We have traditionally operated a global employee referral system that captures employee’s quality referrals. Should they become hired, it automatically puts their name into the queue for a guaranteed cash reward. Similar to many corporations, different rewards giveaways have been offered over time as incentives: cars, boats, and home renovations.

In 2011 at Quintiles, however, an adventurous theme was implemented (one I hinted at a year ago).

In addition to the cash rewards, successful referrers would also be entered into a grand prize drawing for an exclusive trip of their choice with National Geographic Expeditions.

This adventurous approach heightened engagement. Employee referrals began to constantly rise. Three winners, in each of three regions, were randomly picked by Chairman Dr. Dennis Gillings at the close of the fourth quarter. The theme was well received and emphasizes our culture valuing adventure and experience, as well as encouraging world knowledge and culture sharing.

The employee referral program for 2012 holds more ambitious incentives. A mid-year winner will get to attend the 2012 Summer Olympics in London! This reinforces the concepts of value of competition, being the best, pushing the limits, global cultures all coming together for positive reasons, and valuing experiences and memories. We are looking for the world’s best talent — just like the Olympics attracts.

Recruiting never seems to change very much. As I have often written, even with computers, smart phones, cheap video, big bandwidth, and years of accumulated experience, the way we look for people and select them looks very much the same as it looked 50 years ago.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section.

Idea 1: Stop any branding activities and focus totally on referrals. If you are in a nationwide or global firm with a known reputation, branding is a secondary concern. You already attract people because of your product or service brand and most likely have a pipeline of good candidates. Whenever you have an opening, just let employees know and ask them to use their networks to bring in any additional people you might need.

Referrals are free, fast, and effective. Incentives are not really needed and may actually cause employees to reach out to less-than-optimal candidates in the chance of getting whatever reward your offer. Instead give the employees who refer the best candidates, whether they are hired or not, a title such as “Preferred Referrer” or “Trusted Referrer,” and give anyone they refer priority consideration. This will incentivize others to become a titled referrer and raise the bar on the type of candidates you get.

Idea 2: Use online assessments and reduce interviews. Forget screening interviews, meet and greets, and extensive resume reviews. Instead invest in developing one or two screening tests that can be given online, are scored instantly, and provide both you and the candidate with feedback.

These kinds of screening tools can reduce your workload, improve the candidate experience, and result in much better candidates. The challenge is to develop the right tests that actually screen for the characteristics that are important for the job or for the organization.

There may need to be several tests for different positions or levels, but none of this is more costly or time-consuming than endless phone screens and interviews. I would go so far as to say that recruiters should never interview anyone in person. By implementing online screening and eliminating face-to-face interviews, you could potentially expect a recruiter to handle 20-50% more open requisitions.

There are many firms who can do this for reasonable costs, and the online testing and screening business is growing rapidly. Charles Handler, one of the other writers on ERE, has just released a book cataloging and commenting on most testing services available today.

Idea 3: Use video interviews heavily. Video interviews are a powerful and effective way to do more with less and improve legal compliance.

Video interviews are no longer taboo, and many candidates find them much more effective and less stressful than face-to-face interviews. Face-to-face interviews are expensive and time consuming and most of the time lead nowhere. Probably 75% of all interviews do not lead to an offer because of poor screening and poor candidate qualification. By conducting one live interview that is recorded, many people can view the same interview and evaluate the same responses. This leads to consistency, the lack of which is the greatest legal issue with multi-person, live interviews. By recoding the interview, there is proof that the interviews were done legally and that no discrimination occurred.

Idea 4: Train recruiters and hiring managers thoroughly on closing candidates. Make sure every recruiter and as many hiring managers as possible know how to identify potential acceptance issues and how to overcome objections.

Most acceptance failures are because someone — a recruiter or a hiring manager — did not pick up on signs that a candidate had reservations or issues that would be difficult to overcome: perhaps a reluctant spouse, a nagging doubt about the organization or the project, a desire to stay at their current employer, and so on.

It takes practice and training to notice these things and many recruiters are not well trained to not only notice the potential problem, but to deal with it. I often recommend that recruiters take a traditional sales training class where these skills are and the methods to overcome them are taught.

Idea 5: Communicate with mobile technology and via social media. Getting feedback to candidates regularly and fast is one of the ways to differentiate your organization from other and to get first-mover advantage with a candidate.

Most candidates today are more than willing to receive feedback and updates via their Facebook, LinkedIn, or other accounts. Email is fine, but experiment with other methods that cut down the time you spend and get the word out faster. Hiring managers should consider interviewing candidates using Skype or other tools. You could develop a mobile app to provide feedback or updates.

There are probably at least a dozen more ideas that you could try that would lower costs, improve speed, and provide higher quality candidates. But, then again, by doing it the way we always have, we ensure job security — for a while.

