Fistful of Talent

300 Openings? You Don't Need RPO, You Need To Channel Sparta and King Leonidas!!

Editor's Note - This post is part of a Point/Counterpoint series related to an upcoming article in Workforce Recruiting, exploring when and how an organization that must recruit 250 to 300 independent sales representatives every year to cover high attrition rates should consider outsourcing its recruiting efforts.  We'll link to that article when it goes online... 

300 sales positions to fill this year…no sweat!   Really, why are you freaking out?  Only the weak and timid will run from this challenge.  My esteemed colleague Kris Dunn did a nice job of breaking down this challenge and offering advice on how to attack it. Not bad for an HR guy. Actually, it was really sound advice, and I completely agree with his sales process approach.  Calculating "how much of what of what by when" and managing to it makes sense. When I was the Director of Recruiting at Quicken Loans, we were hiring 150 to 200 sales professionals every 45 days.

That's right - 200 every 45 days.  It is not for the faint of heart, and managing every aspect of the pipeline was critical to meeting the demand.

But really, this is only the very first step in addressing this hiring challenge. To win this battle, you have to realize that you are now at war. A war for talent unlike any other you have ever seen or been a part of before. To win a war, you need to come to the battlefield with all of your weapons, ammunition and innovation at the ready. It simply isn't good enough to know the math and hire 300 sales professionals just to get requisitions filled.  Nope, the cost of turnover is equally as high as or higher than the cost of the vacancy. Just hiring to the number won't get it done.

Here's how the modern day King Leonidas would approach it:

1.  Every candidate counts. Sure, you can't get too "touchy feely" with everyone, but the rules of engagement don't change because the numbers are higher. Hanging out in pools of talent is never more important than right now. If it is true that winners hang out with winners, and losers hang out with losers, then it is even more imperative that you exploit your network of high performing talent and get to the best quickly.  Pound your network and squeeze every last drop of talent from it. Offer spiffs and incentives for referring talent that gets hired. Who says paying for talent has to be confined just to search firms or employee referral programs?

2.  Work your vendors. If you are in an organization that has a sizable sales force, such as the one in this example, then you are doing business with vendors who have other prolific sales forces as clients. Work them over for who they know and get the referrals. Offer them spiffs and incentives to give you talent that gets hired. Vendors are invaluable sources of information. Oh, and before the ethics police come knocking on my door, I am not advocating that you hold the vendors hostage until they give up the goods. Just ask the question and incent them to give the referral up. You might be surprised at the wealth of information you get.

3.  Employee referrals reign supreme. Surely you have an EE referral program, but are you truly leveraging it and executing it well?  Now is the time to raise those bonuses, move up the pay out level and personally get referrals from your highest performing sales professionals. Don't send mass emails to your sales force to get referrals. Call them, go to their desks and meet them on their front porch as they head out in the morning. Email blasts are notoriously ineffective, and face-to-face will get better results in this situation. Great sales people know other great sales people, they know who is beating them to deals and kicking their a** in the marketplace. Those are the very first people to call. It is "hire to hurt" (others, perhaps your competition) at its finest. Hiring the best talent from your competitor not only adds strength to your team, but weakens your opponent in the marketplace. Nice…King Leonidas would be proud!

4.  Go where they are! Sales people notoriously travel in packs. I once led a team of recruiters that had to hire 175 field service engineers (engineers who fixed stuff and then sold more stuff) in 60 days. We found out that a group of them from a competitor used to hang out at this local bar after work. We went there, hung out, bought a few rounds and next thing you know we had 37 candidates for our openings. Tough job, but someone has to do it!  Heck, I would even recommend going right to other sales organizations and meet the sales people as they leave the building. This isn't tiddlywinks, it's a war for talent and your company expects you to not just fill these important sales jobs but fill them with people who can perform.

