Rehder Talent Logistics (RTL)

Monday, March 06, 2006

Lou Adler: Three Top Concerns Facing Corporate Recruiters

I just listened to a podcast by Craig Silverman of HireAbility.com and Lou Adler of Adler Concepts. I talked about Lou's Performance Profiles in an article I wrote back in October '05 about creating a Contingent Workforce Talent Management Office (CWTMO) for the Contingent Workforce Strategies magazine. I am a HUGE BELIEVER in Performance Profiles and Lou touches on that in the podcast. However, I was more interested in what Lou said were the three biggest challenges or obstacles for corporate recruiters. They were:

Too many candidates (Have to sift through too many to find the good ones).
Too many reqs.
Hiring Managers that were not 100% committed to the hiring process.

However, what really intrigued was Lou's comment after saying that. His comment was that he didn't see a solution on the horizon. Perhaps there is... the "tweaked" CRM model applied to Talent Acquisition.

First of all, you have to buy into the belief that recruiting is a lot like, if not exactly like, sales. In a sales model you have leads, contacts and products. In talent acquisition model, you have leads, contacts, candidates, and reqs.

Stephan Schiffman is a top "sales guy" and works for DEI Management. One of the sales books that he wrote is called "Cold Calling Techniques (That Really Work!)." In the book he lists what the objectives are for successful selling:

Find out what people do.
How they do it.
When they do it.
Where they do it.
Who they do it with.
Why they are doing it.

Ultimately, "Successful selling means helping people do what they do better." Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like recruiting and talent management, to me.

With a CRM type model, you can effectively take on all of Lou's top issues. With a combination of work queues, workflow and proper lead management you can take the task of filtering candidates off of the recruiter's desk and place it within the "system." The designed "system" filters, identifies, and assigns based upon existing information. Effectively living up to what Jeremy Langhans calls the sourcer's dream, "the ability to push a button & get a targeted batch of leads."

By housing Reqs in the "system" you can match them up against candidates in the proper place and proper time in the "workflow" based upon certain criteria. That criteria comes form each company's structure, roles, and available resources.

DATA IS KING.

One of the best ways to get Hiring Manager buy-in is to create a workforce strategy with them. This strategy can include a SLA that sets "commitment" levels by the Hiring Manger. The "system" then later backs up their participation, or lack there of, with simple reporting that focuses on the SLA terms that can be viewed with a Dashboard of assorted and specific reports.

With this type of process reporting, you can identify successes and failures within your process and also where candidates "drop out" of your overall process....and why they dropped off.

Anyways, if you get a chance to listen to Lou and Craig...you should. It is a "good listen."

1 Comments:

Sean, reading this post has got me thinking! Wow!

I've been wrestling with ideas like this, but never really getting traction on possible solution-scenarios.

Looking at them through CRM eyes immediately makes it clear about my problems--not enough people know enough about the right people.

hmmm....

.... still thinking this one over! Thanks for the brain food!

Robert Merrill, at 7:32 AM

Post a Comment

Contact Information

Sean Rehder
Principal
Orange County, CA.
Phone: (951) 858-4901
Email: sean.rehder@talentlogistics.com

Past Events

ER Expo 2006 Spring San Diego, CA March 14-16, 2006
"Now in its sixth year, the ER Expo conference series has helped hundreds of corporations develop and sustain world-class, industry-leading recruitment and staffing functions."

HCI's 2006 National Human Capital Summit Chicago, IL Chicago Marriott Downtown Pre-Conference April 5, 2006 Conference and Expo April 6-7, 2006
"HCI's inaugural National Human Capital Summit Conference and Expo is this year's most important event for human capital professionals, line managers and executives who understand that talent will be the key driver for success in the knowledge economy."

Key Topics of Discussion

LEAD MANAGEMENT
Leads are suspects or people who have been identified as being part of your company's industry. These people need to be qualified to make sure they are someone you want to have a relationship with.

CONTACT RELATIONSHIPS
Contacts are individuals who are associated with your competitors or Acounts as I call them. Or people you have inditied for potential employment.

ACCCOUNT MANAGEMENT & COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE
Accounts are companies. They can be business partners, vendors or one of two types of competitors. Either a Direct Competitor which is a company that is in the same business you are and sells products “against” you, or an Indirect Competitor which is a company that is not in your business but does employ people similar to whom you employ.

OPPORTUNITIES
Opportunities are what you qualify Leads and Contacts against. Your open opportunities constitute your predictable talent pipeline and opportunities also serve as the foundation of your talent management forecast .

STRATEGIC PLANNING
Strategic Planning is used by both your talent acquisition team and your hiring managers…together. Together you create and manage plans and the associated strategies and execution tactics for these plans.

The planning process will most likely be performed for each quarter and be used only for strategic planning where a company makes the decision to proactively target either a highly desired skill set or to “staff up” for a large, high profile project. Strategic Plans are tied to specific departments or divisions and contain the overall objectives for the strategy such as targets, goals, strengths, and challenges.

STRATEGIES
For each Strategic Plan there is a set of strategies that define how the talent acquisition team will meet the hire targets by using a combination of sourcing, interviewing, recruiting, and presenting qualified applicants to Hiring Managers. Multiple strategies for each Strategic Plan allow a company to implement best practices and effective planning processes which includes plan activity management via collaboration of the talent acquisition team and their goals.

CAMPAIGNS
Campaigns are specific marketing activities that you manage to drive leads, build a brand, or stimulate interest in your company.

REPORTING
Reports are data analyses for you and your organization. You can create a variety of best practices reports, and you can build custom reports on the fly to better measure your team's activities, failures and successes.

DASHBOARDS
Dashboards are graphs, charts, and tables based on your custom reports. You can use dashboards to visually measure and analyze key elements of your talent acquisition efforts.

HOME PAGE
Your home page that displays your Outlook synched calendar and task list, along with a customized Dashboard view. You can also disply a list of "hot" links, RSS news feeds, and more web based customization at an individual user's level.

DOCUMENT STORAGE
These are documents that you use as part of your sourcing and recruiting processes.

Recruiting Links

	Jeremy Langhans
	Jeff Hunter
	Shally Steckerl
	CollegeRecruiter.com
	Michael Homula

	Simon Meth

	ERE Network

	Human Capital Institute

CRM Links

	SalesForce.com

	CRM Guru

	Destination CRM

	CRM Today

	CRM Daily

	Ecrm Guide

Previous Items

The Current State of the Contingent Workforce - One Size Doesn't Fit All
ERE Recruiting Conference
First Blog...