Over the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to participate in numerous industry events allowing me to talk "shop" with many talented staffing professionals.

As always, these events allow me to learn from others and provide me time to incubate thoughts/ideas that often turn into future strategies.

Some interesting thoughts/ideas from my travels:

• Ideally, I think most would agree that hiring people based on competencies (versus skills) will drive better hiring decisions. Unfortunately, because it is not easy to assess someone's competencies, we most often hire based on skills. With internal candidates, we should have ...

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Each day we're deluged with multiple resumes, phone screens, and interviews of hundreds of candidates. But it's our search for the right candidate that is the primary driver of our work. Of course a key to your success is developing relationships ("friends") within the core areas for which you recruit.

While I know most of you have an ATS, or even a CMS (contact management system) to manage candidates, leads, etc., I have found that there are other ways to connect with our quality candidates that may be even more advantageous.

The most effective way I have found ...

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Regardless of the economic conditions, top talent is always in demand, difficult to find and even tougher to hire!

Critical to your success is developing - - and articulating - - a positive brand regarding your company, the culture, and the career opportunities that exist within your organization.

We recently did a pretty cool exercise with a company that resulted in some awesome marketing material and recruitment collateral.

At a recent HR/recruiter meeting, we posed the following questions to the entire staff:

• What truly are your candidates' motives?
• Why would they leave their current organization and join yours?
• Why would they select your ...

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In continuing our theme of "game changing" tactics of elite recruiters...It's something we all struggle with, the balance of consistently maintaining the passion for what we do each day as recruiters. For folks like me that have been doing this for years, it's a constant struggle. I have been in the game long enough to know what to do and how to do it, but I'm human, and we're prone to make mistakes. It's honestly probably every day that each of us struggles with keeping the passion alive. We need to maintain our passion ...

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In our recent post, the Backlash is Back, we promised to discuss "game changing", low tech techniques/tactics (we call them web 0.0) that Elite Recruiters execute flawlessly 95% of the time!

To kick off that discussion, last week Bradley provided thoughts and ideas about being a Strategic Business Partner and the importance of defining the staffing process and setting service level agreements (or SLAs) with your hiring manager.

To me, the most important Service Level Agreement you can set with your hiring manager to manage initial expectations and improve and maintain excellent customer service is - - Requisition Received to ...

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By: Bradley Savoy

Last week David spoke about the "backlash" and he promised some examples of 10 fundamental "game changers" that Elite recruiters execute flawlessly 95% of the time. This post will be the first of those.

From leading staffing and HR functions as well as consulting with clients, I have learned the balance amongst recruiting and Hiring Managers is an age old problem. To ensure internal corporate recruiters are seen as more than administrative job fillers they must effectively manage the perceptions of hiring managers. Recruiters must be seen as strategic business partners!

Tips to becoming a strategic business ...

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It seems like déjà vu. About 10 years ago the art of crafting Boolean search string commands, "peeling back URL's" took the recruitment industry by storm. Much like the Job boards did in the mid to late 90's . These new sourcing techniques were claimed to be the next 'silver bullet' with respect to finding that elusive passive, high quality candidate. Recruiters raced out to learn more about these techniques and if . . .they executed the techniques properly. . . on certain types of positions . . . they found success.

Fast forward and 10 years later and the same phenomenon is occurring again ...

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While there remains high interest around metrics and measuring the performance of the recruitment function, there is still very little data to benchmark/validate best in class performance with respect to process efficiency, service quality, and cost of vacancy.

To that end, over the next year, we are taking the initiative to develop relevant benchmarks in these critical areas. In doing so, we hope to augment what is currently available within the industry (not re-create the wheel on information you can already find!)

We know this initiative will not be without challenges. We clearly understand the importance of segmenting data ...

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A quick tip/reminder as we head into the holiday weekend.

Linkedin!!! - Remember -- when you interview a candidate that you perceive as high quality it only takes a few minutes to send thema a quick linkedin invitation!

There couldn't be an easier thing to do to expand your network. Get done with an interview and, go to linkedin and invite that candidate in.  

I bet many of you are thinking right now - - of course I do that . . . BUT - - do you do it 100% of the time with each and every quality candidate you interview?

If the answer is no ...

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As announced in June, we recently partnered with industry experts in analytics, process improvement and employer branding to create an enhanced service offering through our new entity - LEAN Human Capital.

Today I am excited to announce that Bradley Savoy will be joining us as a Founding Partner of this exciting new organization .

I have worked with Bradley for years and I am very excited to now work with him on a full time basis!

Bradley has been instrumental in helping design our unique Solution proven to help organizations remove waste from the staffing supply chain, allowing them to migrate towards ...

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Developing candidate pipelines (IE having a ready "pool" of andidates available when a position opens up) is a topic that has been talked about for years.