5.  Sales competitions. You have a year to hire 300 people right? So hold a regional sales competition to identify the very best sales professional. Offer a cool prize like a two-year lease on some sweet ride (cheaper than most payouts to contingency or RPO firms) and then put contestants through a sales competition that is judged by members of your sales leadership team. Sort of an Apprentice minus the terrible hair, I suppose.  Not only will you identify the best, you will also find out who the worst are.

6.  Coffee is for closers. Turn up the heat on your recruiting team. Most recruiting teams are notorious for mismanaging time (taking 90 minute lunches, 20 minute trips to Starbucks, and 5 smoke breaks a day) and not focusing on recruiting activities. Breaks, lunch, coffee runs, etc. should be suspended until they hit meaningful goals in their talent pipeline to fill these positions. Look, I am not saying that people shouldn't eat, but last time I checked, it only takes humans about 15 minutes to feed. Get focused and reserve the long lunches for when you have actually accomplished something. While you are at it, how about setting up some meaningful incentives for your recruiters, Mr. Recruiting Director?  If you want them to behave like sales pros, then you have to incent them the same way. It isn't a surprise that the very best recruiters avoid corporate recruiting like the plague when the real money is in third party.

What are you afraid of?  Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!

Editors Note - Michael Homula is the founder of Bearing Fruit Consulting, a national recruiting consulting firm based out of Michigan.  Prior to founding BFC, Michael served as a Director of Recruiting/Talent Management for multiple companies in the Financial Services industry.   Like children in Sparta, Michael was cast out into the wilderness at age 7, and was only allowed to return after he had made his first 100 fills as a full life-cycle recruiter...

Meet Michael Homula - Covering Talent and Recruiting for Fistful of Talent...

Michael Homula is the founder of Bearing Fruit Consulting, a national recruiting consulting firm based out of Michigan.  Prior to founding BFC, Michael served as a Director of Recuiting/Talent Management for multiple companies in the Financial Services industry.  Back in those days, Michael would remove overdraft protection for any candidate rejecting an offer.  Now Michael has to work at it like the rest of us...

See Michael's Riffs and Rants on Fistful of Talent by clicking here...

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10.5 QUESTIONS WITH MICHAEL HOMULA

1.  The elevator just closed and you've got 30 seconds to pitch the random reader on who you are and why they should read your rants.  Go..

It's the recruiting, stupid!  Now that I have your attention, it really is all about recruiting.  Great companies live and die by how well they find and acquire the best talent for their organization.  Regardless of how strong the products or services of an organization are they are destined for failure without the people to drive the business.  With 14 years of experience in executive search, corporate recruiting and as the director of talent acquisition for two well recognized corporate recruiting teams, I believe in creating results and not just creating activity.  I am a provacateur and challenge norms in the recruiting space - both corporate and third party.  To quote 311 on this "I don't dis' people, I dis' ideas".  I still work an active recruiting desk and every day I am involved in finding and placing great talent with both large and mid sized organizations around the US. 

2.  Now for the mundane - break down your location, title, company/firm and what you do for a living..

I am a native of Ohio but now live in Michigan; just barely north of what I call the bad place, Ann Arbor.  As a Notre Dame fan from Ohio I am as close to Ann Arbor as I can be without becoming violently ill.  I am the Founder and Chief Recruiting Strategist of Bearing Fruit Consulting - a full service recruiting stragey consulting firm that helps organizations develop and implement recruiting strategies that get results, re-engineer recruiting teams and process, provide cutting edge results oriented recruiter training, execute sourcing and executive search solutions and convert ATS systems into Talent Relationship Management Systems - to name but a few services.  Previoulsy I was the Director of Talent Acquisition at Quicken Loans and FirstMerit Bank where I led both organizations to ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, and I am a high billing veteran of third party recruiting.

