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What’s your company’s sourcing strategy? Do you have a target audience in mind you want to hire, and do you have the appropriate plans, tactics, and resources in place to pull it off? If you do, you probably have this strategic plan written out with the trade-offs analyzed and argued about and each sourcing channel then optimized to produce results. Of course, before it was implemented, the plan was presented to your senior management with all of the ROI “guesstimates” for approval.

If you don’t have this type of sourcing strategy process in place, you might find this article of interest.

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Monster says its new Career Ad Network is meant to reach some of the most desirable candidates — the millions of people who are not actively looking for a new job, but would be open to exploring an opportunity if the right position presented itself.

Ad space purchased on websites and online media networks by Monster Worldwide can now be used to highlight specific jobs likely to be of interest to candidates.

The company says the ad network will help recruiters transform their job postings into creative, targeted ads distributed quickly online.

“Companies know that the war for talent is on, so we needed to find an easy way to extend reach for employer customers,” says Dee Dellovo, Monster’s director of new media products.

The campaigns target candidates where they spend time online, whether they are actively looking for a job or open to new opportunities if prompted by seeing relevant job postings outside of the traditional job search environment.

The program is “pretty easy,” explains Dellovo.

“The common thread is that recruiters have so much to do, but at the same time, how can they get everything done? Literally, all they have to do is tell us which job postings they want to opt into a campaign,” she says.

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If you have read a newspaper, business journal, or online media outlet lately, you know we are in or on the brink of a serious candidate shortage.

The Beige Book, published by the 11th District of the Federal Reserve, said in December 2006 that, “worker shortages were reported by service, manufacturing, finance, and energy firms. A lack of labor is a capacity constraint for some firms and, in some areas, companies have resorted to using billboards in an attempt to attract workers. While the shortage extends to many types of skilled and semi-skilled workers, of particular note in this survey were reports of difficulty finding engineers, electricians, high-tech technicians, certified mechanics, and accountants.”

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Kelly Services said Wednesday it will acquire Tempstaff Kelly, a joint venture originally created with Sony Corp. and Tempstaff, the second largest staffing company in Japan.

Tempstaff Kelly, headquartered in Tokyo, was the first ever tri-party staffing services company in Japan.

Launched in September 2005, Tempstaff Kelly provides general temporary employment, recruitment, HR consulting, and outsourcing services to Sony and other companies.

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Circuit City announced Wednesday that it will terminate approximately 3,400 store associates “who were paid well above the market-based salary range for their role.”

In their place, the company has announced its plans to re-fill these positions with workers who are “compensated at the current market range for the job.”

Its plans to hire lower-paid employees to replace the retail associates are simply one part of previously disclosed cost-cutting measures to improve sales and cut expenses.

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In seeking to create an effective hiring strategy, there’s a continuum that dictates the key attributes that should be measured in applicants. Finding the right point on this continuum is the key to ensuring that hiring supports an organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

This article provides an overview of the relevance of the two end points on this continuum to organizational hiring strategies as well as some information about how assessment can be used to support these strategies.

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Now might be the best time to turn to your marketing colleagues for help. That is, now might be the time for recruiters to shift their priorities in order to “sell” their opportunities and companies.

While it’s not exactly news that the war for talent is escalating, giving more power to candidates and lessening the power shift among employers, a new study is shedding light on why recruiters must shake things up now.

The study, titled “Slugging Through the War for Talent: Selection Forecast 2006-2007,” reveals that 73% of staffing directors report competition for talent has increased since 2005, while 79% expect it to further intensify in 2007.

Conducted by Monster and HR consulting firm Development Dimensions International, the survey also shows that 51% of hiring managers are finding fewer qualified candidates available compared to two years ago.

The survey shows that incorporating marketing elements into recruitment campaigns, such as branding, sales, and retention tactics, will help to tap the target market of qualified candidates.

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There I was, with three key clients: Stephanie, Suzanne, and Lauren (not their real names). These senior HR leaders within Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical business and I were engulfed in a lively discussion about talent acquisition in the pharmaceutical industry.

We had just spent an hour talking about the key business priorities of one of our growing franchises and how to translate them into talent acquisition and development strategies.

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Candidates with hands-on experience can help diversify the applicant pool and battle the worker shortage. Yet there is still a “huge blind-spot over the value of internship programs,” and Z University.org is attempting to correct this oversight.

The workforce readiness company dedicated to promoting internships recently completed a five-year study that demonstrates that employers can use college interns to gain substantial productivity gains and even do so without hosting students on site.

The study was conducted through “live” internship programs through 14 academic terms, and it also applied a unique virtual program management model.

Specifically, the study found that companies can significantly boost workplace productivity by putting students to work. For example, a single, qualified manager can gain 225 full 8-hour workdays in a calendar year.

And a virtual program proves that companies don’t need to have office space or incur onsite technology costs to manage interns effectively.

“A common misconception is that organizations and individuals don’t have the time to run an internship program,” says Matthew Zinman, president of Z University.

“What employers and managers need to realize is that they don’t have the time not to have interns. The students are highly capable of contributing all kinds of business value. And, when well-managed, the amount of time that interns contribute yields far more productivity,” he says.

Simply put, Zinman says interns can help a company do more.

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Article by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

In the high stakes game of procuring the world’s best talent, organizations are increasingly realizing that positioning one’s self correctly in the labor market is essential to even being considered as a viable employer.

