WEDDLE's Tips for Success
When Using the Internet for Recruiting & Retention

Please select the tips listed below that are of interest to you:

• When It’s Right to Take Care of Number One First - New

• Be One of the “Best Recruiters”

• Job Ads That Don’t Work

• Practice the Golden Rule

• Turning Anti-Candidates Into Pro-Candidates

• Cutting Corners to the Best Candidates

• Avoid Dart Board Interviews

• A Job Posting for Passive Prospects

• Employment Brand Management

When It’s Right to Take Care of Number One First

This dilemma now jeopardizes the careers of countless HR professionals. The workplace has never been more hostile to people in all professions, crafts and trades, but HR professionals are particularly vulnerable. They work in a field that corporate America defines as “overhead” which is just another term for expendable. When the budget axe swings, therefore, their careers are at the head of the line to the chopping block.

The irony of this situation is that HR professionals actually serve both their employers and their coworkers better when they serve themselves, as well. Caring for their own career’s health improves their ability both to manage talent effectively for the organization and to help employees realize their full potential. Said another way, HR professionals make their best contribution by focusing first on their own well-being at work.

How is that so? Practicing healthy career habits not only makes HR professionals more credible—they walk the talk about successful career self-management—it gives them the tools they need to be effective on-the-job. When HR professionals care for their own careers, they acquire a better understanding of how to help others care for theirs. They gain the knowledge and the experience to provide the best possible counsel to coworkers.

There’s an equally important second benefit to such an approach. Attentive career self-management also enables HR professionals to be ready for and react effectively to sudden changes in their own fortunes. The current economic crisis will eventually be resolved, but the 21st Century world of work will always be a turbulent and challenging environment. Being prepared, therefore, is the only prudent way to protect oneself from career cardiac arrest or what most of us call termination.

Thankfully, there are a number of powerful principles and tools for building a healthy career in our modern workplace. They integrate both the best of what was developed in the last century and the new ideas and technology that have emerged in this century. They empower working men and women to direct their own destinies in the workplace so that they can express and experience their unique talent. All HR professionals have to do is take advantage of them and take charge of their careers.

What does it mean to take charge of your career? The following excerpt explores this idea further. It’s drawn from my new book, Work Strong: Your Personal Career Fitness System.

Work Strong: Your Personal Career Fitness System begins with a very simple premise: in order to achieve true career security in today’s tough times, we must re-imagine ourselves as “career athletes.” We must see ourselves as a new breed of worker-champion. Our model is not that of the athletes engaged in professional sports, but rather, the athletes who are most like us. Worker-champions are the workplace version of Olympians, at least Olympians as they were originally envisioned. These champions are not amateurs; they are athletic activists.

Such athletes have a number of special attributes:.

• They are independent. They decide where and when they will exercise their physical abilities and under what conditions. It might be jogging around the neighborhood or playing in a tennis tournament, but they determine the content and duration of their activity.
   
• They are passionate about their sport. They love the doing of it and are energized and fulfilled by that activity. It strengthens and conditions them, exhilarates and rewards them, and leaves them with a pervasive sense of physical and psychological well-being. Indeed, athletic endeavor can actually create a pleasurable physiological response—what is sometimes called a “runner’s high”—that replenishes the spirit as well as the body.
   
• Their goal is to be the best they can be in their chosen sport. A successful athlete continuously strives to excel and then extend the limits of their performance. There is no end to their effort because they believe there is no limit to what they can achieve.
   
• They can be anyone. Athletics are a democratic activity. All of us have a body, so all of us have the inherent ability to engage in and enjoy physical activity. Sure, some of us will perform better than others, but all of us can be athletes, and all of us can reach for and attain the peaks of our own personal excellence.

Career athletes are also not amateurs; they are career activists. Their attributes are identical to those of athletes engaged in sports:

• They are independent.Career athletes decide where and when they will work and under what conditions. It might be for one employer rather than another or as an independent contractor, but they determine the content and duration of their activity.
   
• They are passionate about their field of work. They love the doing of it and are energized and fulfilled by that activity. It strengthens and conditions them, exhilarates and rewards them, and leaves them with a pervasive sense of physical and psychological well-being. Indeed, athletic endeavor can actually create a pleasurable physiological response—what is sometimes called a “runner’s high”—that replenishes the spirit as well as the body.
   
• Their goal is to be the best they can be in their profession, craft or trade. A successful career athlete continuously strives to excel and then extend the limits of their performance. There is no end to their effort because they believe there is no limit to what they can achieve.
   
• They can be anyone.Career development is a democratic activity. All of us have a mind, so all of us have the inherent ability to engage in and enjoy the work we do with it. Sure, some of us will perform better than others, but all of us can be career athletes, and all of us can reach for and attain the peaks of our own personal excellence.

We can’t become successful career athletes, however, by simply stating our intention to do so. We also can’t rely on serendipity or depend on fate or good fortune, and we certainly can’t look to our employers to make it happen. We won’t transform ourselves into career activists by wishful thinking or by being loyal and dependable and showing up for work every day.

There is only one sure way to establish ourselves as genuine career athletes, and that’s to practice Career Fitness. This concept is based on two lessons all of us have learned about our physical health. From our earliest days as a child, we are taught that:

• Each of us is individually responsible for the well-being of our own bodies; and
   
• We must work at strengthening and protecting our physical well-being every single day.

These responsibilities are nontransferable and nonnegotiable. When we ignore them, we harm ourselves; and when we accept them, we better our lives.

In the 21st Century workplace, the same facts of life apply to our careers, as well:

• Each of us is individually responsible for the well-being of our own career; and
   
• We must work at strengthening and protecting the health of our career every single day.

