director of recruiting

recruiting team structure

I'm interested in discussing options and ideas for how to restructure my recruiting team. I have limited resources and no ability to add to staff but believe the team is too flat - 7 recruiters and 4 assistants.  Has anyone found a good resource to generate discussion and straw-man planning on this subject?

Join the community of corporate recruiting directors

I recently had some conversations with some old friends in senior corporate recruiting roles. They told me that they wished they could contribute more to the industry at large, but don't have much time to do it. This seems like a common refrain for corporate directors of recruiting - they'd love to contribute to and connect more with the community of people that share their vision, unique challenges and frustrations. Yet the demands of their job often mean that they don't have time to run their own weblog or write articles for great sites like ERE.

So I came to a decision about what I hope will be the best possible use this weblog: building a community of in-house corporate recruiting directors. Over the next few weeks, I'll be inviting people I know and respect in senior leadership roles in recruiting to contribute to this blog as guest authors. They are all welcome to post once a day, once a week, once a month or even once a year - whatever amount of time they can give. Their posts can cover anything, from tough challenges they'd like assistance with (feel free to use the comments to offer any help you can) to interesting things they're doing to get ahead of the curve. I'll do everything I can to make it easy for them to contribute, and will also continue to regularly contribute on topics that I think are relevant to this audience.

I hope you like the new approach, and if you're interested in getting an invitation, please email me at dlefkow@gmail.com. Comments and feedback would be appreciated!

New buzzword alert: matching

It seems that every new entrant in the recruiting space is talking about one thing: matching.

Matching is what will make us better than the current crop of job boards because you won't get as much garbage in your inbox. Candidates will appreciate matching because they won't be stuck behind hundreds of other people, and if they're highly qualified, their resume will rise to the top. Every VC firm evaluating bets in the human capital space will love the term because they see this as an evolutionary necessity for job boards - and they all have some half-baked vision about funding the category-killing eHarmony of job boards.

The fact is that matching technology already exists - a lot of it just hasn't been applied to the job board industry (i.e. the mass market consumer). Some ATSes already use what's called "concept search" technology from other vendors to group sets of resume keywords together to help you identify similar sets of candidates - this is one of the lighter approaches to matching, as it's keyword driven and based on resumes. ATS vendors also use structured data and workflow approaches (Taleo is the most famous in this area) to create a sort of talent supply chain. Companies like DDI and PreVisor (and scores of others now) use validated competencies to make matches - it's questionable whether this approach could be used as early in the recruiting cycle as a job board site as it's now primarily used after some form of basic match has been made. Still other companies use personality traits or skills test to help make a cultural match or ensure that someone can do what they say they can do.

Over the next 5 years, you will likely see a range of experiments with matching technology, from semantic and concept matching to structured data and personality/competency profiling. The one that will win will not only figure out how to make the match, but also to drive the most relevant candidates at the lowest possible cost, essentially re-inventing the business model of the modern job board (if that's possible).

It's about to get interesting...

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Very virtual job fairs

Remember in 1999 when "virtual job fairs" were all the rage?

An enterprising job board or recruitment advertising agency would set up a website, employers would pay for space to advertise their jobs on the website as well as put up special profile pages and people would apply. By and large, these were just a big waste of money for the companies that participated. Employers were still one of many companies vying for the same job seekers' attention and only the best brands who participated got all the candidates. There was nothing even close to resembling a job fair, where you might get immediate access to hiring managers or have a more personal interaction than submitting your resume into a black hole - it was just an expensive duplicate of a standard application process, with the same black hole and same candidate frustrations.

Smarter employers eventually ditched the concept of virtual job fairs, figuring out ways to drive traffic to their own career sites, where they had a captive audience, could engage people with their brands and get the same (if not more) applicants for less money.

With the much higher levels of interactivity now available on the web in virtual worlds like Second Life there's new hope that a virtual job fair can provide a lot of the same reciprocal benefits that an in-person job fair does. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see TMP Worldwide experimenting with the concepts of networking, hiring events and virtual meeting places in Second Life with a new initiative called TMP Island.

According to a recent press release:

Second Life is a 3-D online virtual world, currently inhabited by roughly 3.4 million residents who have the ability to engage in various forms of personal interaction and commerce.

