If you are a recruiting professional and want to get smarter…more efficient, more effective, more productive…stop talking to other recruiters!  Get out of HR and follow a sales person around.  Walk down the hall and find your CFO.  Go behind the high security access doors and talk to some IT people.  Follow the bright colors and highly decorated cubes and talk to a marketing professional.

Why? Others cracked the code years ago on the very things we struggle with every day.

Trying to figure out to get the add-to-staff you need or the approval to upgrade your ATS? Spend a day with your CFO. Listen to what is important to her.  Ask if she cares how long it takes to fill a job.  Learn how to build the business case to justify adding to staff so you can effectively fill that backlog of revenue producing jobs.  Learn to articulate the impact you are making in pennies-per-share…not in days-to-fill. 

Trying to figure out how to manage your volatile requisition load and unpredictable staffing needs for your recruiting team? Talk to your IT friends.  They figured out this problem when they were all still writing COBOL code.  Figure out your baseline minimum staffing levels and then use on-call staff, contract recruiters, and staffing agencies or outsource the pieces of the work that don’t adversely affect the client.  Don’t build a staff to match the high end of possible volume.

Trying to figure out how to recruit with more of a sales-like approach?  Go on a few calls with real sales people...the ones that have 50% or more of their salary contingent on meaningful, measurable results.  Watch how they interact, follow-up, build relationships and how they close the deal.

Trying to figure out your employment brand or a social media strategy? Stop by the marketing department and let one of them stretch your brain out.  The most effective employment branding effort I ever implemented was one that my early-career-ultraconservative-HR geek-self would have never approved.   

You can do it!  Learn something new.  Apply the best practices of other professions.  And, for good measure, on the way back to your office…stop by and spend three minutes in audit and compliance…so they can help keep you out of jail!