3.  One more question that everyone expects.  What's the reason you're in this game? (why do you do what you do?)

I do what I do because I love Talent Acquisition.  Talent Acquisition is a passion for me (among many others).  I feel that I was given unique talents and gifts in this industry space and enjoy the challenge of helping companies get significanlty better at acquiring talent.  I believe talent is the fuel that drives the business engine and nothing a company does is more important than hiring great people.  There is no other place where you can impact the business more directly and more quickly than in talent acquisition.  I would recruit for food and shelter alone.   

4.  If you've ever been to a professional baseball game, you know batters from the home team get to pick their own theme music as they walk from the dugout to the plate.  If we ever have a FOT convention, what theme music will you come out to to pump the crowd up and why?

Wow this is tough!  I love music of all types (my iPod seems schizo) and picking just one song is really difficult.  311 is my favorite band and for that reason it would be too obvious to choose a 311 song.  The Clash is my other fave band and it is hard to pass on them.  Lunatic Fringe from Red Rider was featured in a killer movie called Vision Quest and that song just rocks.  None of those work though.  Since I reserve the right to change this based on my mood, I am going to roll with "So What'cha Want" by Beastie Boys. I grew up on the Beasties (as you can probably tell I am a child of the 80's making me Gen X all the way) and just think they are one of the most original artists around.  They are still relevant and continue to make incredibly creative music.  I love the intensity of this song and it hits hard enough to get me fired up.  The video is hilarious (I dig the way the video was shot - they overexposed and manually crumpled the actual film) and that NY Knicks ringer t-shirt is super cool.  I have to get me one of those!

KEY AND RELEVANT LYRIC: "But like a dream I'm flowing without no stopping, sweeter than a cherry pie with Reddi Whip topping.  Goin from mic' to mic' kickin' it wall to wall, well I'll be calling out you people like a casting call."

Here is the video, don't adjust your monitor, that is how it was meant to be.

5.  Let's stick with the baseball theme.  If you've ever been to a pro game, you also know that the visitor doesn't get to pick their own music.  The home team picks that for them, and it's usually less than stellar as a means of attempting to crush them.  If you could pick theme music for your arch-rival to walk into a conference room to, what would it be and why?

Ok, this is equally as difficult.  I am going to have to roll with the Tip Toe Through The Tulips by Tiny Tim.  Nothing could be more demeaning than strolling on stage to this monstrosity performed by a complete and total freak.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

6.  Finish the following sentence - "When I'm interviewing, I can tell within one minute that this thing isn't going to work out because _________..."

...the candidate pulls out a crocheted Starship Enterprise and says "I'm a Trekky".  Don't laugh, this actually happened to a recruiter I used to work with.

7.  Name the actor/actress that will portray you in the movie about you.  Why the heck is that a fit?

John Cusack of course.  Because he is cool, he played Lloyd Dobler (my movie character hero) in Say Anything, he was in High Fidelity (great film, better soundtrack) and his favorite band is The Clash (also my fave along with 311) which was my first concert back in 1982 at Kent State Memorial Gym. 

8.  List three of your favorite books to pander to the educated segment of our readership...

Competence at Work: Models For Superior Performance  The bible for developing competency models and behavioral interviews that are tied to performance and get better hiring results. 

Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend  An amazing and misunderstood leader.  There are great business lesson in this book. 

Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul  Proof that being a Christian man doesn't mean you have to be passive, reserved and timid. 

9.  List three of your favorite movies to connect with the segment of our readership that doesn't like to read...

This is brutally hard as I have so many favorites.

The Civil War by Ken Burns - A tremendous documentary.  I am a Civil War geek and this is an amazing film on an American tragedy we all should know much more about.  I lead a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield every summer.  Hit me with an email if you want to go!

Say Anything  - A John Cusack film with one of the best soundtracks in movie history.  Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes has an important role in this film.  Lloyd Dobler is a very cool cat. "The rain on my car is a baptism, the new me, Ice Man, Power Lloyd, my assault on the world begins now."

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation - This one needs no comment at all other than quoting that genius Eddie Griswold "Every time Catherine would turn on the microwave, I'd piss my pants and forget who I was for about half an hour."

