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.

Let’s face it. A lot of companies say they have diversity programs, but not a lot can show metrics as impressive as the companies awarded on this year’s 20 best companies for multicultural women.

The magazine says these businesses recognize that it’s not just about recruitment. Many use “real” inclusion programs to actively develop, retain, and promote their multicultural employees.

In fact, this year the magazine says it noticed a dramatic increase in the number of women of color who are senior managers. Also, women of color represented 13% of all new hires last year, 14% of all employees, and 7% of top 20% earners at the winning firms.

Here is a snapshot into what makes some of these super-star companies so great:

• Citi. Thanks to recruiting efforts at schools such as Howard University and partnerships with groups like the National Society of Hispanic MBAs , 28% of new hires last year were women of color, up from 25% in 2006. Even better, 16% of newly hired managers were multicultural women, up from 12%.
• MetLife. On the list for the third year in a row, one cool feature is its social Global Women’s Leadership Forum that was launched in 2007. In this networking forum, MetLife’s senior women officers and diversity leaders tackle diversity, inclusion, and women’s advancement, and also host webinars and regional meetings.
• Deloitte. Among leading U.S. accounting firms, it boasts the highest percentage of women partners, principals, and directors. Currently, 84 women of color hold corporate executive positions. The firm offered more than 400 networking, mentoring, and professional development events for women in 2007.
• IBM. One cool best practice is its “Basic Blue” week-long class that all new managers attend. It includes a three-hour diversity workshop addressing what is expected of managers in today’s global environment. In its “Shades of Blue” class, the company teaches managers about different cultures and values.
• Pepsico. So many things to note about the beverage giant, run by Indra Nooyi, one of the most powerful women in business. In 2007, PepsiCo’s revenue grew 12%, to $39.5 billion. For the past six years, PepsiCo has focuses on multicultural hiring and retention through its Women of Color Multicultural Alliance. In addition, the company’s “Power Pairs” mentoring program creates relationships between employees and their managers; the turnover rate for women who participate in Power Pairs is half the rate of those who do not.

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?

It’s having an impact. Companies who block Facebook or MySpace are finding themselves having to justify it. Many younger people have never been out of touch in their lives, and even eight-year-olds have mobile phones these days. It’s a logical extension to be connected to all of your friends.

Facebook as Job Perk

If only one or two of a peer group are not permitted to use Facebook at work, then they feel out of touch with the group. A job comes up where a peer works, and suddenly an employer is wondering why they just lost a useful employee.

No one ever admits at an exit interview that lack of access to Facebook was a key factor!

Unlikely? Well, search a job site for “Facebook” and “MySpace” and you’ll find companies are now starting to mention access to these sites as a perk of the job.

Talent acquisition professionals know the benefits of sites such as LinkedIn: personally, I have access to over five million people worldwide, along with plenty of information about them! I can search for people who went to university in South Australia but now live elsewhere. Or I can find people who have specific expertise. As a recruiter and an author, that’s gold.

With recruiters plundering social networks and employees spending all day talking to their friends, no wonder management feels uncomfortable.

Management response is schizophrenic. Let’s stop our people from accessing this stuff at work because we pay them to work and we don’t want them poached! Then, let’s use it to recruit for ourselves.

That’s dumb. You’re finding and recruiting people who enjoy free and easy access to social networking and offering an environment where it’s frowned upon.

How can you help organizations embrace change without being swept along in the excitement?

• Point out that mobile phone technology allows employees to circumvent any restrictions anyway, and allowing access from the PC at least offers some control.
• Explain that an employee who feels trusted and respected is likely to waste less time than one who feels trapped by policy.
• Argue that poaching is a process that starts with an employee not feeling that their current role is valued and respected.

There’s still the fear that allowing access to social networking sites at work will lower productivity and make staff more visible to poaching. So take baby steps.

Make suggestions for improvements: “If we allow some online social networking at work, it will improve the reach, scope, and effectiveness of our already-beneficial ERP” seems quite innocuous.

Eventually suggest something along the lines of “Here’s a way to make an already excellent system 10% more effective.”

As the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: make sure you have superb metrics in place to measure success and costs. IT departments can easily measure connection time on social sites. A policy that limits rather than prohibits is likely to be more respected.

Many companies are actually making social networking activity a compulsory part of the job, as it tells your customers you’re confident and connected. It also shows your competitors’ staff a glimpse into your great work environment.

It ceases to be a great idea if you treat employees like eighteenth-century serfs. The key here is the employee’s perception, and that’s the only one that matters.

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.

Take Amanda Loyola, a 15-year-old 10th-grader at Horace Mann in Manhattan. Her eco-friendly pet business, EcoDog Treats, produces inexpensive, vegetarian dog treats.

Or look at Jelani Anglin, a 16-year-old junior at Elmont Memorial High School in Queens. His company, No Bones, provides exclusive electronic equipment priced at least 10% below its competitors.

Loyola and Anglin are just two students competing for venture funding of as much as $1,200 to help them launch their start-ups. This is all part of the annual New York Regional Business Plan Competition, slated for June 10.

Spoken like a true entrepreneur, Loyola says her eco-pet business “is way better than a summer job, because with a summer job it’s just the summer.”

As part of this competition, Loyola and others will learn business concepts such as developing income statements; conducting market research; and completing and presenting business plans.

“When you have your own business it could be a stable thing throughout the whole year as your income,” she says.

Still, don’t rule these ambitious students out as future workers at your company. Barbara Reuter, metro executive director of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, says “many of our NFTE students may return to traditional employment, yet they’ve learned how the economy operates, which makes them much better business people.”

In addition, Reuter points to research from Harvard and Brandeis universities that the NFTE students tend to set their sights on higher academic goals such as attending and completing college.

Teen summer employment is expected to fall to the lowest rate in the 60-year history of government jobs data. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University says working teens ages 16 to 19 will slide to 34%, down from 45% in 2000 and a high of 48.5% in 1989. A lot of this increased competition can be attributed to adults competing for the same low-skilled, hourly jobs in the service and retail industries.

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.

