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Thanks for so many of you responding to my recent survey about this column. Virtually everyone seems to think that the topics covered this year have been provocative and interesting. The one voted the best was the series on world class staffing. The top two desires for future columns are to focus on sourcing and retention. Other interests are on new technologies, metrics, attracting the passive candidate, general recruiting trends, how to recruit specific types of candidates (e.g. seniors, military, minorities), and on the regional aspects of recruitment. All are great topics and I will strive to tackle most of them during 1999. For all of us who are involved with employment – whether it is looking for good people or developing the tools and processes to make finding good people easier, faster and cheaper – both 1999 and 2000 will be seminal years. These two years, I think, will be the ones in which the technologies and process that dominate the next decade will be born and grow. We have seen some early starts, as I indicate below, but the next 24 months will be explosive. Companies will emerge that are focused on finding automated, Internet-based ways of doing everything from screening candidates to doing background checking and new employee orientation. The shortage of skilled people will not change for at least a decade, which means that the recruiting profession will have to change. It will have to focus on customer service, on public relations and advertising and on building long-term relationships. Here are a few more specific predictions for the next 12 months:

1. Even small companies will find themselves looking at applicant tracking systems of some type to help them more efficiently and quickly process candidates. Likely winners for 1999 will be Personic Software and Icarian.

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When companies first started registering their domain names, most chose the company name itself. For instance, IBM is at www.ibm.com, Cisco is at www.cisco.com and so on. Of course, this type of domain name makes it easy to find the company’s public site – the one the company wants you to visit. But large companies often have more than one Web site. And, on some of those sites reside directories, white papers, association lists and all sorts of things with names of people waiting to be found. One of those people could be your candidate. This week, we’ll look at how to find a company’s other domain names. Then, in the next couple of weeks we’ll look at:

• finding particular files in those particular Web sites

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Have a shortage of candidates? An “Employer of Choice” (EOC) like HP, for example may get as many as 1,000 resumes a day! Becoming an EOC isn’t easy but it certainly can help solve your shortage of applicants. An EOC is a conscious corporate-wide employment strategy designed to re-make a company image as “a great place to work.” EOC is a term used by recruiters to designate a company that, because of it’s status and reputation as a great place to work, is always the first choice (or at least on the short list) of world-class candidates. One obvious advantage to the company is that it can easily attract and retain the top talent it needs to produce a quality product. In addition, EOCs get name recognition, which helps build the firm’s brand, and it also usually improves sales. Many companies say “employees are our # 1 asset” but if you really believe that, then becoming the EOC needs to be the primary corporate goal… Because it is the only/best way to attract and retain those “most important assets.” There is no plaque awarded to for EOC status but there are many benefits that can accrue to a firm that reaches it. ADVANTAGES OF BEING AN EOC INCLUDE:

• Ease in attracting quality talent.

