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Archive for July, 2007 Would you rather hire someone with a high IQ or a high EQ?
According to a new study, EQ, or “emotional quotient,” is superior to intelligence in some ways, since stressed-out workers’ emotions can create potential roadblocks for career advancement and success.
According to the national survey of 1,014 working adult Americans ages 18 and older, 55% report a lack of familiarity with emotional intelligence and its impact on their professional success.
To capitalize on your referral base network, it’s important to implement different techniques and strategies in order to maximize the return of investment. In this article, I’m going to suggest different techniques or strategies that will continue to build your referral-base network so that it will provide you with a wealth of referred candidates and yet provide you with a progressive recruiting tool that can diversify your results.
When you first started building your referral-base network, you used simple tools like meeting key people, asking for referrals from placed candidates, or attending professional networking events.
Perhaps Monster doesn’t think it’s quite hip enough — or at least as cool as other popular sites that promote social networking as the method du jour of connecting workers with companies.
That’s one way to look at its decision to invest close to $80 million to become more competitive in technology, marketing, and advertising.
However, one step on its road to hipper technology is cost savings. That’s why Monster Worldwide announced Monday it is cutting 15% percent, or approximately 800 employees. The company expects this plan to reduce its current operating expense base by $150 million to $170 million on an annualized basis.
This layoff also follows the announcement that its second-quarter income fell 27.8% to $28.6 million from $39.6 million for the same time period a year ago.
The cuts are immediate and will move into 2008 in order “to deliver the kind of experience to employers and job seekers that will maintain Monster’s status as the #1 brand in the online career marketplace,” chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi wrote to his workers on Monday.
What does the future look like for tomorrow’s accountants and finance professionals? A new report from the Robert Half International Financial Leadership Council is offering tips that recruiters can adapt in order to recruit and retain these highly skilled professionals — since finding the right mix of this skilled bunch is not always easy.
In its study of the key issues confronting the accounting, finance, and audit professions, the report gives suggestions on everything from adapting to Generation Y attitudes to coaching a more successful workforce.
During a two-day summit, the council produced a set of recommendations that “call for rethinking traditional recruitment and retention strategies, and improving collaboration between business and academia,” according to Max Messmer, CEO of Robert Half International.
The council included leaders from the corporate world, public accounting firms, industry associations, as well as accounting and finance universities in the United States and Canada.
by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett
Over the course of the last three years, employment branding has grown from a concept a few organizations were spending a little money on to a full-blown discipline that many large and small organizations alike are investing heavily in.
If you work in corporate recruiting, third-party vendors are an integral part of life. Sometimes welcome, sometimes not, I have my fair share of dealings with vendors, a good number of whom I believe generally understand the recruiting field.
Vendor offerings in a host of buckets from niche job boards to automated reference checking systems use a similar pitch as part of their marketing strategy: help make recruiters more effective and efficient.
About 60% of human resources development departments within global companies believe it is possible to measure the return on investment of their employee development initiatives.
However, only 18% measure whether their employee training and development delivers an effective ROI, according to U.K.-based Lane4.
The global consulting company says this is a sign of HR’s continued lack of clout at many businesses.
Following its second-quarter earnings release, Kelly Services said it will restructure its Americas operations and close 40 commercial branches.
The branch closings are expected to occur over the third and fourth quarters of 2007.
While the world’s fifth-largest recruitment firm also has plans to restructure British operations and consolidate headquarters, it says it will expand in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
For recruiters, sourcing is the hot topic right now. There is tremendous focus on social networks, Internet search, and employee referral as ways to generate quality candidates. Most organizations are struggling to find the volume of quality people they need to fuel their growth and ensure their ongoing success. A handful of tools have emerged over the past few years to make certain aspects of sourcing easier for recruiters.
Mostly these address ways to get at the hard-to-find, happily employed talent. These include Jobster and H3, which address referrals; ZoomInfo which provides an easy but powerful way to search the Internet for senior talent; and a variety of social networking tools such as LinkedIn that make connecting to people much easier.
