My company, Lockton, is a sales-led company that has a very intriguing setup. Producers (salespeople) at Lockton are very well-regarded, and an office can be built around a highly successful one.

Our model is a high-risk, high-reward type of opportunity that offers great financial success once you reach a certain level. Traditionally HR has not been involved at all in the sourcing and recruitment of these individuals. That all changed when in fall 2008 Lockton engaged in a Producer recruiting experiment that I was fortunate enough to get involved with.

Senior management selected five markets to target to find successful C-Level B2B salespeople. Basically, we were going to hire some great top-level salespeople and teach them our industry. The types of backgrounds were fairly stringent with regard to minimum amounts of experience, documented exceptional levels of success in sales at the C-level, amounts of revenue produced per deal, community involvement, and other factors. They then partnered with two search firms that varied greatly in their approaches. One of the search firms was very research-based and very selective in who they contacted and targeted and ultimately presented to my company. The other firm was much more industry-specific and took a “smile-and-dial” type of approach that has had some good success with several of our locations. My supervisor got me in front of management as an internal option to see if I could have any success. I was the litmus test and was given the smallest market to try to develop some candidates.

We spent $60,000 with the two firms in four markets that produced one live interview and phone interview. I set up six interviews in my initial market that resulted in one hire and was then quickly put on to two other markets that resulted in four hires out of the eight total hired across the country.

What led to being successful in this initial search, when the firms that do this for a living were not?

There are a variety of reasons for this, and I’m writing about them in more detail in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, but it boils down to several main ones.

First of all, I know my company very well. I have studied our industry extensively and have asked a lot of questions about the various pieces of it. I am able to effectively communicate what it is that makes our company unique and what type of person it appeals to. Second, I asked a lot of questions on the front end. When I first got involved in this project I met with four of our successful Producers and asked them why they joined my company, what obstacles they had building up their business, and a whole lot of other questions in order to gain a good understanding of the value proposition. I wanted to know what type of person this opportunity would appeal to and who it would not. I wanted to know the toughest thing about it, as well as the best things about being a Producer at Lockton.

Finally, I physically traveled to the office I was working with and got their buy-in by showing I was working with them and in their best interests. This was most likely the biggest reason why this project worked: that I traveled to the office I was working with and got an understanding from them of what would work in their office. It is one thing if senior management wants to do something, but another to get the buy-in from the office that it is actually affecting. By doing this I was able to find out what would work there and what wouldn’t. The senior folks in that office were very candid about who they would (and would not) take a chance on hiring.

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t believe search firms can do a good job. They can. It has been my experience from being on both sides of the fence that the right group can be a true partner with a corporate company. If they do many of the same things discussed here, such as getting to know the business very well, than they can and should be successful.

Take Your Time

High achievers want to get results now. If you decide this is something that is worth pursuing and would be of value to you and your company, realize it will take time. You have to think of it as building a search practice within your company. To build any well-regarded practice, you need to start with an initial successful search and build on it. Make sure you have a supervisor who is in your corner and believes in your abilities. If you work with someone like this, they will do their best to get you in front of the decision-makers when the opportunity presents itself. When you do have a chance to get involved with a senior-level search, jump on it with enthusiasm and a well-thought-out plan. Once you are able to show that you can be successful in this role, the word will get out and more people in your company will want your assistance on the next search. And the next one. And we all know you can’t beat a great referral built on a previous success.

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Video 2.0 for Recruitment blog about the U.S. Army’s $33 million investment in a recruiting video game.

Ernest Feiteira picked up on an item I posted and started a conversation about the value of such recruiting tools. A couple others chimed in about the ROI, something I’m looking into for a future article.

At this point in the discussion, there’s no resolution to the question of how you would calculate the ROI.

However, Down Under, the Aussies must believe that outsourcing their military recruiting pays off because they have been doing it for some years. I know that because I talked with a Manpower spokeswoman about a press release announcing that the Milwaukee  firm just won a $200 million recruiting contract from the Australian  Defence Force. 

