With many of you already packing and getting ready to head out to San Diego next week for a full week of great recruiting events – SourceCon 2010 and ERE Expo 2010 Spring, the rest of you aren’t totally out of luck.

As we have over the past two years, we will be live streaming many of the sessions for free for those of you who can’t make the trip.

Of course we can’t bring you all of the benefits of attending the events live in person like the tremendous networking and access to our expert speaker faculties, but if it is not an option for you to be there in person, clear your schedule from Sunday – Wednesday so you can take advantage of the stream.

SourceCon will be streaming live on Sunday & Monday at www.sourcecon.com and ERE Expo will be streaming live on Tuesday & Wednesday right here on ERE.net.

Here is a schedule of what is available to you:

SourceCon 2010 – Sunday, March 14 – Monday, March 15:

Click here for the full details about the agenda and speakers:

SUNDAY, March 14, 2010 (All times PT)

• 1:00 pm – 1:15 pm – Welcome Remarks w/ Conference Chairman Jim Stroud
• 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm - What a Long Strange Trip It Has Been! led by Sheila Greco
• 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm - How to Gain a Recruiting Competitive Advantage Without Becoming an Easy Target led by Eric Jaquith
• 4:15 pm – 5:30 pm – Key Sourcing & Social Media Initiatives for 2010: Distilled Wisdom from 1200 Staffing Leaders led by Shally Steckerl

SOURCECON – MONDAY, March 15, 2010 (All times PT)

• 8:45 am – 9:00 am – Opening Remarks w/ Conference Chairman Jim Stroud
• 9:00 am – 10:15 am – Keynote Presentation: Sourcing and Matching: Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition – led by Glen Cathey
• 10:45 am – 12:00 pm – Managing Social Media Madness led by Terri Coligan & Gail Houston
• 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm - Firefox Lab led by Russ Moon & John Turnberg
• 3:45 pm – 5:00 pm - Employing Talent Communities to Rehumanize the Recruiting Process led by Marvin Smith

ERE Expo 2010 Spring – Tuesday, March 16 – Wednesday, March 17

ERE Expo 2010 Spring will be live streaming here on ERE.net on Tuesday & Wednesday. Check out the full agenda here.

ERE EXPO – TUESDAY, MARCH 16 (All times PT):

• 8:45 am – 9:00 am – Opening Remarks w/ Conference Chairman John Vlastelica
• 9:00 am – 10:00 am – Keynote Presentation – Breaking the Talent Boundaries, led by Russell Kronenburg
• 10:15 am – 11:15 am – Beyond The Downturn: A Panel of Survivors Surviving the Year & Planning for the Decade w/ Jeremy Eskenazi, Ginny Eagle, Brad Warga, Paul Martin
• 11:15 am – 12:30 pm – 2010 Recruiting Excellence Award Winners Announced – Learn From the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards Honorees
• 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm - Building Engaged, Interactive Talent Communities, led by Sherie Valderrama
• 4:00 pm – 5:15 pm - Talent Attraction Successes at AT&T, led by Carrie Corbin

ERE EXPO – WEDNESDAY, March 17 (All times PT):

• 8:45 am – 9:00 am – Opening Remarks w/ Conference Chairman John Vlastelica
• 9:00 am – 10:00 am – KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: Dolby Labs: Talent Ecosystems, led by Jeff Hunter
• 10:30 am – 11:30 am – Convert Your Corporate Recruiters into Darwinian Headhunters, led by Lou Adler
• 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm - Improving Recruiting Function Performance by Systematically Managing the Candidate Experience led by Dr. John Sullivan
• 3:15 pm – 4:15 pm – Using Social Media to Attract & Engage Passive Candidates led by Kat Drum

For those of you who use Twitter, you can also join the conversation with attendees and others by following the #sourcecon hashtag and the #ereexpo hashtag on Twitter.

I also want to personally thank our sponsor Jibe for helping make the live stream possible.

And if you are the impulsive type, you can still register for both SourceCon and ERE Expo 2010 Spring.

Rev: nc 

I’m looking forward to the conversation in San Diego at ERE. (There’s still time to register if you hurry). With any luck, we’ll do something really interesting. I hope that the articles to date will provide a framework for discussion and brainstorming. The session is at 3:15 on Wednesday the 17th. I’m interested in seeing how long it can go.

My presentation will take about 6 or 7 minutes. The rest is conversation. I’m of the opinion that this sort of thing is better done by conversation than a presumptuous lecture.

We’ve covered a broad range of topics in the series to date: Geopolitics, Demographics, Automation, Health Systems, Infrastructure, and Performance Management as a Lifestyle. It’s been a whirlwind tour through a range of possibilities. The idea behind scenario planning is stretching your mind to the point that you can see opportunities and vulnerabilities that you can’t discover otherwise.

