ERE.net

Changes to the Americans with Disabilities Act that take effect New Year’s Day will broaden the scope of those covered and expand the very definition of disability. One of the country’s foremost employment and labor law firms says the “ADA Amendments Act will mean a massive change for most of the country’s employers.”

“More workers will be defined as disabled,” says Myra Creighton, partner in the Atlanta office of labor firm Fisher & Phillips. That will almost undoubtedly mean that more workers will be requesting some form of accommodation for their disability.

Where previously a diabetic or someone with ADD whose condition is controlled by medication was probably not disabled under the prevailing court decisions, now the amendments make clear that they probably are. The amendments loosen up the definition of disability and eliminate consideration of the effect of medication, prosthetics, hearing aids, and the like. That means a person is to be considered disabled whether or not any form of treatment or corrective device (with the exception of glasses and contacts) is used to control or ameliorate the condition.

However, for recruiters and hiring managers, the impact is likely to be more subtle.

keep reading…

Way back in the 20th century, I learned an important fact about recruiters. We’re all salespeople. There are good salespeople and bad salespeople, but every recruiter has to be in sales if they are to function.

This is not up for discussion. We sometimes dance around the premise, but recruiting is essentially the selling of a company on a candidate and a candidate on a company. Those who choose not to engage in selling can pretend to be noble, but they’re doing a disservice to their clients and employers. It’s engraved on stone tablets for every third-party recruiter who makes it longer than three months, and even the most sales-averse HR generalist has to admit that at one time or another, they’ve tried to talk a manager into meeting with a candidate based on their internal interview. It’s the nature of our business.

Where we sometimes butt heads is in the implementation of a sales mentality versus that of a process-oriented human resources approach. I have good news: The sales mentality is remarkably effective for finding high-quality candidates or hiring large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, no company needs that kind of structure forever, and the friction caused by a sales mentality in hiring can lead to management, administrative, and even legal obstacles. The human resources approach of a kindler, gentler HR works when you don’t have urgency, and when you have an enlightened HR/executive management relationship, but process-oriented hiring turns off the top creatives and results in the hiring of a stable, but less aggressive workforce. That’s no way to run a company in uncertain times.

keep reading…

Here’s a company that’s set itself the goal of helping people lead happier lives and helping companies build happier and more productive workplaces.  When Jiibe Solutions (profile; site) has accomplished those tasks it may as well just go on to create peace on earth.

Greg Scott, co-founder and CEO, harbors no illusions about the challenge he and his partner, Stephen Race, have set for themselves. “Well,” he said, explaining his vision, “it takes some companies a while to understand the value of being entirely open. It’s still a small percentage, but I was quite surprised (at how many do).”

What he’s talking about is Diialog, a sort of company-wide 360 assessment that takes the measure of company culture. It’s designed to reveal the culture as it is and compare it to the culture employees — and company leadership — desire it to be. In its purest form, the results would be reported to the entire company and made available on Jiibe.com, a site that matches jobseekers to companies based on “fit.”

There are categories for management style, vision, and social consciousness; 10 factors in all. When enough employees complete the assessment, the results can be revelatory, showing the gaps, as well as the company strengths. keep reading…

Originally published August 6, 2008.

Dating and recruiting have a lot in common. Learn how to improve your recruiting efforts by applying the most common dating rules.

Dating rule #1
First impressions are critical.

Recruiting application:
Differentiate yourself. Resist the “I have a great position for you” especially if you have never spoken to them.

keep reading…

Two years after I visited with Israel’s recruiting-related and other companies, the country some call America’s 51st state has slowed along with the rest of the world. Says Sandy Erez, of assessment vendor HRVision, “The worldwide recession has not spared the Israeli economy from its devastating effects. Every day, companies are laying off tens and hundreds of people.”

Meanwhile, the three companies I mentioned in greatest detail on that trip — Redmatch, CareerHarmony, and HRVision, are still kicking.

keep reading…

Looks like 69 people have started or completed applications for the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, roughly double from this time last year.

We’re shaking things up this year to make this more of a community process. There are way more judges. And some tweaks to the categories and the rules, with the upshot being it’s way easier to apply and way cheaper (free).

