It is all too easy for sourcers, recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers/teams to develop a skewed, distorted, and decidedly one-way view of the world. Perhaps spending 99% of the time on only one side of the recruiting process is to blame.

Regardless of the cause, it is absolutely critical to regularly take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”

In this article I’m going to walk you through over 10 different scenarios in which I think recruiters and hiring teams can benefit greatly by taking the candidate’s perspective into careful consideration.

If you don’t take well to being challenged to think differently from time to time, or if you don’t like long blog posts, you may not want to read any further. This one clocks in at 3700+ words.

Consider yourself warned.

The “Fantastic” Opportunity

How often do recruiters contact potential candidates about a “great opportunity?”

How can a recruiter know if it is a great opportunity without first finding out what the candidate would define as a great opportunity?

Assuming you have a “great opportunity” for someone you’ve never spoken to is presumptuous at best.

At worst – insulting.

I strongly suggest you check out this blog post – “Why are technical recruiters so clueless?“, including the 140+ comments (some not for the faint of heart).

If you perform just a little Internet research, you can find forums in which professionals express their disdain (to put it kindly) for this kind of approach from recruiters, precisely because a recruiter can’t know if their opportunity is a “fantastic match” for the them without first finding out what their current situation is and what they believe is the next step in their career.

Sourcers and recruiters – do your research before approaching candidates and be sure to only approach potential candidates with opportunities that would actually be relevant to them, in their opinion, and not just yours.

Social Recruiting

With all of the buzz surrounding social recruiting, I find it important to take a moment to recognize where all of the buzz is coming from.

It’s coming mostly from people who are in some way, shape or form selling social media/recruiting services and advice, and also from people in HR/recruiting roles.

What about the people being “socially recruited? Shouldn’t we care about what they think?

What does “social recruiting” look like from their perspective? How does it differ for active, passive, and non-job seekers?

Do they think that Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook are more effective at getting them matched to the right opportunity at the right time than any other method?

Do they even want to be approached via sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google+?

If you want to find out the real answers and not just the ones you like – don’t send out social recruiting-related polls solely using social media. It will yield a non-representative sample with skewed results favoring social media (hello!) – use a real random sample and multiple delivery mediums to get a more accurate representation.

As sexy as many people and organizations apparently believe social recruiting to be, there are at least some indicators that it isn’t so sexy from the perspective of the people you’re trying to recruit.

For example, when Steve Boese has asked the Gen Y/Z students in his Human Resources Technology classes about learning about organizations and engaging with company recruiters on social networks like Facebook or Twitter, almost all of them recoil – they say no way, “Facebook is for me and my friends only.”

Shouldn’t we be spending more time worrying about what our target talent pools think of using social media for employment and less time talking (and tweeting) with other recruiters about how social recruiting is “the future of all recruiting?”

Referrals

Yes, yes – we all know that employee referrals are the “holy grail” of talent acquisition.

However, have you ever been solicited for referrals? How did it feel? Do you think everyone feels the same way when being approached by a recruiter or manager for referrals? Have you always provided referrals to people asking you for them? Why or why not?

Have you ever been offered a referral bonus to refer people?

Some organizations pay for referrals – even for referrals from non core employees. Incentivizing people to provide you with referrals isn’t intrinsically a bad idea – but does anyone care about how people feel about being paid for referring their friends and peers to your organization?

I’ve heard of some people being quite offended by referral bonuses – they did not like the idea of “selling” their friends or people in their professional network.

Ultimately, I think that most people provide referrals primarily to help the person they are referring – not just (or at all, in some cases) to help the recruiter, manager, or company.

What do you think?

More importantly, what do the people you solicit referrals from think?

Messaging/Talent Engagement

How many recruiters do you think have ever wondered about what it’s like to get a 5 calls, voicemails, emails, and/or messages via social media from recruiters?

How about 10 a day? 20?

It’s a good exercise to take a moment and think about what it must be like to constantly under assault by sourcers and recruiters.

Sure, most active job seekers will return your call, respond to your email, and even pick up when their phone rings from a number they don’t recognize.

What about passive job seekers? How about non-job seekers? Why would someone who isn’t looking for a job even call you back?

Can we really blame non-job seekers for not picking up the phone or not responding to a voice mails and emails?

Do you know what most recruiters sound like in their voice mail messages and what the emails most recruiters send look like?

Do you realize how awkward it is for someone to receive an unsolicited call from a recruiter while they’re at work? In a cube? Sitting next to their lead/manager?

Do you think the highlight of anyone’s day is talking to another recruiter?

Making phone calls and sending emails and messages to potential candidates are among the highest volume activities that recruiters and some sourcers perform on a daily basis. As such, it seems to become one of the things that the least amount of thought is put into.