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

by John Sullivan and Laureen Edmiston

Several weeks ago ere.net published an article that asked the question “what are the dumbest things that recruiters do.” After surveying recruiters on ere.net, Twitter, and at the recent SMA symposium in Seattle, it is clear that most feel the dumbest thing recruiters do is…

Not managing the candidate experience — the candidate experience is the perception of the sum of interactions with an organization throughout the hiring process. It includes every communication, the design of the process, the fairness of process elements, the quality of information exchanged, and the honesty with which questions and concerns are addressed. Providing a poor candidate experience can have many negative consequences, including an increased candidate dropout rate, negative word-of-mouth, and decreased loyalty to the overall brand.

The rest of the “Top 10” are…

Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — potential applicants assume that the company puts its best foot forward when it describes a job. So when they compare your dull, legalistic description with your competitor’s more compelling description, they will simply apply elsewhere. The net result is that you lose candidates unnecessarily, harm your employer brand, and you will eventually frustrate your hiring managers.

Not taking advantage of employee referrals — the best-practice firms approach 50% referral hires (the percentage of all external hires who come from referrals). Failing to fully use referrals means that you will miss out on a large number of high-quality, prescreened, and presold candidates. Because employees are no longer doing some of the recruiting work, your recruiting workload will increase.

Not learning the business — obviously if you can’t speak “their language” and you don’t understand their problems, hiring managers will be less responsive to your requests. Your lack of knowledge will also make it more difficult to communicate with, to sell, and to build relationships with candidates.

Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — higher-level jobs require a different level of service, knowledge, and relationship-building. So using the same process that you use for lower-level jobs on more sophisticated, technical, or management jobs will result in fewer returned calls, a higher candidate dropout rate, and lower-quality hires.

Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are gone quickly, so a drawn-out process or slow decision-making will likely mean that candidates with multiple offers will be gone. Managers will also become frustrated if a slow recruiting process means losing the best.

Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews are traditionally weak predictors but poorly executed interviews dramatically increase the chances of making a major hiring error. Poorly designed interviews may also screen out innovators and turnoff top candidates, because they have not felt challenged.

Using active sourcing approaches for passive candidates — posting your jobs using active sourcing approaches like job boards, newspaper ads, and job fairs means that the 75% of the workforce that is not actively looking for a job will never see them.

Not prioritizing jobs — focusing on low-value jobs with little business or revenue impact will anger your managers and reduce their business results. It may eventually lead to lower recruiting budgets, after executives see that your hiring is not prioritized and in line with their business priorities.

Not identifying job acceptance criteria — if you don’t proactively ask for their job acceptance criteria, you can only guess about what it will take to get a top candidate to say “yes.” Although it is ranked as #10, not tailoring your recruiting marketing and candidate-selling approaches to the decision criteria of top candidates almost guarantees that you will lose these candidates. Because these individuals have choices, they will simply wait until an opportunity comes along that precisely fits their requirements and expectations.

Final Thoughts

Nearly 80% of CEOs select talent management as the business area that requires the most change. As a recruiter, if you are going to dramatically change, you have only two basic choices, 1) stop doing the dumb things that negatively impact your results or 2) start doing smarter and more effective things. The “stop doing dumb things” choice is probably the easier of the two because it doesn’t require you to learn anything new.

So if you are recruiter or recruiting manager with limited time and resources, we recommend that you use this “dumb things” list to begin the process of changing and improving your recruiting.

For a thought experiment (and to encourage creative conversation), I recently asked a few recruiting friends, “If you were left with only one method or tool for recruiting talent, what would you use?”

I’ve listed a few responses below and included some dialogue regarding pros and cons of each. Hopefully this discussion will help recruiters and recruiting leaders focus their energies on those tools that actually bring value to their organizations.

This list is presented in no particular order.

Employee Referrals: Traditional employee referral programs tend to fail because they don’t excite employees. Too often referrals are advertised on the intranet, posters in the break room, or distributed via internal mass emails, so this communication just becomes background noise. These programs don’t engage the vast majority of your employee base.

If recruiters, however, only had a referral program as their sole launching pad for filling positions, they could have solid success. Instead of advertising the program, recruiters would pick up the phone and proactively ask for referrals from employees on a regular basis. From that starting point, recruiters could have rich and thorough conversations with referrals from their current employees who may be the right fit for a position or point them to the right candidate. This high-touch methodology would certainly turn up passive candidates that none of your competitors are actively pursuing. The sheer size of your employees’ first and second level connections could fill a talent pipeline for a long while.

Existing ATS: In general, most companies underuse their current database of candidates. Compounding this reality is the fact they’ve paid a lot of money to attract candidates to their application process in the first place. For large, well-established organizations, an ATS could mean access to millions of candidates. The biggest challenge then becomes effectively mining the database, but left with only one recruiting approach, relying on an ATS could very well be the best option. If used wisely, by creating talent communities and folders, an ATS can be a great stand-alone recruiting tool. Positions not filled directly by candidates housed in the database, could lead to referrals and hires down the road.

