On Talent

Candidate Segmentation

I've heard it a lot more in the last few months than ever. Customers and prospects are talking about candidate segmentation. Again the (lagging) parallel between marketing and sourcing is producing an increased interest in market segmentation and personalization in sourcing. This is especially important in passive candidate sourcing. Identifying the wants, needs, and hot buttons of particular candidate groups and then tailoring the candidate experience will greatly aid in the attraction of those candidates to the right opportunities. Getting passive candidates to make the move requires that they see a compelling reason. This won't happen by posting a job description on a job board.

John Sumser said it well in today's post. Here is an extract:

...candidates must always be at the center of all of your employment marketing decisions, their influence radiating out to every point of contact you have with them. It's up to you to know their behaviors and preferences and tailor your employment marketing strategies to cater to their needs. Companies who recognize this and build their strategies around retaining and deepening their relationships with their potential employees are the ones who will succeed.

This kind of "micro" segmentation and personalized targeting have been the subject of good marketing for a few years. As we enter an economy where control of the recruiting process is shifting from the employer to the employee, this precise targeting, messaging, and candidate experience will mark the winners in the recruiting battle. The Talenteering Manifesto calls out this kind of personalized communication.

 

More March Madness

There was an interesting comment posted last night to my first "March Madness" post from *Joe* (I think Joe is an alias because the email address posted was bogus, but that's OK I'll reply to anonymous comments:-)

Joe's whole comment can be read here. This extract captures the gist of it:

For you to compare what HR/staffing folks do to a “college recruitment” campaign is insane.

When your out in the field talking to clients/prospects, you constantly here that cost/cost containment are important, in fact always top of the list.

Ask the college coaches about cost………laugable, they are given open ended $$$ and creative folks to almost prey on young kids…….yes kids……17-18.

I still think there is a lot to learn from recruiting practices of sports recruiters--sorry Joe, but that's my opinion. They do several things right (and yes they certainly aren't perfect or in some cases even model citizens) to land the best talent they can for their teams.

First--they are proactive. They don't wait until the end of the season and the day after signing day to start identifying their targets. If they did they would certainly NOT have a good recruiting year. This would be the analog of waiting for a requisition to open to start identifying candidates on the corporate side.

Second--they build relationships with their targets. They reach out using many communications channels to develop a relationship with their recruits (the kids) as well as other influences (parents and coaches). Developing relationships with potential candidates ahead of demand is a good practice.

Third--they create a positive recruiting experience. They get the recruit to feel "moved in" during the recruiting process. IMHO, this is an area where many staffing teams fall short. And I use the team here intentionally because during the interview/assess/select stages of recruiting a large part of the process lives with the business unit and hiring manager. The talenteer has to do a good job of facilitating the visit, and preparing the hiring team for the visit if the candidate is going to have a good experience. Many companies do the reverse--the candidate that is all fired up for the position has a negative experience at the time it matters most--the end of the process. This is sort of like the waitperson who takes great care of you through the entire meal and then disappears at the end after leaving the check--right when you are about to decide how much to tip them. See my previous post on experiential talenteering.

As far as cost containment, I too hear that but I think it makes a very strong statement that staffing is being treated far too tactically. The right metrics should be focused on staffing proficiency and return on talent investment. Jeff Hunter's post on this topic is very eloquent and should be read by all HR executives.

As far as fantasy--I fully realize that corporate recruiting is vastly different from sports recruiting, and can't be executed in the same way. Can we learn something from their best practices? Damn straight we can! If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got. I welcome further discussion on this topic.

March Madness: Where Does Experiential Come In

Like many people I spent a good portion of last weekend watching college basketball's March Madness. The opening rounds this year produced some of the best games I remember in a long time in both the men's tournament and the women's tournament. And how about the number of low seeds winning?!

Watching the games this weekend got me thinking about one of the keynote speakers we had last fall at HireWorks: The Hire.com User's Conference. The speaker was Jody Conradt, hall-of-fame coach of the University of Texas women's basketball team. Jody spent an hour over lunch one day discussing the talenteering involved in sports recruiting--particularly for a major program. There are a few points Jody made that apply to corporate recruiting as much as they do sports.