Google’s cause is free information. It represents the 21st century approach to information: open, free for all, easy to access, and organized in logical ways. That is why Google has purchased YouTube and that is why it has Google Earth and Google Images and Google Docs.

Whether you are interested in visual or verbal data, Google has it all. All its core businesses are focused around this central principle or cause.

And more people are attracted to causes than things.

Starbucks’ cause is community. It’s a place, like in the old television show Cheers, where everybody knows your name. It feels good to go into your local Starbucks every morning, be greeted by a smiling barista who knows your name and your favorite drink, and to meet some friends.

Both of these organizations have built their business strategies around these causes and as a result have created powerful brands. Their brands work not only for the products and services they sell, but as attractors of great people who have similar affinities.

A powerful recruiting brand is about identifying your organization’s “cause” and leveraging it to attract the right people.

Many recruiters think that a recruiting brand is independent of their corporate brand or that it can be different from that brand and image. Whenever an organization puts out a recruiting message that does not reflect the true culture and cause of the firm, its messages will fall on deaf ears and candidates will instantly pick up on the dissonance. A powerful recruiting brand picks up and amplifies and focuses the true culture and cause of the firm.

Recruiting brands are also built very deliberately; they just don’t happen by themselves. Google and Starbucks, as well as Intuit and Cisco and many other top companies, have put together branding strategies that span months and even years.

An effective branding strategy includes a variety of influencing tools: books, blogs, career sites, speeches, presentations, analyst meetings, advertising, and email messaging, to list just a few. A solid recruiting brand is a long-term solution in the short-term world of most recruiters.

Make Your Firm Memorable

This is a tall order for many organizations that feel they are ordinary and unexciting. But I have not found any organization that, on at least a local level, cannot identify a few things that make it special. Use this special quality to build the brand.

There are five keys to successfully building a recruiting brand:

1. Gain perspective and know yourself. Thoroughly understand what your organization’s cause is and its unique characteristics. Do market research to learn everything you can about your competitors and what they are doing. Identify who your primary candidate is, and who you most need to attract to be a successful company. Learn from representative samples of these people what messages they like to hear and what concepts and words attracted them to your firm.
2. Define the promise. What are you promising an employee about what they will get from working in your organization? As mentioned earlier, people tend to be attracted to causes. In Google’s case, their promise is that key employees will be able to work on projects and in teams that continue to expand Google’s ability to access information and make it available to everyone. If you haven’t identified your cause, get several long-term employees to write down why they work for this company. Ask what they find exciting. Probe until you feel you have hit that nerve that really defines the cause your organization stands for in the minds of employees. Once you have that you can develop very powerful marketing and branding messages.
3. Develop a strategy. No brand develops itself. Successful brands are deliberate constructions, based on understanding the cause to be sure, but then constructed step-by-step. Have a final vision of what a successful brand would deliver to the organization in terms of both employees but also in terms of what these employees might accomplish. This means that your employment brand has to be aligned with and synergistic with your corporate and product brands. A typical recruiting strategy might stretch over three or more years and have many milestones and targets. The more time you spend on getting a good strategy in place, the greater the benefit and the easier it will be to see your progress.
4. Create a “buzz” to communicate your brand. Once you have the vision and alignment, you can decide what communication tools will fit your budget and be most effective. Almost for sure at the center of your branding activities will be a career site. This career site needs messages that carefully reflect the brand and strengthen a candidate’s desire to work for your organization. Some of these tools include articles placed in publications or on websites that are read by potential candidates, blogs that someone in your organization writes on a regular basis, videos that shows employees living the cause and doing engaging work, or presentations that you make at college campuses or to professional associations that also demonstrate the cause and culture of your firms.
5. Measure your progress. Corporate executives won’t provide funding for programs that cannot demonstrate some sort of return. Brands can be measured in hundreds of ways. For example, if you mention your company at a cocktail party or to some friends, will they recognize the name and have an impression about the quality of the company? You can track how many know about your company and whether it has a general positive reputation or a negative one. Another idea? Ask yourself whether or not your firm is listed as a great place to work by Business Week or Fortune. If not, you might consider applying for that distinction. It is a time-consuming process, but it may be worth it if it is part of your overall branding strategy. If you are a small company, there may be a local magazine or newspaper that does something equivalent. A third measure could be the number of referrals you receive and how many are good fits. My final measure is how many of your employees are sought after by your competition? Are you considered a good source of candidates? If so, the desire to hire your people most likely has come about due to your strong reputation and brand.

Employment branding is a growing field that has just begun to unfold. It can help immensely in attracting the right people and in making it easier to convince good candidates to work for you.

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.

I don’t get the connection.

Most organizations carelessly use these terms, so it may help to gain some clarity by agreeing on our definitions.

First, “recruiting” refers to those activities that are undertaken to convince employees of other companies to leave their current job in favor of a new one. By definition, the end result of this process should be the addition of new workers to our payroll who were not on that payroll the day before we recruited them. In other words, recruiting results in the influx of new talent into a company.

An important point here: this definition renders the phrase “internal recruitment” oxymoronic, and properly so. There is no such thing as internal recruitment, since you cannot, by definition, recruit someone to join the company who is already an employee. You can internally move, redeploy, reassign, or transfer them, but you cannot recruit them. Having recruiters spend time on internal movement activities and calling it “internal recruiting” represents a misuse of a recruiter’s time that will decrease the effectiveness of a function’s ability to actually recruit new talent into the company.

On the other hand, “retention” refers to those activities that a company undertakes to keep its highly valued current employees engaged and committed to the company. In other words, after workers are recruited, hired, trained, and productive, we initiate certain actions and engage in certain behaviors to encourage their ongoing loyalty to our firm.

Many companies do a nice job of making new employees feel welcome and provide excellent onboarding programs to assist with boosting retention from the employee’s first day. But these also occur after a new employee has been recruited, and after recruiting has moved on to finding candidates to fill the next requisition.

