The objective of a company’s sourcing efforts should be to maxi- mize candidate quality while reducing time to fill and cost per hire.
To do this, use a variety of sourcing channels targeting top semi- active and semi-passive candidates. A sequenced sourcing process like this, if monitored on a weekly basis, also accommodates for cyclical economic changes mentioned earlier. Understanding this economic shift is important in designing multichannel sourcing pro- grams. Include these sourcing channels in a multilevel sourcing strategy for a corporate recruiting department:
➤ Career web site and job boards
➤ Resume databases and CRM
➤ Internal transfers
➤ Employee referrals
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➤ College recruiting
➤ Special campaigns
➤ Passive candidate name identification
➤ Cold-calling and networking
Done effectively, most companies should be able to fill 80 per- cent to 90 percent of their jobs with B+or better candidates using the first five channels. This will also reduce the cost per hire and the time required to fill per hire. The key to effectiveness here is to monitor each channel using a variety of metrics involving candidate quality and recruiter productivity (e.g., quality or sendouts/per hire/per re- cruiter/per channel) to determine when one of the channels is be- coming less effective. Revamp the channel and/or sequence up to a higher-cost channel to maintain a flow of good candidates.
It’s well accepted that cost-per-hire and time-per-hire are not the best measures of sourcing, unless quality is embedded in the equation. Just because an A candidate is easily worth a 33 percent search fee from a return on investment standpoint, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek to reduce costs and minimize time to fill while maintaining quality. In the past, the rush to reduce search fees and build internal corporate recruiters was the basic corporate recruit- ing department strategy. It wasn’t too effective for a variety of rea- sons. In the end, candidate quality declined as corporate recruiters were given too many requisitions to fill.
A sequenced multichannel sourcing approach, as described here, provides corporate recruiting departments a strong founda- tion to handle any changes in workforce needs.
Monitoring channel performance is one critical component of this type of sequenced sourcing program. The other component is to make sure each channel is optimized. Since the career web site and job postings are critical to all of the channels, devote more time to getting this right. The following sections provide some basic ideas on how to optimize the effectiveness of the other sourcing channels.
➤ Resume Databases and Customer Relationship Management
Most candidate tracking system vendors now offer some type of customer relationship management (CRM) module built in. This is
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nothing more than a direct marketing email campaign manager. If you don’t have this functionality available, you can use salesforce .com or some comparable low-cost system. Set it up with just a list of email addresses and the contact information and you can auto- matically pull off a resume. With this system in place, all you need to do is set up a series of email campaigns that are targeted to your specific candidate.
To get started, categorize all of the resumes in your database by job type. You’ll be sending everyone in your database a monthly or semimonthly newsletter that consists of fresh, general company content in combination with some job-related information. Ask hir- ing managers who want to push their open jobs to prepare this. Ask them to describe some interesting things going on in their depart- ments. Also, highlight a few key jobs with links directly to the splash page or the job opening. In the CRM system, prepare different email messages by job family, which will be automatically sent to the can- didates in your resume database. While you might have 6 to 10 dif- ferent emails going out at any one time, most of the content will be common. If you keep the content relevant, fresh, and exciting, you will get a number of good leads for current openings with this type of nurturing “drip marketing” system. The current CRM craze is just a variant of this highly effective process. Of course, ask for referrals and get people to opt-in to the newsletter. If your online job de- scriptions have been rewritten as described earlier, you should be able to fill 10 percent of your open jobs with this technique.
➤ Employee Referral Programs
As far as I’m concerned, a proactive company employee referral program should be at the core of every sourcing strategy. Most com- panies will tell you that their internal employee referral program has produced more top people than all other methods combined.
In the past few years, we’ve heard this from representatives at Mi- crosoft, AIG Insurance, Wells Fargo, Yahoo, Deloitte, Broadcom, SAIC, HealthEast Care System, Cognos Software, and scores of small- and midsize companies. Each indicated that their internal re- ferral programs were by far their number-one source for top candi- dates. Your best employees know other great employees, so you need to tap into this network in an aggressive way. This should also
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be the primary means to accelerate your diversity hiring efforts.
Your best diverse candidates know other diverse candidates.
Making your employee referral programs more proactive can yield even better results. A proactive employee referral involves an aggressive program of getting your employees to identify the best A-level people they have worked with in the past. As these names are being gathered, it’s important to capture why they are being ranked as top performers. With this information, recruiters can re- cruit and network with these top people to develop an even bigger pool of top candidates.
To make an employee referral program more effective, use the following tips:
➤ Make a formal, professional referral program that is heavily promoted throughout the organization.This needs to be an ongoing activ- ity, not just a sporadic event.