The company names that are applying already are great (from India to Taiwan, from restaurants to credit unions). But this award is the industry’s standard-bearer and if you’re the best of the best, you should be applying. We want to make sure the most cutting-edge recruiting programs are considered, and the best of those are honored.

It’s OK to take an extra week beyond the January 9 deadline. Apply before the 16th. This award has vaulted recruiting departments at Aimco and Valero and elsewhere to prominence … and yours could be the next.

What’s wrong at IBM? Not too much. The company hired 47,000 employees and contractors in 2007, for operations spanning 170 countries. But IBM’s global recruiting director, Alex Cocq, (featured in-depth in the February issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership), says there is still room for improvement at Big Blue; most notably Cocq wanted to attain increased recruiting efficiencies and a decreased cost-of-hire.

keep reading…

In what other year in world history could one go onto Facebook and announce to all of their various friends, acquaintances, and business connections that they are about to walk their poodle in the rain, buy groceries at Safeway, or floss their teeth?

keep reading…

Another dismal forecast, and this one has nothing to do with the heavy, wet weather blanketing much of the country.

The forecast is from Manpower, which announced Monday it might be hitting the unemployment line soon. Well, not quite, but the Milwaukee-based staffing company did announce it is withdrawing its revenue and earnings guidance for the fourth quarter of 2008.

Executives have become “markedly more pessimistic” and Manpower chairman and CEO Jeffrey Joerres is no exception. He blames a deteriorating economic environment and anticipates “demand for our services will be especially weak in December as we are hearing that many of our light industrial clients are taking prolonged plant shut downs around the holidays compared to last year.”

He’s referring, of course, to the many companies planning longer-than-anticipated plant closings: General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford Motor Co, troubled automakers that are extending their holiday plant shutdowns; Caterpillar, Inc., the heavy equipment maker that is temporarily closing factories and cutting salaries; FedEx, which is delivering a 5% pay cut for salaried workers and stopping contributions to employee retirement accounts; and Newell Rubbermaid, Inc. the Atlanta-based maker of Rubbermaid containers, Calphalon pans, and Graco baby products, which is planning temporary shutdowns at its worldwide factories and cutting almost 1,000 jobs.

As fewer companies need temporary workers, Manpower may face internal layoffs and office closings. The $21-billion company, with 4,500 offices in 80 countries, estimates a fourth-quarter revenue decline of 9% to 11%.

It wasn’t a much better day for Gevity, whose stock was plunging about 29% mid-day. Stock prices of Volt, Spherion, and other staffing firms were behaving poorly. Salary.com, on the other hand, is up sharply. It’s buying back stock and has completed an acquisition of Genesys.

Corporate recruiters are certainly not the most praised employees in any firm. During tough times they are laid off in numbers, and even during high growth, blame is frequently heaped upon them for not producing miracles.

While external third party recruiters at least have a chance of making “big bucks,” corporate recruiters all-too-often can only be classified as under-paid and under-appreciated.

Given that it’s the holiday season, now would be the opportune time for recruiters to receive thank-you cards from the many people they’ve helped throughout the year. Unfortunately, the majority of recruiters won’t actually receive one, but if you did, here’s what I hope it would say.

keep reading…

Can’t get enough of HR shows and technology? Then you’re in luck. HRchitect (profile; site) is organizing what the consulting firm is calling the “largest regional HR technology event.”

To be held outside Dallas on June 10 and 11, 2009, the show used to be sponsored by the area chapter of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management. HRchitect helped organize it in years past, but is now sponsoring the conference itself.

Matt Lafata, show chair and VP of sales and marketing at HRchitect, promises theHRshow as it’s being called, will be the “largest HRM show in the Southwest and one of the biggest tech shows besides HR Tech.” He and Rick Fletcher, HRchitect CEO, insist they aren’t trying to compete with the HR Technology Conference and Exposition put on every year by the magazine HR Executive.