1. Create the experience. Jody talked about how they turn the campus visits of key recruits into a full-fledged UT experience for the recruit. They work with the communications and media colleges to create a multi-media experience that is tailored for the recruit. They create life size stand up photos of the player in UT uniform that welcomes them to their visit to Erwin Center--UT's basketball arena. Their name is in lights on the scoreboard. They take them to the dressing room where they "stage" the players locker--full gear laid out including a jersey with the recruits name and number hanging in front of a spotlit locker. They want them to feel the Texas experience. Do you treat recruits this way? Do you have the experience your company? If so is it a good experience?

2. They stay in constant communication. Jody talks about how her assistant coaches, student assistants, and even some of the players find ways to stay in touch with recruits personally. This might involve IM or chat sessions late at night, or email conversations. They want to stay top of mind. They want to continue to reinforce the Texas experience, and to be there to answer any questions or deal with objections proactively. Sports recruiting is cutthroat. So is corporate recruiting. Do you stay in touch with recruits before and after the interviews? How about after the offer and before they start? This is an easy time to get cold feet or to consider another offer.

3. Recruiting is broader than just the recruit. In the case of UT, they are recruiting high school students--so the parents are clearly a big piece of the recruits decision process. Jody and team accommodate this by appealing to the parents wishes as well. Tell them about academic programs, student affairs, and other concerns the parents may have about their child attending the university. They make sure they feel part of each step along the way. This too applies to corporate recruiting. Outside factors like a spouse, a significant other, and even parents can weigh in heavily on a career move. Do you factor in these outside factors in your talenteering efforts? Do you provide information to make them more comfortable as well? Many companies do some of the this for relocations, but it is just as important for local hires.

As talenteers, we can all learn a lot from sports recruiting. Many of their processes have been honed to a science. But those practices could help you win the next key sales hire, or engineering hire, or nursing hire. Learn experiential hiring.

Talenteering -- Online Recruiting 2.0

Jason Goldberg has a great post from yesterday on the Jobster blog on Online Recruiting 2.0. The thesis is a direct hit with my talenteering manifesto. Jason makes some great points in his post--read it.

I am a firm believer that recruiting must move to talenteering and begin to develop more targeted, segmented views of the market as well. Automation will help to refine targeting, identify top talent ahead of demand, and use those talent relationships to facilitate a flow of candidates that is more about quality and less about quantity.

Corporate Career Site: Destination or Source?

While catching up on some back feeds I ran across the research summary posted by Gerry Crispin at Career Crossroads Annex. You can read the full  post here. I found both the full report and the summary chock full of interesting factoids.

From Gerry's blog summary:

- 61% of all External Hires can be attributed to just two ‘Channels’- Employee   Referrals & the Internet.

My 2 cents: This number continues to grow. Many observers are crediting the job  boards with the majority of the  Internet candidates, but I believe that number is shrinking relative to the total number of Internet candidates as candidates in increasing numbers are seeking direct relationships with companies they are interested in.

- The Internet and expanding referral networks continue to put pressure on traditional forms of recruiting.

My 2 cents: This especially true of the expanding referral networks. This phenomenon goes beyond traditional employee referrals and is now augmented by formalized relationship networks using the power of the Internet and relationship mapping. Products like Spoke which has a network access to ~27 million people and the ability to leverage enterprise referral knowledge add a new accessibility to passive candidates. Jobster is set to come out of stealth mode with something  rumored to be relationship networking specifically for recruiters. Savvy talenteers have a whole new toolkit to use for sourcing.

- While the percentage of hires attributed to a company’s staffing pages is still inflated (we believe), evidence from a parallel study during January 2005 with CareerJournal.com suggests that “Virtual Walk-ins’ do indeed exist. Job seekers will go to company sites for reasons other than a job and find themselves drawn to openings and then to applying for them.

My 2 cents: By taking a more proactive approach to developing talent pools, not job applications, a far greater number of "virtual walk-ins" gets captured. This is the opportunity to start talent relationships with potential candidates who were interested enough to click on the career page link but may not find a job to be "drawn" to. This is the classic "coincidence hiring" syndrome:  it is a conicidence that the right candidate goes to the career site at exactly the time a job is open and applies. Odds are slim that if that job is not open, they won't come back for quite some time. Give them a way to create a job agent or profile of the ideal job without the position being open or applying for a job. That is sourcing ahead of demand and could increase the registration rates for virtual walk-ins by 10X to 20X.