In the release, Commodore Tim Barrett, director general of defence force recruiting, is quoted saying: “Manpower’s capability in managing and delivering large-scale and complex recruitment services is necessary to attract the calibre of military recruits that we are looking for. The breadth, nature, and complexity of this recruitment program can be considered critical to national security.”

The nation of 21 million people has an enviable problem. Its unemployment rate has been declining for years and is somewhere around 4 percent for 2009. (Incidentally, the Aussies think that’s a recession.) Even though its total military force is only about 53,000 active duty, the military has been hard-pressed to find enough volunteers to fill its ranks, especially when it comes to certain types of jobs that are in demand in the civilian sector.

The problem is so acute that a newspaper analysis a few months ago reported the Navy didn’t have enough submariners to staff its six submarines.

“By any measure,” says the report in the Australian, “the latest figures on recruitment from the Defence Department make for depressing reading.”

Manpower will employ 300 people to manage what it’s calling the “largest and most complex” RPO project in the world. It’s an end-to-end recruiting contract, that includes marketing and promotion up through onboarding.

The transition is already underway with the official launch set for February. Incidentally, it’s worth taking a look at the ADF recruiting website. The videos may not be as action-packed as some of the U.S. Army’s, but the ones I watched give you a pretty good idea of the nature of the jobs the military is looking to fill.

Crowe Horwath has a social media strategy, a plan, and now evidence that its investment in social media recruiting is paying off.

A just-completed mid-term report by  Crowe Horwath’s strategic sourcing leader, Michele Porfilio, shows that in the first six months of the company’s fiscal year (which begins April 1) 20 percent of the hires came from  non-traditional recruiting methods.

Those methods include search engine marketing and optimization, the use of job aggregators (principally Indeed and SimplyHired) and social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. For company purposes, those sources are grouped as either SEO/SEM/Job Aggregators or Social Networks.

The cost of the hires who came in through these sources is about a third of what the company spends on job boards.

“I would say,” Porfilio reports, “that overall, we’re getting better candidates from these social media sources and we have a much better ROI.”

Porfilio shared some of the findings from the report, which she prepared for the company’s Social Networking Advisory Council. Merely having such a group puts Crowe Horwath among the social media leaders. A CareerXroads survey of its mostly blue chip, Fortune list clients found fewer than half had a social media committee.

The CareerXroads survey is more extensively discussed in a report on social media that will appear in the January issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. The report focuses on how companies can inexpensively employ social media in their recruiting programs, and discusses the components of a social media recruiting strategy. Case studies are also presented on how Crowe Horwath and Hyatt Hotels use social media in their recruiting programs.

Overall, she says, the percentage of candidates applying as a result of these non-traditional sources has more than doubled since 2009.

In an earlier conversation, before the report was completed, Porfilio said Crowe Horwath began developing a systematic social media strategy a year ago. For FY 2010, she estimates the company will spend about 30 percent of the recruiting budget on social media and networking sites as well as on optimizing the company’s jobs to make them more easily found on search engines.

“The ROI from this,” she says now, after preparing the mid-term report, “is very good.”

In two charts that include numbers through November, it’s clear enough that job boards may yield the most number of applicants by far, but employee referrals are the single biggest source (35 percent) of hires.

Job boards are next at 22 percent of hires. The two non-traditional categories together account for 15 percent. These two categories include search engine marketing and optimization, the use of job aggregators (principally Indeed and SimplyHired) and social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Social networking sites alone yielded almost 4 percent of the hires.

Though most of the dollar amounts are proprietary, Porfilio shared one data point from the report: About 5.5 percent of the hires at Crowe Horwath were sourced from Indeed.com. The cost of those hires averaged $1,600. That compares to an $8,500 cost of hire from one of the major job boards.

Even though, she says, she has “decreased my spend drastically in the job boards, there is still a need for them … Will we still be using Monster? Yes, until it becomes completely irrelevant, if that happens.”

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!