As if to underline the energy price scenario ($200 oil), crude prices have moved up about 15% in the past month. Soon the rest of the country will be enjoying $3 gasoline like we have in California. Even so, the point of scenarios is not a crisp set of forecasts. The idea is to get at the underlying structure of possibility.

Here’s the real headline. Disruption is coming to a recruiting operation near you. And, soon.

(Disruption happens when industries are overturned by a new way of looking at things. We’ve been undergoing waves of disruption while reconsidering recruiting in the light of slower growth and regionalization. It’s likely that fundamental definitions of quality, success, performance, and delivery are going to change. One great example of recruiting disruption is the ARMY’s video game that was originally used as a recruiting tool. Nowadays, it is a part of the soldier life cycle. The recruiting tool becomes the training tool. That’s a whole new way of managing human capital.)

At the turn of the 20th Century (say, 1905), most people worked on farms. Cars and airplanes were unusual. Communications meant snail mail. Some cities had big companies but they were not the norm. Recruiting then, as it is now in the vast majority of cases, involved word of mouth and “referrals” (meaning the willingness to vouch for someone) As organizations flatten and relationships between them and the people who work for them evolve, several things are going to be really important:

• Knowing exactly what you want to have done is the most cost-effective way to get it done. This means more planning.
• Sensors will be everywhere generating amazing insight into work, customers, markets, and organizations.
• Human resources will be increasingly called to task for navel-gazing at the expense of operations (see the ARMY video game for 21st Century HR)
• More and more people will work for smaller and smaller companies.
• Recruiting will have to spread beyond relationships that involve W2s. Recruiting is talent acquisition, not employee acquisition.

New techniques, ideas, and approaches will take root in emerging industries and fail in the dying industries. The very way that a company uses its people will become the thing that discriminates companies of one era and another.

The point of the conversation in San Diego is to see if we can figure out some of the possibilities and threats. Here’s how to prepare:

–Read the rest of the series to be prepared for the conversation:

• Five Scenarios: I Introduction
• Five Scenarios: II The Trends
• Five Scenarios: III The Marketplace
• Five Scenarios: IV The Future Matters
• Five Scenarios: V Guild Cities
• Five Scenarios VI: Invasion of the Shallybots
• Five Scenarios VII: The Pandemic
• Five Scenarios VIII: The Games

–Make notes about the things that grab you in the material.

–Pick a scenario and list three things you would do in that scenario.

–Make a list of three questions you’d ask about the other scenarios.

–If you can only do one thing, try to identify the one scenario that would make your approach to recruiting fail.

See you in San Diego. (The following week, I’ll summarize the conversation.)

Rev: nc 

How different is what you do today from five years ago? Are you able to find and hire top-notch people faster than before? Have you invested in systems, technology, and process improvements to lower costs and improve the speed to find and present qualified candidates? If not, you are clearly lagging behind those who have, and will have a tough time catching up. The corporate recruiting world is soon to be under full assault from the third-party and RPO world.

The evidence shows that increases in productivity significantly lag the investment in tools and process improvements. We normally first use new technologies to emulate what we already do in another way. It’s only after significant time that we begin to find new and innovative ways to use the tools and adjust our processes accordingly.

An example is the introduction of the typewriter. In the early days of the typewriter a manager would dictate to a stenographer who would take shorthand and then use the typewriter to create a document. This took two people and three steps. It took decades before we got to the point of eliminating the stenographer by having the manager learn to type and enter the document directly. But when this occurred, the profession of stenographer disappeared (as did shorthand), efficiency went up, and the number of people an office needed went down. While this is a very simple example, it illustrates what I mean: It takes a lot of time from the introduction of a new technology for people to learn how to use it and to adjust processes and structures.

From the 1970s through the mid-1990s organizations globally were investing heavily in computers and software and everyone assumed that because of those tools, productivity would soar. For anyone old enough to remember, that did not happen, and lots of economists called this the productivity paradox. It seemed that no investment in technology, computers, or software caused any major change in productivity. Then, around 1995 everything changed. Suddenly productivity began to climb. It has now settled back into a comfortable 2.4 percent per year growth which is still greater per year than before 1970. The great lesson is that investments in technology and process improvements pay off — but it takes time for that to happen.

Recruiting has seen no surge in productivity, and corporate recruiting functions may even be losing ground as the talent market becomes more complex and employer needs change. Relative to most other functions in an organization, HR and recruiting have made little investment in technology and even less in process improvements. A recruiter from 1970 would be very comfortable in most corporate recruiting departments today except for learning to use the computer.

