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Need to fill some open positions? Try spending more time networking and less time surfing the net for candidates. Actively working contacts, including employee referrals and candidates recommended by family and friends, will maximize your time and energy and produce more new hires.

That’s according to the results of a recent online workplace study, conducted by the Bernard Hodes Group. The survey solicited information from 751 employed, active, and passive job seekers asking what sources they are using or would use to look for work and how they actually found their current position.

In looking at how the respondents rated their use of sources, the Internet attracts a great deal of activity and attention from job seekers, but it’s the human connection that’s delivering most of the actual results.

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Note: I am conducting our annual survey of Global Recruiting Practices and would love to get YOUR input. The survey showcases what organizations are doing in recruiting in Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Will you take a few minutes and complete my short survey? We will make a summary of the results available to all survey participants early next year. The survey link is: http://www.glrsurveys.com/globaltrends2008/.

I have watched recruiters come and go over the years, and I am always a little surprised that so very few are ever highly successful. By successful I mean they become well known in the profession and are admired by and sought after by knowledgeable CEOs and headhunters. Few become leaders who have taken command of the recruiting process of a company and have been successful in forging a function that both competes effectively against other organizations and consistently supplies their organization with quality talent without relying on the use of extraordinary measures.

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Imagine opening a recruiting office in a shopping mall. The U.S. military has had them for years, appropriately referred to as a station. What we’re talking about here, though, is not that metal desk, stiff backed chair, linoleum floor office, but a carpeted “living room” with two big screen TVs, leather upholstery and a cheery greeting from a recruiting professional.

“Welcome into our living room,” says Patricia McKinney, HR manager for the Starwood hotel properties in Houston. “It has that kind of feel to it,” she adds, describing the recruiting center that opened Nov. 19^th in the Memorial City Mall in Houston.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc . is opening three new hotels over the next 18 months or so in the Houston area and needs some 400 workers to staff them. What better way to recruit them, says McKinney, than at a mall.

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Steven Hunt, the chief scientist involved in staffing and selection for the Talent Management Division at Kronos, has moved on to a new position, although Hunt will continue to serve as a member of the advisory board for the Kronos Workforce Institute. Hunt, who is an organizational and industrial psychologist, recently joined SuccessFactors in the newly created role of director of Business Transformation Services. Hunt will use his expertise in understanding human behaviors in the workplace to help SuccessFactors’ clients optimize the performance management and talent management software solution.

Below, Hunt shares his reasons for making a career change and his goals for his new position.

ERE: Why did you make a career change?

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Imagine you are on stage and in front of the cameras at the famous game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The last question comes, and you know if you get it right you’ll leave the studio with a million dollars in your pocket. Yet, you have no idea what the answer is. You draw a complete blank. You know, of course, that you can rely on two types of support: help from the studio audience or from a friend who you believe knows the answer. What do you do?

In our world of experts and gurus, we have a tendency to rely on and believe in experts when, in fact, research has shown that in this case we should do the opposite. While experts are indeed right 65% of the time, the studio audience is right 91% of the time, so you should rely on the collective intelligence of the studio audience. How can collective intelligence be applied to talent management, recruiting, or even business?

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Soon, over half the workers in the U.S. will be over the age of 40. Given the growing number of older workers and the tight labor market, it’s hard to imagine that older job seekers would face age-related discrimination when looking for work. But age discrimination in hiring is pervasive, according to Steven Greenberg, founder and CEO of Jobs 4.0, the first job board specifically designed to connect 40 plus job seekers and work opportunities. Greenberg hopes to raise awareness about the problem through the survey and direct older job seekers toward the best age-neutral employers.

“We’re trying to call attention to the issue of the aging workforce, so older workers don’t have to suffer in silence,” says Greenberg. “Companies that are doing a good job in this area will love this survey. Hopefully, those companies that aren’t creating a diverse employment environment will take a look at their responses to the survey questions, and be motivated to do something about it.”

The survey was distributed to more than 10,000 HR professionals across the U.S. Contact Jobs4.0 to request a survey application. Applications will be reviewed by the Cannon Survey Center at UNLV to determine the award winners. The survey results will be released in February 2008.