LinkedIn: Having a dedicated recruiter for LinkedIn searches, introductions, and resulting conversations can result in attractive talent. Since LinkedIn allows recruiters to quickly locate candidates who appear to be a close match to their needs, this tool has a great advantage over several options listed here. However, recruiters tend to start these conversations cold, and this barrier can create resistance to success. For an organization with a low volume of high-niche positions, LinkedIn could be the best go-to tool.

Search Engine Sourcing: Starting a search with the empty box of a search engine can be a daunting first step, but top-notch sourcers can unearth contact information and initiate conversations with talent that no one else is engaging. The weakness of this approach is the energy and time it takes to find candidates. Although much of the search engine process can be automated across several sites, the process still has flaws since connectivity to these candidates is usually pretty weak (as opposed to a referral) so you may have to turn over a lot of rocks to find an interested candidate.

The Phone: Not to be overly simplistic, the old-school recruiters might think it’s best to just start making cold calls to competitors as their starting point. Since fewer recruiters are pounding the phone these days this could be a fairly effective, if not time-consuming, activity. For companies with a high volume of openings this might not be the most practical approach.

Job Boards: This is an obvious choice to discount as a main/only source to find talent. Not only does post and pray not produce the best candidate pool, it also is the only expensive option listed here. However, I would say it has one advantage over all the others above: ease of use. For small companies without robust ATS’s that are mainly filling low-level positions, this may actually be the best option, especially if they don’t have dedicated recruiting support. Most companies are much more complex and require more assertive tactics to fill their positions.

I would love to hear other recruiters’ thoughts on what tools/methods they would use if they were left with only one way to fill positions. Additionally, the common thread in most of these techniques is the ability to engage a candidate and then ask for referrals — this is the relationship nature of recruiting. Those recruiters that are strong on the relational side of the business will always find ways to be successful, regardless of the tools or techniques they are using.

Two big vendor announcements kicked off the 14th annual HR Tech show in Las Vegas this morning. And if these are a sample of what we’re going to be seeing when the show floor opens later, then it’s going to be an exciting three days.

Silkroad technology unveiled something it’s calling Point, a different kind of talent (or is it performance?) management product that’s innovative and even a little unnerving at first. It’s certainly nothing like what we have come to expect from human capital systems.

Meanwhile Jobvite, working at the recruiting end of the talent spectrum, released a Facebook app that neatly complements its Jobvite Source social referral tools. Jobvite’s new social app works entirely within Facebook, connecting users with jobs and telling them who among their friends might be a good match. Apply for a job and the candidate gets to monitor the status of their application, all while still on Facebook.

Jobvite has been leveraging employee social connections for the past few years. The system required a company’s employees to work through Jobvite Source to enable the system to access their connections, search out and suggest matches, and then send referrals to those friends or connections. Now, the new Facebook app allows all the action to occur on the social network, making it simpler and easier for an employee to refer friends for jobs. It wouldn’t be right to call it passive job referral, but it’s undoubtedly going to increase the number of referrals because it’s just quicker and more top of mind.

From a candidate’s perspective, the ability to check on the status of an application is a definite plus. The app also allows candidates to apply for a job directly from Facebook, using either an uploaded resume, work, and education they’ve listed on their Facebook profile (but none of that other stuff), or their LinkedIn info.

For now, offering candidates a choice of what they’ll use to apply is wise; fewer than half of Facebook users have completed even some of the education and work sections off their profiles. However with the network’s changes, particularly the coming Timeline feature, Facebook users will find compelling reasons to fill in those details. Which brings us to Silkroad Point.

It’s not a social networking site or tool as we might think. It’s more of a social and professional analytical tool to assess the impact an employee has on the operation of the company. It’s a means of measuring the influence of workers, in a way that managers only sometimes are able to do.

Let me give you an example. One of your direct reports does a good job on the work you assign. But what may not always be obvious is how much of a resource that person is to others in the department, and even to those in other work groups. Point attempts to assess that.

In that sense, Point is somewhat like Klout or other systems and tools that attempt to measure a person’s social media presence. But in this case, Silkroad is looking at their influence and qualitative value to the company. However, scoring this all is a subjective undertaking, agreed Silkroad’s COO Brian Platz, who walked me through a demo last week.

Among the many components Point takes account of are such things as the number of articles a person posts and how many of their co-workers read it and commented on it. Since Point integrates with all the Silkroad modules, it knows when a worker has taken and completed training and how well they did. That raises the score.

But scores can drop, too. Skills needed for a job can change; not having them, or not being as fresh as a peer, can decrease your skill.

What’s unnerving is seeing an actual rating for what we all know intuitively, but don’t generally attempt to quantify. Some people — and not just bosses — do have more influence than others. Platz says that Point’s analysis is an effort to get at that undocumented value. “Is it scientifically valid?” he said, “I don’t make that claim now.

After thinking about it, I’m not sure how critical a strict scientific validity is, or even if it’s all that necessary. Point is certainly no less scientific than most of what managers use for the annual performance review. In some ways, it’s actually a whole lot more valuable, alerting managers to those parts of what a worker does that sometimes go unseen and therefore undervalued.

