That’s great of course. People need people who are familiar with the industry. But there is something else I know. Recruiters are picky about different things. Some love finding typos and minor spelling mistakes and throwing out resumes because of that. Some hate cover letters and never read them. Some never see all of that fancy font and nice formatting because they have an applicant tracking system that automatically parses and force ranks. And some do the exact opposite of all of those things.

The other thing people won’t tell you is that not every recruiter is good at their job. I know, shock of shocks. So not only will every recruiter have different preferences (and therefore colors their advice in that way) but some of them may be giving advice that is destined to fail in any situation.

Really, there is something a bit more simple and radical that could help more than any of these things:

Be a good recruiter and demand the same of your colleagues.

Imagine if every recruiter analyzed candidates based on rational criteria instead of based on some combination of gut feeling, handshake strength and if they chose to show up six minutes early instead of five? It would be a much more simple way of getting a job and wouldn’t require hours of coaching to get through the process successfully.

And maybe that’s a bit pie in the sky for you. I get that. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t at least try to think of ways of fixing your own process and line of thinking. At the very least, you’ll be helping the most important job seekers of all: your own.

No, I didn’t make a typo in that sentence.  Hiring the best candidate—the most qualified, the one with the highest levels of each sought-for skill, the smartest, best track-record, stand out candidate—is almost always a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong.  “Best” is, you know, a worthy goal.  In their quest to be best, some people accomplish a great deal.  I like best as much as the next guy.

But best what?

How smart are you?

I know a company (well, I know more than one, truth be told) where hiring the “best” means hiring the smartest.  Score a big-number IQ and move to the head of the class.  Best and brightest are, for them, the same.  The consequences of this policy include a worryingly high incidence of “out” during the “up or out” career cycle and too much senior executive time spent managing problematic prima donnas.

So, should they have recruited the dopes?

Of course not.  But rather than recruit the absolute smartest, they should draw their candidates from a pool of the decidedly smart-enough.  Intelligence, for them, should be table-stakes.  Final selection should be on the basis of fit with the job.  Which candidates have the competencies, preferences and capabilities the job demands, at or very close to the level the job demands?

Recruit someone with much higher-than-necessary capability or competency levels for the job and you risk having a bored, frustrated and unfulfilled employee.

That, all too often, happens when the “best” candidate is hired.

Candidates, applicants and employees

Part of the problem comes from the intense focus, in today’s recruiting approaches, on the candidate, the applicant.  I hear, “This applicant has an excellent pedigree”; or “I really like her, she came across as very polished, very smart, in the interview”; or “The awards and honors he has won are very impressive.”

Some people are great candidates.  Some are terrific employees, excellent performers.  The correlation between the two, regrettably, isn’t great.

What matters is not the quality of candidacy but the quality of work.  What matters is not the absolute level of a competency or skill, but the right level and fit of that competency or skill for a specific job.

Jobs, like people, all have different profiles.  The competencies required by a pharmaceutical sales rep are not the same as those demanded of an html programmer.  At university, I knew future world-class physicists who couldn’t write a coherent paragraph; and I knew future world-class authors who struggled mightily in the “physics for poets” course.

I know a lot of people, you do too I am sure, who are really good at their job but weren’t very good at other jobs.  And I know a lot of people who aren’t very good at their job – or who are out of a job at present – but who would be fantastic at a different job.

Don’t be fooled into thinking high quality equals high performance.  Focus on getting the best-matched future employee for your job, not the best-credentialed candidate.  You will see the difference where it counts: in performance.

Paul Basile loves variety: he has worked in five industries, has lived and worked in seven countries on three continents.  He is founder and CEO of Matchpoint Careers, Inc, his third start-up, using science to match people with the right jobs and match jobs with the right people.  He has degrees from Princeton University and MIT (beginning his career as a rocket scientist…).

Many of you know that my day job is as an HR Specialist. What you might not know is that I also have the illustrious title of “Assistant Facility Security Officer.” As a government contractor, we are required to provide security training and comply with various regulations that don’t apply to other employers. While at lunch the other day, I was speaking with a friend at another local defense contractor about using Twitter for recruiting purposes. He’s been running into some seemingly insurmountable roadblocks.