Already, major corporations are showing interest. T-Mobile, for one, has been impressed by the potential benefits TMP can offer through Second Life. “At T-Mobile we're always looking for innovative ways to reach top talent," said Judy Wright, senior program manager, employer branding for T-Mobile. "We're very excited about the possibilities TMP Island will offer, and we believe we’ll be able to connect with our candidate pool in a distinct way that is as entertaining as it is informative."

“TMP Island represents the future of employment recruiting,” said Russell Miyaki, VP, national interactive creative director, TMP Worldwide. “To reach a new generation of employees, successful recruiters will need to employ sophisticated, innovative technologies that extend their reach and demonstrate that they are smart and tech-savvy. TMP Island on Second Life is a great solution.”

TMP expects a number of notable events to take place on TMP Island throughout 2007, beginning in the first half of the year.

“Virtual worlds like Second Life will allow for brand immersion like never before, from showcasing a company’s capabilities in a dynamic environment, to getting a better understanding of a candidate’s creativity, to the benefits of networking in real-time from disparate locations,” said Louis Vong, VP, interactive strategy, TMP Worldwide. ”TMP Island will provide our clients with a multitude of capabilities—and we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible.”

The highest returns on new media and advertising are usually generated by the early adopters (for example, online job boards in 1997 were much cheaper than it is now and you didn't have such a crowded playing field), so I would encourage you to explore this promising recruiting environment soon with your agency or on your own before more companies jump in with both feet.

More information on the TMP Island initiative can be found here and you can learn more about Second Life by visiting this page on Wikipedia. Hats off to TMP and my old friends Russell Miyaki and Louis Vong for being the first recruitment advertising agency (at least as far as I know) to move forward with this kind of ambitious, forward-thinking initiative. I look forward to hearing more about the upcoming events and seeing more companies adopt and experiment with this virtual world.

What's an idea worth?

I published an article today on ERE that is something I've been very passionate about for the last few years - Idea Recruiting. We're in an innovation economy, not a knowledge economy. The rhythm of business has accelerated and changed in many ways - innovate, reap, destroy; innovate, reap, destroy.

Most recruiting systems I've seen (with the possible exception of Google's - but I'd have to see it to believe it) screen out innovators. This isn't a "blame the vendor" statement - this is as much what the customers are looking for as much as what the vendor is providing. Any resume that is unique, different or convention-defying gets surreptitiously put in the junk pile.

So what is an idea worth? If your idea was the iPod, that was worth billions to Apple ($7 billion per year to be exact). If your idea was the Internet, you might have given it away for free (Tim Berners-Lee did), although he could have made billions or dare I say trillions off of it - which other companies have done. And I love this story too. Meanwhile, advertising agencies (like the one who recently won Virgin America's business) and consulting firms make a living off of the value of great ideas.

As a director of recruiting, your job is to find the talent that creates the most value for your organization. Innovators are playing an increasing role in creating shareholder value - one might argue that they create the most shareholder value these days - and figuring out how to find and attract this very different breed of talent is one of the most critical initiatives you can launch within your organization.

I'm baaack...

The blog that was formerly The Lefkow Zone is back online here at www.directorofrecruiting.com.

What have I been doing since I left Jobster? It's only been a week, but I've already been doing consulting work (talentspark is the name of the company, and my goal is to use technology and creativity to help companies gain a competitive advantage for talent), looking at a few different and very interesting opportunities and spending much needed time with my family.

I must say that I'm very grateful for everyone that's emailed or commented on my old blog about my departure - I really had no idea that many people even read it. So thanks for making the trip over to my new blog if you were one of my previous readers, and welcome if you're coming across me for the first time.

This blog will be a bit of a departure from The Lefkow Zone, as I will try to be a bit more independent and opinionated in my commentary, particularly on technology-related ventures and ideas in the talent management space. I'll try to post a few times a week, so please keep on coming back for more! It's not easy to visit the hundreds of recruiting blogs out there - 200 at last count? - but I'll make it easy for you. Click this link to subscribe by email and you'll get new posts in your inbox whenever I post them.

Thanks again for reading and I look forward to continuing the discussion.