- Hires attributed to the ‘Company Website’ (considered by us to be a ‘Destination’ and not a ‘Source’) have declined from 67% (of Internet Hires) to 54% this year.

My 2 cents: Gerry's parenthetical hits the nail on the head. The company career page(s) should not be purely a source, or simply a company job posting board--it should be a destination. All sourcing programs should direct candidates to the company career site destination. Better yet, the career site should consist of multiple destinations tailored to the unique needs of specific candidate types (engineers, sales, call center, field service, college, etc.) to offer a compelling candidate experience for each and every candidate. I guarantee that if companies took this talenteering approach to considering their career website as a set of experiential destinations, and notified matching candidates when interesting jobs became available, that the % of qualified applicants from the corporate career pages would increase and so would the quality of candidate.

 

Collaborative Hiring

Talenteering means think proactively. Talenteering requires collaborating with hiring managers to anticipate what their talent needs will be 3, 6, even 12 months down the road. Why (you ask)? Because getting ahead of demand allows you to build a better supply, and building a better supply makes you the preferred supplier. With this approach you can help build a better business by hiring better people.

Think about it. As a corporate recruiter--soon to be a talenteer--you have insider information that no other talent source has. Early access to the very people who will be creating the demand. By being proactive you can understand  their future business goals, challenges, and mission. Working with the business units you can create a talent plan that becomes an integral part of their business plan. And by being proactive in seeking out the business managers before they bring you an emergency requisition ("we don't need no stinking requisitions" thanks Jeff Hunter) you are able to create a sourcing strategy that can go beyond reactive, active candidate only sourcing. You, as a talenteer, just became an integral part of their business plan, and more importantly an integral of the business.

This is the heart of the Talenteering Manifesto. Plan--find out what the business will really need, and find out ahead of demand. Mapping--develop a targeted strategy of where the ideal candidates can be found. This might be targeted companies, associations, web profiles, relationship networks (real and digital), and any other sources you can dream up. Since you are being proactive you have time to cast a wider net. Develop a compelling message--your company has to appeal to the best of the best as a great place to work. Reach out to them and let them know why you are a great place to work in a language that is relevant to them--engineers and marketers don't speak the same language! Engage them in a personalized candidate experience--again by being ahead of the game the experience can become a dialog. You can use multiple channels to reach them email, RSS, create a blog for specific types of candidates, microsites with news and information relevant to them not just corporate wonk talk. Basically stay in touch.

Now when the positions open--yes the ones you were able to anticipate by collaborating with the hiring managers early and often--you will have a good flow of interested and interesting candidates to present to the hiring manager. You have become the preferred supplier by becoming an integral part of the process. This is an insider advantage that you have over staffing firms and agencies, recruitment advertising agencies, and job boards. They can all be resources to your staffing plan, but you are in the drivers seat.

That's talenteering!

(BTW. There is a great post on recruiting.com that was a collaboration between Jason Davis and Jeff Hunter that hits the nail on the head here too. It is also a great read on a very closely related topic.)

Metrics Mania

It seems like metrics are the hot topic amongst talenteers today. I've been with several customers and prospects late last week. They are all wanting to improve the way they prove their strategic value to their respective organizations and believe (and I agree) that metrics are crucial in that prospect. While I was on the road last week Randall Birkwood from T-Mobile wrote and excellent ERDaily article on the importance of effectiveness metrics. Jeff Hunter has been extremely eloquent over several posts in the last week, even engaging in a very lively blog dialog with Dave Lefkow on the topic of Jeff's "strike zone" metrics.

One thing is very clear to me from all of these sources--staffing metrics have to become better measures of effectiveness as apposed to today's efficiency metrics. It is difficult--let's make that impossible--to prove strategic value to an organization without being able to demonstrate business impact. That means metrics that can be used to prove return on talent investment. Reducing opportunity costs, faster time to revenue, creating a new product line all have business impact ramifications. Tying those actions to talenteering is the challenge and is making us think about a whole new set of metrics. Instead of cost per hire, we should be thinking about production from staffing investment (this is what Randall's article mentioned above was nibbling around the edges of) and requires a feedback loop from the hiring organization to measure the impact of the hire. Instead of time to fill we should be thinking about time to productivity, or Jeff's strike zone.

