Do these quotes sound familiar?

• “People are our greatest asset.”
• “The only real sustainable competitive advantage of any company is the recruitment and retention of great people.”
• “Talent is our #1 priority as a company.”
• “Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors, but your people can’t be.”
• “No matter what kind of business you are in, having the right people determines your company’s success or failure.”
• “The ability to find and hire the right people can make or break your business. It is as plain as that. No matter where you are in the life cycle of your business, bringing in great talent should always be a top priority.” – Michael Dell

How many times have you read or heard something similar?

The ubiquitous “people are our greatest asset” sentiment sounds good, and no doubt feels good to say, but whenever I hear or read it, the first question that comes to my mind is “What are you doing to ensure that you are identifying and acquiring the right people?”

If you believe that finding and acquiring top talent is your #1 priority, then I have a few questions for you.

Critical Questions for Sourcers and Recruiters

• What do you do on a consistent basis to ensure that you are finding and recruiting top talent – the best people that can be found?
• Do you have a strategy to find the best candidates?
• Once you have identified a candidate who is a match for the need you are sourcing and/or recruiting for, how do you know they are a good candidate beyond the skills and experience match?
• Are the people you find the best people you can find, or the first people you could find, or the easiest people for you to find?
• Do you think that the people who apply to your jobs posted online are the best candidates available? How would you know?
• What is your strategy to find great people that your competitors can’t and don’t find?

Critical Questions for Companies

• If talent is your #1 priority, where does your investment in talent identification and acquisition rank compared to all other corporate expenditures? (Payroll doesn’t count)
• How much does your company spend on business intelligence applications and data warehousing? (Ballpark estimate will do)
• Do you think that acquiring and analyzing customer, product, sales, etc., data in order to make better business decisions is more important to your company’s long term success than acquiring and analyzing human capital data to make better hiring decisions?
• How much does your company spend on applications and technologies that enable your company to discover and identify great people? (Most ATS’s and CRM’s don’t count)
• Do you have a budget for sourcing and recruiting technology and process R&D?
• What is your talent identification and acquisition strategy? (Posting jobs and soliciting referrals doesn’t count – more on this in a bit)

Talent Attraction & Referrals vs. Talent Discovery and Identification

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, has said that many companies think that a cunning strategy or great performance will attract the right applicants, but that’s backward – people must come first.

I could not agree more.

Talent attraction, whether it be in the form of employer branding efforts, posting jobs online or social recruiting via social media, is not a method of discovering and identifying talent that involves any assurance of or control over candidate quality.

Soliciting referrals from current employees is generally accepted as a sound talent discovery strategy, and many companies publish data that suggests that referrals do tend to be “higher quality” and have a higher retention rate. I think this is mostly due to the fact that people typically avoid referring others that would reflect poorly upon themselves, so the selection process does have a bit of built-in candidate quality control.

However, while we all know that referrals are a great source of hires, are referrals really the best people you or your organization are capable of finding?

Soliciting employees for referrals is one of the easiest and lowest cost methods of talent discovery, so it’s no wonder it’s so popular as a method of talent discovery. However, referral recruiting isn’t guaranteed to net you the best people available to be found if you really tried.

Referral recruiting can only yield you people that someone in your organization knows, and the right or best people are not always already known to someone in your company.

Talent attraction efforts and soliciting referrals have their place – I’m not challenging that. However, companies that claim that talent is their #1 priority need to incorporate a strategy of talent discovery and identification that involves actively researching and hunting for top talent – specifically those great people who:

1. Are not already known to someone in your company and cannot be referred to you
2. Are doing an excellent job for their current employer and won’t ever “see” employer branding or a job posting even if it was placed directly in front of them

Investing in Talent Discovery and Identification

Jim Collins has said, “People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”

Practically all technologies, products and services can be copied and rarely remain a company’s competitive advantage for long. Being able to consistently find and hire the right people is truly the only means by which a company can attain a sustainable competitive advantage, regardless of industry.

Spending time and money on posting jobs, social recruiting efforts, and executing a sound referral recruiting strategy will always yield candidates, but they are not enough to ensure that you are discovering the best people that can be found and identified.