Of late, given the decrease in open positions, the candidate pipleine subject has resurfaced again as a 'hot' topic among many recruitment leaders and hiring managers.

Comments like:

"Now is the time to fill the pipeline for future hiring needs."
"Since the recruiters have extra time, let's have them build candidate pipelines."

These comments are being made at companies throughout the country.

What I find most interesting is a growing frustration and disconnect ...

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OK - you want to put yourself in a good mood in the morning? - - call Richard Newsom - VP of Recruitment Operations at Fifth Third Bank (Wait! - Don't really call him! - - he will kill me! )

As with all of us, he is busy, has tight deadlines, and deals with the normal day-to-day challenges we all face professionally, as well as personally - - but when I call him, he has such a positive, pleasant greeting that not only does he make it inviting to want to talk to him, he gets me excited about his organization and having a great day.

So what ...

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Over the last few months, I have been working with (and speaking to) numerous corporate recruitment organizations on what it takes to go from good to 'elite'! While I find there are many "good" recruiters out there, there are far less that have the passion and drive required to be 'Elite'.

Of course this discussion begs the question - - what are the competencies and skills of 'Elite' recruiters?

We have created two "self-assessment" tools to help you assess whether you have the competencies and skills of a top performing recruiter. Please feel free to "rate" yourself. It is completely confidential. Of ...

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One of the toughest things to do as a recruiter is telling a candidate they are not getting the job, especially in this economy. This becomes even a bigger challenge when:

1. A hiring manager does not provide objective reasons for not selecting them.
2. There are multiple positions to fill, so you will continue to source candidates after you have rejected them.
3. They are just super nice, friendly, etc.

Of course it should go without mention (but I will mention it) that if there are objective, technical/skill related reasons for not selecting them - - you should address them in your debrief ...

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As we start the second half of 2009, the economy continues to deliver uncertainty for most individuals and organizations.

How do you prepare for unchartered times? How can you predict the future? How do you plan for the future?

As I talk to recruitment leaders across the country, no one seems to have a crystal ball filled with answers to these questions. But most agree now, more than ever, we need to be strategically connected with line of business executives to keep a pulse on the business climate and how it will impact staffing.

When hiring volumes are down, or ...

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A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to participate in the Thought Leadership Institute's Corporate Sourcing Leadership Conference. As with any discussion around sourcing today, we talked about Social Media sites/Web 2.0 tools as it relates to sourcing top talent.

For larger companies, regulating access to these sites has become a big issue and debate.

• Should we allow access to employees?
• If we don't, will that negatively impact our brand identity and how the public perceives our organization?
• If we deny access, does that really stop them from accessing these sites via their mobile computing ...

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While talking "shop" on a recent visit with Sylvia James (Manager of Talent Acquisition at Spectrum Health), she had some excellent, practical advice that I thought would be worthwhile to share!

We were discussing how often hiring managers request more "candidates to review" (even after we have given them a quality slate of 2-3) and the negative impact that has on process efficiency and time management.

On the surface, there almost seems to be distrust on behalf of the hiring manager that:

• The candidates submitted for consideration are NOT all high quality and worthy of being hired.
• That we haven ...

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I wanted to update you on some exciting things happening with our organization!

As many of you know - - It's my 20th year in recruiting (I can't believe 20 years already!). Reflecting on the past 20 years has brought me a renewed passion around four topics:

• Lean Recruiting
• Just-in-time hiring
• The Changing Role of the Recruiter
• Success attributes of 'Elite' Recruiters

With that said, we have recently partnered with industry experts in analytics, process improvement and employer branding to create an enhanced service offering through our new entity - LEAN.

Our enhanced Solution will help organizations:

• Reduce waste/cost - associated ...

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I recently wrote a blog post titled - "How many friends do you have?". In this piece, I defined a "friend" and discussed the importance of building your network of friends!

Well . . . I would like to do just that!

I would like to add individuals to my 'friends' network that I can exchange relevant, insightful information, network, etc. Since LinkedIn makes it easy for us - - I figured we could 'connect' using their useful platform. So if you are interested, please link in with me!

On the subject of LinkedIn, at the Kennedy Conference Sourcing Summit Shally Steckerl shared something I didn ...

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I had the chance to sit in on Simply Hired  CEO, Gautam Gadhwani's presentation at the Kennedy Conference the other week. His presentation topic was Recruiting Buzz Index: What's hot and why?

As always, he provided invaluable insight into what is going on in the world of social networking, SEO, Internet Search and Web 2.0 tools. He kicked off his presentation with a cool video I thought I would share with you today - Did you know? 

Gautam makes a compelling argument that we are heading into unprecedented times. I would add that the only thing that is ...

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