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The resume or curriculum vitae (Latin meaning course of life) is dead as we know it. This decade of the Internet has already changed the way we look for work, are screened for work, and are recruited. The resume in its usually rather drab and inconsistent dress has gradually given way to the list of key words that satisfy the applicant tracking systems and automated database entry that most large companies now own. Even smaller companies are opting to use an outside service to scan resumes or are purchasing any of a number of smaller systems that are cost effective and adequate for organizations with low volumes of openings and resumes. These rather crude matching systems are now evolving into interactive tools for building resumes in real time and for simultaneously conducting aptitude and interest testing. Entire books have been written giving hints on how to write a resume for this electronic age. Many of them include lists of words that will get your resume noticed by a recruiter. Many job seekers trade secrets and discuss strategies on how to beat the system and get their resume into the hands of an actual human recruiter who may see merit where the computer doesn’t. At outplacement seminars topics include discussion and practice in crafting resumes that list all relevant words that might result in a match with a job. Applicants are taught how to read a job decryption and ferret out the significant words and phrases. Dictionaries of key words are passed around the Internet. There are 5 downsides to resumes from an employers perspective: (1) they are written by the candidate and show only favorable information and use key words to influence the matching process, (2) they do not include all the information an employer may want, (3) they are too general to clearly identify what the candidate is interested in, (4) they require a written (and administratively time consuming) response, and (5) they have to be scanned into some form of database to be easily accessible to hiring managers and recruiters. As the job market remains tight for skilled people (and it will remain this way for at least the next decade despite the economy, Asia, or Clinton simply because of supply), the paper resume will slip into oblivion. The process of applying for a job will be more interactive and more focused on a variety of parameters rather than the few that can be encompassed in a resume. I think all of us agree that our careers are more than a piece of paper. I have heard candidates say countless times: “My resume doesn’t really reflect what I can do.” Sharp managers also realize that a person who has a skill doesn’t necessarily become a great employee. Other things such as attitude, energy level, creativity, and philosophy all play a part in making someone a good employee. These are traits and abilities that don’t come across on paper very well. Because of this, some organizations are now developing web sites that build a resume for you by asking the questions the company wants to ask and by ‘forcing’ you to supply the information the organization needs to make a decision about proceeding on with you or not. Cisco and Microsoft have built web sites that not only build a resume, of sorts, but also screen you for a variety of jobs based on how you answer a series of questions. Microsoft has developed an on-line aptitude test that then automatically recommends a variety of jobs that a candidate might be interested in. More companies will begin automating the process of gathering basic information about a candidate. The process is already accelerating as we end 1998. Korn Ferry has teamed up with the Wall Street Journal to offer FutureStep, a program that determines interest and aptitude and then builds an on-line profile in real time of potential candidates. World Hire, a newly started company in Austin, Texas has developed a number of tools that aid a company in building a profile of potential candidates and then ranks candidates based on how they have responded to questions that have been weighted by the hiring manager. World Hire also builds an on-going relationship with candidates and keeps information current. I predict that between now and the turn of the century most large companies will have modified their web sites to include interactive, real-time resume building. These sites will take the candidate through a discovery process about the company and the potential jobs. They will be very interactive, have video and audio, and give a prospective candidate a realistic preview of what the company is like. At the same time, the site will collect information from the candidate about education and experience, probe for skills, assess interests, ask for opinions and ideas, and in the end offer a hiring manager a much more rounded picture of a candidate than can be done with a paper resume. Look for more and more tools and companies to pop up that help your create these sites. Also look for tools that evaluate skills and that assess interests. These are available now but will be greatly enhanced and sophisticated over the next two years. The resume has had a good run — more than 80 years — and will live on electronically in a vastly different format. May all those resumes in file cabinets and file folders around the world rest in peace as they crumble into dust.

Do your searches still produce myriad unwanted results? Read the suggestions put out by the University of California at Berkeley. In this easy-to-understand article, there is a superb table that categorizes the types of searches you might want to do and how best to go about them. They break your type of search into the features that you might be looking for. For instance, are you looking for a proper name or phrase? Or are you looking for information “about” something, such as an industry? Perhaps you’re looking for a rather common phrase that has so many contexts, your search results become a new search on their own. Or are there numerous words to describe the type of person you’re looking for and you’re not sure which is best? UCB gives you suggestions for how to conduct your search in each of the above trying situations. There is a dandy little chart that explains how best to incorporate search operators and phrases to help you get better results. Read it-it can save you an amazing amount of time in your future searches. If you’re not a fan of reading tables, and find tables hard to follow, there’s also a text version that includes details and very specific search instructions.

Intraplacement is a dynamic process that uses the tools and strategies of external search and applies them to internal candidates. Internal candidates are superior to external candidates because they usually have a much higher success rate in their new jobs than external candidates. This is because they already know “our” culture and they have already performed well in it. But they might also be “passive job seekers” with poor job search skills. If you don’t act to keep their career moving they could easily become your next retention problem. The goals and objectives of Intraplacement: The basic goal of Intraplacement is to increase the number and quality of growth opportunities available to current employees. Intraplacement works because there are many employees (and particularly technical staff) that have low job search initiative and weak interviewing or job search skills. Internal systems can also be so confusing or frustrating that employees often postpone any internal search. Sometimes they will only act when they get direct help from another source and unfortunately, that is often the executive search professional that calls them with a new external job opportunity with another firm! The second goal of Intraplacement is to improve the retention of key people, because “if we don’t place them (internally)… an outside firm will.” Intraplacement is a prevention strategy that “pushes” or guides key employees into new opportunities rather than waiting for them to “jump” on their own. Intraplacement also offers a variety of challenges in addition to the traditional promotion opportunities. A strategic goal of Intraplacement is to help redeploy a firms “Human Assets” to areas of business need (and opportunity). Intraplacement facilitates the movement and helps direct it from areas of low return to those of higher return. (Yes, this means moving people when the corporation needs it as well as just when the employee wants to go!) Another goal of Intraplacement programs is to motivate and excite the workers. Continually challenging workers through internal placement will increase employee motivation and growth. An added side benefit will be that you will enhance your firm’s image, so it will be easier to attract new workers. A final goal of Intraplacement is to get managers more involved in the development of their employees. Currently it is solely the employee’s responsibility to grow his or her own career. Rather than being advocates of movement and growth, some managers actually “hold back” their best employees in order to protect their own self-interest. By including metrics and individual rewards for managers that attract, develop, and grow employees (theirs and ones from other departments) more learning, movement and growth will occur. With Intraplacement, managers can become more of an equal partner in the growth and movement of employees. Companies like Intel, Sun Micro, HP, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Silicon Graphics are famous for the internal movement and the development of their people. They have all advanced beyond relying on “paper” postings and have added mechanisms to increase the movement of their employees. Steps in Intraplacement: Intraplacement programs must be customized to the culture of the company. However there are some common steps almost all firms go through in implementing an Intraplacement program. They include:

1. Start with tracking the movement (or lack of) for all key employees and identify those that are “stagnant” (haven’t moved in __ years). Be sure to monitor for diversity and any possible adverse impact.

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With over 2,500 job posting sites on the Internet, hundreds of newspapers, and a multitude of job fairs to choose from, on a limited budget, it can seem overwhelming to determine the most effective ways to spend recruitment dollars. The goal is to achieve the highest qualified response rate per dollar spent. Incorporating a thorough, well-planned, Internet campaign into your current recruiting strategy will significantly increase the exposure of your positions and decrease your cost per hire. The key to success is spending the time up front to develop a well-planned marketing strategy. Continue to think strategically about the most efficient and effective ways to reach your target market.

• Evaluate your recruitment budget as ONE pool of money. This includes allocations for Job Fairs, Print Advertising, Search Fees, and all other resources for finding qualified candidates.

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FIFTEEN WAYS TO FIND EMPLOYEES: More than ever recruiters and managers have to be creative and willing to experiment in order to locate and woo candidates to their organizations. Here are a list of fifteen ways you can find candidates. 1. Attend conferences just to scout out potential talent. Start building a relationship by chatting, offering them a coffee, telling them about you and your organization. Make sure they know how to get in touch with you and you with them. Other types of meetings or community service events also offer you a chance to recruit. A good salesman, so the saying goes, never rests. 2. Hang out (or get the right recruiter or manager in your organization to) at the places your candidates hang out. If you are looking for programmers into the good life, try micro- breweries or small nightclubs and bars. Pass out your cards. Make acquaintances. Ask around to find out who does what, for whom and how they are regarded. This has worked well for Cisco and other Silicon Valley firms and can work for you too. You have to go to where THEY are. It’s really not hard to find out where the hottest spots are or what hobbies are ‘in’ at the moment and then place yourself there. 3. Go to a job fair like a Westec (obviously an event on the West coast, but there are similar ones all over the country) and raffle off a top-of-the-line bicycle or sports car or Sun workstation. Although the items may be expensive, they are cheap compared to endless and fruitless ads! The publicity you’ll get if you stage this right is worth a fortune. You can even get TV and radio coverage if you get your PR or advertising group to help. Send out press releases. Make it a BIG DEAL! 4. Hold an informational or educational session carefully planned to attract the type of candidate you need. Send out an invitation to a list of people in a certain profession or who subscribe to a certain magazine. Make it an early evening event with wine and cheese or some other snack appropriate to your audience. Offer a real education value make sure you really deliver — but gather business cards and infiltrate the audience with your managers so they can chat and start building relationships. Last year for example, the Charles Schwab Corporation held an event to educate programmers about investing. Invitations were extended to about 1,000 people and over 400 showed up. Schwab collected business cards. Each speaker talked for 2-3 minutes about Schwab and what it was like to work there. Everyone who attended got real value and learned a lot about investing better. Schwab eventually hired about 50 people from that event. And the cost was minimal — just a hotel room and some snacks. All speakers were employees. 5. Offer ANYONE who checks out your corporate web site a chance to find out more about your organization and its jobs. Make it easy for them to click and be led into a well designed series of web pages that entice and explain. Make the candidate want to apply and make it easy for them to do it. Promise them a personal call if they apply after filling out a qualifying form, or promise them some form of contact quickly. Every hour that goes by diminishes your chance of closing the deal. 6. Build strong relationships with professors and instructors on college and university campuses. Many college students rely heavily on the advice of their professors when making a career decision. Some studies show that professors have more influence than spouses, close friends, or parents. So if you and your company are well regarded, you will have a leg up over the competition. But, these relationships are built over years and take a commitment on your part. The good thing is that the relationships often go with you, whether you are a recruiter or a manager, and help you no matter what organization you are with. The belief is that if you are there the organization must be OK. 7. Join everything! Belong to as many professional associations and local groups as you can. Keep your involvement at a professional level, not at a recruiting level. Offer to make presentations, contribute and yet make it known that you are always ready to help someone find a job (even if it’s not in your area of need). The more good will you build up, the easier it will be to tap into the group when you are really in need. I have friends who make this a mainstay of their sourcing efforts. The by-product is in-depth information about candidates. You will really know who is strong, who is weak, who is liked and who isn’t and why. All of this can be invaluable in making the right decision for your organization. 