BUILDING A WINNING RECRUITING TEAM… If you are going to recruit this year - whatever the size and scope of the plans – build a winning recruiting team. This will not only help you get the best new hires possible and the most return on your investment. A winning recruiting team can also create a stronger sense of community within your company and build internal capability of hiring great talent that is always a competitive advantage. Even in times of reorganizations and layoffs, deep down your employees know that bringing in new talent is important to the life and growth of the company. As long as the culture is inclusive rather than exclusive and doesn’t create an elite class of the haves vs. the have nots, you can manage not to alienate your current employees or make them feel threatened. Eight Fundamentals Building a winning recruiting team is a somewhat like creating and managing a great football or basketball or team. You need a mix of eight fundamentals: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

talented players who deliver performance attitude individual and group accountability a sense of purpose endurance and stamina the ability to execute humility and speed to learn from mistakes love for the game

Building a winning recruiting team at its best, however, is an active process. It is strategic – intentional – well executed. Most of the best recruiters across industries practice the eight common themes or a subset of them. Having led recruiting efforts in financial services, retail, and consumer products, as well as working with a diversity of employers as Assistant Dean at Stanford’s MBA Career Management Center, I’ve learned that the most effective employers work at getting their recruiting team DNA right. They don’t leave its composition, the make up – to chance. Ideas, Strategies, and To-Dos What follows are ideas, strategies, and to-dos for each of the eight fundamentals. By recruiting teams, we’re talking broadly about the individuals chosen to represent your organization with candidates throughout your recruiting efforts. This could be for pre-recruitment activities such as employer information sessions, a day-on-the-job, or other recruiting events that you host, or those conducting your interviews (whether on campus, callbacks, or sell days in the office), or for follow up (making offers, closing the deal). The ideas and strategies here are also applicable to recruiting for your experienced or industry hires. Talented players. They come in all shapes and sizes with a diversity of strengths and experiences. Talented players can deliver performance –results, may be generalists or specialists; individual contributors or managers/executives. They come in different colors and with different backgrounds. Each individual possesses strengths so that

overall when working together as a team, their combined strengths, limit any weaknesses. Talented performers are those that do well when in play and take the behind the scenes preparation seriously. They achieve results in their roles. They accomplish their responsibilities that move forward the team and the organization. They keep their eyes on the ball but know what’s going on in the overall game. All of your talented players together create a dynamic and strong team that can achieve incredible results. . A football team needs its quarterback, punter, receivers, and linemen. A basketball team needs its center, shooting guard and power forward. They each have a unique yet valuable role and set of responsibilities. Understanding the overall strategy and game plan, they synch up, integrating their efforts to play, to win – to accomplish results for the team. Translation for recruiting team: Select individuals from different groups, offices or regions. Try for gender diversity and a variety of backgrounds, ethnicities, levels, styles. You don’t have to limit yourself only to those groups who have openings. You are trying to build a presence on your campuses about who are as an organization and to offer a picture of what kinds of people bring your company to life. Choose people who will be good ambassadors for you. Go for those who offer a diversity of perspectives and who represent the broadest spectrum possible of your organization. Involving alumni from the school will also help you decode the culture of the school and how to tailor your efforts. Alumni can be utilized either in the planning phase of your recruiting or in the actual pre-recruitment activities and interviewing/follow up. Also, now is not the time to be modest. Bring out your role models, the stars, those who have had incredible, interesting careers so far. Above all, try for recruiters who can engage with others effectively. Invite those who really like people to be part of the recruiting team. Attitude. A favorite role model of mine, the late John Gardener, a professor at Stanford and former HEW Secretary, often talked about tough-minded optimism. This means stretching yourself for high aspirations and believing you can reach them. This also means being realistic about what is and is not possible, the challenges along the way, and what you need to do to succeed in your endeavors. People can learn skills but attitudes are usually more genetically encoded. You either have a positive attitude or don’t. Your general outlook on life or the perennial glass of water (is it half empty or half full) is part of someone’s DNA. Translation for recruiting team: call on individuals who are enthusiastic about their work/jobs and excited about the organization. Choose those who understand the value of recruiting new talent and are motivated to play a valuable role in that. Select individuals who will also be realistic in talking about what’s not so wonderful about the organization and changes they’d like to see. Job seekers appreciate the straight scoop and can decipher when recruiters enjoy what they do and believe in the organization or not.