Whoa! You can’t say that!

Apparently it’s virtually impossible to do social recruiting in a meaningful way in our industry. See, recruiting via Twitter/Facebook isn’t just about saying, “Here’s a job. Here’s a link. Apply for it.” It’s about building trust and value for followers so that they are actually interested when a job becomes available. It’s about sharing (via social media) your employer’s brand and culture. At this point, it looks like we defense contractors aren’t going to be able to do that kind of thing.

Welcome to Paranoia. Population: You

See, we are required to keep all information private about what we do, where we are, and what’s going on. It’s called PII (Personally Identifiable Information). You never know when there’s a pirate, ninja, or zombie lurking around the corner to snatch you away (or so they tell me). Here are some sample (seemingly innocuous, yet disallowed) tweets that would encourage someone to think your company doesn’t suck and might encourage them to apply there:

• Woot! Just had pizza brought in from Mellow Mushroom downstairs. This place rocks.
• Sweet! My manager just offered to let me take her place at the local HR conference next week.
• We are headed to Breakfasts R Us. Our CEO is taking everyone out for winning a big contract!

Sure, that doesn’t completely knock out everything you could tweet about, but it’s time consuming to think through every single tweet. It takes out the spontaneity that makes it so much fun in the first place. Once you take out all the other details it leaves you with “Well. I am working again today somewhere doing something for someone. Kinda like yesterday.” How interesting is that?

Not just on Twitter

And if I’m going to follow the intent of the rules, I can’t have conversations like this outside of work, either. No telling others about fun things we do. No sharing about our great leaders and how much they do for us. Heck, I might even have to keep the kind of drinks in our kitchen a secret as well (you never know who’s listening, right?). So if you’re thinking this doesn’t apply to you since you’re not using the social tools, you might need to think again.

Anyone else out there in an industry (finance, PR, etc.) that’s so burdened with regulation and legislation that it knocks you on your butt in some ways? I’d love to hear about it and if you’ve been able to confront or circumvent the issue.

Ben Eubanks is a blogger and HR professional from Huntsville, Alabama (just don’t tell anyone). He loves his day job (whatever it is) and enjoys telling others about his work (whatever he does). He is the cofounder of HRevolution, author of a blog about human resources, leadership, and zombies, and a new dad to some amazing twin girls.

This company has spent millions of dollars on talent acquisition alone in this one critical area of their business. Their problem isn’t going away anytime soon. And they are doing things to help but it isn’t enough.

So I asked who is going to blink first: the people that need to hire or the people that need the jobs? Whose will is going to break in order to make the tough decision that maybe it is time to retrain the workforce since many of the positions that existed a decade or two ago aren’t coming back.

No response.

Is there a third option? As I discussed with someone else, there is a short term solution. Importing talent has been going on for quite a while. The person I talked to said his company got 5% of the temporary visas they asked for though. And they certainly didn’t advertise that fact.

I was thinking later that to someone outside of the talent industry, this has to be a maddening conversation. And maybe I am starting to agree with them a bit.

So let’s say you’ve got one of these positions where there are a very limited number of people for the role. And you’re spending millions of recruiting dollars and you’re still falling short. What’s the solution?

Some recruiters would say devote more budget and more energy into recruiting.

Yuck. Talk about diminishing returns.

How about becoming a real talent pro and looking at the broader picture? Maybe it is time to do a lock down on your retention efforts. Every person you lose not only means another search, it means a person with institutional knowledge leaving the workplace.

What about internal training? You’ve got people interested in moving into this role but they don’t have the skills they need. You make it as easy as possible for them move up by offering training classes, education incentives, whatever. And that retention program will come in handy when you sell this to your boss.

How about external programs? Working with colleges, scholarships, adult educators… We could go on and on.

The current war for talent isn’t like it was hyped in the past. Right now, there are too many people with the wrong skill sets to do anything more than drift from contracting/freelancing, side jobs and occasional full time work below their level of experience. We were hoping for a war where finding is the difficult part, not a true shortage.