My concern is that recruiters have been and still are too focused on the short term to see that investments they make today will eventually pay off — and pay off tremendously. If you have not made the investments, you are not only behind, but it may be impossible to catch up. Being able to use technology requires a learning curve that early adopters get from the beginning. Look at how hard it is for a middle-aged person to grasp the power of social media or to fully realize the capabilities of the iPhone compared to someone younger who has been working with these technologies from the beginning of their careers. Time is not our friend when it comes to adopting technology, so early investments pay off the most.

Here are a few ideas on what kinds of investments you should be making:

1. Invest in software that will increase your ability to interact with candidates. This includes all sorts of things from websites and highly-targeted marketing systems to candidate relationship management tools. Most of you are still focused on the zero-value-add backend systems that do nothing directly to serve your customers: the candidates. Applicant tracking systems may be convenient, but they are the equivalent of order entry systems for salespeople. They are not going to make you better at finding candidates or getting them interested in your clients. You will need to refine how you source candidates and try to reduce the number of people you need to do each step of the hiring cycle. The goal might be for a single person to attract, source, screen, and present a candidate while the administrative tools automatically track everything that is happening and generate the appropriate reports and paperwork. RPOs and agencies have been working on these things for at least a decade and are about to reap its benefits.
2. Invest time in thinking through how you recruit people today. How many steps, people, tools, and touchpoints are average? How much time does a recruiter spend per hire? What could be done to shave seconds or minutes off that? What would you have to do differently if a recruiter were to deal with twice as many requisitions as they do today? The answers to these questions can form the backbone of an improvement strategy that will pay back high dividends down the road. Several RPOs have made big strides toward integrating automated processing and tools into what they do. This has given them the ability to charge lower prices while maintaining customer loyalty. Over time, they will refine and improve the technology until it will offer them such a large time and cost-saving that very few will be able to compete with older and less technology-enabled methods.
3. Move on from legacy systems and old technologies. Even if you have not recovered your investment, hanging on to obsolete applicant tracking tools, old databases, and inefficient processes will hurt you. Anything you own or use that is more than three years old and has not been upgraded is a candidate for the dust bin. Most technology has moved into the cloud or is delivered from an ASP. No software sits on your own servers unless your organization is large enough to need its own instance of the software. Almost every kind of software is being delivered as an app that can be installed on your mobile devices as well as your computers. Social media is dominating the sourcing arena and search is becoming easier to do, is likely to be built into applications, and is more powerful than ever. Resumes are being served up along with compilations about the candidates that have been scraped together from many different sources. Candidates are delivering their own “social resumes” that expand the information on the usual resume. You need to be able to accommodate all of this easily and quickly. Recruiting productivity will go up — I think exponentially — very soon. Most of this improvement will come from third-party agencies and RPOs. Unfortunately, the corporate recruiting world is still mired in yesterday and is unable to make the investments needed to move productivity up and to ensure success.

Rev: nc 

Want to get updates from the community delivered straight to your inbox daily? Make sure to subscribe to the community newsletter so you don’t miss a conversation.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Are you clueless about diversity recruiting?
2. Developing and nurturing candidate relationships
3. Working for a boss that doesn’t know recruiting
4. Monthly retainers for recruiters
5. How common is a draw in commission based sales positions these days?
6. Featured group of the week: Independent Recruiters

1. Are you clueless about diversity recruiting?

Sarah Welstead writes, “Age discrimination in the workforce is still prevalent, but it’s based on obsolete information.  The 50+ group is the fastest-growing demographic on the Internet; they’re more productive than younger counterparts (fewer sick days, less-frequent turnover); and our own research found that almost 85% of them had cellphones (and almost 10% of them were using Blackberrys every day)!

What is your take on diversity recruiting? Weigh in on Sarah’s post.

2. Developing and nurturing candidate relationships

Matthew Hakaim writes about the importance of candidate relationships. He states, “Building candidate relationships with each and every individual that will stand strong over the months and years translates into loyalty and referrals that will increase placements and income.  Critical to the process of building that relationship is the art of listening.  Make it a practice to be fully present during all of your conversations.  Learn what is important to each unique candidate.

Building relationships is important but does it work in an environment where more recs are being pushed to recruiters? What’s your take?

3. Working for a boss who doesn’t know recruiting

Sung Kim writes, “It’s not really a secret that I believe that “corporate HR” and “Recruiting” should be two separate departments, neither one reporting into one another but rather facilitating each others’ needs as distinctively individual units.  It’s not been the first time I’ve said it or blogged about it since it’s always been my professional stance.  Simply put, the “traditional HR” person just doesn’t get it.

Is working as a recruiter in an HR department more difficult? Let Sung know what you think.

