ERE.net

The title of this article comes from a conversation with a senior-level HR professional who demonstrated a level of awareness that many employers seem to lack about their onboarding process.

We were talking about their need to upgrade their onboarding, and she was describing her concerns about the effects of a poorly executed process.

While she listed the typically cited negative costs of slopping onboarding — increased turnover, longer time to productivity, etc. — she hit on one of the biggest prices employers pay for a shoddy, sink or swim, unwelcoming onboarding process:

You take someone who is initially excited and even starry-eyed about working for you, and rapidly turn them into a cynical, skeptical, eye-roller, who does not respect or trust management and their employer.

I experienced this harsh reality with the one and only corporate employer I worked for. I remember wondering why my new co-workers would roll their eyes whenever we got a directive from management and say “That’s insert name of insurance company here for yah.”

It didn’t take me too many weeks to realize where this cynical attitude came from. keep reading…

The Internet makes talent communities inevitable

In recent weeks we’ve seen a lot of outpouring of grief over the now dead SOPA legislation. The law’s critics claim that, if passed, the law would end the Internet as we know it, threaten our way of life, and confirm the Mayans were right. We periodically experience this type of mass hysteria, whenever something seems to threaten the “promise of the Internet” — the last time was over net neutrality. That so-called promise has to do with the perceived “free” flow of information: articles, stories, videos, songs, or content. What’s gotten lost in this noise is that that nothing is free. The current business model of the Internet has simply shifted dollars from content creators to content aggregators. Advertisers sponsor content so users can pretend it is “free.”

A long time ago, about the time the last ice age ended, there was something called AOL. It seems like eons have passed, but those who remember that era may recall that after we returned from foraging for food we would turn on our dial-up modems and connect to AOL, having paid a monthly fee for access to all the content that was available, the forums, the news, etc. Connection speeds were 1,200 bits per minute — you could almost count those bits coming in. Now we do the same with Facebook and Google, which we experience as free. Perceptually, we ignore the ads — targeted ads based on all the information collected by the sites — ads tailored to our habits, our behavior, and interactions. AOL charged a fee and had no ads; Facebook doesn’t charge a fee but has ads. There is no free lunch. keep reading…

So often pronounced dying, dead, and all but useless for job seekers and employers alike that it’s passing into legend, job boards somehow manage to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of their pyres to successfully deliver candidates and hires to employers worldwide.

For being so out of fashion, so yesterday, job boards manage to come out on top or top-adjacent on nearly every source of hire study. In a Bersin & Associates survey this fall job boards tied for first with internal transfers as the leading source of all hires. CareerXroads says job boards produced 24.9 percent of all external hires in 2010, second only to employee referrals (27.5 percent).

The latest survey comes from tech vendor Talent Technology, which reports that job boards are the leading source of candidates, according to the 1,100 North American HR professionals who participated. Job boards account for 17 percent of the candidates, followed by employee referrals, which provide 15.8 percent.

What’s remarkable about the evidence is how few accept it. Even after reporting that “job boards remain popular and are used to fill 19 percent of open positions – making job boards the No. 1 source for candidates,” Bersin titled that section of the report “Job Boards: Not Dead, but Dying.”

Even more remarkable is how little the job board industry has done to promote itself. The major boards have their own, proprietary data, guarded more carefully than the U.S. does its diplomatic messages. Second tier and certainly mom-and-pop operations have little data beyond gross traffic counts. So for all practical purposes employers do their own market surveillance.

Now, finally, seven years after it’s founding by Peter Weddle, the International Association of Employment Web Sites has bestirred itself to do some serious research about the industry. keep reading…

This eighth year of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards brought applications from big corporations, small companies, government agencies in the U.S., and consultancies in India. In some categories there were runaway winners, and in others, there were knock-down, drag-out barn-burners.

As fun as it is to judge, it was taken seriously. Some applicants used every hour of their midnight, January 6 deadline (we know — we were on the phone answering their questions) and judges used every minute of theirs (we know for the same reason). Judges wrote lengthy explanations of their choices, and some created algorithms to rank each applicant, and sent us the spreadsheets they created as living proof.

