Do executive recruiters getting results because of their experience or do they have a secret arsenal of tricks give them the edge? Michael Morell, managing partner at Riviera Partners, says it’s both.

“There isn’t a shortage of talent… there’s a shortage of folks who have enough experience to be really good at recruiting great talent.”

At HireCamp 2014, Michael shared three key things that executive recruiters do to land big kahunas:

Success is Never an Accident

Morell stressed there has to be a process – no matter how simple.

“I emphasize prioritizing the top 3 or 4 requirements, then present a few candidates that meet them to be sure the hiring manager really wants what they say they want.”

Morell also expounded that a feedback loop that requires everyone to vote on candidates individually without seeing what other people said… this helps to avoid groupthink problem which derails many searches.

Create Brand Ambassadors

Every person who walks into your company should have a great experience, even if you don’t hire them. You want everyone to leave excited about what you do and why you do it. Morell described an experience with a company that was being turned down by great talent. No one seemed to want to work there, so Morell went to to visit the company’s HQ to see why.

“Wanna guess how many people said hi to me? ZERO.”

Morell contrasted this with his visit to Zappos where they give every visitor an identifying flag so team members could welcome them and take fun polaroids they could take home with them.

Show Candidates What They’ll Get

Candidates want to know they can thrive at your company. Let them know what kinds of problems they’ll be solving, where your company is going, and what’s in it for them.

“People want to work with smart and passionate people, so when you set up the interview process find folks who are the best representation of your culture and your organization… and put them in front of your candidates,” Morell said.

Click below to listen to Michael Morell’s chock-full of wisdom talk from HireCamp 2014.

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In the decade he spent recruiting for Apple Computer, Patrick Burke helped build the iPod and iPhone teams. At HireCamp 2014 he shared the story of how 1 tactic sourced 10% of the team that shipped the first iPhone – before anyone knew the super-secret project even existed. His key lesson?

“You’ve gotta take big swings to get big results.”

Gossip is valuable

It all started when Apple learned in advance that Nokia & Sanyo would announcing a partnership. Burke knew the news would go over like a lead balloon with Nokia’s mobile team in San Diego. Apple quickly built a list of who worked in the division and sent everyone a simple email: “We’re hiring.” – and then he got to work.

“Soon after Nokia announced the Sanyo partnership internally to it’s employees another email went out saying that Apple was hosting a hiring event 2 miles away in a few days and to come on down. 150 Nokia employees attended and interviews were conducted onsite by managers that same day – and Apple made 8 hires.”

When rumors surfaced that Motorola was in trouble they held similar events…. and bagged 12 more hires — scaring the SIM cards out of Motorola in the process.

B-E Aggressive!

We know that sounds great – but how can you prepare your recruiting team to be ready to drop everything when it’s go time? Patrick says that an aggressive recruiting culture is necessary, but also shared that you need to lay some groundwork. How was Burke able to quickly get the go ahead to run these events despite the high costs of flights, hotels and employee time?

“You need to get buy in on potential strategies before they happen. Plan for what if.”

Getting commitment from management to take a more aggressive approach meant recruiting could go “all in” when the time was right. Listen to Patrick’s talk from HireCamp 2014 to learn how to create a “swing for the fences” recruiting culture.

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Hiring Managers often think of recruiters as magicians who pull out their wand and PRESTO! amazing candidates appear out of nowhere.

In a past life John Vlastelica  was a recruiting leader at Amazon and Expedia. He’s now the Managing Director of Recruiting Toolbox, a firm that helps organizations get better at recruiting. In his practice, John has interviewed over 1000 hiring managers:

“I’ve seen a lot of recruiters talk about educating hiring managers, setting expectations and trying to have difficult conversations… but when I see them in action or go to talk to hiring managers, they describe the recruiter’s role as transactional.”

John took this information and went on a mission figure out what the best recruiters do differently. In his talk at Hirecamp 2014 he shared that what top recruiters do isn’t magic, it’s communication:

“One of the things that really good recruiters do is have honest, transparent, expectation setting conversations with hiring managers.”

