Sean Rehder is a founder of Rehder Talent Logistics (RTL), an independent consultancy based in southern California that implements internal workforce applications and processes. RTL focuses primarily on recruiting and managing workforce business solutions. Sean's work is currently being used by companies like Oracle, Adobe, Yahoo, Seagate, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts.


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DC: Sean, can you explain to us what you are doing and why this is so significant for the world of recruiting?

SR: The whole premise of the work is the belief that if you think recruiting is selling then you should be on a CRM (contact relationship management) system rather than an ATS (applicant tracking system). You can still have the functionality of an ATS, but when it comes to actually going out and recruiting that passive talentpassive being the people who are not coming to your job boardsyou really have to go out, find them, market to them, and really recruit them.

About a year or so ago, Jeff Hunter from Electronic Arts (EA) approached me, and we started talking about what EA needed. EA is like the 800-pound gorilla in the gaming industry, a $15 billion company. They found that being the big gorilla in a creative industry, like computer gaming, isn't always the best thing to be when it comes to recruiting talent. Their numbers were down in terms of people coming to their job board and they really had to go out and market their company to people and recruit them. They wanted to build a tool that did just that.

They had their ATS system in place, but they needed the selling tool. Jeff wanted to use Salesforce.com, which is probably the biggest CRM application out there. Salesforce.com is what is called Software as a Service (SaaS) software. They are a web-based application and he wanted to build it on that, using CRM principles, and then customize it for mass recruiting in the company. So that's what we did.

DC: It's interesting to have that change of mindset where suddenly you say, "Wait a minute, I am not in the business of placing ads, sifting through resumes, and then selecting the best candidate. I am in the business of selling. That is a substantial mindset change. And then to take that to the conclusion that an ATS is the wrong tool is also a big step. Were you surprised when Jeff Hunter suggested you use a sales platform?

SR: Yes actually. A lot of principles and practices in third party recruiting is the sales-type model, but you rarely see it in the corporate environment. Cindy Nicola, who is the head of talent acquisition at EA, was totally in on it and made it happen. Even more surprising was when we presented it to the global recruiters; it took about 30 minutes for them to see it and say, "When do we get it? Once you see the purpose and the process of it, it really does make sense.

It has evolved into much more than just a sales tool. We really do follow the entire process down the line from finding that lead to becoming a hire or getting to the point where an offer is made, and it is declined or what have you.

DC: Tell us more about this approach to recruiting.

SR: People can understand the concept of selling. A CRM application is really a funnel. A person starts off as a lead. The goal is taking leads, converting them to contacts, to candidates, and then to hires. A lead is somebody that you know might be appropriate, perhaps someone you've found in LinkedIn, ZoomInfo or a company directory; you know who they are, what their title is, and the company that they work at.

The differentiator between a lead and a contact is you have established contact with this person, and you have made some qualifying determination that yes, you want to further develop the relationship with this person, and that could be for the purpose of an appointment or simply networkingand ultimately everybody is a contact, including employees at your own company.

DC: As this concept of starting with leads and going on to contacts becomes better known in the recruitment world I imagine ATS vendors will do their best to offer this kind of functionality.

SR: Yes, I agree. A lot of your companies are starting to use the term CRM and from what I have seen, they give it their best shot, but compared to the way we use the tool, there is a lot more for them to do. I encourage companies to challenge their vendors and say, "Can we do this or can we do that? to see what the functionality really is.

As we get into the application you are going to see how workflow comes into play. SFA is sales financial automation. You get to see a lot of metrics behind everything that we get into, and that's the whole premise in the sales model. You find leads, initiate contact in some way, determine whether they are candidates, and then ultimately hires.

For many ATS systems for a person to come "into the system, they have to be associated to a job requisition. A lot of companies will create what they call sourcing requisitions, and attach their version of a lead to a sourcing req, and ultimately change it over to an active req somewhere down the line. You have to follow OFCCP compliance rules with this initiation of contact based on leads. It's never been truly tested but the process we follow is matching all the guidelines as far as we can tell; you don't have to initiate the compliance rule until you are further down the line in hiring.

Your database of leads is what I call outward facing - the system really faces outside of your corporate walls and into your industry. You are really going to be talent mapping your industry rather than just collecting those people who went out and submitted their resume to an online portal.

