The Science of Recruiting – Part 1: Making First Contact
By Lou Adler

"Welcome to our new series of articles, The Science of Recruiting. Over the next ten weeks, we’ll look at every skill and technique necessary to be a great recruiter. At the end of it all, you’ll have a sense of what you need to do to take your performance and success as a recruiter up another notch or two, or maybe more.

Recruiting is a multi-phase process that leads to the discovery of a perfect job match. It starts with an intricate knowledge of what the job requires. Finding top candidates is another part of this process, and is assessing candidate competency. Interspersed throughout these activities is the recruiting, convincing, and influencing part. Recruiting isn’t heavy-handed, in-your-face selling, it’s finesse. It’s about convincing top candidates to stay involved even though their kids don’t want to move. It’s about convincing a hiring manager to see a top person even though he or she doesn’t have all of the experience that had been originally demanded.

Recruiting is about taking a fuzzy, imperfect, human process and using it to find and place perfect candidates. The profession of recruiting will always be a bit of a black art, but in the effort to make hiring top people a systematic business process, trying to find science where we can will most certainly be a useful effort."

Full article.