In his talk at HireCamp, John shared two specific, actionable, simple techniques that all recruiters can use to improve rapport with hiring managers. Give it a watch:

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Recruiting involves assessing people by asking questions… but how do you know if you’re asking the right ones? Michael Housman is the Chief Analytics Officer at Evolv, a firm that’s amassed a huge pile of recruiting data – 100 million assessment responses from 3 million people. Evolv uses predictive analysis (think Moneyball) to help companies make better hiring decisions.

What’s Housman’s key learning for recruiters? “Questions matter; the way you frame the questions, ordering, how you ask these questions, they all matter… but what’s really interesting is when you close the loop and match up someone’s responses with the job outcome.”

His “big data” analysis has shown that the right questions are like a crystal ball that shows how likely a candidate is to perform if you hire them. Watch Housman’s full talk from HireCamp 2014 for some concrete examples of how this all works, including specific examples of good and bad questions.

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What’s the meaning of life? Why do fools fall in love? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Some questions may never be answered … while others can launch you into the next phase of your career. At HireCamp in 2014 Dan Portillo from Greylock Partners shared how asking questions and using data shifted his career from “execution-only” to bigger picture strategy, analysis and results:

The Clue

“I knew my job was fundamentally different when in a one-on-one meeting with my boss he brought up all the things that I said the week before. I was now on the hook to do all the things that came out of my mouth.”

Tough Questions

“I coined a term that I lovingly called the ‘John Lilly Fire Drill.’ This was him asking me a question… and then me hunting down the answer,” Over time, this forced Portillo to change how he approached his job: “I started thinking about what are the set of things that I should be asking or that I should be measuring.”

Recruiting Cost

Dan figured out that it’s cost of hire is not just hard cash money – but the cost in man hours was crucial.., and explained how sharing that understanding drove critical thinking and improvements. When you frame things in terms of time and cost, it really changes the dynamic of the conversation with the executive team.”

The 3 a.m. Spreadsheet

“I specifically remember one night waking up at 3 in the morning worrying about people leaving the company.  I got up and put the name of every single employee on a spreadsheet… and ranked them in terms of their impact and risk to leave.” That spreadsheet resulted in Mozilla’s leveling system, which helped them retain employees for 5-8 years in an industry where 2-3 years is the norm.

Quitters can Help

“Voluntary, regrettable attrition is really bad, so if you have a good sense of what that looks like, it helps you have productive, strategic conversations with the executive team” – specifically about what’s going on and what you’ll need to do to attract and retain people.

A Call to Action For Recruiters

“Go home, get out of the regular execution that you’re doing and think about what questions are important? Ask them frequently and figure out the information you need to answer them and drive change in the organization to help everyone get better at recruiting.”

What are your favorite questions? What wakes you up at 3 a.m.? Let us know in the comments!

Click below to see Dan Portillo’s full talk on using data to make recruiting easier.

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Google acquired Meebo in 2012 for $100M. Elaine Wherry is one of Meebo’s co-founders and back in 2005 she was tasked with hiring a team of javascript engineers. So she got creative – and had some great success. Last year Elaine shared one of her best recruiting stories – the recruiter honeypot – and now she’s sharing the 7 guerrilla tactics that worked for recruiting software engineers:

1. View Source – Meebo embedded a hidden jobs in the HTML code of their homepage so engineers investigating how their site was put together would see that they were hiring.
2. Riddle Me This – Meebo posted coding puzzles on their blog and tracked who responded correctly. ;”The blog – it’s an amazing recruiting tool, both for finding talent and developing engineering street cred.” .
3. Real time chat – Meebo added a chat widget to their jobs page so visitors could immediately interact with the team – often before even sending in a resume.
4. Adword Hijacking – When engineers searched Google to find answers to specific technical issues they’d see an ad encouraging them to learn about working at Meebo.
5. Earlybird College Recruiting – Elaine researched and identified students and invited them to meet in advance, before competitors had a chance to meet them at a career fair.
6. Think Outside the Valley – Local Silicon Valley meetups were overcrowded with companies trying to hire. But Boston and Chicago? Another story. Elaine wooed talent to the “other, sunnier coast”by attending meetups in other cities – particularly in winter.
7. Open Season – Not every talented engineer has a day job doing what they want. Elaine found talented engineers in unlikely places by monitoring open source contributions.

