As the hiring recovery gains momentum, some older recruiting strategies are coming back in vogue. One that seems to be high on many HR executives’ action plans is the need to develop an internal executive search capability within the corporate recruiting department. While the idea offers great merit, the approach many companies take is hiring recruiters or researchers who have worked in retained executive search and have th...

Although there were some naysayers about my predictions for job growth in 2011 (Dec 14, 2010 ERE), it’s more clear that 2011 will be banner year for professional hiring, coupled with the added impact of employee churn. Even if the prediction is somewhat premature, get ready for it anyway. What else are you going to do? With that as a backdrop, consider the impact Facebook’s new career network BranchOut will have on the worl...

I have a brilliant nephew — Harvard grad, etc., — who is, shall we say, a bit left of center. He has an executive position in the California state government, which is enough to further pinpoint his political persuasion. While I love him dearly, during the holiday season we have some rather contentious discussions regarding the politics of the moment, given I’m his somewhat right-of-center uncle. While civil, at least in mo...

In his book Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande contends that good people underperform largely due to errors of ineptitude — not doing what we know needs to be done — rather than errors of ignorance or inability. With this as a backdrop, he goes on to demonstrate that the proper use of checklists can minimize ineptitude-related problems to maximize performance. Using doctors, pilots, and construction managers he shows how to...

As most of you know, I think job descriptions are the primary reason why companies can’t find or hire top talent. For this reason alone they should be abolished. Here’s the first dozen of a zillion reasons why.1. Except for the list of responsibilities, they don’t define jobs at all; they define people taking the jobs. If these descriptions left out the required skills, years of experience, industry background, and academi...

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” – Elizabeth Barrett BrowningNot being Valentine’s Day, nor the 24/7 romantic, some of you might be confused. Of course, in this case I’m referring to quality of hire. It’s a worthy topic, but like a cloud, it’s hard to get your arms around. When should it be measured is as difficult to answer as how. “Why” adds another set of variables to the mix. I’ve just volunteered to help HR...

I’ve just written a recent companion piece on ERE (July 30, 2010) on my top ten favorite networking techniques for recruiting passive candidates. There were actually more than 20, but here are the next five. Caution: there are two prerequisites when using any of these techniques. First, you must get the candidate to agree to enter into an exploratory career discussion as a condition for beginning the conversation. Second, w...

We’re now working on a major survey with LinkedIn on determining the percent of their 70mm+ network that is active, passive, or somewhere in-between.Recent data from the Recruiting Leadership Council1 indicates that for a broad sample of the U.S. workforce, 15-20% are very active and around 20% passive, with the remaining 60% showing a mix of passive and active behaviors. Our internal research would indicate that higher qua...

PART IAs the economy strengthens, negotiating compensation will become a huge part of the recruiting puzzle. Before you even get to the negotiating part, navigating through the maze of compensation issues will become a prerequisite for sourcing, recruiting, and hiring great talent, whether they’re passive or active.This series of articles will help you handle candidate compensation issues at every stage of the process. Succ...

Earlier this year I presented a financial model that demonstrated that on average, hiring a C+ person instead of a B+ person costs a company somewhere between 50 and 100% of the person’s annual compensation.This becomes a huge waste of resources if you do this more than once. For example, if you’re hiring just one $60,000 C+ person instead of a B+ person, the net loss is $30,000-60,000 per year. If you’re hiring 1,000 peopl...