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CACI International is a company on a mission. That’s the message that Larry Clifton says he received from the company’s CEO and president before he accepted the position as the VP of recruiting and workforce management at the IT solutions and government contracting company. Missions are certainly one thing that Clifton understands, because he retired from the Air Force before joining CACI in 2000. But Clifton says that it’s his knowledge and understanding of leadership’s critical role in driving change and increasing accountability that has helped him the most since assuming his current role as the company’s chief talent acquisition leader.

“We’re in a very unique position,” says Clifton. “What I understood before I took the job, is that Paul Confoni, our CEO and President, wanted to grow the company to tier one status in the next four years through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions. That will result in a need to increase our workforce from 11,400 to 20,000 employees. So it was clear to me that we needed to improve our results very quickly to succeed with the mission. While I didn’t have a background in recruiting before coming to CACI, I do understand what it takes to initiate change and achieve results. You need leadership, you need process, and then you need to measure and improve the results. Our success has started at the top, because Paul is our number one recruiter, he supports everything we do. He also holds the line managers and the recruiters accountable for recruiting.”

One of the tools that Clifton has used to help speed-up the company’s hiring process is a memorandum of understanding between recruiters and CACI’s line managers. Clifton drafted the terms of the agreement, which spell out both the accountabilities and responsibilities of managers and recruiters in the sourcing and hiring process. As an example, the memorandum specifies how much time the line managers have to schedule an interview, once a recruiter refers them a candidate. But it was Confoni who approved the memorandum, and then went one step further, by incorporating all the memorandum’s timeframes and specific deliverables into the performance plans of the company’s recruiters and line managers. Holding everyone on the team accountable has improved results.

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There are two huge problems when hiring is viewed as an end-to-end process. The first one involves sourcing. Most companies are terrible when it comes to advertising, recruiting, and attracting the best. Of course, as a recruiter, how I make my money is by finding top people that others can’t. And, in today’s Internet age, this is actually quite easy. However, this is a big waste of time if you or your hiring managers don’t know how to accurately assess candidate competency.

I’ve seen many good people get overlooked and underperformers get hired because the recruiter or someone on the hiring team didn’t properly assess competency. With this in mind, I would like to offer a 10-step process that will increase your company’s ability to accurately determine a person’s ability to perform on the job with 80-90% accuracy.

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Get ready to welcome one more entrant to the annual competition for college graduates. The facilities management field is yet another profession facing challenges from an aging workforce and a lack of interest from new college graduates, so its industry association is stepping up efforts to lure new grads. Based upon the earning potential, the profession just may succeed in grabbing interest from students.

A recent survey completed by Building Operating Management, in partnership with the International Facility Management Association, reveals that the average salary for facility managers has increased nearly 13% from $56,000 in 2004 to $63,000 in 2007. At the same time, the average age of the survey respondents has steadily increased from 43 to 48 since the first survey was taken in 1989. Degrees and professional certification drive the average wage up further. The current survey shows that the average wages for certified facility managers, with a master’s degree or higher, were $96,750 and certified employees with a bachelor’s degree were earning an average base salary of $82,000.

“We’re not seeing as many people enter the profession,” says Shari Epstein, associate director of research for IFMA. “In the past, people sort of stumbled onto the profession; it really wasn’t a career choice. Facility managers often migrated from architecture or the construction industry to fill the jobs. The complexity of the job is increasing, and we require candidates for Certified Facility Manager certification to have a bachelor’s degree, so we’re increasing our efforts to reach more students. Currently, there are about 20 institutions offering the major in North America; we’re working to get that number increased.”

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TMP Worldwide has launched a slick Facebook widget, adding another dimension to online employee referral programs. Work With Me, as the program is branded, enables Facebook members to promote jobs within their company by adding them to their online profile.

If someone applies for one of those jobs – and, presumably, is hired – the employee earns the reward the referral program offers.

Courtney Hub, vice president, interactive strategy for TMP Worldwide, told us her team came up with the idea after watching the Facebook membership explode. Facebook claims to be adding 200,000 new users a day, which translates into a doubling of its current 40 million or so registered users every six months.

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Despite the stated importance of attracting and hiring quality talent, many recruiters and recruiting managers continue to face challenges in getting managers to adequately prioritize their roles in recruiting or securing a budget that makes world-class recruiting possible.