Click below to watch Elaine’s full talk which includes the boolean search strings she used to identify students, a killer bonus tactic only available in the video and much more:

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Competition to hire software engineers who can build iPhone and Android mobile apps is intense.  Some of the best and most used mobile apps in the business are built by Xtreme labs (now part of Pivotal Labs) in Toronto, Canada.  Xtreme grew from 10 to 350 people in 4 years. What’s the secret that drove over 25% of their mobile development hires?

Interns

“Luckily,” jokes Farhan Thawar Xtreme’s head of engineering, “You only have to be 19 to drink in Toronto.”

Here are a few more secrets that helped little known Xtreme consistently beat Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft in the battle to hire high-powered software engineering interns:

• Bribe ‘em: Bring a few PS4s and iPads to career fairs. Tell engineering students that all they need to do to have a chance to win one is drop off a resume. This hack allowed tiny Xtreme to collect more resumes than virtually everyone else.
• Press the flesh: Farhan goes to career fairs himself.  He meets people in person, selling the opportunity one-on-one and his goal at career fairs is to actually make hires.  He gives prospective interns simple programming problems to solve in person, on paper, and then reads the code they hand back to him.  If he likes the code, he hires them on the spot.
• Real work: Each intern is paired with a full time employee for the duration of their internship. Interns don’t do “intern projects” – they are integral parts of teams that ship real world systems for well known brands.
• Hire early: Make full time job offers years in advance, sometimes before an internship is even over. They pay signing bonuses immediately to hungry college students, not in a year or two when they’ll start full time. Once they sign they are treated like full timers from that day forward: they are given company schwag, issued company email addresses, cc:ed on company correspondence and invited to events.  After signing they are free to finish their studies and even intern at other companies knowing that they have a home. Thawar says “Go find out what it’s like at these other companies and then come back to us,” Only one engineer has ever failed to return.
• It pays to be the cool kids: When interns get to work on real jobs with a mentor, their ambition and knowledge pushes full timers to work better and faster. Great up and coming talent helps attract seasoned engineers. “More experienced folks,” Farhan says, “want to work where all the smartest interns are going.”

Intrigued? See Farhan’s full talk from HireCamp below for more great ideas.

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What would you do if you were asked to build a world class team of sourcers from the ground up? Would you hire fresh new faces or grizzled veterans? What metrics would you put in place to track success? How would you structure things to make sure the team could scale up?

Sourcing Czar Anand Bheeman has done it twice: he built the sourcing function at both Google and Palantir Technologies.  In his recent talk at HireCamp Anand shared some of what he’s learned so far:

Go for the hybrid

After lots of trial and error, he’s found that best teams are a mix of experienced sourcers and fresh, new talent. Bheeman suggests a ratio of 3 rookies to 1 veteran. Here’s why:

1. Rookie sourcers bring drive and enthusiasm to the team, but require training.  When hiring rookies Anand recommends not looking for hard skills or immediate throughput but instead focusing on aptitude.  
2. Though it’s tempting to add veteran sourcers who add throughput right away, he cautioned that many come with bad habits.  For veterans, he recommends focusing not just on skills, but also on finding leaders who can mentor, teaching rookies the ropes.

It’s a team sport

High performing sourcing teams are collaborative, not competitive. It’s important that sourcers not be treated as support staff who are “resume machines” but as partners who are an integral part of the recruiting process. He recommends setting things up so that sourcers regularly interact with hiring managers and the interview team, often sitting with them part of the time… that way they get the complete picture of what’s going on and can do their job better.

Numbers matter, but not right away

It’s not unusual for new sourcers to take 3-6 months to become productive. Instead of focusing on the number of hires they source, create more achievable goals that can be measured faster like the # of onsites they generate, or # of hours the team is spending interviewing their candidates.