10.  Let's reach out to what remains of our readership.  Who's your favorite Old-School Rapper and why?

Run DMC of course.  Rap pioneers fo sho!   "My Adidas cuts the sand of a foreign land
with mic in hand I cold took command"

10.5.  My first car was a 1964 Ford Falcon Sprint and here's how it defined who I am....

I can't say it defined who I am but it was black with red interior (my high school colors, completely coincidental) and it was very fast.  A major contributor to my 3 speeding tickets by age 17.  It sort of had a whole muscle car, Rebel Without A Cause, Danny Zucco (check it out, he's on MySpace) thing going on.   

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See Michael's Riffs and Rants on Fistful of Talent by

Karl Marx - Your New Director of Recruiting...

My partner in crime at Fistful of Talent, Tim Tolan, had an excellent post last week entitled Looking For Talent?  Always Look Outside Your Company.  It is part of a point/counter point discussion between Tim and the mighty Kris Dunn for a Workforce Management series.  I have many thoughts on this topic, so I decided to share some of them with you here. 

I am going to come right out and say it.  I think organizations with documented process or policy that require them to look at and/or hire internal talent, absent a side-by-side comparison with external talent, are practicing a form of talent management/recruiting communism.  It's like Karl Marx rolled out of the grave and became your Director of Recruiting.  Let me explain.

When I was the Director of Talent Acquisition at Quicken Loans we had a saying within the organization that went something like, "what got us where we are will not get us where we want to go."  Great organizations need to constantly evolve and get better.  Rarely can this type of performance improvement evolution happen without an influx of talent from outside the walls of the organization.  Constant promotion from within is a form of corporate "inbreeding" that is dangerous and often leads to innovation stagnation, acceptance of norms, inefficiency and general acceptance of mediocre performance.

Internal focus in hiring virtually ensures that the very best don't get the job, only the very best within a specific organization.  What if the very best within a specific organization isn't really that good?  What if the very best within an organization isn't good enough to take the team, division or company where they need to go in order to get better performance, greater efficiency etc.?  There is no competition for the open position.  Lack of competition, as we have learned with communism, doesn't work out so well. 

This is why so many organizations with an intense union presence are literally bleeding out because of inefficiency, lack of performance, and lowering of quality in order to feed a union mentality of entitlement.  Nothing comes closer to communism in America than unions.  No where is this more vividly portrayed than in the promotion, job posting and internal transfer policies that unionized companies are forced to follow.  These policies almost assure an organization will not put the best talent in the open position but, rather, the next talent in the open position.

What is more frustrating and perplexing is that non-unionized companies have built career opportunity, job posting, promotion and talent acquisition strategies on these same principles.  This effectively ensures a low performing organization by preventing competition in the recruiting and selection process. 

When it comes time to fill an open position, it is right and equitable to look at internal talent.  It is also right, equitable, in the best interest of the business, in the best interest of the shareholders, and in the best interest of American corporate health, that companies create a situation where internal talent competes with and is evaluated against external talent. 

I think this will ensure that the very best person gets the job.  What a novel concept!

Editors Note - Michael Homula is the founder of Bearing Fruit Consulting, a national recruiting consulting firm based out of Michigan.  Prior to founding BFC, Michael served as a Director of Recruiting/Talent Management for multiple companies in the Financial Services industry.   A world-class athlete, Michael's boycotting the 2008 Olympics in protest of the Communist Party of China...

Hanging With the Cool Kids In The Talent Pool - Winners Hang With Winners...

When I was a little guy, my mom used to tell me to choose my friends wisely.  Cue the Forest Gump audio - "my momma always said life was like a box of chocolates".  Like any kid, I thought my mom was full of it, and I only wanted to hang out with the cool kids.  Of course, my mom was right in her admonishment to choose carefully when it came to friends.  A little incident involving me setting an abandoned farm building on fire with Greg Ensign should have been my first clue that she was right.  But I had to experience many more incidents, some greater and some lesser, before I found out mom was dead on the money with her advice. 