8. Re-recruit those who have left. Remember that a great source of candidates are those previous employees who decided to seek greener grass. Many are more than likely willing to return. Your job is to find out where they are (and actually you should have never let them leave without knowing how to stay in touch), discover why they left (the real reason) and then try to remove objections and overcome reluctance. Get them back to talk to key people, court them actively, and try to get management over any anger at them because they left or were disloyal. We all like to try new things and are probably stronger and more experienced for it. If you are new to the company yourself ask for a list from HR of those who have left in the past six months. Call them up and ask them to fill you in on the company as you are new. Get to know them a little and find out if re-recruiting is feasible or not. You can both benefit from this. 9. Use high school students now and hire them later. I have written a previous column about school-to-career programs (October 1st, 1998) which outlines in detail what these programs are. Basically they are designed to provide a high school student with some work experience and to give them a chance to learn workplace skills. Many go on to college and can work part-time or full-time in the summer and then become regular employees. These programs are wonderful in that they give you a chance to screen and mold future employees. You get to guide their school work and get them focussed on what you need as a company. They get a good job and the guidance that many of them need to make tough choices. Many companies get a significant portion of entry-level people through these programs quite inexpensively. 10. Other similar programs focus on welfare people re-entering the workplace after being trained with tax dollars. Some organizations are using released prisoners in certain types of jobs. 11. Hire the elderly and those who have already retired once. Many of these senior citizens are happy to get back to work, to learn and contribute. They are excellent workers and are obviously less likely to be enticed away for a few dollars. If you are in an area with many retired people, you are siting on a potential gold mine of skills, knowledge and talent. Go to the retirement communities and groups that have a large percent of older people. Offer them benefits that are attractive to them such as medical benefits that will augment Medicare or more expensive eye care instead of life insurance or child care. This is where a partnership with your benefits department is invaluable. 12. Offer more people fewer hours and more flexibility in work schedules. This can be a source of many people who are constrained by family or other duties from full time, 8-5 employment. If you can restructure jobs so that they can be shared, done at different times, or done at home, you can reduce your need for harder to find fulltime workers. 13. Move parts of your business to areas that have attractive lifestyles and high unemployment. Although these areas are harder and harder to find, they do exist. Many high tech companies have opened design centers of 5-25 employees in remote areas of Oregon, Washington, and Colorado because of the life style and the fact that families like to live in these areas. They can then attract the best designers to move there. There are also fewer temptations for these people so turnover goes down. 14. Develop work-while-you-learn programs that are focused on bringing in a group of people who can perform one job while they are learning to do another more difficult or more complex job. For example, C++ programmers can be productively working halftime while studying Java programming. This trend will continue to grow over the next several years as certain skills die away or become less needed and others are growing rapidly. 15. Go global. Many countries have few jobs and lots of skilled people. Central Europe and parts of Asia fall into this category. High tech has been tapping this market for a decade, but others can too. Many of these countries have excellent teachers, mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. Many are willing to learn new skills and may even fit the category above (#14). There are many third party companies that bring these people to America legally and with proper visas and then help them find employment. You can utilize these services easily and at a reasonable cost. I hope these stimulate your thinking. If you have an idea that I haven’t mentioned, I would like to hear about it. Send me an email at kwheeler@ricochet.net. Let’s keep this list growing. See you next week. Happy Holidays to everyone.