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Being a diversity recruiter must feel like being in an M.C. Escher drawing. Just when you think you’re getting ahead, you realize you’re heading back to where you started.

Success is elusive because diversity recruiting goals are poorly defined and one-dimensional. Your goal is to increase the proportion of women and other minorities in the candidate pool. But whatever success you achieve is blunted by a failure to support integration with special efforts. Most employers that commit to diversity recruiting do little to ensure that managers devote the time and energy necessary to ensure that diversity hires fit in with the organization and receive the support they need to succeed. It’s not that diversity hires are singled out for this treatment. The same is true of most hires in most organizations, but that’s another article. In this article, we’ll focus on how diversity recruitment can be a success.

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Currently, the most underperforming corporate recruiting tool is the careers or jobs webpage. Honestly, taking your own for example, is there any chance it conveys the energy and excitement that you encounter on a regular basis as an employee? You and I both know that the answer is probably not, because 99% of corporate careers sites are just plain ugly and boring. It’s truly unfortunate that one of the primary channels of communication that both applicants and candidates experience is so poorly managed.

I realize that right now some of you are nodding your head in agreement, while others are getting defensive. Before you start spewing defenses, I realize that most corporate careers sites do receive a lot of traffic, and some actually receive more traffic than the parent site itself. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that study after study has identified that nearly all applicants, regardless of their application channel, visit a company’s website to learn more about it or to verify that what they have heard about the firm is really true either before applying or shortly thereafter.

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RehabCare, an outsourced provider of physical rehabilitation patient care, has launched a new blog which provides information and communication opportunities to college students and those interested in the rehabilitation profession. In answer to the talent shortage in the allied health profession, the company has been building undergraduate pipelines and actively garnering interest among college students over the last two years. By providing career information and resources for prospective: physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, and other rehabilitation professionals, the company hopes to keep its 10,000 clinician positions filled.

“It’s still too early to say how many people we’ve hired because of the blog,” says Barbara Wallace, assistant VP of Campus Relations for RehabCare. “We went live with the blog in August, and what we have noticed is that we’ve had increased traffic to our Web site and there are more searches being conducted on our job postings.”

Given the technical savvy of today’s college students, Wallace says that creating a blog seemed like a good way to convey the company’s branding and recruiting strategies to Generation Y students.

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The government’s job report, released a few minutes, ago, looks strong. The 94,000 jobs added was higher than forecasts that predicted more like 70,000.

Bloomberg’s take.

Let’s say you are looking for a sales executive to fill a position in your software company. Candidate A has a lot of contacts in your industry and has three years of software sales experience. Candidate B set the school record for the 5,000-meter run at her college. Which one do you hire? Unless Candidate A can show me a six-figure W-2 from his previous employer, I’ll take my chances with Candidate B every time.

In his famous 17th century text, A Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi discusses how to become a great swordsman. He emphasizes the discipline, sacrifice, and practice involved in mastering this art. After a student spends years practicing and eventually mastering every nuance of sword fighting, he is said to “know the way broadly.” The author says, “If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.” Meaning, if someone can learn the discipline it takes to be very successful at one thing, he can apply this success formula to other pursuits in his life. The bottom line is: People who are very successful at one thing in their lives usually find a way to continue on this successful journey.

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A new national job board, dedicated to connecting disabled workers and employers, launched this week featuring 118 job postings from two sponsoring New Jersey employers. AccessibleEmployment.org is a non-profit venture financed through the New Jersey Business Leadership Network and the Henry H. Kessler Foundation. The goal is to have the job board become a national resource for employers seeking to hire disabled workers and disabled workers seeking employment, according to Dan Honig, COO for the organization.

“So many people with disabilities are able to work, but they are largely being ignored by employers,” says Honig. “The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there are over 30 million disabled workers between the ages of 16 to 64, but only 18 million are currently employed. Over 70% of disabled workers have hidden disabilities, but of those declaring their disabilities, the average cost of the reasonable accommodation is anywhere from $200 to $600. We think that this workforce offers financial advantages to employers.”

Honig points out that some disabled workers are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, which provides health insurance cost savings for employers, and also that employers may be eligible for tax credits when they hire a disabled worker.