I hate to overly simplify the case here, but it really is time to get strategic or get outsourced--and that is at the heart of talenteering. Become more aligned with the business and help build a better business by bringing the right hires.

Blizzard?

Ok--so I've received numerous emails regarding my Measure post to inform me that the winter storm I encountered on Tuesday was not a blizzard. As a Texas boy, it seemed like one to me. The temperature was in the teens, the wind was blowing 40 miles per hour, and it was snowing sideways so hard you couldn't see. I guess maybe it just didn't last long enough to be classified as a blizzard. MY BAD!

US Tech Talent Crisis?

Ouch! Forbes.com reports today... "Singapore Surpasses U.S. As Top Tech Nation"

Quoting the Forbes.com article,

"Singapore has displaced the United States as the top economy in information technology competitiveness, according to the World Economic Forum's latest annual Global Information Technology Report released today."

Today the U.S. ranks #5 surpassed by Iceland, Finland and Denmark.

Read the article!

Talent readiness is key. Today we graduate a lower percentage of Science and Engineering grads than Russia and China. We are faced with fewer students due to demographic shifts and the alarming decrease of foreign talent attracted to U.S. Schools...

Wake up calls! There will be more. Will the U.S. react?

Just Exactly What Are We Measuring?

Sorry for being dark for a couple of days. I made a trip to the northeast on Monday and got trapped in the "surprise" blizzard coming home last night.

As I continue to talk to customers--both existing customers and prospects--I continue to be puzzled by just how stuck many companies are in yesterday. It manifests itself in the obsession with process caused by the candidate glut of the past 3 to 4 years. It manifests itself in the naivete of the belief that high volume produced by job board posting equals recruiting productivity. And it manifests itself in the meaningless ways that staffing organizations measure themselves. The two primary metrics used today are cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, and occasionally hiring manager satisfaction gets thrown into the mix.

These metrics are outdated and meaningless. And in many cases they are either manipulated or outright wrong. For example, a lot of staffing organizations manipulate the time-to-fill metric by moving the position in and out of a "hold" status. Buyers of ATS functionality want to know if the time-to-fill reports are taking this manipulation into account to make the number look better. Is that not manipulation? A more meaningful measure would be time to deliver qualified candidates, and percentage of candidates delivered that fit the job description. Or as Jeff Hunter called it his recent  post, the "strike zone" metric. After all isn't the point of talenteering to build a better business by hiring better (or the right) people. By being proactive the time to deliver should be improved, but if it isn't are we going to hire someone fast just to make the metrics look better? Of course not, or at least I hope not--thirty days of opportunity cost to hire the right person is a lot cheaper than hiring the wrong person fast! In fact I think I even remember a home page tagline on Unicru's website at one point that said something like: "what's so great about hiring the wrong person fast?"

And cost-per-hire is also meaningless. Most of the time all of the costs are not figured into the cost numbers because they lived in another budget anyway. What is probably more important here is source effectiveness. Which sources produced the best candidates (producers) most economically.

Net-net of this discussion is that we need to move away from artificial efficiency measures and begin to define effectiveness measures that show how staffing is impacting the business with good return on talent investment. I don't purport to have all of the answers, but I do observe that many organizations are stuck in yesterday's metrics and are not focused on the what the objective should be--RESULTS. Producing the best results possible for the company at the optimum investment. That's the talenteer's approach. I would be interested in comments and ideas about the right talenteering metrics.

Dive Into The Talent Pool Game

Received some good comments on the Experiential Talenteering post and the Talent Pools or Resume Database post. I thought I would just expand a little on those in today's post.

Alan Whitford, an e-HR and e-Recruitment consultant based in the UK says:
"One of the key differentiators that I have talked about over here (Europe) is that everyone has a talent pool if they have ANY type of candidate filing system - most just don't have any way of accessing it. Meanwhile, the accepted terminology that Hank started has a talent pool as an interactive, candidate communication environment.

My take is that what recruiters really really want is a 'talent puddle'- in other words the traditional shortlist of truly qualified candidates."

Alan's comment drives home a very important point. Most recruiting automation efforts today are actually making the recruiters job HARDER! Today's typical process is wait for requisition to be posted, post the job to a job board (usually the big ones), search existing resume databases for interesting resumes, merge the flood of resumes for the boards with the search results and then begin the hard work. Visually screening resumes, showing the pile of "possibles" to hiring managers, phones screening the interesting ones, and working the scheduling logistics to get candidates in. Meanwhile, many of the more interesting candidates (the passive and semi-passives) are not even involved.

