Recruiting Strategy

The Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting Based on conversations with recruiting leaders, questions asked during seminars, advisory requests, and best-practice research, expect to see an increased emphasis in: Upgrading employment branding. Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. Firms throughout Asia, in particular, are increasingly adopting employment branding as a wildly important activity for 2009. The …

During hard economic times, it’s survival of the fittest. Yet many corporate recruiters fail to understand or acknowledge the cyclical nature of our business; every five to seven years, recruiters are let go en masse. If you work for an auto company in Detroit or an airline or a mortgage company, the time to prepare for layoffs has already past. …

Corporate recruiting is an interesting field. There are no books entitled The Theory of Recruiting or Principles of Strategic Recruiting. As a result, most individuals in recruiting tend to make it up as they go rather than follow a more defined set of rules or principles. There is no formal body in recruiting that “codifies” the established practices. In this article, I am attempting …

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 aggressiveness to the point where it would have to be …

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 time-consuming for all parties involved, often repetitive, and highly subjective. …

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 reasons why you should hire quickly in certain cases, but …

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 be created from scratch, because the risk of failure is …

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 to know better. Looking back, I realize that there is …

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 after the 2001 downturn? Those dominating recruiting functions have never …

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practices at the best firms. Fortunately, it’s a little easier to learn about the emerging benchmark best practices as a result of ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards, which honor the most strategic and innovative global recruiting practices developed throughout …