Separate and Distinct

If “recruiting” focuses on external talent who does not yet work here, and “retention” focuses on keeping the employees who are already here, aren’t these two activities separate and distinct at their core? Don’t they require vastly different activities and different skill sets to accomplish? Why do we automatically lump these activities together?

The most common thinking, of course, ties the quality of recruiting to retention performance using the argument that if the recruiting function hires the right people in the first place, our workers will have higher engagement, will be more career-oriented, and will stick around longer. But there are a few big problems with this argument.

First, in all but a few rare cases, recruiting doesn’t make the hire; the hiring manager does. Almost universally, the most the recruiting function can do is create the slate of finalist candidates (if they even do that), and the manager takes it from there.

Recruiting may have a vote, but it is rarely a veto. And on those rare occasions when it is a veto, it is not an override veto: recruiting may be able to stop a hire, but it can never force one on a hiring manager who doesn’t want the candidate, no matter how poor the manager’s reasoning.

Turnover’s Fuzzy Logic

The other problem with the argument is that it reflects fuzzy logic about the prime causes of turnover. While a good recruiter should be able to increase the quality of the candidate slate, and therefore increase the quality of the final hire, a bad line manager, poor management practices, and unkind co-workers can frustrate the greatest hire in the world, causing them to leave in record time.

Does a recruiter have control over any of these factors? I have never read a study that links attrition to recruiting practices. I have read hundreds of studies, though, that clearly link attrition with bad management practices, poor selection practices (remember, the manager makes that decision), bad bosses, boring work, lack of career-enhancing opportunities, and unsatisfactory compensation opportunities. Notice that none of these qualities have anything to do with recruiting.

Another challenge in merging these functions is that the capabilities required to be a great recruiter have little overlap with the skills required to build impactful, measurable retention programs.

Great recruiters have an external focus on the market of people who do not work here and may not have ever thought about working here. Retention initiatives are internally focused on people who have already decided to work here. Why would we think that one human being would be good at or be able to split their time between the two worlds? In fact, both roles are large enough to ensure that if you are doing one well you are almost certainly under-delivering in the other.

Interestingly, when we ask recruiting leaders who have this title to enumerate the scope of their retention activities, it is typically limited to ensuring the quality of candidates in the pipeline, sometimes providing marketplace feedback on competitive talent practices (usually compensation and talent management schemes at direct competitors), and marketplace feedback on the company’s market reputation.

Recruiting can certainly increase attrition through poor recruiting practices. Recruiters could, for example, misrepresent actual job duties, fail to eliminate habitual job-changers, or fail to stand firm with hiring managers about best hiring practices. But these are recruiting failures, not retention failures.

Look at it this way: assuming that recruiting does its job right, retention of that employee is no longer up to the recruiting function once that hire becomes an employee. It is up to HR and to line management to ensure their long-term success and loyalty.

After all, consider that line managers:

• Make the final hiring decision.
• Are primarily responsible, along with HR, for onboarding/new hire integration.
• Direct employees’ day-to-day work.
• Set the tone of the work unit.
• Lead the career development, along with HR, of direct reports.
• With assistance from HR, provide performance feedback/direction.
• Using HR programs, are responsible for promotions, both within their work groups and throughout the organization.

Let’s stop pretending that recruiting and retention are natural soul mates. Even more importantly, let’s put the retention focus where it properly belongs: in the hands of HR for overarching programs and in the hands of line managers for day-to-day delivery.

Let’s make first-year retention performance and top talent retention performance part of line managers’ key performance objectives. Let’s measure HR business value in terms of their demonstrated effectiveness at impacting workforce engagement and key employee retention.

Let recruiting focus on bringing us the best new talent on the market.

Then recruiting and retention will have the space they need to improve.

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.”

“However, this continues to be a skill-driven market and we’re still seeing pockets of strength in the tech sector, such as SAP, Oracle, security, and product development, and software and hardware engineers,” says Lanzalotto.

If the strength found in these sectors permeates the weaker sectors of the market, there is a chance that it could ultimately produce stronger wage growth for the second half of 2008.

The Yoh quarterly report also identifies the top job titles in highest demand. Based on conversations with more than 9,000 hiring managers in over 15 major metropolitan areas, Yoh says the following roles have appeared most frequently nationwide:

• Biostatistician
• Civil Engineer
• Clinical Research Associate
• Firmware/Embedded Engineer
• Java Developer
• Mechanical Engineer
• .Net Developer
• Oracle DBA
• Project Manager
• SAP® Consultant (Functional/Technical)

“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.

Here’s the example Hill used in the demo:

A req comes in for a computer design engineer with a master’s degree and skills in RTL and Verilog. Without having to know what those skills are the recruiter runs the req through SourceView to discover that in the entire United States there are only about 35,000 design engineers and of those fewer than 1percent have a master’s and know RTL and Verilog. Another view tells the recruiter how many reqs asking for the same qualifications are currently online across the country, in the state or even right in the same metro area.

As Hill drilled through the analysis it was quickly obvious that if our hiring manager was insistent on a design engineer with all those credentials, it was going to be a long search.

The pool grew quickly as qualifications were dropped from the “must have” side of the ledger. Now what if we knew the other skills design engineers had who listed Verilog knowledge on their resume?

SourceView does. And it can display these skills in a tag cloud manner, meaning the relative size of the name of each skill indicates how often design engineers mention it as a skill. Select a few of those in place of the Verilog skill and the candidate pool expands even further.

The value of SourceView should be obvious.

“What matters to recruiters is they have a way to talk to hiring managers,” says Hill. “MPG (MyPerfectGig) gives them that.”

In our example, the recruiter and the hiring manager can knowledgeably discuss the job req. Should there be no match or willing candidate in the MyPerfectGig database (we’ll get to that in a moment)recruiter and hiring manager can discuss just how critical each qualifications and what substitutions may be acceptable. The hiring manager knows what they need; the recruiter has the data to help the manager understand the challenge.

“It’s a much more informed discussion,” Hill points out.

The data on the worker supply comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage of workers in the category that have specific skills comes from MPG’s sampling of resumes. And the number of jobs posted online, which includes where the jobs are and the name of the company doing the hiring, comes from an automated searching of industry job sites.

