A few days ago, The New York Times had this great article essentially about how bad waitresses’ jobs are. The short point is that their jobs - in a word - suck. The long point is that in an industry where 50% of the employees think their customers are just OK (not great or even good) and 25% are “awful,” it’s easy to imagine things like low job satisfaction and high turnover. Paradoxically, the article reports that

“American waitresses take pride in doing work that they realize many people, including some they serve so diligently, put them down for doing at all.”

“What’s this got to do with recruiting?” you ask, angrily? Only everything. It’s an example of the attitudes many talented employees have about their jobs. Many have the notion that a workplace is to be tolerated, and they still have great pride in their job and their abilities. To HR professionals, those employees are among the most wanted candidates: they’ve got talent, ability and dedication, but they’re probably interested in a way out - it you can give it to them.

To get them interested, you’ve got to be able to offer them “the whole package,” which is something we’ve written about repeatedly. Here, for example. Think about these figures: Google got 1.1 million resumes last year alone, according to Chris Russell (among others). Guess why. The salaries they offer are essentially in line with similar salaries, but the perks of working for Google are legendary. Those perks are often enough to make a candidate say, “Hmm, maybe I don’t have to tolerate this job. Maybe I should call that recruiter back.”

That’s why people like Toby Lucich recommends candidates “find that organization that operates like an Alma Pater [nutures growth and development, essentially] - this could be invaluable in your future career cycles.” Similarly, a study by the Chartered Management Institute argues that employees are less and less interested in playing office politics, in “playing dirty” to get ahead. You can show them there’s a way out of the soap opera of their current situation. Make sure you’ve got something better lined up for them, and you’re going to be able to attract the best and brightest every time.

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We’ve talked before not only about what a Quiet Working Professional is but, even more importantly, why they’re so desirable. It’s an increasingly important topic as the war on talent continues to lumber ahead, so we thought we’d revisit some of our best QWP posts today.

Say goodbye to the passive candidate. Say hello to the Quiet Working Professional.

In this information age, recruiting a Quiet Working Professional differs from going after a passive candidate because of the “arrogance of supply.” In their book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business, Rusty Rueff and itzbig’s Hank Stringer argue that this arrogance of supply is a “disregard for the importance of great talent that some companies have grown accustomed to through decades of labor abundance.” The Quiet Working Professional is empowered by the Internet, and recruiting them means you have to “drive the process and actively go after the best people, the majority of whom most likely work for your competitors” (in the words of Krista Bradford). As Howard Adamsky pointed out some time back, they don’t need your job, your company, your opportunity, or you.

What puts the “Quiet” in Quiet Working Professionals

The difference is in a QWP’s latent desire for “something more” out of a job. A passive candidate is satisfied with their job and unwilling to participate in the very real stress of a placement process. However, a QWP, while not actively looking for another job, longs to be challenged in ways that their current employer doesn’t offer. A post on Sytematic HR claims that this underlying sense that a job is just OK or mediocre is why the best HR departments develop multiple career ladders. The post explains that many professionals who like their jobs aren’t necessarily interested in traditional advancement within their organization. They aren’t “on the market,” but they’re quiet (internally and externally) about their advancement needs.

Recruit Quiet Working Professionals by giving them a better work culture

A truly “Quiet” QWP may not have even considered how their work-culture could be improved, but opening that door for them can make them more receptive to the great opportunity you have lined up for them. Of course, as Barb points out, if their answers are simply money or advancement, you better be able to offer them those simple improvements too. However, it’s more likely that they’re going to want to be accurately matched with an opportunity that meets the broader spectrum of their work-culture needs. That means that you better have those kinds of opportunities lined up if you want to attract the QWPs in your network.

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In an interview a little while back, Merck CEO Dick Clark (not that one; the other one) said that “‘culture eats strategy for lunch’ if a firm does not possess the ‘enabling systems and structures’ that support and co-ordinate with a desired strategic direction” (from a post on Consulting Times).

The post goes on the describe how few managers (around 20%) devote any real resources to the development of a hiring culture or even a work culture. But the kinds of “people problems” created by that lack of HR attention can have a disastrous effect on the bottom line and make it difficult to acquire quality talent down the road.

Referring to Clark’s statements, Gautam Ghosh points asks readers to

“guess which is the only function which impacts organisational culture everyday [sic]? Yes, our humble friendly HR function. Every person hired, every compensation cycle changed, every performance management change impacts the overall organizational culture.”

That means that merely going through the motions of talent acquisition without considering how you are contributing to the your organization’s HR culture means your HR department will suffer. Guess what happens if HR suffers? Bye-bye, bottom line.