Anyhow, it sounds trite, but great work’s being done, in many cases under challenging circumstances. Some of the companies that didn’t win were so good that we hope they apply again, or share their stories on ERE.net webinars or at future conferences. As for next spring’s conference in San Diego, that’s where the winners will be announced, and that’s where they’ll take questions from you as to how they succeeded, overcame hurdles, and what’s in store next. Without further ado, here are the finalists in alphabetical order within the categories:

keep reading…

It’s a good thing that this year’s Super Bowl game lived up to its name because the 50+ commercials were mostly just OK.

Dogs and babies came out on top. They were the stars of four of the top five favorite ads in the USA Today Super Bowl Admeter. The M&M commercial ranked 4th.

However, it was a such a mediocre crop of ads this year that more than a few newspapers used the word “Yawn” in their headline of the coverage. The Associated Press report said: “The Super Bowl may have been a nail biter, but the ads were a snooze.”

“What’s notable about this year versus others is that advertisers played it safe. As a result, we saw fewer standouts, but we also didn’t see as many costly mistakes,” said Tim Calkins. He’s clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University who each year leads the school’s Super Bowl Advertising Review.

The panel’s top pick was the M&M ad. CareerBuilder, which ignored criticism over its use of chimpanzees, got a “B” grade from the panel. The USA Today audience ranked it in the middle of the pack. keep reading…

This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

If you haven’t seen it in the news lately, there has been an uproar over the practice of secret “no-recruit” agreements between major corporations. A significant number of notable firms including Google, Apple, Intel, and Pixar have been accused of restraining the movement of employees between firms. But don’t be misdirected by all of the legal issues.

The real damage that these agreements can have is on your firm’s business results, and at a large firm, these damages could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work in HR or recruiting, you need to be able to advise senior managers of the unintended consequences related to these agreements. If you currently use no-recruit agreements or you are considering one, this article covers the numerous potential business problems and impacts associated with them.

Potential Problems and Issues Related to Using “No-recruit” Agreements

The 25 problems are broken into two categories, 1) ways that these agreements can hurt your firm and 2) reasons why the agreement may not even work. keep reading…

Strike up the band. Break out the confetti. The market’s going to love this. The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent and non-farm jobs grew by 243,000 in January.

This morning’s monthly report from the U.S. Department of Labor blasted through even the most optimistic of expectations. The jobs gain would have been the largest since May 2010, except that the Labor Department’s data group adjusted 2011′s jobs numbers. Now, only March (+246,000) and April (+251,000) had stronger numbers.

January is the second consecutive month to beat estimates. Economists predicted anywhere from MarketWatch’s tepid 121,000 to the more optimistic 182,000 in the Bloomberg survey. None of the widely reported surveys saw a decline in the unemployment rate.

Indeed, the unemployment rate, which has been declining very slowly since hitting a peak of 10.1 percent in late 2009, is now at the lowest point since February 2009. The government report also put the number of unemployed at 12.8 million. A year ago it was at 13.9 million.

While governments continued to cut jobs — federal jobs were cut by 6,000 and local government cut 11,000 positions — the private sector added 257,000. This was more than 50 percent higher than the ADP estimate earlier in the week. keep reading…

What would you do if the person interviewing you fell asleep? What Irwin did turned out to be worth $100. You’ll find out more if you read through this week’s roundup. And, as a little incentive to make it to the very end, there’s a link to some nifty free marketing analytics tools.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain. keep reading…

Dice this morning became the second job board in a week to see its stock price drop after reporting a profitable quarter and a year of growth.

Hours after the company reported it nearly doubled its fourth-quarter profit over the same quarter in 2010, meeting Wall Street’s expectations, its stock price took a 16 percent beating. In afternoon trading in New York, Dice Holdings was selling for $8.40 a share, down $1.59 on the day.

Last week Monster’s stock took a 20 percent hit after it missed analyst profit expectations and announced layoffs. The company earned 11 cents a share, rather than the 12 cents Wall Street expected. Yet, the company grew revenue for the year by about 14 percent and turned 2010′s loss into a 37 cents a share profit.

keep reading…

That grocery store chain popping up all over Arizona, Nevada, and California has launched a new careers website with a good main-page video talking about jobs at the British-owned grocer.