It is important to realize that people who don’t know you don’t call you back just because you left them a message. As I am fond of saying, “If they don’t know you, they don’t owe you.”

All Recruiters are Not Created Equal

While you might be a great sourcer or recruiter – many are not.

In fact, some very talented and good natured people view recruiters on the same level as used car salesmen (again, a little Internet research will yield a lot of information you may not want to see).

This is because some recruiters do not do the recruiting profession justice.

It’s important to realize that on any given day, you might be the 10th recruiter to try and contact the person you’re calling. Realize that the last 10 recruiters they spoke to may not have been very good at what they do.

On any given call, you may have to overcome an opinion of recruiters that’s been deservedly earned through multiple bad experiences with horrible recruiters.

You may have to fight an uphill battle to prove that you actually are better than all of the other recruiters who over-promise and under-deliver, don’t take the time to appreciate and understand the candidate’s experience and motivators, only push jobs, and never follow up.

In fact, you should assume it – you might just alter your approach a bit and get a higher response/success rate.

A little empathy goes a long way.

A Players

What defines an “A” player anyway?

The reality is that one person’s or organization’s “A” player is another’s “B” player, and vice versa – it’s all a subjective matter of perspective, and who is to judge?

It should also be recognized that specific corporate and team environments can play a huge role in whether or not someone even has the opportunity to be an “A” player.

And let’s not too hastily forget that companies are quite literally built on and by “B” players. “Research by Harvard professor Tom DeLong has shown that while A players can make enormous contributions to performance, companies’ long-term performance, even survival, depends far more on the unsung commitment and contributions of their B players.”

On the retention side – focusing heavily on retaining “A” players can give solid “B” players the feeling that they are not valued, making them more likely to leave, and certainly more easily “recruitable.”

Resumes and LinkedIn Profiles

Sourcers, recruiters, HR pros, hiring managers are quite often guilty of committing the age-old error of judging a book by its cover.

When your job consists of reviewing tons of resumes, it’s easy to get picky and judgmental, and equally easy to forget that the resumes represent real people who simply cannot be effectively represented in a resume.

That Java software engineer you’re recruiting/hiring for? Remember that you’re hiring for a Java software engineer and not a professional resume writer.

Ditto for every other role/skill that could ever be hired for.

It’s important to keep in mind that the resumes of the people you’re reviewing may be the 2nd or 3rd resume they’ve ever had to write.

How good are you at anything when you’ve only had to do it 2-3 times?

Don’t see a particular skill or experience in a resume or social media profile?

Don’t assume the person lacks the skill or experience. While the idea that everyone should have a 1 page resume (2 pages max) is still perpetuated amongst job seekers and employers alike, have you ever stopped to think about what someone is actually doing when they have more than 1-2 pages’ worth of experience?

That’s right – consciously deciding to remove information in order to reduce the length of the resume – information you can no longer search for or use to determine whether or not the person might have the skills and experience you’re looking for.

The next time you or someone you work with is getting a tad overzealous with the resumes they’re reviewing, remember that there is a real human being attached to those resumes, and that it’s better to rule people IN rather than OUT.

You’re not judging a resume writing contest – you’re trying to identify top talent. You don’t know anything about a person until you talk to them.

Talent Pipelines

We all know it’s important for recruiters to build up talent pipelines, but how many recruiters have ever wondered what it must feel like to actually be a “pipeline candidate?”

Is it some kind of an honor or a privilege?

What do they get out of it?

Would you like to be continually contacted and screened by recruiters who never actually produced any well-matched opportunities for you, but liked to stay in touch with you regularly anyway, if for no other reason than to solicit you for referrals and leads?

If so, how many recruiters would you or could you entertain in this fashion?

Recruiting Relationships

What is the ultimate value that a recruiter can provide a potential candidate?

Wait – before you answer, it really doesn’t matter what you think.

Only the candidate can truly answer that question, because value can only be evaluated from the perspective of the customer of a service or product.

It’s one thing for people in the recruiting profession to talk about the value of relationships – but it’s ultimately the candidate who defines the value.

So why don’t you ask them?

A while back I wrote an article that challenged the value of the traditional “relationship” between recruiters and potential candidates- I urge you to read it and let me know your thoughts.

Do we really believe that all active, passive, and non-job seekers really need another recruiter to have a relationship with? How many “relationships” can any given job seeker have and maintain anyway?

The reality is that the vast majority of people ultimately want a job that is a great fit with what they are looking for – one that is the critical next step in their career, not another “relationship.”

Talent Communities

If one of your company’s talent acquisition strategies involves building and maintaining talent communities, the theoretical value that a talent community could provide a company is obvious.

However, have you ever wondered what real value a talent community provides the people in the community? Do they even perceive it to be a community?