Because of the amount of data My Perfect Gig collects for each job in its inventory, the service is limited right now to the computer manufacturing industry. Hill says MPG is already expanding its offerings into the medical devices and computer manufacturing related industries before branching into biotech and finance.

What about the candidate side?

For starters, it’s an invitation-only network. Professionals in the field who make the cut upload a resume if they choose, which is parsed and automatically populates their personal profile page. They can choose to be private, anonymous or public (though public in the sense that only other invitees and client companies can see the profile). Participants can enhance their profile or not. Their skills and resume go through the same kind of analysis as a job req and they can use the results to see how much in demand their skills are and where the most jobs are. By adding skills and enhancing their experience in a “What If” scenario, participants can see how it changes their career outlook.

“We’re giving real value to the members of the network whether or not they are looking for a job or would even consider one,” Hill explains.

When a match is made, both the company and the candidate decide whether to go further. If they do, My Perfect Gig puts the two together and they take it from there.

The company is already working with Raytheon, Teradyne, Broadcom and a few other big names in the computer manufacturing industry. Several more, Hill tells us, are waiting in the wings.

My Perfect Gig’s SourceView is available by subscription starting at $50,000 annually.

With today’s move out of beta, My Perfect Gig is launching a major corporate advertising campaign and an email campaign that Hill says will invite some 250,000 computer industry professionals to join the network.

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.

Beaker’s New Science ‘Hood…

We first chatted about this new online community back at the ERE Expo Spring 2008, and now Beaker.com has launched its community for professionals in the life sciences industries.

The site merges social networking, career advice, multimedia education, and online recruitment catering specifically to the life sciences industry.

The Beaker management team includes CEO Jeffrey Clark (former president/COO for Ken Clark International); VP of Sales Josh Akers (formerly with Monster.com and Direct Employers Association); and Chief Information Officer David Evans (formerly with America Online, CareerTours, Jobing, and Cendant).

Changing Face of Microsoft…

Watch for Microsoft to soon launch a campaign to showcase the diversity in its employee ranks, and ultimately attract more women and minorities to the company. (Todd Raphael has a more in-depth look at diversity coming up in the July Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.)

In partnership with ad agency Worktank, Microsoft conducted focus groups of both internal and external employees to understand what was important particularly to Native Americans, females, Hispanics, and African-Americans. It learned to put authenticity first, and to ditch the corporate speak.

In search of authenticity, the campaign is featuring rank-and-file employees, rather than Microsoft execs or an emphasis on Microsoft HR people. Among the employees featured prominently: one of the top-20 females in gaming in the country, as well as an African-American general manager who handles a 79-country region in the Middle East and Africa.

Microsoft will kick it off with a May 29 webinar.

TheLadders.com Says Bye to Bios…

TheLadders.com has unveiled new resume functionality, saying good-bye to “bios” and hello to the old-fashioned term resumes.

It’s essentially a matter of semantics, of course, but the change now gives candidates a chance to upload or create a resume in one step before letting recruiters skim through the latest postings. Candidates will still have the option to keep their personal and contact information confidential.

However, the company is making a plea with candidates on behalf of recruiters. In a letter to job-seekers about these new changes, it says “we have heard loud and clear from recruiters that they much prefer to know your name and current company. If you must, please use this confidentiality feature; but please do realize that it comes at the cost of making your resume a bit less transparent to those who are looking for you.”

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.

You can’t afford to lose control when credibility is the currency to all recruiting transactions.

We will never be able to completely eliminate these types of situations; however, the goal of a best-in-class recruiter is to minimize them as much as possible by maintaining candidate control. This control refers to the partnership and relationship that the recruiter drives. The recruiter should always remain in the driver’s seat, making the candidate the passenger. Control does not mean forcefully restricting what the candidate can and can’t do. Remember, you want to build the relationship.

To help maintain control of the recruiting process, the recruiter should set the tone of the relationship from the very first conversation with the candidate. This includes verbally setting clear expectations as to what each party needs to bring to the table.

At times, this practice can be challenging for new recruiters who may question its value, but the first conversation is the foundation upon which your candidate relationship will be built. The right conversation will positively affect all future conversations and will help ensure a positive final outcome in the recruiting process.

Setting expectations is not just for the recruiter’s benefit. The recruiter should clearly communicate the purpose of the conversation to the candidate so both parties understand what is required to ensure success.

During the initial conversation the recruiter should always:

• Provide full disclosure of the job requirements, duties, and full responsibilities of the position. At this time, the recruiter should also nail down the expected compensation and benefits. Do not end the conversation without clear expectations about what the candidate needs to make and what you can offer.
• Be available to answer the candidate’s questions in an open and transparent manner.
• Keep in close contact with the candidate through the qualification, interview and offer processes.
• Let the candidate know where they stand in the hiring process and provide constructive feedback when necessary.

On the flip side, the candidate should always:

• Provide you with full disclosure of their job search status. This will include, if possible, the companies or agencies that they have submitted their resumes to, the companies they are actively engaged with and the status of each of those engagements.
• Provide you with a well-written resume, examples of their work when applicable and being available to answer in-depth questions about their background.
• Keep you well-informed of any changes in their availability to interview or anything that would prevent them from starting a new role, including vacations that may conflict with your company’s or client’s schedule.

This is not a one-way or a one-time process. This should be the standard for each and every initial candidate conversation.

As a recruiter, ask your candidate: “Has anything changed in your search status?” on a recurring basis. I’ve seen more “back outs” in my career due to the recruiter not having a 360-degree view of the candidate, their motivations, and all opportunities they are exploring.

The goal of the first conversation is for the candidate to leave with a clear understanding that you’re a professional, an expert in your industry, and a partner in the process. Also, that an open and honest line of communication is a critical component to the recruiting process.

