Date: Wednesday, May 9, 2012Time: 11am-Noon PT
Location: Webinar
Session: How To Avoid The 10 Biggest Mistakes Corporate Recruiters Make with John Vlastelica, Managing Director, Recruiting Toolbox
Session Overview and Registration: Link to ERE site

As a consultant and trainer to corporate recruiting teams, John Vlastelica gets to see what many of the best recruiters do differently. In this fun, sometimes irreverent webinar, John will share 10 of the biggest mistakes corporate recruiters make, and what you can do to avoid them. We’ll discuss…

• poor assumptions recruiters make about sourcing, technology, and hiring managers,
• things that can be career-killers when you’re looking to interview for your next recruiting job,
• and some tactics to help you recruit better today.

I hope you can join us for this free webinar.

The Challenges of Benchmarking

Yesterday, over on the ERE recruiting website, I posted an article on the challenges of comparing your recruiting performance across industries, companies, teams, and individual recruiters.  Your resource model, your budget, your employer brand, how much you pay – all of these things make it hard to benchmark externally. Unfortunately, too many recruiters and recruiting leaders look externally to benchmark, without a true apples to apples comparison.

Check out the article here: Recruiters: Do You Suck? (Hint: No)

And then let me know – what external data do you leverage to benchmark your performance with other orgs?  How do you use that information to help you influence execs and make business cases to justify new investments?

Date: June 25-27, 2012
Location: Atlanta, GA
Session: Five Keys to Successful Corporate Recruiting Leadership with John Vlastelica, Managing Director, Recruiting Toolbox

I’m excited to return to the largest HR conference in the world, the SHRM Annual Conference, to deliver a session on Recruiting Leadership.

Session Overview: Link to SHRM site
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Date: April 30-May 2, 2012
Location: Washington DC
Session: How to Leverage Hiring Managers as Your Secret Recruiting Weapon with John Vlastelica, Managing Director, Recruiting Toolbox

I’m excited to return to the SHRM Annual Talent Management Conference to deliver a session on a topic that – in my opinion – doesn’t get enough of a focus: how can we better leverage our hiring managers to recruit the best talent?

Session Overview: Link to SHRM site

For all of the talk about employer branding, improving quality of hire, and competing for top talent, not nearly enough focus has been given to the role of the hiring manager.  In this fun how-to session, John Vlastelica, former Recruiting Director with Amazon.com and Expedia, will guide you through the top 10 actionable strategies you can take back to your offices to fully leverage your hiring managers as attractors of talent, direct sourcers, interviewers, closers, and talent leaders. You will learn actionable strategies to help them set up the interview process and team so that you select and sell top talent effectively. You will also learn how to lead and influence hiring managers so that they see their roles as more than just passive participants in a recruiting process; get them to see their true roles as talent leaders. Hiring managers can and should be your secret weapon!

I hope to see you there!  Contact us if you plan to attend.

7th Annual ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards

I was honored to lead the panel discussion with the ERE Recruiting Excellence Award Finalists again this year down at the 2011 Spring ERE event.  20 judges evaluated applications that came in from around the world, across 8 categories.  We had fantastic applicants this year.

Who are these companies?
Want to learn more about the finalists, winners and and what makes them great?  Check out these ERE.net posts by Todd Raphael: Finalist Writeups and Award Winners

Award Winners
A big congratulations to the award winners, including Deloitte (Best College Program), AT&T (Best Career Site), Accenture (Best Employee Referral Program), Adidas (Best Employer Brand), Cisco (Best Retention Program), Naval Sea Systems Command (Best Military Program), Informatica (Most Strategic Use of Technology), and CACI (Best Recruiting Function of the Year).

So they won an award.  What did they actually do to win? (Link to Video)
What makes this session great is that audience members get to ask questions of panelists to learn not just WHAT they did, but HOW they did it.  As I said (with a big sarcastic smile) to the audience when I kicked off this session, “Please ask great questions.  If this session sucks, it’s because of you.”  So, would you like to learn more about what makes these finalists and award winners worthy of this kind of industry recognition?  ERE captured the live 90 minute Q&A session for your viewing pleasure: ERE.net

Watch ERE.net this Fall for information on how your organization can apply for the 2012 Recruiting Excellence Awards.