On the Fresh & Easy home page — the company home page, not the careers home page — the words “A Great Place to Work” (as opposed to “jobs,” “employment,” or “careers”) take you to the carers page.

That’ll take you to the redesigned careers page, which includes videos, a q-and-a about the interview process, a blog, and more.

Fresh & Easy is recruiting employees and interns on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The company — which despite its growth is not without challenges — plays up its low energy use, and its food that avoids trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, and high-fructose corn syrup.

I just read that the average Silicon Valley tech salary is over $100,000. I’ve seen starting salaries for CS graduates come pretty close to the magical $100,000 mark. Google recently had to give a 10% raise to all its employees just to stay competitive.

Yep, programmers are getting expensive. But my experience has been that most great programmers don’t really have salary as their No. 1 consideration when deciding where to work. They only worry about salary when the job is so awful that it has to pay well or they couldn’t imagine sticking around.

Here are 10 things that many programmers think about first, long before salary even comes into play: keep reading…

When Glassdoor launched its Facebook connection a few minutes ago, the company that’s the Yelp of employment jumped full-on into the scramble for dominance in the world of careers social networking.

Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in. keep reading…

The Australian defense department has started a new campaign with a “Superman” motif to recruit reservists, the first big effort like this in seven years.

Its plans includes TV ads, movie ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertising, and of course the career site, featuring people lifting up their shirts to show military uniforms underneath.

The site plays up the potential for good benefits, travel, community involvement, and personal growth — the latter, for example, exemplified by the prominent quote from a reservist on the site saying: “I wanted an opportunity to step out, try new things, and push myself.”

The Australian Army hopes to use the campaign for at least three years.

Facebook did today what everyone expected: It filed for an IPO.

In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.

Facebook reported in its S-1 filing that it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, most of it coming from advertising. It reported having 845 million monthly active users as of the end of the year, a 39 percent increase over the year before. In the U.S., Facebook saw a 16 percent bump over 2010, ending last year with 161 million monthly average users, or about half the country’s total population.

Its average daily user count is 483 million, meaning more than half those who visit the site in a month do so every day. The company also reported 425 million monthly mobile users, a number it expects will grow with some of it replacing PC access. keep reading…

HR services company ADP says the U.S. added 170,000 private sector jobs in January, providing more evidence that while the economy isn’t backsliding, it also isn’t advancing.

Indeed the January number came in below the average of 182,000, which is what economists in a Bloomberg survey were expecting. A Dow Jones Newswires survey however put the number right at 170,000.

The ADP report also adjusted down the December numbers from the initial 325,000 to 292,000.  Nearly all the January gain, says ADP, came from companies with fewer than 500 workers, and all but 18,000 of the new jobs were in the service sector. Manufacturing added 10,000 workers during the month.

A year ago, ADP said 190,000 private sector jobs were created in January.

This morning’s report, says Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, “compares to the 2011 monthly average of 160,000 and thus points to a continued recovery but the mediocre pace this far into a recovery still remains frustrating,” He estimates that Friday’s official report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show 165,000 non-farm jobs created in January. keep reading…

An old Gary Larsen cartoon once showed a kindly old lady hand-feeding birds in her back yard. Off to the side was a sack labeled with words that read something like: “Fake birdseed. Great fun! Birds just can’t figure it out!”

Fake bird seed represents many vendors’ test claims … and, what users don’t know about birdseed and test validity can cost them a fortune. Test validity does not mean people like the test; or, the test has zero adverse impact; or, the EEOC approves; or, the test looks sexy. Validity means test scores consistently predict some specific aspect of job performance. For example, if high scores predict more mistakes, then low scores should predict fewer. Validity predicts on-the-job performance … both ways.

Reputable test vendors (i.e., those who follow professional test development standards) eagerly show controlled studies of test results … and, welcome questions about them. Bird seed vendors enthusiastically produce client testimonials … andget defensive when questioned. How can testimonials be unacceptable? For the same reason you cannot trust political ads. They have an agenda and are seldom supported by facts. Here is an example using a sales job: keep reading…

Employee referral programs may produce more hires — perhaps many more — than surveys would suggest.