4. Monthly retainers for recruiters

Have you ever worked as a recruiter on a monthly retainer? A commenter in the forum asks, “I have been retained before by clients, but never on a monthly basis.  Have any of you made a monthly retained agreement?  Wondering what to charge?” Can you share any tips with her?

5. How common is a draw in commission-based sales positions these days?

Have you been seeing more draw based commission-only sales positions out there? What have you seen as far as structures for these arrangements? A questioner in the Independent Recruiter group asks, “When there is a base plus commission model, how common is it to have a draw (recoverable or nonrecoverable) on commission for a few months?

A commenter threw out this warning: “I would be very leary of a recoverable draw scenario where there are no existing accounts given and no initial period of a non-recoverable draw.” What’s your take on draws?

6. Featured group of the week: Independent Recruiters

The Independent Recruiters group was founded by Craig Silverman and is all about connecting the community of independent recruiters. The statement for the group states that, “[t]his is a group for recruiters that are interested in working with independents or as an independent to share information. We will discuss topics such as: fee agreements, split placements, Applicant Tracking Systems, direct recruiting, job boards, account management, developing contract business, back office services, building your brand image, and more.

There are several discussions going on such as the best industries for independent recruiters and who’s responsibility is it to check references.

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

Rev: nc 

The Brazen Careerist has launched an interesting experiment in social recruiting, introducing what the site and its founder Penelope Trunk call a “social resume.”

Aimed squarely at the young Gen-Yers for whom Brazen Careerist was designed, the social resumes allow these early career professionals to offer hints at their potential. Besides all the usual biographical stuff of a traditional resume, these social resumes provide a home for the professional musings and business ideas of the participant.

The announcement of today’s launch says, “The application helps younger candidates compete more effectively by overcoming an unlevel career playing field that gives preference to years of experience, and helps recruiters discover candidates who are on the verge of becoming stars.”

It’s an ambitious goal, and certainly the site has no shortage of Gen Y careerists eager for a showcase. It has 100,000 updates a month, which includes the robust conversations that take place. How many people that translates into is not a number the site shares, though the 600 percent growth suggests the Brazen Careerist is offering its target demographic what it wants.

But this is a well-trod path, with hundreds of  networks vying for participants and dozens of resume replacement and resume makeover sites launching in just the last few years.

LinkedIn and Facebook represent the establishment social networking sites: LinkedIn for business, and Facebook for fun. Granted, neither offers the same sort of stage for a Gen Y careerist as Trunk’s social resume. But both have a huge head start in traffic and brand recognition.

Then there are the resume-reinvention startups like Personavita and VisualCV. These offer flexible resumes that are more portfolio-oriented than what you’ll see on a LinkedIn.

When I discussed these with Penelope Trunk, I was thinking “How are you going to compete for time and attention?” How old school. Sixty seconds on the phone with her and I realized Brazen Careerist is part of the vanguard in new social media recruiting ideas.

There’s still plenty of room for the experiential resume — it won’t be going away anytime in the forseeable future — but as she made clear, the Brazen Careerist and its social resumes are a better portrait of a 25-30 year old than any single-sheet bio.

“The recruiting industry is shifting from search ninjas to those who understand conversations,” she said.

The social resume is not some standalone document, but a living, changing profile of a person. The conversations the members participate in with their Gen Y peers; how they analyze things, explain themselves, and relate are the ingredients of that social resume.

Finding talent in this environment is different than doing a keyword search on Monster or a Boolean search on Google. “It’s a skill to judge people through their conversation,” Trunk explained. “It’s like an interview in that way.”

The Brazen Careerist is, at heart, a social network for the Gen Y professional. There are niche networks for specific careers, locales, pop culture, and even, or should I say, especially for ideas. Read through a few of the posts and you quickly discover the nature of the conversations are more collaboratively helpful than purely observational.

That’s typical of Gen Yers, says Trunk. “They were raised on teams and teamwork. They’re not like the Baby Boomers where everything is a competition.” She also says that this generation is less into the one-on-one discussions of email, than it is social network conversations, yet another manifestation of its team approach.

There is no consensus about the long term effectiveness of social media recruiting generally. I explore that in depth in the March issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. However, there is no doubt that it is a growing trend and almost certainly should be a part of every recruiter’s toolbox.

Today’s young employees grew up with networks as a natural part of their daily experience. So it’s hardly surprising that they are engaged in professional networking on the scale they are.

As Trunk says in today’s press release, “The new workforce is about knowledge management. So you had better be known for your ideas, otherwise no one will know why they should hire you.”

Rev: nc 

“Job growth is about to begin,” The Conference Board declared Monday. In the second quarter, says Manpower. “We are already seeing evidence,” insists the Association of Executive Search Consultants.