You’ll find one of two things when you discuss these mutually beneficial expectations with your candidate:

1. The candidate is amenable with the expectations set and it is clear based on their active participation with you during the conversation that they are engaged and committed to the role and interested in partnering with you throughout the process.
2. Or, your candidate will not be completely engaged with the process even after you talk through their objections and have presented the benefits associated with each of the aforementioned expectations. For example, the candidate may not be open to sharing their past salary history or their desired rate with you, they may not be open to keeping you informed on their search status, or unwilling to confirm changes with you in a timely manner. These are the candidates you potentially will want to pass on. I say potentially as I’ve been in this business long enough to know that the recruiting process requires us to be flexible (especially when working with top-notch candidates). Make this decision with one caveat: a candidate who is unwilling to conform to simple parameters will be more likely to throw you for a loop at some point in your recruiting process.

Know what category your candidate fits into and resolve any red flags before proceeding.

After the initial conversation, touch base with your active candidates often. Determine whether anything has changed in their status and uncover and resolve any additional concerns.

Reconfirm their ongoing commitment to the opportunity. Many of us have learned the hard way that things change quickly, at time daily! Reconnecting with candidates often will minimize being caught off guard.

You must drive the recruiting process; the recruiting process should not drive you. To keep your candidates as partners in the process, do your part to proactively and routinely reach out, engage, and set mutually beneficial expectations with them. By driving the process, you will stay in control, help your candidates land an amazing job, and achieve record placement results.

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:

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.

Whether you’re a third-party or corporate recruiter, making more placements per month would be a good thing. With this goal in mind, here are 10 ways you can double your placements per month:

1. Make sure all of your candidates are interviewed. Part of the service level agreement with your clients should be that 100% of your candidates will be interviewed. To pull this off, develop a track record of only presenting strong candidates. Work toward this. If you deliver consistently here, you’ll be able to schedule the interview instantly through Outlook without your client even seeing the resume. Achieving this will eliminate all of the work involved in interviewing and screening candidates who are presented, but not seen.
2. Increase your cold voicemail return rate to passive candidates. You should be getting at least 50% to 75% of your voicemails returned. One of the best ways to achieve this is to only call people who have been referred to you where you can mention the referrer’s name. You’ll achieve a similar callback rate if you’re an industry expert or with a highly regarded and recognized search firm. Your productivity will soar when everyone calls you back.
3. Minimize the time spent talking to bad candidates. Even if they return your call, you shouldn’t be wasting your time calling people who aren’t any good. Work toward making 80% of your cold calls only to those people who have been referred to you and are considered top notch. Become great at networking and getting great referrals. If you can mention the name of the person who referred you to the candidate, this will increase your callback rate, too, so it’s a double win.
4. Don’t spend time reviewing resumes of under-performers. When searching or Googling a resume database, add in recognition or top performance keywords in your string to separate the good resumes from the bad. For example, the term “club” is typically found on the resumes of top salespeople and “laude” is found on the resumes of top under-grads. Every job has terms that indicate the person is a strong performer that would be included on the candidate’s resume. The terms can range from “patent” to “whitepaper” and from “award” to “GPA,” and to everything in between. Don’t waste precious hours reviewing resumes that can be easily eliminated with simple search strings.
5. Reduce the percentage of candidates who say “no” or “not interested” on first contact. Good recruiters are persistent and don’t take no for an answer until the candidate has enough information to accurately decide if your job is worth considering. The best recruiters go a step further and don’t ask questions that can be answered with a “no.” For example, asking someone if they’d be interested in exploring a situation that could potentially be a fast-track career in marketing is more likely to get a yes than asking the same person if she’d be interested in a senior marketing analyst role. Job knowledge, applicant control, and strong recruiting skills are critical here, and worth it if you want to increase your pool of strong candidates.
6. Reduce the rate of candidates who voluntarily opt-out of your interviewing process after meeting with the hiring manager. Top candidates are frequently underwhelmed after meeting their potential new boss and team. Top candidates are impressed when those on the hiring team are prepared, clearly understand real job needs, don’t oversell, and ask thorough and meaningful questions. Prep your clients if they’re not good interviewers, if they make emotional decisions, or don’t know how to recruit. Instruction in Performance-based Hiring can help here.
7. Prevent your clients from eliminating good candidates for bad reasons. Sometimes great people aren’t seen because they don’t have exactly the right background. More often, top people with the right background aren’t great at interviewing or selling themselves. Even more often, managers aren’t very good at assessing competency across all job needs. To prevent this wrongful elimination, become a better interviewer than your clients and intervene before the bad decision occurs. Here are some ideas on how to prevent this costly error: send a sample (e.g., product or presentation) of the candidate’s best work along with the resume, personally lead an initial panel interview and formal debriefing session, have your client conduct an exploratory phone screen before a formal interview, or provide some type of evidence (e.g., an award for something or recommendation) that can’t be easily refuted.
8. Prevent your best candidates from rejecting good offers for bad reasons, especially money. Sometimes top people get shortsighted, especially when first learning about an opportunity. Even during the interviewing process, people get hung up with the short-term issues, like comp, location, and job title, and decide to arbitrarily withdraw themselves from consideration. It’s important to get candidates to consider both the short- and long-term issues in balance. Some of the longer-term strategic issues include job growth, job stretch, degree of learning, the impact that can be made, and the overall upside potential of the job in comparison to others being considered. Early in the recruiting process, suggest that your opportunity should be examined on a multi-factor level balancing strategic and tactical issues collectively. This is how to convert your job into a career opportunity and increase the odds more top people will fully evaluate them on this basis.
9. Increase the number of top people who see your ads. If you’re using any form of advertising, make sure they’re found by the people you want to find them. The simplest way to see if your ads are even being seen is to see if you can find them using Google. For example, if your ad is for a warehouse supervisor in Atlanta, Google “warehouse supervisor jobs Atlanta” and see what boards and jobs show up. Then post your jobs on these boards. This process is called reverse engineering. Of course, you’ll want to be the top listing when you click on the board. The best short-term way to do this is use a sponsored search approach either on the board or with Google. The best people are now Googling for jobs, so regardless of how you get to the first-page listings, it will increase your flow of top people.
10. Increase the quality and response rate of your ads. If you’re not tracking the number of people who see your ad and the percent that apply, you’re wasting your money. The best way to increase the response rate (typically less than 10%) and the quality level is to write creative ads that emphasize what’s in it for the candidate, not the skills and experience requirements. If you position these great ads to be found (see point 9), you’ll increase the quantity and quality of the candidates by three to five times. Then if you screen the resumes using performance terms (see point 4) you won’t waste time looking at any of the bad resumes.