Platz agrees that as a new, and innovative tool, there’s the possibility of some tinkering down the road. For one, Silkroad currently decides the weighting to be given to the multiple elements Point measures. He says there’s some thinking that eventually companies may want to do their own weighting. Other fine-tuning is also likely.

Point deserves a good look by Silkroad users and the company deserves credit for attempting to find a way to address all those other things an employee does that too often don’t get valued.

This was the seventh year of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, but it was the military talent category, added for the first time, that was mentioned by more judges than any other category, as employers searched for creative ways to attract the many returnees coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

One judge (Rob Dromgoole) wrote on Facebook:

Finished voting for Recruiting Department of 2010 and Military Recruiting Program of Year 2010 for ERE. Lots of great applications. I’m humbled by how great some programs are.

And another (Gerry Crispin) emailed to say about the “military talent” category:

EVERY ONE of the Public and Private Companies and Agency firms who submitted to this category are winners. They are ALL engaged in ensuring that an underutilized but highly prized segment of our population is getting up to bat for jobs and competing for openings.

The judges took this project seriously, some showing me the spreadsheets and algorithms they created to keep track of their entries and sending me feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

As always, you’ll hear a lot more about the finalists throughout the year. At the Spring conference in San Diego, the winners will be announced, and you’ll be able to ask them how they did it, how they overcame challenges, and so on. We’ll also talk about them more on this site, in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on the ERE.net site, and we’ll ask some to speak at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (September 7-9, 2011).

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order within each category:

Best College Recruiting Program

Deloitte: Among its many efforts: enhanced faculty relationships. More than 1,500 faculty use its accounting and auditing case materials in their teaching. A great quote from a Deloitte employee sums up a lot of what Deloitte’s done:

As a recently hired Business Analyst at Deloitte Consulting, I can say with conviction that I am with the organization because of a three-year relationship I built with Deloitte prior to being hired on full-time.

Ernst & Young: EY is no stranger to these ERE Recruiting Excellence awards. The company, in its own words, “honored every single job offer we’ve made to campus recruits” despite the recession. Its “Your World Your Vision” program invited teams of students to propose how they could make a difference locally; winners were awarded $10,000 to implement the ideas. Ernst & Young Careers on Facebook has 58,781 “likes.” Its Flexspace virtual reality tool allows students to explore real-life ways that work and personal commitments can work together. An International Intern Leadership Conference it held drew 1,339 students from more than 13 countries. EY’s now offering overseas assignments for some interns over the summer. It has more than a 90% conversion rate of interns to full-time hires for the past four years.

Best Corporate Careers Website

AT&T: Some highlights cited by judges: strong use of social media; strong use of color; engaging message to candidates; job search broken down by job seekers, returning seekers, and current employees.

Nestle Purina: After a March 2010 relaunch (featuring real people and real animals), site traffic rose sharply and “stickiness” increased 95%.

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture: A finalist last year, Accenture’s program in the past was significantly different from country to country and was run decentralized. It implemented one globally consistent referral submission process; a system was developed internally that has a two-way interface with Accenture’s talent acquisition system; and it implemented one globally consistent employee referral communication campaign with one centralized global team running the program (day to day & strategy).

Aricent: It has won before, and shared a few of its secrets before, too. Its “offer to joinee” ratio is higher for referrals vs. overall. The same goes for its “selection conversion ratio” (how many people are selected out of total interviews). Its cost per hire is much lower. It has also measured quality of hire for referrals, finding that it’s higher than other hiring channels. Referred employees stay longer.

Best Employer Brand

Adidas: Surveys of employees and job seekers helped Adidas better understand how people perceive the company. Then it brought marketing, communications, and HR together to finalize its positioning, and its advertising execs were brought in to refine the brand (which is all about employees’ ability to shape sports and through their work, their ability to help customers achieve their sports dreams, and the connection to pro athletes). Adidas built a “brand bible” to educate people about the brand, and an employer branding toolkit to use in recruitment advertising.

Sodexo: It involved all levels of the company — from executive team members to interns — as brand ambassadors, communicating the brand on college campuses, professional association meetings, and through social media. Far more people are searching for Sodexo now on CareerBuilder and going to Sodexo’s career site. It has reduced paid advertising costs, such as job board spending. Last year, the company won the “department of the year” award.

Best Retention Program/Practices

Cisco: It created a new retention program to actively recruit its own employees for new positions.

PNC: The company reduced layoffs through a sort of in-house temp firm it created. An employee could take on a temp assignment within the company, perhaps in another division, possibly resulting in a permanent gig. The company saved on recruiting costs, severance costs, and saved some of its employees’ jobs. Melissa Mounce, the bank’s SVP of corporate talent acquisition, is on the agenda this coming March 25 in San Diego.

Best Military Talent Program

CACI: A contractor for the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, CACI has an internship initiative providing on-the-job experience and training for disabled veterans interested in learning new career skills; collaborates with many veterans’ organizations to provide resume writing, interview training, and mock job fairs; and partners helps teach career skills at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center. CACI has 522 disabled veterans in its workforce.