Even coming upon the heels of a robust labor report last week (that fueled a Wall Street mini-rally) these pronouncements probably won’t do much for the pessimists, but for recruiters, consider the collective news a call to reveille.

The Manpower report in particular says the second quarter should see a “modest” increase in hiring, based on the company’s survey of 18,000 employers in the U.S. While 73 percent expect to keep staffing level, 16 percent expect to hire. Only 8 percent expect to cut. (The remaining 3 percent fall into the “don’t know” category.)

“We continue to see encouraging signs in hiring activity in the U.S.,” says Manpower Inc. Chairman and CEO Jeff Joerres.

If you read down in the release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you would have seen that temp jobs took a big jump in February. It’s a good sign. Employers may not be ready to commit, but at least they’re dating.

The leaders of two of the biggest staffing firms in the U.S., Tig Gilliam of Adecco, and Roy Krause, CEO of SFN Group (previously Spherion), expect to see 100,000 temp hires per month before much longer. Gilliam also says Adecco has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of its temps hired on full time.

Like the staffing industry, executive recruiters have seen improvement, though it has been more noticeable outside the U.S. As a whole, the industry took a 32.5 percent year-over-year revenue hit in 2009. But the 4th quarter brought revenue improvement and an increase in search activity.

Globally, Asia/Pacific, Central/South America, and Europe saw increases in executive search activity in the 4th quarter of 2009 versus the same quarter in 2008. Though the quarter was down over the 4th quarter of 2008 by .5 percent in North America (the U.S., represents the biggest share) there were 11.4 percent more searches started than in the third quarter of 2009.

Add these reports to the other reports and data coming in and there’s little doubt that the world economy is improving, with the U.S. trailing, but moving forward nonetheless.

That this is no gangbuster recovery in the U.S. is evident from all the cautious comments and qualified statements. ERE member Keith Halperin has amassed a slew of estimates from well-respected sources suggesting it could take years before the 8.4 million plus unemployed are back to work. Scroll down to the comments to see his data points.

The Conference Board’s various surveys shows that confidence in the recovery is shaky and uncertain, even as its Employment Trends Index rises. Consumer confidence dropped big in February, mostly because of fears about job growth. Meanwhile Monday’s Employment Trends Index posted a sixth monthly gain, and the biggest overall percentage gain for a six month period since 1994.

The February rise to 93.5 from January’s 93.2, modest though it may seem, was enough to lead Gad Levanon, associate director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board, to say, “The continued rise in the ETI suggests that job growth is about to begin.”

Rev: nc 

Recruiting is clearly not for everyone. Its demands can be extraordinary and its customers unrealistic. Its candidates not entirely truthful and its reward often just the self-satisfied glow of a job well done.

By its very nature, recruiting often creates a sense of contrast and contradiction. Hiring managers want the perfect candidate for the lowest price; candidates want the perfect job for the highest price and the government attempts to legislate a fair and level playing filed. Stuck between these conflicting forces, egos, and politics, is the recruiter: a person who is charged with the overwhelming task of identifying, attracting, and hiring the people required to create a great organization. (What is a great organization?)

Here are a few characteristics required to successfully do this job?