Career Fitness enables us to become career athletes and face down the bullies among our employers. It gives us a new vision for our work and the fortitude and self-confidence with which to redesign the nature of our employment. It transforms the reality of our workplace experience. It alters the possibility in our lives from simple survival to prosperity and fulfillment.

Career Fitness will restore us—it will give us back what many of us have lost: our belief in the American Dream—but it will not recreate the past. It will not bring back the gold watch or a workplace built on (seemingly stable) career ladders. Instead, Career Fitness enables us to re-set the conditions of our future. It empowers us to end the abusive behavior of bad employers and to reach for the extraordinary occupational goals that each and every one of us are naturally capable of achieving. It liberates us to claim our right to full citizenship in the American workplace as well as in the American polity. Ultimately, Career Fitness gives us the vision and the tools to transform our work into a personal and potent pursuit of Happiness.

How do you translate the concept of Career Fitness into a fit career?

As with physical fitness, you have to condition your career on a regular and repetitive schedule. You have to develop occupational strength, endurance and reach by working on your seven centers of career vitality. I call these loci of activity the Career Fitness “exercises.” They are: These responsibilities are also nontransferable and nonnegotiable. When we ignore them, we harm our standard of living; and when we accept them, we better the quality of our lives.

I. Pump Up Your Cardiovascular System The heart of your career is your occupational expertise, not your knowledge of some employer’s standard operating procedures. Re-imagine yourself as a work-in-progress so that you are always been adding depth and tone to your HR knowledge and skill set and memorializing that enlarged capacity on your resume.

II. Strengthen Your Circulatory System The wider and deeper your network of contacts, the more visible you and your capabilities will be in the workplace. Adding to your network, however, means exactly what the word says—it’s netWORK, not net-get-around-to-it-whenever-it’s-convenient. Make nurturing professional relationships a part of your normal business day.

III. Develop All of Your Muscle Groups The greater your versatility in contributing your expertise at work , the broader the array of situations and assignments in which you can be employed. Develop ancillary skills—for example, the ability to speak a second language or knowledge of key software programs—that will give you more ways to apply your HR capability in the workplace.

IV. Increase Your Flexibility & Range of Motion In the 21st Century world of work, career progress is not always a straight line, nor does it always look as it has in the past or stay the same for very long. Moving from industry-to-industry, from one daily schedule to another or even from one location to another is never easy, but your willingness to adapt will help to keep your career moving forward.

V. Work With Winners Successful organizations and coworkers aid and abet your ability to accomplish your career goals, while less effective organizations and less capable peers diminish it. Working with winners enables you to grow on-the-job, develop useful connections that will last a career and establish yourself as a winner in the world of work.

VI. Stretch Your Soul A healthy career not only serves you, it serves others, as well. A personal commitment to doing some of your best work as good works for your community, your country and/or your planet is the most invigorating form of work/life balance. It regenerates your pride in what you do and your enthusiasm for doing it.

VII. Pace Yourself A fulfilling and rewarding career depends upon your getting the rest and replenishment you need in order to do your best work every day you’re on-the-job. The human body and mind have limits, and those limits cannot be extended by multitasking or even a Blackberry. Instead, you have to discipline yourself and your boss to set aside time to recharge your passion and capacity for work.

Understanding what’s involved in these exercises and then performing them on a regular basis is the foundation of a ”system” for building Career Fitness that everyone—mid-career professionals, executives and managers and those just entering the HR field—can use effectively. It is all laid out in my new book, Work Strong: Your Personal Career Fitness System. Think of it as a plan for preserving and protecting your future in the HR profession.

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Be One of the “Best Recruiters”

We in recruiting have seen this phenomenon occur in our own profession. We use a retronym to describe what we are about in the labor market these days. It’s a war, right? But not just any war; it’s a War for the “Best Talent.” Thanks to the Internet, it’s now necessary to add an adjective to a word that should be sufficient in and of itself.

Talent is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “a special often creative or artistic aptitude.” Recruiting people of talent, therefore, is the goal of every organization. Some may do it better than others, but every employer sets out, at least, to attract and hire those who have that special aptitude in the skill areas it needs to accomplish its business operations. They know they need the competitive advantage that talent provides. And, they know that their probability of success declines dramatically with the “untalented.”

Why, then, do recruiters now believe that they have to recruit the “best talent”—the talent whose aptitude is more special than the rest? There are at least three reasons:

• First, unlike other retronyms, the “best talent” is not a pejorative term. It isn’t something that technology has made obsolete, but rather something that it has made possible. By properly tapping the power of the Internet, we can reach into that very small population of the truly superior talent in the workforce and present a case for their moving to our organization.
   
• Second, we have proof that the economic value of truly superior talent is greater—indeed, considerably greater—than that of even good talent. The McKinsey & Company study that was, ironically, called The War for Talent provided quantified confirmation that “A” level performers are 50-100% more productive than “C” level performers. We’ve always know that intuitively; now, we can demonstrate it with numbers, so even the Chief Financial Officer will understand.
   
• Third, many corporate leaders, including some in the HR profession itself, believe that they can acquire the best talent with a minimum of fuss. All they have to do is bolt a little e-recruiting technology onto what recruiters have done in the past. There’s no need to change policy or procedures or even the capabilities of the recruiting staff (witness the number of HR Generalists being asked to recruit as an additional duty in an already overloaded day). As long as they have the Internet and a shiny, new career area on their corporate Web-site, pulling in the best talent is as easy as fishing in a barrel.