For military spouses, multi-tasking is the name of the game when the spouse is away for months on end. About 92% of military spouses are women, and with work, kids, and household responsibilities, they’re far from desperate housewives.
That’s why Military Spouse magazine has created a list of what it calls the nation’s “Top Military Spouse-Friendly Employers.”
Executive editor Babette Maxwell notes that these women are “master multi-taskers. These women are patriots who give 110% to companies that appreciate them.”
The magazine looked at 2,500 companies (minimum of $1 billion annual revenue) that make significant efforts to recruit military spouses.
The companies Maxwell and her editorial team selected include: USAA, Army & Air Force Exchange Service, RE/MAX, The Home Depot, Wachovia, Computer Sciences Corporation, Sears Holdings, Kelly Services, Lockheed Martin, and Starbucks.
Rich McCormack, Military Spouse’s content chief, agrees that “large corporations, which have built solid military spouse recruiting programs, will enjoy competitive advantages over their peers, given the tight labor market. The companies on our list have done just that.”
A few years ago, the top talent acquisition challenge most companies were facing was online assessment tools. Screening and assessment tools have been gaining steam over the past few years as companies are investing their resources into new ways to look more closely at their applicants for both skills and behaviors. This webinar covered some of the tools that are used by today’s leading organizations and defined the difference between Screening and Assessment.
This topic was so popular, we decided to follow-up with a survey. Some of the more interesting findings include:
I get this email newsletter put out by David DeAngelo that touts his “Double Your Dating” portfolio of tricks on how men can meet women more effectively. I admit that I usually read the whole thing. Why? The guy is a genius at understanding human nature and ways of putting that understanding to work.
There are numerous parallels between what he describes in his world and the world of recruiting. In fact, a recent subject was on how women test men. I made it my own as to how “testing” applies to sourcing. Here are my tips on winning over the Gatekeeper if you regularly get tested yourself.
At global express delivery company DHL, its three-year-old college recruitment sales training program is paying off.
First, it nabbed a “Stevie Award” in the 2007 American Business Awards, presented yearly in recognition of an outstanding achievement in business. The honor was in the “Best Human Resources Team” category, and DHL was the only company recognized for its achievements in sales training. DHL was in competition with more than 2,000 entries from companies of all sizes and in virtually every industry.
In fact, this sales training program — known internally at DHL as the “College Recruitment Express Training” — hires recent college graduates and trains them to become sales professionals on a fast-track program focused on product knowledge, selling skills, customer management, and experiential learning.
Second, the company reports that this successful college sales training is not only showing 100% retention rates among college recruits, but the graduates are bringing in significantly more package revenue than participants in previous programs.
Like with many companies, DHL openly admits it struggled with retention issues. Despite its motto of choice that “customer service is back in shipping,” it was not always easy to find the right blend of workers to promote a flexible, enjoyable experience in the shipping industry for all customers.
“Three years ago, our turnover rate was a little higher than we wanted. So we took a look at the types of people we were hiring,” says Paul Read, director of sales training for DHL USA.
“You would think you just teach them the products and services and they hit the ground running. But that wasn’t always the case, so we decided to take a look at the makeup of what the candidates should have to be successful at DHL,” says Read.
The company does have an internship program, but Read explains that it’s not for sales and mostly for admin functions.
So it launched the College Recruitment Express Training program to cover DHL’s business, industry, and market. Training program graduates learn soft skills such as listening, rapport-building, as well as identifying and understanding customer needs. The company says the interactive program blends conventional learning methods with experiential activities that expose the participant to real-world customer situations.
The Sticky Similarities
Responsible for sales training for the United States, which includes almost 1,500 sales reps and managers located around the country, Read likens college recruitment to molding a colorful piece of Play-Doh. He notes the similarities in being able to make an impressionable sales team look and act a certain way.
