Recruiting Strategy

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett It’s 5:30 a.m., and Joe McHenry, a 36-year-old international tax manager who works in New York City, wakes up, checks his e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter activity from his smartphone all before getting out of bed. By 6:45 a.m. he’s dressed and walking to …

It’s hard to build a world-class corporate recruiting function without a comprehensive list of the principles that define a top function. While tips on being a good recruiter are available in abundance, there is little written that focuses on the undocumented principles that separate merely average functions from those that …

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that when business revenues are down, it simply doesn’t make sense to carry a large-scale recruiting effort, but if you’re smart, you know that once an economic turnaround begins, the competition for talent will again be fierce. Starting a major …

Talent Is Key in Any Turnaround   Despite CEOs acknowledging that developing “strategies for managing talent” (Growth Reimagined, PwC, 2011) is the most critical business problem they face in this difficult business environment, there are few leaders in talent management bold enough to accept the challenge of leading a business …

I’ve written many times about actions recruiting managers can take to improve the impact of recruiting, but with the ongoing pressure many recruiting functions feel to do more with less, now is a great time to review a short list practical, easily implemented actions appropriate for an individual recruiter or …

Recruiting leaders tend to be a pretty conservative group, sticking with tried-and-true approaches, tools, and methods.  Because they are almost always managing from the weeds, there is little time invested in identifying, testing, and refining new solutions, but that doesn’t mean such solutions don’t emerge. The inventory of available approaches …

Talent acquisition functions spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars designing processes to hire top performers, innovators, and game changers. Unfortunately few of those dollars or hours are spent fixing the biggest roadblock in recruiting A-level talent: weak hiring managers. Everyone seems to intuitively know that managers are the …

Consider this scenario: you’re trying to recruit a star in your industry, but you’re having difficulty because they are treated extremely well at their current firm. You try everything in your recruiting toolkit, but the target still won’t budge. Because this is an exceptional individual that is slotted for a …

There are two fundamental types of hiring strategies: high volume and high impact. Most corporate directors of recruiting think that the most common, high-volume recruiting, has the highest overall impact because, after all, it is used to fill a large number of openings. However, senior executives in sports, entertainment, the …

This March at the ERE Expo attendees (and those watching the live video stream) will be treated to something new. For the first time in the Expo’s history three of the longest-running ERE authors (Kevin Wheeler, Lou Adler, and myself) will come together for a live crossfire to respond to your questions …