The first two of these reasons make sense to me, but third … well, the third is just way off the mark. The best talent may be a retronym, but recruiting it with the Internet is not like using other technology. Take the television, for example. The viewer’s experience is enhanced by simply flipping a switch on their color, flat screen, high definition, surround sound set. As long as they can find the on-off button, they’re good to go. e-Recruiting, on the other hand, requires considerable understanding and skill. The Internet does not enable us to recruit the best talent; that capability is achieved only with a fundamental change in the way recruiting is done—one that is carefully designed to capture the full potential of the technology.

What does that change involve? As a minimum, it must incorporate the following:

• A change in recruitment advertising. It doesn’t do any good to use the Internet to connect with previously inaccessible populations of great workers if your message has all the appeal of a wet mop. Unfortunately, however, that’s the nature of most job postings today. They are uninformative, uninspiring and therefore uninviting to all but the untalented. To access the best talent with Internet, companies are going to have to change their view of the purpose and content of recruitment advertising posted on that medium. They must give it the same priority as that of their product and service advertising and develop it with the same care and creative energy. They must see their job postings not as simple notices of open positions, but as electronic advertising brochures that have the power to differentiate and sell their special value proposition as an employer
   
• A change in branding. An organization’s employment brand isn’t conveyed via a slogan or a marketing campaign; it is, instead, the sum of the experiences that are provided to candidates throughout its recruitment process. And in many organizations, those experiences are off-putting to all but the most desperate of job seekers. Candidates are subjected to the “black hole” feel of online resume submission and to the generic content of corporate career sites; they have to endure being kept in the dark on their status as they move through the process and the frustrating inability to connect with a human being at almost any point during the process. To recruit the best talent, companies must re-design their processes to improve the way they touch people on the Internet. While administrative efficiency is important, the critical objective is to provide a total consumer experience that is so unique and compelling that it attracts and sells even the most reluctant (i.e., passive) of superior talent.
   
• A change in individual communications. At one time or another, every employer attracts prospects. For that reason, virtually every candidate management system on the market these days has some functionality for communicating with them. Unlike applicants, these individuals are not yet ready to submit a resume (in fact, they probably don’t have one), but they are interested in learning more about what an employer has to offer. In most cases, they are successful and employed (somewhere else) and all but ignored by the recruiting team. Why? Because the team lacks the staff with the skills and time necessary to communicate with these individuals. Doing so, however, is the one sure way to enhance the quality of a company’s applicants and to cut the time and cost of reaching them in the future. To capture those advantages, companies must change their view of the timing and purpose of individual communications on the Internet. Their goal is not to develop a database of static resumes, but rather to build a vast web of active relationships that nurture interest and trust among the best and brightest.
  

Recruiting the best talent may be a retronym—a capability made possible by technology—but it cannot be accomplished by technology alone. Indeed, the War for the Best Talent will only be won by the “best recruiters”—those who most effectively adapt their organizations and operations to capture the full potential of the technology.

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Job Ads That Don’t Work

What’s behind such lousy performance? The study concludes that two factors cause much of the miscommunication:

• Many ads simply deliver the wrong message, and
• Companies continue to invest in ads beyond the point of diminishing returns.
How do these factors impact on recruitment advertising? Let’s take a look.

Ads that deliver the wrong message.

Sadly, many if not most job postings today deliver the wrong message. In many cases, that message is conveyed by using a print classified or, worse, a position description as the content for the online ad. As a result, these ads have little information, very little appeal or both. When that occurs, the message the job seeker receives is loud and clear: here’s a company that is too lazy, too arrogant or too incompetent to use the online medium to its full advantage. Said another way, here’s a place you don’t want to work.

Job seekers, in general, and the best talent, in particular, expect much more. They know the Internet doesn’t have the space constraints of the printed page, so they want employers to provide job postings that are both informative and compelling. They want ads that answer their questions before they even have a chance to ask them. They want enough detail to be able to evaluate an opportunity carefully and make an informed career decision. And, they want to be wooed. They want an ad with enough selling power to sway them into considering a new position, even when they aren’t looking for one.

Such ads transform the job posting from a print classified ad listed on the Internet to an electronic sales brochure. Ironically, this “alternative advertisement” is more akin to an old fashioned, full page print display ad, but one on steroids and at one-tenth the cost. It not only sells the opening the organization has to fill, but it makes a powerful statement about the organization’s employment brand, as well. Explicitly and subliminally, it transmits the right message: here is a company that understands the importance of hiring the best and brightest and of helping them to succeed in its employ. In short, here’s a place where you do want to work.

Companies that continue to invest in ads beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Print ads grow weary over time, and thus fail to motivate buyers as they once did. Job postings lose their effectiveness in a different way. Although they typically remain visible for 30 days or more and could conceivably suffer the same exposure fatigue, their poor performance is actually driven by their location. In other words, the ads continue to be posted at certain sites even though the quantity and/or quality of their yield is insufficient to meet recruiting requirements. The results aren’t diminishing; they’re diminished. The net effect, however, is the same: the advertiser achieves a sub-par return on its investment.

Why do ads continue to be posted at sites that generate “diminished returns”? There are at least several reasons:

• Habit. Recruiters can get into ruts and continue to use sites long after the results warrant a change. More often than not, these “behavior locks” occur when an organization lacks a process by which it evaluates the performance of its ad spending at each online source and makes timely adjustments to that spending, as appropriate. Without such continuous assessment and adjustment, organizations inevitably perpetuate mistakes and guarantee disappointing results.
• Finances. In some, perhaps many organizations today, the CFO negotiates a special deal with a job board and then requires all recruiters to use that site regardless of the kind of opening they are trying to fill. While this forced level of usage may justify the deal in financial terms, it all but eliminates the value of the resulting advertising in recruiting terms. Limited sourcing inevitably limits recruiters’ reach into the candidate population and that, in turn, limits the quantity and quality of their yield.
• Awareness. There are, today, at least 40,000 job boards and career portals on the Internet. You can write a job posting with the right message, but if you place it on the wrong site, its yield will be just as disappointing as the yield you achieve from an ad with the wrong message. Recruiters who fail to acquire the information necessary to identify and evaluate all of the relevant job boards for any given requirement are, in effect, advertising by guesswork. And, the odds are against they’re being successful.