Individual and group accountability. Teamwork and pulling together to accomplish a big feat is important but the buck stops at the individual. It is the sum total of each individual’s efforts that give a team its synergy – to allow it to accomplish something larger than itself. Translation for recruiting team: choose individuals who will take initiative, be responsible and accountable for what they need to do, but who want the team overall to succeed. Select those who will put the team (and organization’s) efforts above any personal self-interest. Choose those who are quick to share wins and successes and fast to accept responsibility for wanting to improve on something they could’ve done better. A sense of purpose. A favorite professor of mine, Jim Collins, author of the best selling, From Good to Great…While Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, notes that great leaders as well as great organizations have clarity around what they stand for – what their sense of purpose is. Likewise, a recruiting team needs a sense of purpose. What is its reason for being? What does it stand for? What are goals and objectives? Translation for recruiting team: a recruiting team’s purpose has got to come from the organization eco-system. The organization provides the context – the overarching purpose – for the recruiting team’s work. What does the organization stand for? What are its values, vision, and mission? How do new recruits fit into the bigger picture? Why is recruiting important? What are the team norms and culture? A sense of fun? Intensity? Creativity? Taking risks? How will you know if you’ve succeeded? What are the qualitative and quantitative measures of your success – how you will evaluate your results and performance. Endurance and stamina. You need energy and consistent, dedicated effort to keep something worthwhile going. You need the energy and stamina to keep driving towards goals and objectives, through good and challenging times. Translation for recruiting team: Recruiting, whether on MBA and undergraduate campuses or for experienced industry hires, is all about relationships, not transactions. Recruiting takes year-round effort and activity. And results build over the years, typically not in one quick shot. Focus on building relationships with influential faculty, staff, and student leaders. Take initiative to give and receive feedback on how things can work better. If you are just starting off recruiting at a school or coming back after a break, realize that it will take awhile to build a presence, create visibility, and to start seeing results. Try to integrate into the educational process at the school so that you differentiate yourself from competitors and get your name in front of you’re the students. Research faculty initiatives, student/school-sponsored conferences, the student clubs and their slate of activities for the school year. Decide what you’ll spend your time and energy on for the year-in-total –what you will sponsor/host and what you will participate in that the schools offer.

Add to your to-do list, going the extra mile to get feedback, 360 degrees. Make a point to seek feedback from senior executives who may have relationships with the dean and faculty through an advisory board role, etc. Draw on your relationships with key career center and other school administrators as well as your recruiting colleagues to share information and issues. Make a point to hear from the students you are trying to recruit. Get the unabashed view about your reputation, presence, and what’s working and not. Ask who the best recruiters are within and outside your industry and learn from what they are doing. The ability to execute. A brilliant strategy and plan are just those without the ability to execute – to take action. Translation for recruiting team: Pay attention to the details. Realize that every action, interaction, and activity either reinforces your reputation, presence, and ultimately what you will be able to accomplish in the long run. Develop a culture for the team that embraces: actions speak louder than words. Humility to learn from mistakes. Great players are those who are self-critical and who accept responsibility for failure. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s how we learn from them and apply it that will ultimately improve our game. Translation for recruiting team: schools have their own personalities, quirks, cultures. Add to that, each recruiting year is different in terms of competition/demand for the student talent; budgets and level of aggressiveness in pursuing the candidates. Within your company, on the individuals on your team will have varying experience in recruiting. Those just starting out will inevitably encounter some bumps along the way. Even those who have been recruiting a long time, will make mistakes – maybe the sentiment towards an entire industry has changed dramatically rapidly and your recruiter who is going to speak at your event doesn’t come prepared for that. Perhaps bad press about a few firms and their scandals are casting doubt on others and your interviewers are not sure how to handle that. Maybe a rogue recruiter from your firm did something politically incorrect the year before and the team is blindsided with its advertising for its first pre-recruitment activity. Maybe it’s something seemingly small like: an interviewer shows up late and gets confused about where to go causing a backlog on interviews or a recruiter makes a snide remark about a competitor that doesn’t go over well with students or one of your executives alienates offerees by negotiating offers too aggressively. We’ve all made and seen mistakes in the recruiting process – both ours and from candidates. The key point is to be open to accepting them. Then to learn from them and do something about them to become better, to improve. Love for the game. Whether you call it love, passion, enjoyment, or satisfaction – if an individual and a team overall don’t have a love for what they are trying to accomplish – both the journey and the destination - they will under perform.

