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ERE junkie Ben Gotkin (he’s on his sixth straight conference), the national recruiting director for the accounting firm RSM McGladrey, led a discussion today about what it’s like to attract candidates to a company that’s “a great unknown,” as he puts it.

Among those in the ERE Expo audience was a recruiter from another tax firm, Crowe Horwath, a company name that also doesn’t roll off the tongue like Coke, Pizza Hut, Nike, and Google. Also in the audience was a defense contractor in San Diego without the name-brand of Northrop Grumman.

Gotkin’s company has to compete with the biggest four accounting firms for talent. (McGladrey’s the fifth or sixth biggest.) Here’s a rundown of suggestions not only from Gotkin, but from others in the crowd. Yeah, some aren’t new, but they’re good reminders that other recruiters who aren’t working for Google have the same challenges. keep reading…

Some of you may have already seen the posts around Twitter & Facebook about the third #socialrecruiting summit, coming to Best Buy HQ in Minneapolis on May 17!

Earlier today at ERE Expo in San Diego, our Community Director Lance Haun made the official announcement. If you missed it, here is the video:

keep reading…

Top of the morning to you! This is a special ERE Expo/St. Patrick’s Day edition of the community highlights.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Multitasking hurts corporate recruiters too
2. Two Facebook accounts? No!
3. Are video interviews going to replace face-to-face interviews?
4. Example RPO agreements
5. Featured group of the week: Sales Recruiting

1. Multitasking Hurts Corporate Recruiters Too

Louis Kadetsky writes: “Multitasking, once considered a rare talent, is now an essential skill … but it comes at a price. As employees juggle tasks – and take this into their personal life, checking devices while pushing grocery carts and ordering dinner – they are paying with pain. Fortunately, there is a cure for what ails you!

Do you think multitasking is harmful? Check out the conversation.
keep reading…

Jobvite isn’t making a big splash about this, but it has a new social recruiting tool for job seekers. Think of it as a combination of bit.ly, the URL shortening site that allows you to track your links, and Jobvite’s matching service.

I only heard about it this morning at Expo, so there has been no time to try it out. But between what I was able to see and what Dan Finnigan, Jobvite’s CEO told me, it could be a useful tool to help out friends looking for a job.

When you come across an interesting job, you can use the site to shorten the URL (which creates a Jobvite connection). Then detail the job in the next screen, which Jobvite will use to match to your Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn connections. Then you give Jobvite permission to access those friends and connections and send the job to those that match.

Must you be a job seeker to do this? It doesn’t look like it. It appears even recruiters can use the tool to send announcements to their networks.

It’s a minimalist site, so you’ll have to experiment to see what it does and how best to make use of it.

JobTarget

The company now offers metrics for all its recruitment advertising customers. OneClick Analytics lets employers analyze the effectiveness of their ad placements, measuring views, clicks, applications, interviews, and even hires, says JobTarget.

The announcement of the new service was made today.

The analytics are detailed enough to monitor even such things as “when and where candidates abandon their applications, what kinds of technology they’re using, and even what day of the week yields the most candidates,” says the JobTarget announcement.

The company has a network of thousands of niche, regional, and diversity job boards that employers can select from for their job posts. The OneClick Analytics now can help them decide which of them are the most effective, and even help them improve the job post wording.

Optimism returned to the recruiting community in November. That’s what my informal survey here in San Diego at ERE’s Expo tells me.

In conversations, people say things like, “We were told last year that we would start hiring again” or “I started seeing reqs from departments that I hadn’t heard from in a year.”

The vendors on the show floor are more specific: Business inquiries picked up noticeably by November.

After hearing three or four of these comments, I started my survey. An hour ago, Ethan Bloomfield, VP with JobTarget, said “the money started to show up” last summer. But it was November that he noticed “people had better moods.” keep reading…

A big congratulations to this year’s recipients of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. They’ll be in the good company of past winners such as Starbucks, Deloitte, and Enterprise.

You’ll hear about the winners in multiple venues, including upcoming articles on this website, as well as at this week’s conference in San Diego, this Fall’s conference in Hollywood Florida (October 26-27-28), and in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. keep reading…

Today, The Ladders is turning loose MyPipeline, an interesting new service that seems inspired by Twitter.

The announcement will be made this morning at the ERE Expo underway in San Diego.

Now, subscribers to any of The Ladders’ various job boards can opt to follow specific recruiters and receive their job posts. What makes this different, if not better, than following a recruiter on Twitter is that these job posts are not blasted out publicly. As anyone who has used Twitter knows, tweets are public. keep reading…

SourceCon is underway and in the spirit of this event dedicated to the art of finding a certain needle in a haystack loaded with other needles, I should probably not tell you who was named the 2010 Grandmaster Sourcer this morning.

