Stop looking for a job!  Start building relationships.  Every day I talk to someone looking for a new job.  Some are between jobs.  Some are employed and unhappy.  Most are uniformly dumbfounded by the lack of success of their sit-behind-the-computer-and-apply-online job search strategy.  

Obsessively waiting for the job of your dreams to magically appear online is not going to work.  We’ve all seen the statistics about the high percentage of jobs that are filled via networking and through a company’s employee referral program.  Then why do job seekers continue to sit at home and hope to find a job?  That dumbfounds me.  Stop focusing on applying for open jobs.  Start focusing on building relationships that will get you positioned for consideration for open jobs. 

Eat a big bowl of “getupoffthecouch” for breakfast tomorrow and start talking to people.  Anyone. Everyone.  Get yourself on the radar.  There is no such thing as a bad networking contact.  You don’t know all the people that your friends and former co-workers know.  You don’t know when someone you know is going to meet the person you need to know.  Go tell your story.  Help others along the way.  It’s a two-way street.

And, if you are a recruiter sitting in your office praying that the perfect candidate will apply to your job posting or a business development professional cold calling people to get 30 seconds to explain how you are different from the last 25 people that cold called (and are just like you), then stop!  It’s the same for you.

It’s never too late.  Start today.  Call a friend.  Have coffee with a former co-worker.  Connect with a college pal on social media.  Hang out in a local coffee shop.  I can all but guarantee that there is at least one recruiter in every coffee shop in town!

That’s the game.  Start building relationships.  Keep building relationships.  Never stop building relationships.  You can choose to play the game.  Or you can stay at home.  Seems like a simple choice to me. 

I woke up today thinking about how we know when we have great recruiters around us (don’t ask why – I’m just geeky that way about recruiting).   Simple answer: you know you have great recruiters when others are aggressively recruiting your recruiters.  

You know you have a great recruiting team when your hiring managers (especially the sales leaders) want their assigned recruiter to stop recruiting and start selling for them.  That’s a statement!

You know you have a great recruiting team when your competitors know who your top recruiters are, because you are crushing them in the talent market.  When your competitors know more about your recruiters than you do, start to worry. 

When search firms figure out that the reason you no longer call for their help is because of the great new recruiter you have; and they attempt to woo them away in order to get their cash flow moving again, then you have a great recruiter. 

Previously, I posted about “The Parking Lot Test” as a simple assessment to determine if you have a top-notch recruiter on your team.  Here’s the premise: if you tell your most important hiring manager that you are transferring their assigned recruiter to another business unit and they threaten to run you over in the parking lot, then you know you have a great recruiter!

If your recruiters aren’t being recruited and if your hiring managers could care less if you move their assigned recruiter, then you have a problem.  Time to clean house.  Time to start recruiting someone else’s great recruiters! 

Does your CFO call you monthly to thank you for your recruiting metrics and the impact you made to the bottom line?  Do your recruiters look forward to metrics that validate their personal impact to improving business results?   Do your metrics provide you the insight necessary to make upgrades to your recruiting strategy and tactics?  If you did not answer a resounding yes to these questions, then you have some work to do!

Are you measuring results or activity?  If you are proudly sending out data to show how many interviews you had, the number of phone screens you completed, or my all-time-favorite waste of paper: time to fill, then you are measuring activity.    These are merely indicators and do nothing to prove the value and impact of your recruiting function.

If you are measuring the quality of your sourcing and the quality of hire then you are measuring results.  If your data can prove a reduction in turnover, an increase in department and company performance, and a reduction in expense, then you are measuring results.  If your data can prove that the experienced call center reps that you hire stay longer and perform better than those without call center experience, then you are measuring meaningful results. 

If you are measuring results, then you have actionable data that will allow you to continually upgrade your sourcing, screening, and selection strategies.  You will be able to build the business case proving an increase in recruiting staff will reduce third party recruiter spend.  You will be able to prove that investing more in your employee referral program will decrease your cost for job boards.  You will know the impact of your social media and employment branding efforts and be able to justify additional resources for the future. 

Measuring activity is easy.  It’s why most HR functions default to it.  Measuring results is difficult.  Measuring results takes time.  Measuring results takes an amazing amount of collaboration.  Measuring results will make sure that your CEO and CFO know that you are making a significant impact to the ongoing success of your business!  

I’m impressed with the efforts of recruiting teams that are focused on sourcing military Veterans to upgrade the talent of their company’s leadership.   I’m disappointed when I hear about the difficulties they are having in actually hiring great Veteran talent into their organizations.  Sourcing is not enough.  Making the quality hire is the only meaningful measure of success.

My fear is that the cart is before the horse in many organizations.  Strategic sourcing efforts are great when hiring managers are prepared to hire from the source.  My fear is that the reluctance of hiring managers to see beyond the specific details of the most recent position on the resume will render these great Veteran sourcing programs worthless. 

