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You probably know of Working Mother magazine for its annual list of “100 best companies” that actively recruit and retain those multitasking wonder women known as working moms.

But the magazine for career-committed mothers, which reaches two million readers, also has an annual award to honor companies committed to diversity.

The magazine’s new list honors 20 companies that require manager training on diversity issues and rate manager performance partly on diversity results, such as how many multicultural women advance.

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All around the world, organizations are scrambling to formulate policies to deal with social networking. Should our employees be allowed to use Facebook at work? Can we check out someone’s MySpace page before we hire them? Can we stop our sales manager from posting pictures of himself at a drinking festival wearing just a barrel and a cheeky grin?

There’s an equal air of excitement within marketing: It’s so hot right now, how can it help us sell more, find new customers, or stay closer in touch with the customers we have?

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This is a new take on old-fashioned summer jobs.

Hundreds of teens from across the five boroughs in New York City, who are part of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, are looking to “make a job, not take a job.”

These students certainly have the entrepreneurial spirit.

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Three new recruiting campaigns I thought I’d mention today … Microsoft, which we recently said is kicking off a campaign to showcase (and increase) its diversity, has launched a new site at youatmicrosoft.com. Despite the lame cliches and generalities (”diversity is critical,” “the best thing about Microsoft is the people,” etc.), the design is great, and who doesn’t love baby pictures? … Speaking of new sites, Spirit’s new careers page features the tagline “Dream Big, Make it Fly” — check it out with your sound on for full “whooshing-sound” effect. Spirit’s being helped out by its new RPO vendor The RightThing … Lastly, General Dynamics is touting its “Jobs That Rock” and is hiring engineers, particularly because of a big contract it got from the military to work on the Warfighter’s Information Network.

Why are people attracted to companies like Google and Starbucks? Is it money? Opportunity? Or maybe for the bragging rights?

Certainly a few candidates are drawn by these superficial attractors, but more are subtly drawn by what Google really does and by what it stands for. I call this the organization’s cause.

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Over the past few years, the term “recruiting” has increasingly become almost automatically appended with “and retention.”

The titles of VP, Director, or Manager of Recruiting & Retention have become pretty common, and many industry commentators clump the two together, almost perfunctorily.

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If you need parallels between our softening economic conditions and the job market as a whole, consider this depressing fact: after hitting all-time highs in 2007, hourly wages for highly skilled technology professionals dropped year-over-year during the first quarter of 2008.

Yep, tech professionals. There is no denying the market’s sluggishness after you skim the Yoh Index of Technology Wages. Tech professionals’ salaries are falling, with wages dropping 2.7% in the first-quarter, when compared to the same period in 2007.

Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing for Yoh, points out that “this drop in wages this quarter, coupled with April’s negative Bureau of Labor Statistics report on employment, paints a very lackluster picture of the economy.”

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They call it My Perfect Gig (profile; site ), but you may be tempted to think of it as My Best Gettable Candidate. You’ll be forgiven if you do because after you strip away all the hype from all the matching sites that are sprouting like rainy season mushrooms, the matches they come up with and the candidates who get hired only occasionally fit every job spec to a T.

“We’re creating a common language,” explains Chris Hill. “It helps makes sense of job reqs and makes it possible for recruiters to have a dialog with hiring managers.”

Hill is My Perfect Gig’s SVP of marketing and product management. The site is MyPerfectGig.com, launched in October 2007 by founders Mark Dane and Charlie Jutkiewicz, both founders of BrassRing now owned by Kenexa (profile; site).

Last week, in advance of today’s official unveiling ofMyPerfectGig.com after months in public beta, Hill gave us a tour of the company’s capabilities. To call it a job matching site is technically correct, but too limiting. What impressed us most wasn’t the fact the system can take the requirements in a job req and find candidates with matching skills. Instead, it’s the intelligence and market data that the SourceView product makes available.

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Fries with My Software…

Kronos has launched Kronos for Dining, a software platform designed to help restaurants recruit and retain the best people, forecast and schedule to meet customer demand, track time and attendance, and manage absences.

Beyond the recruitment and scheduling features, it offers a way to automate compliance tasks, which can help to reduce liability and let managers focus more time on taking care of hungry guests.

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We’ve all heard of the perfect candidate flaking out at the 11th hour. Reasons can vary from the infamous counteroffer, a surprise month-long vacation, or the candidate accepting another offer you never knew they had.

Like it or not, any time you are blindsided by your candidate, you’ve lost control of the recruiting process. This negatively impacts your client, your organization, and it directly reflects on you as a recruiter.

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Most recruiters know that a developer who is amazing is worth 10 times as much as an average developer. But do you know how to get great developers excited to work at your firm?

