Economic downturns, mergers, and acquisitions all place pressure on organizations to curb labor costs. No time in the last decade has that tenet been more apparent than right now. Layoffs, large or small, force organizations to cut loose the talent in which they have invested salary and training dollars. While …

The Top 10 Advantages of Recruiting During Tough Times It’s quite common during periods of economic turmoil for CFOs to assume and declare that robust recruiting functions will not be necessary due to a surplus of talent becoming available as more and more firms engage in layoffs, consolidations, and the …

How do you ensure that you are getting quality referrals and aren’t just talking with people who aren’t the top talent and may never be a fit for the company? Almost all “first generation” referral programs suffer from low-quality referrals, primarily because they are not designed to produce anything but. …

  How is the Friends Program (Cisco) an employee referral program? The Friends Program, introduced by Michael McNeal in the late 1990s and no longer active at Cisco Systems, leveraged employees in a specific role to communicate with and excite possible applicants for similar roles who had indicated a potential …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

I am an unabashed follower of the HR philosophy of Jack Welch, former CEO of GE. He is a proponent of a “business-like” approach to HR that emphasizes its critical role in impacting organizational results. Welch is certainly controversial in HR circles because he advocates many things that “softies” in …