We’ve written about how creating and maintaining a better hiring culture here, here and here, just to link a few. As we’ve said, a better hiring culture, which leads to better recruiting results, comes from a better overall work culture, if only because that’s going to make your organization more attractive to those hard-to-get candidates. Take a good look at your hiring/recruiting system, at the networking you do, at the online solutions you have in place for reaching that talent. Are you going forward with a culture or just a strategy? Which one do you think will attract top talent?

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Well, OK, they’re going to retire eventually (remember what Ben Franklin said about those two certainties in life…). But Boomers are evidently in no real hurry to retire, and why should they be? As the Talent War continues to heat up - partially because some Boomers are retiring, but also because of a scarcity of upcoming talent - organizations are starting to think more carefully about just how long their Boomers should keep working. At the same time, aging members of America’s talent force are taking careful stock of their lives and realizing that retirement may not even be an option for now.

Two of the hottest watchwords in HR right now are “talent management.” To many organizations, that means things like employee development and retention (see a recent post at the Lucas Group for another take on it).

That means refining the recruiting process to not only scope out new, young talent, but also to hunt down experienced talent like QWPs. Right there are two different fronts in the War: businesses keeping who they have, recruiters trying to take them away. Of course those two sides work together all the time, but it all puts Boomers in the driver’s seat. Why would they want to retire?

In a recent study by Buck Consultants, WorldatWork, and Corporate Voices for Working Families, 52% of the respondents said they were most concerned about a Boomer exodus’ effect on senior leadership positions. Big majorities said they were interested in developing “mentoring programs (57%), knowledge gap analyses (69%), and intergenerational work teams (44%)” to make use of the remaining time they have with Boomers.

“However, more than 80% of respondents, regardless of industry, have not surveyed their mature workers to determine future work preferences or intentions. Forty-two percent have not even identified who is responsible in their organization for knowledge transfer and knowledge management” (from College Recruiter).

Between their increased desirability and increased costs of living (meaning they can’t always afford to retire), Boomers are likely going to be an integral part of the workforce for the foreseeable future. The question is, what are you doing to recruit/retain them?

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You might call it specialization, or you might call it focus. You might like finding a niche or a groove. If you’re a baseball fan you might think of it as a sweet-spot. Whatever metaphor is your favorite, the fact of the matter is that to stay competitive, discerning recruiters need to create a precisely-targeted discovery process if they want to see positive results.

Part of this specialization means you’ve got to figure out what you do best. Kind of sounds like advice for a first-time job seeker, doesn’t it? But many recruiters don’t follow this fundamental. In a post on Contract Recruiting, Doug Franklin says that many “recruiters looking for that next gig struggle to verbalize or even put in an email what their ’sweet spot’ is when it comes to recruiting.” But it’s pretty unlikely (as Franklin suggests) that a discerning recruiter is as good at filling industrial positions, for instance, as they are at healthcare or financial.

He argues that contract recruiters are being asked more and more often to perform vertical searches which almost always require some pretty specialized knowledge and ability. We’ve posted about branding before, and Franklin covers it too. He recommends three steps towards branding your recruiting specialty:

• Determine your niche recruiting strength and force yourself to write it on paper as a way to clean up the wording.
• Prepare your “elevator speech” which will clearly define your niche to any agency or company looking for a Contract Recruiter.
• Begin to build your brand. Put your marketing paragraph of your niche or expertise on your web page. Get involved in industry events specializing in this niche recruiting area. Comment in Blogs about your area of expertise.

A focused sense of your own recruiting strengths will put you in a better position to actually recruit: to understand the needs of the organization, to assess candidates and ultimately to place them by accurately matching their talents with those needs. As the recruiting world becomes a more specialized environment - as a result of more and more specialized job markets, niche job boards, etc. - recruiters are going to want to find their own personal sweet-spots and start swinging for the fence.

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To put it frankly, the days of lifetime employment may be behind us. That means that absent a really incredible set of incentives - meaning the whole dream-job package: compensation, work culture, etc. - it’s likely that top talent will change jobs repeatedly during their career. Just a few years back, job-changing might not have been quite so common, but nowadays, it’s the rule of thumb.

However, that fact isn’t necessarily evidence that jobs are getting worse, nor does it prove that the upcoming generations of candidates are overly demanding or whiny. In fact, what it shows is that top employers are adapting their human resources models to fit the human needs of their top talent, and that puts talent in a great position. At the same time, it’s why Quiet Working Professionals are so desirable: they’ve got OK jobs now, and they’re talented and loyal but they can be enticed if given the right conditions. And that’s not a bad thing.