Don’t be naive and think that you can just find someone by asking all the people you know. One of the participants at the NextNY event on tricks and tips for hiring great developers claims, “You really don’t know as many people as you think you know!”

Don’t be desperate to hire anyone who knows basic code. With the right planning, you can recruit and retain a super programmer, and here’s how:

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A good measure of recruiter performance is placements per month, with sendouts (interviews arranged with hiring managers) per month and sendouts per hire being the two key performance drivers for this.

For third-party recruiters, add fee per placement to obtain total billings per month as another critical performance measure.

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To the pantheon of teams like Martin and Lewis, Ben and Jerry and (Ted) Kennedy and (John) McCain, add Ramer and Steckerl. Today the two announced the merger of Arbita (profile; site) and JobMachine , their respective companies.

Shally Steckerl, perhaps the best known sourcer in the world, built JobMachine into a leading consultancy for the training and development of recruiters. Don Ramer, a 35 year recruiting veteran, founded RecruitUSA, possibly the first online posting service company, which has since become Arbita.

Now the two companies will join forces, offering their clients products that span what Ramer calls “two magnetic poles.” “We’re combining the two poles of thought.”

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Got stress?

Just before we head out for the long Memorial Day weekend, let’s review how stress can be the silent killer of retention in your recruiting department.

Think “silent killer” is being a bit dramatic?

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My friend was released after just 20 days on the job.

She was given work assignments to complete that had never been discussed in the interview. At her exit interview, her manager admitted he had overestimated her technical skills in the interview. She had not professed extensive technical skills in the interview. She was given no notice that she was to be terminated, just asked to come to the conference room at 3 pm on what turned out to be her last day.

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Do recruiters care about retention? If not, I think they should.  I also think that Marty Fischer, Director of Talent Acquisition at T-Mobile, would agree with me. The role of the recruiter is to identify candidates. Today’s recruiters achieving competitive advantage are also measuring their efforts to prove that the candidates they acquired are the “right fit for the organization”.

Marty was kind enough to share his success story in obtaining spending and advertising metrics for T-Mobile. To that end, Marty discusses how they used that information to make better recruiting decisions and validate their recruitment strategy. His presentation includes:

·      Implementation of online tracking and management tools.

·      Analysis of metrics and quality of hires.

·      Results (improved negotiations with media, diversification of spend, reduced costs, and enhanced employment brand exposure).

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Jobfox (profile; site) has been named to Red Herring’s Top 100 in North America list of tech startups.

Hundreds of companies vie for the distinction of making one of the tech business magazine’s lists, both for the prestige value and the very real notice they get from investors and tech industry insiders. Companies nominate themselves, or, in some cases are nominated by others. For this list year’s list, 800 companies were reviewed, according to Jobfox, with the top 100 chosen on the basis of financials, subjective criteria, quality of management, execution of strategy and dedication to research and development.

“Jobfox is changing the way professionals and employers connect with each other,” said Rob McGovern , CEO of Jobfox. “Millions of job candidates visit Jobfox as a smarter way to advance their careers. Thousands of corporate recruiters now subscribe to Jobfox as a more efficient and cost-effective way to hire quality professionals.”

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Every industry and profession carries with it its own distinct jargon. In fact, it is the measure of recruiters’ worth to be able to pick up on the unique lexicon of the positions for which they recruit.

Being able to spout off the verbal equivalent of Google Adwords also preempts most candidates’ assumptions that as recruiters, we’re slightly above amoeba but slightly beneath bonobo monkeys on the evolutionary ladder. (The monkeys do admittedly win by default, though like recruiters, they have been known to eat their young, although most of us do this figuratively through the invention of the concept of “entry-level” employment.)

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Just when it seems that recruiters are shunning the power of Web 2.0, along comes perennial hot employer Southwest Airlines.

The company is chatting with you, your neighbor, and your potential next star candidate about lots of Southwest-related things in a new blog, aptly titled “Nuts About Southwest.”

On the blog, the company notes that “we want to build a personal relationship between our team and you, and we need your participation. Everyone is encouraged to join in, and you don’t need to register to read, watch, or comment. However, if you would like to share photos or videos or rate a post, among other things, you will need to complete a profile.”

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You can only hope that the best A-level candidates in Sarasota, Florida, are two-pack-a-day smokers and get turned down for employment with the county and ultimately end up working at your company.

While everyone can agree that smoking is unhealthy, should it be the primary reason to close the door on prospective new applicants? Especially prospective “star” candidates?

Well, Sarasota county government seems to think so. On Monday, it implemented a tobacco-free hiring policy for all new job applicants.

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