• A Strong Desire to Make Things Happen. Recruiting is a push business, and if you wait for things to happen, you will be sorry down the road. Hiring new employees is no easy task but if you press on and do what is required, you will be able to come into work and see the results of your efforts in the form of shinny new employees. If this type of satisfaction, born of seeing tangible results makes you smile, this is a very good sign.
• Strong Nuanced Thinking. Seeing the world in black and white is dangerous. The shades of grey we miss are often where the real hiring decisions are made. Ever wonder why a perfect candidate does not get the job? Ever look at the candidate they finally hire and wonder why they made that choice? If so, I suggest that you step back look more deeply into the organization’s culture: its dynamics, politics, personalities, and long-term survivors. Learn to read between the lines and the smiles and the polite conversation. Hires do not arise from simply matching qualifications with requirements but from complex political, emotional reactions to a given candidate. Recruiting is a place where nuanced thinking can help you to be successful by understanding the real attributes managers want before they pull the trigger.
• A Thick Skin. Recruiting is not for the faint of heart. Recruiting is not for those who wish to be loved. (If you want unconditional love, get a dog.) Recruiting is not for those who can’t manage conflict and/or ambiguity and/or stress. Recruiting is a contact sport whose rough and tumble playing field can leave us all with the occasional battered ego and feelings of self righteous indignation. If we are to be successful recruiters, we must be OK with that day in and day out type of a life while never giving in to cynicism or losing our sense of humor.
• Political Savvy. This characteristic has always been my Achilles heel — my inability to relate to the politics. It is not that I did not understand them. It is simply that I did not care about them as much as I cared about doing my recruiting. I lived under the belief that if I did good work, everything would fall into place. Sadly, that viewpoint is naïve and I suggest that you do not make that same mistake. For us to be successful, we must know where the power lies, what is acceptable, what is not acceptable, and how to get the job done without stepping on the wrong people’s toes. I can tell you from experience those in power do not like being told they are wrong, especially when they are.
• A Sense of Responsibility. Endless things can stand in the way of making a hire. Poor communication, compensation issues, unclear requirements — the list is endless. Successful recruiters will drive the process though any and all obstacles because they feel a sense of responsibility. They feel a sense of ownership for what must be accomplished as well as their specific role in its completion, because bottom line, you either make the hire or you don’t.
• A Sense of Urgency. Always in a rush? So am I, and that characteristic creates results. Most of the great recruiters I know are not exactly patient people. They understand that deals have a shelf life and burning daylight will do nothing for your career, your hires, or your value to the organization. Take the time to know what is required, make your plan, and execute, because there are the quick and there are the dead. Being quick is a prized characteristic and dozing in your chair can get you wheeled out the door.
• A Disdain for Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is means-over-end while great recruiting is end-over-means. Personally, bureaucracy makes me crazy. Forms on desks waiting for a signatures (What do you mean she is traveling? Have someone else sign the damn thing…); compensation people to run numbers again; and diversity people to review who was and was not interviewed. (What do compensation people do all day?)

Other characteristics? I am sure there are, but it is 1:30 a.m. and I need to close a VP of sales for a startup tomorrow!

Rev: nc 

The most powerful recruiting advertisement I’ve seen in the last two years didn’t originate from Google and it wasn’t found on a social media site; instead it was a “take your breath away” billboard designed to attract a single person.

Usually billboards are a complete waste of money, but this one dared to go where no one has gone before. We’ve all seen the famous 1916 James Montgomery Flagg portrait of Uncle Sam with the caption “I want you for the U.S. Army,” but imagine if instead of a generic message you passed a billboard or poster bearing your name, your image, and a message specific to you, i.e. Nicole Pollock “we want you!” There is zero chance you wouldn’t pull over immediately just to stare, but chances are you would have already learned about it through calls and text messages from your family and friends. Such a startling communication would even cause people who didn’t know you to take notice and to wonder about both you and what kind of organization would be so bold to attempt this type of recruiting.

The roadside billboard was only the beginning of a broad reaching “one-to-one recruiting” campaign launched by Wilkes University to land a single student. In addition to the billboard, it added personalized messages to pizza boxes at the local pizza shop, signs on top of local gas pumps, pre-screening ads in local movie theaters, directory signs in the local mall and even localized ads on MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central. The campaign turned everyone in the community that interacted with Nicole Pollock, the student of interest, into a stakeholder/influencer of her decision, which was ultimately “yes.”

The marketing firm, 160over90, hired by the university, clearly understood the value of the seldom used but powerful one-to-one approach. While not appropriate for every vacancy, the cost of a one-to-one campaign pales in comparison to the value of getting a top performer into a key role. Even if you are not ready to engage in an effort as bold as Wilkes University, there are components of one-to-one recruiting that can bolster any effort.

Narrowing Recruiting Scope Broadcasting to One-to-One

Defining the scope of recruiting processes and activities is perhaps one of the most overlooked elements of planning in the typical recruiting function. Instead of developing programs and practices that target a specific range of actions or individuals, most recruiting leaders engage in broadcasting, i.e. using a one-size-fits all approach. One-size-fits-all clothing generally isn’t that attractive, and neither are overly generic recruiting processes and communications. Scope, like clothing comes in many sizes, including:

• Broadcasting (targeting a large multi-demographic audience)
• Narrowcasting (targeting a smaller more defined audience)
• Microcasting (targeting a specific population within a narrowcast audience)
• One-to-one, aka 1:1 (targeting a specific individual)

Personalization is the Wave of the Future

The practice of 1:1 or personalized marketing is a well-established concept in customer relationship management circles, and is becoming more of a mainstream practice thanks to many emerging technologies. Last fall, the Castrol Oil Company practiced an extreme version of personalized marketing by placing cameras along a main road in London to capture the license plates of passing vehicles. The license numbers were then cross-referenced with vehicle registration records, enabling Castrol Oil to display targeted ads on a digital billboard suggesting which type of oil the drivers should use as they drove past the billboard!

In addition to 1:1 marketing, personalization is invading the product and service deliver arms of organizations as well. Mass customized manufacturing enables firms like BMW to personalize literally every car they produce so that no two are the same.

