Its 5 am on Monday morning and you’re up ... But Holdup! (My Jamaican expression for wait a minute) You don’t get up this early on a Monday for work, after all you’re one of the Recruitment Player Veterans who normally strolls in at 10am for work after you’ve had your work out at the gym, Juice, coffee and bagel with cream cheese; oh yea let`s not forget your morning newspaper...

But instead, you are getting ready for a 7am meeting with the VP of HR and staff to discuss the Social Media (SM) conference in LA she just came back from; all excited and pumped - which focused on the Impact of SM on Talent Acquisition and Management. What`s worse she has given you the task to research the tools in the market and to propose a rough plan on how to integrate them along with the existing process you have in place ...

Great, a cushy $120k a year Job and title with monster responsibilities not so cushy after taxes - compared to the $220k killer income as a Top Recruitment Veteran ... (Yea, you wanted a company with a great reputation, change and stability in your life... Really?) Your boss has promised to allocate a substantial budget if your proposal gets approved...

You`ve been going to conferences, reading blogs on SM and some of the Best Practices written by some of the Gurus, and you have some ideas ... You have identified the SM Consultant you`re going to bring in but you also have some major problems to deal with first.

After a few days of careful study and review, you discover: You have a team of 8 internal recruiters who are mandated to support Hiring Mangers across your Company nationally. Based on the some of the reports, the department is 25% over budget due to over use of Third Party Agencies. You have an ATS that`s utilized half the time by some of the Recruiters; (you can forget about accurate reporting metrics) and even though you have asked for a common Reporting system you have 8 different spread sheets because your recruiters each have their own ``best practice`` on Reporting ...

Wait a minute – Hiring Mangers have open requisitions for 4, 6 and 7 months – and they are still in Wild Wild West mode doing their own hiring, using their own Third Party Agencies. Did you not have a 2 hour Hiring Managers meeting 3 months ago discussing this bad practice with their superiors promising things will change? Your Vendor of Record of over 200 Recruitment vendors and rising is submitting the same candidates the Corporate website is pulling in from Monster and other popular Job Boards and in some cases internal referrals are slipping through the cracks even though the $2000 per referral program has been blasted across the Company internal Intranet ... The Cost per hire is through the roof ...! You feel like how President Obama felt when he took the US Presidential Role on day one ...

It just hit you that your SM integration proposal with all the bells and whistles mobile and all, would not have much of an impact with the current state of affairs left as they are. Your reputation is also tied to the successful or unsuccessful outcome of this project... The company’s existing recruitment process was in a word chaotic at best.

The recruitment process would need to be overhauled, the status quo disrupted, before any thought of integrating or adopting any sort of SM Recruitment model. Everyone in the Enterprise had to be thinking along the same lines and on the same page. The company needed a new Corporate Recruitment strategy.

You suddenly realized, while sipping on your coffee at your favorite coffee shop, why you did so well as an Independent Recruiter all these years... All this internal chaos and necessity for quality driven recruitment processes – provided, unpredictably, tons of opportunity to support some of your clients` needs – even some of your clients who boasted having solid internal recruitment processes...

Not to say you did not provide a valuable service to your clients, a better question is: How much of your success was attributed to some of your clients’ internal struggle, with refining their processes...?

It’s Monday morning, you`ve strolled into your office at 10am with coffee and newspaper in hand- you can't quite wipe the smile off your face, still thinking about that crazy nightmare you had ...