Between 1978 and 2002, I personally made 457 placements. These represented a combination of retained and contingency searches ranging from professional staff to general management. In addition, I was actively involved in another 283 search assignments where I either got the retained assignment, or had my candidates as finalists. In total, about 60 percent of these were true passive candidates. The others were hot tiptoers w...

High achievers leave a lot of evidence in their wake. As long as you know what you’re looking for, much of this can be easily found during the work history review portion of the formal interview or during the phone screen. Once you find it, you then need to determine if the person is a fit for the actual job available, and if the job offers a significant career move for your candidate. This takes a bit longer, but if it’...

There are three basic types of metrics that should be used by recruiting departments to see how well they’re performing. Historical metrics like cost per hire and time to fill, tell you where you’ve been, but not where you are or where you’re going. While the trends of these are important, the information is too late to take preventative action. Process control metrics like interviews per day and job postings viewed and...

If you follow these five steps you will find more top performers within hours:1. Put the employee value proposition (EVP) in the ad title as a tagline. Here are two examples of before and after ads and the impact of this change. A hospital group in Northern California ran an ad for nurses with this title on a nurse job board: “Flight Nurses – Sacramento, CA.” It had few responses between Thanksgiving, 2009, and Feb. 5, 2...

Most recruiters think that recruiting means being able to sell or talk your candidate into the merits of your job. To me, this is a 10% solution at best. While it will work some of the time, it misses the forest for the trees. The best people – whether they’re active or passive and not desperate – will not be swayed by your cleverness. Instead, they will make a career-oriented decision focusing on short- and long-term c...

The economic recovery will begin. Someday. Hopefully soon. You’ll know that day has arrived when most of the following occurs on a regular basis:1. Candidates begin accepting counter-offers.2. Candidates want more money.3. Candidate opt-out rates increase at every step in the hiring process. 4. Candidates you just found tell you they have just received an offer.5. Your best people leave for greener pastures at an accelerati...

John Sullivan wrote a great piece on ERE a few months ago, titled Five Ugly Numbers You Can’t Ignore. John’s article pointed out public research indicating fundamental flaws with the interviewing and assessment process used by most companies.As a result of John’s article, I participated in a series of animated discussion on these ERE pages regarding the relative impact of increased interviewing accuracy on improving quality...

Let me start off this article by saying that I’ve been working with top candidates, top hiring managers, and top recruiters for the past 30 years. As a result of this we’ve developed training tools based on how top candidates make job change decisions, how top managers who can attract and recruit the best talent make their decisions, and how top recruiters out-produce their average peers by factors of 100-200% or more. Man...

When I started out as a recruiter, some 30 years ago, it was pretty clear that you could make more placements if you were a better interviewer than your hiring manager clients. Not only would all of your candidates be interviewed, but your best ones wouldn’t get tossed under the bus by superficial or narrow assessments, or if they possessed less-than-stellar presentation skills. This led to the development of the one-questi...

Over the past year, I’ve been making the case that the best people – the top-third of your future workforce – won’t look for jobs, nor decide which one to take, based on the primary sourcing processes you now use. Making matters worse, traditional behavioral and competency interviewing are not designed to differentiate between the best and least best of your fully-qualified candidates, even if you can find them. To address...