The talenteering approach is to use automation to improve the flow of more qualified candidates, allowing the talenteer to present a shortlist of interested and qualified candidates to the hiring manager in less time. How? By marketing the company and the position in advance of the "official" opening of the position. (See Jeff Hunter's We Don't Need No Stinking Requisition post!) By taking a proactive approach to gain visibility into the upcoming requirements, filling a talent pool with both active and passive candidates, using automated matching to notify candidates of the new position (instead of posting to boards and waiting), and then using technology to screen candidates, the "talent puddle" referred to by Alan is what flows through the system to the talenteer and hiring manager.

Get proactive. Use technology to make your job easier not harder. Cast a wider net by sourcing ahead of demand for both active and passive candidates.

I Wish I'd Written This!

I found a new blog link today on Dave Lefkow's blog. It's a blog written by my friend Jeff Hunter  entitled And Talentism. In reading through Jeff's past posts I read one that truly strikes a chord with me (read my bio to see my musical interest:-) called We Don't Need No Stinking Requisitions.  Read it. Add Jeff's blog to your RSS feeds (if you forgot how to do that read my post here).

I won't attempt to even paraphrase Jeff because he so eloquently stated how and why hiring requisitions are an outdated artifact.  But I will pull this extract:

...the reason that there is no "sales requisition" is because there is a fundamental (though often unstated) belief that when you are closing deals, the customer is in the driver's seat, but when you are closing candidates, the company is in the driver's seat. In other words, candidates need jobs more than prospects need software (or services, or whatever you are selling).

And one would have to agree with that statement if there were only one employer in the universe for any particular sort of opening, and if there were vendors as numerous as the stars available for any prospective sales situation. But of course it is usually exactly the opposite.

The point Jeff makes here absolutely reiterates two talenteering points that have been in previous posts here. 1) Recruiting is SELLING and should be treated as such and 2) recruiting top talent, especially PASSIVE talent requires that the process accommodate the candidate being in the drivers seat. Any process that dictates that recruiting starts when the requisition is approved is fundamentally broken and is counter to the notion of sourcing ahead of demand to fulfill a talent plan.

It is my belief that if companies put the same effort into talent planning that they do into sales forecasting, and measure recruiting accordingly--on recruiting's ability to deliver quality talent not on their ability to process resumes more efficiently, then recruiting could work more like sales against their annual (or quarterly) plan in advance of demand. That would be the talenteering way.  Jeff makes another great point that if the offer is going through an approval process anyway, the requisition is redundant.

A point I made in the Talenteering Manifesto is that talent is not acquired it is attracted to companies that can offer the candidate a compelling opportunity. The requisition is a PURCHASING artifact--and does not fit! I reiterate--read Jeff's blog.

Experiential Talenteering

There is another great post over at smallbusinessbranding about 'experiential marketing.' You can read it here. Without telling the whole story, Michael describes the power behind the total customer experience created by a company like Apple, with iPod, PowerBook and all of their products. The experience from first encounter, through purchase, to unpacking the box, to interacting with their support desk is outstanding. I have to say that I was totally blown away by the whole experience with my iPod--even unpacking the box was exciting, the design of every single component was terrific.

This same concept applies to total candidate experience. I was talking to a close friend last night that has been going through a hiring ordeal (or nightmare) with the largest software company in Texas. It brings home to roost many of the concepts that Hank blogged about yesterday. Especially the need for companies that are trying to attract top talent to adopt a hiring culture.

This particular story shows exactly how not to do that. My friend is a very experienced marketing communications expert, and has developed a particularly strong reputation and history of analyst relations expertise. The company is looking for exactly that. My friend is currently doing very well as a free agent, is booked solid and wasn't looking for a job (remember the passive candidate?). They found her as a referral from an industry analyst--duh, she must be pretty good if one of the very same people they are wanting to interface with is referring her! So far so good--they did a great job of sourcing.