We have an obligation as recruiting leaders to educate and influence our hiring managers on how to effectively view the leadership, teamwork, and results orientation competencies developed in the military as the leadership competencies necessary in corporate life.

The continued overly conservative narrow-minded “I will only hire someone that has worked in this exact job in our exact industry” mentality is way too pervasive in selection today.   This is not just a problem with hiring Veterans.  It’s a widespread problem across many organizations.  

I am thrilled when I hear about companies that have created dedicated teams to specifically source Veterans.   My excitement builds when I hear about the efforts to create a Veteran-friendly employment brand or on creating mentoring and onboarding programs designed to help Veteran new hires effectively assimilate into corporate culture.  Great.  Keep it up!  That’s step two. 

If you are not filling an increasing number of your leadership openings with Veterans, then you may want to stop sourcing for a moment and bust out your influencing skills and impact the thinking of your hiring managers.  That’s step one!

It’s not enough to just source great candidates.  We must be able to hire the great candidates.  What are you going to do about it?

Do you ever stop to think about how your recruiting practices affect your employment brand?   You should.   It’s only Tuesday and I have already heard three recruiting horror stories this week.

A search begins for two new leaders.  So far, so good.  Two weeks into the search the company decided it really needed one “even bigger” leader instead.  It happens.  Restart search.  Recruiter notifies candidates and goes back into the market to tell a new story.

Several weeks later the company decides that what it really needs are the two leaders it originally asked for.  Cue up the horror movie soundtrack.  Restart search. Tell the story again.  Are you kidding me?  Would you take precious time off of work to interview with this company?  Would you leave your job for this opportunity?  I doubt it.

Do you ever stop to think abut how your employment brand is affected by your “strategy” to have multiple contingent search firms simultaneously working a search?  I know, I know.  It’s easy for the recruiting leader to throw a search out to multiple firms and let the race begin.  We can save the discussion for another day about the poor third party recruiter behavior this generates.

Let’s look at it from the candidate perspective.  “In the last 36 hours I have heard from four different recruiters about the same job…they were not listening to the company, because they all explained the job differently…no one seemed to really know much about the company.  The only constant was how aggressive they were in getting my resume.  The company seems really unorganized and desperate.”  Actual quote.  Actual candidate.  Was it yours?

Do you ever stop to think about how your employment brand is affected by going dead silent for three weeks after a candidate has been in for the “final” interview after leaving work on four different occasions in two weeks to accommodate your schedule?  I heard this story today.  Again.  It could be any Tuesday.  Or Friday.  It doesn’t matter.  I hear this story all the time. 

Slow down.  Stop if you have to.  Think about how your practices are experienced by the candidates.  Think about how many people hear their stories.  You create your employment brand.  Think about it.  Then do something about it! 

More often than not, when I ask HR leaders if they have an employee referral program, the answer is yes.  That yes is usually accompanied by some version of chest thumping pride and declaration of victory.  More often than not, when I ask HR leaders about the success of their employee referral program, I receive a blank stare. 

In response to their blank stare, I start asking questions like:  what percent of your external hires are sourced from an employee referral?  Do your referrals perform better and stay longer than hires from other sources?  How much are you spending on job boards and agency recruiters?  What is the quality of hire from those sources?  Mostly blank stares.

What percent of your employees have submitted a referral this year?  Do your managers expect you to find their next hire via a referral?  What percentage of your referrals do you actually hire?  Are your top performers also your top referral sources?  Almost always blank stares. 

What are you doing to promote your program and educate your employees about the importance of employee referrals?  The answer is most often some version of “we have a policy.”  

 Don’t declare victory just because you have an employee referral program.  Declare victory when your CEO openly talks about the importance of the program.  Declare victory when your CFO asks what else you need to make the program even more successful.  Declare victory when your program is making a significant bottom line impact and you can prove it!  

I hear way too many stories about recruiting practices that make me say “ugh” and scrunch up my face in disgust.   Many of these practices are driven by archaic hiring managers and not necessarily endorsed, supported, or even known by HR.  Somehow as HR professionals we need to influence the behavior that leads to stories that make us cringe.

Here’s a sample of what I’ve heard recently -- the blog friendly version of what could easily be a book if I spent less time meeting people for coffee.

A senior level hiring manager not considering an applicant for an interview because “they don’t have enough LinkedIn connections.”  Are you serious?  Ugh. I know that the number of LinkedIn connections could be an indicator of the networking strength of a candidate, but a legitimate primary reason for not interviewing someone? I don’t think so. 

Or not considering an applicant because “I didn’t see any sports listed on their resume.”   I get it.  Participating in sports reinforces teamwork.  Not listing your high school sports on your professional resume should not determine whether you get an interview.  Ugh.

