I clearly remember my first day in the recruiting industry at TAD Resources in Danbury, CT in 1994. My manager called me into his office and tried to summarize recruiting, how far it has come, and how much the industry had changed since he joined. He kept stressing that the goal of the Danbury office was for us to make sure we were on the forefront of what was called “Strategic Recruiting.”

He then told me my first assignment was to go over to the massive file cabinet, grab a file and start calling candidates. He told me to ask the candidates all the standard recruiting questions and whether they were interested in making a job change. If they were not interested in a new opportunity, he wanted me to ask them who they knew that might be. "Wow," I thought to myself, "how strategic to call a person who was not responding to a job ad just to do a bit of research on the candidate and ask for a referral." He then explained to me how strategic it was to capture what was called "G-2 intelligence" to build my pipeline of candidates.

A year into my job with TAD I was called by a start-up company in South Florida to interview for a recruiting position that would initially help hire over 100 employees immediately. The Director of HR stressed to me how much of a "strategic HR Department" she was trying to build. She said in my case she was looking for an agency recruiter to come into the corporate world and proactively source candidates. She didn’t want a paper pusher; she wanted someone to be very "strategic" in the way that they recruited. "Wow," I thought to myself again. "She brought up that 'strategic' word again." It seemed like she was using "strategic" in a very different context than it had been used a year earlier. Even so, I was more than happy to accept the job and move from the Northeast to the beaches of Boca Raton.

Now, 13 years after joining the industry I am still surrounded by the words "strategic." Over the years, this word has been completely overused, has taken on hundreds of meanings, and seems to mean something quite different in every organization of which I have been a part. I just ran a quick Google search on "Strategic Recruitment" and it returned over 51,000 hits. When I did the same on "Strategic Human Resources" it returned over 202,000 hits. Our organization TALENThire.com, actually utilizes the word weekly as we partner with organizations to enable them to become strategic and "earn the seat at the table."

So back to my initial question: "Are we Strategic yet"?

Many of you would say absolutely not, but some of you might say that we as an industry are getting there. The labor pool is definitely tightening and many organizations are finally starting to understand their employees are the most important aspect of their business. There are some recruitment/HR departments that actually have achieved that "seat at the table" we refer to. Has your organization achieved it? Have you actually defined what strategic means within your organization? How can you get there?

Here are some "strategies" to help your organization become more strategic.

Define:

• What "Strategic Recruiting" really means to you and your organization. If you do not have definition around what the words really mean to you and your team, how would you ever be able to measure if you are successful? In my earlier examples "strategic" meant two different things to my first two bosses.
• The vision and goals of your company and business units that you are supporting. You must thoroughly understand what will make the overall company successful so you can build a plan to align your department with them.
• Your playbook to align your recruiting organization with the overall goals of the company.

Implement:

• The playbook. Take the necessary steps to achieve your goals and vision that you have created for you or the recruiting team. Remember, things and situations will change; be flexible enough to change with them.

Measure:

• The strategic goals and vision you have set. Lay things out by timelines and milestones that are attainable. Track your progress and always be flexible to change as you go. If we do not measure we will never be able to achieve continuous process improvement.

It seems the words strategy and strategic can take on a life of their own depending on your vision and goals. The important thing to remember is "strategy" is literally just a word without solid definition, implementation and measurement. Make sure the next time your recruiting organization claims it is strategic that these three pieces are clearly in place.

Mike Veronesi is Managing Partner of TALENThire.com. With over 600 recruitment suppliers on the system, hiring companies enjoy a single point of billing as well as a single point for all contracts, while controlling recruiting costs and increasing their talent pool.