As a result, recruiters learn to do more with less, often at the initial expense of the candidate experience and the long-term expense of the organization’s employment brand. Many recruiting leaders have tried to counter this trend with approaches that run the gamut of possibilities, yet most have failed. During this interactive webinar with world-renowned HR strategist, Dr. John Sullivan (sponsored by Previsor), learn the top-10 metrics recruiting organizations can use to demonstrate the impact of effective world-class recruiting. This isn’t a session about transactional analytics, most of which have no value to line managers, but rather metrics that focus on recruiting effectiveness and bottom-line impact.

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We hear all sorts of conflicting messages these days. For example, we hear that virtual recruiting works best, but then we learn that people are really seeking personal contact and want old fashioned face-to-face contact. We are told that our candidates are members of social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and then we find out that many of our best candidates are not part of any social network. We hear that young people want freedom and flexibility and, in our interviews with new graduates, we hear them say they want stability and guidance.

What these mixed messages mean is that we are entering a new century and dealing with deep changes in the nature of business, work, and recruiting. The simple formulas and beliefs of last year are no longer applicable. A door has opened and let out the comforts and habits of the 20th century. Many of us now miss its familiarity and the rules that gave us a sense of security and certainty.

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Interested in finding information on the I-9 changes you’ve been hearing about? Here are some links that may help.

Five things to note, from Jackson Lewis.

Updates from Littler, Sheppard Mullin, and Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney.

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Every so often, I come across shameful hiring information included in newsletters. I always thought journalists were supposed to research their facts; however, in a recent career newsletter, there were three articles that immediately got my attention. If any readers come across articles like these, may I suggest you flame the author for reporting pure nonsense to both recruiter and applicant.

Secret Documents

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Candidate screening is one of the most difficult tasks that recruiters and managers face. Most will tell you that screening sales talent is the toughest of all. Why? Salespeople are trained in the art of persuasion. They know how to provide the desired responses to the questions. Even more daunting is when you are interviewing salespeople who worked for a competitor. These salespeople know the language and industry buzzwords, making it even more challenging to screen them. Fret not! It is possible to successfully screen sales talent, but there is work to be done before you even look at a resume.

The most important step a company can take is to develop a sales talent screening program. This helps bring focus to the initiative. The mission of this program is to provide data that allows for the measurement of the candidate’s pedigree versus the desired profile. Think in terms of formulating a marriage…a sales marriage, that is.

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Talent acquisition leaders gained additional time to prepare for the impact from pending immigration reform in 2007, but as 2008 approaches, the clock is still ticking toward an inevitable passage of legislation in some form, so recruiters must be vigilant and prepared.

This past summer, Congress failed to agree on specifics that would produce Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation, and the Department of Homeland Security’s “No Match” program was placed on hold via a temporary injunction in October.

While all the specifics have yet to be worked out, the first drafts and early discussions around immigration reform legislation clearly point toward increased responsibility on the part of employers for validating the legal status of their workers. When passed in any form, immigration legislation causing increased employer accountability for worker documentation will undoubtedly tighten an already competitive labor market.

Some industries such as construction, hospitality, agriculture, manufacturing, and food service stand to be directly impacted by CIR and the “No Match” program, which requires employers to respond to letters from the Social Security Administration citing disparities between an employee’s personal identification records and the records maintained by the SSA.

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I have been involved in recruiting for over three decades, and I used to routinely say that nothing had changed in recruiting. However, in the last few years, the Internet, the mobile phone, and other changes in society have finally produced enough change in recruiting that someone can differentiate between “old-school” recruiting and “new-school” recruiting. Old-school recruiting relies heavily on old media, including newspaper ads, career fairs, large job boards, and mailed-in resumes.

In direct contrast, new schoolers are enamored with new communication media like blogs, podcasts, and text messaging. The divide is getting larger, and it’s becoming more obvious every day. Old schoolers in recruiting are decidedly uncomfortable with these new communication approaches, the same ones that the new schoolers can’t live without.

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Originally published January 31, 2007.

What’s your plan to find the best candidates? Post more ads and hope for a response? Connect with even more people on LinkedIn? Search the job boards for resumes? Look at the phone and hope that it will ring? Do the same things as you did last year?

