Most of you are witnesses to my assertion last year that the currently tight candidate market is costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars based upon the number of positions that are going unfilled or taking longer to fill than they should. Congress agrees with me and is considering authorizing another 80,000 temporary visas for skilled foreign workers to enter the US job market.

Still, there are some things we can do ourselves to help stop the hemorrhage and to fill our open positions more quickly:

• We can adopt a Customer Service approach to recruiting. Give up the, "Wait in line," "We will be back to you when we are ready to get back to you," attitude. Today's candidates will not put up with it.
• We can question the value of hiring procedures that are unnecessarily drawn out and which cause us to lose good candidates to more flexible and agile companies. Unwanted is the three interviews with preliminary testing, then a trip to the psychologist for complete testing, followed by a visit to Headquarters, and a final interview, drug screening, and the offer interview, and an added trip in just to fill out an application.
• We can re-evaluate our knock-out factors and screen-out methods, that may have worked when there was an unlimited supply of candidates, but now inappropriately limit the group of individuals we can properly consider and evaluate.
• We can raise the status of recruiting above being the duty of an entry level HR Generalist with one year experience. Our recruiters will need to be more like the search firms in identifying and following the careers of potential employees; to know where they are when we need them, and even have had an ongoing relationship with them.
• We can have the interviewing team prepared and organized for the candidate interview and adopt timely and objective candidate evaluation systems. Candidates comment to me, "They were so disorganized, I would not go to work there." At least look at the candidate's resume or "fact sheet" before the interview begins.
• We can extend basic civility to the hiring process by starting interviews on time and by not making the candidate wait unnecessarily long between seeing the various interviewers.
• We can pay greater attention to our current employees and prevent them from walking. In spite of old mores, we can try to recruit back ex-employees who already know our culture and we know their capabilities.
• We can develop internal training programs to qualify our own employees for the new, higher skill jobs. It may be a skill gap, not a body shortage.
• We can even have the CEO personally sit down and call a wavering candidate or resigning employee. Bill Gates does it.