Every job seeker should be prepared to answer some tough questions. It’s the part of the interview process that makes job seekers the most nervous. If, however, you calm your nerves by preparing to answer the tough questions ahead of time, you may sail right through the interview.

Dave Fogg, associate director of career services for DeVry University, says, “Be calm and relaxed. Stop and think before you answer the question.” He says that many candidates “don’t know what the hiring manager is looking for. They’ve not thought that far ahead and they are just not prepared for general HR questions. Tell me about yourself … don’t give me a bio.” In order to be prepared, he advises, “Meet with a career advisor and have them do a mock interview. You’re not trying to be perfect in the mock interview, you’re trying to reach perfection for the interview — but we know no one is perfect.”

Start by anticipating basic questions the interviewer is going to ask, and prepare solid answers. This will give you confidence in the interview, and confidence is very attractive to hiring managers. Here are a few basic questions to think about:

1. Tell me a little about yourself. This is not the moment to recall your life history, nor is it the moment to ramble on. Prepare a focused, two- to three-sentence statement about what makes you the best candidate for this job.

Example: “I graduated from [insert college here] with a degree in [insert major here]. Since that time, I’ve been working as a [insert career here] where I have done [insert key accomplishments here]. I’m looking forward to [insert future goals here] and I feel this position would be a great step in that direction.”

2. What are you looking for in your next position? Design your answer to reflect the position for which you are being interviewed. Be genuine, but highlight what you find most attractive about this role and how it fits into your overall career goals.

3. Why are you interested in this position? This is a great opportunity to talk about why you are a match for the position. Use examples from your job history and tie those to the value you would be able to offer if you served in this role.

4. Why did you leave each of your previous positions? Be honest, but remain positive and succinct in your answer. Hiring managers want to understand a job seeker’s career decisions and motivations. The job history should make sense, otherwise there is room to interpret it as a red flag and potential problem.

5. What is your greatest weakness? Job seekers who answer this appropriately can make a positive impression by taking responsibility and explaining their commitment to improve. Select a weakness that allows you to demonstrate what you’ve done to address it. Use a past, present and future statement to explain it.

Example: “In the past, I used to have a problem with time management, so I asked my supervisor how I should be prioritizing my work and took a class to learn how to use my calendar and task lists more effectively. Since then, my time management skills have improved and I’m confident they will continue to do so. For example. …”

Here are five additional strategies that successful job seekers use to prepare for tough interview questions:

1. Before they begin interviewing, they analyze their résumé and job history to identify areas that will be difficult for them to explain. They take the time to develop strong, succinct answers to address each issue so they can be confident in the interview.

2. They know how to use past, present and future statements. They take responsibility for any past mistakes, emphasize what they learned, and state what they should have done or how they would handle things differently now.

3. They remain calm and focus on appearing confident. Rambling answers distract from a job seeker’s achievements and give the impression of nervousness. Speak with a low tone at a measured pace.

4. They are positive and professional. They stay away from comments that blame others, sound defensive or could be perceived as negative. Hiring managers are looking for people who are mature enough to take responsibility for their actions.

5. Their answers incorporate positive examples from their work history. They know that interviewers are more convinced by brief, relevant stories that demonstrate skills, as opposed to someone simply “telling” them they can do the job.Keep these tips in mind and your performance in an interview will stand out over your competition.

Becoming comfortable with your ability to answer tough questions is half the battle. Confident candidates get hired. Employers aren’t looking for perfection. If you effectively convey confidence in your skills and experience during your interview, they will be confident in you.

Personally, I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.  –Estragon, Waiting for Godot

Some years ago I was sitting in a product design meeting. The discussion kept circling around some particularly knotty issues that no one in the room actually knew much about.

In one sense, this wasn’t a serious problem given that the company was still actively hiring and there was a recognition that more people were needed. Someone finally commented that we’d have to make sure to hire someone with the particular expertise in question, and in one fell swoop, that task was assigned to a non-existent person. Again, this is not necessarily a problem … yet. It became a problem, however, as the meeting progressed:

“We don’t have anyone on the team who can handle […technology…] either.”

“That’ll be the next hire.”

“Wasn’t the next hire supposed to be […original problem…]?”

“We’ll need someone who can do both.”

And so it went, with each problem that came up being assigned to the same non-existent person. Each problem would be dealt with when the right person was hired. Unfortunately, each individual present had a very different idea of what that right person looked like and the necessary skills that he or she would possess. Those who have ever read a college catalog might have noticed the vast number of courses in a wide range of subjects taught by Staff. Well, by the end of that meeting, Dr. Staff was probably the only person who could have handled the job.

More recently, I was conducting a training exercise. The exercise was focused on leadership, negotiation, and creative problem-solving. Part of the structure involved people being given a problem and a list of names of people who might be able to help them. Only some of those people are actually present. The objective is to figure out alternate solutions that do not involve the missing people. What was particularly fascinating is that every time I’ve conducted this exercise, a significant number of participants become fixated on the missing people, convinced that if those people were present, all the problems would immediately evaporate. They spend the entire exercise waiting for help that never arrives.

When I ask at the end, “Why do you think that [missing] person will actually help you? What if they have their own agenda?” the participants are taken aback. They had never considered the fact that Godot might have his own wants and needs, even if he should happen to show up. I’ve run this exercise with managers, college students, psychologists, engineers, and so forth, and the same behaviors emerge every time. In each case, the person who is not present becomes the repository of the hopes and dreams of the rest of the group. In the end, that “person” has become a tool whose only purpose for existing is to solve the problems of the group.

The difficulty, of course, is that the longer this behavior persists, the harder it is for the organization to find anyone they are willing to hire. First, none of the people they are looking at actually fits the mental image that they’ve developed: a person with some of the desired skills is simply not recognized or passed over for a future someone who will have all the skills. Unfortunately, Dr. Staff is a very busy person, and is somewhat less likely to show up than Santa Claus. Also, Dr. Staff is not only expected to show up eventually, but to be totally and completely enthusiastic about working for the company. People who do not exhibit that mindless enthusiasm are deemed to be not serious candidates.

Hiring, however, is a two-way street: part of the job of the existing employees is to help get the candidate excited about the company. To be fair, the search rarely lasts forever. Eventually, people get tired of interviewing candidates and someone does get hired. Often, though, it’s the last person to walk through the door, as opposed to the most qualified of the people who came through.

A Focus on Goals, Objectives

Start by focusing on goals and objectives. What are you trying to accomplish? How will you know when you’ve succeeded? View the job from the perspective of goals, not skills. Quantify what you’re trying to do and figure out how you’ll recognize someone who can accomplish one or more of those major goals.

Second, look for people who have a track record of getting things done. Remember that there are often multiple solutions to any problem. The skills you see as necessary only represent one possible path. People who are good at solving problems in a particular field may well find other solutions that will be more effective. Good problem-solvers are also the most likely people to acquire skills when they need them, whereas people who just have skills might not be good at solving problems.

Next, look for passion and enthusiasm when they talk about the work they’ve done and the problems they’ve solved. Don’t worry about whether or not they’re enthusiastic about this company and this job. If you’re offering them the chance to do what they love doing, that’ll come quick enough.

Take the time to find out what they’re looking for. Don’t make the hiring process all about you; make it about them. After all, when you make someone an offer, you want them to accept it. Take the time to connect with the candidate and give them every opportunity to feel that they’ll enjoy working with you.

Finally, periodically check and evaluate your progress. Make sure you’re not looking for Dr. Staff or waiting for Godot.