Recently, while catching up on some work at a local coffee shop, I witnessed an interview that led to an obviously overweight male not being offered a job.  How do I know?  I listened to the two interviewers (not HR professionals) discuss how the candidate had everything they were looking for…and that they would not be hiring him because he was “just way too fat.”  Ugh.  Don’t pretend it doesn’t happen.  It does.  

And, who decided that you must be currently employed to be a viable candidate? Ugh.  Who really has the ability to gauge when a candidate might actually retire and arbitrarily decide that it’s not worth the risk?  Ugh.  When did we become so narrow-minded that we are not willing to consider candidates that aren’t currently employed in our exact industry niche?  Ugh.

Let’s just get back to doing our jobs.  Source, screen and select candidates based on who is most qualified for the job.  Based on legitimate job related reasons.  What a concept! 

Who controls your employment brand?  If you are not aggressively and proactively managing your employment brand, then grumpy people are controlling it; primarily bitter ex-employees and even worse, your less-than-happy current employees. 

It’s actually pretty simple to define.  Your employment brand is the word on the street about your organization as a place to work.  That’s it.  It’s not recruitment advertising.  It’s not some fancy aspirational slogan about what you wish you were.  It’s not the smoke and mirrors job description you created to make your boring job, working for an awful manager, sound enticing. 

It’s actually pretty simple to do.  Create a great place to work!  You can’t fake this.  You either have an environment that people enjoy working in or you don’t.  If you don’t, then start there. Fix it! If you do, then make sure people know about it. 

Your employment brand is what real people talk about when they go out to dinner with friends or answer questions about their job at a networking event.  Your employment brand is what former applicants say about how they were treated, or ignored, during your selection process.  Your employment brand is what your former employees say about their experience.  Your employment brand is simply the most important foundational piece of your recruiting strategy.

Be aggressive.  Be proactive.  Make sure you are the driving force behind your employment brand.  Or, feel free to sit back and let the grumpy people control the word on the street.  It’s your choice.

Trying to create or upgrade your employee referral program? Do you have what it takes to lead the effort? Is your organization ready to embrace the change?  Today I want to go beyond the tactics necessary to implement a strong employee referral program and discuss the leadership and organizational attributes that are at the core of world-class employee referral programs.

Passion.  Are you genuinely excited about the potential bottom-line impact of your program?  Have you read everything you possibly can about the topic? Have you talked directly to multiple people who have created award winning programs? If you, as the leader of the change effort, are not bouncing off the walls with excitement about the future of your program, you may not be ready to take this on.

Pride.  Are you proud of the program plans you have? Are you ready to go tell everyone about the exciting things you have planned?  Are you proud of your organization? Can you stand tall and talk with strangers about why they should work in your company?  Are your employees proud of where they work? How are your employee engagement numbers looking?  An engaged workforce is more inclined to support a program and create the success you are looking for.  

Creativity.  What interesting things are you prepared to do to catch the attention of your employees?  Creative does not necessarily mean you have to come up with an idea that no one else has. Sometimes creativity is finding a best practice from elsewhere and figuring out how to make it work in your organization and within your culture.  Are you prepared to step out of your comfort zone and try some new things? Creative referral programs catch and retain the attention of employees.

Willingness to invest.  Are you prepared to invest time and money today to save time and money tomorrow?  Companies with great employee referral programs understand that you must invest to win.  Companies with great employee referral programs believe that they will have a tremendous return on investment and aggressively move forward knowing that with strong leadership and flawless execution they will improve their quality of hire and reduce expenses.

Are you ready? Do you have what it takes? Go for it. Lead your company to success!

I love to hear about recruiters doing great things for their companies.  Admittedly, I get pretty grumpy when I talk about the lack of recruiting leadership out there.  There are many great recruiters.  There are some great recruiting leaders.  There are a few great recruiting organizations.  One of the recruiters that has cracked the code is Frank Zupan, who recently blogged “I am Recruiting and I Do Not Suck.”  Beyond the fact that he has a great sense of humor and a knack for catchy blog titles, he gets recruiting!

Frank has passion. He loves what he does.  He is proud of what he does.  He loves being a recruiter.  He has mastered the important things.  He does great work, pops up regularly to effectively engage in social media, and stays focused on keeping hiring managers, candidates and new hires happy.   And, most importantly, he has made a business impact.

He doesn’t just talk about being a good recruiter. He measures it. He reports it. He was also smart enough to align himself with a supportive leadership team that enables his success.  Great recruiters don’t stay in sucky organizations, they leave.

My grumpiness with recruiting isn’t with sucky recruiters.  My grumpiness is with sucky recruiting leaders and sucky executive leadership.  Most recruiters are well intentioned, passionate about their work, and good at what they do.  Too many of them work for companies that don’t support them.  Most work for companies that really don’t understand how to position recruiting for success.  

Do you make an impact on your business?  Do you measure it? Do you report it?  If not, be like Frank.  He doesn’t suck!