Instead, follow these clues: United Kingdom, Sourceress, and laundry, cheese, Star Trek, Tea, and Tweetups.

keep reading…

A reporter from the Wall Street Journal once asked me what I thought was the greatest secret in recruiting. Such a broad question would usually cause one to ponder, but my immediate response was that abusive hiring processes cost organizations millions of dollars by turning possible customers into lifelong “haters.”

For decades it has been accepted that god-awful treatment of candidates is normal, and that since it is widespread, it’s OK. How anyone in recruiting cannot connect that a poor candidate experience is similar to a poor customer experience and assume that there is a significant negative impact is disturbing. Anyone with a basic knowledge of customer relationship management knows that there is a well-documented correlation between customer satisfaction (with their treatment and the products purchased) and customer retention, i.e. their willingness to buy from the organization again.

Organizations like the Ritz-Carlton and Wal-Mart have elevated monitoring guest satisfaction to a science and know the exact dollar cost of obtaining a customer, upsetting a customer, and losing a lifelong customer. While such evaluation is common in sales and customer support functions, it is nearly unheard of in HR functions, which often interact with a significant volume of potential customers in any given year. The impact of a poor “candidate experience” is uncalculated, unreported, and not discussed, making it quite possibly one of the largest “hidden costs” facing modern organizations. keep reading…

With many of you already packing and getting ready to head out to San Diego next week for a full week of great recruiting events – SourceCon 2010 and ERE Expo 2010 Spring, the rest of you aren’t totally out of luck.

As we have over the past two years, we will be live streaming many of the sessions for free for those of you who can’t make the trip.

Of course we can’t bring you all of the benefits of attending the events live in person like the tremendous networking and access to our expert speaker faculties, but if it is not an option for you to be there in person, clear your schedule from Sunday – Wednesday so you can take advantage of the stream.

SourceCon will be streaming live on Sunday & Monday at www.sourcecon.com and ERE Expo will be streaming live on Tuesday & Wednesday right here on ERE.net.

Here is a schedule of what is available to you:

keep reading…

I’m looking forward to the conversation in San Diego at ERE. (There’s still time to register if you hurry). With any luck, we’ll do something really interesting. I hope that the articles to date will provide a framework for discussion and brainstorming. The session is at 3:15 on Wednesday the 17th. I’m interested in seeing how long it can go.

My presentation will take about 6 or 7 minutes. The rest is conversation. I’m of the opinion that this sort of thing is better done by conversation than a presumptuous lecture.

We’ve covered a broad range of topics in the series to date: Geopolitics, Demographics, Automation, Health Systems, Infrastructure, and Performance Management as a Lifestyle. It’s been a whirlwind tour through a range of possibilities. The idea behind scenario planning is stretching your mind to the point that you can see opportunities and vulnerabilities that you can’t discover otherwise.

As if to underline the energy price scenario ($200 oil), crude prices have moved up about 15% in the past month. Soon the rest of the country will be enjoying $3 gasoline like we have in California. Even so, the point of scenarios is not a crisp set of forecasts. The idea is to get at the underlying structure of possibility.

Here’s the real headline. Disruption is coming to a recruiting operation near you. And, soon. keep reading…

Productivity change in the nonfarm business sector, 1947-2009

How different is what you do today from five years ago? Are you able to find and hire top-notch people faster than before? Have you invested in systems, technology, and process improvements to lower costs and improve the speed to find and present qualified candidates? If not, you are clearly lagging behind those who have, and will have a tough time catching up. The corporate recruiting world is soon to be under full assault from the third-party and RPO world.

The evidence shows that increases in productivity significantly lag the investment in tools and process improvements. We normally first use new technologies to emulate what we already do in another way. It’s only after significant time that we begin to find new and innovative ways to use the tools and adjust our processes accordingly.

An example is the introduction of the typewriter. In the early days of the typewriter a manager would dictate to a stenographer who would take shorthand and then use the typewriter to create a document. This took two people and three steps. It took decades before we got to the point of eliminating the stenographer by having the manager learn to type and enter the document directly. But when this occurred, the profession of stenographer disappeared (as did shorthand), efficiency went up, and the number of people an office needed went down. While this is a very simple example, it illustrates what I mean: It takes a lot of time from the introduction of a new technology for people to learn how to use it and to adjust processes and structures.