Perhaps you saw it coming this time, but I have to remind you that it really doesn’t matter what you think. What really matters is what the people in your talent community and the ones you are trying to attract think.

Have you asked them? Probably not.

The idea of building talent communities is a deceptively logical approach to the need of proactively identifying talent. I say “deceptively logical” because what is good in theory may actually not be in practice.

The talent community concept has issues. For example – have you ever wondered about how many talent communities the people you are looking to identify, attract and perhaps hire at some point can possibly belong to?

It may feel as if the talent universe revolves around your company, but chances are you aren’t the only company of your kind. That means your competitors and other companies are vying for the same talent you are. Your talent community is one of many that the talent you so covet can chose from.

How many talent communities can a person realistically belong to? Actually participate in? Actually want to belong to and participate in?

Bear in mind that having an interest in your corporate brand does not necessarily equate to someone’s interest in becoming a part of your “talent community.”

Gareth Jones wrote a spot-on piece about the myth of the talent community – I urge you to read it if you haven’t already. Gareth astutely points out that “Job seeking is an event, not an interest,” and that fact alone will render many corporate branded talent communities into pit stops along the career highway, frequented mostly by transients and passers-by.

My guess is that isn’t how most companies would like to view their talent communities.

While “talent community” seems to be quite the sexy term in HR and recruiting circles these days, it is important to realize that “community” is defined as “an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location.”

That means that if your “talent community” doesn’t have an interacting population, by definition, it isn’t a talent community.

If you have anything to do with a company’s development of a “talent community,” please make sure it provides some real value to the people who join and that it fosters interaction, and that it doesn’t function more like a talent collection point, farm or holding pen.

A good start in that direction would be to ask the talent you are trying to attract and serve what they would like to be able to get out of the talent community.

Either that, or just stop calling it a “community” if it really isn’t one.

Effective Job Posting and Response

You may think your job postings look good, but you’re not a neutral party. What really matters is what they look like to the average job seeker.

Do they accurately reflect the opportunity? Do they have enough real content (as opposed to boilerplate mumbo-jumbo) and are they interesting and compelling enough to get a response from the right people? From a passive job seeker that doesn’t have to or need to make a change? Can a potential candidate really get a sense of what they would be doing in the role?

Even if you have the most fantastic and compelling job postings, as I recently wrote, passive and non-job seekers typically don’t even “see” job postings or employer branding content even if it’s on the same web page they’re reviewing (think Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

Take the time to look at your job posting/socialization strategy from the perspective of a discriminating active and/or passive job seeker who has many choices to choose from and who will only respond and take action on a select few. How can you ensure that you and your organization are among the select few? If you take the time to understand your target talent pool, you headed in the right direction. It’s not what you think is interesting and effective – it’s what they think is interesting and effective.

Last in this category, but certainly not least, is the response provided to applicants who take the often considerable time and effort to jump through the numerous flaming hoops of your applicant tracking system to respond to one of your postings.

How would you like to apply for a position that you feel you are well qualified for and never get a response? Would you be impressed with an auto-response sent via email confirming your resume/application has been received? How about the same snail-mail postcard that you know everyone else who applied also received?

The bar for what is “acceptable” has been set incredibly and embarrassingly low.

Interview Process and Feedback

Imagine you’re a job seeker for a moment.

You successfully landed an interview with a prestigious and well-respected company and arrive on time and fully prepared. How would you feel if no one who interviewed you was on time or prepared? Yes, this actually happens.

What if all the interviewers seemed interested in was how well you fit into their predefined job description, rather than looking for ways to fully leverage your talent, skills, and experience? How would you feel if the only questions you were asked were the “standard” interview questions?

How would you feel about not being selected for a role you interviewed for, and all you were given in response was that “you were not a fit for the role,” with no further explanation?

My guess is that you wouldn’t like it. So please make an effort to treat others as you would like to treated.

Active/Passive Candidates

Active candidates are okay, but passive candidates are better, right?

We all know that as soon as someone posts their resume on a job board or responds to a job posting, they can magically transform from a highly sought after “A” player passive candidate to just another “B” player active job seeker.

After all, “A” players don’t need to post their resume anywhere, right?

Ridiculous. The reality is that the subjective perception of any particular job-seeking status has nothing to do with the objective quality of candidate.

Nothing.

Active candidates are not plague-stricken, desperate “unemployables.”

Active, passive, not looking – who cares?!?! Let’s stop labeling/classifying people – anyone can be a candidate for the right opportunity.

Non-Competitive Offers

If you and your organization are looking to hire top talent, make sure that your offers and total compensation packages accurately and directly reflect that desire to the people to whom it matters most – the candidates.

