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

Employee engagement is at or near the top of most surveys that cover the concerns of HR leaders. Almost everyone is enthusiastic about the concept and their program. However, there is far too little focus on the problems or issues related to engagement.

My research and experience with HR leaders has helped me compile a list of the potential issues, problems, and concerns that should be considered by anyone involved in employee engagement. The process of gathering engagement data and the interpretation of it both improve dramatically when program managers and users are fully aware of all of its potential problems. The following article highlights each of these potential issues in bullet point format.

The Top Problems With Employee Engagement Programs keep reading…

Sodexo is launching two things: a new mobile-friendly careers site, as well as a job-hunting application for U.S. job seekers to use on iPhones, iPads, Androids, and soon Blackberries. Candidates can use the app, available from a landing page, to search for jobs, apply for jobs, join a talent community, get job alerts, and learn more about working for the company.

What makes it not just-another-mobile-recruiting-launch is, for one, that it’s Sodexo. The company earned the 2010 recruiting department of the year award; is a finalist this year in the best-brand category; and is a leader in recruiting with social media. Also, candidates who create a profile in the Sodexo career center can apply for a job straight from the mobile device; this differs from many other setups, where companies need candidates to eventually get to their laptop or desktop to apply. keep reading…

 You can be proud to work here.

That is one of THE most important messages your new employee orientation program should communicate.

This is so crucial because people of the caliber you want to attract and retain place a high value in working for an employer of whom they can feel proud.

So, make sure you communicate to your new employees — both explicitly and implicitly – that they can be proud to work at your organization.

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” implicitly by conducting a well-designed, well-organized, effective onboarding program. They see by the way you deliver the onboarding experience that your organization does things right. Conducting a high quality onboarding program engenders both pride — “I’m part of a great organization” –and respect for management — “They know what they’re doing here.”

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” explicitly by sharing stories that demonstrate why your organization is worthy of pride.

“Pride Story” Themes You Can Draw From

These include stories with the following themes: keep reading…

Facebook, and potentially other social media as well, can be used to assess a person’s potential for job success.

That not-so-surprising conclusion is reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and comes out of two studies — one dealing with academic performance, the other with job performance — conducted on college campuses in Indiana, Illinois, and at Auburn University.

What is surprising about the study is that a group of modestly trained evaluators could better predict success after spending a few minutes on a Facebook profile than could a self-assessment of personality traits often used by industry.

“SNW (social networking websites) ratings correlated with job performance, hirability, and academic performance criteria,” the researchers concluded, “and the magnitude of these correlations was generally larger than for self-ratings.” keep reading…

Ask the next hire you onboard to describe everything, every step they took on their way to becoming a candidate, and you may be in for a surprise.

If you track your source of hire, chances are excellent that what your numbers tell you is only a part of the story — the most recent part. What all that data is telling you may be not more than from where your new hire submitted their application.

With two-thirds of the companies participating in CareerXroads’ source of hire survey relying on the hires to say how they learned of the job, “What that’s telling us is what the candidate remembers, which is going to be from where they applied. You might get them to tell you where they first heard about the job,” says Gerry Crispin, one of the survey authors. “But we’ve suspected that more goes into this than is being captured (by source of hire reporting).”

So for the first time in the 11 years CareerXroads has surveyed America’s largest employers on how and from where they make hires, this year’s report includes the best thinking of recruiting leaders about what influenced their new hires to apply.

The just released report, 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire: Channels that Influence, not only offers a look at what recruiting leaders believe about the pathways in talent acquisition, but it also provides a data-rich look at where the 36 responding companies attribute the hires they make. The sources of hire were detailed on ERE yesterday. Today’s post looks at the social media influencers of that hiring. keep reading…

What I learned recently is that colonoscopies and pre-employment testing have a lot in common. First of all, managers and employees dislike, maybe even detest, the seemingly invasive nature of both evaluations. Second, you can’t fake out the results — what physicians see and personality tests reveal is simply “what it is.” Both assessments, when properly administered, are objective and neutral. Finally, both the colonoscopy and personality tests are critical for detecting or preventing “cancers” from spreading in your body and organization respectively.

How did I come up with this crazy comparison? I’m not sure. Let’s just say the analogy just appeared — one of those “aha” moments — during a conversation with a client. She had just completed an evaluation of several employee assessments for her company.

Here’s a little background that prompted her search. keep reading…

After two years of looking internally to fill vacancies, companies in 2011 again began to hire new workers, relying on referrals and job boards for nearly 50 percent of their external hires.

Social media, though it accounted for only 3.5 percent of those external hires, evidences a much greater impact on hiring than the numbers would suggest, influencing candidates whose hiring ends up being attributed to other sources.