Naval Sea Systems Command: With the unemployment rate among disabled veterans at 18%, NAVSEA has tried to address the problem with mentoring, training, and more for the wounded. In 2010, NAVSEA placed 282 disabled veterans into civilian careers and set a goal of hiring one “Wounded Warrior” per day in 2011. It has an over 90% retention rate among disabled veterans at NAVSEA, saving unemployment costs.

Most Strategic Use of Technology

Informatica: Informatica’s talent acquisition strategy emphasizes competitive intelligence mapping and how it can translate findings into actionable sourcing channels. The outcome is a solution to a common industry ailment, a way to retain the intellectual property of the organization’s recruiters, regardless of staff reorganization.

PNC: It did a lot tech-wise, from audio screening 400,000 applications in a year to centralizing its sourcing activity with SourcePoint CRM, which it uses to locate potential candidates and have the empirical data needed when talking with business managers, such as how hard a search is gong to be. Its landing pages have a “stay connected” option at the bottom to feed data into its CRM. For some jobs, it’s moving away from job boards and more toward search engine optimization and landing pages. PNC also implemented an online recruiter toolkit to standardize its processes, and is working on a hiring manager kit.

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

CACI: It was a finalist last year, too. You read above about its military recruiting. It uses a candidate-centric recruiting team to proactively source a pipeline of candidates in major skill set areas. Recruiters tap into a pool of thousands of candidates as business needs necessitate. The referral program provides the No. 1 source of candidates, and an alumni program provides regular communication to former CACI employees to encourage them to return to CACI. CACI has also worked to facilitate the internal movement of employees to reduce hiring costs while increasing retention. The company had record 15% revenue growth in FY10.

Fluor: One of those companies and one of those award applications where you see how critical talent management is. Recruiters and human resources employees helped establish a candidate pool to support the BP oil spill clean-up effort, and helped recruit and train candidates onsite in several Eastern European countries for mobilization to a job site in Afghanistan without the cost and time involved in first sending them to the U.S. for training.

U.S. Navy: The Navy delivered one of its best recruiting years despite a shrinking military-eligible population, decreased propensity to serve, and significant budgetary challenges. It developed and launched a new brand. It used a cross-functional supply chain management working group comprised of recruiting, training, and fleet stakeholders to foster early communication of manpower needs, training availability, and resource constraints. And, it dramatically increased diversity market penetration though minority affinity group partnerships, focused diversity marketing and advertising, and strategic placement of diverse employees — recruiting the most diverse new employee population in the Navy’s history. All in all, it recruited the highest quality new employees in Navy’s history.

Without question, having a large LinkedIn network is a competitive advantage for any recruiter working on hard-to-fill positions and hard-to-find candidates. This advantage is lessened dramatically with LinkedIn Recruiter, since it includes complete visibility to the 70mm+ people in their network. Since this full-visibility product is off-limits to TPRs, it levels the playing field somewhat for corporate recruiters. But this is not as significant a disadvantage as it would seem to those of us who have to find top candidates the old-fashioned way — networking. Getting pre-qualified referrals from people who will call you back is the real secret of recruiting passive candidates.

With this in mind, I’d like to offer a few of my favorite passive candidate recruiting secrets.