As I think about CRM (Candidate Relationship Management in the recruiting world) and how it relates to recruiting, I think we would all be wise to heed our mom's advice about choosing our friends wisely.  Oddly enough, once we're in the recruiting game, that leads us back to the cool kids.

I know - I burned a barn, my Mom warned me, and now I'm back to chasing the cool kids.  Let me explain...

This epiphany came to me a while back when I was the Director of Talent Acquisition at FirstMerit Bank.  As some of you may know, the team I built at FMER was widely recognized as being one of the most aggressive and successful corporate recruiting engines in America. While there, I began to utilize and cultivate, into our talent acquisition tactics, an old cliche - "winners hang out with winners and losers hang out with losers".  I know the HR weenies in our group will hate this expression and, frankly, much of what I say, because this concept is completely contrarian to their "level the playing field", equitable, treat everyone the same, social worker approach to their job.

Any recruiter who has been in this profession longer than 30 seconds knows that talented people flock together like the Velocaraptors from Jurassic Park. The idea, which we will explore in a later post, that you can have relationships with all candidates is complete CRAP.  Why would you want to have relationships with ALL candidates? I don't know about you, but I am not in the business to hire ALL candidates.  I want to hire high-performing employees.  I say have relationships with true talent and create great candidate experiences with them. Hang out with the talented people around the talent pool.  Essentially, hang out with the cool kids.

This is capitalism at its finest.  I have found in 14 years of recruiting, both in corporate and third party environments, that I don't have time to talk to everyone and I certainly don't have time to have relationships with everyone.  I keep a very select group of talented, known high performers and well-networked talent in my pool of relationships I build, cultivate, contribute to and leverage.  This leads to a higher level of success when conducting and closing searches or in developing business. 

So listen to your Mom and choose your friends - and talent - wisely!  I'm the guy in the letter jacket at the cool table, BTW...

Editors Note - Michael Homula is the founder of Bearing Fruit Consulting, a national recruiting consulting firm based out of Michigan.  Prior to founding BFC, Michael served as a Director of Recruiting/Talent Management for multiple companies in the Financial Services industry.  FOT team and readers, please move to Michael's table in an orderly and civil fashion to soak up the benefits of being with the "cool" crowd...

Ditch the Animal Tracking System - How to Move from ATS to TRMS...

A few weeks back I wrote about how the ATS (Animal Tracking System) adds no value to recruiting. There was a pretty robust set of comments around some of my assertions and the esteemed Kris Dunn of FOT tried to fire me. While we are still in negotiations over my reinstatement here at FOT, Kris threw out a challenge of sorts that would allow me to return to FOT under probation. He asked me to outline the top 5 configurations you can make to your ATS to capture more meaningful information or data, and actually drive recruiting related results. In the event you missed it, here is the money quote and gauntlet "throw down" from KD:

"MH - if the ATS doesn't normally capture the right info, give me the top five things I  should configure my Taleo system to capture. The most useful tweak I made was current/goal salary just so I could cut through the BS. Give me more items, and maybe, just maybe, you can come back on under probation."

So, how can you convert your compliance driven, HR focused, process managing, ATS into a true Talent Relationship Management System? Never one to shy away from a challenge, here are 3 things you should consider customizing your current ATS to accomplish so that you can get better recruiting related results.  I would give you 5 right now, but here at FOT we like to keep a little suspense in the mix. Plus, I am so long winded that the word count is going to get ridiculous, and KD is going to censure me (or fire me again).

