The performance gap between the very best employee referral programs and the typical program is growing dramatically wider each day. Benchmark organizations dedicating resources and formally managing their programs are very close to producing 50% or more of all external hires from their programs — nearly double that of the …

Do People-Management Factors Cause Failures? In recent years, numerous scandals and disasters have demonstrated the far-reaching impact of corporate policy, and more importantly corporate practice. While firms like Enron, Bear Stearns, and “systems” best practice icon Toyota had well-documented processes, policies, and procedures, they also all engaged in management practices …

A reporter from the Wall Street Journal once asked me what I thought was the greatest secret in recruiting.  Such a broad question would usually cause one to ponder, but my immediate response was that abusive hiring processes cost organizations millions of dollars by turning possible customers into lifelong “haters.” …

In any situation where employees fail to perform as expected, investigators must determine if the human error could have been caused by factors beyond the employee’s control. Such external factors might include actions by senior management, lack of adequate information or job training, faulty inputs to the process, or rewards …

A “thank you note” from a grateful new hire… I just wanted you to know that you are my hero! The Christmas season is an ideal time for me as a new employee to say thanks to the people who helped me get this new job in this competitive job …

It’s hard to argue against the fact that 2009 has been a rough year for corporate recruiters. Budgets have been slashed, training has been all but eliminated, and even with reduced recruiting activity, requisition loads are still onerous. Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but as it falls at the end of …

It’s Time to Face the Numbers and Facts… Almost any senior executive would be alarmed upon learning that users were dissatisfied, failure rates approached 50%, and a significant percentage of your customers regretted their decisions. Obviously, if the numbers listed above came from an important profit-impact function (supply chain, finance, …

Being strategic always requires some degree of unconventional thinking. If you are a corporate recruiting manager and you are looking for an opportunity to have a strategic impact, you need to understand why today is literally the best time to be actively recruiting in at least the last 25 years. …

For many organizations the time is right to build capability within the talent acquisition function to recruit executive level talent. Globalization combined with aging leadership demographics imply that a majority of organizations will need to recruit a record number of external leadership candidates in years to come, the cost of …

Now is the perfect time for organizations to bring executive search capability in-house. While the business case for this strategic shift has been clear for some time, ongoing cost-containment efforts combined with increasing demand for strategic staffing make now the perfect time to execute the shift and build out the …