Rarely do HR functions support mass personalization, but there are exceptions. Cafeteria style benefits programs allow employees to personalize their benefits portfolio. Career planning tools in use by firms like Deloitte allow employees to customize their careers (Deloitte’s program is referred to as the Mass Career Customization Program.) Executive recruiting efforts often target “most wanted” individuals i.e. individuals the organization has remotely assessed and determined that they would like to recruit them in the near future. One-to-one recruiting isn’t unheard of, just rare. Google has employed it several times, most notably with its famous “math puzzle” billboard, and the practice was common at FirstMerit Bank while under Michael Homula’s recruiting leadership.

The Many Benefits of One-to-One Recruiting

When I present during corporate recruiter trainings or HR offsites, I frequently mention one-to-one recruiting examples just to see how progressive the organization is with regards to its thinking about the value of top talent. Undoubtedly, most audience participants rarely ponder the value of the talent, they seek and universally assume it’s just too expensive for them to consider. Those open to actually delivering strategic recruiting versus just talking about it, often change their viewpoint once they learn more about the approach and its many benefits, some of which include:

• One-to-one marketing builds the employer brand—one-to-one recruiting efforts provide the organization with an opportunity to establish a much more realistic brand perception among a highly targeted and highly desired population, often in a way that gets talked about by others. (Contrary to popular belief, not all employees/candidates experience the organization the exact same way, so brand perception is not universal across the organizations despite generic corporate messages that say “we are…”) Using one-to-one creates high visible individuals who can become ambassadors of your brand in the community.
• One-to-one targets act as magnets—one-to-one efforts almost always target industry icons. While you will certainly spend a little more money to capture these individuals, doing so will not only send a message that “something is up,” it will save you money in the long run as magnet hires often bring with them or attract from other organizations a significant volume of quality hires.
• One-to-one efforts can boost morale—if your organization has recruited team players who like to win, one-to-one efforts send a clear message that your organization will do whatever it takes to recruit the very best for existing employees to work alongside fellow top performers and industry game-changers. A win for the team is a win for all, and morale will likely skyrocket.
• One-to-one efforts increase visibility—bold recruiting efforts are almost always noticed in ways that dramatically increase the publicity the organization receives, raising the profile of the recruiting function both inside and outside the organization.
• One-to-one efforts will also likely net boomerangs—even if you don’t actually “catch” your primary target the first time around, the power of the one-on-one campaign guarantees that they will consider your firm again later in their career, without much additional effort on your part.
• One-to-one efforts produce amazing results—rarely are recruiting efforts 100% successful, but one-to-one efforts almost always produce positive results.

Tools and Approaches to Consider

Even if there’s no chance that you’re going to try a full-fledged one-to-one recruiting campaign, there are many tools and approaches that have proven to be extremely beneficial when included as a component of broader efforts. These approaches include:

• Identifying how to reach them—get at least a rough idea of the best way to reach your target candidates. Start by asking your own top performers in similar jobs, “how could we find you again?” Use the information your employees provide as an indication of the best ways to identify and communicate with your targeted candidates.
• Identify their job acceptance criteria—there’s no more important step in any sales process than asking each of your top targets what decision criteria they will use when deciding to accept or reject an offer. With that information in hand, you can at least modify the recruiting and offer processes to ensure that you have provided each candidate with enough evidence to prove to their satisfaction that you best meet their criteria.
• Ask them to apply—most recruiting processes assume that merely being made aware of a job opening will be enough to trigger everyone to apply. This is a huge mistake because there are a significant number of currently employed individuals who, for whatever reason, won’t apply to a new job unless they are personally invited.
• CEO calls—if you’re not already using them, you should be aware that a personalized call from a CEO who knows the candidate’s background is the most effective recruiting tool there is. If you can get your CEO to agree to a limited number of calls per month, you can use them to convince individuals to apply or to sell them on your final offer.
• Personalize the job—top candidates generally accept because the work itself and the opportunities are unique and exciting. As a result, if you expect to have a reasonable chance at landing top candidates, you will need to realize from the beginning that at least part of the job will need to be customized to their unique needs and interests.
• Identify who they would like to meet—most recruiting schedules are set based 100% on which individuals within the company have decided that they want to interview the individual. Unfortunately, that ignores the fact that the candidate themselves might want to meet certain individuals (by title) before they would be comfortable in accepting the job. Allowing top candidates to meet a few people of their choice makes the hiring process appear more personalized to them.
• Personalize onboarding—if you tailor the onboarding to their unique needs, not only will they feel accepted by their team faster, they will also reach their minimum productivity levels in a much shorter time and be more apt to share positive stories about the organization with former colleagues.