When you’re dealing with people who don’t need to leave their current employer, you’re not going to get ”A” players and not even solid “B” players with significant talent, skills, and experience who can make a large positive impact on your team and in your company to leave without some incentive.

Don’t get too comfortable with your prestigious employer/company brand and assume anyone would be honored to work for your company for a lateral compensation move.

It is critical for hiring managers and HR to always keep in mind what it’s like to be on the other side of the hiring process, but it seems that not enough do. I’ve seen hiring managers that get so confident with their corporate/employment brand that they will extend offers under a very good candidate’s current pay.

I have a few questions for managers who extent these kinds of offers – how would you feel receiving such an offer, what kind of message does that send to you, and what would you do/how would you react? Would you seek to interview elsewhere?

Take the time to think (and care!) about how your offers will be received and perceived by the top talent you are trying to acquire. The best candidates invariably have choices in the market, and no one likes to feel undervalued and unappreciated.

And they talk.

Do you care if the word on the street about your company is that you’re a good employer to work for, but you don’t pay competitively? How about developing a reputation as a “cheap” employer?

Gen Y/Millennials

I daresay that the amount of time spent writing and talking about recruiting and managing Gen Y candidates comes close to the amount of time spent writing and talking about Social Recruiting.

I know and understand (and loathe) the human need for labels and categorization, but the fact of the matter is that you simply cannot generalize and stereotype everyone that’s been born in the 80′s or 90′s.

There are Gen Y people who actually think and behave more like Gen X, and vice versa. There are even Gen Y’ers who are more like Baby Boomers than the traditional “Trophy Kid.”

I know I don’t like being lumped in with anyone or any group simply because of when I was born – it’s absurd and insulting. I’m pretty sure most “Millennials” feel the same way.

Each person is a unique individual.

Take the care to recruit and manage people for who they are as individuals, not as a member of any particular generation.

Final Thoughts

Sitting on one side of the recruiting and hiring process can lead to the development of a distorted and disconnected view of the talent identification and acquisition process.

I strongly urge you to take the time and think about, understand, and appreciate the recruiting life cycle from the candidate’s side – the job seeker, the passive candidate, the non-job seeker, and the elusive “A+ player.”

I don’t think you can be a top recruiter or employer without the desire and ability to understand and appreciate the perspective of the people you are trying to recruit.

That’s the human element to the recruiting process.

Now that we are on our way into exploring the new year, I’ve seen some articles on what’s coming next for the recruiting industry this year, and even as far out as 10 years from now.

When I read one such article written by Kevin Wheeler, I was struck by his comment that although sourcing remains a topic he is interested in, he feels that “the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.”

I was prepared to write an article just in response to that thought, but as I sat down to review his post again on Sunday in preparation for my post, I noticed that Kelly Dingee had commented in defense of electronic talent identification.

In response, Kevin wrote “I think that intensive Internet searching, for most internal recruiters, is a sign of their failure to develop a community of potential candidates. If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter. For volume and routine hiring there should be no need to use anything beyond a network of potential candidates whether proprietary or not. Building that community is what a recruiter’s job is all about – not running searches or becoming a computer nerd.”

Wow. Where do I begin?

Boolean Search is NOT Dead – Nor Will it Ever Die

We are well into the Information Age of recruiting - ”characterized by…the ability to have instant access to… (candidate) information that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. The idea is linked to the concept of a Digital Age or Digital Revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based around the manipulation of information.”

When you need to find information, unless you’re using a single word or phrase (I literally shudder at the thought), there is no escaping Boolean logic. You either want something (AND), you want at least one thing in a list (OR), or you don’t want it (NOT).

The reason why Boolean logic will never die is that it doesn’t get any simpler when it comes to information retrieval. Yes, I said “simple.” We’re not talking SQL here -  we’re talking about 3 very basic operators. There is a reason why Boolean logic is the foundation of ALL modern digital electronics – it’s the simplest fundamental logic!

Of course, if you’re using Google, Bing, or LinkedIn, you don’t have to type AND, as every space is an implied AND, so perhaps many people are unaware that they are conducting simple Boolean searches. However, if you use more than one search word/term you’re still using Boolean logic – it is inescapable.

The Boolean operators of a search are the easy part – the more challenging aspect of electronic talent discovery is the entire process of understanding the hiring need, thoughtfully translating it into an effective search strategy, and adpatively modifying consecutive searches to return results that have a high probability of being excellent potential hires.

Yes, searching information systems to find candidates requires thinking. Sorry.

Recruiters Do Need to Know How to Perform Electronic Talent Discovery

While every step of the recruiting life cycle is equally important, the fact of the matter is that you can’t build a relationship with (or hire for that matter) a potential candidate that you haven’t identified in the first place. Talent acquisition is dependent upon talent identification.