These are but a few of the findings in the just released 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire survey. Conducted now for a decade by the talent consultancy of Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the annual survey queries the recruiting leaders of America’s largest companies about where they source the hires they make. Additional questions touch on emerging trends.

While Crispin and Mehler caution that the results reflect only the hiring practices of the participating companies, the survey has come to be an industry standard, occupying the top Google results for “source of hire,” and is one of the tools recruiters use in developing their own recruiting strategy.

This year’s survey found that in 2011 the 36 participating companies, which collectively have 1.2 million employees, filled 59 percent of their 213,375 openings externally. It’s a dramatic change from the last two years when half the openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions. keep reading…

An IT staffing company you probably haven’t heard of is quickly hiring employees and recruiters after it won some new business that it probably hadn’t dreamed it would.

XpertTech has already grown about 400% in six months money-wise, and in terms of employee size, from 12 employees to 61 employees in six months. Now it’s hiring 30 people in 30 days in the San Francisco Bay area for a mobile phone application project. It’s looking for designers, coders, and others. Joe Budzienski, the company’s executive vice president, is telling candidates, “Whether you have just graduated college and have been developing in your dorm room between classes, or have worked as a senior engineer who realized app development was your true calling, we want to speak with you. The only thing we ask is you live, breathe, and eat APPS!”

“To be trusted with this project is an honor,” says Budzienski. “It’s a very very prominent company, global.” One job listing on LinkedIn suggests the client is a banking company, as do some other posts.

The 30-day hiring blitz started Monday, and XpertTech has hired 12 of the 30 already. keep reading…

In today’s roundup we’re going to give you the secret to a more productive workforce. This isn’t one of those five-tip lists that tell you to start by raising the level of engagement.

Nope. The secret we’re going to share is something every company can do and costs nothing, unless you want it to. Even then, it will cost around $5 a year, but give you an ROI of about 50 to 1.

First, Todd insists on sharing about a new recruiting site. Here he is to tell you about it himself. keep reading…

I continue to be impressed by the evolution of pre-employment assessment tools. This evolution is being driven by the continued growth of the value proposition assessment provides. As a result, an increasing number of new product include embedded assessments designed to help predict which applicants have the best chance of success.

This past year has brought a proliferation of firms that are using assessments to provide a new twist on matching online job applicants with job openings (and conversely allowing firms to match their job openings to candidate data residing in a database).

To understand the origin of Internet based matching, one has to turn the clock back about 15 years to the dawn of the job board. Job boards provided arguably the biggest overall change to the status quo for the way — both in the way people are hired because of the increased ability for individuals to find out about job opportunities, as well as for those hiring, to locate viable candidates.

Things have not changed much as even in the present day. The basic Internet job search equation involves a matching process in which each party provides information about who they are and what they are looking for. Behind-the-scenes algorithms living on servers evaluate the data provided by each party and calculate a match.

Although the job boards would argue otherwise, my basic description of the matching process used by most of them can be summed up with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” keep reading…

Having worked with and trained many recruiters and owner/ managers all over the world, it is clear to me that almost universally, the first improvement that can be made is in actually measuring performance. It probably won’t surprise most people that with rare exception, in the recruitment industry globally appraisals are at best a “congratulations you’ve hit your target for the quarter, let’s increase by 10% next quarter and good luck,” and at worst non-existent.

Somewhere in the middle is an appraisal that only gets pulled out of the drawer when someone is not hitting their targets. Often called a “performance improvement plan,” or cynically a “you’ll be fired if you don’t achieve this” plan, it usually only monitors quantitative measures, and is rarely supported by adequate training. It could be argued that the managers and owners themselves need to go on a performance improvement plan at the same time to observe and improve upon their influence over their underperforming team member.

It surprises me further how managers expect their teams to perform when they themselves are too busy hitting their own revenue targets. There’s a clue in the title given to those responsible for a team of performers: manager. You have to manage their performance and every aspect of it. keep reading…

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Law schools across the country are being sued by graduates who claim they were misled into believing that a law degree would be their ticket to a well-paying career.

The 73 plaintiffs, many of who say they’ve been unable to find a job in their field or have had to settle for poorly paying legal work, allege the schools fudged their employment stats in order to attract applicants. The suits claim schools relied on self-reported income by small numbers of alums and counted as employed any graduate doing any kind of work.

“It’s a failure to disclose that the majority of their students fail to obtain jobs for which their degree is required or preferred,” says New York attorney David Anziska, who organized the nationwide legal campaign. “Students wound up paying inflated tuitions based on what we believe are overly broad — or in many cases downright false –placement statistics.” keep reading…

Marine Drive - Mumbai

After declining for about three years, India’s popularity as an outsourcing hotspot for tech companies has increased sharply.

That’s according to BDO USA, an accounting/consulting organization, in a poll of 100 U.S. technology CFOs.