And I keep thinking tomorrow is coming today. So I am endlessly waiting. – The Counting Crows

It’s hard to argue against the fact that 2009 has been a rough year for corporate recruiters. Budgets have been slashed, training has been all but eliminated, and even with reduced recruiting activity, requisition loads are still onerous.

Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but as it falls at the end of the year, it is an opportune time to take a minute and to thank those who have helped you throughout the year. While executive recruiters used to get huge paychecks and bonuses, corporate recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as under-appreciated.

Hiring managers, often busy trying to meet end-of-year deadlines, rarely find the time to send out a well-written thank you or take you to lunch to express their gratitude for all the work that you’ve done on their behalf.

New hires are acclimating to their job, which more often than not isn’t exactly what they thought it would be, so thanks are not on the top of their minds.

Every year come December, I start to envision what it would be like in a perfect world where the efforts of corporate recruiters were recognized with a real thank you. Recruiters may not get as many “thank yous” as they deserve, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that recruiters have a profound impact on people’s work and private lives.

A “thank you note” from a grateful new hire…

I just wanted you to know that you are my hero!

The Christmas season is an ideal time for me as a new employee to say thanks to the people who helped me get this new job in this competitive job market. Specifically, I want to thank you, “my recruiter” for:

• My self-confidence: the way you treated me during the hiring process built up my confidence. My daily life is better because you helped to remind me of my many strengths and capabilities.

• My job: I have a great job and a paycheck during a time when many well-qualified individuals don’t. I owe you big time because you recognized my unique talents and guided me through the complicated hiring process. I am no longer under-appreciated by my former firm, or worse, unemployed. Both my family and I are happier and more secure, thanks to your hard work and trust in my ability. Our house will be secure and there will be lots under the Christmas tree because of you.

• You were the face of the company: applying for a job is a lonely task that is full of uncertainty, but you were my first and primary contact. Rather than being an adversary, you treated me like someone who was “special” (maybe you treat everyone that way, but honestly, I felt like I was the only applicant for the job). You were always there when I had a question, and you skillfully calmed me down so that I could perform at my best during the hiring process.

• Finding me: thank you for finding my name in the boundless confines that make up the Internet. Your ability to search out details about me and learn about my interests from dozens of sources was exceptional.

• You built a relationship: I got to know you through Facebook and Twitter, which made it easier for us to share the truth with each other. If it were not for that social network relationship and your strong convincing skills, I’m not sure I would have ever taken the time to apply for a job that seemed so different than what I was used to.

• Identifying my capabilities: even though you might have been faced with hundreds of resumes of people applying for my job, you kept mine at the top of the pile. I now realize that I should have spent more time improving my resume, so that my skills and experience came through more clearly, but your superior sorting skills found traits, experience, and potential that others might have overlooked.

• Coaching me: thanks for helping me through the hiring and interview process so that my strongest attributes came through for all to see. Even though my interview skills were a little rusty, you were my champion and coach.

• The candidate experience: I have certainly been through numerous other interview processes in my career, but none seem to be as closely tailored to my needs. I never felt like I was being grilled, and before every step of the process you explained exactly what I should expect. Even if I wouldn’t have gotten the job, I would’ve remembered the positive way that I was treated and I would’ve become an even more enthusiastic customer of your firm.

• Answering my concerns: you probably knew that I was nervous and uncertain after the final interview. Your honesty and openness convinced me that you did your best to ensure that the offer I received was highly competitive and fair.

• Helping me get acclimated: you could easily have moved on after I accepted your firm’s offer, but instead you remained available when I had questions. When you showed up and welcomed me on my first day and made sure that I got up to speed rapidly, you once again proved that you were more interested in my success than in just filling a job.

I also wanted you to know that because of your professionalism and the information you provided me about the firm, I now go out of my way to tell colleagues at other firms that this firm is a great place to work, in no small part because of you and the way you treat applicants and employees. I hope to make several employee referrals during the next year as a result of the information you provided and the way you treated me. Thanks again for all that you’ve done; I’m proud to be your coworker!

* * * * * * * * * *

A “thank you note” from a grateful hiring manager …

I just wanted you to know how much you impacted my business success!

The end of the year is an ideal time for me to say thanks to the people who allowed both my team and I to be among the most productive and innovative within our organization. Specifically, I want to thank you, my recruiter, for all that you do to make me successful as a manager, including …

• Understanding the processes: in the past, I’ve been guilty of procrastinating when it comes to recruiting, mostly because I found the process to be confusing. However, I want to thank you for taking the time to help me understand the complex requisition, recruiting, and hiring processes. With your coaching and guidance I have successfully avoided hiring delays and legal issues without having to read endless recruiting policies and manuals. You help me understand why some of the steps that I thought were bureaucratic actually helped to contribute to a higher quality hire.

• Sourcing: thanks for consistently identifying so many top candidates. Without your advice, I would probably still be running newspaper want ads. Thanks for educating me about the new approaches to recruiting, including social networks, blogs, and direct sourcing using Boolean search strings. Without them, I would have missed most of the best and brightest candidates who you sourced. The percentage of qualified candidates that you presented to me was so high that I could have picked up a resume when blindfolded and still ended up with a superstar.

• Being so responsive: thanks for your responsiveness. Even though you have a huge requisition load and a dozen hiring managers to service, you consistently found a way to respond rapidly to my questions and calls.

• Tolerance: thanks for your tolerance and understanding during the many times when I let you down. That includes when I wasn’t available for interviews and for the countless times that I took forever to sort through the resumes you sent me. I now know that you can’t do your job effectively unless I as a hiring manager do my part.

• Position descriptions: thanks for your help in improving the position descriptions that I create. I realize that without your coaching and advice, many of these descriptions would be so dull and off the mark that I would have never attracted a single top candidate.

• Innovators and game-changers: my team is now one of the most innovative in the industry in no small part as a result of you. Many thanks for demonstrating to me the large business impact that innovators can have over average hires. Without the numerous tips on how to successfully hire these hard-to-understand innovators, I might have settled for average hires.

• Global capability: even though over 50% of my business came from overseas, I found myself lost when it came to recruiting talent from around the world. I never would have understood the complexities and the keys to success without your guidance and advice. My team now has broad global capabilities as a result of your hiring expertise.

• Follow-up: thanks for following up after my hires were completed, in order to ensure that the new employee started off at full speed. Your continuous coaching and help also resulted in lower new-hire turnover rates. You could have stopped helping immediately after they said yes to our offer, but fortunately for all, you didn’t.

• Curbing my enthusiasm: thanks for subtly, but effectively, pointing out the weaknesses in many of the candidates who I was enamored with. Sometimes I got so emotionally involved with a candidate that I couldn’t see their weaknesses without your help.

• Metrics: you have successfully demonstrated to me the cost of a bad hire and the tremendous value add of a great hire. As a result, I am now no longer willing to settle for the mediocre level of talent that I used to hire before you began helping me.

• Diversity: without your help, my team could never be as diverse and inclusive as it is today. The high degree of diversity among my team allows it to be more creative and to identify problems and opportunities from multiple perspectives. This diversity also helps my team understand the needs of our diverse customers, which further improves our products and services.

• Help with the generations: thanks for coaching me about the differences between the many different generations that candidates come from. You helped me understand their different needs and what was necessary in order to land and keep them on my team.

• Closing: thanks for your help in understanding what it takes to “sell” so many top candidates. Fortunately, with your coaching and guidance, we have been able to land so many exceptional candidates that I could never have sold on my own with my limited sales knowledge and abilities.

