In collaboration with Glenn Gutmacher and Maureen Sharib, I wrote an article ERE considered worthy of their front page today.

Why, you may ask?  

Because it’s bold, and in these turbulent times it clearly needed to be said. Too many organizations think that a free webinar, a $20 pocket reference guide or a $49 event fully satisfies the need to develop the skills of their recruiters. These are the organizations that later whine about having their talent "poached" by better-prepared recruiters working for the competition. They are the employers which get beaten to the "top talent."

Guess what? Not everyone can hire the "top talent." If every company claims to hire "only the top 10%" of the talent in the industry, then where does the other 90% of our workforce show up to work every day? I'll tell you where: to employers staffed with recruiters stuck in "post and pray" mode, as my dear friend Eric Jaquith is fond of calling it.

Sure, things are slow right now, but they will pick up.  Once they do, a new generation of tools, techniques, and methods will be required in order to survive. Things change very fast. Did you know there are 3 billion more mobile phone users than there are PC users? Or that many of today’s teenagers text more than they talk? You may not care about that now, but in 5 years those teenagers are your new hires.

Now, more than ever, with budgets being cut and loyal, hard-working recruiters being kicked to the curb due to short-sighted management decisions, is when organizations should invest in their remaining staff to get them the skills required for survival when the next hiring wave hits us -- and it’s going to hit us hard. Put simply, talent that is hard to find today will not get any easier to find tomorrow. Even more simply, recruiters lacking the skills to find them today will be even less prepared when hiring picks up again.

When budgets are tight like they are right now, direct sourcing is the most efficient and inexpensive way to find the right people to hire. Dealing with the flood of resumes coming in from unemployed, underemployed, unhappily employed or frightened people applying directly through your career websites may work in other times, but with the extremely high volumes of applicants we’re seeing now, this is just not efficient. Budgets and headcount are slashed and staffing leaders have to do more with less, yet it takes their now-reduced recruitment workforce even longer to process the flood of applicants. And then, of course, there's the time suck involved in accounting for the tracking and metrics required, either by law or by policy. Not only is your remaining staff working harder than ever but they are accomplishing less than ever before when they are stuck in filter mode.

Read our article to find out about the top five lame excuses managers use when deciding to pass on training, what effective training looks like, and how it can be measured to ensure success here.