Now is when the s**t hits the fan. Their process is not flexible enough to deal with a busy passive candidate. They have a rigid process with as many as 12 different people involved in the interview--which is okay, lots of companies do that. But in this case, those people are all located at corporate headquarters 200 miles away. And of course their schedules were too busy to accommodate this in a single interview trip. So they asked my friend to make multiple trips--she said that couldn't work because her schedule was too booked with billable assignments to accommodate that. Then the recruiter went dark--gasp, candidates aren't allowed to push back on our process are they? They totally didn't grasp the notion of a process modification to accommodate a highly-desirable passive candidate being in control.

Finally, after filling in the hiring manager on the situation and 2 weeks passing they figured out a way to facilitate the interviews via phone and one trip to corporate. Guess what--the majority of the 12 interviewers were not even prepped to know why the were interviewing!

And in the meantime my friend had gathered a lot of information about the company from her analyst contacts, web research, and numerous other sources and now knew more about the company and its external perception than any of the insiders (see my earlier post on this topic here). In her process, she was interviewing the company--not visa versa. And the company failed miserably because they did not have a hiring culture, they did not know how to deal with a passive candidate, and they were not prepared for the process.

Talenteering is about relationships! We've said it before, and we'll keep saying it. Relationships live through the whole experience. What may have started out looking like a wonderful opportunity turned sour because poor execution ruined whatever relationship had been started. It doesn't do a lot of good to spend millions on recruitment advertising and sourcing programs, or tapping into great referral sources if the entire experience has not been thought through. Different talent requires different experiences. Work to understand this and execute experiential talenteering.

Scary - For Real!

One of those phrases we use as kids to describe and rationalize something or a situation we don't completely understand. When telling the story about how your friends pulled a prank on you the first time and you believed it - 'it was Scary - For Real!'. The description designed to give the experience depth, life and 'real' meaning.

Most kids had another phrase used to rationalize - 'Oops, I did it accidentally on purpose'. A feeble and sometimes cute attempt at placing the blame elsewhere when you and everyone involved knew it was you who accidentally lit the match in the field next to the house or decided mom's make-up was an experiment waiting to happen. More on this later. Right now it's scary out there - for real!

A few friends and I have been waiting, watching and asking one question of Talent specialists for the past couple of years. A simple question that got us for the most part puzzled looks. Why would anyone in the recent past worry about Offer Rejects? Companies were not hiring. People were not looking. Climate - job offered - job accepted. The question was asked last week again...this time the answer was proceeded with furrowed brows, a questioning look and some fear. Scary - For Real!

One company, a successful company...small, doubling in size - great technology - incredible market niche - nothing but growth...had 7 offer rejects in the past 3 months. A few of the rejections came after the offer was accepted only to be reversed the night before the start date because an offer 30% higher had come across the bow and wrecked the deal. Now, good recruiters read this and understandably exclaim, 'wouldn't have happened to me...I know how to bring the ship in'. I believe you. The point - the sea is churning....companies need talent and some are desperate. The companies who must have the talent and are willing to do what it takes are driving the cost and speed of the talent market. The rules are changing quickly - again...Scary - For Real!

Another company needs a Chief Architect and happily recruits only to learn three candidates and a month or two later their offer (right by local survey!) was off by 25 - 35%. They were low and lost time and productivity - the product schedule shift hurt - bad! Scary - For Real.

And now Google news as reported by By KEVIN J. DELANEY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL February 10, 2005; Page B5

"Google Expansion Is Being Held Back By Hiring Process"

"Google Inc. executives said they can't expand as rapidly as they would like because they can't find enough qualified employees or deploy new computers fast enough."

So, Google tells Wall Street - sorry we can't make the forecast...not enough of the right talent. OK, it's about talent availability and the process to source, qualify and deliver. But c'mon...this is most successful IPO in a long while. Google can't have problems sourcing and hiring - talent is waiting at the doorstep - right? Wrong...Scary - For Real!

Health care, Retail, Truck Drivers...are there enough people to do the jobs? Probably. Are there enough of the right people willing? Maybe not. Are companies doing all they must do to ensure they have the right talent in the right place at the right time to drive the business? Good question.

CEOs all over the world are looking to HR and Talent Execs and are asking the same question. Where's the Talent?

Some are digging deeper and wonder what have we been doing for the past three years? Why haven't we been preparing for this? Some have...other Talent Execs say they missed it...Accidentally On Purpose'

So what is the answer?

The talent market has scared us before. We can't find enough - we increase salary and hiring bonus. Still can't - we offer a Porsche to the employee who refers the most. New strategies and maybe new businesses will emerge. Once the initial fear is over - the opportunity rush begins and probably already has.

