Amitai Givertz’s Recruitomatic Blog

In the hopes that it may give pause for thought, a selection of notes taken from phone conversations with John Sumser. The social web was our topic de jour.

1. Data? What data?

It can be difficult to make sense of the data that gets reported under “Social Media.” Harder still, accepting it could be useless in the context of traditional HR metrics, or under any circumstances, come to think it. Teasing intelligence from a new data set can leave one befuddled. Correlating things like “authority,” “increased awareness” “mentions,” and “sentiment” to the traditional metrics like time-to-fill and cost-per-hire may not only be a challenge of Rubik proportions, but ultimately an exercise in futility.

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If you’re a designer, entrepreneur, or creative – you probably haven’t been asked for your resume in a long time. Instead, people Google you – and quickly assess your talents based on your website, portfolio, and social media profiles. Do they resonate with what you’re sharing? Do they identify with your story? Are you even giving them a story to wrap their head around?

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Need some Recruiting & Sourcing Juice to get you going these days? Feel like you’re connecting with lots of people in the Talent Pool, but they’re not yielding the information you’d like (referrals, intel, leads, “word on the street”, etc.)? Perhaps it’s time to step back and think about the structure of the Talent Pool itself . . .

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Industry patriarch and beloved Dumbledorian John Sumser posts on HRExaminer another in his series on branding: Traffic Development. What follows will make more sense if you begin by reading John’s post and our exchange of comments. You may also want to use the restroom first.

I spent a good amount of time trying to post what follows to the original post in reply to a rebuff from John.  To no avail. Apparently a plug-in on John’s site may have become unplugged. Feel free to post your comments here or there, at this point it may not matter.

Anyway, reluctant to break the thread, or retire for the night with this undone, here is my closing argument…

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I know it seems awfully shallow to say I find Tyra Banks’ breasts attractive, but I do. Clearly, her achievement as a top international model, screen goddess and big-time TV producer makes Tyra Banks a powerful woman in her own right, one of the most influential.

Even so, I find her breasts grab my interest more than her other professional attributes. As I research everything I possibly can about Tyra Banks’ and the origins for my own curiosity – it’s a transparency thing, duh! – I realize that my being distracted by her voluptuousness is perfectly normal for a man of my age and orientation, certainly nothing to be embarrassed about. And, in the musings of an authentic post, I mean no offense to my less worldly or more matronly readers.

More, as I research the psychology of physical attraction and how having a beautifully formed bosom can influence outcomes in the recruiting process – in ways we might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about, screening and assessment, interviewing, salary negotiations and so on – I find Tyra Banks feeds a number of my interests, not shallow at all.

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Branding has come a long way since it was first used to mark cattle and criminals. It has evolved from the scarring of symbols on flesh to the calculated deployment of symbols for the molding of minds. Where once the medium for branding was soft tissue that resulted in searing pain, nowadays branding draws upon every conceivable means to stimulate our senses with promises of pleasure, success, and instant gratification.

Branding is big business – big and complicated. For larger employers in particular, management of their employer brand as a subset of their total communications strategy should not be placed in the hands of novices. Rather, it should be outsourced to experts who understand how to fabricate beauty from the imperfections in the body corporate. Advertising agencies – excuse me, full-service recruitment communications and HR solutions partners – have become the high priests of employer branding, dazzling in their use of magic to transform the ordinary into the extra-ordinary.

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Lou Adler publishes an interesting article on ERE, How to Hire Better Salespeople. Curiously subtitled: “It only takes two questions, if you know what you’re looking for” Lou Adler proceeds to describe a methodology to formulate those two questions that requires a lifetime of experience and a staff of twelve. 

Lou Adler closes his article with this remark:

“There are probably other ways to reduce new sales rep turnover by 50% and get newly hired sales reps achieving quota in half the time, but it’s unlikely they are any easier than this three-step process.”

Wow! That’s some assertion. Lou Adler sounds like a salesman, doesn’t he? To the extent that there are probably other ways to hire better salespeople is beyond question. And, we’ll give Lou Adler the benefit of the doubt regarding his easy-peasy three-step how-to by simply saying: nothing about recruiting top-flight sales talent is easy. But that closing remark reminds me that ERE has a ways to go in finding “unbiased” cover stories from writers capable of transcending their own vendor-agenda and who – I might add – may leave their readers drawing erroneous conclusions.

Please don’t misunderstand me or over react. I applaud with standing ovation Lou Adler for managing to promote himself as a subject matter expert – provided he picks the right subject – and for managing to get no fewer than three links in back to his own website and one instance of his email in the article. And I still assert that being an expert capable of writing good copy and running a business are not mutually exdusive. Proving this point, Lou Adler is a master marketer and should be cited as one of the best in our industry. But three month’s into ERE‘s new look and editorial direction, are we to believe new writers are so few and far between? We don’t want to replace Lou Adler on ERE, we just want more of what was anticipated when the revamped ERE was heralded in.

Bearing in mind that experts come in various guises and that the universe extends beyond our own comfortable circle of favorites, Recruitomatic gives you two for the price of one: Lou Adler in fine fettle on ERE and Dave Kurlan who is exceptionally well qualified to comment on this particular subject. If you have an interest in recruiting better salespeople, visit and bookmark Dave Kurlan’s blog: Understanding the Sales Force. Visit his website. Perhaps Dave Kurlan will enlarge the recruitment bubble with a more active participation than in the past. And one day – we can only hope – we will be reading Dave Kurlan and other guest authors on ERE too.