Here is how you start using this concept of CRM. I did what I called feeding the database, which means going out and finding your competitors. There are two types of competitors for every single company. There is a direct competitor, those which sell a product or service directly against you in the marketplace. There is also an indirect competitor. That would be somebody who is not in the market selling product or service against you, but for whatever reason you are competing to hire the same type of people.

With the gaming industry, there are direct competitors like Interactive Vision or Lucas Arts, which are developing games. There are also marketing studios that have a whole lot of artists. The gaming industry needs artists, so those would be indirect competitors. You can use tools like Yahoofinance, googlefinance, or Hoovers to really find out the competitors in your industry. Once you have identified your competitors, both direct and indirect, you want to start mapping out the talent and you are doing this as a way to create a database of leads.

If employees save their Outlook contacts in a CSV file, like an Excel file, you can easily mass upload that into the platform. You give credit to all those people who submitted their contacts. We recently interrogated the resume parts of Hireability with Salesforce so we were able to pursue resumes directly submitted into the Salesforce platform. There is also a little company called Anagram, which is a resume parser, so you just input resumes and instantly create contacts or leads within Salesforce.

One you have your leads you, your boss, your boss's colleague's can contact them.

Within the Salesforce platform you can have multiple applications. At EA we started off with just their central sourcing teams. They had a group of six that this project initially started off with, that were centralized sourcers. EA has studios across the globe, eight in total. They had a central sourcing unit to help source for each of those studios. In about three months' time we added on all the global recruiters. After that we added on their university recruiting team.

DC: Does each recruiting team have a slightly different view of the data?

SR: Yes. Salesforce is all user profile and role-based so you can give each person or group the permissions to see whatever they are supposed to see. If you are looking at the UR (university recruiters) application, you would see the university event tab. You would see things specific to the UR team. If you have to work on both teams, then you would have permission to see both applications.

We also added another application four weeks ago: we added on their vendor management contracts approval team. So now they are managing all their talent within one portal, they are managing potential employees and they are managing current employees, and we have an alumni-networking site on this so they are managing former employees and when it comes to their vendors we are managing that application too. Once we get all that into one window, we are managing all the types of talent so it's a pretty cool little tool.

DC: This holistic view of all types of talent is something that people have long been interested in, but usually haven't been able to do anything about.

SR: And it's jumping like wild fire. Once people see that they are able to do this, they are really getting into it. I knew it was a good product, but I was surprised at the amount of enthusiasm that I was getting. So it comes into play and is giving people ideas and now they are able to take action on them, so that's pretty neat. Salesforce has these things called record types and that's true for every single tab or object that you see. When an engineer lead comes in versus a marketing person that comes in versus an accounting person that comes in or a sales person, based upon that record type we are able to change the page layout or the look and feel that you see. If you are looking at an engineer you can see questions specific to engineers.

Salesforce has a lot of built-in functionality where you can easily design backend workflow, so for example all the software engineers that come in can go to recruiter #1; marketing people that come in go to recruiter #2. A sales mentality means you jump on sales leads as quickly as possible and when it comes to talent, you need to jump on that talent lead as quickly as possible.

This is really geared towards your high-end people who are getting recruiter calls all the time. You need to differentiate yourself. Salesforce has the ability to create a catalogue of e-mails so you can respond to specific types of leads with the specific type of e-mail and even track those results.

I have done some customization to Salesforce and one of those customizations took a play on how LinkedIn works. If an employee sends in, "Here is my LinkedIn contact list, or, "Here is my list from my Outlook, I can take that list, import it into Salesforce and give them credit for submitting that referral. When I look at one of the leads that they referred in, I can see every single person that knows this lead. I can see who knows the lead so instead of doing a cold call I can go through one of my people who know that lead and convert this lead into a contact.

What's really cool about Salesforce is its ability to sync with each person's Outlook. If you send an email to a person within your own Outlook, you have a little button that says Sync with Salesforce. If I am e-mailing somebody that is in your Salesforce account, it will automatically show up on the Salesforce lead or contact record. Contract recruiters don't usually stay very long and if information is only in their Outlook, then when they leave all the contact information is lost. With the syncing capability of Salesforce, this allows you to track that relationship history of that recruiter and you don't lose it if they leave.

DC: Typically there are all sorts of things one might like to do with technology, but often they prove hard to do in practice. Now we seem to be hitting the point with technology that the things you want to do really are doable, perhaps more easily than one would have even hoped.