➤ Make sure all new employees learn about the employee referral program during orientation.Highlight the part about providing names of top performers with whom the person has worked in the past. Especially mention that you want to get names of top people who are not looking, and that the employee will get a referral fee even if the recruiter does all of the contacting.
This alone will yield many more names of top performers.
➤ Encourage current employees to only provide names of good people.Let the staffing department call the candidate and do the re- cruiting.
➤ Provide a bounty for referrals.This can range from $500 to $3,000 for recommended candidates who ultimately get hired.
Bounties seem to work better than some type of prize.
➤ Follow up quickly with every referred person in a very professional man- ner. The lack of proper backend administration can leave your employees with a bad impression of your company.
➤ Recruit Passive Candidates Using
Networking and Cold-Calling Techniques
Calling passive candidates takes time, skills, and effort. There are techniques you can use to get better results, but before you start
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networking with passive candidates, ensure that you’re doing everything else that’s easier first. However, if you’re still not getting enough strong candidates using the techniques described in this chapter, then you’ll have to begin direct sourcing of passive candi- dates. The good news is that there are now some great ways to get names of passive candidates on the Internet. The best are Zoom- Info, JigSaw, and LinkedIn. While they differ in approach, these sites provide names of people with their titles, companies, and some- times a quick blurb about their background. But the real skill here is how you call, recruit, and get more names from the original list of names.
First, act vague about the job when you first talk with the per- son. Provide few details about the job initially, with a goal of not asking questions that can be answered with a “no.” Instead, when you get the person on the phone, ask, “Would you be open to ex- plore a situation that’s clearly superior to what you’re doing today?”
If the answer is yes (which it will be most of the time), tell the candi- date you’d like to first obtain a quick overview of her background, and then you’ll provide a quick summary of the job. This way, a quick phone screen can determine whether the candidate is even a possibility before the person has a chance to say she’s not inter- ested. This is a very critical step. Getting the candidate to respond first gives the recruiter an opportunity to develop a professional re- lationship. If the candidate is not a good fit, it’s much easier to ask for referrals.
Conduct a quick work history review as part of your initial ques- tioning. When it’s appropriate to ask for referrals, ask the person for the name of the best person at her prior company. Getting names from prior companies like this is quite easy. You can also ask who the person’s best boss was, or who mentored her, or who she men- tored. Ask whether she knows somebody in the industry who might know somebody else. Make sure you don’t ask for people who are now looking. State explicitly that you want to talk with people who are not looking. Try to get three names from each person you talk with who could be a potential candidate or someone else he or she knows in the same field.
Once you have the name, ask the candidate to describe the per- son. Find out why she considers the person highly qualified. Asking questions this way allows you to prequalify the candidate. When
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you do this consistently, you’ll be able to develop a small pool of highly qualified candidates within days. You can save lots of time when you’re only calling top people. If you can systematize this pro- cess, then you can maximize your candidate quality while dramati- cally reducing your cost and time to hire.
How to Work a Cold List
If you buy a list of names or use one of the name-generating tools noted earlier, don’t even think about calling every person listed.
This is too time-consuming. For one thing, many of the people listed are not top performers. For another, only a few will ever wind up being a candidate you’ll present. However, the best people in this group probably know other great people who could wind up being candidates. The secret to maximizing the value of a cold list is to only network with the A players on the list, and get referrals of other A players from them.
To narrow your focus down to A players, start by calling the best 20 people on the list using some type of reasoned decision making (e.g., good title and respected company). When you call someone cold, there’s only a 1 in 50 chance that the person is going to ultimately be a candidate for your job opening. However, there is a one in five chance this person knows someone else who is a good candidate.
Your goal when making the first cold call is to get names of other good candidates. This is easier than it sounds. However, I’ve discovered that people will more likely give you names if you recruit the person first as described previously. If the person is not a good fit for your current opening, then begin the networking process. People are more likely to give you good names if you’ve spent 10 minutes or so getting to know them. That’s why I suggest you recruit first and network sec- ond. If you tell him too much about the job before you get to know the person, he’ll normally say he’s not interested, eliminating the chance to develop the relationship needed to get some referrals. If you ob- tain his background first, you also can use this information to target specific companies and situations to get names. It’s far better to say,
“When you were at Motorola, who was the best coworker you’d like to work with again?” rather than “Who do you know?”
Recruit first, network second.
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Once you’ve found three to four very good people from the orig- inal list of 20, only network with referrals these people have recom- mended. This way you’ll only be calling top performers. Recruiting and networking with top performers is much more efficient than calling people at random. To be credible though, you must know real job needs, have a great elevator pitch, and become an expert at the “recruit first, network second” approach described earlier.