1.  Capture Decision Making Criteria – I don't care how good of a recruiter you are, you will never get a high performer to leave company A to go to company B, unless they have a career wound. One way to uncover the career wound(s) of a candidate is to identify the key decision making criteria they will use to make a career change. You can ask the question a lot of ways using the candidate profile or candidate question aspect of your ATS (if you don't have this functionality you are pretty much screwed and need to find a new vendor partner). Here is one suggestion: "what are the key decision making criteria you will use when deciding upon your next career opportunity or situation?" We recommend providing a drop down list of common DM criteria for the candidate to choose from. Besides the obvious advantage to gathering this information on specific candidates, the recruiting engine will begin to formulate DM criteria by geographic location, industry, job category, position etc.   Recruitment branding, advertising, messaging etc. can all be tailored as a result to maximize recruiting effort and attract the right candidates. This data can also be used to identify trends and make adjustments to your current employee culture to acquire better talent.

2.  Identify Who Influences The Decision – No one makes a career move or career decision in a vacuum or on their own. We all have colleagues, friends, family members, mentors, advisors, pastors, rabbis (the list is really endless) with whom we consult when making a big decision. A career move is a big decision. Identify and capture, early in the process, who influences the career decision for the candidate. The obvious use of this information is to influence the influencer. Suffice it to say that you have to have a strategy to educate and influence those that have the ear of your candidate. The more passive or higher performing the candidate is, the more important this becomes. A side effect of having this data? You can identify which groups of people are most influential to candidates in certain job categories and set your recruitment brand in front of these groups, so there is more awareness about your organization within the pockets of people who influence the majority of candidates in your industry. By the way, most utilize someone in their company or in their industry space to bounce ideas off of. This becomes a great networking source for you, as well as another possible prospect.

3.  Get RAD – RAD stands for Recruiting Activity Development. Recruiters need to stay focused on recruiting , not HR activities, in order to be great at what they do. At BFC, we teach and train recruiters how to focus on being RAD, even helping recruiters with how to plan their day in order to get better results. Because most ATS systems are designed to manage and track information and process, rather than help recruiters with executing recruiting activities, it becomes necessary to rethink and redesign how your ATS is used. Take a deep dive into the activities that are tracked in your system and ask "why does this activity exist?" If the answer is not directly related to achieving a recruiting related result, then you need to abandon it, re-label and refocus it, or turn it over to someone who handles process and administration. A great example is call tracking of passive prospects, suspects and candidates. Monitor how often you are touching the high performing talent you are after using your ATS systems. This is usually best accomplished using the contact/call/communicate functionality of your ATS.

Those are the three (3, tres, drei) for today. I will provide you with two (2, dos, zwei) more in a later post. In the meantime, feel free to email me, if you want some help with executing these ideas. I have to get back to making recruiting calls, catching up on all things ESPN and rocking out to some 311 so I will see you all later!

Editors Note - Michael Homula is the founder of Bearing Fruit Consulting, a national recruiting consulting firm based out of Michigan.  Prior to founding BFC, Michael served as a Director of Recuiting/Talent Management for multiple companies in the Financial Services industry.  With this post, Michael has changed his employment status from Triple Secret Probation to simple "Probation".  Way to go, Michael...

Should You Pound Out Recruiting Calls on Memorial Day?

A guy over at ERE says yes... But Homula's mad as hell, and seemingly offended.  See clips from Mikey at Bearing Fruit and I'll let you decide....

"Over at ERE there is a post by David Szary on his blog 3-O'Clock Coffee Break going into some detail about how Memorial Day is the best time to recruit passive candidates. 

First off, I don't know David and I have no personal issues with him.  I am sure he is a nice guy and knows his stuff.  That said, I have to take professional issue with some of the recommendations in his blog post.

While David is correct that Memorial Day, and for that matter the days leading up to holidays in general, is a good time to recruit (calling the Thursday and Friday before Memorial day are great times to connect with people) the tactical recommendations in this blog post are not the best.

Here are the 3 recommendations from David with my thoughts interspersed:

Develop a target list of passive candidates and do a "networking" email blast followed up by a phone call (concurrently or within a few hours).  Volume is the key, get your message out to as many people as possible.