Translation for recruiting team: Build a team that loves or at least likes recruiting and being part of the team. Being great at it is not enough. Without some modicum of passion for it, the commitment won’t be sustainable and when there are setbacks, there won’t be the overriding energy to keep the momentum going. Now What? After You Have Your Dream Team… Once you have the dream team, then what? You need effective coaches, a thoughtful game plan, clear roles and responsibilities, information and resources, practice, feedback, benefactors/supporters, and competitors that keep you on your toes. In brief, here are some thoughts. •

Let the coaches, coach and the players play. Coaches are like HR or the recruiting team leaders and the players are the recruiting team members. Coaching can be directive or more consultative. Tough or more nurturing. Command and control leadership doesn’t work. Today it’s about motivating and inspiring. Entreating others on the mission critical. And it’s one for all and all for one. A common purpose as a driving force. For good coaching and playing, the team needs a process. How will it communicate and how will decisions be made? How will it handle conflict? Reward performance or deal with non-performance?

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A strategy and plan are not nice-to-haves – they provide the structure and game plan for what you want to accomplish and how you will go about it. We’ve seen what happens to recruiters that do things on the fly – by the seat of the pants. There’s a lot of crash and burn. While spontaneity and flexibility are good, people some structure in order to perform at their best. They need a vision a play book. They need to know the rules, what’s expected of them, bigger picture goals, and what they get in return. This might be: recognition, extra perks, the feel-good satisfaction, being part of a terrific team, making a significant contribution to the organization, building their own core competencies and skills as a resume builder or to help them in future roles...

The book, Hiring the Best and the Brightest:A Roadmap to Recruiting MBAs, discusses 10 key to dos for developing a recruiting strategy and plan from the ground up. Briefly, these are to: assess your organization needs and enlist internal resources; research and evaluate and choose schools or sources for recruiting; cultivate relationships 360 degrees (students, faculty/administrators, and those within your own organization); formulate key messages/communication strategy; plan and execute your pre-recruitment; select and brief/coordinate your interviewers; get the most from your interviewing process; conduct your second rounds/on-site follow up like a symphony; make offers that get accepted; and get feedback, thank people, make improvements and start again. •

Assign clear roles and responsibilities. Who will do what, when, how.

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Flow critical information and resources. Share information, recognition, rewards. Make sure the recruiting team has the information it needs to do its job. Do they have research about the school, the history of the relationship? Are they prepped about overall recruiting plans/needs/numbers and timing? Have the recruiters seen the advertisements and communication to the school?

Are they aware of the key themes and messages to convey? Have the logistics for their events or interviews been arranged so they can focus on execution? Does the team have the internal resources it needs? For example, a resume tracking system, an adequate budget, web support for its recruiting site, senior management participation when needed? •

Practice, practice, practice. Those on the recruiting team who have never interviewed or who have limited experience, need to go through coaching, training, skill building, or something so they are skillful in interviewing candidates. Recruiting team members who will be speaking at an event need practice too.

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Sports teams vigorously dissect and analyze how they and the other team played, with particular focus on what went wrong and what can be learned for improving on. The self critique as well as seeking feedback from others is useful to becoming better.

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The recruiting team needs its benefactors, supporters, and loyal fans. Internal champions within your organization who value recruiting and developing new talent can influence resources and decisions that make or break recruiting programs. Supporters of recruiting, such as those who have been involved in the past, currently, or who will be involved in some way once the new hires come aboard, are equally important to a recruiting team. Fans not only show up but also provide word of mouth to others and generate momentum to keep the team going. In a recruiting team-sense, fans are the candidates you attract and the key people on the campuses you have relationships with. Internally, they are the people in your company whose contributions make your efforts take flight. They are the web designer who goes above and beyond to create a cool, substantial recruiting site for your recruiting team or the assistants who handle logistics like scheduling interviews, travel for the recruiting team, or arranging rooms/food for events; or the analyst who developed the PowerPoint presentation.

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Worthy competitors keep us on our toes but more so, we can always learn from them. To keep your recruiting team skills up-to-par, make a point to find out about the competition. Do your homework to know what organizations within and outside your industry –are the best at recruiting and why. Ferret out what they are doing that’s working well. Think about what you can adapt for your recruiting efforts. Most of all use what you glean about your competitors to identify and articulate your points of difference. What makes you unique to the candidates you are recruiting?

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Sherrie Gong Taguchi has expertise in University Relations and Recruiting as former VP of recruiting for Bank of America, Director of HR for Dole Packaged Foods and Assistant Dean of MBA Career Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her first book, Hiring the Best and the Brightest (American Management Association) was for recruiters to recruit and develop top talent. Her second (McGraw Hill) is for individuals who want to create and evolve bold, meaningful, dynamic careers over a lifetime. Taguchi is currently a guest lecturer for the London Business

School and a regular contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Worker’s Dozen” career advice column.