Attracting Talent: Good companies create a strong brand identity with their customers and then deliver on that promise. Great employment brands do the same, with quantifiable and qualitative results. As a result, the right people choose to join your company.

Selecting Talent: Management should implement proven talent selection systems and tools to create profiles of the right people based on the competencies of high performers. It's not simply a matter of finding the "best and the brightest," it's about creating the right fit - both for today and tomorrow.

Retaining Talent: In the current climate of change, it's critical to hold onto the key people. These are the people who will lead your company to future success, and you can't afford to lose them. The cost and time of replacing a valued employee is enormous. your company needs to promote diversity and design strategies to retain people, reward high performance and provide opportunities for development.

Managing Succession: Effective companies anticipate the leadership and talent requirement to succeed in the future. Leaders understand that it's critical to strengthen their talent pool through succession planning, professional development, job rotation and workforce planning. They need to identify potential talent and groom it.

Talent Acquisition

Rich Peterson is certain that the Internet has largely changed and influenced the recruitment process. As for discussion regarding, “Tactical Strategies,” Recruitment is entirely tactical. Talent Acquisition is about Relationship Management unlike Recruitment which is consistent with the, “Post it,” and they will come mentality.

 We went from corporate career sites, continued with the rise of job boards and, more recently, expanded to enable companies to generate candidates using search engines.

Social media

Social networks extend this evolution, offering for the first time the ability to create is a powerful new tool that, when used as a part of a mix of sources, can have a substantial impact.

 The ability to target communities of people who share specific skills and interests, combined with the power of two-way conversation, makes it a great channel for niche roles.

One key advantage social networks offer over traditional job boards is the ability to attract both active and passive candidates. Facebook claims more than 700 million people are active on Facebook, with 50 percent logged in daily. (Take the "Z" man with a grain of salt. I saw Social Network! :-)

 While the numbers look promising, here are a few tips to help recruiters narrow the field.

1.)  First, they must build the employment brand by creating a profile presence on these sites and building pages that communicate your company’s values and goals, where candidates can search for jobs and the two-way employment conversation can be initiated.

Instead of creating a generic corporate profile, they can add pages unique to job categories.

It’s important to ensure the ability to capture submitted information and feed this into your Recruitment Information Systems. An applicant tracking system (ATS) or candidate (client) relationship management (CRM) tool will capture this data. Updating content frequently is also a must.

2.) “Pull” candidates to the company. Don’t expect that putting up a LinkedIn page will attract the best and the brightest. Major social media sites offer targeted advertising programs where one can create highly specialized messages – this is how recruiters can start to “microtarget” the talent acquisition process. For instance, they can advertise accounting jobs by running an accounting audience-focused ad campaign – pulling them to the company’s accounting-specific microsite and starting the mutual courting process.

3.) One can also leverage one of the biggest opportunities on social networks: a two-way relationship with candidates and to engage the most qualified talent in an ongoing dialogue before the first interview.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed trying to determine how to blend this sourcing channel into your company’s existing recruitment mix, but remember that social networks are not a replacement for everything else recruiters do. At their core, they are another source of people and communities with some unique attributes.

Employee Referral:  Facebook claims, (Zuckerberg again) that active Facebook users have an average of 130 friends; (I’ve heard of way more).

LinkedIn’s most active members have more than 300. Employee referrals still drive the best-quality candidates. However, an effective social media referral program needs to be tightly managed. Several companies offer employee referral program software specifically designed for social networks, where recruiters can easily push out new referral contests to employees, control what they post and track success.

4.) Tracking success is crucial to any social media effort. It’s easy to get dazzled by the number of clicks and friend invitations, but how many of those actually get hired or become part of the future hiring pool? Recruiters can think about working with talent acquisition partners who understand a pay-for-performance approach to sourcing using Social Media. Recruiters should never begin a social media initiative without knowing what success looks like and how it should be measured.

Think of your company’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn presence as the vehicle to bring candidates to the door. But without the ability to invite them in and start an engaging conversation, how long will they stay? A well-executed CRM program allows recruiters to create lasting relationships with this talent pool – this is especially important for those active and passive candidates that the company may not be able to hire at present but would like to re-engage in the future.

Rich Peterson strongly believes that is true Talent Acquisition, and Not Recruitment.