Email blasts are notoriously ineffective and have a low ROI.  Great talent will shun this approach because it isn't relational enough, and it has a dirty telemarketing feel to it.  Recruiting is, at its very core, a relationship driven profession.  Trying to recruit talent absent a relationship, even of the most minimal nature, is an exercise in futility.  In this tactical scenario, the email and the call is "allegedly" about them but the agenda is all yours.  You don't just email "blast" high performing talent about you and your job and hope that someone will respond to you when you call.  This is the same tactic played out in bars everywhere at 3 a.m. in the morning.  If you aren't familiar with that analogy you should listen to and watch this.  Volume does not replace quality in recruiting EVER."

Click over to Homula to see the other two ideas and the response. 

I'm with Homula on this one.  Plus, it's freaking hard to make calls from the beach - the sand, the background noise as I'm applying 100 SPF (which has a grain to it, I believe)...

Have a great holiday weekend, we'll see you back here on Tuesday.... 

I'm Gonna Make You An Employment Offer You Can't Refuse

Everything you need to know about making offers you can learn from The Godfather.  Yeah, I know that is a loose reference to the chick flick You've Got Mail, but I am man enough to admit that I dig that movie and other chick flicks like Serendipity and Say Anything.  I digress.

Recently, my esteemed colleague - errr - partner in talent crime, Kris Dunn talked about hiring managers' ability to sell offers to candidates.  If you missed it, shame on you and you should immediately go here and read it.  In fact, you need to read that post and the comments before reading this one.  Think of it as sort of a pre-requisite to this post.  I mean it.  Go ahead...really, I'll wait!

Are you back?  Great!  Essentially I agree with Kris in his observations, but I take issue with the word "sell" when it comes to the recruitment process and the offer.  Yeah, I am a big fan of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I understand and buy into the synergy between recruiting and the sales world.  That said, there is a difference between the recruiter as a sales agent and recruiter as a needs-based sales consultant.  If you find yourself in a position of having to sell the offer, then you have likely already lost the candidate.  Additionally, if you sell and do push through to sign the candidate, there is a high likelihood the candidate comes into your organization feeling as though they were sold rather than choosing the opportunity based on their needs. 

So what can you do to avoid being in a position of selling the offer?

1.  Execute a better recruiting call.   Most recruiting calls suck.  Yes, suck!  I have a voice mail hall of shame of bad recruiting calls.  It is both amusing and sad.  Recruiting calls today are so full of sales jargon and lingo it makes candidates feel dirty when they hang up the phone.  Last year my firm, Bearing Fruit Consulting, conducted a survey of 517 mid-level and senior level professionals and executives across multiple industries in the U.S.  When asked how they feel when they get a call from a headhunter, the top two answers were versions of "dirty" and "like I was talking to a telemarketer".  To keep it brief, most recruiting calls sound like telemarketing because they are pitching jobs without knowing the candidate, and they are in sell mode rather than consult mode.  The call is made under the disguise of helping the candidate, but all the recruiter talks about is their company, their job and/or their client.  If you want to learn more about this and how to execute a better recruiting call you can listen to this.

2.  Uncover the Career Wound.  No matter how good of a recruiter you are, you can never get the best passive talent to move without identifying, uncovering and having a remedy for their career wound.  Without doing this, you will forever be in selling mode as a recruiter.  The Career Wound is something in the candidate's current situation that they would like to change in order for them to make a job change.  Sometimes there are multiple career wounds.  Every candidate, and I mean EVERY candidate, has one.  It is the recruiter's job to uncover it, show it to the candidate (repeatedly, by the way) and offer a remedy for it.  In doing this, you become a consultant and not a sales person.  You have to uncover the key career wound a candidate will use to choose a new opportunity or make a move.  You make the recruiting call and the recruiting process about THEM and not about YOU.  Once the wound is uncovered and validated, and the decision making criteria is understood, the recruiter no longer has to sell.  The opportunity and the company either DOES or DOES NOT remedy the career wound and address the candidate's decision making criteria.