A few things companies can do immediately to ensure talent competitiveness.

• Put a proactive talent strategy in place. Which begs the first question - do I have anyone in place now I trust who can make this happen. Close your eyes - if you don't get one. If you're the talent leader and are not secure with your abilities or staff - get the right Talent Strategists on board now.
• Whoever - must have vision...talent attraction recruitment and delivery is not easy in a competitive market. And this time it's not who can get the most expensive Sunday ad, thanks to the Internet everyone plays - all the time. Companies require a Talenteer with vision who also has a history of making their visions a reality.
• Recruitment Skills: The company has to understand that recruitment is a complex bi-directional selling process. We're not selling pens - we're bringing people together. Not easy in a market full of competition. You are up against messages from everywhere. Success requires balls out successful recruiting...that means the leadership must have a background. It's not enough for a HR generalist manager to hire the recruitment talent...it has to be a part of the culture - top to bottom.
• Technology Rules. Efficiencies and productivity have been added to all parts of the enterprise. Look at what Dell and computer manufacturing or how Fed Ex has changed the world of postal delivery. We want - expect everything now. Talent is the same. It is a unique mix of technology and recruitment skills that lead to talent success. Again, we are dealing with people and that requires a person to person process. Use technology to automate the administrivia of recruitment. We at Hire understand this...our clients do as well.
• Hire Culture Make hiring great talent important throughout the organization. Everyone from the CEO down has a role to play. Define it. Make it happen. Talk about, heck preach about it - ALL THE TIME. No more Scary - For Real! No more ' Accidentally On Purpose Excuses...

This is One of Those Times...companies are looking for talent answers - results...time to step up.

So Just What Is This RSS Thang?

As  promised earlier I'm going to do a quick post about RSS--or really about to take advantage of a really cool technology that has become very prevalent on the web. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Its basic purpose was to allow for news syndication to websites easily, hence really simple syndication. It was designed and first implemented by Netscape in the late 90's and has evolved over a few releases. There is a very good description and history on Wikipedia.

What's really cool about RSS is that when a new news, or in the case of a weblog like this one when a new post is created, a short description of the new content along with a link to the full content is automatically created on the site. That little summary file is called an RSS feed or an RSS channel.

But now for the best part. By installing an RSS feed aggregator, users can create customized news feed from any news site or weblog that they are interested in keeping up with. There are a lot of aggregators out there and most are free downloads. NewsGator, FeedDemon,  Bloglines, and KlipFolio to name a few. I personally use Pluck because it has a few features that I personally like a lot. (Plus they are another Austin-based company, but I didn't know that 'til I'd been using Pluck for a few months.)

Here's how I use Pluck to manage my ~120 feeds. I use the Pluck IE plug-in. It was a quick download and easily installed. It runs next to my browser window like a little "sidecar" and looks very much like the MS Outlook folder view. When I find a new RSS feed that I'm interested in keeping up with I look for something like the "Syndicate This Site" link that you see in my left-hand nav bar right under the ABOUT. Some blogs and news sites have a little red RSS icon, or some other icon representing a feed. In many cases you simply drag and drop the link onto your reader--or by clicking the link it opens and registers itself with your reader. At this point you are SUBSCRIBED to the blog.

Now is when it gets really interesting. Your aggregator automatically checks your subscribed feeds for new content and updates your personal reader with notices. With Pluck the folder shows the title in bold with the number of posts I haven't read yet. So in my case without having to go visit more than 100 websites to see what's going on, my Pluck tells me what's new and makes it really easy to keep up with new content. I also find it much more convenient than receiving email notices of new content since I already get 100+ emails every day--and that's just at work. My feeds don't junk up my email box.

So now you can practice this yourself. Go pick up a reader from the list above if you don't already have one. Install it. Then come back to On Talent and click on the Syndicate This Site link. Walla--now every time I (or Hank or another guest author) post, your aggregator will show you that you have new content and you can read it at your leisure.

And while I'm at it--see the Comments link at the bottom of this post? Part of the idea of blogs is to create an industry or special interest dialog. So far this blog has been active for 2 weeks and has had 1400+ visitors, but only 10 comments! Click the link and type a comment--or if you're a blogger use the TrackBack link connect your site to mine via your comment. Or go to recruiting.com  or Jobster or any of your favorite sites and join in their conversations.