Online recruitment advertising can be extraordinarily effective. In the survey of recruiters that we at WEDDLE’s conducted earlier this year, over half of the respondents said they were filling a quarter or more of their vacancies with candidates sourced from the Internet. That’s proof positive that online ads do work and that online ads with the right message and at the right site work best.

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Practice the Golden Rule

The message was a downer, first and foremost, because the person who sent it was struggling to find a job. It was also depressing, however, because it illustrates how far we have come and how far we have yet to go in recruitment. Thanks to the Internet, we now can reach deeper into the candidate population faster and cheaper than ever before. We can connect with even the passive prospects and “A” level performers who were formerly accessible only via headhunters or by time-intensive networking. We have all of those advantages, and in many organizations, at least, we’re frittering them away. How? By violating something as simple as the Golden Rule.

As any grade school child can tell us, that rule simply urges us to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. So, why are we behaving as if job seekers are persona non grata in our organizations? I’ve heard all of the rationalizations, but frankly, they simply aren’t compelling. Usually they are a version of one of the two following themes: in tough economic times, there are simply too many applicants, and in good economic times, there are simply too many openings for recruiters to communicate with those who would like to work for their employer.

Implicit in this statement is the real reason prospective employers mistreat candidates: their recruiting functions are not staffed to do the work they should. While that’s an unfortunate reality in far too many organizations, it is not a justification for such behavior. Why? Because technology, in general, and such developments as applicant tracking systems and corporate Web-sites, in particular, provide an effective way for us to:

• practice the Golden Rule in our candidate interactions and
• do so within the constraints imposed on our headcount in the recruiting organization.

Taking this step is vitally important because the experience a candidate has while interacting with an organization is a key element of its employment brand. The way candidates are treated conveys a subliminal, but powerful message about an employer’s culture and the value it places on people. While those who are desperate for employment will probably apply no matter how shabbily they are treated, the best and brightest will not tolerate impolite or disrespectful behavior, even if it is unintended. They deserve to be treated better, they expect to be treated better, and they will only consider working for employers where they are.

How can you use technology to burnish the experience you provide to candidates? The following steps will get you started:

• An easy first step, of course, is to use the auto-responder built into your applicant or resume management system. (If you don’t have such a system, see if your e-mail technology can generate an automated reply to resume submissions.) While these messages are obviously generic and therefore impersonal, they do address the “black hole” experience of resume submission. When job seekers apply for a position and get no acknowledgement that their credentials have been received, they immediately assume the worst; the Internet has let them down, their resume or application has been lost, and they will be overlooked for a position they want and could do well. A simple “Thank you; we got it.” would go a long way toward relieving that angst.
   
• In addition, use the message in your auto-responder to enhance and promote your organization’s employment brand. To do that, the message content: (1) must persuade the candidate that they will be treated fairly and responsibly in a process that is well organized and meticulous. Your communication should thank them for their submission, underscore your organization’s commitment to hiring only the best prospects for each opening, and tell them what will happen next in what time period, whether they are selected for further evaluation or not. (2) should also tell them that you provide in-depth information on your corporate career site to answer any questions they may have. If you don’t provide such information, you should. It indicates that you care enough about candidates to try and be helpful to them even before an offer of employment is extended. How do you determine what information they want? Ask some of your recent hires what was most helpful to them in making a decision to join your organization.
   
• Manage the expectations of job seekers by being honest about your limitations. Use your corporate career site to tell them, right up front, what you cannot do and why. For example, you might say that the volume of applications is so great that you unfortunately don’t have the resources to provide individual feedback or the answers to personal questions early in the evaluation process. Simple as such a statement might seem, it conveys an appreciation for the needs and concerns of job seekers that can differentiate an employer and induce even the best and brightest to apply.

There are never enough arms and legs in today’s staffing organizations to do everything we know we should in dealing with candidates. That reality, however, does not mean that we don’t have ways to set our employer apart among top prospects. Ironically, one of the most effective strategies is to use technology to implement a practice most of us learned in grade school. Treating candidates as we would like to be treated not only makes you popular on the playground, it also helps make your organization’s employment brand very hard to resist.

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Turning Anti-Candidates Into Pro-Candidates

Passive job seekers are tough to recruit because they’re human, and most human beings hate to make a change. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we recruiters are trying to get them to do. In most cases, passive job seekers are employed, so we have to convince them to go from the devil they know (their current employer) to the devil they don’t (our employer). That’s a tough value proposition to sell. Most people don’t like the uncertainty and risk that inevitably attend a change and, not surprisingly, are very reluctant to volunteer for it. In short, they are “anti-candidates.” To be successful in recruiting them, therefore, we must be persuasive enough to overcome their natural reluctance even to consider our employer’s opportunities. We must be able to get them to do what, in the beginning at least, they really don’t want to do. In other words, we have to be as good as the salespeople who ultimately sold my father.

How was my father persuaded to make a purchase? As I recall, he was influenced by three factors. Each was as important as the other, and all three factors had to be addressed or he simply would not be moved to buy. These factors were:

• The trust he had in the provider;
• The respect he was accorded by the provider; and
• The enthusiasm he felt for whatever the provider was offering.
Let’s explore how we recruiters can put these factors to work in selling passive job seekers.