Fully implemented, you should be able to get 20% to 50% better on each of these factors. With this type of improvement, even if all of the factors don’t personally apply to what you do, you’ll still be able to become 100% better in a few months.

Collectively, this is how you move from being an average recruiter to a really good one. Now once you get 100% better do it again. This is how you become a great recruiter.

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.”

Arbita provides job posting distribution services, enabling companies to select the most productive places to post job openings from among thousands of different job boards around the world. The 30-person company tracks the results, providing recruiters data to help them maximize the ROI of their ad spending.

Job Machine works at the other end of the pole, teaching recruiters how to find and qualify candidates who might not even consider looking at a job board, let alone search for another job. Steckerl’s five-person firm also consults with companies that want to develop a stronger sourcing component to their overall recruitment strategy.

Though Steckerl – and Ramer – disdain the “passive / active” terminology (“I don’t believe in the term,” Steckerl tells us.), it’s a good way to distinguish the two companies. Arbita focuses on active candidates; Job Machine on passives.

So what brought the two companies together in a deal both insist is not a sale?

“”We’re brothers of a different mother,” says Steckerl, explaining that a strategic recruiting program needs to encompass both passive and active candidates. “When Don and I started talking I knew I was talking to a brother. Both of us know a good talent pipeline gets fed from different places.”

Combining the two companies means their clients can tap into broad expertise with the assurance that the solutions are the best fit. As Ramer explains the synergy, “It’s really possible to serve the customers by offering a spectrum of solutions.”

It was Steckerl who went shopping for a partner, after doing some soul-searching about the future of JobMachine. His choices boiled down to “grow the company organically, or join forces with an organization or not grow at all,” Steckerl told us.

To grow, he needed help with the administrative and sales functions. Not growing would be to stagnate, he says. However, he didn’t want to sell the company or take in investors who could end up running things.

“I won’t be told what to do,” he told us as he jokingly said he wanted to “continue to be the rogue mercenary.”

Arbita’s business emphasis meant the two companies didn’t compete and each would benefit from the knowledge of the other, Steckerl says. Plus, he adds, “Don’s the only one who didn’t want to buy me out.”

Even before the merger is complete, which is expected early in the summer, the two companies have begun to work together. Eventually, Arbita will handle JobMachine’s accounting and related administrative details. Both companies will offer the other’s services and products. The name JobMachine will continue and Steckerl will continue to run it as a separate unit.

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?

Recruitment analyst Peter Weddle doesn’t think so, coining stress “the silent killer” because he thinks no one is paying much attention to how stress breaks down an otherwise healthy staff.

In Watson Wyatt’s 2007/2008 Global Strategic Rewards report, 40% of employees cited stress as the number-one reason for leaving their last employer. But when asked why their employees jumped ship, the bosses ranked stress at number five.

Be Resilient

Weddle encourages adopting a slower pace to embark on a recruiter’s stress reduction program:

• Step 1: Conduct a test among your recruiting team. This blind survey can pinpoint what’s currently causing any pressure or anxiety, and nothing should be off limits. Weddle says the goal is to identify the fixable sources of stress within your organization. Weddle acknowledges that the team will likely complain about leadership, culture, or compensation policies, but you should really determine the growing irritants that collectively shadow a recruiter’s perceived ability to succeed on-the-job. Some worries, for example, are unrealistic workloads, insufficient training, unpleasant work environment, or unrealistic schedules.
• Step: 2: Identify any “stress-reduction resources” you could use. For example, a nonconventional resource might be found within your own staffing group. During a budget crunch, it might leave some open time on someone else’s schedule. Voila! That’s recruiter talent that’s normally committed elsewhere. Also look for things outside of the staffing group. For example, Weddle suggests that a reduction in workload in the finance department may enable someone on that staff to invest some time in tutoring recruiters on building the business case for corporate investments.
• Step 3: Allocate the resources you have to address the sources of stress that you’ve identified. After you’ve determined what stresses you out and what resources, if any, could help, build and prioritize a list of specific stress-reduction actions. Then brief the entire recruiting team on your plan, and finally, execute the steps to help lower stress for you and your team.

Stress is a state of mind, sure, but these tips can help you keep the right frame of mind all year long. At the very least, maybe these tips will help you rest better this long holiday weekend and return to work on Tuesday significantly refreshed!

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.

Reflecting back, she realized that there had been virtually no communication with her manager over her last three days leading up to her termination. What’s ironic is that she was actually getting a lot of work done then. She felt that she was finally just starting to get the hang of things.

This was during the time when her manager was probably meeting with HR to work out and finalize her termination. At the exit interview, she was told that she “didn’t pick things up quickly enough.”

My friend had asked lots of questions of her manager while employed there, particularly when given work that was beyond what had been discussed in the interview. But whenever she asked her boss about her assignments, he talked about other things and never really answered her questions.

When a manager says something like “you didn’t pick things up quickly enough,” this can also be seen to mean, “I didn’t take the time to manage you well.”

Especially with new hires, managers have to invest a lot of time in integrating the new employee. When a new piece of equipment is obtained for the office, there is often instruction in how to use that piece of equipment, at least for the person who is responsible for using it. We may even send the person to training in how to use the machine.

Sink or Swim?

We don’t seem to do that consistently with people. We throw them into situations and expect them to “sink or swim.” We cannot afford to have too many new hires sink. It just costs too much money.

It costs a manager something more than money to admit that he may not have managed the person in the way that they needed to be managed. He didn’t take the time to figure out how to motivate the person. He didn’t figure out how the new person learns best, through careful instruction or trial and error.