While many companies think it’s logical and necessary to invest large sums of money and effort into business intelligence applications to analyze product, customer, sales and all other kinds of data, too few companies invest anything beyond trivial amounts of money and effort into technologies, applications and research that can help them actively acquire and analyze human capital data to make better hiring decisions and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

So what are you doing to ensure that you are identifying and acquiring the best people for your company?

Are You a Sourcing Snob?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Is a candidate identified on LinkedIn intrinsically “better” than a candidate sourced from Monster?
• Is candidate sourced by cold calling inherently “better” than a candidate sourced from a job posting on Careerbuilder?
• Does it really matter where a great candidate comes from?

I continue to see well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and there seems to be no shortage of those in the recruiting and staffing industry who are happy to jump on that bandwagon. However, whenever I read or hear broad, sweeping statements claiming that an entire population of 50,000,000+ candidates is low quality just because they happen to be in an online resume database of a major job board - my response is a mix of shock and disappointment. 

Stereotyping is Poor Judgement

Broad statements such as ”the job boards have low quality candidates” reeks of stereotyping.  A stereotype is an oversimplified conception or opinion based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the “other group” (in this case, job board candidates) have in common. Stereotypes are often formed by an Illusory correlation , a false perception of an association between two variables where in fact none exists.

You just can’t go around claiming all job board candidates are bad. That’s like saying everyone in New York is rude, or that everyone in California is a hippie. To stereotype all job board candidates as low quality is downright insulting to the many fantastic people who make the decision to post their resume to well known online resume databases. If they only knew that posting their resume to a job board was equivalent to moving to “the wrong side of the tracks.”

Sourcing Snobbery

Many sourcers and recruiters use the Internet to source and identify candidates all the time, yet there is never a mention of the intrinsic “quality” of candidates who happen to post their resume on their own websites. As if creating a website and posting your resume to it somehow makes you a better person than someone who either doesn’t know how do do that or simply doesn’t care to, instead opting to post their resume to a well known job board site.

And what about Social Media? The last time I checked – there is no “candidate quality filter” built in to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or any social network. ANYONE can decide to create a web page or a Social Media profile, from “A” players to “F” players.

So what’s with the stigma of being a “job board candidate?” I think it’s sourcing snobbery.

If you find a candidate by searching Facebook – that’s cool. Found your candidate by cold calling into a competitor? You’re awesome! If you found a candidate by searching Monster – you suck.

Employee referral?  Great candidate! Job board candidate? Ewww – gross!

As if  WHERE a candidate comes from actually matters! A great candidate is a great candidate. Employee referrals are wonderful, but I’ve got news for you – the best candidates do NOT always come from employee referrals. If they do in your organization, maybe your sourcers and recruiters aren’t very good at actually finding quality candidates on their own – referrals are “gimmes.” Think about it.

Statistical Facts

Job board resume databases - just like LinkedIn, Twitter, companies you directly source from, and every other source of candidates - are a large random sample  of the entire candidate population. Large random samples adhere to the statistical inevitability of a normal distribution (bell curve). You’ll have a small percentage of horrible candidates, a large percentage of average candidates, and a small percentage of top-notch talent. For those interested in learning more about the statistics of large random samples, check out the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) and the Law of Large Numbers.

That’s right – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet are no different than the job board resume databases in that they all adhere to the laws of statistics. Statistically, it can easily be argued that any given person that can be found on the Internet or in a social network is no more likely to be an “A” player than any given person that can be found on a job board resume database.

Why Do People Post Their Resume on Job Boards?

If you think that the only reason people post their resumes to online job board resume databases is because they are “desperate” and unemployed, you’re wrong. Many people see the job boards as an online marketplace, not unlike eBay.

Let’s use an analogy to drive this point home. If you’ve cleaned out your garage, basement, or attic and you’re looking to sell some stuff – you could have a yard sale, but yard sales limit your potential buyers to your neighbordhood and nearby areas. Why not dramatically increase the pool of potential buyers by putting the items on eBay?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with candidates using job boards as one approach to helping them make the next step in their career. The idea that candidates should not leverage job boards in their efforts to find their next career opportunity is like thinking that you shouldn’t shop online, sell things on eBay, or use Match.com. This is the 21st century – by all means everyone should leverage all available Internet options in all endeavors!