So, you’ve found a newsgroup posting that interests you. Apparently she’s got the skills, understands the lingo, seems articulate…But don’t jump the gun. Check her out a bit first. Think of it as a pre-screening. Author-profiling is a great way to see who has said what. It’s a statistical summary of articles originating from a particularly identified person. This helps you decide whether postings are from reliable sources; it’s a multi-step process. For instance, let’s say you found a resume or an interesting post from Jane Doe. Go to the Power Search page, leave the “Search For” box blank, but put in at least a partial e-mail address for Ms. Doe. This brings back a listing of all the postings made by anyone who has “Doe” in their e-mail name. (For more information, see last week’s issue on “Didja Know of DejaNews”. You could then read what the person has posted and where. But, to save time, click on one of the postings. To the right of the screen you’ll find a link to author-profiling. Clicking on it will give you the number of postings the person has made and where they were made-almost makes spying seem easy. USENET II – FOR THE SERIOUS USER If you’ve been to the newsgroups you probably know there’s a great deal of spam, off-topic postings, and commercialization. Certainly, this takes away from your ability to efficiently find people you need. Passing by all the spam is often time-consuming, particularly as spammers have become better writers. You now have a choice. You can try out Usenet II (UII), which tries to deal with some of those problems. It has carved out a piece of Usenet and made it subject to consensus controls. What this means is that a newsgroup can become part of Usenet II by being a “sound” site-one that has no spam but has content. Clearly this is a controlling step. Groups are determining what can and can not pass through. However, no matter where you fall on the side of control of the Internet, having two Usenet sources to troll can’t be all bad. For further information, see Usenet II, which offers a clear explanation of acceptable policies as well as a listing of which groups already participate. Or, view a clear explanation of their goals.

In these times of low unemployment, recruiters are constantly on the lookout for the best talent to fill open positions. We put tremendous resources into external sourcing and recruiting, but most of the time we fail to actively seek out some of the best candidates in the world-those that are literally right under our noses… our own employees! Sure, most companies have internal job posting systems but many were designed in the 1950′s before Generation Xer’s and technology came along! These traditional systems almost universally rely on the employee to initiate the search for a position while Intraplacement systems use Intrarecruiters to proactively seek out and place the best internal candidates (even though they might not be actively seeking a new position)! Intraplacement is a dynamic process that uses the tools and strategies of external search and applies them to internal candidates. Internal candidates are superior to external candidates because they usually have a much higher success rate in their new jobs than external candidates. This is because they already know “our” culture and they have already performed well in it. But they might also be “passive job seekers” with poor job search skills. If you don’t act to keep their career moving, they could easily become your next retention problem. Many existing job-posting systems have serious flaws. Employees are often frustrated with them for a variety of reasons. Finding out the “real scoop” on a potential new job takes hours of “detective” work and if you are not well connected, it’s a shot in the dark. Firms post the openings on the bulletin board but just browsing through it can get you instantly branded as a disloyal team member. Some bosses even “hold back” the best employees from transfers for their own advantage and brand those who transfer often as “job jumpers.” Increasing the internal movement of our employees through Intraplacement (it can also be called “Intrasourcing” or “Intramovement”) has additional benefits beyond the higher success rates of internal candidates. These include “back-fill” capabilities in case of an unexpected opening; increased retention rates; higher levels of motivation, and an increase and expansion of our employees’ competencies. The currently tight job market has forced companies to look at new ways to motivate, grow, and retain their workers. Intraplacement reduces turnover by increasing opportunities for employees to grow and to be challenged. It assists employees in moving to new projects, opportunities, and jobs within the company. Effective Intraplacement Programs use a combination of internal posting, external sourcing, and career development tools to accomplish its goals. This piece will give you insight into how top firms have increased their internal movement. It will help you improve your current job posting system or show you how to replace it with a totally new Intraplacement system. How does Intraplacement differ from current programs? Intraplacement differs from the more traditional job posting systems in a variety of ways including:

• Intraplacement is a shared partnership where the company assists candidates by increasing their opportunities to learn and grow within the firm. Under the traditional job posting systems candidates are pretty much “on their own” to place themselves. Intraplacement is a proactive approach that helps employees get placed. It assumes that many internal candidates are “passive” and that they don’t automatically possess great job search skills (if they did, they might use them to leave our company)!

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