Over the years it has come to be accepted that the average number of new hires coming from employee referral programs is somewhere between SHRM’s 24 percent (for non-exempt positions) to about a third. Some programs do much better.

From CareerXroads now comes evidence that the hires from employee referrals are undercounted.

“Referrals permeate the recruiting process more than we think,” says recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a CareerXroads principal.

He and his partner, Mark Mehler, surveyed their clients and others about employee referral programs and found that most of the 50 respondents have a referral program, most pay a bonus of some kind, and on average 28 percent of their external hires are referrals.

Most of the results, says Crispin, were expected. However, in comparing data from that admittedly limited, and unscientific survey with the early results of the consultancy’s annual Source of Hire study, “we’re finding referrals are a part of every source or almost every.”

For instance, rehires, a small, but steady source of hires, include a sizable percentage of individuals referred by employees. The rehires may first come to the attention of recruiters through a referral, but when they’re onboarded, the source of hire tends to get reported as a rehire. keep reading…

It’s a brand new year, great things are on the horizon … and for me, I have had it up to my eyeballs with a particular topic. I am so fed up with this topic that I want to climb to the highest peak and scream, bang my head against a wall, and even toss my desk around the room over and over. This topic that’s making me and others so irritated is Passive Candidates.

Yes, that’s right. The topic or even the mention of passive candidates now a day makes me want to throw up. In conducting my own personal year in review and through scouring HR topics, articles, blogs, etc., it seems as if 2011 was the year of the “Passive Candidate.” My response … so the heck what.

I guess I am at a loss as to why there is so much over-emphasis on “passive candidates.” Whatever happened to simply hiring the most-qualified, best-fit individual who can add their strengths in order to advance the organization? Now we have resorted to “Commandments of Recruiting Passive Candidates,” “Rules to Recruit Passive Candidates”, “Your Guide to Passive Candidates” — you get my point.

So here are some questions for you to ask yourself and answer: keep reading…

Complaints of retaliation by employers trumped race for the second consecutive year, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The EEOC said total new complaints during fiscal 2011 were just slightly ahead of 2010. Last year it received 99,947 claims compared to 99,922 the year before. It also reported taking in $455.6 million through its administrative program and litigation.

Released last week, the stats show charges of retaliation by employers against workers who raised discrimination issues accounted for 37.4 percent of the commission’s workload. Complaints alleging just violations of Title VII (discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and national origin) accounted for 31.4 percent of the complaints.

Retaliation claims are rising faster than any other category of complaint, up 10 points in the last decade. Race discrimination claims, historically the most frequent, were the second-most commonly received complaint by the EEOC. They’ve hovered around 36 percent for years and last year represented 35.4 percent of the total charges. keep reading…

A new site launching today is described by its CEO Suki Shah as “Job board ATS video audio social recruiting.”

It’s called “Get Hired,” it’s backed by private equity investors, and it’ll be free, at least for now.

The company, which has raised $1.75 million, has been building up a list of job-seekers and employers, and then contacting signers-up to send them a distinct URL to use in spreading the word via Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. “The more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll get access,” Get Hired tells them.

To explain what this site does, it helps to provide a super-brief history. Suki Shah had started a company around the time you don’t want to start a company — about when Lehman Brothers collapsed. Called Statacor Biosciences, it specialized in nutritional therapy and dietetics.

Not only were the times challenging, but Shah realized while hiring people that HR practices were, too — “even more archaic” than physician practices, he says. He found the job boards’ prices to be “mind-blowing” and found himself inundated with many hundreds of applications when hiring for his new firm, which has grown to 25 employees in seven states.

So Shah had applicants record an audio, minute-long explanation about heart disease, to see how they’d sound to a patient, or to a sales prospect. Instead of hundreds of applicants he now had maybe 30 good ones for a job, and could go through them quickly. He added video, too.

This takes us into 2010. Shah felt that he was onto something. In 2011 it was time for his brother to run the other company and for Suki to focus on making money off of this video-audio-more-to-come business.

What is launching today is supposed to replace a job board and an applicant tracking system — particularly for a company that finds that about $400 for a job listing on a job board to be expensive. keep reading…