• Employment brand: I now realize that without the strong external image and employment brand that you and your colleagues have helped to build, few top candidates would seek out our firm. I just wanted you to know that I am continually approached at conferences and events by top talent whoare already excited about and sold on our firm. Our firm is a talent magnet as a result of your branding efforts, and as a result of your convincing, I now try to spread the word myself through my blog (which you helped me with) and my Facebook connections.

• My business results: Thank you for the impact you’ve had on my business results, the recognition, bonuses, and the promotions that I have received as a direct result of your competencies in hiring. Your advice and occasional cajoling have resulted in enough great hires to almost guarantee the success of my team. The people who you have identified and helped me hire have such exceptional capabilities that I routinely exceed my business goals with embarrassingly little effort.

I also wanted to apologize for all the times during the last year that I might not have taken hiring as seriously as I should have. Thanks to your efforts, I now realize that in business, just like in sports, even a mediocre manager can succeed when they are provided with a recruiter and a hiring process that continually provides exceptional talent. I now confidently enter into new business and product areas knowing you will somehow find and land the exceptional talent I require in that field. Thanks again for making me look good.

Final Thoughts

During turbulent economic times, it’s easy to become disillusioned as a recruiter. Even though a few think of recruiters as little more than “requisition jockeys,” you and I know that the work we do makes a huge difference. If we get it right, we change people’s lives and our company’s results for the better.

However, if we get it wrong, we also realize that we can hurt not only candidates but also our organization’s shareholders. So, even if you don’t receive a single thank-you card like the ones illustrated above, take a step back as the year comes to a close and applaud yourself for a job well done.

Happy holidays and once again, thank you for making a difference!

Maximizing your use of time is the key to hiring more top performers. In a recent webinar with Jobs2Web, I described the sourcing sweet-spot. This is the point just before and just after a fully employed person decides to consider looking for another position. This time-frame represents the window of opportunity to hire the best passive candidates and early-birds with less effort and salary premiums than any other point.

If you get to these top people first, you’ll have no competition, and they’ll be much easier to recruit since they’ve already made the decision to pursue a new job. However, it’s what you do when you first connect that will determine whether you’re successful or not in hiring them. This involves a number of critical recruiting key skills. These are described below.

If you’re a recruiting manager, evaluate your current crop of recruiters and any new hires to determine whether they have these skills or the ability to learn them. If you’re a recruiter and you want to hire more top performers, you need to be exceptional in these areas. As you’ll see, hiring top performers without paying unnecessary compensation premiums requires great recruiters, great opportunities, and great hiring managers. Without these, it just becomes a numbers game. But as Chicken Little, or some other similar authority, once said, “the early bird catches the worm, as long as you have a good fishing pole.”

Passive candidates and those just entering the job market — the early-birds — are a different breed of prospect. For one thing, they’re not desperate. This changes the game entirely from those who have been looking for more extended periods of time. More important, if they’re good, they’ll be very choosy and they will get multiple offers. But since you’re first, and if you play your cards well, you should be able to reel in these top performers in greater numbers than those recruiters who find them after you do. In this case, your competition has to play catch-up. This is a great position to be in. But to pull it off you have to be an exceptional recruiter. Here are the key recruiting skills needed to turn these top candidates and prospects into great hires.

Recruiting Skills Required to Turn Hot Prospects Into Great Employees

1. You must be able to walk very slowly, not run. People who are fully employed and very strong always have options, even when you get to them first. Most important, they will not move fast. They want to evaluate the situation and compare it to others that will come along. They will give more value to the long-term career growth opportunities than the short-term issues. Good recruiters know they must move slowly, not selling the job, but selling the idea of a staged series of steps where information is mutually shared, all leading toward the best career move among competing alternatives. Moving too fast is a turn-off. It’s equivalent to making a passive candidate complete an application before you talk to the person.
2. You must be able to instantly convert your job into a career move. Passive candidates and early-birds don’t need another job; they want a better job, generally some type of significant career move. If you don’t know the job at a detailed level, you’ll sound like a used-car salesman selling smoke and mirrors. Knowing the job allows you to ask a few questions early in your conversation to see if there are any gaps or voids in the person’s background that your job fills. If you can fill enough of them, your job becomes a career move. For example, if the budget or team the person has managed in the past isn’t as big as your opening, you have a tremendous chance to excite the hot prospect. Doing this with flair, sophistication, and aplomb is essential, but it all starts by preparing a performance profile with the hiring manager. Without this, assume you won’t be hiring too many great people.
3. You must have exceptional verbal and written skills. Top people need to see the recruiter they’re using to advise them as someone credible. This means you need to speak well, have a complete understanding of the job (the performance profile), your company, and your industry including the competition. This includes preparing well-written emails and professional advertising copy. If you’re not comfortable speaking to people you don’t know who are more senior to you organizationally, you’ll not be able to influence them to consider what you have to offer.
4. You must understand human behavior. Candidates’ job requirements change depending on how long they’ve been looking and how desperate they are. You need to find this out right away. If a candidate is not looking, but open-minded, or has just started looking, you need to recognize that the person wants career-oriented information, not detailed job specific information. I wrote a few articles on Maslow a while back that provide some insight on how to adjust what you say and what you do based on where the person is in their job-hunting process. If you don’t modify your approach with this in mind, it’s comparable to selling a hammer to a plumber, or a laptop to someone who wants a smart phone.
5. You must be a partner with your hiring manager client. Good hiring managers — those who can attract and hire strong people to work for them — are an essential element in hiring more talented people. Good recruiters come next. Eliminating job descriptions is number three on the prerequisite list. Four is recruiters and managers working together, both having a completing understanding of real job needs, trusting each other to accurately assess candidates and jointly working through the recruiting process. If you don’t have all of these elements in place, you won’t be able to hire stronger people unless you have a great brand, an excess supply of top talent, and a willingness to spend more than necessary to convince people to accept your offers.
6. You must break some rules. If you want to hire top performers who you’ve found in the sourcing sweet-spot, expect to break from tradition and aggravate some people. For one thing, ignore the job description. For another, ask for forgiveness, not permission, from the comp department. Top people are not part of the average population. They make more money, have less experience, and won’t play by the rules. So you can’t either, if you want to hire them. If you’re uncomfortable with this, you need to only handle candidates who have responded to your ads. You won’t find many top people this way, but you’ll sleep better at night.
7. You must get the candidate to sell you. Selling isn’t recruiting. Paying salary premiums isn’t either, or playing hard-to-get with a person who’s desperate. Anyone can do this. Presenting a career move in a persuasive manner in order to get a top person who’s fully employed and/or has multiple offers excited enough to tell you why he or she is a perfect fit is recruiting. Being able to pull this off is the key to hiring more top performers. It requires that you know the job, use the interview to look for career gaps, and ask respectful, but challenging questions, that encourage candidates to present in-depth insight into what they’ve accomplished. By staying the buyer this way, you’re able to establish and maintain applicant control.
8. You must determine if you’re interested in the prospect, not the other way around. Most recruiters waste so much time calling up top people — both active and passive — making a bumbling pitch about a job opening, hoping for a statement of interest from the prospect. If not, they move to the next name on the list. If the person says yes, they then qualify the person and hope the person is reasonably good enough to send to the hiring manager for an interview. This is a very low yield and time-consuming process. By presenting your opening as a career move, you’ll be able to get the candidate to describe his/her background before you give too many details. Done properly, you’ll be in a position to determine if you’re interested in the candidate for the opening, rather than the candidate making this decision. This is one of a number of critical steps involved in maintaining applicant control.