Recruiters should know how to search information systems to find and identify talent. It’s not about being a “computer nerd” – it’s about the fact that with each passing day, there is more information available about more people electronically, whether it be in a corporate ATS/CRM, a social network, a blog, a press release, a resume, etc. This is a trend that will continue to accelerate – we will never experience a decrease in access to human capital data.

If a recruiter cannot fully capitalize on all of the human capital data that is readily available and accessible today, they are doing themselves and their organization a considerable disservice, and their organization is at a competitive disadvantage.

When Kevin states that for a corporate recruiter, “If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter” – my question is why? If I was a corporate recruiter, I would never need to use a third party recruiter, primarily due to my ability to leverage information systems and human capital data. I am not bound solely to candidates with whom I have a pre-existing relationship.

More on that in a few paragraphs.

Bottom line: You’re not a full life cycle recruiter if you can’t find your own candidates. Whether or not candidate sourcing should be a separate role or integrated function will be the topic of a future post.

Access to Information is Not Enough

The value of information lies not in the information itself, but in the ability to retrieve the information needed at the appropriate time. Information is of no use or value if it cannot be discovered in the first place.

Having direct access to an unprecedented number of potential candidates via a combination of an ATS/CRM, the Internet, LinkedIn, job board resume databases, Facebook, and Twitter is of no value without the ability to capitalize on that data – the ability to sort through the information and retrieve the right candidates at the right time.

In part 1 of Dr. John Sullivan’s excellent 3 part series on talent acquisition trends for 2010, he comments that “The challenge moving forward isn’t finding people – that’s too easy…” I agree, in that with ready access to millions of potential candidates, finding people is easy. However, finding the right people at the right time is not, nor will it ever be.

It is all too easy to assume that access to information automatically confers the ability to fully capitalize on that information. It does not.  That’s like saying I’m a great tennis player because I own a tennis racket.

Even if you’ve already built a community of candidates, you still have to be able to find and retrieve the right person at the right time. If you think that a potential candidate has been “found” just because they are already in your ATS or CRM, think again. Having a candidate record in an ATS/CRM only means that the human capital data has been captured.

Many ATS/CRM applications are well-nigh unsearchable – candidates go in, but they don’t come out. Consider the Fortune 500 corporate recruiter who recently admitted to me that it’s easier for her to run a search on Monster, find a candidate based on skill and experience, then cross reference the name in their Taleo Talent Management solution to find the candidate record.

Ouch.

Breaking the Bonds of Pre-Existing Relationships

The Information Age of recruiting, unbeknownst to many people, has enabled recruiters to break the bonds of the pre-existing relationship.

A core responsibility of any recruiter is to build a community of potential candidates. For over two decades, recruiters have been trained that proactively pipelining candidates is the best way to ensure that they will have ready access to the right candidates at the right time.

However, there are many intrinsic limitations and weaknesses of this practice. What is the likehood that the best candidate available for a given position is already in a recruiter’s pipeline? Also – what happens when a recruiter’s community of potential candidates fails to produce any viable (appropriately qualified, available, and closeable) candidates?

For the first time in the history of recruiting, a recruiter who has the ability to fully capitalize on the huge and ever-increasing volume of the readily accessible human capital data available to them via their ATS/CRM, LinkedIn, online resume databases, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  can almost instantly identify and engage well-qualified candidates with whom they have no pre-existing relationship.

The Information Era of recruiting enables recruiters with solid e-sourcing skills to no longer be limited solely to candidates with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. These recruiters can find and attract the best candidates, regardless of whether or not they have previously identified them.

I’ll let that sink in a bit. It’s deep.

Social Networking

Nearly everyone in the recruiting industry is buzzing about the opportunity provided by and the importance of social networking. While I enthusiastically engage in online social networking (yes, I’ve even made a hire from Twitter), social networking is simply an evolution of in-person and phone networking - taking what recruiters have been doing for decades in person and over the phone (building and maintaining relationships) online.

While social networks increase access and reach for many recruiters, they do not significantly improve a recruiters ability to quickly find the right people, nor the right people at the right time, unless they are adept at e-sourcing.

Moreover, networking of any kind (in-person, online, referral recruiting) has intrinsically low levels of control over critical candidate variables, and thus a low inherent probability of producing the right candidate at the right time.

Final Thoughts

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The human element of recruiting – contacting, building and maintaining relationships with, and consultatively selling to (recruiting) potential candidates – has not changed in the past 20 years, nor is it likely to in the next 20.

What has changed significantly, and will continue to do so, is the level of access recruiters have to people beyond their pre-existing relationships, which is 100% due to evolving and emerging information technology.