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There are a couple of new job sites for recruiters to choose from.

The first is foliocareers.com, and covers circulation, production, and editorial jobs in the magazine industry.

Also launching: eventcareers.com, for design and management jobs in the event-planning/trade-show industry.

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Getting things done is essential to both business and recruiting success. The popularity of books like Execution by Larry Bossidy has raised the idea of achieving goals and acting decisively to godlike levels. But, Americans have always been particularly good at accomplishing things, even though they frequently aren’t sure why they are doing it. We often seem to act as if we are blind to the longer-term reason for what we do.

We make more cars, produce more food, and have one of the highest productivity levels in the world. Our employees work longer hours than those of any other country in the world (even more than the Japanese, who come in second), but we are not really sure why we do this.

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The aging workforce issue has reached top-of-mind awareness among HR professionals in major corporations, but no single company has developed or deployed a comprehensive solution dealing with the entire problem. That conclusion is based upon the results of the latest Aging Workforce Survey conducted among HR executives in Fortune 1000 companies by Ernst & Young. The follow-up survey was conducted by E&Y approximately 18 months after their initial survey about HR’s response to the aging workforce challenge and the results were released in October.

Among the survey’s key findings: The number of respondents citing that retaining key employees and maintaining intellectual capital were the human capital issues of most concern rose from 38% in the prior survey to 68% in the current survey. Also 70% of respondents in the recent survey said that the impact of the aging workforce will reach beyond the members of the C-suite to members of middle management, compared to 48% in the last survey.

One of the gaps noted in the survey is around succession planning activity. The survey noted that senior-level executive positions is where 75% of HR executives say they are focusing their succession planning time and efforts, while 41% of respondents say that the retirement of middle managers is the area most likely to be affected by the brain drain and skill shortages. According to the survey, lack of succession planning for middle managers is resulting in unplanned turnover and higher recruiting costs.

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Back by popular demand, Ed Newman from The Newman Group explores today’s talent acquisition systems industry landscape and the trends that will affect your choices tomorrow.

Sponsored by Taleo, a leading provider of on-demand talent management for small businesses and corporations, this session explored key findings from ERE’s annual Talent Acquisition System 2007 Industry Analysis and Buyer’s Guide. From customer satisfaction to integration, vendor viability, candidate sourcing, configurability, pricing, compliance and overall system lifecycle, check out this footage to hear all about the demands and drivers shaping the industry and how they may affect you.

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The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines research as a “careful or diligent search,” a “studious inquiry or examination,” and “the collecting of information about a particular subject.” Why is it, then, that most executive search and recruiting professionals so often think of research as mere “name generation?” “Name gen” is rarely careful, diligent, or studious. More often, it involves a relatively haphazard scooping up of names and titles, willy-nilly. And that leads to a “kiss every frog” approach to recruiting in order to find your prince.

As the execution engine of executive search, your research can be either a Ferrari or an Edsel, a car that failed spectacularly due to poor workmanship and a failure to understand the American consumer. The Ferrari is Human Capital Intelligence: research that, through analysis, is transformed into actionable intelligence to provide your search with a competitive advantage. When you embed intelligence into virtually every step of your search process, you dramatically improve search performance. I’m not suggesting that you work harder. I am suggesting that by doing the following 10 steps, you can work smarter so you don’t have to work as hard.

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Corporate recruiters and HR professionals have a long history of treating all applicants and jobs equitably, a term that synonymous most organizations use to mean “the same.” Unfortunately, if you treat all applicants the same, you’re liable to miss some individuals who, if identified and hired (and in many organizations allowed to do what they were hired to do), would have an unequal impact on business results. These individuals are labeled as innovators, game changers, thought leaders, and diverse thinkers.

Although pursuing operational excellence and efficiency in recruiting was once an acceptable goal, it is no longer. We are now living in a world where innovation drives growth and performance, not process conformity, strict policy, or established standards. In this new era, recruiters and recruiting leaders need to toss aside everything they think they know about recruiting, and reinvent a recruiting process capable of identifying innovators and treating them differently. (The same could truly be said about recruiting any type of diverse candidate.)

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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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