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The number of U.S. tech jobs jumped 140,000 between January and June, a 2.5% rise, for a total of 5.81 million. This is nearly double the 78,900 tech jobs added in the first half of 2005 and the strongest job growth of any six-month period since 2001, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the technology trade association AeA.

January to June tech-job growth lags that of the private sector overall, which rose by 3.5% in the same period.

Technology manufacturers added 33,100 net jobs in the United States in the first half of 2006, for a total of 1.37 million jobs, a 2.5% increase, the second consecutive year that high-tech manufacturing is seeing net job growth.

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If you want to hire top quality candidates in the shortest period of time at a reasonable cost, you’ll need to organize your team to meet the ever more challenging recruiting demands of your company.

In my opinion, most corporate recruiting departments have been created using the Lone Ranger model. Hiring third-party recruiters and allowing them to play using their own rules is a losing proposition. It’s inefficient, results are unpredictable, and doing this leaves your recruiting efforts at risk if one of your starters leaves. If you want to scale “best practices and best processes,” you have to start with a well-organized team of specialists doing the right things every time.

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Vendors selling products to recruiters as well as corporations trying to get the attention of job candidates are producing short, hip, fun videos that, deliberately or not, are winding up on the online video-sharing site YouTube.com.

Though not suitable for all audiences, this clip from Accolo sends the message that hiring the right person makes all the difference.

The video, produced to spoof a controversial Carl’s Jr. fast-food television advertisement starring Paris Hilton, was based on the premise that perhaps the rail-thin celebrity had neither washed a car nor eaten a hamburger in her life, according to John Younger, president and chief executive officer. The video was uploaded to an internal link ? the link was forwarded to a few friends, who let their friends know about it ? and within days, numerous news organizations were contacting the company and the video became an unexpected hit. Younger estimates that 17 million people have since seen the online video, a data figure that does not include television audiences.

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A few days ago I was talking with a client who had, like most of us, spent a lot of time and money developing a recruiting website. She had put together a very functional site with up-to-date job listings and excellent information about the products and services the organization was delivering. The site had interactivity, an online profiler, and even offered some streaming audio content.

This is the kind of recruiting website that makes the reviews of good sites and attracts a lot of compliments. That’s how it came to my attention. Unfortunately, she could not provide any information about who was accessing the site or how they were using it. Increasingly, I see that recruiters have instituted a “half” website and have forgotten to include the other half, which is to track the statistics about the site that will give them feedback to make improvements.

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Consider the following disparate facts: In 2004, approximately 58% of traffic accidents were due to improper driving (source: InfoPlease.com); in August, approximately 36% of employees turned over (source: www.nobscot.com).

You are probably asking yourself, “What do car accidents and employee turnover have in common?” The answer is, “More than you think!”

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Whether your reason is to reduce recruiting costs or maintain an easy reach into the professionals’ cache of tools and technology, the results of a recent survey suggest that recruitment process outsourcing is not one thing for all people. In fact, 62% say the allure of RPO is to increase recruiting effectiveness (of 131 people, 81 listed that as the most important reason; another 35 listed that as an important reason), while 44% of those playing up the tactical approach suggest that RPO provides the best access to candidate databases (of 127 people, 56 listed that as the most important reason; another 43 listed that as an important reason). Other answers cited included using RPO to have access to trained professionals and increase HR productivity.

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How many times have you seen your company hire an individual who seemed like he had all the attributes of a successful hire during the evaluation process, and then after the third, fourth, or sixth month, you discovered this person was not cut out for the job?

Conversely, have you ever seen someone get hired – over the objections of others – who you were certain was destined to fail, and that person then exceeded all expectations and set new records of performance? I have seen both situations occur, and I began to wonder why some people succeed at a task that others can’t even conceive of doing. How can a company hire someone with so much pride and conviction, only to have that individual fail miserably?

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Last week I attended the biannual ERE Expo recruiting conference, the premier event for identifying best practices in recruiting and talent management. Attending it provided many examples of practices others would want to emulate. It also reminded me of several best practices that occur throughout the recruiting profession.

Unfortunately, not all companies are allowed to talk in public about their best practices, and almost all are reluctant to brag about them in the media. Fortunately, one of the things I specialize in is tracking best practices and what I call “next” practices. Below you’ll find some of my favorite best practices that you might want to consider emulating.

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I think I have been to every ERE Expo since the dawn of the Internet, but Dave and crew outdid themselves in Florida this year. It was filled with fresh faces, new ideas, and a new take on some lingering problems.

But the big news flash is that even with all of the new tools, hiring top talent is not getting any easier for anybody. In fact, it will be getting harder as the supply of the top-talent labor pool begins to decline as demand increases. Worse, the Internet has profoundly increased workforce mobility, and now everyone is looking. So expect turnover to increase. With this in mind, here is some critical advice:

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?Job interviewing is dead,? declared keynoter Seth Godin at last week?s ERE Expo in Hollywood, Florida.

The best-selling author and acclaimed marketing guru also gave his top-three marketing tips you can’t afford to ignore:

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Before we start talking about consultative recruiting, we need to quickly explore the concept of consultative sales. I first heard the term a couple years ago, when it was a fad in the business world to append the word “consultant” to the end of every title. Your plumber became your hydro-fluid consultant, your AC guy a climate-control consultant, and your mechanic an automotive consultant.