That's it for tonight--hope this helps you participate more actively in blogging--at least as a reader.

What Could The Future Bring?

OK. So I'll admit I'm a gadget freak. Just ask any of my friends. I have a closet full of 1st generation PDAs, cell phones, notebook and tablet computers, and just about any other high-tech thing-a-ma-bob that seems like it might have a use.

OK. So while I'm at it I'll also admit that I am subscribed to about 120 blogs via RSS (I will post on this later tonight or tomorrow because the more times I say it and people say "what is it?", the more times I think I should explain it. It also makes me wonder that out of the 1500 or so visitors to this blog--how many have actually syndicated the blog? Oh well, I will blog on that later and maybe more of you will subscribe:-))

Back to the point. I subscribe to ~120 blogs. 3 of them are gadget blogs: Engadget, Gizmodo, and Woot! . Mostly these blogs talk about the hottest, newest stuff in mp3, cell phones, computers, flat screen dsp tvs and the like. But today on Engadget, along comes the ultimate future of recruiting--er, talenteering!

CrowdSurfer. From Engadget:

What happens when you pass an old high school flame on the street? We tend to say, “Phew! We weren’t recognized!” But Small Planet thinks you want to meet up, and has developed the CrowdSurfer application to enable finding each other via your Bluetooth phones. The software officially runs on phones using the Symbian Series 60 OS, but should work with any phone that supports J2ME Midp 2.0 and JSR-82. CrowdSurfer also wants to help you find friends and people with similar interests, but considering you’ll both have to be a member of Small Planet, have one of the supported phones, and install the software, don’t expect to instantly gather any smartmobs on the spot just yet.

Imagine this as a talenteering tool! You are doing a really difficult search for a software architect and are coming up dry. You go to lunch at your favorite bistro, and all of the sudden your data-commander phone starts vibrating. The guy at the table next to you is a software architect and his bluetooth enabled phone just polled your bluetooth enabled phone, updating it with his profile -- he is a hotshot software architect. You drop your napkin and casually start a conversation--next thing you know...

This is probably not going to happen this year, but who knows. Never say never and keep your eyes open. The next great talenteering tool can come from anywhere.

Talent Pools or Resume Databases

I have used the term talent pool several times in my previous posts. It occurred to me after talking to some prospects last week that many staffing teams don't really *get* the difference between a talent pool and a resume database. While surfing around on Dave Lefkow's blog (it's amazing how I keep finding new blogs!) I found this comment from Gerry Crispin. "The next generation of "tracking" systems will also differentiate between current and prospective candidates and, with the latter, help to manage and automate multiple levels of relationships along the 'pipeline'."

Gerry's comment iterates what I've been driving home in On Talent--talenteering is about relationships. And it is mostly about relationships with prospective candidates. And to my point earlier about the resume database vs the talent pool? A lot of great talent are not actively looking for jobs--hence they don't have a current resume stored on a job board or resume bank, and they probably aren't going to update one to stick in your resume database. Most of the resumes in your database are from active candidates who have been applicants to jobs previously. Not that they shouldn't also be part of your relationship efforts, but the resume data gets stale and shouldn't be relied on to source new positions or as the only source for sourcing ahead of demand (the real talenteering approach!).

A talent pool on the other hand is your marketing list. Your source for relationship development. This list contains enough information to allow you slice and dice the pool by job interest, geography, and other valuable marketing information. It gives the candidate an opportunity to participate in the relationship by doing real-time updates to their data--job interest, experience, geographic preference, and availability. It gives you an opportunity to develop a relationship (as Gerry so aptly pointed out) on multiple levels--not just send new job postings. This is the essence of relationship building. Send stuff that is interesting, relevant, and  timely to the candidate. Give the candidates a portal to obtain information about the company, what it's like to work there, and more specifically about the kind or work they might get engaged in their speak (engineerese for engineers, salesese for sales pros, accountingese for accountants). Keep these relationships interesting and engaging--all ahead of the real demand. Read The Talenteering Manifesto principles 2, 3, and 4.

Then when the position opens, interested candidates will apply--then you can ask for their resume and store it the resume database for tracking purposes. At that point they become a current candidate, or applicant, depending on your definition and tracking and process efficiency are invoked.