Of course, if you’re a QWP, that doesn’t mean you should haphazardly look for a way out of your job. We’ve recommended against it, and Penelope Trunk posted recently about it too. She addresses one of the big reasons for a job-change: The Bad Boss. However, she recommends that employees evaluate their own interpersonal skills before denouncing a boss who - granted - may leave a bit to be desired in terms of “managing skills.” She tells a personal story about a job in which

“I could have spent my time complaining. There was a lot to complain about. Instead I always approached [my boss] with empathy and knew when to put my two cents in and when to shut up. Aside from cutting a deal, he didn’t have a lot of management skills, and this gap left more room for me to shine.”

She learned not merely how to grin and bear it but how to excel by taking advantage of the “gaps” bad management created.

Of course she doesn’t work there any more, and that’s important. Maybe it was because she just couldn’t put up with it any more, or maybe it was because she pulled the trigger on her Plan B. Regardless, one way or another, she moved from being a QWP to an active candidate. Sometimes, that’s a talented employee’s best option.

In a post on his blog, Bryan Johanson says that that transformation is becoming more and more common as businesses and recruiters figure out ways to graciously attract top talent.

“If your current recruiting process doesn’t take these things into account, you’re likely to be losing some real top talent. Sleeping Giants [QWPs] won’t remain passive for long. Once awakened, you have to quickly change your process to accommodate their needs.”

Employees know these truths in growing numbers. There’s less and less remorse about a job change. It’s not seen as being disloyal or “jumping ship.” As more employers become savvy about what it is that top talent wants out of a job, QWPs are becoming more willing to activate Plan B or otherwise shift into active candidate mode.

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OK, the word “intangibles” in the title might seem a little esoteric, but it’s something we’ve all come up against in the HR world. We try to source candidates based on a sheet of paper (which we so often stress should only be one page). We ask a variety of questions in an interview - some of which give us useful results, some of which don’t. Then we make an offer that we hope will top talent will be enticed to accept.

Every step of the hiring process has costs attached to it, and we try to carefully monitor all of them. But are HR professionals ignoring the intangibles that can help them place the best talent? Are we forgetting to take into account the needs and desires of the candidates themselves?

If that sounds too “touchy-feely,” good luck in the ongoing War on Talent, because getting “touchy-feely” (maybe aka “recognizing intangibles”) are increasingly what makes the difference between an adequate candidate and a dream candidate. Which do you want to place?

In a great post on KnowHR.com Frank Roche recommends “hiring the best.” OK, sure. Sounds obvious right? Only, how do you assess “the best,” and what does “the best” even mean for your purposes. Well, for starters you better really understand the position’s needs. The next step is figuring out a candidate’s potential. Roche links out to a post by Mosiac founder Marc Andreessen, in which he argues that “intelligence, per se, is highly overrated.”

Instead, he says we should be assessing drive, curiosity and ethics in addition to demonstrated intelligence. He defines drive as “self-motivation,” the lack of which will cost an orginzation down the road. Curiosity is a “a proxy for do you love what you do?” Ethics is harder to asses, but an honest, ethical employee is going to provide obvious payoffs for any organization worth its salt.

The interview process is probably the most practical place to assess these intangible characteristics, which is why Andreessen advocates planning out your questions and watching for “the little things” during the interview. Reading the interviewee (like a poker player, perhaps) is at least as important as getting answers to interview questions.

Trying to assess the intangibles before the interview process is a little trickier, but not impossible, especially if your sourcing system is set up properly. Your criteria should be broader than just what a one-page resume provides. You should always try to read between the lines and gauge the candidates “intangibles.”

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This may seem like an echo of Friday’s post here about volume, but… well, it kind of is. But, if you take a look at the world of recruiting today, it sometimes seems like “volume” is the only goal of recruiting, and that’s pretty confusing. Unless you’re trying to fill a newly-constructed factory, or complete some equally gigantic HR project, when is hiring about quantity?

Never. It’s about accurately matching quality talent with specific employment needs. Still, if you take a look at a lot of the conversation surrounding the employment world, volume (in compensation, job postings and candidate acquisition) seems like one of the most prevalent tactics for recruiting.

Part of the reason many recruiters shoot for high-volume is to raise the denominator in the Cost-per-Hire metric. In a great post on Recruitment Redefined, Doug Fuehne explains that the numerators of that ratio (i.e. the direct and indirect costs of recruiting) may seem to continually rise, but he warns that you should accurately track that number based on “what is important to your organization, and what integrates with your recruitment strategy the best.” To us that means keeping the quality placements high not through quantity but through accuracy.