“Our show is regional,” Lafata told us, estimating that about 90 percent of the attendees will come from Texas and adjacent states. Added Fletcher: “We’re not trying to take away from HR Tech or any other show.” keep reading…

This article has been updated with a corrected link to the survey at the end.

by Dr. Charles Handler and Mark C. Healy, M.A.

We I/O psychologist-types tend to be real data hounds. Much of the work we do for our employers/clients involves the use of data to investigate specific hypotheses in order to illuminate the underlying truth in a situation. The outcome of this work often has tremendous value to organizations because it provides them with hard data on which strategic decisions can be based. Additionally, the collection and analyses of data often helps us to identify new trends that we haven’t yet thought about.

Many of you who follow our articles know that we have a keen interest in the pre-employment assessment industry, and write quite a bit about its trends and happenings within. Our interest in data and trends has led to an annual online screening and assessment usage survey.

The idea for this survey was born back in 2002, when we became frustrated over the lack of available information about the usage of pre-employment screening and assessment tools. This lack of information has been a challenge because though everyone seems to be saying that screening is becoming a hot area, there’s little actual data available to confirm this statement or to tell us how hot it really is. This lack of information also makes it hard for those of us who follow this industry closely to provide factual information about how companies are using online screening and assessment tools, and what the results of this usage have been. This year we have made a few changes to the survey questions to help us be sure we are staying up to date with some of the major trends and issues that pertain to assessment and the manner in which it is integrated into the hiring process.

At the end of this article, you’ll find a link to this year’s survey. Take a few minutes to help other members of our community by providing information about your company’s screening and assessment practices. The more data that’s collected, the clearer existing and emerging trends will become. Last year, we had a record number of responses, a fact that seems to indicate the increased interest level in screening and assessment. Given the steady increase in interest and the lack of information about this industry, we feel the results will continue to have value for the ERE community. We look forward to reporting our findings right here on ERE sometime this coming Spring.

In order to provide some extra motivation, here’s a quick summary of the trends identified in last year’s results.

keep reading…

Here’s what companies are doing and plan on doing because of the slower economy. Watson Wyatt’s survey was conducted during the week of Dec. 8, and includes responses from 117 companies across a variety of industries.

A top-down command-and-control structure leads to power grabbing, not power sharing. It prevents people from seeing the bigger picture as groups defend their turfs and fight off change at all costs. This sounds like Detroit, and until Detroit develops and implements a customer-driven strategy with a culture of success before self-interest, the bailout won’t work.

A comparable situation exists in how most corporations have designed their hiring processes.

In this analogy, this means the needs of top candidates must drive every aspect of a company’s hiring processes, not the ego of managers, nor the bureaucrats in legal and HR. Your company falls into this category if you worry more about preventing average people from applying instead of figuring out how to attract more top performers. You’re equally culpable if hiring managers won’t see someone without all of the skills listed on the job description, if these same managers think they’re great interviewers, if they won’t spend time discussing real job needs with their recruiting team, or if they expect candidates to be enthused during the first interview.

I neither like nor dislike unions, but I do believe that they can make companies uncompetitive if they restrict management’s hand in optimizing business performance. However, I also believe that employees, whether unionized or not, need to be given a certain set of rights to protect their collective interests. Too much power in the hands of anyone unlevels the playing field. As a result, some regulation is required to preserve an appropriate balance of power. Finding this equal balance is pretty tricky, and history doesn’t offer many good solutions.

Now what does this all have to do with sourcing and hiring more top performers?

The idea behind all of this is something called sub-optimization. Sub-optimization occurs when the rights of a sub-group override what’s best for the primary group. In essence, the sub-group can’t see beyond its own self-interests. I’d suggest lawyers, government regulators, corporate bureaucrats, and academicians prevent companies from hiring the best people because they don’t see the bigger picture. Include here untrained interviewers, managers who rely on the gut, and recruiters who act more like vendors and car salesmen, than consultants.

In sourcing, a top candidate perspective is necessary when designing hiring processes, not some power grabbing bureaucrat or unsophisticated neophyte. Some examples will help clarify this cynical viewpoint:

keep reading…

Let’s face it: YouTube, Break, Hulu, and Veoh have changed the way we view movies and videos and, more important, they have changed the way we use the Internet.