Looking vs. Being Found

If a candidate relies solely on searching job postings online, they are being proactive in seeking employment, but they are 100% dependent upon the reactive response of the firms they reply to. And let’s be honest here – most companies aren’t very good at responding to candidates who apply to their job postings. Too many candidates experience the “black hole” effect when they respond to job postings (auto-responders don’t count here – they’re no better than auto-DM’s on Twitter).

This lack of response leads many candidates to seek to take more control over the process by opting to post their resume into a resume database so they can be actively found and pursued by potential employers – kind of like posting something on eBay so that people looking for that thing can find it and attempt to acquire it. Many candidates pursue both paths, thinking they’ll cover both angles.

You have to be aware that some people have not had to switch jobs in the past 5-10 years, and that most candidates are not professional job seekers. When the time comes for these folks to move on in their career - many seek the job boards simply in response to the effective and ubiquitous advertisements of the major job boards. Instead of going to the employment section of the local newspaper – going online is perceived as the “new” way of finding a job as compared to the last time they may have had a career transition.

Why not let 100’s of recruiters try and find you the best opportunity for free? Aside from the experience they may have with poor recruiters, this is not a bad value proposition. Also – this is essentially the same value proposition of posting a resume on the Internet or updating a LinkedIn profile with a complete work history.

But What About Networking?

Networking to find a job can definitely work and I would never discourage or disparage it. However, there is no guarantee that any given person’s network can provide the ideal job opportunity at the right time.  What’s the proabability? 

Limiting your job search efforts to only your “network” would be similar to looking to get married to someone, but only on the condition that it must be to someone that your friends know. As if your soulmate can’t be someone outside of your “network.” 

All Sourcers/Recruiters are NOT Created Equal

Perhaps some of the stigma attached to job board candidates is based in the belief that candidates in job board resume databases are “easy” to find. As if the challenge and drugery associated with sifting through large volumes of garbage results while performing Internet searches somehow will produce a higher quality candidate.  Also, there’s nothing inherently “easy” about quickly finding the best possible candidate among 20,000,000 others. All sourcers/recruiters are NOT created equal.

I love to challenge those who assume that just because 100 recruiters may have access to the same source (say Monster, for example) that they can all find the same candidates, as well as all of the best candidates available in the system.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. That’s no different than thinking that if 100 people go fishing in the Pacific Ocean that they will all catch the same fish and all of the available fish to be caught. Ridiculous!

Unlike many who disparage the job boards, I have actually used them to source candidates, and I’ve recruited and placed many “A+” candidates from the job boards that my clients and competitors also had access to. By “A+” I mean candidates that were better than those produced through client/employee referrals. Blasphemy? No – just the facts.

How is it that no one else found the same people I did? Did I get lucky? Only if you can get “lucky” consistenly. Just because many people have access to a given database, it is not safe to assume that everyone can find the same candidates, or find ALL of the qualified candidates, or find the BEST candidates in that database. Perhaps the people who are always claiming the job board resume databases have low quality candidates lack the proficiency to actually FIND the high quality candidates.

For a look into how 1 person can find great candidates that 100′s of other recruiters did not using the exact same job board database, read this post about a Google Network Performance Tester position that literally hundreds of agency and contract recruiters had been working for 4 months.

Conclusion

If part of the stigma of job board resumes is that everyone has access to them and thus they are “easy” to find – I am thoroughly confused. The last time I checked – literally EVERYONE has access to the Internet, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. There is no competitive advantage in using any of these sources to find candidates because everyone has access. The same goes for cold calling – everyone has access to a phone, right?

However, as I have hopefully shown you, having access to a resource and being able to find the right people are two completely different things.

If posting a resume on Monster is an act of a deserate job seeker, then so is posting a resume on the Internet, updating a LinkedIn profile, and using Twitter to advertise that you’re looking for a new position.

More of the candidates of today and certainly most of the candidates of tomorrow are likely to have a blog, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, use Twitter, AND post their resume to an online resume database (Monster, niche, or other such as VisualCV). 

The bottom line is that it really doesn’t matter where you find a great candidate.

Don’t be a sourcing snob.