Networking Secrets of an Old-time Headhunter

1. Network in 3D. While the names on LinkedIn are great to have, getting the names of their best connections is even better. As you begin your quest for great referrals, don’t just consider peers. Consider those who these people have mentored, who mentored them, who they most likely worked with on cross-functional teams, and who they regularly work with outside the company, including vendors, customers, and consultants.
2. Track your effectiveness. Don’t waste your time. Networking is not about dialing for dollars. Instead, track how many people call you back, how many are interested in talking about your position, how many are qualified for your opening, and how many referrals you get per call. If you’re not tracking this daily, you can’t get any better, since you won’t know what to work on. If you do track these metrics, you’ll soon discover that great referrals from well-respected people can increase your productivity 5-10X. That’s why the first name found on LinkedIn is not nearly as valuable as a referral from one of these people.
3. Get three referrals on each call. The most important metric you can track is how many high-quality referrals you get on each call. You need to become adept at getting these names. Make sure you highlight the fact that you don’t want to know anyone who’s looking. Instead, ask the person for the best person they know who’s absolutely not looking, but would be open to discussing a potential career move. Thinking in 3D helps here. For example, I’ve called buyers at major retailers looking for salespeople, product marketing people looking for engineers, ad agencies looking for product marketing people, and CPA partners looking for CFOs. The key is not to hang up until you have three great referrals if the person you called isn’t appropriate for the job at hand.
4. Don’t call people who won’t call you back. Great people will call you back if you mention the name of another great person. That’s why step three is so important. Track your callback rates. If you make sure that 80% of the people you call are warm, pre-qualified referrals, your call-back rate will be 75% or better. If you just make outbound cold calls, your callback rate will be closer to 25%. This is a huge difference in productivity.
5. Only call people who are worthy. While getting people to call you back is important, if they’re not worth talking to, it’s a waste of time. That’s why it’s important that you pre-qualify the referral. Just ask the person giving you the name why the person is a top-performer. As far as I’m concerned, a worthy person is someone who is either qualified for the job or knows someone who is.
6. Leave professional and career-oriented messages. Whether it’s a voicemail or an email, suggest you’d like to enter into a discussion regarding what could potentially be an important career move for the person. You must include some substantive proof as part of the message, not hyperbole. For example, “You might have heard that we just merged with XYZ Resources, and are looking for a product manager to lead the first integrated development project. I’d like to chat with you to see if this could offer a significant career move for you.” If you can mention the name of the person who provided you the referral you will more than double your callback rate. Hyperbole — “the greatest position in the world” — will cut it in half.
7. Create instant careers. If you’ve asked the person if they’re open to discussing a possible career move and they answered yes, don’t tell them much more about the job; instead, get them to first tell you a little about them. This is essential. As you quickly go through the highlights of the person’s work history, look for gaps in the candidate’s background your job fills. This could include staff size, scope of the project, impact the person can make, exposure to management, and the like. Mention these as reasons to proceed in the discussion. Of course, if the gaps are too big, or non-existent, smoothly switch your focus to getting three referrals.
8. Don’t take “no” for an answer. In addition to doing everything described above, you also need to be adept at overcoming objections. These cover the range from I’m not looking, what’s the comp, I’m happy where I am, to I’d don’t like the industry, your company has a bad reputation, and I don’t want to relocate. It’s impossible to put 20 years of advice into a single paragraph, other than to say that persistence is the key here. If your position represents a true career move, you owe it to your hiring manager, yourself, and the person on the phone not to give up until the person has the information needed to compare your job to what they’re doing today or whatever else they’re considering. Don’t give up until they do. Even if the person decides it’s not a true career move, you’ll still be able to get your three referrals.
9. Recruit first, network second. You’ll increase your networking productivity by directly recruiting the person first, rather than calling the person on some “networking” premise. To me this later approach should only be used when calling someone who clearly is not a candidate for the job. Recruiting the person first allows you to find out about the person’s background before revealing much about the job. This allows you to determine if you should recruit the person or get referrals. You also establish a different relationship once the candidate has shared some confidential information with you.
10. Become SWK (someone worth knowing). Top prospects want to stay connected with top recruiters who handle important jobs. To become SWK you must know the job, the hiring manager, your company, your industry, and your competition. You need to be seen as a reasonably objective career counselor who is only willing to proceed if the job represents a true career move. You know you’re SWK if you get unsolicited referrals from top people in your area of expertise who want to work with you and give you other top referrals.

What’s great about LinkedIn and its Recruiter product is it gets you in the major leagues on day one. This is an invaluable gift. Regardless, since everyone will soon have access to the same information, your ability to convert a list of names into hot prospects and great hires is the real difference-maker. In my mind, this is the essence of great recruiting.

I had an informative, and reassuring conversation this morning with the founder and head of BranchOut, a Facebook app that I wrote about yesterday, which has a potentially valuable future as a sourcing tool.

Rick Marini, an entrepreneur with an impressive pedigree, was concerned enough about the transparency issues I raised in the post, that he pinged me to clarify a few things.

What he said was encouraging. “We are very aware of the privacy issues,” he said at the outset of our conversation this morning. “We would never compromise privacy.”

In the team’s haste to push out the app, a few things were overlooked, he said. One of them, a rather important oversight, was any sort of explanation about the access to personal Facebook information that BranchOut needs to do its work.

“We didn’t do a good job explaining,” Marini agreed. It’s being fixed, he said. Explanations and clarifications are being added to both the www site and the BranchOut Facebook presence. The first piece, an explanation page that comes up when you refuse to grant the requested permissions, is now in place.

The additions and fixes are all welcome, even if it does suggest that privacy and transparency weren’t priorities until they were raised by others. Nevertheless, recruiters should be heartened by the responsiveness of Marini and his team to the feedback if, for no other reason, than self-interest: BranchOut could become a remarkably useful tool to source candidates and to further employee referral programs.

You can read more detail about what BranchOut does in yesterday’s post. Briefly what it does is tell you where the friends in your network work or have worked and it lets you know if any of your friends have friends in specific companies.

You can post jobs to your own friends network for free. Soon, Marini told me, employers will be able to post jobs and have them targeted to Facebook users that have been identified by BranchOut on the basis of their job or employer.

You can do all this on LinkedIn, and many recruiters do. LinkedIn makes it easy to source candidates.

Facebook is more of an attractant approach. People generally come to you. BranchOut adds the missing dimension. Its sheer numbers — 500 million users as of just this week — make it a very attractive pond in which to go fishing.