You know you’re getting better at maximizing the use of time when top prospects tell you they just started looking or are not looking. If you’re determining interest, you can either then decide to move forward at a slow-but-steady pace, or obtain two to three great referrals if you decide they’re not qualified. Since you’re a partner with your hiring manager clients, 100% of your candidates will get interviewed. Since managers are using performance profiles, not job descriptions, to determine competency and fit, fewer candidates will be excluded for bad reasons or superficial interviews. Since you’re offering career moves, rather than non-descript jobs, fewer candidates will voluntarily opt-out of the process along the way.

On top of this, with a career move as the focus, fewer candidates will be screened out at the beginning and fewer offers will be rejected due to monetary reasons. Collectively, this is how you hire twice as many top performers in half the time. Of course, these are rules you must not break.

(this is part of a larger feature on internships in the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership)

For the first time in years, there are new things to be said about the quality and quantity of internship programs. Interns should run social media campaigns. Employers should advertise for interns on Twitter. An entire unit of interns should be brought on to achieve A, B, and C.

Internship programs are on the rise. Take a look back before looking forward. Yes, many improvements can be made to any internship program. But, how is your company’s internship program to begin with? How does it run? Do the students enjoy it? What do they get out of it? Are employees properly using interns?

I question the current internship programs at companies across the United States. I question if all employees, from CEO to entry-level assistant, are really aware of their internship programs and how they run. Are clear goals defined within the company to outline the purpose of hosting interns? How are these students managed and used on a day-to-day basis?

With that in mind, here are some suggested quick fixes to your internship program:

1. Every employee at the company must be kept in the loop. The CEO of the company should be aware of the internship program and what role the young minds play within the company. Entry-level employees, secretaries, and all administrators must be aware of who these interns are and what they should be doing. This will better communication among employees and also create a secure environment for the interns to operate under.
2. Assign the role. A specific employee needs to be in charge of the internship program and provided with the additional title of “internship coordinator.” Having one person in charge of this company will avoid departments finding interns on their own and will create a central source for internship communication.
3. Have yearly intern meetings. Meetings should be held at least once per year to define appropriate intern tasks. An employer is wasting their time and energy creating an internship program if the interns are going to sit around and do nothing. Their time should be used wisely to build a beneficial experience for the student and for the employer.
4. Start an internal conversation. Ask employees in all departments what they need and how they could put interns to work. Interns are legally supposed to be “assisting” and/or performing “vocational-like tasks.” Research, organization, and database management are very popular intern tasks. Teaching interns to perform this kind of functionality will increase the efficiency of most departments while educating students on the behind-the-scenes components of any business deal or transaction.
5. Set limits and boundaries for interns. Remember, when you are dealing with an intern, you are more-than-likely dealing with a parent. Review the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act before bringing interns into the workplace. This agreement is supposed to protect interns from illegal situations. Keep intern tasks appropriate and business-related. The intern is most likely working for free, and they are taking the internship to learn about the specific industry. The company must provide an education environment and days filled with tasks that will help the interns learn about their future. Interns who run personal errands all day go home upset and frustrated. This does nothing for the company or the student. Set boundaries with all of your employees and list tasks that are not appropriate for interns.
6. Be a Mentor. There are several ways for employers to go above and beyond the traditional internship experience. A mentorship program is a great extension of the internship program and provides a beneficial experience for both interns and employees. Each semester, assign an intern to an executive at the company. They should meet once at the beginning of the internship and briefly in the middle of the internship, and the company can host a big mentor/mentee luncheon to celebrate the end of their internship. These are programs that don’t take too much additional time or dollars to create.

It may be a stretch to say that 2009 was a good year for assessment. The impact of the downturn definitely hit vendors of assessment just as hard as it did those in other areas of recruitment and staffing. Most of the vendors I have spoken with over the year definitely felt the impact in terms of booking less new business during the first two to three quarters of this year. This makes sense, as the overall pace of hiring slowed to the lowest point in decades during the majority of 2009.

Despite a slowdown in new business, most vendors have been able to continue to generate revenue from their existing client base. Vendors who have assessments that can be used for both hiring and development are finding their ability to diversify beyond hiring to be a serious asset. This makes sense given the fact that many companies have chosen to invest more in their existing employees instead of investing in hiring new ones.

Many vendors I have spoken with have taken this past year to concentrate on developing new products and ideas to ensure they are ready to hit the ground running once things start to pick up. From what I have seen, the evolution of assessment tools has continued in a very positive direction.

Most of my conversations with vendors over the past few months have been more positive then they have in some time. Everyone is starting to see some movement in a positive direction, with pipelines starting to fill up with increased opportunities.

I am a glass-half-full kind of guy. So, here are a few reasons why I feel very optimistic about what we can expect in terms of assessment uptake in 2010.

New Vendors, New Products

I have seen a number of new vendors pop up on the scene in 2009. To me this means that people are continuing to invest in the idea of assessment and what it can do to help add value. While the marketplace has many players already, competition is a very good thing. Also, every vendor is a bit different, and not all are a good match for the needs of every situation. So, more product offerings and differentiation means more options for the consumer. The downside of this trend is of course that, as has always been the case, not all vendors offer products that meet the standards that must be upheld for sound science and compliance. So, now more than ever, it pays to do your homework when it comes to choosing an assessment vendor.

I have also seen a number of nice new products from existing vendors and think that as consumers of assessment re-visit the idea of using assessment, they will find that there are more products then ever to choose from and that these products are continuing to evolve.

Increased Focus on Linkage to Business Results

Vendors are finally starting to get the idea that they should sell products based on business results. There continues to be an increased focus on using business terms and providing real-world ways to measure ROI from assessment. This is the exact type of philosophy that is required for assessment to gain credibility and increase its stock amongst consumers. It’s essential to provide ways to clarify the bottom-line impact of assessment. Although slow to evolve, the continued shift in focus to thinking of assessment in terms businesses understands is helping move perceptions of assessment from that of an overly complex academically based mystery to a solid tool for improving business outcomes.

More Transactional Products

Assessments are becoming increasingly transactional. This trend has been unfolding for several years now, but I noticed a significant increase in the development of off-the-shelf assessments that are tailored for specific jobs or industry verticals. There are several reasons for this: These assessments are easy to “plug in” to broader technology-based solutions and are thus easy to sell as add on value-adds. Assessments are just one piece of information collected during the hiring process. Using assessments to provide a sketch of a few characteristics critical for a job and not asking them to provide an in-depth dossier makes it much easier to add a more general, off-the-shelf assessment.

In the past, I felt that off-the-shelf products were often too general to really add value, given the fact that jobs often look different within different organizations. With a solid decade of web-based testing under our belts, we have been able to greatly accelerate our understanding of what works and what does not. The insight we have gained from literally tens of millions of data points has allowed generalized off-the-shelf assessments to be more accurate then ever.

Finally, transactional assessments are very appealing to small- to medium-sized businesses, a segment that represents tremendous untapped potential. This group often does not have resources required to create customized tests but can still benefit from assessments. Since highly transactional products can be sold entirely without human interaction, they represent a nice additional revenue channel for many vendors.

Continued Integration of Assessments

Another trend that has been continuing to unfold over the past decade or so is the integration of assessment into other products. Almost every ATS has experience with integration, and many are continuing to take the initiative to offer their own integrated suites that include assessment tools.

Talent management vendors have not focused on pre-employment assessment to a great extent thus far. This is bound to change shortly.