Large corporate ATS’s contain millions of candidates, each of the major job board resume databases has over 20,000,000 resumes, and LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter alone provide access to over 100,000,000 people in the U.S.!

With ready access to unprecedented volumes of potential candidates, the competitive advantage lies in the ability to  search for and find the right people to engage and attract at the right time.

I disagree with Kevin’s assessment that the need to ”apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.” However, I wholeheartedly agree with his idea that data mining is an advanced skill that can facilitate recruiting success(on the same level as relationship building, no less).

The ability to quickly and effectively extract value out of information systems containing human capital data enables a recruiter to be more productive – to do more of what most people consider to be “real recruiting.” Quite simply, the more qualified candidates you can identify, the more qualified candidates you can contact, engage, attract and recruit - with or without pre-existing relationships.

Relationships and recruiting go hand and hand. This has been long-known and well established, and there’s nothing new to discover here. However, the next frontier in recruiting lies in the effective information management – ATS/CRM solutions, the Internet, resume databases, social networks and whatever comes next.

With more information available about more people on a daily basis, the complimentary need arises to leverage that information to find the people you want and need. The ability to query social network sites, systems, and databases to find these people to engage and recruit is a highly valuable skill and ability, and will only increase in value to organizations who wish to have a competitive advantage in the “war for talent.”

What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates as a recruiter?

I want you to really think about that question before proceeding. In this post, there will be more questions raised than answers provided. Please take a moment to ensure that you have your thinking cap on and that your mind is open. 

Who Defines Value?

From the candidate’s perspective, what do you think the real value provided by a recruiter is? There are countless recruiting articles and blog posts (such as this one referencing Guanxi) that will tell you that the relationship is more important than the transaction itself. But for the majority of candidates, is it? Really?

I’m a little bit of a Lean freak. One of the core principles of Lean philosophy is Value - every activity in a business should be scrutinized for how it adds value to the final product or service provided to the customer. A lot of activities previously thought to be essential in a business turn out to be non-value adding when evaluated from the perspective of the customer.

There’s the key – “when evaluated from the perspective of the customer.” It’s one thing for people in the recruiting profession to talk about the value of relationships - but it’s ultimately the customer who defines value.

Imagine this scenario: Recruiter A (“John”) has been developing a professional relationship with a “passive” candidate (“Brett”) for the past year, but John has never been able to find precisely the right opportunity for Brett to make a move. Recruiter B (“Jenny”) finds an old version of Brett’s resume and calls him with an opportunity that happens to very closely align with exactly what Brett has been looking for. Within 1 week, Brett interviews for Jenny’s opening, receives and accepts an offer. 

From Brett’s perspective – which recruiter provided more value?  

How Do You Define a “Relationship” With a Candidate?

I think that “relationship” is one of the most overrused words in recruiting – it’s slung around with reckless abandon, yet it is rarely defined or explained.

And I can see why. The definition of “relationship” in Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary isn’t very helpful: “the state of being related or interrelated, the realtion connecting or binding participants in a relationship, a state of affairs existing between those having relations or dealings.” Umm…okay.

However, the the definition of “relation” (the root of “relationship”) is more helpful: ”an aspect or quality (as resemblance) that connects two or more things or parts as being or belonging or working together or as being of the same kind; the state of being mutually or reciprocally interested (as in social or commercial matters)”

And there it is. To paraphrase – a connection built by working together in mutual interest.

In this sense, a relationship between a recruiter and a candidate can be defined as a connection built as a result of them working together towards the common goal of the candidate making the next step in their career.

How do you define a “relationship” with a candidate?

Relationships – How Many and How Deep?

For a recruiter to ever hope of assisting candidates with making the next step in their career, certainly they will have to get to know each candidate to at the very least assess their current situation, understand the candidate’s motivators, and learn specifically about what the candidate would ideally like to be doing.

But in order to qualify as a “relationship,” exactly how deep does the interaction between a recruiter and a candidate have to go? 

In his “The Death of Sourcing” post on RecruitingBlogs, John Sumser explained his belief that “Next generation recruiting is about relating intimately, not about mutual discovery. It’s about fidelity and long term value exchange, not one night stands.”

In response Paul Davenport commented, “By the numbers: 1 hire requires approx. 10 interviews (phone and full face-to-face). 10 interviews require 40 profiles (resume, candidate profile completed by Recruiter). 40 profiles require 100 solid “hits” (candidate generation through passive and active search). A typical Recruiter carries 20-25 Reqs at any given time and they are rarely all for the same exact description. However, let’s assume for our purposes these req’s are identical. 20 req’s times 40 profiles = 800 profiles…people YOU claim are interested in long-term “fidelity”. Let’s make this easier by cutting everything in half. You still claim that success can only come with intimate, professional relationships with over 400 people. In the ever-changing real world, skills, priorities and hiring targets are constantly moving. How many people do you honestly think a professional can have a true intimate and long-term professional relationship?”

