Besides, have you ever had a relationship with a Talent? It's a nonsense idea dreamed up by marketing people who have never had recruiting responsibilities.

As we've said, no current vendor really executes well in this arena. Hire.com's product comes closest because it is built around the idea of a relationship. The rest of the offerings border on dangerous. Sending bulk email to potential employees send a pretty ugly message about your company to recipients and non-recipients. Be careful if you use this tactic.

We're beginning to hear the early refrains of the coming hit song...."We can't get no candidates." The stories emerge, as you'd guess, from areas where unemployment hovers at 2%, not the much ballyhooed 6% National number.

(A slight digression...if you are responsible for developing a supply of potential employees, what matters is the rate by specific category for your area, not the national rate. Stock market prognosticators and investment people with limited brainpower worry about the national number. As a note, the labor force took in nearly 600,000 new members during April. The rate rose because all of them could not be absorbed instantaneously.)

Regardless of the noise about unemployment rates and the coming flurry of advertising, the job of recruiting is undergoing extremely rapid change as we speak. It is clear that recruiting will begin to segment into three sub specialties:

1. Alumni
2. Current Employees
3. Potential Future Employees

Each arena requires distinct skills in discrete mixes. Alumni stay in touch because they had a good experience and want more. Maintaining a relationship with each alumnus has powerful implications for reduced training and rapid integration. Reaching out to employees who have departed introduces a range of issues that is not a part of other areas.

Current employees are probably the most fertile and least recruited group. A recruiter with good marketing skills, armed with a clear understanding of hiring requirements, should be able to make the attrition problem very specific and soluble in the critical cases. Attrition rates, like unemployment rates, are useless in the aggregate but powerful in specific cases.

Potential employees all have jobs now. Making them open to solicitations at the precise time of need through the development of long term relationships is key to long term survival for the business itself.

CRM is simply an existing toolset that should be modified and put into service as a part of developing these relationships.

-John Sumser

Workstream Recruiting Systems - Make the right choice!