From the 1970s through the mid-1990s organizations globally were investing heavily in computers and software and everyone assumed that because of those tools, productivity would soar. For anyone old enough to remember, that did not happen, and lots of economists called this the productivity paradox. It seemed that no investment in technology, computers, or software caused any major change in productivity. Then, around 1995 everything changed. Suddenly productivity began to climb. It has now settled back into a comfortable 2.4 percent per year growth which is still greater per year than before 1970. The great lesson is that investments in technology and process improvements pay off — but it takes time for that to happen.

Recruiting has seen no surge in productivity, and corporate recruiting functions may even be losing ground as the talent market becomes more complex and employer needs change. Relative to most other functions in an organization, HR and recruiting have made little investment in technology and even less in process improvements. A recruiter from 1970 would be very comfortable in most corporate recruiting departments today except for learning to use the computer.

My concern is that recruiters have been and still are too focused on the short term to see that investments they make today will eventually pay off — and pay off tremendously. If you have not made the investments, you are not only behind, but it may be impossible to catch up. Being able to use technology requires a learning curve that early adopters get from the beginning. Look at how hard it is for a middle-aged person to grasp the power of social media or to fully realize the capabilities of the iPhone compared to someone younger who has been working with these technologies from the beginning of their careers. Time is not our friend when it comes to adopting technology, so early investments pay off the most.

Here are a few ideas on what kinds of investments you should be making: keep reading…

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Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Are you clueless about diversity recruiting?
2. Developing and nurturing candidate relationships
3. Working for a boss that doesn’t know recruiting
4. Monthly retainers for recruiters
5. How common is a draw in commission based sales positions these days?
6. Featured group of the week: Independent Recruiters

1. Are you clueless about diversity recruiting?

Sarah Welstead writes, “Age discrimination in the workforce is still prevalent, but it’s based on obsolete information.  The 50+ group is the fastest-growing demographic on the Internet; they’re more productive than younger counterparts (fewer sick days, less-frequent turnover); and our own research found that almost 85% of them had cellphones (and almost 10% of them were using Blackberrys every day)!

What is your take on diversity recruiting? Weigh in on Sarah’s post. keep reading…

The Brazen Careerist has launched an interesting experiment in social recruiting, introducing what the site and its founder Penelope Trunk call a “social resume.”

Aimed squarely at the young Gen-Yers for whom Brazen Careerist was designed, the social resumes allow these early career professionals to offer hints at their potential. Besides all the usual biographical stuff of a traditional resume, these social resumes provide a home for the professional musings and business ideas of the participant.

keep reading…

“Job growth is about to begin,” The Conference Board declared Monday. In the second quarter, says Manpower. “We are already seeing evidence,” insists the Association of Executive Search Consultants.

Even coming upon the heels of a robust labor report last week (that fueled a Wall Street mini-rally) these pronouncements probably won’t do much for the pessimists, but for recruiters, consider the collective news a call to reveille. keep reading…

Recruiting is clearly not for everyone. Its demands can be extraordinary and its customers unrealistic. Its candidates not entirely truthful and its reward often just the self-satisfied glow of a job well done.

By its very nature, recruiting often creates a sense of contrast and contradiction. Hiring managers want the perfect candidate for the lowest price; candidates want the perfect job for the highest price and the government attempts to legislate a fair and level playing filed. Stuck between these conflicting forces, egos, and politics, is the recruiter: a person who is charged with the overwhelming task of identifying, attracting, and hiring the people required to create a great organization. (What is a great organization?)

Here are a few characteristics required to successfully do this job? keep reading…

The most powerful recruiting advertisement I’ve seen in the last two years didn’t originate from Google and it wasn’t found on a social media site; instead it was a “take your breath away” billboard designed to attract a single person.

Usually billboards are a complete waste of money, but this one dared to go where no one has gone before. We’ve all seen the famous 1916 James Montgomery Flagg portrait of Uncle Sam with the caption “I want you for the U.S. Army,” but imagine if instead of a generic message you passed a billboard or poster bearing your name, your image, and a message specific to you, i.e. Nicole Pollock “we want you!” There is zero chance you wouldn’t pull over immediately just to stare, but chances are you would have already learned about it through calls and text messages from your family and friends. Such a startling communication would even cause people who didn’t know you to take notice and to wonder about both you and what kind of organization would be so bold to attempt this type of recruiting.

The roadside billboard was only the beginning of a broad reaching “one-to-one recruiting” campaign launched by Wilkes University to land a single student. In addition to the billboard, it added personalized messages to pizza boxes at the local pizza shop, signs on top of local gas pumps, pre-screening ads in local movie theaters, directory signs in the local mall and even localized ads on MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central. The campaign turned everyone in the community that interacted with Nicole Pollock, the student of interest, into a stakeholder/influencer of her decision, which was ultimately “yes.”