The cost is that the manager has to admit that he made a mistake. That he was wrong. It’s much easier to blame the now-terminated new hire:

• “You didn’t pick things up fast enough.”
• “You weren’t communicating enough.”
• “You didn’t understand the culture here.”
• “You were a bad fit.”

In all these cases, the common denominator may have been that the manager didn’t do a good enough job in interviewing the person or integrating the new hire into the workforce in the first weeks or months. In every case, the manager blamed the employee for what may have been the manager’s shortcoming.

Managing is hard work. It’s not intuitive. No one is born a manager. Some people are born leaders, but managing requires training and it takes time.

Good managers can be developed, but only if they are given the time to learn, also the same way new hires need time to develop.

Managers need to master a broad skill set to be effective in all phases of the role:

• Understanding how the department operates so that the right mix of jobs is created.
• Interviewing (which is so much more than just talking to people) to effectively determine whether candidates have the correct skill-match for the position.
• Orienting the new hire to the workplace and to the job and his or her colleagues. Integrating a new hire takes weeks, not hours. Too frequently, managers leave orientation up to HR. No offense to HR, but new hires are too valuable to be trusted only to HR. The HR team has a critical role to play in integrating new employees, but the new hire is going to listen far more to what their new manager tells them than anything HR has to say.
• Setting performance objectives so that the new hire clearly understands what is expected of him or her.
• Giving feedback on an ongoing basis, not just at the end of the year in an anxiety-ridden performance evaluation.
• Recognizing and rewarding people for their effort as well as for their accomplishments.

When you look at all the expectations that we have of managers, it’s easy to understand why we invest so much in management development and training. It takes time to become an effective manager. Anyone promoted to management generally figures this out in the first few days on the job.

The piece that too often gets overlooked is training our managers in people management. How to interview candidates, how to select the right ones who can be most productive in their environment, and how to continue to get the most out of them on the job. Managers need to learn how to engage their staff so they give their best effort on the job as opposed to just doing enough not to get fired.

The good news is we usually give new managers the time to figure out how to do their new job, in part because of all the time and money invested in developing this person to the point of promotion.

No doubt, this new manager would certainly be annoyed if after a few weeks in the new position, their manager called them into a conference room and started in with, “You’re not picking things up quickly enough.”

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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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.”

Launched in July 2005 as Mkt10, the job matching site later changed its name to JobFox as it began to expand beyond the Washington, D.C. market where it first tested its approach to recruitment. It works by matching candidates, who complete a series of qustions about their interests, skills, background and expectations, to jobs and companies, which also complete a corporate profile.

“Jobfox puts the spotlight on top professionals instead of job listings,” said McGovern, who founded Jobfox after selling CareerBuilder (profile; site), which he also founded and lead, in 2002.

Earlier this year, Jobfox was recognized as an Official Honoree for the 12th Annual Webby Awards. Jobfox was also named a 2008 most promising startup by American Venture Magazine.

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.)

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the banalities of “corporate speak,” those words such as synergy, deliverables, scalable, and, my personal favorite, paradigm shift, which sounds suspiciously like a Led Zeppelin cover band or a Tom Clancy novel.

Additionally, there is a preponderance of words that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever to anyone outside of a specialized functional area.

As an accounting and finance recruiter, I am able to speak quite convincingly about Tier One ERPs, f(x) hedging, and econometrics. In fact, I can come across sounding a bit like a wonk, which I will consider a professional asset, given my inability to do simple arithmetic.

I feel a little bit like an expatriate; I’m able to speak the language with some proficiency, but throw in an idiom or colloquialism, and I’m rooting around for my dictionary.

Meaningless Catch-Phrases Take Off

Slowly but surely, these buzzwords have trickled into the public consciousness because most of these words are reserved for candidates specifically. The overwhelming majority of our etymology, in fact, was specifically created for less-than-desirable candidates.

As recruiters, it is vocational anathema to create a negative impression on a candidate, or to in any way create a negative reflection on the organization we represent. A successful recruiter strives to make each candidate feel like his or her interaction with the company was a successful one, even if it was, in fact, the worst disaster since the Hindenburg.

To prevent further confusion, I’ve provided a quick guide for candidates to decipher recruiter-speak with the hope that it eases the search process by providing the subtext of the terminology recruiters use the most.

While corporate recruiters are honest, we are never brutally honest. Our errors are of omission, and we tend to accentuate the positive, whether in presenting an opportunity, rejecting a candidate, or even closing an offer.

A Growing List

This list is by no means definitive, but it is a start?any suggestions or additions are greatly encouraged.