While the numbers and ratios are debatable, Paul raises an excellent point – any recruiter who is responsible for 20 or more positions per month (let alone at one time) will be required to contact a large number of candidates every month in an effort to find and hire the right people.

Some points to ponder:

• Is a recruiter expected to develop intimate and long term relationships with every great candidate they come into contact with? Is that realistic or even possible?
• How many “deep and lasting” candidate relationships do you think can any given recruiter hope to effectively maintain? 
• Do relationships between recruiters and candidates necessarily have to be “intimate and long term?” 
• Do you think that candidates are actually looking for “deep and lasting” relationships with recruiters? 
• Exactly how “deep” does a relationship between a recruiter and a candidate have to be in order to provide value to the candidate? 
• Ultimately, what do candidates want from recruiters? 

“Transactional” Recruiting

I’ve read many recruiting articles that take the position that “relationship recruiting” is superior to the lowly ”transactional recruiting.” That certainly sounds good (it probably feels good to say as well), but I have yet to see those concepts clearly defined. 

Hitting up the dictionary again, “transaction” can be defined as “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other; something transacted, an act, process, or instance of transacting.”

“Transact” is defined as “to carry to completion, to carry on the operation or management of.” 

Hmm…action or activity whereby two parties reciprocally affect and influence each other – nothing intrinsically evil there, in my opinion. What do you think? Is there anything wrong with carrying the relationship to “completion” (a hire, perhaps?) and carrying on the management of the recruiter-candidate relationship?

How effective or productive would a recruiter be if they only focused on building relationships and never sought to achieve hires (transactions) – helping candidates take the next step in their careers? Isn’t that what recruiters do? 

Final Thoughts

If a recruiter happens to find and call a candidate with the right opportunity at the right time, yet hasn’t developed a deep and long term relationship or value exchange with them, are they a bad recruiter? Is the recruiter providing any less value to the candidate? Would the candidate care?

Do all candidates need a new best friend, or another recruiter to have a relationship with?

It’s nice to have a relationship with your doctor, but if they don’t ever actually help you when you need them, how good of a doctor are they? Would you look down upon your doctor for being “transactional” if they spent most of their time helping you when you needed them? 

What is the ultimate value you provide to candidates as a recruiter?

Technology and Relationships are not Oil and Water

When I write posts about creating Boolean search strings to source and find talent/human capital – I often get responses from readers and those I train, especially staffing industry veterans who focus on executive search, that state that the foundation of recruiting is based on relationships built by human interaction and networking.

I couldn’t agree more.

Why does it seem to be ingrained in human nature to have an either/or mentality – as if things have to be one way or the other, but not both. Like phone sourcing vs database sourcing. You can and should do both, and I hope you are trying to contact and develop relationships with people identified via both methods.

If I wanted to be obtuse, I could argue that the phone is impersonal – and that to be a really good recruiter, I should never leverage the phone to make contact with people. Instead – I’ll just wander around looking for people to meet in person to establish a wonderful professional relationship with.

By the way – there isn’t anything instrinsically impersonal about leveraging technology to find or communicate with people. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s this thing called email that quite a few people use these days, and you know what? – it seems to work. I’ve also heard that there are millions of people communicating with something called text messaging, and that there are more text messages sent every day than phone calls made. How impersonal!

Let’s face it – if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t exist and be used by so many people so often.

When I talk about leveraging technology for talent identification and acquisition, my primary point is NOT that it is a replacement for any other method of candidate identification, nor am I saying technology is a replacement for human interaction and relationship building. My point is that there is more and more information stored about more people somewhere electronically every day – and you can either learn how to harness the power of using Boolean logic to create search strings for Talent Mining that can ACCELERATE your ability to establish MORE relationships with MORE of the RIGHT people, MORE quickly…..or not.

Running Boolean queries on the Internet, an internal corporate candidate database, or an online job board to find people who meet and hopefully exceed your basic/minimum qualifications isn’t anti-relationship. In fact – it has nothing directly to do with relationships. It’s nothing other than a method of identifying people who are likely to be able to meet the needs of your organization or client. Nothing more, nothing less.

I will, however, say that if you are particularly adept at Boolean search strings and have access to 1 or more databases of significant size (50,000+ local candidates), you can more quickly find more qualified candidates than by any other method of candidate indentification. And being able to find a large number of well qualified candidates quickly enables you to begin to contact and build relationships with those people. It’s a competitive advantage for those who can do this, and a competitive disadvantage for those who cannot.

I love analogies, so I’ll use two here to drive my point home.