So if you’re one of the few companies looking for people and you’re having trouble finding them, wouldn’t it be great to alleviate some of that confusion by showing that you’re thinking outside of the box? That you want to hire people, that you don’t want to be constantly behind in those critical reqs.

Isn’t it time for us to stop waiting for candidates to blink and actually take some action?

A couple people commented that several of the sessions were overly tactical. Almost skipping the “why” and going straight to the “how”. Of course, presenters only have an hour to bring something of value to attendees so time constraints alone challenged presenters to get straight to the point. But there is another point I will make:

Social Recruiting Tools Do Matter

You don’t want to look like a rookie out there. Strategize all you want but if you stumble on the execution, you still flushed an opportunity down the drain. And nobody wants to do that. Here are some considerations though as you’re looking at social recruiting tools:

1. Strategy matters – Using social tools has to fit into your overall recruiting strategy. If you are searching for mechanics, it doesn’t make sense to invest a ton of time into using social tools. Good strategy plus good execution is how the game is won.
2. Reach isn’t about raw numbers – So you have 10,000 followers on Twitter. If none of them can help you build relationships or fill a req (or if they aren’t listening to you), those raw numbers don’t matter. Reach is about relationships plus influence plus a voice that is listened to.
3. Spammers don’t win – At least in the long term. Spamming might get you a short term result but the people who are having long term success are the ones who are building relationships. If you are recruiting in a specific industry, there is absolutely no choice. No spam.
4. Social = real life – Behind that avatar or user name is a real person with real needs. Connecting with people and humanizing that connection as quickly as possible is critical. Use relationship building tactics that are successful in real life with social tools.
5. Ready, set, adapt – Shifts in social media happen all of the time. As soon as you are set to go, a change will come along. You have to be ready to shift your strategy when new opportunities become available.

If you were there, what did you take away from the summit? And if you weren’t there but are starting to get involved in social recruiting, what have your takeaways been?

1. It is one of the toughest jobs to start and be successful in.
2. It is one of the toughest jobs to hire for.

As for point one, I don’t know what to say. We’ve tried a ton of different programs to help people get their start in these sorts of positions. The most successful people don’t seem to need too much guidance though. We’ve tried giving training pay for a month or two just to see if we could get them over the hump but it never made much sense in the dollars and cents department.

As for point two, that’s really where my mind took a flip. I couldn’t figure out why our selection process, no matter how well defined and executed, still ended up with 75%+ turnover in the first 90 days. Behavioral assessments be damned, something wasn’t adding up. Here’s a quick shortcut on something that took me a couple months to figure out:

Most selection processes assume that the company has the most at risk in making the selection. Given that assumption, questions are asked in a way that will reduce that risk or make the risk more acceptable.

Whenever you are hiring a commissioned salesperson though, that risk now falls squarely on the candidate. There is a serious opportunity cost for that person if they take a job that they don’t succeed in (because they won’t get paid). So if you are looking to reduce risk in your selection process (as you would typically do), you are actually increasing the likelihood of a bad fit hire. You throw a hitch into their risk assessment efforts that make it difficult to determine if they could be successful.

So we started talking to sales candidates like we would talk to a partner. We talked about our process, our business, success rates, failure rates, industry trends, leads, turnover… whatever. We focused questions of the candidate on past results, skill sets and industry or job specific knowledge. We helped them decide how they could handle our risk factors as a willing partner and we would evaluate their talents (and possible pitfalls) like we would a partner. If it meshed, great. If not, no biggie.

Was it a grand slam? No, but it was significantly more effective than the behavioral based, scientific process we used to use. It also helped us identify those who were entrepreneurial minded and interested in growing their own portfolio of business (because that’s what it really takes to be successful in this environment).

It didn’t change the fact that commissioned sales positions still stink to identify the right talent for but it at least made it easier for us to identify quickly those who were wholly unprepared to take the risk that commissioned sales demanded.

Look, I get it. You heard about some tech company doing it. You read How Would You Move Mt. Fuji? and thought it was brilliant. You want to be innovative. Or hip. Or whatever. Hell if I know, I’ve never been any of these things.

