Articles

Managers and recruiters often complain that they only see bland candidates. They say they’re desperate to hire innovative people, but that they just can’t seem to find them. I don’t dispute the fact that most firms can’t find them, but there is certainly no shortage of innovative people. The problem …

As we saw in Part 1 of this two-part article series, many HR professionals in general ó and recruiters in particular ó act as though they are isolated from the competitive battlefield of business. All too often they act like socialists instead of capitalists. But fierce competitors hire away a competitor’s talent: …

The world of business is highly competitive. Firms frequently introduce new products or run attack ads with the specific intention to hurt their direct competitors. It’s not unusual for managers to undertake deliberate actions to steal customers, force competitors to lower their prices, or even to capture prime retail locations. …

Recruiters are no different than most people; they gravitate toward what is easy. In sourcing, that means settling for “active” candidates. But what they should be doing is seeking out the most difficult candidates to source&nbsp:ó currently employed top performers, most of whom are not actively looking for a new …

Many managers think that recruiting stops after you hire someone. But smart managers know that the best way to ensure that you always hire great people is to continually improve your recruiting process. One way to improve the process is to gather information from those that have just gone through …

During tough economic times, it’s easy to retain workers. Even the top performers are focusing on maintaining their job security, so they aren’t going anywhere. In fact, no one is leaving or even looking. But it’s also easy to get lackadaisical about turnover, because traditionally the topic only comes up …

Okay, before you instantly think, “John’s nuts!” stop and think about radio for a minute. Don’t you personally listen to it several times a day, perhaps in your car, in places where you are a “captive” audience? Some of the most under-used tools in recruiting involve the media. Nearly every …

Your organization’s success in the future will depend more and more upon getting the right people in the right seats to drive it. To accomplish this, corporate recruiters and hiring managers will need to become steeped in the art of differentiation. Unfortunately, few organizations have mastered this art from a …

While the methods of recruiting have changed somewhat with the times, the critical challenges that most recruiters face have not. We still struggle to find enough time to get everything that needs to get done finished; we still deal with misperceptions by others regarding what it is we actually do; …

My last article on outrageous recruiting approaches gathered several new ideas and a great number of comments. The comments came from three basic categories of recruiters: Executive recruiters. Executive recruiters thought that the whole “outrageous recruiting” argument was comical and that the tools proposed were relatively mundane.  Advanced corporate recruiters. Advanced corporate recruiters were …