John and I talk a lot as you would expect.  And our conversations are generally really interesting, given our backgrounds. It’s actually one of the things I like best about working together is we both have done very similar big global recruiting jobs, but at very different companies, so it’s fun to talk shop and compare insights, perspectives, and related points of view.

Last week we had a conversation about when Google opened an office in the Seattle market…. and how Amazon was out-executing Google with candidates that both companies were competing for.  In fact, he shared a story about one particular candidate that started the recruiting process with Google, and then got engaged with the recruiting department at Amazon, and Amazon engaged, interviewed, selected him, made him an offer and closed him before Google even launched their interview process. In fact, the candidate was still waiting to hear back from Google after he started as an employee at Amazon.

I shared that back in the day (circa 1998…. dot.com bubble age, Y2K Preparedness Era, etc, etc) when I ran recruiting for the small Oracle-technology consulting company that was acquired by CSC, we used to invite people to interview on site, with the intention of giving successful candidates an offer before they left our office.  We prepped candidates to expect it, and we beat our competition as a result.   In fact, as part of the M&A deal with CSC, I was given the opportunity to present to the CSC M&A team because they didn’t understand how we could be so effective at recruiting.  But I digress.

Now, this post is not about Google or Amazon or CSC, but it is a good anecdote, given the competitive landscape unfolding in the talent marketplace, to illustrate an important point:  Speed is a competitive advantage, and should strongly be considered.  In fact, speed is one of 3 Big Variables inherent in most recruiting efforts that are interdependent:  Speed / Time; Cost, and Quality.  Generally speaking, one can only optimize for two of these factors and the third will remain suboptimal.    The classic example is using search firms:  generally they produce fast, high quality results, but it costs more.  Similarly, if organizations want to hire high quality talent but also want to be fiscally conservative, then recruiting efforts will take longer.   It’s all a big never ending trade off.

So here’s the main point: Although few corporate recruiting organizations choose this, I would argue that focusing on speed is a great strategy in today’s market.   One reason is the financial cost is low… with operational discipline, recruiting organizations can (relatively) easily impact the speed of their process.  And that will lead to greater recruiting yields.  And it will also reduce the average net ‘candidate processing effort’ required per hire.  Which preserves capacity.  So getting candidates through your process quickly is a great area of focus as we head into a more competitive talent marketplace, while recruiting departments are being rebuilt and are currently really stressed.

Here’s a few ideas to consider when optimizing for speed:

• Pre-schedule interview days for hiring teams at the onset of the search.  This saves cycle time and allows you to execute more quickly.  In other words, set the interview days at the launch of the search, and cancel if you don’t have candidates.
• Pre-close candidates before you invite them on site.  Ask them, “If we made you an offer at the end of your interview day, what questions would you have to have answered in order to say yes?”  And then answer their questions.
• Prep your hiring teams that speed matters.  Pilot a speed-recruitment process with candidates that have exploding offers or related competitive pressures.
• Limit the number of interviews for candidates.  More interviews, beyond a reasonable number, simply doesn’t correlate to improved hiring quality.  I recommend less than 8 interviews.
• If you aren’t using videoconferencing for interviews of non-local candidates, you are negatively impacting speed (and cost!).  Most VC technology is now so effective that it won’t negatively affect interview and related assessments.  You should be scheduling candidates for interviews via VC and executing the interview process before you could even get a flight booked.  If you don’t believe me, you should experiment with the technology.

College Recruiting Best Practices: Online Conference, Aug 11-13, 2009

I’ll be presenting at my first NACE conference in a few weeks. My topic will be How to Leverage Your Hiring Managers. We’ll discuss how to lead, how to set managers up for college recruiting success, what tools they need to effectively interview, select, and sell candidates, how to engage and reward managers, and how to leverage SLA conversations to set and manage expectations. I’ll also be part of the opening keynote session on The Future of Recruiting.