BDO also found that: keep reading…

That famous “what’s your biggest weakness?” question may be more ubiquitous than a Grande Frappucino, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good at determining whether someone’s a good candidate or not.

Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ and author of a book called Hiring for Attitude, says this question and many others used every day should be placed in the dustbin of history. It’s about a 7-minute video, below.

keep reading…

During the six years I led talent acquisition for Deloitte New Zealand, much of our employment brand strategy revolved around humanizing our brand and creating an engaged talent community. We aimed to do this through allowing people to experience our culture and what it was really like to work at Deloitte NZ. We did this through social media initiatives and other means. Our culture and value proposition appealed to some and not to others — this was our aim and I believe it was successful.

So we had this engaged talent community — that’s great, what’s next?

Recruiting Needs to Look Outside of Recruitment keep reading…

Mobile technology especially the apps that go hand-in-hand with portable devices, is fueling tech hiring this year, as companies scramble to build out their mobile capability.

Just over half (54 percent) of IT leaders surveyed for the quarterly TEKsystems’ Executive Outlook Survey will implement some mobile initiative during the year, with more healthcare leaders (76 percent) planning projects than those in any other sector.

Mobile apps are among the leading projects, according to CIOs polled by Robert Half Technology. Twenty-two percent of them say they’ll be developing a mobile application for their company before the end of the year. Besides getting their development teams, the biggest challenge, say 28 percent of the CIOs, is finding and hiring IT staff with the necessary skills.

“Building mobile applications requires intense collaboration between numerous groups within the organization, including marketing, IT, operations and sales,” said John Reed, executive director of Robert Half Technology. “It’s important for mobile application developers to have strong soft skills, in addition to the ability to write code and test and debug software applications.” keep reading…

Everyone knows what it means to reboot your computer, but what does it mean when you reboot your entire workforce?

It’s no secret that the speed of change in business is incredibly fast. And as a result products, operational processes, customer expectations, and even business models are constantly changing. Every time one of these business factors is upgraded, it simultaneously requires the raising of the needed skills and the expected performance levels of the employees. Whenever skill requirements and performance levels are raised, the normal practice is to expect your current workforce to adapt and to meet those higher expectations through additional training.

But what would you do in a business situation where instead of the occasional need for incremental change, you were faced with a business environment that demanded both continuous and rapid change. You could call it chaotic change: a situation where products, customers, competitors, operational processes, and performance expectations needed to be constantly improved to the point where even with training, most of your current employees simply couldn’t handle it. When corporate leadership insists that in order to be successful “everything must change,” should “everything” include changing or “rebooting” the entire workforce?

What Does Rebooting Your Workforce Mean?

There are two categories of rebooting the workforce. The first is a situation where the current workforce has simply failed in its performance. keep reading…

Video didn’t kill the radio star and it hasn’t killed the job boards so far, but another new career site would like to take a chunk of their business. This startup hopes to marry video, screening, and job searching. Ring a bell? Well, we were talking about something a little similar two weeks ago.

That company, Get Hired, was really more of an applicant tracking system, with an emphasis on audio and video — and more. This one’s goals are less massive. It’s called Spark Hire, and it has received a million dollars in angel funding from private investors.

Like with other career sites, job seekers can search for jobs, of course. They can also record a 60-second video about themselves.

As for employers, they can do a number of things, some commonly found on other sites, some not. keep reading…

Here’s a link to a Forbes magazine article that was pushed to me last month (January 27, 2012) by LinkedIn Today, highlighting why 46% of all new hires fail. The point of the article was to introduce a “radical” new approach to selection based on Mark Murphy’s new book Hiring for Attitude. The key point of the book and the article is that lack of proper attitude, not skills, is the primary contributor to weak performance. The author is only partially right.

For one thing the idea proposed is far from radical. There have been many other books over the past 10-15 years including the Amazon best-sellers Hire With Your Head (for full disclosure — this is mine) and Top Grading that espouse similar themes. For another, and far more important reason, he mistook cause for effect.

I absolutely agree that a bad attitude is an extremely common hiring problem, but the bad attitude was caused by a lack of job fit, not the other way around. Bad fit is a multi-headed monster, including a bad fit with the manager, the team, the job itself, the company’s culture, the company’s growth rate, and the underlying business environment. There are probably a few more “lack of …” factors that could have been cited, but these represent the 80/20 rule and the primary cause of a bad attitude.

Consider this: even highly motivated people with a track record of success can develop bad attitudes and become disruptive workers when they don’t work well with their boss, when the job promised is different than the one taken, or the resources needed to do the job right are not provided. In most cases, the person got the bad attitude as a result of these underlying root cause issues. So to solve this problem make sure the person you hire fits the situation from top to bottom. Now that’s radical. keep reading…