SR: Yes, absolutely and to attest to that they were moving their ATS data to Salesforce, I believe they use Resumix, which is not exactly the best of the bunch in ATS, and come September Salesforce will be the database of record for all recruiting including non ATS type tools or processes. We are also going to redo their jobs portal, and bring Salesforce to the back end of their jobs and build that user experience with people that are tired of the job boards.

The technology is at a point where you can make it happen and you don't have to use the resources of a major IT department. One of the things that I saw when I first started playing with Salesforce was that corporate IT departments are going to hate this product, because it's taken a nice shot at their job security. You don't need a database architect, you don't need a database developer, you don't need a QA department, you don't need a systems architect, you just need to know your business. And if you know your business very well and you know a little bit about technology you can make a lot things happen on this platform. The cost is also reasonable.

DC: So that covers the two big issues; can the technology do what you want it to do and is it affordable?

SR: The affordability is much better than when you hire a full-size vendor. One thing about Salesforce is they have its Appexchange platform where you are able to look at their marketplace and add things on your platform. Some applications cost money, some are free but it's really opening up this environment for developers on the back end, it's almost open source in a sense.

DC: Tell me about some other software features you use.

SR: The companies tab is basically a tab that lists all your competitors and when you click it you see all the leads that you have at that company, all the contacts and the actions that you are taking in regards to that company such as trying to hire people who are currently working there.

When we get into the opportunities tab that really is the opportunity to hire. All that information is really tracked against the contact against their employer or their company, including things such as salary history.

Imagine, I was talking to David who used to work for Pepsi, and he gave me his salary history including when he worked at Pepsi. As time goes on I talk to a lot of people at Pepsi and get their salary information. It gets tracked to their company account here and I will see over time what my competitors pay their people. I can also see the progression of employees at their company so when I am calling somebody there to recruit them I know what their financial package likely is.

So, what it is doing is it is trying to create information that will be helpful for selling our company to a candidate. Why is my company better than theirs? There is a little thing in Salesforce like Google mapping. I am able to determine the person's commute time. I can see what his current commute is so if my commute time is shorter than his commute time than I am going to sell that. If the salary history is in my favor, I would sell that too. So really trying to identify key pieces of selling point information.

When you develop your contacts at a company you track who they report to or what department they are in. There is a neat little org chart button where I can click on so I can see the org structure of my competitors.

When people switch companies you just change their account or their company name and track that change of employment. One of the key things that I use in practice when I was doing third party recruiting is that if I knew somebody just took another job, I would call him immediately and ask for referrals from the previous company, because people aren't usually going to give you names where they are working because it's not professional but if they leave my employer, then I can say who is looking for opportunities. I could get a lot more leads and referrals when I knew somebody just left the company because they want to help out their friends in the company they just left.

Within Salesforce there are alerts, so when anything happens based upon a field like a change in employment or a change in title you can automatically alert the right people.

DC: What other customizations have proved useful?

SR: One of the customizations I did was to create a custom screen, which allows you to store interviews with people. If you have a call script that you go through with sales people or a call script with accountants, nurses, or engineers, you can call up the script and store their answers in Salesforce so it can always be seen by people who talk to them later. If I wanted to print it out and give it to the hiring manager who's about to go and do an interview that's easy to do.


Within the CRM world there are what are called opportunities. In sales, it's an opportunity to sell product. In the hiring model, it's an opportunity to make a hire and this is where the heart of this whole system comes into play because everything relates to this one specific opportunities tab. Within that process there are different stages, there could be a phone screen, a submit to recruiter, submit to hiring manager, face to face interview, telephone interview, all these are basically stages that a potential hire is going to go through at your company. Your company is going to have different stages than the next company. Even within your own company you're going to have different stages for whether, if I am a hospital, I am hiring a nurse, a doctor or an orderly.

We get into pipeline management where, as soon as somebody comes in the system we are identifying a pipeline for them and with the opportunity we identify which pipeline we are trying to hire this guy off of. We are going to identify the stage that they are at and what our goals are. For nurses we want to hire them upon initial contact within 30 days because we know if we don't they are going to go someplace else. You can track the history of the hiring managers and what they are doing and that allows you to go to them with some push back and not just talk about your opinion.

Another thing that has worked out great at EA is they track the turn down ratio, which is when I contact a lead and they say, "I am not interested. With the system you can track the reasons why they are not interested and deal with them. EA had a pretty high turn down ratio and it's gone down since we started, not because of this system, but because we were able to track the reasons, take those to the business which is where changes can be madebecause recruiters can't change the work environment, only the business can do that.