What we don’t know is how many Facebook users have bothered to post detailed profiles about themselves. Or, if they have, to make them available. On LinkedIn, the majority — by quite a bit — have complete and public profiles. So far, from what we’re seeing, Facebook is just the opposite.

Thus anything Marini and the BranchOut team can do to instill confidence that data won’t be misused, can only help encourage Facebook fans to complete those profiles. Which will improve sourcing for recruiters.

Without even knowing the name of your organization I can predict that throughout the most recent downturn you let your employee referral program “go,” so to speak. By failing to take advantage of new trends, technologies, and tools, and decreasing efforts to update and keep the program highly visible, your organization has allowed a number of program-performance-degrading-things to occur.

Unlike the previously posted list of program design features that can “kill” an ERP, these factors plague even well-designed programs, rendering them weak and ineffective. While much more likely to occur during economic downturns and periods of reduced or halted hiring, these program degraders can emerge whenever an employee referral program is neglected.

If your program doesn’t seem to wield the power it once did, do a quick mental audit to see if any of these factors may be to blame.

The Top 20 Employee Referral Program Performance Degraders

1. Loss of a program manager — losing or failing to replace a program manager charged with championing the program and keeping it active can lead to disastrous consequences even for a short period of time. Solution: a resource, hold them accountable, empower them with program metrics, and educate them on key ERP success and failure factors.
2. Reliance on job announcement spam — unfortunately it has become common practice to spam employees with irrelevant job announcements and generic program communications, both of which overworked employees quickly learn to recognize and set aside. Solution: use a more targeted approach to sending out announcements, decreasing the overall volume, and making sure each contains information relevant and of interest to the recipient.
3. Repetitive message formats — years of experience have demonstrated that using the same message format over and over will eventually result in employees tuning out the noise, just as you tune out the billboard that rarely changes on your commute to work! Solution: toss out form-messaging templates and craft a real communication that educates, empowers, excites, and calls for action.
4. Repetitive rewards — program rewards and prizes are intended to excite, but once they become commonplace or stale, they cease to be effective. Solution: periodically change or rotate program incentives using a survey sent to a sample of your employees to determine what would or would not work.
5. Program suspension — some organizations completely suspend their program when hiring is slow, resulting in an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality among employees with regards to being 24/7 talent scouts. Solution: regardless of requisition volume, never suspend a program. It’s OK to narrow the scope of the jobs covered or temporarily reduce incentives, but the process and mantra to keep employees scouting talent for future hiring needs must never cease.
6. Not countering “inappropriate now” arguments — when reductions in force occur, it’s not uncommon for arguments against external hiring to emerge on the premise that giving a job to anyone other than those displaced already would damage morale. Solution: it’s unfortunate that reductions in force must occur, but when they do, those shed by the organization are often those in non-core roles or that possess skills no longer as valuable to the organization as their rate of compensation. To assume that a mission-critical or key vacancy could always be filled by the ranks of those laid off is silly. It’s also silly to assume that other organizations would be laying off volumes of talent in previously hard-to-fill areas, reducing the difficulty of recruiting scare talent moving forward. It’s the role of the ERP program manager to counter or prevent such arguments before they get started. In modern agile organizations, hiring can occur in critical business units just as layoffs occur in others. Make managers and employees aware that the development of new products and services (and their future job security) often depend upon access to new skills and technologies. While retraining those displaced is nice, sometimes it is both time and cost prohibitive.
7. Not maintaining operational responsiveness — without dedicated attention, it is easy for programs with exceptional service standards to slip, resulting in delayed responses to inquiries, slower referral response times, and even complete non-responsiveness. Because response time is the No. 1 success factor for ERPs, service standards should be restored. Solution: re-examine the service standard expectations you have set for your program, and if unable to resource the program adequately to maintain them, reduce the scope of the program temporarily or seek volunteer assistance so that every interaction meets expectations.
8. Relying on the original business case — business priorities change, unfortunately few HR organizations update their business case for key programs such as the ERP to reflect the changing environment. Without ongoing program positioning, it’s easy for programs to lose their executive champions and for participants to forget all the ways the program benefits them and makes the organization stronger. Solution: the business case for the employee referral program should be reexamined every quarter and changes should made to the program strategy and operating model in accordance with changing needs. Executives, managers, and employees in particular need to be reminded of the important role the program plays in building better teams and improving organizational performance. The communicated business case should include evidence of improved quality of hire, retention rates, diversity rates and promotion rates. It is especially important to update the “performance differential” calculation, which demonstrates that referral hires produce more on-the-job than other sources of hire.
9. Ignoring new tools and technologies — programs designed even recently might not have taken advantage of newly developed referral tools, approaches, and technologies. In recent years a lot of development in process and technology has occurred to support vacancy prioritization, electronic referral marketing/communications, social network extension, external stakeholder participation and automated program administration. Solution: every quarter reevaluate how technology can empower the world-class process you desire to execute and try out many of the new service/tool offerings among pilot study audiences. With many tool developers adopting agile development methodologies, product offerings are likely to change/evolve frequently.