Whenever someone wants to ask a stupid question in an interview, this is what I ask:

Are We Hiring Clowns?

If so, I have no problem having a clown jump through hoops and put on a circus act. I do have a problem with making people who aren’t clowns put on a circus act and jump through hoops though.

That whole thing about resumes and interviews being poor predictors of success in the workplace has to do with the fact that doing well in those situations rarely has anything to do with the job at hand. Let’s stop pretending that we are savants when it comes to interviewing and realize that successfully finding the right fit based on a standard resume and interview protocol is more of a happy stroke of luck than anything else.

So why are these tech companies spending thousands of dollars developing complex puzzle questions if they don’t get results? I would suggest three things:

1. They think it works because they continue to see success. I would say that they are successful in spite of their erroneous selection methods. Many companies can be successful in this situation.
2. They think they are more innovative than they actually are. Using the two commonly cited examples, Microsoft isn’t really an innovator of new products (just reinventing their current products like Madonna every couple of years). Google’s most successful innovations outside of search have come through acquisition (YouTube is arguably the most successful product by Google outside of search and they bought it).
3. They’ve become part of a hazing culture. If everyone in an organization has had to go through the pain of that sort of selection process, they believe that everyone in the future should as well in order to become part of the culture there.

What are your thoughts on these interviewing tactics?

I received some interesting tips from one of the vendors we work with (CareerBuilder), the Top 10 Recruiting myths. Here are some myths:

1) Good interviews always select the best employee
Managers hire unqualified people every day. Many qualified candidates simply lack interviewing skills. Nerves and other outside factors can also affect a candidate’s ability to interview well.

6) Testing is more important than interviewing
Recruiters should rely on tests, interview performance, resume, background information and references. Tests can evaluate aptitude, or how a person reacts to a given situation, but will not paint a complete picture.

Structured interviews are the best approach
Many people who conduct interviews possess no interview training. To avoid issues with untrained interviewers, companies implement structured interviews that ask each candidate the same questions. This can be a terrible approach because companies neglect the listening, observing and testing nature of the interview.

And some other great things as well. I really think that HR/Recruiting has become more of a science in recent years (as far as looking at more factors) but it will never be a sure thing. We are dealing with human beings here and that will always make any perfect process…well, not perfect.

For everything recruiting, checkout ERE.net.

Networking as a job or candidate searching tool is crap. Not only is it ineffective, it is dishonest. But I thought that Ragan had made it pretty clear that she wasn’t doing it for that. I do cold e-mails and cold calls all the time with professionals in my area or in my industry. Here’s a hint though, I am usually doing networking during times when we have lulls in hiring. If we are doing a bunch of hiring, I don’t have time to network because networking takes a ton of time. It is building a relationship. I rarely use my networks to poach from (like some seem to assume).  In fact, I’ve only hired a couple from my cold called/e-mailed/introduced network of people. But guess what, those network of people know other people and I get a ton of referrals from them.  And whenever I have a candidate that doesn’t fit with what our company does but does fit with another company, I hook them up.  I also give advice to these networked contacts and have developed friendships from it.

I use e-mail because I am on the phone all day and the people that I want to talk to are busy as well. I feel that e-mail is a courtesy and as long as it isn’t spam, I haven’t had any ill reaction to using it. Calling can interupt a person’s day and if they are busy, they might be more turned off by the fact that you called and interupted them.

The rude response is never okay though and it is irritating to me that some would justify such rudeness. Even if it was a straight recruiting e-mail, wouldn’t a simple “I’m not interested” work? Why be a jerk about it?

I’ll never get how people can be such jagoffs on the internet or over the phone yet be so normal if you ever meet them in person.

There are some industries that aren’t in that position. There are some industries that are in South America, Asia, Europe and Africa looking for talent.  Are recruiters prepared to step up to the next level? Are companies ready to pony up the resources to get the best people or is being average (or below average) okay? Are companies going to start focusing on retention because soon, very soon, not every live body in your organization is going to be interchangable with someone out there looking for a new position. Only the most adaptive companies will strive through the upcoming storm. Only the best recruiters will make a killing. How prepared are you?