The marketing firm, 160over90, hired by the university, clearly understood the value of the seldom used but powerful one-to-one approach. While not appropriate for every vacancy, the cost of a one-to-one campaign pales in comparison to the value of getting a top performer into a key role. Even if you are not ready to engage in an effort as bold as Wilkes University, there are components of one-to-one recruiting that can bolster any effort. keep reading…

Here is what is going on around the ERE.net world this week:

• Sign up for this week’s free webinar on Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, Going from Good To ‘Elite’!: Becoming an Elite Recruiter, led by David Szary from the Recruiter Academy. David will discuss the competencies, skills, attributes and work habits of elite recruiters.
• We are just a week away from turning San Diego into the recruiting capital of the world as hundreds of recruiters are set to converge on the city for SourceCon and ERE Expo 2010 Spring. If you aren’t able to make it there in person, make sure to keep your schedules clear next week as both SourceCon and ERE Expo will be live streaming many of the sessions right here on ERE.net. Visit the websites for times and agenda information and stay tuned for more about which sessions will be streamed.
• You can also follow and take part in the conversations taking place in San Diego on Twitter by following @ereexpo and the #ereexpo and #sourcecon hashtags.
• Just last week we announced that the third #socialrecruiting summit will be taking place at Best Buy HQ in Minneapolis on May 17. Join the conversation at the only event which cuts through the hype to tell you not WHY you should be using social recruiting tactics, but to help you learn HOW you can successfully implement them into your recruiting function. Check out the agenda and session leaders today at socialrecruitingsummit.com and reserve your spot today. Don’t wait too long, space is limited and the summit has sold out in the past.
• For those of you on the search and placement side of the business, you will want to get yourself to Las Vegas from June 9 – 11 for the fourth annual Fordyce Forum. Brought to you by our sister publication The Fordyce Letter, this is the conference for big billers to talk about how to consistently earn five and six-figure fees. Check out all of the information and book your spot at www.fordyceforum.com.

9.7 percent and holding steady. Net job loss in February 2010: 36,000. Net job loss in February 2009: 726,000.

That’s the top line of the monthly Labor Department’s employment numbers for February. The results surprised most economists who had been expecting a higher job loss because of the snowstorms that crippled big parts of the U.S. last month.

The good news, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, is that but for the weather, the numbers would have shown an increase in jobs during the month. Citing Morgan Stanley economist David Greenlaw, the Journal says, “payrolls would’ve increased sharply last month — and would be expected to show strong growth in the March (employment) report.”

So take that you naysayers and prophets of doom. The U.S. may not exactly be booming, but it appears those predictions of job growth in the second quarter of 2010 are spot on. keep reading…

At the ERE Expo in San Diego, March 15-17, 2010, I’ll be describing what it takes to be a true corporate headhunter. This is a recruiter who can go head to head with his or her external rivals without compromising quality of hire or time to fill. To pull it off though, you’ll have to break some company rules and break from tradition. In the process you will probably aggravate your comp, compliance, legal, and I/O departments, at least at first. Hopefully, your recruiting manager will intercede and act as a buffer as you plow ahead making a positive contribution.

Before you know it, your hiring managers will be carrying you on their shoulders as you begin to consistently deliver far better candidates than your external rivals. Without unnecessary and contrived restraints you’ll also be finding more diverse candidates, passing every EEO and OFCCP audit and eliminating every wrongful hiring or discharge lawsuit. Within a year even the comp, I/O, and compliance departments will be singing your praise as you bring in more top performers without breaking the compensation budget. (The legal department might be a bit smaller though, since it will have less to do.)

Now to get started with my confession, which will soon become yours, you’ll need to get a sense of the hiring manager support you’ll soon be getting. As an example, here’s an email we just received from a former hiring manager client:

Many years ago Lou hosted an offsite manager event for Synaptics. A few months later I left Synaptics to found a startup with two good friends.It was a fantastic opportunity to take the Adler approach and apply it to a company on day one. I think Lou would be proud to know how much of an impact he has had on our organization four years later.

(Note: Synaptics is a major developer of touchpad technology, and the person’s new company is a well-known, rapidly growing social networking company.)

With this as a backdrop, here’s the short version of my confession, as to how I transformed from being a corporate recruiter into a more successful corporate headhunter. (Caution: go slowly as you try this out. This is only an overview. I’ll provide the longer version and more of the tactics at the 2010 Spring ERE Expo.): keep reading…