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Originally published April 17, 2007.

In an earlier article, I made a case for cultivating a more civil attitude during the interview process as actually a means of growing a long-term referral base and to stem negative reverberation from bad candidate experiences.

In this article, I want to highlight some of the actions that drive candidates crazy so we can try to avoid them at all costs.

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For the second time in three months Monster.com has been hacked. Unlike the episode in late August when thieves gained access to personal information, this time the hack was intended to install malicious software on computers used by visitors to the site.

Somehow, hijackers gained access Monday to some of the pages on Monster Company Boulevard , an area where employers post corporate profiles. Code was surreptitiously installed on pages featuring Eddie Bauer, Toyota Financial Services and Best Buy, among others. Visitors to these pages were then unknowingly redirected away from Monster and to a site where software intended to exploit weaknesses in the user’s browser and operating system was installed.

Roger Thompson, chief technology officer at Exploit Prevention Labs, was among the first security experts to discover that pages on the Monster site had been hijacked. He posted a note about it on his blog Monday and credited Monster with taking Monster Company Boulevard offline. That part of the site was dark for several hours while Monster’s engineers worked to cleanse it of the malicious code.

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I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group of CEOs about their sales recruitment needs. To make a point, I mentioned to them that my friend Willie McMoney had heard that I was speaking to this group and asked that I mention he was looking for a new sales home. I shared Willie’s background with the group: Willie has a bachelor’s degree from a well-respected institution, has a great look, has been selling for more than 10 years for household name companies that offer low-priced products, and has exceeded quota each of the last three years. That being said, I asked the group who wanted to hire Willie. Most raised their hands in earnest.

I shared with the group that there were a few more details to discuss before a decision could be finalized. The information to consider was the profile of their companies, which included the following attributes: They were startups with no name recognition in the marketplace, were positioned as high value/high price providers, and required customization for each client. I asked the group again about hiring Willie. The light bulbs started turning on.

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• “America’s Finest City” — as former Mayor Pete Wilson called San Diego– is where job candidates most want to live, according to the Human Capital Institute and Monster. This comes despite still-jaw-dropping housing costs that recruiters frequently cite as a major impediment to convincing people to relocate to San Diego. In the survey of 806 employees, San Diego was the place candidates would be most willing to relocate to, followed by San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, Boston, Austin, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. The least desired: New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New Orleans.
• We don’t have a specific link to any news item, but we hear Sykes will be picking up its hiring in the coming months.

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The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws…Just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with. – Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (1957)

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If your boss walks by your desk and asks why you’re watching videos, tell him you’re screening candidates.

MyCredentials is a new Web site for job seekers, which allows them to build unique, interactive, 3-D career portfolios. The portal also allows candidates to upload traditional documents like cover letters and resumes as well as other validation of their qualifications such as: copies of business plans, white papers, case studies, salary histories, and certifications.

Candidates can provide interviewers a quick preview of their presentation skills, because the Web site’s functionality enables job seekers to record an audio introduction or provide a link to YouTube, where recruiters can view a video introduction. So now, the only other thing you might need to spend the afternoon screening candidates– is popcorn.

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If you haven’t used the news alert services provided by Google or Yahoo! as a recruiting tool, you’re missing a great opportunity. These services provide notification via email or text message whenever a news item that contains search terms you specify is uncovered.

While many individuals use alerts to keep themselves up-to-date about current events, alert services can also be used to enable powerful relationship-recruiting capabilities. Some of the possible uses include:

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We I/O psychologists spend a lot of time talking to people about what they do, and we try to identify the human traits and experiences it takes to perform their jobs. We then use this information to develop components of the hiring process that will allow organizations to make predictions about which applicants will make successful hires. A big part of a successful hire often centers around hiring someone who will not leave the job in a manner that will cause a negative economic impact on his or her employer.

Of course, the good news is that in many situations, even a slight increase in the accuracy of predictions made during the hiring process can lead to huge levels of ROI. In my world, one of the most common reasons for using assessment and best practices is to reduce turnover primarily for this very reason. It takes effort to find, evaluate, hire, and train someone. All this takes two precious commodities: time and money. So, helping predict who will stay in a job long enough to offset these costs (at a minimum) and provide even more value through delivering good performance of job tasks, etc., is totally worth the investment.

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