The more accurate generalized assessments become, the easier they are to insert into other products that have a broader footprint across the employee lifecycle. Increased understanding and development of assessments that can be used for both pre- and post-employment purposes will also help to ensure uptake.

A Final Note About Progress and Doing it Right

Since day one, the integration of technology has definitely made the old-guard academics in the testing world a bit nervous. In many cases such feelings are justified. The value of assessment lies in adherence to a strict set of guidelines for test development and usage. The trends I have noted above may seem at odds with these requirements to folks who are from the old school. While proving ROI of assessments and the business drivers for using assessment may seem at odds with the roots of testing, nothing could be further from the truth. It would simply not be possible to show real ROI without ensuring any assessment was measuring the things required for successful job performance. Any vendor of quality assessments understands this and as such should have a dedication to upholding the proper standards for assessment.

The legitimate vendors out there get it and are continuing to do their best to strike a balance between doing it right and making it easy for the end user. As with any other field, survival and progress requires that we adapt and evolve. Part of this is the continued meshing of the science of technology with that of psychology. The continued evolution of assessment will see it move in a direction that makes it increasingly easy to use and understand and this will serve as a significant force in its increased popularity.

Last week I introduced this series by talking about how general business changes have rendered what many might consider traditional strategy development in talent management more of a hindrance to organizations than a benefit.

I did not say that strategy is not important, or that delivering a strategic impact is not important, but rather implied that how most organizations are approaching talent strategy today is out of touch with the times.

As the general business environment has become more turbulent, and technology combined with consumer demand has driven significant shortening of most product lifecycles, the complexities of delivering really strategic impact through talent management have ballooned. While competency management systems, career path planning, and multi-year development cycles may have made sense decades ago, that simply is not the case today.

Organizational agility is something the majority of human resource functions are not designed to enable or support. In fact, most traditional HR systems, including those in talent acquisition, hinder agility by imposing rigid control structures with process cycles that take months and even years to execute.

You can’t hit a moving target that changes location unpredictably every six months using processes that take 18 months to execute!

In this installment, I expand beyond the six capabilities of agile talent management introduced in Part I by talking about the critical elements of such a strategy.

However, before launching into the elements, let’s first take a look at a few examples of agile talent management in action.

Examples of Agile Talent Management

A key characteristic of organizational agility is the ability to rapidly shift idle resources. Like most airlines, Southwest Airlines was affected significantly by the most recent downturn in the U.S. economy. While competitors were busy slashing payrolls, Southwest instead cut back on hiring and temporally redeployed idle recruiters (more than 80 of them) into other areas of the business where work needed to get done, in line with the recruiter’s abilities. The shift enabled Southwest to maintain access to the talent it would need when hiring demand ticked up and simultaneously enabled the organization to catch up on project work elsewhere that added value in the current economic state.

Along similar lines, Corning once used idle recruiters to manage the outplacement of surplus employees in place of a third-party vendor. The refocusing of resources again preserved access to a resource Corning would need months later as new opportunities emerged that required staffing increases.

While using idle recruiters to accomplish work elsewhere in the organization was a new trend this downturn, it by no means is a stellar example of organizational agility.

Enterprise-wide efforts that are emerging include:

• Temporary redeployment of top performers into development roles where the primary mandate is knowledge-sharing and collaborative solution development to emerging issues (Numerous companies)
• Creation of flexible talent pools that grant temporary project-based access to top talent by managers without budget or need for permanent hires (Coors)
• Business unit/team prioritization schemas that enable simultaneous investment/cost-containment efforts across the enterprise (HP)
• Counter-cyclical process execution, i.e. taking advantage of economic cycles by executing growth-mode processes during downturns and vice versa (Slide-College Hiring)
• Redefinition of labor needs to allow for extensive use of contingent and alternative labor types that aide real time increases/decreases in labor cost (Google)

The unifying themes in all of these different examples is that firms need a strategy that allows them to respond rapidly with a customized solution, whenever something in the business environment changes.

Critical Elements of an Agile Talent Management Strategy

Some individuals think that an agile talent management strategy is little more than a focus on using contingent labor whenever and wherever possible, but that is much too narrow of a view. An agile talent management strategy is really more about making a bevy of talent management solutions available to the enterprise that enables organizational flexibility in a timeframe consistent with evolving business lifecycles.

An agile talent management strategy differs from a traditional talent management strategy in many ways:

• A broader range of more specific goals, including:
  — To increase the overall labor productivity and ROI
  — To increase the capacity of the workforce
  — To increase the capability of the workforce
  — To improve rates of innovation and adaptation
  — To provide a competitive advantage through labor deployment
• An acceptance of a need for alternative paths: an agile strategy must predict a possible range of paths possible and offer relevant solutions regardless of whatever path environmental conditions dictate taking.
• Core business strategy integration: to ensure that talent management solutions are truly relative versus reactive, talent management planning must become a component of core business strategy development versus being cascaded from it.
• Data-driven decision making: one of the most difficult elements to enable is diverging from past practice. In an agile talent management strategy, decisions are made much more quickly using all available data and facts, and then reevaluated frequently rather than following a path dictated by tradition.
• Intra-enterprise prioritization: to maximize labor ROI, an agile talent management strategy focuses resources on the highest impact business units, jobs, regions, individuals, and critical skills. This is a direct contrast to most strategies that advocate equal treatment across the enterprise and make customization or delivery of one-size-fits-one solutions nearly impossible.
• Holistic focus: unlike the majority of talent-management strategies that focus solely on permanent employees, an agile strategy looks at coordinating talent management activities across all segments of the labor force, including numerous alternative labor types such as part-time workers, seasonal workers, outsource service providers, contract labor, strategic partner labor, and project-based deployment of retirees/interns/alumni/customers.
• Aggressive perspective: An agile talent management strategy doesn’t aim at enabling organizational survival, it aims at total domination of the industry by employing talent management tools and approaches that provide the organization significant influence over the talent marketplace.
• Consistently revised business case: as a result of a dynamns/business environment, the business case for talent management activities must be consistently revised. However, due to better alignment of deliverables with business need that proves a consistent positive impact, many agile strategies seek multi-cycle funding to enable greater resource usage flexibility.
• Extensive use of existing proven business tools/approaches: another major break from traditional talent management strategy is an increased focus on using non-HR tools and approaches to support talent management activities. Agile strategies borrow concepts often related to inventory management, quality control, adaptive manufacturing, CRM, and supply chain management. It is from these models that we get talent management terms such as “talent pipeline” and “talent inventory.”
• Comprehensive planning: delivering organizational agility requires that every activity that influences the organization’s ability to execute business strategy, including every talent management activity, incorporate a need for enabling agility into tactical and operational planning. To ensure that roadblocks to agility to do not occur, all plans should be analyzed using if/then scenarios prior to approval.

While not elements of the strategy itself, executing an agile talent management strategy requires two management practices that are not found in many organizations. Those practices include:

• Extensive use of recognition and rewards for delivering agility
• An organizational preference for agile individuals

Without management practices that focus on these two things, executing an agile strategy is nearly impossible.

Factors Influencing Talent Management Strategy Shifts

Many factors affect an organization’s ability to be successful, but when it comes to talent management the five key factors that should trigger a possible change in strategy include:

• Changing internal business needs: need to cut labor costs, need to rapidly add talent or to change skills, need to meet expanding business goals, need to accelerate product development, or a need to increase the rate of innovation.
• Changes in external economic factors: when external economic factors like the unemployment rate, interest rates, or labor quality change.
• Changes in the relative “power” of talent: changes in the supply and demand of labor. As talent becomes more powerful, organizations must become more talent-centric.
• As talent interests change: whenever what talent expects or demands in a job or work environment changes, so must the talent management approach change.
• Changes in a competitor’s talent management strategy: unlike most traditional talent management strategies, an agile strategy must monitor and react to the talent-management-related actions of organizations you compete with for talent.