3.  Debriefing and Conditional Invitations.  At different steps in the recruitment process you need to stop and debrief with the candidate.  Each debrief should be structured to gain understanding of what the candidate is experiencing and what information they need to move forward in the process.  Before you advance a candidate to the next phase of the recruitment process, you gain acceptance on key parts of the offer as a condition of moving forward.  If they can't commit to that aspect of the offer, then you have to be able to find out what the source of their discomfort is, then either get it resolved or be willing to push the candidate away.  Candidates often make decisions without having all the information they need to really decide.  Asking candidates at multiple points in the process what information they need to move to the next step helps the recruiter to maintain control.  With this ground covered, once you get to a formal offer, all the key elements are already locked down like a penitentiary and the offer will be accepted. 

There is so much more to this than these 3 recommendations, but it's a start.  In the end, if you truly consult with talent and execute these simple recommendations, you will have fewer (dare I say "0"?) offers declined because you will never make an offer without knowing it will be accepted.  Great recruiters and hiring managers don't play guessing games and selling games when making an offer.  They maintain careful candidate control, pull candidates through the process with information and conditional invitations, and address career wounds and decision making criteria well in advance of extending an offer. 

Don't make offers that will get refused!

Editors Note - Michael Homula is the founder of Bearing Fruit Consulting, a national recruiting consulting firm based out of Michigan.  Prior to founding BFC, Michael served as a Director of Recuiting/Talent Management for multiple companies in the Financial Services industry.  Back in those days, Michael would remove overdraft protection for any candidate rejecting an offer.  Now Michael has to work at it like the rest of us...

Shhh! Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet. I'm Huntin' Wabbits!

By now, we are all painfully familiar with the term ATS (Applicant Tracking System).  I say painfully, because there is a lot of pain involved with these systems.  I am not talking about the pain of selecting and then implementing them - I am referring to the pain of actually using them and have them add benefit to your recruiting organization. 

Remember Elmer Fudd?  The great bard of cartoon hunting lore who incessantly chased that "wascally wabbit"?  Fudd was a tracker.  And thus my point.  You track animals and you have relationships with people.  No talented person in their right mind wants to be tracked.  By their very name, ATS systems tell us all we need to know about their usefulness when it comes to recruiting.  I commonly refer to these so called systems as Animal Tracking Systems.  I think it is more accurate of what they are.

Let's face it.  The ATS was built to manage process and track information for the purpose of compliance, EEOC, OFCCP, the corporate legal counsel and HR weenies in the house.  Sure, occasionally they kick out some tired, worn out and meaningless metric about time to fill, or number of positions filled in a quarter, but all the ATS really does is take the recruiting process on paper and put it on a server.  No value add whatsoever to actual recruiting. 

Recruiting isn't about process or tracking.  Great recruiting is about useful information, relationships, networking, needs-based consulting and exceptional communication.  No ATS made yet has been able to do these things well.  Nope, it comes down to a skilled recruiter being able to execute exceptionally well in all of these areas.  Sure, a system can house the information necessary to help a recruiter make better decisions, but in the end, it really all comes down to how effectively the recruiter can execute when they get to the right talent.  Sadly, ATS systems are ill equipped to add any value to this endeavor.

Any recruiting organization that seeks to add value to their company or client has to build and/or manipulate their current system into a TRMS (Talent Relationship Management System), so that the activities of real recruiting are enhanced by the system.  The list of functionality necessary to do this properly is quite extensive, but it can be done, and has been done, in many right-thinking, recruiting organizations. 

That said, the ATS providers continue to feed the recruiting masses the same old Elmer Fudd "tracking" approach, which only further erodes the value of recruiting to the organization they serve.  The blame for this doesn't lie with the ATS providers.  Nope, it lies with the recruiting masses that keep accepting it and implementing it. 

Wake up people!   Did Fudd ever kill the wabbit?