: Corporate recruiters have long been evaluated by the “time to hire” metric – i.e., how long it takes to get from open req to productive employee. Yet, there is understandable resistance to this measure of success. The corporate recruiter could source high-quality resumes quickly, conduct a thorough screening ahead of schedule and put candidates in front of hiring managers, only to wait as interviews are delayed. What could be a 30-day process turns into 45, 60 or even 90 days. So, it may be more effective to focus on “time to source” performance – i.e., how long it takes to put high-quality candidates in front of a hiring manager.

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Tweeting for Jobs: Cute, but Not a Long-Term Strategy: Some of the stories coming from the job market right now can be pretty entertaining. The tale of the man who sent little more than a tweet and got a job, for example, has circled the web several times already, showcasing the power of social media in a crowded talent market. But, when you cut through the humor of the anecdote, it isn’t hard to see that the potency of social media can consume its users, unless they have plans in place to keep from getting bombarded with Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook inquiries.

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Green Future: An Introduction for Corporate Recruiters: If you’re not thinking about green talent pools right now, you’re a step behind the market. Every day, it’s looking more and more like the next economic bubble – in the United States and around the world – will involve clean technology. Cast aside your politics on this one – the argument over climate change isn’t relevant to the business opportunity. Instead, look at the data from the market. Private equity and venture capital money is increasingly headed toward green investments, and the talent market for this sector is gaining steam.

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Bubble Watch: Are You Ready to Respond to a Fast Change in the Market?: Trick question! The correct answer is that your recruiting practices should be impervious to rapid changes in the job market. If you are recruiting constantly – building talent pools for when you may need them – you will be able to absorb the market conditions that will send your competitors scrambling.

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Did You Forget about the Next Talent Shortage?: Before the subprime mortgage market pushed the global financial system to the brink of collapse, nobody was worried about unemployment. Our priorities have changed, of course, now that the unemployment rate is at 10 percent, and recruiting isn’t top of mind. This myopic view of the talent market, though, means we’re just creating the next crisis.

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Did You Forget about the Next Talent Shortage?: Before the subprime mortgage market pushed the global financial system to the brink of collapse, nobody was worried about unemployment. Our priorities have changed, of course, now that the unemployment rate is at 10 percent, and recruiting isn’t top of mind. This myopic view of the talent market, though, means we’re just creating the next crisis. Have we all forgotten about the Baby Boomers?

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Five Ways to Supercharge Your Corporate Recruiting Practices: Corporate recruiters have always struggled to gain a seat at the strategic table. A support unit, it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to link what this department does to achieving company objectives. But, without an efficient corporate recruiting team that’s plugged into the needs of every aspect of the business, success can remain elusive.

Read the article >>

Bubble Watch: Are You Ready to Respond to a Fast Change in the Market?: Trick question! The correct answer is that your recruiting practices should be impervious to rapid changes in the job market. If you are recruiting constantly – building talent pools for when you may need them – you will be able to absorb the market conditions that will send your competitors scrambling.

Read the article >>

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