We rely more and more on pictures, graphics, and videos to display data, deliver the news, give us instructions, and keep us up-to-date with our families. The facts are amazing. Using Quantcast as my source, here is a rough idea of what’s going on. The online version of the New York Times, for example, has a monthly readership that averages about 14 million people in the United States. And that’s the largest readership of any print media I could find. The online Wall Street Journal does a paltry 4 million and even the prestigious Economist does only 3 million globally and most are seeing declining readership.

On the other hand, YouTube averages about 71 million viewers monthly — just in the U.S. And its rivals are also doing well and growing. Veoh does about 23 million, Hulu about 19 million, and Break about 15 million globally.

This indicates a decisive trend: more and more of us are getting information and education from video, rather than from words – whether in print or online.

We have already seen video slowly gaining in popularity and importance in recruiting. All top-tier career sites incorporate both pictures and video. Usually the videos are of employees talking about their jobs, but some include campus tours or chats with the CEO or a hiring manager. Many recruiters have received a video resume, and chat rooms have buzzed with concerns over the legality of such resumes and whether they should be accepted.

I don’t believe there is any serious legal issue in using video resumes, as long as your organization has a policy about how they are used. They are no more discriminatory than a face-to-face interview and may actually help to showcase communication skills and other positive traits. They can speed up the pre-screening process and may even eliminate the need for the number of interviews we subject candidates to.

Younger candidates, who are just entering the job market, may prefer to create a video resume as it reflects the media with which they are most comfortable. I can also easily imagine a time when the face-to-face interview is replaced with a live, virtual interview, perhaps with the hiring manger and several others also present virtually. The use of video lowers costs, expands the number of people who can participate in an interview, allows asynchronous viewing, and makes it more convenient for a candidate.

Here are just four of the ways organizations are using video.

keep reading…

When Jim McDevitt took over as CEO of Authoria last month, the announcement of his ascendancy was all about growing the business.

Bad luck for him that among his first official acts was to lay off workers and cancel the annual user’s conference.

“The economic times are threatening,” McDevitt observed during an interview the other day that was surprisingly optimistic. “I think the (HR) market is going to be OK,” he says. “We are pretty bullish about next year.”

The layoffs and other cost-cutting measures are a consequence of the U.S. recession and a prudent response to conditions, not a sign of problems at Authoria, McDevitt says as we discussed the layoffs and cutbacks other companies have gone through in the past few months. He wouldn’t give us any numbers, characterizing the Authoria reduction as “minimal” and affecting mostly project-based workers who had completed their tasks.

Authoria may be better positioned than some of its competitors, considering the infusion of $8 million it got in September when it was acquired by Bedford Funding, a private equity fund. The money is being used to expand the company’s sales force and especially to enhance its customer service.

keep reading…

UK employees were asked why they feel disloyal to their employers — a disloyalty that results in lower productivity and turnover. Harris Interactive did the survey for CareerBuilder among 656 UK employees (employed full-time; not self-employed) ages 18 and over.

An interview with Rich Kenny of Northwest, who talks about the company’s combo with Delta; reducing time-to-hire; background checks; on-the-spot hires; recruitment advertising; and improving the candidate experience.

keep reading…

Many of us in human resources are measuring our diverse hiring results and are not reaching our goals at all levels. We are also seeing senior staff exiting, as retirements become an increased reason for openings, leaving a wide gap in knowledge.

To battle these issues, employers are exploring options such as: retaining retirees, immigration hiring, retention raises, talent increases from buyouts, the use of offshore workers, hiring displaced workers from other industries, and targeting competitors.

Brown Shoe has come up with another solution.

keep reading…

Sun-Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher who authored The Art of War, had a saying, “Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree.” It means that there are circumstances in which one must sacrifice short-term objectives in order to gain the long-term goal. He was writing about military strategy in the seventh century B.C., but that’s the recommended approach when it comes to recruiting in China. Establishing a recruiting operation in China requires patience and persistence. Quick rewards are not likely.

The Chinese can put up some amazing numbers — and not just those having to do with the ages of their gymnasts.

keep reading…