One other thing that's cool about Salesforce, because it does sync up with your Microsoft Office, is that it can take all types of data on the back end, export it into Excel and give managers live, real-time reports whenever they want them. The opportunities tab tracks your wins and losses, it tracks why you lost within each stage, if they pull out, if the candidate says they no longer want to be there, you track why. If your hiring managers or recruiters say, "I don't want to hire this guy, you track why.

If you are really interested in tracking to see why some recruiters are successful and some aren't based upon their activity, you really are able to see that and flag the ones that aren't doing it right and put the spotlight on the ones that are really doing a good job and find out what are they doing differently than everybody else.

In any sales environment, there is a lot of peer competition between salespeople and in third party recruiting there is a lot of competition between recruiters. You can create a dashboard, which is a graphical representation of any report. You can spotlight the good ones, like your top five recruiters who generated the most contacts this week, this month, this year. You don't put a negative spotlight on the poor performers, but they know if there name is not up on the list.

The pipelines tab is the main differentiator between a requisition based reactive recruiting and pipeline sourcing. A pipeline is basically an identified and defined need that is ongoing. So, if you are a software company, for software engineers you can drill down what types of disciplines of software engineering you want for this pipeline. If you are in healthcare or you are running a hospital, surgical nurses could be a pipeline; surgical nurses in San Antonio could be a pipeline. So it's all specific as to how you as a company want to define your ongoing needs.

Any time a lead comes in or a contact comes in you are basically associating them with a pipeline, and if you start to develop an opportunity with a contact for a hire you associate for what pipeline this person would be hired under. So when you look at your pipeline tab, you are going to see all the contacts that you have associated with this pipeline, see all the activities going on. Then there is what I call 'in the pipe' and that would be your contact that you have added into this pipeline. The main goal is any time you get a new requisition or a hiring manager comes in and says, "I need somebody today, the first place you go to is your pipeline for that skill set because your pipeline is showing all the previous activities that you've built up for up until this date.

The university team at EA has gone wild with these pipelines. They love it, and what they do is they have individual recruiters that will manage a campus, like we could say Ohio State. A recruiter goes out there, he gets students from your Ohio State University, they go into his Ohio State pipeline, and then he goes back and qualifies them, "where would you like to work? This person wants to work in Florida, that person wants to work in Southern California. He will assign them to those pipelines, which are owned by recruiters at those locations. So along with the identification of pipelines, you have ownership.

If you are in a recruiting environment where you are not doing full life cycle recruiting, you have to pass the baton a couple of times. Pipelines are a great way to do that because, one person could belong to multiple pipes and you can track your status with each pipe and again with those opportunity records to retest, you can track specifics. Have they passed the interview? Do we have their resume? Have they passed a background check? All that information is right there, and you can see it in just one window.

The campaign tab is a defined marketing effort. If you really want to know an ROI on your recruiting efforts, this tab literally tracks to a dollar every single person that you hired off a marketing effort.

This is the best way I have ever seen a company have success with when it comes to initiating contact with new leads, and the best way to meet new people is to throw a party. For all the leads in our system, I would send an e-mail that already had their name, title, company, employer, etc. inside of it. They would confirm the information was correct and would opt in, going into permission-based marketing. They are qualifying and verifying their data, and one thing that I love is that through this little question they said, "I can't come to this one but let know me about future events. The results have been great.

The University Recruiting Application, this is something I put out on Salesforce's AppExchange for free download. If you have a university recruiting program at your company and you so happen to use Salesforce you can go and get that one for free.

Oh one more quick tool: Google AdWords. There is an application that not too many companies are using to recruit but I am about to initiate a project with EA where we are trying to recruit female software engineers, which are hard to find. Google has an application that we can embed in Salesforce to use as an online search marketing tools.

DC: Where can we learn more?

SR: If you believe that recruiting is sales there are a lot of blogs out there that are sales focused or CRM focused. If you go to blogsearch.google.com and type in CRM there is a lot of information in that way; however, you yourself would have to apply recruiting process and your knowledge to CRM. As far as combining the two, Jeff Hunter and I speak about it and write about it. He is the main guy from EA, he will write about it. Ron McIntosh from Deloitte is into the concept. I am about to sign an agreement with Salesforce to come in a formal fashion to develop talent management pieces for them, not only for them but on their application.