10. A lack of employee education — even in great times many organizations failed to provide enough tools, training, and support to help employees uncover great talent within their network, so during tough times it’s no wonder that education efforts all but go away. Without referral events, manager executed referral activities, PDA parties, referral open houses, “Give Me Five” visits, and priming exercises, ERPs become purely reactive and fail to produce the volume of flow needed in the most critical areas. Solution: the referral team must develop quick but compelling presentations/exercise kits for employees and hiring managers (available both online and in person). These tools should explain and clarify new and revised policies, procedures, and expectations, as well as walk employees through simple exercises designed to help them identify possible referrals for current and near term key talent needs. Participant research reveals that a majority of employees are underwhelmed with the amount of how-to guidance their organization provides on identifying possible referrals, networking, dealing with “would you refer me” requests, and how to convert contacts into referrals.
11. Not interfacing with related HR programs — in recent years many organizations have invested in social media programs, alumni group development, and contingent labor programs, all of which have logical ties to the ERP, but that might not have been used well during the downturn. Solution: put together a team with leaders from each related program to determine where partnerships make sense, where duplicate efforts are underway, and most importantly where resources/tools are underused.
12. Outdated prioritization — well-designed referral programs prioritize vacancies based on their business impact, and referrals based on the past referral success rate of the referrer. However, the organization’s priorities may have changed. Solution: if you don’t have a prioritization schema, develop one now. If you do have one, work with senior management to adjust the schema based on emerging needs quarterly or as critical incidents emerge. (Note: prioritization does not require that individual referrals be treated any differently during the hiring process.)
13. Lack of recruiter training — failing to periodically update training of existing recruiters and skipping the training of new recruiters regarding the critical success factors of referral programs can degrade a program from within. Solution: program managers need to be continually educated on the latest benchmark best practices and performance targets leading organizations are adopting and develop periodic training/information sessions for recruiters outlining their evolving role.
14. Failing to do periodic upgrades — the performance of even the best-designed referral programs degrade quickly when program evolution ceases. Solution: if you are not now or have not been rolling out program enhancements and promotions at least once a quarter, start now. Tie enhancements and promotions to forecasted critical needs and short-term business issues to create natural excuses to communicate about the program and improve visibility.
15. Not using metrics — great referral programs rely heavily on metrics to continually improve, but when times get tough, metrics often all but disappear. Solution: identify how employee referrals impact business operations and layer program performance metrics into existing finance and operations reports, making the program visible as a performance driver. Do not forget to quantify the dollar impact on revenue of the key quality of hire metrics.
16. Mergers with other recruiting programs — during tough economic times, it is not uncommon for autonomous referral programs to be combined or merged with other recruiting programs. This lack of identity and control will rapidly degrade program performance. Solution: if you have merged your ERP with other initiatives, make the business case to restore its independence immediately.
17. Unfounded legal fears — even well-designed referral programs get “nitpicked” on by “overly nervous” lawyers and HR professionals who often present their personal opinion as unbiased professional guidance. Solution: don’t argue with attorneys; instead, partner with them on the premise that it is the corporate counsel’s duty to find a way to do what the organization “needs” to do in a manner that reduces the organizations exposure to risk. You wouldn’t propose writing their legal documents, so they shouldn’t design your programs! Make the business case for key program features and outline the negative impact of foregoing a practice. Risk mitigation is about balancing the possible cost of litigation with the financial benefit of a practice. If you are not armed with ROI projections, real-world data, and best-practice benchmark examples, don’t expect to fend off unfounded legal arguments.
18. New/alternate ATS — many applicant tracking systems provide an ERP module that becomes more attractive versus operating a separate ERP program with isolated infrastructure during tough times. These modules which allow employees to send an invitation to apply to referrals turn all referrals into online applicants long before they need to be. They also result in a dramatic decrease in the conversion rate of employee-initiated employee referrals. Solution: figure out when it makes sense in your organization for a referral to become an applicant, and structure your technology solutions to empower your process the way you want it versus altering your process to fit the design of an available tool. Hundreds of mashable tools and services exist today that can empower your program as you envision it.
19. Failing to scale — in tough times organizations merge and get acquired. If your organization has done either, it’s not uncommon for a program designed for a small organization to be ineffective in a larger organization. Solution: evaluate what elements of your program can scale to meet the needs of the newly combined organization and which elements need redesign. Until all program elements can function effectively, consider limiting the scope of the program to that which the existing infrastructure can support at the service level desired.
20. No globalization — if your organization has become a truly global one, as many have, your ERP must be globalized. Solution: look at all processes, communications, and policies to ensure that cross-border referral of talent is being facilitated, and that all possible scenarios have been planned for. Identify what elements of your global program my require localization (communications, rewards, etc.) and develop a matrix specifying each.

Final Thoughts

Very few things that are easy to do have more of an immediate impact than using a failure analysis “checklist” to conduct a quick assessment of an important HR program. With hiring targets growing, there is no more important recruiting program to assess than your ERP, don’t you agree?