The trust he had.

The best candidates have lots of employers making them offers, so any one offer—no matter how good—is easily lost in the din. The best recruiters, therefore, dampen the noise from the competition first and, then, sell the value proposition of their employer. In effect, they induce candidates to hear selectively, to pay attention to one opportunity while ignoring all others. How are they able to do that? They take specific actions to convince candidates that the organization for which they work cares as much about their making a smart career move as it does about filling an open position. In effect, they earn the trust of the people they want to recruit by creating a win-win situation, one in which both the employer and the prospective employee benefits.

What actions can create such a situation?

• Writing job postings that are comprehensive in their description of the opening and the organization. In effect, they envision job postings not as classified ads listed online, but as electronic sales brochures. They contain all of the information a person needs to make a smart buying decision.
• Answering candidate questions on their corporate career site. While the recruiting function may not be staffed to answer individual questions, it can certainly keep track of those questions that most people ask and move to help them by providing the answers before they even have a chance to.

The respect he was accorded.

All candidates, but especially top performers and those with rare skills, expect to be treated with dignity throughout the recruiting process. They may be applying for employment, but they are also customers—working men and women who are being asked to “buy” the value proposition of an organization with openings to fill. For most candidates, that means an employer where people really matter, and the best evidence of whether people really matter is the way the organization treats prospective employees. As a consequence, recruiters should create a candidate experience that is consistently polite and respectful. It should acknowledge that candidates aren’t cogs in some supply chain, but cognitive beings who have a choice of organizations for which they will work.

What actions will create such a feeling among candidates?

• Acknowledging every resume that is submitted to the organization. This message can be transmitted via an auto-responder in your resume management system or by old fashioned postcard, but whatever the medium, it should both thank the individual for their application and tell them what will happen next in the process.
• Providing timely updates on their status as they move through the recruiting process. Those who are not deemed competitive for an opening should be told that immediately so they can move on, and those who are selected for further consideration should be told what to expect next and in what timeframe so they can prepare.

The enthusiasm he felt.

Employers offer jobs, but candidates “buy” an organization. In other words, they evaluate the quality of an opportunity by assessing both the specifics of an opening and the attributes of the organization in which it is located. Most candidates, however, realize that no organization is perfect. They get excited, therefore, when they interact with recruiters and hiring managers who are enthusiastic about an employer despite its warts. Assuming it is genuine and based on factors that can be identified and articulated (e.g., the quality of a company’s products or services, its commitment to ground-breaking research), the pride that employees feel for their organization is incredibly infectious and predisposes candidates to be equally as generous and positive in their assessment of the organization.

How can this enthusiasm be conveyed to candidates?

• By fostering a culture where employees take pride in their individual and collective work and feel comfortable acknowledging and expressing their pride to others. Pride, of course, cannot be established by edict, but organizations can nurture it by celebrating corporate values and achievements that demonstrate the organization’s commitment to excellence.
• By explicitly integrating this organizational norm into the interactions that recruiters and hiring managers have with candidates. In other words, demonstrating pride in the organization and its employees should be a condition of participation in the recruiting process and, therefore, essential to recruiters’ and managers’ advancement in the organization.

• Turning anti-candidates into genuine prospects—into pro-candidates—requires that we adopt the best practices of successful salespeople. Their principles must be adapted to our mission and environment, of course, but fundamentally, we have to be as good as they are at transforming reluctant buyers into committed consumers.

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Cutting Corners to the Best Candidates

Ironically, their own approach to leadership is exacerbating the risk. Without advance notice of staffing requirements, recruiters do not have the time to source prospects from among the passive job seeker population. Without the lead time necessary to build relationships with those prospects, they are often unable to sell them on the value proposition of working for their employer. With a planning cycle only a gnat could love, recruiters have no choice but to limit their candidates to those they can find among active job seekers.

Why does that add to the risk facing corporations today? Because it decreases the range of talent an organization can potentially hire, and it increases the competition for that talent.

• According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, active job seekers make up just 16% of the American workforce. Even if you believe that “A” level performers are as well represented in that group as they are among passive job seekers (and not everyone accepts that view), limiting an organization’s recruiting to fewer than one-out-of-every-five workers will inevitably depress its performance over the long run.
• Further, as the majority of employers are now using the shorter planning cycle that forces recruiters to focus on active job seekers, the competition for the best among them has significantly intensified. In essence, 67% of corporate recruiters are now trying to meet their requirements from among just 16% of the workforce population. The demand has remained constant, but the supply has been artificially limited, producing what is now accurately described as a War for Talent.

Yes, I know that sounds a bit hyperbolic. For many organizations, the problem isn’t finding talent; it’s staying on top of the tsunami of resumes that crashes into corporate e-mailboxes these days. This happy plethora of applicants would seem to belie any limitation on available talent. Unfortunately, however, the resume surplus is not evidence of a robust pool of candidates, but rather, the natural byproduct of the ease with which resumes are now submitted online. Full e-mailboxes mean that your employer is hearing from more of the 16% of the workforce who are actively looking for a job, not that it is reaching the other 84% of the workforce who are not.

What can we recruiters do to mitigate the risk this situation poses for our organizations? How can we cut corners to sourcing the best candidates? Consider the following steps:

• Build, communicate with and recruit from an alumni database. As long as a former employee left your organization on good terms, hiring them back provides two key advantages. First, you get someone about whom you know a great deal. They have a track record with your organization that eliminates much of the uncertainty associated with recruiting a new hire, and they can often be hired more quickly because much of your “due diligence” has already been accomplished (the first time you recruited them). Second, you get a “new” employee who has strengthened their potential ability to contribute to your organization by acquiring additional skills and/or experience elsewhere. If effect, their previous employer subsidized their development, and your organization can put that enhanced capability to its advantage.