That doesn’t just mean that you have to reduce the size of your network in the way some job boards have apparently done. The New York Times recently reported that some job boards have begun to charge high-dollar candidates to check out executive-level positions. According to the article, their goal is “precisely the opposite of the approach used by mass-market employment sites” and is evidently to attract the more serious (and presumably higher-quality) candidates - and, of course to generate millions in revenue.

The goal of recruiting should always be to make accurate connections between high-quality talent and an organization’s job needs. A history of quality matching (coupled with an effective network) will keep you in the recruiting game better than a throw-it-at-the-wall/see-what-sticks mentality. But we want to know what our readers think: is the most effective aim of recruiting quality or quantity? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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One battle-cry of business success used to be “location, location, location.” However, thanks to the internet’s hand in shrinking the world’s borders, a new, better mantra might be “branding, branding, branding.” Odds are, whatever it is you do online has a lot in common with what bunches of other folks are doing too, so you’ve got to take steps that distinguish you from the herd. It seems like a no-brainer, but unfortunately one of the most important arms of the business world - human resources (including recruiters and sourcers) - doesn’t always seem to take branding to heart.

The branding of HR is going to be most effective if it reflects a healthy hiring-culture. In other words, if an organization lacks a real hiring-culture, a sense of what it means both to work at and apply to a business, they can’t expect top talent to get excited about employement opportunities. Putting it another way, Korre Johnson, Recruitment Marketing Director for VersantWorks challenges HR to

Think about it…what steps is your marketing department taking to attract and retain customers? Now compare that to the steps your human resource department is taking to attract and retain best-fit employees.

HR is usually as results-driven as other branches of the company; why aren’t they just as promotional with their brand identity?

It begins with developing a good online HR presence with SEO in mind. Of course, a little active marketing (whether a blitz or a drip, as HRMarketer.com puts it) will help increase brand awareness. And remember what your parents (hopefully) taught you about honesty, or as the web-world puts it “transparency.” There’s a lot of skepticism out there directed at marketing in general. If potential candidates suspect your brand is being less-than-accurately described (as an anonymous CSO warns on CSOOnline, you can probably kiss them goodbye.

Sound like a massive undertaking? It potentially is, and that’s why enterprise-sized corporations have thus far lead the way in really successful HR branding. But at itzbig, we think our new network, which goes way beyond job-posts and resume-shopping, can help HR professionals of any size craft the right online presence to foster their brand. We think its going to make a world of difference to the online hiring space.

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Imagine trying to recruit a candidate - any candidate - with a job-posting that offered “draconian scheduling” and “small, cramped cubicles.” The job offer describes a severe boss (it actually calls her “Overlord”), distant parking, and constant micro-managing. However, it does promise free coffee to all employees.

OK, obviously the point here is that you aren’t going to attract talent to such a limited job opportunity, if you could even call that an “opportunity.” Yet, some employers still think that trying to force “round” candidates into “square” positions is a perfectly acceptable way to recruit. Instead, to attract top talent, they should be offering flexibility and freedom that will allow growth and increase productivity.

Time’s Lisa Takeuchi Cullen has a post today about the kinds of flexibility that candidates (including Quiet Working Professionals) desire. Citing a study done by the Families & Work Institute, Cullen says that “78% of workers” - both Boomers and Gens X and Y - named increased flexibility as a major concern for future jobs. 63% said they said they “would consider leaving the workplace for a period,” just to gain a sense of freedom and flexibilty. She said the numbers were so high that it was creating a culture of “reduced aspirations,” wherein a lack of flexibility made employees uninterested in increased responsibility. In other words, not giving talent enough freedom meant not being able to move them up in the organization. That, in turn, means not being able to draw new talent in.

Similarly, Systematic HR took a look at twelve major studies on employee engagement (which we’ve written about here) and found eight factors in common. Successful engagement (meaning all eight factors in play) created a willingness in employees to spend discretionary time (i.e. free time or flex-time) on work-related projects.

Does that mean they’re giving up weekends and lunch hours? Not necessarily, and you should expect them to. It simply means that given flexibility and engagement, employees want to do a better job. Conversely, if they’re under a corporate thumb, they resist productivity and even advancement. This translates directly into the world of recruiting since those same work-culture enticements are what many candidates expect from great jobs. If you can’t offer it to them, don’t expect talent to exactly beat a path to your door.

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