Best Practices: Get ’Em While They’re Young
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Written by Chris Resto   
Tuesday, 01 April 2008
Best Practices: Get ’Em While They’re Young - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
What do CEOs and senior managers need to know about entering the battle for young talent?
The war for young talent is tougher than ever. At universities nationwide, career fairs routinely draw over 100, 200, even 300 or more employers, all seeking to attract today’s best and brightest for their organizations. There is no question that the contagious energy, abundant ambition, and lower salary requirements of new graduates can add to your company’s bottom line. But if you want to enter the battle for your share of gifted young minds amid the growing talent shortage, you’d better know the lay of the land.

After recruiting and managing new college graduates for a European strategy consulting firm and starting MIT’s largest professional development and internship program, through which I advised hundreds of employers and thousands of students, I literally wrote the book on college recruiting: Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent (Portfolio, 2007).
   
The book takes you inside the minds of today’s young talent—what they think, what they want—and offers specific tactics for improving each phase of recruiting, from identifying talent and making offers to managing new hires and beyond. But when speaking at conferences and corporate meetings, the question I’m often asked is what the CEO and executive management team need to know about this.

Two things.

First, here are the four keys to dominant recruiting organizations like Microsoft, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs consistently getting the talent they want, leaving struggling organizations to fight over the leftovers.  

1. They know exactly who they want and won’t settle for less.
2. They work harder and smarter to know their target audience.
3. They sell their people first, the company second.
4. They recruit as a team, presenting a united front.

Second, and most important, in which of those four areas can executive leadership make the most impact? The answer is number four: recruiting as a team, presenting a united front.

In fact, without executive involvement, organizations can’t recruit as a team at all. Most organizations I know seem to be infected with adversarial relationships between HR and other business units. For instance, in one global communications company, the HR department is centralized and operates with the assumption that a job well done is simply hitting its hiring quota.  

The business units, the organizations actually hosting summer interns and taking on entry-level hires, have other ideas. They want a certain type of student for their groups or no one at all. The result is recruiting so ineffective that the HR staff has to apologize to top universities for not being able to attract and hire their students.

In this scenario, there’s an obvious mismatch of goals and expectations between HR and other business units, one that can be solved only by open discussion among all parties and a directive from senior leadership that all parties buy into. It’s a difficult situation, but it can be fixed. Here are five more ideas for aligning your organization for recruiting success.

Make a statement about recruiting being a key business function. Many organizations have formed selective, elite leadership development programs that rotate rising stars through stints in business units such as R&D, sales, and operations. Add recruiting. If recruiting is truly important, you won’t view the time of your future leaders as too valuable to spend in HR. Also, if you make it clear how recruiting can help build the kind of valuable skills that advance careers, more employees might be eager to pitch in. Demonstrate how recruiting skills transfer to other aspects of their careers, such as making persuasive presentations, closing business deals, and growing their networks in their everyday jobs.

Put your money where your mouth is. Every company says something to the effect of “our people are our greatest asset.” Establish a referral fee or commission structure for employees who help the company land great hires. Also, to prove that recruiting is a team effort, add it as a category on everyone’s performance reviews. Remember, if it isn’t measured, it won’t get done.

Provide recruiting training for everyone. It would be cruel to evaluate your employees’ work on something without teaching them how to do it. Conduct formal training on how to interview and what to say to new candidates. Besides strengthening your extended recruiting team, this training will combat the poisonous attitude that “anyone can do recruiting” by showcasing the expertise of your HR professionals. Plus, time spent working together to achieve a common goal can work magic before a team of recruiters and hiring managers go to a campus recruiting event.

Train HR folks in everything else. A common complaint of hiring managers and line workers is, “The recruiters have no clue what we do.” Okay, so teach them. Have business units create educational workshops, job shadowing opportunities, and reading lists to help HR better understand the company’s operations. The more HR knows about how the company really works, the better they can help their internal clients and serve as ambassadors to the outside world. What’s more, any curriculum your business units create for HR can be repurposed for prospective recruits who crave this kind of what’s-it-really-like information for such a big decision of deciding where to spend the majority of their waking hours.

Enforce real consequences for non-cooperation. Any hiring managers who have consistent communication problems with HR or don’t stay on the recruiting messages you’ve worked so hard to create should not be allowed to participate in your recruiting. Period. IBM, in its much-improved college recruiting of late, has gotten great results with this practice. Individuals who don’t share the recruiting load are off the IBM extended recruiting team. One recruiter said, “If they don’t get it, they’re gone. It’s a difficult conversation to have with people, but you’ve gotta do it.” If business-unit managers really want the best talent, they’ll learn their lesson and change their ways.

To be sure, all of this takes a significant investment of time and some strong commitments from top executives, but those who can successfully unite their organizations to recruit together will enjoy a competitive advantage that few others have.

Chris Resto is the lead author of Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent (Portfolio Penguin, 2007). As founding director of MIT’s largest professional development and internship program (UPOP), he advised hundreds of employers and thousands of students on recruiting issues. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
 
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