Articles

Microsoft has a clever strategy to recruit away Yahoo! employees. For the most part, Microsoft has successfully relied on its strong employment brand and near-boundless opportunities to attract the best and brightest as opposed to seeking them out. That is, until recently, when Microsoft raised the level of its recruiting …

The basic process of interviewing candidates for open positions hasn’t changed very much in the last century, despite radical changes in how people socialize and interact both in and out of the workplace. Traditional interviews continue even though no one enjoys them! There is little argument that traditional interviews are …

When economic times are volatile and businesses are facing a downturn in revenue, many CFOs turn their attention to cost-containment. A logical place to start cutting costs is labor, given that in many industries labor costs account for an average of 60% of all variable costs. The volatility in the …

The subject of analytics is often discussed but rarely executed well, even in the most well-established talent management functions.   While most organizations collect data, manipulate it, and produce reports from it, few could honestly state they are leveraging HR data to drive business performance by making better decisions about …

I have been writing on the need for increasing the speed of hire for nearly a decade. During that time, many corporations have begun to realize the benefits of fast hiring. Unfortunately, too many rely on a single time-to-fill metric as their way of measuring hiring speed. There are many …

Employee referral programs are a lot like bottles of wine. Most companies have at least one, the vast majority of which are average or less than average, and only a few ever truly become exceptional. But the similarities don’t stop there.   When the blend of features is perfect, everyone …

Employee referral programs are the most powerful corporate recruiting tool, bar none. They can produce a high volume of quality hires who have been statistically proven to have lower rates of attrition. When designed well, they can not only be cost-effective, but they can produce one of the highest ROIs …

Most corporate recruiting functions are far from strategic, and most recruiters are intensely resistant to change that. It’s a fact that the business world is rapidly changing, and how organizations recruit talent will be forced to change dramatically as well. The corporate recruiting function of the future isn’t likely to …

A while back, I was asked to give a presentation at Google’s main campus in the heart of the Silicon Valley on the future of corporate recruiting. The audience was a combination of Google recruiting staff and recruiters from other organizations in the community that Google was interested in getting …

Anyone who has worked in corporate recruiting for any period realizes they work in a profession that has dramatic up-and-down cycles. Unfortunately, the down cycles following rapid growth tend to be the harshest. Who can forget the literal “implosion” of world-class recruiting functions like those at Cisco, Nortel, and Trilogy …