 
• Build a database of prospects and establish relationships with them. Prospects are not past or current applicants. They are individuals with whom you have made contact (normally, through networking and employment branding) who may be superior candidates in the future. More often than not, prospects are already employed, and are not looking for a new job. They are the quintessential passive job seeker. They do not make snap decisions about their career, nor do they listen to strangers. To recruit them, therefore, you must first earn their trust and confidence. You may not know exactly when your organization will have an appropriate opening, but if you regularly recruit for top talent in their field, start communicating with them now. It takes time and effort to provide the information, persuasion and reassurance necessary to convince passive candidates to leave the devil they know (their current employer) and join the devil they don’t (your organization).

 
• Reinvigorate your applicant database. Your applicant database represents a population of job seekers who have already expressed an interest in your employer and about whom you know a great deal. You have a resume or application form on file and, for those who made it beyond the initial screen, you are likely also to have interview notes, assessment test scores and other data. Moreover, since these candidates were not selected to fill the opening for which they originally applied, they have probably gone on to other employment situations where they may have acquired new skills and/or gained additional experience. In effect, they are likely to have become stronger candidates, but the only way for you to know that is to stay in touch with them. Treat your applicant database not as a repository of dead data files, but as a reservoir of living contacts, and nurture those connections with continuous communications. To speed your sourcing, these messages should be both helpful (to pre-sell the recipient) and inquisitive (to keep their record up-to-date in your database).

Short planning cycles in the corporate headquarters can be a problem for recruiters, but only if we let them. There are ways to get ready today for almost any requirement that may arise tomorrow, and now is the time to get started.

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Feature: Avoid Dart Board Interviews

Two members of the Harvard community, Nitin Nohria and Thomas A. Stewart, recently wrote, “The raison d’etre for organizations and their leaders has long been to increase control and predictability.” Said another way, the purpose of those who work in organizations is to reduce or, if possible, eliminate risk. Risk exposes the enterprise to unknown and, therefore, potentially negative consequences, so controlling risk is the one sure way to point an organization toward positive results.

How does that apply to recruiting? In a number of ways, but one of the most important is in our execution of interviews. The purpose of an interview—its reason for being conducted—is not to select a candidate. It is to minimize or eliminate the risk involved in bringing a new employee into an organization. The hiring decision exposes an employer to change—it introduces a worker who is unfamiliar to his coworkers into an environment that is unfamiliar to the worker. If an interview is effective, it will reduce the possibility that such change will be disruptive or harmful to the organization.

That’s why interviews so often focus on “fit.” If we can assure ourselves of a candidate’s good fit with:

• the skills required for job performance,
• the micro culture of the work team,
• the macro culture of the organization, and
• the personality of the work team supervisor,
then there is a high probability that the candidate will be a successful hire. For that reason, most interviews focus on questions that will elicit information related to those factors.

And that’s where the problems begin. Technical and other discrete skills can be accurately tested, so a person’s ability to perform a specific job requiring those skills can be reasonably predicted. That’s not the case, however, with “softer” though often more critical skills such as situational analysis, problem-solving, and even time management. These skills are much more difficult to measure, and the results of such an assessment are more open to interpretation. So too is the probability that a person will feel comfortable interacting with a specific work group and boss or a specific organizational culture. It’s a tough call to make unless you’re a trained psychologist, and even then, there can be significant ambiguity (i.e., risk) in individual assessments.

So, what happens? Interviewers probe for information, as best they can, on a candidate’s higher order skills and then concentrate on the factors with which they are most familiar and, therefore, comfortable. They base their assessment on how well the candidate will fit in—with them, the team and/or the organization. In effect, they focus, often unconsciously, on trying to answer two questions:

• Do they like the candidate—do their two personalities “click”?
and
• Does the candidate interview well—do they effectively represent themselves (and the interviewer, if they are selected)?

I call such assessments “dart board interviews.” The interviewer’s chances of selecting the best candidate for their employer are about equal to throwing darts while wearing a blindfold. Even more important, skills and cultural fit are one step removed from what we must actually know, if we are to reduce or eliminate the risk involved in a selection decision. These factors are input variables to performance. They’re important to know, of course, but what we are really trying to determine is the output. How will a potential employee perform on-the-job? If we can answer that question, we are much more in control of the risk a new hire represents to our employer.

How do we acquire the answer? By structuring our interviews to focus on outcomes—what we want the new employee to accomplish within a specific period of time in their new role. The more explicit and detailed we can be about that requirement, the more fine-grained we can make our interview questions and the better we are able to evaluate candidate responses. In other words, a clear statement of performance expectations can actually be two powerful interviewing tools:

• a basis for interview questions—tell us what you would do and how you would do it to achieve this specific result; and
• a baseline for evaluation—how detailed and credible was a candidate’s response and how did that response stack up to those of other candidates.

The more granular and complete an interviewer’s understanding of the outcome, the better their assessment of the candidate. Indeed, if the outcome an employer desires is clearly described in its online and print advertisements for an opening (as well as in its position description or requisition), the impact will likely occur even before the interview begins. Prospects are much more likely to self-assess critically if it’s clear to them that the organization has a very well defined set of performance expectations.

