I posted my own abbreviated executive summary of the Recruitment Genome Report on ERE but saved my more controversial opinions for this post here. Please read on...

 NOTE: I recommend you download the full 11-page report for yourself here 

This report is important to staffing leaders because:

• Our industry has long needed a concerted, vendor neutral, consensus-based approach to answer the question of what works and what is just hype. Through this report we intend to find some consensus around which technologies are appropriate based on real results, not just on speculation. 
• The answer to "what works" in recruiting must come from a community not from one single person's biased voice. New ideas are great. Innovation is necessary. But so is testing and validation, and not just in one environment. If a solution works only in specific, rare or controlled situations then it is not a best practice.  
• Our service economy has given way to a knowledge economy. Knowledge comes from people and that makes recruiters critical to an organizations survival but the recruiting industry has not yet dealt with this shift. The recruiters role will become increasingly valuable as job seekers become more sophisticated at finding connections and networking for their next job. 
• Most survey respondents believe Internet recruiting is so key it must be kept in-house but half felt team is inadequately trained. Just going out and buying any training is not the solution. First we need to better understand the gaps shared across many organizations, then we can devise the best ways to fill those gaps. 
• Companies’ recruitment goals are not strategic when their staffing leaders highly value Internet recruiting, yet half feel sourcing skills are deficient and are not allowed to spend on developing recruiters' skillset. It is not a leader's job to know how best to do all the jobs but to make everyone's job better.

Anything short of a synergistic recruiting strategy involving all these components remains tactical no matter how excellently executed:

• Solid team architecture. This could mean centralization, decentralization, or a hybrid of both. And it could include various definitions of roles, both internal (employees) and external (vendors/partners). But what it must include is strong definition. There's very little in the form of a "standard" for recruitment positions. How can an organization decide if it needs a dedicated sourcer, community developer, or candidate developer if the definition of the primary role of recruiter varies so widely? Answering questions around what kinds of team structures really work will go a long way in making more efficient use of the technologies available.   
• Direct sourcing ability. Every recruiting organization should be able to find leads for their hard-to-fill positions. Finding talent and making connections is a core value we offer. Survey respondents clearly agree this is an important skill. Not all positions are "critical hires" but when they are, we need to be able to fend for ourselves and not depend on someone else doing it for us. This doesn't mean every recruiter must be a master researcher, it just means every recruiting team needs to have some ability to get out of a tight spot and find a handful of leads at critical times.  
• Functioning analytics. We don't know what we don’t know.  62% of staffing leaders feel they have the wrong metrics but 70% of them feel their marketing strategies are satisfactory. How could anything be proven satisfactory when it is not being adequately measured? Before we can begin to target social media sites, focus our search engine marketing, or more accurately distribute our job advertisements, we must have complete details on every click and forward. Anything else is just guesswork. The only way to do this is with a system capable of tracking every source without requiring us to manually create or police the source categories inside our applicant tracking software.
• Grassroots social media involvement. Only 15% of respondents source from blogs! Only half of respondents identify talent on social networks or use search engine queries to find prospects. Each of these mostly ignored sources is larger than any one database, why overlook them? Recruiters can and should engage their target audience in their native habitat and that includes blogs, micro-blogs, networking sites, and online communities.  
• Search engine optimization. Only 25% of respondents have effective strategies for optimizing their organic presence in search engine query results. Fewer than 25% of respondents use search engine marketing to have a paid presence among search engine results. Search engines are the first place where many people go to ask questions. Why are only a quarter of us using them to reach our target audience?
• Career web sites that provide an engaging user experience and that have full integration into your HRIS. If you are engaging prospects online keep they are going to expect your organization to be web savvy. We already know that arcane and dehumanizing online applications don’t get us very far, but what we are learning is that our applicants are expecting convergence. Next generation career websites will allow applicants to use them how they want to use them, and connect with your on their terms. This may very well involve following your organization on Twitter or belonging to your company Facebook fan page, but the point here is that it is their choice, not yours. Instead of making them go where you want them to go, you now have to be where they already are.
• Sustainability through nurturing a center of excellence, and championing subject matter expertise. Lets face it, nobody knows everything. But by putting a few good minds together we can certainly keep up. Organizations need a place to house their collective experiences, and a champion or two charged with keeping alive the body of knowledge. Wisdom comes from putting this knowledge into practice, so if the knowledge resides outside your organization, or can easily walk out the door, what becomes then of your wisdom?

 What do YOU make of the survey results? And remember you can download the full 11-page report for yourself here