I’m excited to hear great speakers like Kevin Wheeler, Gerry Crispin, and Steve Lowisz talk about social networking, the future of recruitment, metrics, and more.

Details are at: http://www.naceweb.org/education/2009recruiter/default.htm

How to Avoid Hiring Mistakes and Select Top Performers

I was asked to write an article for the WTIA (Washington Technology Industry Association) Executives Forum (designed for non-HR leaders). While most of you reading this blog entry already practice these best practices, I thought I’d share it with you in case it’s the type of thing you’d like to share with the execs you work with. It’s a good short read on what leaders can do to prevent hiring mistakes and hire the right people.

Whether you’re an emerging small company or a large technology leader, every hire counts…especially in this economy, where headcount is so precious. So, what should you focus on to…

• Avoid hiring mistakes?
• Structure your interviewing process to yield the best hires?
• Leverage your interviewing strategy as a selling strategy?

Full article here:
http://www.washingtontechnology.org/community/forums/thread/615.aspx

Do you have an upcoming interview for a new recruiting job?

Top 5 Things You Need to Do to Prepare

1 Know your results.
It shocks us how few recruiters know how many hires they made in the last month or the last year. Even fewer know how those numbers compared to other recruiters. As crazy as it sounds, simply knowing this information will put you light years ahead of most recruiter candidates. (p.s. Put this information on your resume, so that it’s easy to recall during the interview)

2 Know where your hires came from.
Whether you use your company’s ATS/Talent Management System, or a simple excel spreadsheet, you should track and pull source information on your hires before you interview. Most recruiters guess where their candidates came from during the interview, which doesn’t build confidence in the interviewer that you know how you spend your time – or how you should spend your time – to find them great people. Obviously, most companies are listening for your ability to focus on the right, high ROI source for the job. Be prepared to walk through your strategy for sourcing common candidate types via the web, social networking tools, referrals, networking/cold calling, etc. Show how you keep agency fees low and leverage your toolbox to be uber productive.

3 Know your close rate.
It will impress most interviewers if you know what your offer:hire rate is, and how that compares to other recruiters in your company. All companies want to hire good closers. Great companies want to hire recruiters who know the levers that predict close rate. So, if you end up interviewing with a great company, know why your candidates declined and the steps you regularly take to pre-close candidates.

4 Know your business, and how it differs from theirs.
We have to practice what we preach. You should know your current/old company’s people-competitors and products inside and out . You should also research the company you’re interviewing with. Differentiate yourself by knowing more than just what products or services they offer. You should also…

• go on to their /jobs site and see what kind of people they hire
• read their latest press releases
• try out their product or service (when I first interviewed at Amazon.com in early 1998, I made sure I bought a book online before I went in to the interview, and I’m glad I did, as they asked me a lot of questions about the customer experience)
• talk to anyone you know who works there (leverage your linkedin network) to learn about their growth plans, recruiting culture, and recruiting pain.
• identify their people competitors (leverage linkedin to see where their current employees used to work, and where they went when they left this company)
• read any company or employee blogs you can find, and see if glassdoor.com has comments about what it’s like to interview or work there

Interviewers are absolutely blown away when recruiter candidates ask smart questions about their business, or relay examples that seem incredibly relevant to their company. The best interviewers are trying to answer one core question while they’re interviewing you: How likely could this recruiter repeat the success they had at company X here at my company? You must help them answer this question by highlighting how you’ve overcome challenges or met goals that are similar to what you’d find if you worked for this new company.

5 Prepare examples.
Don’t wing it. Spend some time writing out a few examples of your accomplishments, and review them the night before the interview. Practice saying them out loud. Most companies will ask the “tell me about a time you had to…” questions as they try to gather evidence that you can source, assess, and close candidates, and appropriately account manage – and push back on – difficult hiring groups. Quality examples that highlight your strengths is what gets you hired.