My partner, Brad Remillard, posted a blog post on our Hire and Retain Top Talent blog, making the bold statement:

Traditional Job Descriptions DON'T Attract Top Talent

I'll go so far to suggest that when a top caliber candidate sees your job description masquerading as an advertisement on a job board, they are disgusted, turned off, and under-whelmed by your company's attempt to recruit.

They take their hand and put it down. You never get to see these candidates.

When will you dramatically improve your process of bringing great candidates to your doorstep by using more compelling advertising than the traditional job description which only brings the bottom third of the candidate pool forward most of the time.

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions HIRE and RETAIN Top Talent

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog

Do you have a FREE Copy of our best selling e-book on how to hire and retain top talent?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/hiring-managers/hiring-products/our-award-winning-book/a-digital-ebook-version

Learn how your success depends on the quality of the team you build and keep by joining us in our LinkedIn Discussion Group on hiring and retaining top talent

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IMPACT-Hiring-Solutions-HOW-Hire-1819296/about

A very good article on the concept of creating talent pools. I used to call this  Just-in-time recruiting. How do you identify, nurture, skim the cream of the crop, engage with future potential employees around specific roles like customer service or operations.

Very few companies are willing to be proactive in creating the infrastructure, training, and ask hiring managers to invest a miniscule portion of their time in traditional networking tactics.

Most companies are stuck in the quadrant of "it's urgent-it's important", the classic reactive firefight. If all your doing is being reactive - you'll never move beyond the "let's just get a warm body in that open chair" because "a warm body is better than nobody".

This article lays out some basic ideas of starting to create talent pools for better finding/sourcing of great potential employees.

What's holding you back?

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions HIRE and RETAIN Top Talent

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog

Do you have a FREE Copy of our best selling e-book on how to hire and retain top talent?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/hiring-managers/hiring-products/our-award-winning-book/a-digital-ebook-version

Learn how your success depends on the quality of the team you build and keep by joining us in our LinkedIn Discussion Group on hiring and retaining top talent

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IMPACT-Hiring-Solutions-HOW-Hire-1819296/about

Celinda makes some excellent points about the laziness of most recruiters - both corporate and 3rd party. I agree with her that most recruiters DO NOT want to work hard to find great talent - they want to fill jobs as quickly, cheaply, and efficiently as possible. These two goals are sometimes mutually exclusive.

Finding great talent requires fishing in deep waters, leveraging referrals and social media to extend your opportunity through the various layers of your network. As Celinda mentions in her article, this takes time, investment, and effort.

One of reasons most executive searches fail, 50% of all hires don't live up to initial expectations, and hiring managers lower their standards is due to laziness in recruiting.

Here's what Celinida had to say in generalizing about the recruiting profession (by the way, I've been an executive recruiter for almost 30 years and the laziness of most recruiters is no different today than it was 30 years ago. The issue is not as much about not effectively leveraging social media - it's about the person doing the recruiting):

"I was recently asked about the fact that Recruiters are not adopting Social Media, even though Forbes proclaimed 2013 as the year of Social Recruiting.  The blogger was curious as to why I thought this was the case… plain and simple Recruiters are lazy.  We are conditioned to want fast and easy to attain results. We want the first call we make to be the hire. We want the interviews to always result in offers. Don’t get me wrong I know other types of Recruiters do exist, but generally speaking most of us are too lazy to use Social for Talent Attraction."

When are you going to fire your external recruiter, replace your internal recruiters, begin fishing in deep waters and start demanding they find great talent instead of focusing on putting "butts in chairs" with the mentality of "better a warm body than nobody in that role?"

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions HIRE and RETAIN Top Talent

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog

Do you have a FREE Copy of our best selling e-book on how to hire and retain top talent?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/hiring-managers/hiring-products/our-award-winning-book/a-digital-ebook-version

Learn how your success depends on the quality of the team you build and keep by joining us in our LinkedIn Discussion Group on hiring and retaining top talent

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IMPACT-Hiring-Solutions-HOW-Hire-1819296/about

I'm not sure employees should be paid to use social media if you're not a social media company like Hootsuite - however, I do think the Ryan Holmes is onto something special about leveraging social media for recruiting.

Most companies think using social media for recruiting is posting a paid advertisement on LinkedIn's job board. There are hundreds of tactics you can you use to drive referrals for potential employees through social media. Most companies have not begun to try these tactics.

Unfortunately, as the job market starts heating up, the companies who are leveraging social media to find, engage, and attract great talent will find themselves winning the "talent wars" at your expense.

What's your plan to compete in the talent wars by implementing a social media strategy when it comes to filling jobs at your company?

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions HIRE and RETAIN Top Talent

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog

Do you have a FREE Copy of our best selling e-book on how to hire and retain top talent?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/hiring-managers/hiring-products/our-award-winning-book/a-digital-ebook-version

Learn how your success depends on the quality of the team you build and keep by joining us in our LinkedIn Discussion Group on hiring and retaining top talent

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IMPACT-Hiring-Solutions-HOW-Hire-1819296/about

Many recruiters (and software vendors) are claiming that someone's digital footprint on Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Facebook can reveal interesting things about a candidate. I DISAGREE!

The only exception is for those in the on-line world where activity, profiles, and connections indicate their level of understanding, use, and sophistication of using on-line tools.

The problem is that most individuals beyond those in the on-line space are so new to social media tools - that the lack of significant presence is NOT yet a negative. In 3-4 years when social media use by business professionals becomes more common, then the lack of using these sites/tools might be viewed as a negative.

Most companies are struggling still to figure out how to use the most basic elements of social media for recruiting - forget about using sophisticated tools.

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions HIRE and RETAIN Top Talent

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog

Do you have a FREE Copy of our best selling e-book on how to hire and retain top talent?

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/hiring-managers/hiring-products/our-award-winning-book/a-digital-ebook-version

Learn how your success depends on the quality of the team you build and keep by joining us in our LinkedIn Discussion Group on hiring and retaining top talent

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IMPACT-Hiring-Solutions-HOW-Hire-1819296/about