College recruiting has been in the doldrums during most of the economic downturn, and as a result there have been few strategic changes in it, even though the rest of the recruiting function has undergone major shifts during the downturn. And just in case you haven’t seen it yourself, I …

Recruiting is full of practices that seem to last forever. Unfortunately, many practices endure for years despite the fact that they add no value to the hiring process. I call these well-established practices “sacred cows” because many longtime recruiters and hiring managers vigorously defend them even though both company and …

If you’re going to measure and perhaps reward individual hiring managers for excellence, you will need to work with a sample of them to determine which output metrics are strategic, effective, and easy to measure. Here are 23 possible scorecard measures as a starting point for that discussion. Note: the …

How to develop a recruiter scorecard for assessing individual corporate recruiter performance Champions insist that you keep score. If you understand that concept, you will ensure that in addition to function-wide metrics, you will supplement them with a scorecard for assessing the performance of each individual recruiter. Everyone knows that …

Recruiting is a unique field because it has no entry barriers. Unlike most professions, you can become a corporate recruiter without any formal certification, registration, recruiting experience, or even a college degree in the discipline. Because becoming a recruiter requires no formal qualifications, you probably won’t be surprised to find …

During the newly reinvigorated and exciting ERE conference, two attendees posed related but powerful questions to me. The first was “What advanced topics should be on the agenda of recruiting leaders at elite firms?” Or as another put it “What should Google be planning to do next in recruiting?” At …

Nearly every firm that I have worked with that captures data on the quality of their hires learns that employee referrals produce both the highest volume and the highest quality of hire from any source. However, the results of referral programs can almost always be dramatically improved when referral program …

Most know references to be a tool for checking a candidate’s background, but it’s important to realize that reference related factors can also be one of the simplest, cheapest and effective areas for identifying top candidates. Even the best corporations that excel at recruiting routinely fail to realize that references …

The Top 18 Metrics for Recruiting Leaders It’s hard to find anything in recruiting that has failed to live up to its potential more than recruiting metrics. For nearly two decades recruiting leaders have poured resources into measuring recruiting success, and in most cases, the best that they have to …

There’s no better way to start out a new year than to take one or more strategic actions. On the surface, selecting a new strategic area may seem to be difficult because at established firms, it would seem as though all of the important talent management areas would have already …