Final Thoughts

Every freshman studying journalism, communications, PR, sales, and marketing learns in their first semester that if you want “your message” to be read and accepted, you need to make it personally relevant to the target audience. It’s a basic lesson that we often forget in the world of broadly targeted recruitment advertising, candidate messaging, and employer branding. Mass personalization is essential if you are courting top candidates, but I would argue that it’s quickly becoming essential for all quality candidates. No one wants to feel that they are entering a corporate monolith where they will become lost. Recruiting leaders need to examine every program and process to determine how each can appear more personalized to candidates. They should also allocate more time to benchmarking marketing functions, which are light years ahead of most recruiting functions in the area of effective personalization.

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Here is what is going on around the ERE.net world this week:

• Sign up for this week’s free webinar on Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, Going from Good To ‘Elite’!: Becoming an Elite Recruiter, led by David Szary from the Recruiter Academy. David will discuss the competencies, skills, attributes and work habits of elite recruiters.
• We are just a week away from turning San Diego into the recruiting capital of the world as hundreds of recruiters are set to converge on the city for SourceCon and ERE Expo 2010 Spring. If you aren’t able to make it there in person, make sure to keep your schedules clear next week as both SourceCon and ERE Expo will be live streaming many of the sessions right here on ERE.net. Visit the websites for times and agenda information and stay tuned for more about which sessions will be streamed.
• You can also follow and take part in the conversations taking place in San Diego on Twitter by following @ereexpo and the #ereexpo and #sourcecon hashtags.
• Just last week we announced that the third #socialrecruiting summit will be taking place at Best Buy HQ in Minneapolis on May 17. Join the conversation at the only event which cuts through the hype to tell you not WHY you should be using social recruiting tactics, but to help you learn HOW you can successfully implement them into your recruiting function. Check out the agenda and session leaders today at socialrecruitingsummit.com and reserve your spot today. Don’t wait too long, space is limited and the summit has sold out in the past.
• For those of you on the search and placement side of the business, you will want to get yourself to Las Vegas from June 9 – 11 for the fourth annual Fordyce Forum. Brought to you by our sister publication The Fordyce Letter, this is the conference for big billers to talk about how to consistently earn five and six-figure fees. Check out all of the information and book your spot at www.fordyceforum.com.

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9.7 percent and holding steady. Net job loss in February 2010: 36,000. Net job loss in February 2009: 726,000.

That’s the top line of the monthly Labor Department’s employment numbers for February. The results surprised most economists who had been expecting a higher job loss because of the snowstorms that crippled big parts of the U.S. last month.

The good news, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, is that but for the weather, the numbers would have shown an increase in jobs during the month. Citing Morgan Stanley economist David Greenlaw, the Journal says, “payrolls would’ve increased sharply last month — and would be expected to show strong growth in the March (employment) report.”

So take that you naysayers and prophets of doom. The U.S. may not exactly be booming, but it appears those predictions of job growth in the second quarter of 2010 are spot on.

Americans, however, aren’t feeling the same confidence that economists and labor analysts are. Consumer confidence, as measured by The Conference Board, dropped precipitously in February, free-falling from 56.5 in January to 46 in February. The last time the venerable index took that big a plunge was in February a year ago, when it dropped 12 points to 25.3.

There are all sorts of explanations for the plunge after three months of steady, if slow increases. Chief among them is the outlook for employment.

“Concerns about current business conditions and the job market pushed the Present Situation Index (one of the elements used to calculate the confidence index) down to its lowest level in 27 years. Consumers’ short-term outlook also took a turn for the worse, with fewer consumers anticipating an improvement in business conditions and the job market over the next six months. Consumers also remain extremely pessimistic about their income prospects,” said the Board’s Lynn Franco, director of its Consumer Research Center.

This morning’s numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provide some explanation for American’s pessimism. Of the 14.9 million unemployed, 40 percent have been out of work for seven months or more. When you add in the 2.5 million people out of work, but not counted as unemployed because they gave up, and the 8.8 million (an increase of 700,000 from January) who are working part-time because they can’t find a full time job, then the full effect of the recession becomes apparent.

Together, those numbers add up to 26.2 million Americans who are out-of-work or underemployed. And those are only the official numbers.

For those with jobs, the BLS says the average per hour wage was $22.46, an increase of 1.9 percent in the last 12 months.  Overtime hours and total weekly hours worked declined during the month.

Now, instead of closing on that sour note, look at the stats for temporary workers: February showed a gain in that sector of 47,500 jobs. The 2.009 million temp jobs during the month was particularly good news, since it is a gain of 76,000 jobs over the 1.933 million temp jobs in February 2009.

Like the robin, increases in temp jobs is considered a harbinger of permanent hiring to come.

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