To achieve such clarity, the employer must address two key elements of an outcome:

What must be accomplished. For example, to be able to handle all customer inquiries without assistance from coworkers or the supervisor or to increase sales by 10%. and
 
• When it must be accomplished by. For example, to be able to handle all customer inquiries without assistance from coworkers or the supervisor within 90 days on-the-job or to increase sales by 10% within one year.

The more that outcomes can be quantified (e.g., increase sales by 10%) or determined with a Yes or No answer (e.g., could all calls be handled without assistance), the better they will serve as a basis for interview questions, a baseline for evaluation and a template for performance management once a person is hired. And there’s the rub. The more senior a position, the longer it often takes to achieve measurable outcomes (e.g., it could take a year or more to improve sales significantly) and the more likely it is that at least some outcomes (e.g., improve morale and esprit in the accounting department) simply can’t be measured with standard metrics.

In that case, the organization has at least two options:

1. It can break down the desired outcome into discrete sub-outcomes that, once accomplished, will produce the larger goal. For example, to evaluate an individual’s ability to increase sales by 10%, interviewers could, instead, assess their ability to (a) hire two additional sales agents within four months, (b) devise a way to identify and follow up on key accounts within 6 months and (c) add 2 major new customers within 8 months.

2. It can use one or more surrogates—alternative, but related factors—that will serve to indicate performance. For example, to evaluate a candidate’s ability to improve a unit’s morale, interviewers could probe their ability to (a) reduce attrition or absenteeism and/or (b) raise employee satisfaction scores by a measurable amount.

The key, of course, is always to stay focused on the end you’re trying to achieve. That goal is to minimize the risk any new employee represents to an employer by maximizing your certainty about their ability to get the job done.

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Feature: A Job Posting for Passive Prospects

The Holy Grail for most recruiters is the “passive job seeker.” This person is normally a high quality candidate who is almost always employed someplace else. And there’s the rub. They aren’t job seekers at all. By definition, so-called passive job seekers aren’t even looking for a job. They are, in most cases, happily employed right where they are. So, will these passive people even consider another opportunity someplace else? Of course they will, but only if it’s presented persuasively. In a sense, they are the classic consumer; they have to be “sold” on an employer’s value proposition. That’s way I call them passive prospects.

How do you write a job posting with enough power to influence a passive prospect?

First, you have to understand what goal you’re trying to accomplish. Unlike with active job seekers, a recruitment ad that targets passive prospects must be able to convince them to change devils: to go from the devil they know—their current employer, boss and commute—to the devil they don’t know—your employer, a new boss, and a different commute. Your job posting, therefore, has to be persuasive enough to sell the reader on doing the one thing humans most hate to do: change.

Second, passive prospects never look for a job; they search for an employment opportunity. That means your posting must do more than simply describe the requirements and responsibilities of a particular opening. If you want it to connect with and influence an employed person who has other employers knocking on their door regularly, you must craft an ad that sells all of the following aspects of your organization’s employment experience:

• the leadership of the company and its vision for the present and future,
• the culture of the macro organization and the micro-culture of the team or unit where they will work,
• the open position and the role it plays, directly and indirectly, in the success of the larger organization, and
• the ancillary advantages the employer offers to its workers (e.g., work/life balance, community support).

Unlike the printed page, the Internet provides enough physical space to present such information and more. Indeed, the average commercial job board will permit postings to run as long as 1,400 words—the equivalent of two typed pages—and for passive prospects, you need every syllable. To convince someone to change devils, you must see your posting not as the electronic equivalent of a classified ad, but as an electronic sales brochure. It has to be so informative and so compelling that even the most reluctant consumer will be moved to consider the opening. There are two keys to developing such an ad:

• Format—passive prospects have the attention span of a gnat. They don’t read on the Web, they scan. Therefore, you should lay out your ad in headlines and bullets so that the reader can quickly grasp its key points.
• Content—passive prospects care most about WIIFT. They don’t want to read about requirements and responsibilities—those are employers’ concerns. They want to know What’s In It For Them.

All recruiters are good at verbal selling; they do it every day on the telephone and in interviews. On the Web, however, selling is done with the written word, and many recruiters don’t have as much practice with that medium. For that reason, I’ve developed a template for job postings that arranges the information in the ad to optimize its impact on a passive prospect. The template has five sections described by this acronym: S—ABC—S.

S—Summary The first five lines of a job posting are extremely important. Our research here at WEDDLE’s indicates that if you don’t get these first lines right, the passive person is unlikely to read any further. To be effective, the lines must include the following information in the following order:

• a compelling statement about why this opening is a dream job,
• an equally compelling statement about why the organization is a dream employer,
• a salary range; while most passive prospects do not make employment changes for money, they use their compensation to gauge what is important to them: their career advancement,
• a powerful statement about the organization’s commitment to privacy protection. Since most passive prospects are employed, they need to be assured of full confidentiality.

ABC—Advantages, Benefits, Capabilities The Advantages section of your posting addresses the responsibilities of a position, but from the WIIFT perspective. It answers all of the key questions a passive prospect is likely to have about an employment opportunity:

• What will I get to do?
• Whom will I get to work with?
• What will I get to learn?
• What will I get to accomplish?
• How will I advance my career?

The Benefits section of your posting is not boilerplate. It is not information conveyed in legal gibberish or in a long laundry list of HR jargon. Nor is it the same tired, old paragraphs that you insert into every posting. You might be able to get away with that if you’re selling to active job seekers (although I wouldn’t recommend it there either), but if you’re trying to reach reluctant candidates who have other options, you have to create a Benefits section with focused appeal. It must be a tailored presentation that highlights the benefits that are most important to your target demographic.