Analogy #1

20 years ago, if you found something in your attic, closet, or basement that you no longer had a use for, but thought someone might pay money for it, you could try selling it at a garage sale, or perhaps put an ad in the local paper and see if it draws any interest.

Today, although you could try selling it at a garage sale or put an ad in the local paper, you could also put the item on Craig’s List, or on eBay. Arguably, you should probably try all 4 methods because you can’t predict where your highest bidder will come from. However, there is no arguing the point that we now have access to technology (the Internet and sites like eBay) that can more quickly expose you to more potential buyers than ever before. Now, one might draw more satisfaction from selling an item at a garage sale because they can meet the potential buyers in person, but let’s get real here – the main point is selling the item at the highest price possible (for most people – if not, just donate it). Exposing yourself to more and a wider variety of potential buyers does increase the statistical probability that you will encounter more opportunities to sell your item at a higher price. You can either have 20 people see the item at a garage sale, or 1000 people see it on eBay. It’s a no brainer. But why not do both?

Analogy #2

20 years ago, if you were single and wanted to meet someone, you could head to a local hot spot where you might encounter people looking to do the same. Or you could get lucky and just happen to run into the “right” person at the grocery store, soccer field, DMV, whatever. In any of these cases, you’re really only exposing yourself to a relatively small number of people that just *happen* to be where you are at any point in time, and you literally have no control over whether the people you meet via this method are single and looking, nor do you have any control over the type of people you might encounter and your potential compatibility with any one of them. Meeting people is easy – meeting the RIGHT people isn’t so easy.

Today, if you are so inclined, you could leverage technology and try an online service such as EHarmony or Match.com. With either, you are in all likelihood exposing yourself to more people than you could if you just went to the local bar (coffee or otherwise). Also, with these services, you have some degree of control over your preferences and potential compatibility – it’s not a science – but it’s definitely better than making contact with random strangers out in public who you cannot tell if they are open to a relationship or not. Using an online service, the vast majority of people are actually looking for a relationship, and you can actually get to know someone before meeting them in person.

Using services like EHarmony and Match.com isn’t a replacement for meeting people in person and establishing relationships – in fact, it’s about accelerating and facilitating your ability to potentially meet more of the right people – people who are looking for a relationship and people who are looking for a relationship as well, people who you may not every run into otherwise, and people who may be more compatible with you based on their profile? Yes, I am sure it’s not all accurate, but neither are resumes. Wow – this analogy is really getting good!

So – if you were single and looking for a relationship – why not be ready to meet and potentially get to know people you run into as you go about your normal daily routine at work and out in public AND leverage technology to expose yourself to even more people more quickly – people who are looking for a relationship as well and people you may not otherwise ever have the chance to cross paths with? You can’t predict where and when you will meet your soul mate – but why not play the odds and work with a larger sample of the population?

Conclusion

You may be unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or inexperienced with recruiting and staffing technology – there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But there is no denying that when properly leveraged, technology can typically help you do things faster, better, more often, and more accurately. In the case of talent identification and acquisition – aka sourcing and recruiting – you can choose to embrace technology or not. Your choice should be made based on personal perference and the FACTS - not in a belief that somehow using technology and information systems is impersonal and is anti-relationship. That would be silly. Or some other word starting with “s.”

Make no mistake – properly trained sourcers and recruiters who are skilled in the art and science of Talent Mining – running Boolean search strings in resume databases and on the Internet – can find more and more accurately qualified candidates more quickly than with any other method of candidate identification. That gives them the ability to begin to establish contact with and build relationships with more of the right people more quickly – a competitive advantage over people who do not or cannot leverage information systems.

True – you can find and contact candidates via phone sourcing and referral recruiting that you cannot find online, on LinkedIn, or in a resume database somewhere. Ah – but the knife cuts both ways…the converse is also true, so there is no inherent advantage of “exclusivity” for either method over the other. However, I will say that because of the speed, accuracy, and volume advantages of Talent Mining, sourcers and recruiters leveraging information systems automatically gain the advantage of accelerated and higher volume referral recruiting and networking opportunities as a result. Sweet.

Be advised – recruiting and staffing technology and information systems are not going away. They are not only here to stay – expect them to evolve and advance rapidly. The recruiting and staffing industry isn’t going back to paper resumes and faxes. Every day, there is more information about more people made available electronically somewhere – on the Internet, in a Social Network, or in an internal candidate database. And you either know how to quickly and precisely leverage these information systems to find the right people at the right time or you don’t.

If you can’t, or simply don’t by choice – don’t use the excuse that technology is impersonal and that the recruiting industry is based on relationships. We all know that. But thankfully today we have technology available, that when properly utilized, can help sourcers and recruiters to more quickly find and contact and build relationships with more of the right people.