• Sourcing (v) Usage: “I sourced your resume and thought that you might be a great fit?” Definition: The entry of keywords onto a job board.
• Exciting (adj.): Usage: “We’ve got an exciting opportunity currently available?” Definition: An open headcount that needs to be filled as quickly as possible.
• Prescreen (n) Usage: “I’d like to set up a brief, exploratory prescreen.” Definition: The conversation by which recruiters ascertain if they can afford the talent in question.
• Visibility (adj.): Usage: “This role has high visibility to all levels of management throughout the organization.” Definition: The phrase most often used to describe a position with the smallest margin for error and highest turnover rate in the company.
• Growth (n): Usage: “This position is really a great growth opportunity.” Definition: The naturally occurring phenomenon by which workers find fulfillment doing exactly the same job in a different company.
• Ad-hoc (adj.) Usage: “There will also be some ad-hoc projects required.” Definition: A catch-all phrase used by corporations to describe the countless hours of manpower invested in activities unrelated to one’s job function, generally evoked at the whim of departmental heads.
• Expectations (n) Usage: “What are your expectations for your next position?” Definition: The test commonly used during the screening process to see whether the candidate is capable of reading a job description and changing tense from third- to first-person.
• Stable (adj.) Usage: “It’s a very stable business unit.” Definition: When the collective tenure of a department’s employees preempt any consideration of change or improvement upon the status quo.
• Reinventing (v) Usage: “We’ve had challenges in the past, but we’re reinventing ourselves and our processes.” Definition: A commonly used tactic employed by recruiters to explain recent or forthcoming layoffs (see: derecruit, reorganization, shared services, offshoring, outsourcing, et al).
• Competition (n) Usage: “You’ve got some pretty stiff competition for this position.” Definition: A word used by recruiters to preempt disappointment for the candidate by establishing expectations upfront. Alternative definition: A tactic employed to make an extremely undesirable position appear more enticing.
• Team (n) Usage: “We’re looking for a team player.” Definition: The intangible qualities associated with a candidate who will not make waves and demonstrates the willingness to accept abuse by supervisors and fellow staff.
• DOE (acr.) see also depending on experience.Usage: “I am unable to provide a salary range for the position as it is DOE.” Definition: Whereby a company unable to pay market rate for a position compensates by placing the blame on candidate deficiencies.
• Best practices (n): Usage: “We’re a best practices organization.” Phrase has not yet been defined. See meaning of life, UFOs.
• Work-life balance (phrase): Usage: “We put a real premium on work-life balance.” Definition: The ratio of one’s time at home to one’s time at work. The smaller the ratio, the more likely the employee is paid on an hourly basis.
• Overtime (n) Usage: “There may be some slight overtime involved.” Definition: An institution imposed by corporations to increase shareholder value without increasing headcount by maximizing working hours of employee population, up to and including Saturdays, holidays, and seminal life events.
• Feedback (n) Usage: “I’ll provide feedback from my hiring manager as soon as I get it.” Definition: Generally construed as a one- or two-word answer by which hiring managers summarily reject top candidates.
• Next steps (phrase) Usage: “We’ll be in touch regarding next steps.” Definition: A phrase used to put off rejecting marginal candidates for as long as possible until an offer is accepted by a more qualified party.
• References (n) Usage: “We’re going to begin checking your references.” Definition: The process by which a recruiter contacts previous coworkers of a potential hire from a list provided by the candidate in an attempt to bring objectivity to the hiring process.
• Background check (n) Usage: “You’re our final candidate, but I can’t extend an offer until your background check clears.” Definition: A control imposed by corporations in order to slow recruiters’ ability to extend an offer for a period of time that perfectly coincides with a candidate’s extension and acceptance of other offers. Alternate definition: An industry whose practitioners continue to thrive despite the Internet’s abilities to perform the same functionality at a fraction of the cost.
• Benefits (n) Usage: “We are proud to offer a comprehensive, competitive benefits package to all employees.” Definition: A tactic used by corporations to attract full-time employees and entice temporary ones into menial labor.
• Offer letter (n) Usage: “Congratulations on joining our team. I’m sending over an offer letter that contains all the information you’re going to need.” Definition: A document or set of documents that contains all information relevant to one’s employment with a company, denoting the last communication between recruiter and candidate until the candidate becomes eligible for transfer consideration.

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.”

The JobsinPods.com team calls it “probably the best employment branding site we’ve ever seen,” noting its use of a blog; photos via Flickr; YouTube-hosted videos; polls; RSS feeds; and podcasts.

So if you’re contemplating a career in the airline industry, let’s compare Southwest to how other airlines are communicating with an audience full of potential applicants: Delta Airlines has a few creative things but is mostly ignoring any use of interactivity anywhere on its site. The same goes for the websites for American Airlines and Continental Airlines, both drastically devoid of any human-esque interaction, though they tie for having the most boring and static career sites. Even JetBlue Airlines, considered one of the more “inspiring” airlines, has a rather flat, “log-in required” website that isn’t much higher of the cool scale.

What About Me?

Well, if you’re like most other companies, you’re not as cool as Southwest. (But you might not be as bad as some of Southwest’s competitors though.)

ERE’s recent webinar pointed out that social networking tools allows personalization and control; is fun and engaging; has global reach; and provides for in-depth customization.

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Also, a study conducted recently in the United Kingdom shows that only 10% of recruiters use social networking sites and only a small minority use blogs, videos, or other Web 2.0 technology for recruitment. The research suggests that one of the reasons why social networks have been slow to take off as a recruitment tool is because recruiters do not consider them a credible way to communicate, despite large numbers of their target labor market using them regularly.

“Recruiters may be missing a trick by not adopting Web 2.0 technology. They need to engage with job seekers to encourage them to apply for jobs. Text-heavy recruitment pages with no interactivity will not win the hearts and minds of the Web 2.0 generation,” said Cranfield University research fellow Emma Parry, in the study.

What to Do

You can do it yourself, finally tapping into the power of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., or you can pay someone for help.

SuccessFactors, for one, has a new “Web 2.0-based collaborative network,” a solution that helps you learn about tagging, social networking, and other tools.

Kevin Wheeler wrote a whole column about this, said it’s here to stay, and shared tips on how to gain a competitive edge.

In reality, Web 2.0 is so here to stay it’s practically over. So what is your company waiting for?

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.

On the one hand, everyone should applaud this healthy step forward. On the other, what’s next? Testing for the presence of excessive levels of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey or a few too many Twinkies?

But Sarasota is serious about this new policy, stating that all applicants for jobs with Sarasota County will be required to acknowledge during the application process that they have not used tobacco products for the preceding 12 months.

Applicants who refuse to verify that they do not use tobacco products will be deemed ineligible for employment. In addition, applicants will be screened for tobacco use during the new-hire physical exam process. If the screening indicates the presence of nicotine above a specified amount, the applicant will be considered ineligible for employment.

Why Change Now?

The county says its revised policy is based on years of research regarding the negative effects of tobacco use on the personal health of individuals and employer organizations.

For example, from 1997 to 2001, cigarette smoking was estimated to be responsible for $167 billion in annual health-related economic losses in the United States.

Sarasota County says its decision to adopt this tobacco-free policy will promote a healthier workforce and benefit taxpayers’ dollars.

Of course, Sarasota is not alone. Due to higher insurance costs and the drain on productivity, employers around the country have considered such measures.

(We checked its online jobs board, but R.J. Reynolds is not one of these more progressive employers.)

If your company is thinking of such a policy, make sure to learn from other companies that have faced lawsuits from employees. For example, a Miracle-Gro employee challenged the policy last year.