Dave Lefkow posted a great diversity recruiting story, saying there are great lessons for employers to be learned from the FBI’s diversity outreach. He’s right. But the warm fuzzies promised in the casual introduction to “Jericka Robinson. Mother, computer engineer, FBI special agent” are an unwitting peddling of Washington spin. Worse, we could all be innocently drawn into a wider conspiracy, a cover-up. Let me explain:

I quote Dave quoting from the original article:

“A recruitment poster on the FBI’s Web site tells a new story, with a picture of a black woman and the words: Jericka Robinson. Mother, computer engineer, FBI special agent. Today’s FBI. It’s for you. Visit FBIjobs.com.”

Well, I have it from a reliable source from within law enforcement circles that Ms. Robinson was – until recently at least – Supervisory Special Agent Jericka Robinson of the FBI’s Personnel Resources Unit. In other words, Ms. Robinson is literally a poster child for the FBI’s diversity program and not necessarily a result of it. Of course, it is possible that Ms. Robinson has been reassigned from an elite group of Glock-toting recruiters to an equally elite group of key-tapping computer engineers. Why not? It seems like a natural transition for a black working mother working her way round the Beltway, doesn’t it? If this extraordinary reassignment is for real, the FBI would be better served promoting itself as a champion of talent management. If they are capable of leveraging their human capital at a time when recruitment funding is being held at levels that would cripple any employer in the private sector, then there are lessons there we could all learn from.

Let’s look beyond Dave’s post for the real lessons here:

1. Metrics: We do not have enough data to draw any meaningful conclusions. However, I would submit that if only 18.8% of Special Agents are women, then the numbers do not support the notion that the FBI’s outreach is working. A spokeswoman for the FBI quoted in Dave’s post (who for all we know could be white) says: “There are no targets or quotas.” Then performance metrics for the FBI, like gender, is a “non-issue.” Good. No harm done.

2. Diversity Recruiting: The FBI used to be highly visible in print – even dominant. As far as I can see, they have gone undercover. I have long lauded LawEnforcmentJobs.com and the diversity sites that that engine powers as the best destinations for recruiters looking to attract qualified diversity candidates. Nada. On DiversityInc.com, another old stomping ground, the only sign of the FBI is the moonlighting it does for Fortune 500 companies. I found the CIA and NSA on LatPro, but, again, no FBI. Will the Men (or Women) in Black please stand up!

3. Employer Branding: Employer branding is not like product branding. It’s something that exists in the minds of stakeholders and constituents. It cannot be manufactured or even manipulated as such. Your brand exists – like it or not. If effectively managed, employer branding can be a tremendous contributing factor to optimizing the return on all recruitment marketing, including, of course, diversity. 9/11 did more to change the perception of law enforcement as a career prospect than years of trying by the FBI, NYPD, LAPD to transform a less than glamorous image. And the FBI, like all the agencies who saw demand for specialized talent skyrocket, missed a golden opportunity. Unfortunately, the whistleblowers will be remembered long after the FBI’s horn-tooting for an inclusive workforce. I say the FBI has really blown it. They should have looked to the gal next door and taken a page out of Condi’s book.

4. Sourcing Strategies: I know from past experience recruiting talent fluent in Pashto, Farsi, Swahili, Arabic and all dialects of Chinese is a cake walk. Russian and Chechen – old hat. You just run a few 4×6 ads in the Boston Globe (preferably with half of that ad taken up with a photo of a real diversity phenom.) and hey-presto! Yiddish-speaking mashuganas start clogging up your ATS. Today, the only ads you’re likely to see are band-aids put out by the field in support of their local initiatives comprised mostly of career fairs for students.

5. Screening and assessment: Here the agency scores big time. If you have the hard skills, can pass the physical and have never been caught chopping down cherry trees, you’ll get put through the FBI grinder. It doesn’t matter if you are a white male lawyer, accountant or cop, black working mother or Jewish Rastafarian, get this far in the process and the FBI does not discriminate. Scientifically developed staffing assessments to guide employee selection decisions – what a concept. For those of you who recruit salespeople, another lesson learned: polygraph your applicants.

6. The Special-Special Agent: You can train a man or woman to withstand psychological and physical torture. You can train them in the ways of the Ninja. You can arm them with sophisticated weaponry and state of the art surveillance equipment. But that doesn’t mean you can expect that person, however well-intentioned, to be an effective recruiter. When recruiting is relegated to being a second-rate desk-job, it’s not recruiting anymore. Sorry.

7. Retention: I used to see huge ads for Special Agents run in national papers with a TTY number as one of the response mechanisms. This is true. Polygraph me. I’m told that the prognosis for an Agent who can’t hear the words, “Incoming!” and “Duck!” is not good. Otherwise, the FBI could be a job for life. If you don’t meet the rigorous requirements for work in the field, you can join as a recruiter and end up in programming, or forensics, or business management. That kind of career progression speaks volumes, even to the hard of hearing.

But hold on! Hold on for just one cotton-pickin’ minute… Could it be? None of this is the FBI’s fault?

The FBI does a stand-up job under extraordinarily difficult (staffing) circumstances. That is an irrefutable fact. They should be commended for not giving up however tough the going gets. But, if there is one agency that should be held to account for the FBI’s failed diversity recruiting, it should be the Bernard Hodes Group. In my opinion – and no, I don’t know it all, and yes, there are always two sides to a story – in recent years Hodes has squandered what little money the FBI did have and left their diversity recruiting efforts – even on a continuing resolution (read: no commissions) – wasted. What’ll be next? Pawning the jewels in the FBI’s crown – the real gems like Jericka Robinson? You guys really rock.