“The college graduates don’t have prior sales — or even prior work — experience. You don’t have a benchmark to measure DHL against; you don’t really know what sales is about yet. We could mold that person,” he says.
Read recently chatted with ERE to share more insider tips on how he helped design the program and how things are faring in the program’s third year:
After recent announcements by Facebook and the rise of networking platforms like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning, social networks are once again gaining momentum. Usage is accelerating, new audiences are being drawn in, and new applications are being developed that can help us all better manage our lives and contacts. Recruiters stand to benefit most from these trends, and here’s how.
One of the biggest challenges in online recruiting has been a lack of detailed, regularly updated and public information on candidates. Social networks have the ability to change this, and we’re still in the early-adopter stage. There are signs that social networks are growing up, expanding their audiences beyond the earliest adopters, and increasing their usefulness to recruiters.
Eight leading corporations do a better job than other companies at focusing on the “Four Ps” that help to advance women’s leadership roles in corporate America, according to PINK magazine.
The national business magazine, geared toward American businesswomen, selected its “elite eight” of what it calls America’s finest companies for women.
In its inaugural selection, PINK magazine chose American Express, Heller Ehrman LLP, Kelly Services, Aflac, FedEx Services, Grant Thornton LLP, Turner Broadcasting System, and Wachovia. Also, Bebe Stores received an honorable mention.
Many organizations struggle to get enough high-quality applicants. While corporate websites, job boards, and events generate lots of flow, most agree that the quality is lacking in a vast majority of applicants.
The culprit might be how organizations sell their opportunities. A quick scan of major job boards, print advertisements, and corporate career sites reveals that organizations rely on ordinary, bland recruiting materials and dull position descriptions to attract talent.
Talking about college athletes…
The Corporate Playbook is new and focused on helping current and alumni student athletes prepare to find their first careers. It lets students and alumni work on resume development, business networking, career placement services, and job postings. The company notes that this assistance helps athletes prepare for the transition from “the locker room to the board room” and provides a direct connection for companies seeking those skills.
The Louisville, Kentucky-based company is also focused on diversity initiatives, and it says that is why it offers a “unique database” to help recruiters who are seeking diversity in their workforce.
Recruiters are their own worst enemies. They perpetuate their own misery by creating websites and cultivating mindsets that focus on getting lots of resumes. Most recruiters bemoan the fact that they do not have enough of the right kind of candidates, yet they still advertise and promote in a way designed to attract all sorts of people, qualified and unqualified alike.
Consider these quotes from recruiters:
“How does he know so much?”
This is a question I continue to ask myself about Shally Steckerl. If you are not familiar with the Chief Cybersleuth of JobMachine, you should be. ER101 was originally published in September 2003. At that time it was the industry’s most up-to-date guide on Internet recruiting, with full coverage of all the latest trends, tools, and tricks of the trade. This third edition takes advantage of technology advances since the original publication and incorporates many new tools not previously available.
Whether you’re a beginner who wants to learn the basics or a pro who needs quick access to all the latest resources in one book, this presentation of ER101, sponsored by H3 and ZoomInfo, will bring your skills up to speed and help you recruit smarter, faster, and better.
Just when it appeared the drama surrounding Susan Stanton had subsided, there appears to be yet another staffing-related snafu trailing in her wake.
Stanton, fired as the city manager in Largo, Florida, in February 2007, later applied to serve as city manager of nearby Sarasota, Florida.
The city of Sarasota retained national firm The Mercer Group to conduct its city manager search.
City commissioners interviewed five candidates, including Stanton, who was not ultimately selected.
However, at the end of the search, city commissioners expressed disappointment in The Mercer Group’s handling of the background searches, claiming problems with some of the candidates the firm provided.
Abuse allegations were leveled against the city’s top choice, while the runner-up had an alleged personal bankruptcy history.
In a relatively obscure part of the state of Washington lies a relatively obscure lab, working to free America from its depen... more »
