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TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications’ North American operations have been sold to Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a media-focused private equity and mezzanine capital fund management company for $45 million by Monster Worldwide.

TMP is one of the top three recruitment advertising agencies, along with the Bernard Hodes Group and J Walter Thompson.

“The sale of our business in North America is consistent with the earlier divestments of our TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications businesses in Europe and the Asia Pacific region,” Andrew J. McKelvey, Monster’s chairman and chief executive officer said in a press release Thursday.

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A couple of weeks ago I presented a case study about a recruiting director named Mark who was faced with numerous challenges and decisions. His organization is not well-known, and is growing faster than Mark can bring in the talent it needs.

He has run ads, posted jobs, and created a recruiting website but is not getting the volume of quality candidates he needs. He’s considering using a recruitment processing outsourcing firm to help but isn?t sure it can do any better than he can. He is debating between building more internal capability and going the recruitment process outsourcing route. He is also struggling with how to create more name recognition and visibility for his company with likely candidates.

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Candidates know that making a good first impression is critical. They also know that their first impression of their potential employer is an important element in their decision. The little stuff ? timeliness, courtesy, and respect for privacy ? say more about the company than the shiny brochure or user-friendly career site. The overall experience a top candidate has throughout the recruiting process can make the difference in which offer he or she will take at the end of the process. Yet, many recruiters don’t give much attention to creating a positive candidate experience.

There are so many avenues to impress or offend a candidate during the course of the recruiting process. Believe it or not, there are countless candidates who tell a story about a company that didn’t give them time to use the restroom or get water at an on-site interview. Other candidates talk about the company that got back to them within a day of the interview, and they remembered that positively even if they didn’t get the offer. Candidates talk. Many times, top candidates in the same geography and industry know each other. And it’s the negative stories that usually come up. Candidates may walk away saying, “If that’s how they treat people, do I want to work there?”

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Recently I attended a meeting of HR executives at the leadership development center of a big company based in Minneapolis. The subject of the meeting was recruiting challenges, particularly the difficulty in finding top talent?the A players. Appropriately enough, on one wall of the facility was a saying: “So easy to find an army, so hard to find a general.” This was attributed to some ancient Chinese philosopher (apparently no one in China has had anything interesting to say in the last 2,000 years). Of course they might have just found it in a fortune cookie, but it sounds better if attributed to Sun Tzu. But deeper thought brought the realization that this statement was not exactly profound. Old man Sun was probably in a philosophical slump when he came up with this one. He was only stating the obvious: good leaders are hard to find. Few are called, even fewer are chosen.

But even finding a good army is hard. An army represents all the people the general depends on to get the job done. For every A player an organization has there needs to be lots of B players. And this is where recruiting needs to focus its energies. A players are hard to find but there aren’t that many jobs that require A players either. Dave Lefkow recently wrote about recruiting B players and I couldn’t agree more. So why do recruiters always strive to hire the “best”? Part of the reason is no organization likes to admit they accept anything but the best. But this creates unrealistic expectations and unnecessary pressure on recruiting. Hiring the best may be possible for an organization with an unlimited budget, but that doesn’t apply to anyone I know. Leave aside the fact that an organization with all A players would likely implode under the weight of all those egos; one reason Enron turned out to be such a fiasco was because it was packed with hotshots. The B players, like whistleblower Sherron Watkins, were shunted aside.

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Corporate employers are generally divided on the question of whether a long-anticipated shortage of talent will soon emerge and stress their growth plans.

While most companies have seen some signs of a talent shortage, 39% report no such indications. At the same time, one-third of organizations have already taken steps to update selection and recruitment criteria. Nevertheless, 10% of employers expect no shortage of talent in the next decade.

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article by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

In last week’s article, we introduced the concept of paradigm paralysis and discussed at a high level how existing HR technology “solutions” have become more of a barrier to next-generation staffing processes than an enabler, which technology has always been considered.

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Who better to build Monster Worldwide’s Asia Pacific operations than an experienced marketing manager who helped expand one of the world’s biggest brands with a swoosh across the Pacific Rim?

That’s the notion that moved Monster Worldwide to recruit former Nike executive Tony Balfour as president of its Asia Pacific operations, a newly created position the online recruiting giant hopes will help propel the growth of its existing operations in India, South Korea, China, and elsewhere in the region.

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More than half of private and public companies have increased their employee benefits for recruiting and retention purposes over the last six months, according to a recent nationwide survey of hiring managers, recruiters, and human resource professionals. But unlike the flashy perks and glitzy giveaways some offered in the frenetic late 1990′s, companies are now increasingly focused on ‘bennies’ that support their employees’ sense of work-life balance.

“In the late 90′s, it was commonplace to hear about companies with recruiting campaigns that included extreme employee perks such as company cars, game rooms with foosball tables, huge sign-on bonuses, and chef-prepared lunches,” says Heather Galler, CEO of JobKite.com. “That ship has sailed.”

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Let’s start this article with two BHAGs (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals). The first one: reduce turnover of all newly hired sales people by 50%. The second one: reduce the time to their achieving quota by half. These goals are in the bag if you do these three things before you hire another salesperson:

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In the last few weeks I’ve been contacted by a number of people looking to hire recruiters, and apparently having little luck. I’m also seeing big increases in bonuses offered for employee referrals, and signs of frustration (and desperation) among HR professionals in charge of recruitment. Some of my friends who run search firms are turning away business. If any further proof was needed that for recruiters happy days are here again, then look no further than the ERE conference this past spring. That was the most well-attended one that I can remember and for once no one handed me a resume or described their current situation as being “in transition.” Let the good times roll.