Talent Management Functions That Must Be Agile

As mentioned previously, all talent management activities need to allow for agility, but those most likely to shift as a result of a change in the factors highlighted above include:

sourcing/recruiting approaches
emphasis on development/training
rate of internal movement and redeployment
use of rewards and motivators
scope of retention/blocking strategies
contingent labor utilization ratios
emphasis on innovation
leverage of external resources for ideation/innovation
change in skill/competency profiles
release of surplus/poor performers
employment branding
candidate experience
new-hire/transfer onboarding

Benchmark Firms

Firms that have adopted some aspects of the agile talent management include:

Capital One

The U.S. military

Valero Energy

Microsoft

Southwest Airlines

City of Sunnyvale, CA

Google Slide

Final Thoughts

Like it or not, many of the old stalwarts of business strategy such as long-term forecasting, continuous improvement, long-range planning, and best practice benchmarking may already be on their way to becoming obsolete in this new, dynamns/environment.

Even if the world of business were to slowdown, you would still have to ask yourself, “is it ever a bad thing to be too agile and nimble?” In fact, it may be that agility, along with continuous learning, might turn out to be the two primary competencies for both successful individuals and thriving businesses in the future.

Early Greek mythology tells tales of sailors lured by Sirens. Their sweet music mesmerized the sailors and led them to believe that the illusion was reality. Ultimately, those sailors who blindly followed the tunes crashed their ships on the rocks and their boats sank.

Sirens lure business executives and small business owners too. The song that the Sirens sing has one line … “Promote my top salesperson, put six people underneath them, and generate six times the sales.” And, like the sailors, many business executives and their companies have been led into harm’s way.

A promotion? The first issue with promoting your top salesperson into sales management is that it’s not a promotion at all. The promotion perception is the first way the Sirens get you. Sales management is not a job elevation; it’s a job change. If you consider this move as a promotion, you probably send a congratulatory email and hold a luncheon for the new sales manager. A nice handshake is offered and the new manager is sent to achieve grandeur. This approach delights the Sirens and your ship is sunk!

If you handle this as a job change, your approach is completely different. Since this is a new job, you provide training and mentoring as well as monitor their performance. As the manager of the new sales manager, your role is to help them successfully assimilate into their new role.

Top Seller = Top Sales Manager? Before we go any further, we need to take a step back. The second way the Sirens trick you is they lead you to believe all great salespeople can become great sales managers. Some certainly do. And, some pretty good salespeople become rock star managers. And some great salespeople fail miserably at sales management.

Before moving your top salesperson into the sales management ranks, consider the ramifications of this move. You are taking your rainmaker out of the sales game where they’ve generated millions of dollars for your company. While your hope is that your theory of “disciple selling” (placing six people underneath the new manager and getting six times the sales) becomes proven, that is rarely the case. If it was so easy to clone a rainmaker, every company would do it. Quite frankly, the “disciple selling” dream is flawed. Again, you’ve been duped by the Sirens. The sole reason to place someone in the role of sales manager is that you feel that they have the potential to succeed in that capacity.

What does all of this tell you? You need a process and methodology to evaluate sales management candidates … just like you evaluate sales candidates. And, even though the rainmaker got on your radar screen because they blew out their quota, their sales management candidacy should be handled the same way you would if you were considering an external sales management candidate. Don’t skip any steps in the evaluation process!

Profile the Role. This evaluation starts with the development of your profile of the ideal sales manager for your company. Think about what it takes to succeed in the role and document those elements as part of your profile. Once you’ve prepared your list, identify each element as either required or desired.

With your profile developed, the next step is to develop a screening process that allows you to compare and contrast the candidate with the profile. It is critical during this process that you ascertain why this successful seller aspires for management, and ensure that you set clear and accurate expectations of a day in the life as a sales manager in your company. In addition to interviews, you may want to consider tools to help identify a synergistic match like personality and proficiency assessments.

If your rainmaker succeeds in the evaluation process, you’ve found your sales manager. If not, don’t lose the revenue! Keep this seller selling!

Positioning Your New Sales Manager to Succeed. With your new sales manager hired, there are four keys to making the venture successful.

1. Support. The first is dealing with the sales team. Yesterday, she was a peer. Today, she is the manager. The new manager needs your help in developing managerial respect. The reaction to the new manager will be mixed. Some will be fully supportive, but there will also be some on the team who are jealous and attempt to undermine her efforts. The key message for you to deliver to your new sales manager is that she has your unwavering support.
2. Mentoring. Your new manager needs a resource to guide them through the neophyte status: a mentor. Don’t just look within the organization for a mentor candidate. Many sales management consultants mentor and develop new sales managers. The role of the mentor is to bridge the managerial knowledge, skills, and experience gap.
3. Training. Chances are that your new sales manager has never been taught how to hire a salesperson, have a difficult conversation with an employee, or develop a sales compensation plan. These are all skills that can be taught. If you aren’t will to provide the new sales manager with skills training, don’t put them in the role. They will fail!
4. Expectation Setting. Your new sales manager should be provided with a scorecard that tells them how they are going to be measured. In most companies, sales managers are measured on revenue. But that is only one component of the scorecard. Based on the role and responsibilities of the sales manager, the scorecard could include metrics like profitability, cost of sales, turnover, sales cycle, forecast accuracy, etc.

Sales is one of the few professions where moving into management isn’t always the best path for the salesperson or the company. Make sure the person you put in this critical role is the right sales manager for your company. After all, while this person may not be directly generating sales, they are the one responsible for the company achieving its revenue goals. Don’t let the Sirens lure your business into trouble. Develop the systems to help you make the best decisions.

Not sure how to interview sales people for a sales management job? send me an email for my 29 favorite questions when interviewing new sales manager candidates.

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy has gone to hell.

It’s been up and down like a yo-yo for the last decade, a fact that led Time to declare the first decade of the new century “the decade from hell” in a recent cover story. If you work in talent management or HR, this yo-yo pattern certainly isn’t news to you. Surprisingly enough, it’s times like these that present the best opportunity to become more strategic as more managers open their minds to alternative solutions to improve productivity, save money, and move their organizations forward.

This article is intended to get you to rethink your current talent management strategy and to change it so that it better fits turbulent economic conditions and trends that are most likely to stick around for awhile.

Times Change; Strategy Isn’t What it Used to Be

As a professor of management in a college of business, I must remain knowledgeable on economic trends and the strategies organizations can leverage to survive and, in many cases, thrive during various economic situations. While some might argue that a PhD is needed to understand the complexities of the global economy, it doesn’t take a great deal of education to realize that for as long as man has recorded details on trade, there have been oscillating cycles of growth and decline.

If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember the recessions of 1970, 1975, and 1983, followed by growth spurts in 1977 and 1984. Despite blips here and there, the U.S. economy and Western economies in general have grown at a relatively stable rate for some time.

However, if you look at the deviations in growth, you would note that since 1983, the cycles of economic growth and decline have become much shorter and for the most part less severe.

The economy of today is turbulent, and will continue to be for sometime as more and more feedback becomes available in real-time enabling organizations (including governments and corporations) to adjust their economic activities more quickly. Instead of investing in growth for three years and containing costs for four, organizations will more likely find themselves growing for one quarter, contracting for two, growing for three, contracting for one, etc.

