Part 2: The Recruiters of the Future—Talent Advisors

Two weeks ago we introduced CLC Recruiting's new study, Building Next-Generation Recruiter Capabilities, and outlined today's hairy recruiting realities. Given these constraints, it's clear that traditional ways of doing business won't cut it.

To go deeper into the skills that really matter, CLC Recruiting looked at a suite of recruiter capabilities to determine those that separate good from great. We found one group that clearly rose above the rest: Talent Advisors.

While many recruiters talk about business impact, Talent Advisors actively influence hiring managers by informing staffing decisions with deep knowledge of the organization and expertise of labor markets. They "earn" the right to influence first, and then bring their expertise to bear.

How do you identify a Talent Advisor on your team? Take a look around and note who you see doing the following:

– Bring the voice of talent strategy to hiring decisions
– Challenge—don’t just satisfy—hiring managers
– Leverage deep labor market expertise to influence hiring decision
– Build targeted pipelines
– Convey the business logic of recruiting recommendations

How many Talent Advisors do you see? Access our replay of these findings to learn more and discover how to build these capabilities on your team.

Part 1: The New Recruiting Realities

In Part 1 of our series on Building Next-Generation Recruiter Capabilities, the “Great Recession” has vastly changed the world for Recruiting. The average person outside of Recruiting, including many of the hiring managers we work with, hears about high unemployment and desperate candidates and figures recruiting today must be easy.

Those of us in Recruiting know that is far from the case. In fact, recruiting today is far more challenging than it has ever been. CLC Recruiting research reveals several factors that are making acquiring quality talent especially challenging today:

• Uncertain requisitions: Most recruiters report they work on requisitions with changing job requirements.
• More with less: Not only are most Recruiting organizations facing flat or declining budgets and higher workloads, today’s recruiters are working with more business units and hiring managers.
• More noise in the system: Application volume has more than doubled since 2007, which wouldn’t be such a problem except over 80% of recruiters report few than half of applicants meet even basic qualifications.
• Fragmenting labor markets: Variability within and across candidate segments has increased considerably over the last two years, placing a premium on segment-specific labor market expertise.
• Risk-averse passive talent: The percentage of the employed labor force that is actively searching for a job has decreased from 45% to 25% since 2006.

The global economy has changed drastically, and so has the recruiting environment. CLC Recruiting members, learn more about these challenges in our upcoming webinar Navigating Recruiting’s New Realities. Does your Recruiting team have the skills to operate effectively in the new world?

Building Next-Generation Recruiter Capabilities Makes a Splash in Chicago

Our newest research, Building Next-Generation Recruiter Capabilities, made a big splash in Chicago earlier this month as we kicked off our 2010 Annual Executive Retreat meeting series!

Much changed in the world—and our organizations—across the past two years, leaving many Recruiting executives wondering: How can Recruiting—and specifically our recruiters—drive strategic business impact in the new environment? We’re excited to share key new insights that address this question, which we will feature in our webinar series (for CLC Recruiting members) and on our Web site. In the meantime, here’s a brief preview:

Despite the widespread perception of a “buyer’s market,” quality of hire has declined significantly across the past year. This is largely a result of rising organizational complexity and increasingly unforgiving labor markets. These new realities require Recruiting organizations—and recruiters—to extend their impact through strategic framing of recruiting decisions.

Next-generation recruiters are Talent Advisors. Their capabilities go beyond process expertise to also embody talent pipeline management and strategic advisory capabilities—with a heavy emphasis on the latter. Talent Advisors:

• Drive for impact, not hiring manager satisfaction
• Challenge hiring manager assumptions instead of “taking orders”
• Strategically frame—they don’t just fill—requisitions

The bad news is that only 19% of recruiters today possess Talent Advisory capabilities.The good news is that being “strategic” is more concrete and tactical than you might think.

Stay tuned for more highlights from this work to learn simple but powerful ways to build Talent Advisor capabilities in your team.

Employment Web Sites: What (Not) to Do

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that many organizations are continuing to invest in their employment Web sites despite the recession and lower hiring volumes.

We released similar information late last year: Although most Recruiting organizations’ budgets are flat or decreasing in 2010, 54% of organizations anticipate an increase in spending on their employment Web sites. (CLC Recruiting members, see the full report in the 2010 Recruiting Forecast.)

The decision to maintain or increase investment in your employment Web site is a smart one. Friends and family are still the number-one source of hire, but most candidates cruise the Web site to find out more information about your company and your jobs, to apply, and to prepare for interviews. In short, your employment Web site is critical to your employment brand.

What is less smart is how many Recruiting organizations go about upgrading their employment Web sites. The flowering of Web 2.0 technologies and Web-savvy candidates provides an overwhelming number of options for employment Web sites. Mobile updating, day-in-the-life videos, Flash tours and demonstrations, presence on all the mainstream and niche networking and sharing sites, customized information…and the list goes on.

What NOT to do: Don’t go for what is “cool” for the sake of it. Candidates may be initially impressed with a high-tech or media-heavy site, and a “cool” site may convey your organization as one that values technology and innovation. But, if candidates do not get the information they came to the site seeking, their visit is a failed one.

What to do: Start with the content you want to convey and the functionality your candidates need. Of course, look around to get inspiration from sites of other organizations (and to ensure you are differentiated from your talent competitors’ sites), but keep in mind the following questions first:

• How accurate and consistent is our site’s content (including accurate descriptions of our jobs, within and beyond job postings)?


• How engaging is our site’s content?


• How well does our site’s content target key talent segments?


• How well do we promote our site?


• How well does our site facilitate information gathering?


• How well does our site facilitate the job search and application process?

CLC Recruiting members, read the Employment Web Site Primer, as found within the Action Toolkit for Upgrading Your Employment Web Site, for more information and progressive examples from more than 50 organizations’ sites.