There’s something familiar about this. We have been here before. The late ’90s and all the way up until 2001 was a virtually identical period. Then as now, unemployment was low and recruiters were as popular as Paris Hilton’s video (though for entirely different reasons). But having experienced all this before, are we any smarter now in how we approach recruiting and talent acquisition?

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Here are few comments I have recently received from recruiters about what they are experiencing. It seems that some things never change.

“I have received almost 500 resumes for a single position. Over 90% of these people are not qualified or not what my company is looking for.” Another wrote, “I have been overwhelmed with candidates; some fit our needs but most don’t even take the time to read the job description. I wish I could reply to every candidate, but if I did I would not be doing my job!”

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A combination of issues is reshaping the war for healthcare talent in the American Southwest.

If the scarcity of healthcare talent wasn’t enough of a challenge, consider how a spate of recent deals that has resulted in the sale or closure of hospitals and California laws that regulate minimum nurse staffing levels have stressed the region’s healthcare recruiting market and increased the competition for the best talent.

Kristin W. Alexander, senior healthcare recruiter with Glendale Memorial Hospital and Health Center, a Catholic Healthcare West institution in Glendale, California, says her hospital’s top priorities are filling hard-to-recruit positions, much the same as with many of the Catholic system’s 43 other hospitals in California, Nevada, and Arizona.

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Recruiting is, within many organizations, slowly emerging as a more credible and well-informed force within the business community. As a result, many recruiters can have a more significant impact in hiring decisions, as organizations look not just for growth and the talent required to gain a competitive advantage, but for guidance and counsel on how to get there. Recruiting is closing in on making more of an impact organizationally then ever before. (See Recruiting Today: Good People in Difficult Times for a totally differently perspective.)

Recruiters who wish to seize this opportunity to make a difference, to be on the vanguard of great recruiting and noble contributions, can do so, but the price of admission is high. You must work hard and you must work smart. You must push forth initiatives that support organizational objectives and most of all, you must be willing to use technology, people skills, and critical thinking to reinvent not just the recruiting profession but yourself.

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article by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Anyone who knows either of us well knows that we often speak highly of the role that technology plays in the modern organization. For us technology has and will forever be an enabler: a tool that lets us accomplish more than we could without it.

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Should recruiting be part of the human resources department? A recent survey of 256 staffing professionals shows that 45% believe the role of recruiting does not belong in a traditional HR department.??

“More than any other function, recruiting shapes the future of an organization,” says Maureen Conn, U.S. staffing manager at Siemens VDO Automotive in Troy, Michigan. “Companies need to ask themselves where they want to be in 10 years, and they should remember that the future is driven by the people we select to have as part of our team. Some companies may view recruiting as a transactional department, but really, they should view it as a business partner to effect corporate strategy. The business world tends to view HR as incompetent police and that makes it difficult [for recruiters] to get a seat at the strategic table.”

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The softening residential real estate market is tightening recruiting plans for the nation’s realtors.

After the number of real estate agents in the country nearly doubled between 2000 and 2005, the National Association of Realtors expects the number of agents to stay flat in this year compared to last.

With unit sales of existing homes predicted to be down 6.5% this year, Walter Molony, a spokesman for the group, said the number of realtors is expected to be close to the nearly 1.3 million sales agents working in 2005.

That 1.3 million compares to just 767,000 as recently as 2000.

Molony said the drop in home sales is the most severe in California, Florida, and the Mid-Atlantic with some upturn in the less-pricey areas in the nation’s midsection.

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In our just completed 2006 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey, 68% of the respondents indicated that sourcing was a major problem ? comparable to dealing with hiring managers who supposedly don’t know what they’re doing. This seems very odd, since 55% of this same group said that they were satisfied or very satisfied with their sourcing efforts. The only thing I can infer from this seemingly inconsistent data is that people are measured largely on how busy they are, not on the results they achieve.

However, if you do care about getting better results with the sourcing channels you are using, here are some tips. To use them, you must agree now to send me your results, because I do care about these things.

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As special interests pressure the U.S. Senate to lift the cap on H-1B visas, a computer programmer advocacy group is filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice against more than 300 IT services employers whose ‘Help Wanted’ ads it believes discriminate against American citizens, denying workers here equal access to U.S. jobs.

The Summit, New Jersey-based Programmers Guild is filing employment discrimination claims with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related discrimination. The complaints allege that the companies have discriminated against U.S. citizens and permanent residents in job postings that express preference towards hiring foreign workers on H-1B, L-1, or student visas.

John Miano, who founded the Programmers Guild in 1998, is filing the cases because he says there has been a major lack of oversight by the federal government regarding some employers’ openly favoring foreign workers over American workers.

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On more than one occasion, people who should know better have criticized my articles on behavioral interviewing. The gist is they know more than anyone else and make a living promoting an “easier” technique that presumably achieves the same results. Nonsense!

These claims can be filed under the “wonder platinum gasoline additive,” the “magnetic mileage improver,” and the list of politicians who vote their conscience instead of their welfare. The sooner we all understand the basics of behavioral interviewing, the sooner these silly arguments can end.

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Alaska Governor Frank H. Murkowski has instituted an immediate hiring freeze for the state government because of the several million dollars Alaska is losing in taxes and royalties every day resulting from BP’s decision to shut down the Prudhoe Bay oil field to stem pipeline corrosion.

BP has since announced plans to keep the Western half of the oil field online, which will allow it to produce 200,000 barrels per day, or about half its pre-shutdown capacity, by the end of the month.

“Alaska has had a wake-up call,” Murkowski said in a statement about the ongoing crisis. “With 86 percent of our revenues coming from oil taxes, we are vulnerable to any decline in production.”

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