Prior to 1983, developing an effective HR strategy wasn’t easy, but economic conditions did allow for making plans three, five, and in some really rare cases 10 years out. There was no need to change the HR or talent management strategy. All you needed was a strategy with three modes: a growth mode, a “freeze” mode, and a layoff mode to match the three corresponding economic cycles. Organizations were much less complex decades ago, often operating in narrowly defined regions and businesses with similar cycles. When economic decline occurred, it hit the entire organization uniformly, meaning that if pay cuts were called for, everyone was impacted. Economic trends have changed, organizations have changed, and how organizations develop talent management strategy must change too.

Thriving on Chaos

Economists prefer to label this new turbulent economic environment as a “dynamic economy,” but the old Tom Peters catchphrase, “thriving on chaos,” might be a better description.

No matter what you call it, leaders are beginning to realize that the speed of change is increasing at a breathtaking rate. Products that used to have a lifecycle of five years might now only be viable for a few months. New ideas, products, or benchmark business processes that in the past could be protected for decades, are now copied, stolen, and possibly even rendered obsolete within weeks.

Workers who used to be loyal and want to work at a company for life have been replaced with a new generation that might consider three years at a single firm to be the equivalent of a lifetime commitment.

Some areas of knowledge are doubling in a year, rendering many skilled workers struggling to remain relevant or become obsolete within years of being educated. It may not sound like reality, but if you step back and take all the change around you, you would realize very quickly that the old way of doing talent management no longer fits.

Characteristics of a Chaotic Business and Economic Environment

This dynamic business and economic environment has four defining characteristics:

• A blinding speed of change: everything changes so fast that the things that worked well last year will not work at all next year.
• Dynamic of almost-impossible-to-predict change: rather than things evolving in a predictable way, so many options are now available in nearly every aspect of being that the direction of change has become irregular and almost impossible to predict. Plans or forecasts that deal with cycles greater than 18 months have no chance of being accurate.
• Inconsistent/non-uniform change: rather than things changing in the same way at the same time across the entire organization, some parts of the business and some regions are going up while others are going down.
• Obsolescence demands complete replacement: while in the past we could often refine or update existing products and processes to keep them viable, the new environment requires that most be shelved and completely replaced with a different approach. Routinely making obsolete your own products requires a level of innovation and speed that that must be classified as several levels above the historical continuous improvement model. Can you imagine one of your teenage children even considering using a perfectly operational reconditioned mobile phone that is two years old? In this new world, we don’t fix things. We replace them with the latest model.

Six Capabilities of Any Agile Strategy or Approach

Whenever you’re faced with a situation where the speed of change makes accurate forecasting and planning virtually impossible, there is only one feasible approach that can guarantee success. That approach is known as agility. Agility is a term that has been used by CEOs for years, but it’s now time that we embrace it in talent management and HR.

Agility calls for six major capabilities, including:

1. Moving fast: reacting almost immediately to problems and opportunities.
2. Accurate movement: moving fast isn’t enough; you also have to routinely hit your target while moving fast.
3. Simultaneous movement: rather than waiting for one action to be completed before starting another, many actions must occur simultaneously (multitasking).
4. Many directions: rather than moving in a single direction, agility means moving in many directions, probably at the same time.
5. This and that: traditionally if you aimed for one goal (i.e. low costs) you would assume that another “counter goal” (i.e. high quality) would have to be sacrificed. When you are agile, you expect to reach both goals, even though they might be on opposite ends of what was traditionally considered to be possible.
6. No new resources: traditionally, in order to do more, you needed more resources, but agility calls for using your resources more effectively with less waste and idle time.

In fact, much like playing the carnival game “whack-a-mole,” being agile means more than just moving fast. It means in order to be successful, you must move fast, hit hard, and accurately but also while dealing with lots of uncertainty!

The Definition of an Agile Talent Management Strategy

An agile talent management strategy is a strategy that is designed to increase the overall productivity and capabilities of the workforce by rapidly shifting, in a coordinated manner, talent management approaches, tools, and resources in response to the dynamic economy, a changing talent marketplace, and the changing needs of your major business units.

It abandons an emphasis on the one-size-fits-all model in use by many organizations in favor of a one-size-fits-one model. It generally requires a significant increase in the use of contingent workers and alternative labor types. In executing an agile talent management strategy, organizations will need to be prepared to rapidly shift resources between talent management processes including recruiting, retention, development, redeployment and releasing “surplus” talent, as business needs fluctuate.

Up Next Week

Next week’s installment will include an example of agile talent management, a list of common elements that comprise an agile talent management strategy, and further discussion of the factors forcing organizations to embrace a more agile approach.

Free Webcast: Crafting an Agile Talent Management Strategy in the Age of Talent

Taleo has graciously sponsored a free webinar featuring Dr. John Sullivan discussing a number of factors related to crafting an agile talent management strategy in an age when talent is gaining power. If interested, check out upcoming air dates and register to attend here.

In a previous article, I suggested that most companies don’t have a formal hiring strategy in place that drives planning and decision-making. As a result, some default strategy predominates how hiring is done; generally, some mashup of competing ideas. Typically this is hiring manager-driven with individual managers determining who gets hired.

Few managers are great at this, and many can’t attract top talent. Lack of oversight and an audit trail complicates the organizational need to get better. Adding to the mashup problem is the comp group determining the pay ranges, the OD group describing the interviewing methodology, and the recruiting department trying to drive down costs while letting each recruiter do his or her own thing. Unless the company is an “employer of choice,” the performance of a mashup hiring strategy is uneven, with the best candidates bypassing the “approved” process entirely, sneaking in the back door.

This is unfortunate, since the impact on company performance of better people is undisputable. A maximize quality of hire strategy coupled with appropriate processes and used by everyone throughout the company, is an essential component of long-term company success regardless of current economic conditions. As part of this, HR/Recruiting should be responsible for ensuring the strategy is implemented properly.

The focus of this article will be on describing the financial impact of this type of raising-the-bar hiring strategy. This starts by benchmarking your current hiring process. One way to do this is to take a sample of recent hires and divide them into three equal groups — top, middle and least best. Even with a tepid recovery, many of those in the top-half are likely to pursue other opportunities, just due to the need to continue to grow. On some level, burnout causes everyone to become less effective, so if you don’t do anything, your overall talent level will decline. To offset this and to raise your company’s current talent bar, you’ll need to implement programs that allow you to hire more people in the top group and stop hiring people in the bottom group. The financial impact of this shift is described in the formula:

Financial impact of hiring people in the top third instead of the bottom third = 2DC(1+MPL)N.

For an average company, in a average industry, the pure financial gain for this shift is 110-130% more than the person’s salary! I’ll prove this in a moment.

Here’s the short definition of each of the terms:

• N: the number of employees shifted into the top group from the bottom group.
• D: percent difference in performance between the top and the middle groups of people you now hire.
• C: average compensation of the people hired.
• M: revenue per employee (RPE) divided by average compensation, aka the revenue/comp multiplier
• P: profit/savings contribution as a percent of revenue or total cost. This is the cost savings or profit contribution opportunity each person makes.
• L: leverage factor for those who have the potential to make a bigger impact on the organization.

In this model, two dimensions of personal contribution have been captured. One is the direct cost savings due to productivity and the other is the bigger business impact the person can make on the organization. This includes factors like grow sales, design products, hire better people, and increase customer retention.