Always be training

The state of the art in sourcing is constantly changing and evolving – and sourcers need to continuously update their skills.  Sending a few folks to a conference once a year for training won’t cut it – aspire to share new tips and tricks monthly.  Also don’t be afraid to jettison outdated tools and techniques, switching up your tools and tactics is a great way to keep things fresh.

Sourcing is a stepping stone

While some people will learn sourcing and make a career of it, most won’t.  Recognize that most people with aptitude will spend some time mastering sourcing, but then they’ll want to move on and learn new things.  This is fine.  Sourcing, in the end, is often boring, repetitive work.  Think ahead and be sure to create a structure where you can gracefully “graduate” some people on to new roles & challenges while replenishing the ranks with fresh talent.

What are your secrets to success for building a great sourcing team? Let us know in the comments.

For more ideas, listen to Anand’s full talk from HireCamp:

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Recruiters often define wining as closing candidates.

For many, however, closing remains mysterious art… something you get better at through trial & error while managing the hiring process for 100s of people over many years.

Boris Epstein (@bozonit) knew there had to be a better way.  Boris co-founded BINC – a fast growing project based recruitment firm that takes on chunks of hard to fill jobs. He knew that too for his business to grow he needed to not just make closing candidates predictable – he needed to be able to train newbie recruiters to consistently deliver candidates.

 In the video below Boris shares his elegant, innovative and simple solution… how by asking just two simple questions you can add transparency, predictability, and scale to recruiting… check it out:

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It probably started with the cavemen.

The more visually acute among us were more likely to escape saber-toothed tigers and catch Sunday brunch. Stop signs and help wanted shingles didn’t come along till much later.

In short, we’ve evolved as visual beings.

MRI in Indianapolis was an early adopter of online-video-as-job-posting. I’m talking 2006 early. At the time, posting on YouTube was too dangerous for corporate viewing, so MRI set-up a Blip.tv channel to bypass firewalls.

They still rock videos:

We’re not talking Oscar quality here, folks, but it must be effective considering they’re in year seven of the strategy. They even add “See Video” in all their job titles, which I’m sure helps them cut through the clutter on job search engines like Indeed and titillate candidates to click.

And I’d guess 7 years from now, they’ll still be doing videos. Cameras are on everything. High speed connections are ubiquitous. And an ever-demanding audience is wanting more.

Will more employers follow this example?

A growing number of vendors are hoping so. From video interviewing to promoting employer brands, names of companies like Wowzer, Hirevue, Green Job Interview, Montage and Take the Interview are connecting employer and job seeker in unique ways.

One of the more interesting new solutions is Wowzer Match, coming soon to a smartphone near you.

It’s a bold move to say the least.

It goes beyond the business-to-business model of most video recruiting solutions and goes after the candidate. Job seekers have been hesitant to download native apps to search jobs and company profiles, especially if they don’t have a ton of job listings to peruse.

Unless Wowzer has 100,000 companies using their service, the odds are against success, but it may be a window into the future. While a standalone video solution is akin to climbing Mt. Everest, becoming a nice feature to an existing product could be interesting.

A handful of job sites already offer video as part of their traditional offerings, and while most of these videos fall under the “Here’s Why It’s Great to Work Here” banner, envisioning a greater variety seems likely.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Jason LaBarbera of Sunol Group at HireCamp, who specializes in video recruiting. Their strategy focuses on sending hard-to-recruit candidates a series of three videos promoting various qualities of a company. Videos are much more attention-getting than black-and-white copy.

Penske is one example, targeting management training prospects.

In 2009, Kevin Wheeler wrote Why Recruiting Has To Go Video. In it, he said, “According to Gartner, Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, more than 25 percent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013.”

Well, fast forward and here we are in good ol’ 2013. In those four years, the world got acquainted with Instragram, Vine and Pinterest. A world dominated by pictures? Indeed. And don’t forget about YouTube, Hulu and Netflix bringing moving pictures to TVs, tablets and smartphones everywhere.

All this video talk reminds me, there are a few episodes of “House of Cards” I still haven’t watched. I just hope I can find it among all the cartoons my kids have watched under my username.

I do admit to loving “Adventure Time” though, just between us.

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