LEAN, Just-in-time recruiting!

The Kennedy Recruitment Conference just finished up yesterday with Shally’s Sourcing Summit. It sure was fun participating and sharing information with a lot of passionate recruiting colleagues.

If you have not attended this event before, I highly encourage you to consider attending the spring event in Vegas.

Probably my biggest AH-HA moment came from two sessions put on by Ryan Loken (Senior Manager of Talent Services for Wal-Mart) and Don Ramer (CEO of Arbita). Don’s presentation was, by far, the most intense and powerful presentation I have seen in years.

While both of these speakers have completely different styles, they were both passionate about:

• Treating people with dignity and respect
• Doing the right thing
• Creating raving fans (Ryan’s term) as a result of treating people with dignity, respect and doing the right thing!

In the current economy, we, as recruiters, are going to be receiving more requests from folks that are struggling to find employment, under-employed, or somewhere in-between. As we know and experience, the recruiting profession, in general, tends to forget the human/compassion side of our industry. We sometimes forget that these requests from “unemployed and potentially unqualified people” are still coming from human beings! And, as Don illustrated in his message: “…these are our brothers, our sisters, our children…”

How do we treat them? Do we engage? Treat them with respect? Go out of our way to help them if we can’t employ them?

Or do we delete their request and/or send them a canned response telling them they are “unqualified”?

We can make every excuse in the world why we cannot personally touch/help everyone that applies to our respective organizations; BUT . . . each and every day, we can also try and reach out to as many folks as possible and, with those we do interact with – take the time to help.

If req. loads are lower, would you invest in helping others in their time of need? Maybe give tips on interviewing? Resume writing and/or finding positions that fit them?

I’m certain if you have friends/family members in similar situations you would hope that they are treated with dignity and respect by the recruiters with which they interact. You would hope those recruiters take an extra few minutes to provide interviewing tips, share resume advice or even make a quick recommendation.

Sometimes in our quest to “fill req’s,” find new ways to source candidates, improve candidate quality, etc., – we forget about the true nature of our business; Connecting hiring managers with talented professionals and helping professionals find a dream opportunity!

We truly do have the ability and opportunity to “change peoples lives” each and every day.

At the ERE conference a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of discussion around Web 2.0 sourcing tools and even “beyond” (cloud recruiting!). While it is truly exciting to discover how we can use emerging technologies to find and recruit talent regardless of generation, at some point – the conversation comes back to the start.

That is, at some point – no matter how you find and “connect” with a potential candidate for your search (text message, Boolean search string, Facebook, etc.), in order for them to get hired . . . you have to reach out and talk to them.

At one of the ERE break out sessions on emerging technologies, someone made the point; “…don’t forget about that piece of technology called the phone…!” The point being that while discussions around “pre-web 1.0″ tactics might not be “in-vogue,” there are still time-tested, no-cost, highly effective sourcing techniques that should be front and center within each recruiters “tool kit”.

For example, one simple, but powerful, technique to identify the organizational structure (and talent) of your competition (or any organization for that matter) is to engage in a little investigative conversation with each and every candidate you interview.

No matter how you find candidates, at some point (if the candidate seems qualified) you will interview them. Whether they are active or passive, they are prepared to provide you information about themselves during an interview. In your interview/pre-screen, it is very easy (and necessary) to engage them in discussion about themselves, their work history, their accomplishments, etc. and it is natural to ask questions regarding organizational structure, their centers of influence, etc. This line of questioning can provide you with a tremendous amount of information about them, their department, and how many people in that company do what they do.

One possible conversation/interview (and good Investigative Questions (IQ’s)) might go like this:

“So, Jim, please walk me through your work history, from your first job out of school to present…?”

“So now you are at XYZ Company, what is your current role and responsibilities…?”

“So I get a better understanding of how you fit within the organizations, briefly describe your organizational structure…?”

“Who do you report to? How many peers do you have? What do they do? Who reports to you? Who else do you interface with? What are their titles…?”

Having this information is invaluable!

First off, if the candidate gets hired, you can use this data to ask more specific, effective IQ’s like:

“You mentioned you had 5 other peers. As you know, we have 2 more positions, of those 5 folks who would you like to bring over? If you could pick your “dream team,” who would you pick?”

“You mentioned that you interfaced with the business analysts; we currently have a position in that area. Who would you recommend I contact that might be interested and/or well connected that can help me with my search?”

If you find out the candidate is not right for the position, you now know exactly how many other folks exist within that organization that you can target/recruit! This is very important. For most recruiters, they usually ‘don’t know what they don’t know.’ They can’t tell you how many of ______ exist within a company. And if you don’t know that, you can’t truly say that you have “exhausted” recruiting all talent within a specific organization. On the flip side, if I know there are 10 recruiters at a company and I end up talking to all 10 (through various techniques), and no one is qualified and/or interested, I can cross that company off my target list and move on. I can now say that I’ve “exhausted” all recruiting efforts into that company.

This Conversational, Investigative, Methodical sourcing technique is just one example of a “Pre-Web 1.0″ technique that has been used, successfully, for years!

If you would like a copy of our Pre-Screen form used to guide us in this discussion, please email me at dszary@recruiteracademy.com