Now to the proof of the enormous financial impact of making this shift. To do this let’s use an example of the financial impact of hiring 100 people in the top group instead of the bottom group for our “average” company. As part of this assume an average compensation of $75 thousand. For the productivity piece, assume the top group is 25% better than the middle group, and the bottom group is 25% worse than the middle. In most companies the performance difference (D) in productivity, better quality, lower turnover, etc., ranges from 20-40%, so this is reasonable.

Let’s also assume the company’s RPE is $300,000. This results in a revenue/comp multiplier (M) of 4 ($300K/$75K). We’ll assume the profit/savings contribution (P) as a percentage of sales is equivalent to the company’s variable operating margin of 40%. This component captures how much each dollar of salary relates to sales and ultimately to cost savings and/or earnings. Finally, we’ll assume the leverage factor (L) is 1, an appropriate figure for a staff level position. Those who have a bigger role, like managers or those in marketing, could have a higher value for L, and some process positions could be lower. Collectively, these are very conservative assumptions for determining the financial impact of hiring people in the upper group instead of the bottom. Also, recognize that this shift is in comparison to your current hiring processes, not to the population at large.

Using these assumptions, this equates to a net financial gain or increase in profit of $97,500 for each person hired in the top-third who replaced someone not hired in the bottom group. For 100 people this is equivalent to approximately $10 million in increased bottom-line profits. (Email me if you’d like to see the calculations for your company.)

To better understand the significance of this, consider that on average the 100 people hired would be expected to bring in $30 million in sales (100 times $300,000 RPE) and a generate a contribution margin of $12 million (40% of $30 million). If you only hired the best group, the contribution margin would be $17 million. If you hired only the bottom group, the margin would be $7 million. This is the $10 million difference of hiring better people.

If you want more details on how to use this formula, there’s a recorded session on the Recruiter’s Wall, plus we’ll be holding a webinar with Jobs2Web on December 9, 2009, demonstrating how to use this information to calculate the ROI of any new recruiting project. If you missed the date, you’ll find this recording on the Recruiter’s Wall, too.

The financial impact of a raising-the-bar hiring strategy is huge. Conceptually few would disagree. However, without a financial metric to clarify the magnitude of this, most companies default to a mashup strategy, with no one really responsible for improving overall talent quality. As a result, the talent bar keeps dropping as managers hire below the average, and the best leave for greener pastures. While an employer branding strategy can offset some of this natural decline, more needs to be done to ensure your company’s talent bar continues to grow. Understanding the financial impact of raising the talent bar can be an important first step.

Good people know that even in a recession, they can find another position.

In fact, signs point to increased opportunities for currently employed people with specific skills and experience, and many of your top performers are most likely being actively recruited without your knowledge. As the stock market improves, so do attitudes about hiring. Every day I see signs that companies are starting to hire selected people more aggressively than they have over the past six months. Google has (or had) openings for 200 recruiters; do you wonder why? Facebook is ramping up hiring; wonder why? Even in Silicon Valley, the keenest firms are hiring people even when they don’t really need them!

Facebook, Google, and others continue to hire large numbers of top people for two reasons: first of all, to keep them from the competition. Top people employed by you are not going to be contributing to someone else’s’ success; and second, they are “stockpiling” talent to have it ready when things start growing again, which is already starting to happen.

In many areas, including healthcare, telecommunications, marketing, computer security, and computer engineering, demand remains strong. Biosciences and pharmaceutical companies are hiring, as are the movie and media industries despite layoffs, recessions, and slumping consumer demand.

So what can recruiters so about retention? Isn’t it a fact that once people are hired they are out of your hands? While this may be the case in some firms, I believe for most of us there are several ways to help your organization keep the best people and help yourself by reducing your workload and keeping your internal networks alive.

Most basically, you can make a real difference in any employee’s attitude who you have helped to hire. Employment is about relationships, and the strongest relationships are built on trust, respect, and open communication. As a recruiter, you most likely have an advantage with the employees you helped to hire. You spent time with them, got to know them more deeply than many others in the company, and may have given them advice about accepting offers or on how to deal with an interview. By simply checking in with these folks, you can get a sense of their mood, concerns, and what the issues are they may have with the organization. You may be able to change negative attitudes or to pass on information that might help “save” one of them from leaving.

But here are a few other things that you can do, as well.

Help every employee build a social network. Employees make friends and build relationships that can be strengthened or damaged during stressful times. Many employees stay at an organization because of who they get to work with, and many leave for the same reasons. We all know how powerful social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Twitter have become, and companies can use these networks to promote employee interaction and teamwork.

Good organizations can even develop networks for those who have been laid off so that they can help each other and retain the connections they had when employed. By making these kinds of assets available, organizations not only improve their own reputation and brand and help former employees, but also reinforce the loyalty and motivation of employees who are still working.

Encouraging internal blogging, the use of virtual communications tools like SMS or IM, and the use of video conferencing to strengthen networks and extend them globally. Knowledge is a powerful retention tool, and naivety and ignorance can best be combated by sharing of ideas and experiences between people from many different firms.

Encourage constant and candid communication. Silence is the greatest enemy of retention. When management does not update the employees on the financial and business state of the company and when rumors can be counted by the minute, turnover goes up and productivity goes down. While some people (usually the “B” and “C” players) hunker down and hide, the best ones start looking. I can’t tell you how many excellent employees who are highly valued have left their employers because of business uncertainty. No one expects assurances or guarantees; what they hope for is an understanding of trends — are things better, the same, or worse? Are customers leaving? How is sales volume?

Make sure your management team is present, is as upbeat as it can be, and that every member of the executive staff is visible and concerned about every employee.

To maintain the employment relationship, employers have a huge responsibility. First of all they need to clearly know who their best employees are, keep them informed, help them maintain and develop skills, and encourage them to build networks and internal relationships.

None of these things cost much when compared to the cost of recruiting and developing new employees, and none of them are really very hard to do. But, to put them into place does require a change of mindset and a willingness to break (or at least stretch) the usual policies and rules that exist in many organizations. Good HR and good recruiting is all about treating people fairly, not necessarily the same.

Focus on internal placement and movement. Offer your best employees an opportunity to move within the company to jobs that may fit their skills and interests better, if that is possible. It is also a good idea to keep the bureaucracy to a minimum and remove time constraints. Lobby HR and hiring managers to look more intently and more honestly inside the company for talent rather than seeking it from outside. We know that the grass always seems greener somewhere else. It is part of a recruiter’s responsibility to push back and encourage managers to give internal people, even if they lack all the requirements for a job, a chance.

Encourage employees to update their skills all the time. In bad times, employees have time to soak up new information. Education and development are the cheapest retention tools in your arsenal. Locking people into degree or certificate programs is almost a guarantee that they will remain with your firm until they complete the program. Most will be loyal and thankful. And all of them will be better-educated and hopefully more productive employees. This is a big plus for the large organizations and you should be capitalizing on this right now.

But development can also occur through on-the-job development and through many informal networks and conversations. Every employer should encourage employees to share knowledge using social networks or communities of practice, and employers should reward managers who encourage their employees to take classes or take on new responsibilities.

Many employees who leave organizations are simply looking for a bigger challenge or the opportunity to use a new skill or degree. Smart organizations will encourage this and motivate managers to source and hire internally whenever possible and even if it will require a bit of training.

None of this is new or unique. Every recession sees the patterns repeated: the good performers leave, the average and poor hunker down and hide. But the good can be retained through active concern, HR and recruiter involvement and caring, and by proactive HR and employment practices.