For example, if you’re trying to reach passive prospects early in their career, you might emphasize tuition reimbursement and work/life balance. If you’re trying to reach seasoned workers with a lot of years in the workplace, you might emphasize child or elder care programs. And, as with any good advertising copy, you must both describe the benefit and its value to the prospect. To put it another way, it’s not a Benefit unless you explain what makes it so.

The Capabilities section deals with the requirements of a position, but again, presents the information from the prospect’s perspective. In other words, it answers the questions:

• What skills and experience will I need to achieve success in this position?
• What knowledge must I have to advance my career with this employer?
• What preparation will enable me to make a significant contribution on-the-job?

S—Sign-Off Once you’ve gone to all of the trouble of creating a job posting with enough power to sell a passive prospect, don’t undermine your success with an incomplete or misconceived sign-off. This section of your posting is part “call to action for the prospect” and part “return for you on the time and effort it took to write the posting.” Accordingly, it should include all of the following:

• multiple response options—passive prospects are finicky customers, so don’t force them to use one method (e.g., online) to “buy” your organization. Encourage them to apply any way that’s convenient for them (remembering that passive prospects often don’t have a resume).
• a referral request—passive prospects know other passive prospects. If your opportunity isn’t right for someone interested enough to get to this point in your posting, make sure that you ask them to pass it along to an appropriate friend or colleague.
• an opt-in opportunity—passive prospects change their minds. Ask if you can stay in touch with them through a regular e-mail communication that will keep them informed about the developments and opportunities at your company.

Selling passive prospects isn’t easy. It can be done and efficiently, however, if you transform traditional recruitment ads online into electronic sales brochures. These alternative postings can set your employer apart and strengthen the persuasive power of its message for top talent.

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Feature: Employment Brand Management

Employment brands (e-brands) are increasingly recognized as the single most important factor influencing the selection of an employer by top talent. A strong e-brand will both attract even the most passive prospects to an organization and predispose them to consider its employment opportunities even when they wouldn’t consider openings anywhere else. Brand management, therefore, is now among the most important tasks for Staffing Departments. It involves the development, promotion and oversight of an organization’s value proposition as an employer.

E-brand development

An e- brand is not an advertising jingle or tag line. Such phrases work with consumer brands because the consumer has, in all likelihood, actually experienced the vendor’s product or service. For example, when GE says it “brings good things to life” in its light bulb advertising, we can appreciate the meaning of the phrase because we have all used a light bulb. The same is not true when GE or any other employer is trying to recruit talent. The vast majority of the “consumers” they target with their e-brand ads will not have had the experience of working for their organization. To be effective, therefore, an e-brand must be complete expression of the attributes that characterize the employer’s workaday experience. It is not a ponderous mission statement, but a window into what it’s like to work in and for an organization.

Which attributes of employment should an organization include in its e-brand? I believe that depends upon three tests. The selected attributes must be:

• Real. An e-brand is not the place for wishful thinking or spin. It must be believable to both the external audience and, equally as important, to an organization’s employees.
• Relevant. An e-brand should highlight the attributes that are most important to the high caliber workers an employer most wants to recruit. The best way to identify those factors is to ask the consumer. What made the organization’s best performers say “Yes” to its employment offer and what keeps them there?
• Recognizable. An e-brand must differentiate an employer and set it apart in the minds of the top talent the organization is trying to recruit. It should be a unique combination of attributes expressed in a way that is unique to the employer.

E-brand promotion

E-brands are meaningless statements if they are not seen by the “consumers” an employer is trying to reach. Since the best talent are often employed and/or passive in nature, however, these e-brand ads must be visible far beyond the Career area on its Web-site.

Where should an e-brand be advertised? At Web-sites and in any other venues where there is likely to be a high ratio of the top talent an employer is trying to reach. Among the former, these might include:

• Job boards that offer features for passive as well as active job seekers,
• Association sites,
• Newspaper sites, and
• Search engines.

Among the latter, these might include:

• Print newspapers,
• Print professional journals, and
• Commute time radio programs.

No less important, the e-brand advertising must be durable. Before the advent of the Information Age, advertisers counseled that an ad had to be seen seven times before it would break into the consciousness of a potential consumer. Today’s omnipresent, 24/7 information distribution has only increased the clutter, upping the number of ad repetitions by at least a factor of two. Said another way, an e-brand must be promoted constantly, even when an organization is not hiring.

E-brand oversight

Like personal reputations, e-brands are fragile creations that can be destroyed in the click of an e-mail. Moreover, an e-brand is not only what you say about your organization’s employment experience, but it’s what others say about it, as well. As a consequence, organizations must continuously monitor outside commentary about their employment value proposition. They can’t, of course, violate the free speech rights of others (including their employees), but they can identify inaccurate, misleading and/or harmful statements and correct or counter them.

How does an organization monitor its e-brand? It should keep an eye on sites:

• That target your specific company and employees. For example, StarbucksGossip.com covers everything from the public response to the company’s new products to the latest personnel moves in its corporate headquarters.
• That solicit commentary about all employers. For example, the Electronic Watercooler at Vault.com encourages people to do online and do what they do at water coolers in the real world: gossip, gripe and exchange “information” about employers.
• That solicit commentary from all employees. For example, OfficeBallot.com lets people rate their coworkers, boss or anyone else in their company and do so with complete anonymity.

The goal is not to keep track of everything that’s said about an employer—that’s the job of its Public Relations function—but rather to oversee what’s being said about its attributes and practices as an employer. Critical or false statements can quickly and seriously harm an e-brand. Therefore, uncovering such assertions as soon as they occur and, if appropriate, counteracting them effectively are essential to the maintenance of a strong and attractive e-brand.

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