Naturally, salespeople latched on to this fad, always looking for a way to add prestige and improve their perception and title. The term “consultative sales” was coined and voila, suddenly everyone was consultant. Consultative sales was not something new; the best salesmen have been practicing it for centuries. And yet so few today understand the principle behind it.

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Corporate employers would be wise to offer interesting work, regular recognition and rewards, and clear advancement opportunities to recruit top talent because job seekers value traditional benefits and personal growth over increasingly common corporate citizenship and diversity programs.

That’s according to the findings of a global recruitment survey released by Accenture, which polled more than 4,100 job seekers in 21 countries in North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region to identify the most-valued career goals of both entry-level and experienced job seekers.

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Recruiter Bill was referred to Candidate Joe around 3 p.m. on a Thursday. Candidate Joe was pleased to get Recruiter Bill’s phone call and seemed very interested. Candidate Joe was employed by a competitor, had all the right skills and experience, and faxed his bio almost immediately after being contacted. He didn’t have a “real” resume, as he hadn’t been looking for another job. Recruiter Bill suggested he take the weekend, log into the recruiting website, and enter his information. They agreed to have a follow-up telephone conversation Monday morning.

Around 2:30 p.m. Monday, Recruiter Bill remembered that Candidate Joe had not called. He dialed the phone. Candidate Joe answered and said, “Oh, a friend of mine saw me working on my resume Saturday morning. He referred me to his boss on Sunday and we met this morning. I think I’m going to go work for them. Thanks for the interest.”

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New technologies have not solved old recruiting problems, according to attendees at this month’s ERE Expo in Hollywood, Florida. ?

On the first day of the conference, recruiters divided into a series of discussion groups to examine what’s most giving them fits. Here are the issues, in no particular order, that attendees during those roundtable discussions and elsewhere during the conference said are most vexing:

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West Coast employers should be particularly mindful of how location impacts the market pay for a great number of professional positions, as San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Seattle all rank this year among the top five employment markets with the largest salary differentials from the national median pay for the same jobs in other American cities.

For example, a job that commands a salary of $30,000 nationally can pay as little as $27,840 in Birmingham, Alabama or as much as $37,680 in San Francisco, according to the 2006 Geographic Salary Differentials study (link shows salary definitions for select cities) from Mercer Human Resource Consulting. That one example represents a pay variation of more than 32 percentage points ? from 7.2% below the national median to 25.6% above.?

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It’s Monday morning, you just logged on to your PC, and after checking your inbox, you jump over to your web browser to review the responses that trickled in over the weekend to the ad you posted on one of the major job boards. Your excitement fades into disappointment as you discover that more than 90% of the applicants are unqualified.

No doubt, if you have ever used one of the major or minor job boards to post an ad, you have experienced what I just described above. Some of the resumes submitted to my postings have been so far off-target that I contemplated asking the candidate whether they’d even read the ad. Oftentimes, it seems as if the candidate didn’t even read the advertisement. Rather, they simply sent their resume out as far and wide as possible, hoping the numbers game would eventually yield them a job.

For about three years, I worked in sales for one of the major job boards ? arguably, the largest job board – in direct sales. I sold the company’s products to small- and medium-sized businesses on the west coast.

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Bruce Murray believes he’s struck on something that every recruiting services provider needs to direct its business development efforts — a barometer that measures which companies are hiring, which are leading the pace in recruiting, and how much they’re spending to attract new talent.

That’s why his New York-based company, Corzen, Inc., a provider of recruitment market data and analysis, has developed a recruiting activity model that tracks the hiring habits of each of more than 13 million businesses in the United States.

Murray, the company’s CEO, says Corzen is now using a combination of data-scraping from online job boards, Dun and Bradstreet data, statistics from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources to determine which companies are doing the most hiring and for what positions, and feeding that to recruitment services providers.

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“Broad purposed recruiting teams that attempt to excel at both “mission critical” jobs and at high volume jobs, will invariably fail? at both”

Being strategic, by definition, means focusing on high-impact things. On the other side of the coin are tactical things, where your output is still important, you just work on more operational-level items. The two levels of work are both important but the one thing that will lead to the failure of both efforts is to attempt to combine the teams that work on the two distinct levels. Why? Because just like combining champagne and beer in the same glass, the mixing of tactical teammates with strategic team members dilutes the strengths of both groups. Combining the rules, expectations, and processes of any strategic and operational teams into one will make both ineffective. Just as combining the rules, metrics and training regiment of a team of long distance race walkers with a 100m sprint team will mean lost races all around.

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Our recently completed 2006 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey revealed some significant conflicts between recruiters and their hiring managers that aren’t abating. Between 50 and 60% of the survey respondents indicated these were significant problems at their companies:

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Corporate recruiters and human resources professionals plan to spend more on online talent channels and less on print classifieds while they begin to explore the impact of attracting job candidates from social networking sites.

That’s according to the results of the first comprehensive national study of recruitment advertising effectiveness, which reveals that most corporate recruiters find online job sites effective in filling job openings, despite complaints that they generate too many unqualified applicants.

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