While 10 years ago candidates may have trusted what employers had to say, today top talent is presented with a bevy of options that enable them to “get the skinny” on what it is really like to work for an organization from nearly every perspective. The Internet has not only radically changed how people communicate and associate with one another, but it has opened the global labor markets directly to employers and made organizations transparent.

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Most people hate the idea of rejection. It causes the phone to slip in their clammy hands as they break a cold sweat, a lump to appear in their throats that makes it hard to breathe yet alone speak, and a knot in their stomach appears that feels like it could come up at any second.

You know the feeling?

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There is a common language used by top-level managers in every company, and these managers assume you can speak that language. It is a language centered on business concepts and understanding a handful of concepts. Whenever those of us in talent acquisition or human resources are not part of a conversation, it may simply be that we don?t speak or understand that language.

For example, CEOs instinctively move toward the action that will maximize profits and minimize costs or expenses. Investment is the first concept and cost savings is second. To them this is as basic as breathing, and they often do not consciously even realize that they have moved in that direction. However, many HR professionals focus on costs or on how a candidate feels about a given action, and they emphasize these over the investment side or over the impact on profits in presentations and conversations.

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Video resumes and video interviews are here. Yet some employers, afraid of the legal ramifications of reviewing videos of people in the hiring process, are curling up into the fetal position and taking steps to avoid them altogether. Here’s why you should do the exact opposite and fully embrace them.

I recently had a conversation with a director of recruiting at a large organization who said that he had just put a policy in place to reject all video resumes. “And why would you do that?” I asked.

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Peter Cappelli’s not losing sleep over the aging workforce, but Cingular Wireless is a little short on shut-eye.

Cindy Mayer, the company’s executive director of staffing, easily rattles off a laundry list of statistics about how quickly the workforce is aging and how a crisis is impending because of too many jobs for too few people.

You’ve seen them in a suburban mall near you– the company hired about 6,500 to 7,000 retail sales consultants last year. It has been trying to increase the number of Spanish-speaking employees in order to better serve Hispanic customers, and is increasing the numbers of part-time employees. All the while, it’s trying to reduce time to hire and increase productivity.

Mayer, speaking at the Human Capital Institute conference yesterday in Phoenix (at the dreaded pre-cocktail-hour timeslot), is aiming for 30% store attrition. Her company gets about 15 applicants per hire, or about 100,000 candidates annually for those 6,500 or so hires.

These candidates are high-school grads, college students, and college grads. They’re not in it for the long haul; average tenure is about 2.8 years, she says. What’s more, “there are markets where there are just not that many 20-somethings.”

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One of the first things seared in to my psyche upon arrival at recruiter training in the Marines was the term esprit de corps. Having not taken French, I was flummoxed by this oft-used military colloquialism.

Everywhere I turned, someone was all too enthusiastically force-feeding me (and the rest of my platoon) this concept to the extent that even to this day, I find that I have actually incorporated it in to my daily vernacular.

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Human resources publications — heck, ERE’s no exception — talk about the demographic problem soon to be caused by the retirement of the baby boomers like it’s a done deal.

Not so, Wharton’s Peter Cappelli said today at the Human Capital Institute conference in Phoenix.

Cappelli called the ticking-boomer-time-bomb “overblown.”

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Tales from digital branding…

There’s some new insight about employer branding in the digital world, with Tales From the Digital Side recapping the various trends and strategies companies are trying.

Laura Shanon, VP of Interactive Sourcing/Media and Strategy at Bernard Hodes Group, is the face behind this new blog.

Her impetus for creating the site was her desire to join the “discussions that are taking place on interactive recruitment. I’ve had a lot of experience helping clients take advantage of this medium, using the best solutions for recruitment to increase return on investment.”

She says she will be posting about search engine optimization, virtual recruitment, mobile marketing, bluecasting, podcasting, relationship marketing, digital metrics and analytics, and much more.

Boomer site nets $22 million financing…

Eons, the 50-plus media company for “loving life on the flipside of 50″ scored $22 million in series B financing recently.

The company says the financing will fuel Eons‘ accelerating growth as it “continues to inspire boomers to see, learn, and be more on the way to the reachable goal of living to 100.”

Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, started this new Boston-based company.

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If you want to avoid many of the interview errors that have been outlined in the previous three installments in this series, it’s important that you take the time to educate managers about interviewing.

I’m not talking about a day-long training session; instead, use a reminder sheet, e-mail, or website with warnings and tips delivered just before the start of interviews.

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Employers that fail to consider flexible work options may be missing important opportunities to enhance both their business performance and their employees’ engagement, according to a new survey by Boston College researchers.

The survey finds that more than 25% of U.S. businesses have failed to plan for the effects of the aging American workforce, according to the national survey results.

The results seem alarming, given that many companies seemingly express concern about the coming shortage of millions of workers as baby boomers retire, taking with them years of experience, talent, and expertise.

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Recently, I wrote about video resumes and their somewhat dubious value to recruiters. But a recent conversation with John Sumser has prompted me to expand on what I wrote, since maybe video resumes need a second look.

In my earlier commentary, I said I was unclear about anyone’s motivation for creating a video resume, given that the resume is often unflattering to the candidate. These resumes are amateur videos, usually produced without any script or editing and are far from the slickly produced ads for politicians. The overall effect can be the opposite of what a candidate intends; instead of impressing recruiters, a candidate may turn them off. Then again, well-produced video resumes don’t necessarily work either. (Just ask John Kerry.)

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