➤ Workforce Planning and Just-In-Time Sourcing The key to developing a systematic process to hire top talent re- quires at least a six-month time horizon. This gives the sourcing group enough time to use all sourcing channels and build pipelines of talent. Most corporate sourcing programs are far too reactive. For many companies, new hiring requisitions are the re- sult of someone quitting or the approval of a new project. The sourcing process then begins. This gives little time to source top talent and fewer options, generally job boards or third-party re- cruiters. Under this time-pressure scenario, standards fall since the need to fill the position overrides the desire for quality. The best people generally take more time to find, and when they’re found, they take longer to decide. If your hiring process is primar- ily reactive, you have little chance to consistently hire top people.
Forward-looking workforce planning can minimize these problems by providing the time to do sourcing properly.
A good workforce planning process consists of a rolling quarterly forecast of all hiring needs for the next year. This should be pre- pared by every hiring manager and it should tie into the company operating plan. It needs to take into account new programs, normal attrition, and changes in the company’s business outlook. Every quarter, revise this forecast to maintain visibility over the next year.
If the hiring forecast is done properly, changes for the upcoming quarter should be minimal. Changes in the forecast for the next two quarters provide an early indictor that business conditions are changing. A good workforce planning process, combined with realis- tic updated forecasts, is an invaluable tool for the sourcing group.
The essence of workforce planning is to forecast your hiring needs at least four to six months in advance. This provides you the time to implement all of the sourcing programs described in this
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* Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t(New York:
HarperCollins, 2001).
†Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, with Charles Burck, Execution(New York: Crown Business, 2002).
‡Jack Welch, with John Byrne, Jack: Straight from the Gut(New York: Warner Books, 2001).
chapter. Hiring the best requires preplanning. If you must hire peo- ple yesterday, you’ll always compromise your standards. Planning ahead is important. If you need to hire 20 design engineers in six months, start the planning today. In six months, some top people will be waiting at your door.
➤ Sourcing—It’s the Strategies, Not the Tactics, That Will Ultimately Determine Your Success
A number of sourcing tactics have been presented in this chapter, but it’s the strategies that really matter. Most important is the need to create a proactive talent-driven culture. This mindset is essential to hire top people. If the senior management group doesn’t buy into this concept, all of the best tactics in the world will have little impact. Jim Collins, in Good to Great, indicated that building a top team was the first step for every company that eventually became great.* In Execution,Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan clearly point out that an organization’s people “are its most reliable resource for gen- erating excellent results year after year.”†It was clear in Jack: Straight from the Gutthat setting up a methodology and culture that focused on hiring and developing outstanding managers was Jack Welch’s true legacy at GE.‡These were three books that looked at the land- scape of American business over the past 20 years. Although each took a different path, each came to the same conclusion—hiring the best is not some activity that can be talked about, ignored, or dele- gated to HR.
Aggressive and proactive sourcing is essential if you want to in- crease your share of top talent. This is more important today than ever before. Workforce mobility is increasing at a rapid rate. Every- one is visible. The winners in the new hunt for top talent will be those that have the most creative and aggressive sourcing and re- cruiting programs. Planning is a prerequisite and provides the time needed to do it right. If you treat candidates as potential customers, rather than future subordinates, a whole shift in attitude takes
place. This shift impacts advertising, priorities, the time spent on the process, the allocation of resources, and the quality of the inter- viewing and recruiting process. But if you want to hire great people, you have to find them first. That’s why great sourcing is so impor- tant. Every company, big and small, has access to the same tools to find people. It’s how they use these tools that make the difference in whether you hire great people or not.
HOT TIPS FOR TALENT-CENTRIC SOURCING
✔ Implement a multichannel sourcing strategy. You’ll need this to counter the increase in workforce mobility and maximize candi- date quality while reducing time-to-fill and cost-per-hire.
✔ Use the hub and spoke concept to massively upgrade your career web site.
Your company career web site should be an inviting place where top people can find jobs quickly.
✔ Make your advertising visible. Work hard using search-engine opti- mization and reverse engineering techniques to make sure top people can find your jobs.
✔ Offer careers, not jobs.Don’t post traditional job descriptions; these are boring and counterproductive.
✔ You’ll find your best candidates in the sourcing sweet spot.Build your ac- tive and passive sourcing programs around how the best people in each group look for new opportunities.
✔ Be fast. Be different.To compete for the best, you must be different from your competitors. To hire the best, you must move fast. Re- design everything with these two ideas in mind.
✔ Recruit first, network second. The best people will give you the names of other good people if you build a personal relationship with them first. Recruiting them directly is the shortest way to build a relationship.
✔ Implement a proactive employee referral program.Your current employ- ees know many great people who aren’t looking. Ask them who they are and then recruit them.
✔ Implement workforce planning. Planning and forecasting resources and needs are at the core of good management. A workforce plan provides the time to find the best people available, not the best available people.
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