The big news in its financial report is that the company turned a profit and beat analysts’ estimates. The company earned and adjusted 15 cents a share, which is 2 cents more than the consensus estimate. In terms of dollars, the company reported earning $1.1 million for the quarter vs. losing $1.8 million for the same quarter in 2007. (Numbers here include both GAAP and non-GAAP reports. See here for an explanation of what these mean.)

It got a boost from an 83 percent growth in international sales, which now represent 13 percent of company revenue. New customers from outside North America include Cargotec, Veolia, AirFrance, Baloise, Eiffage, Manpower, and Vic Roads.

“Taleo achieved record performance across the organization, posted record revenues, and set a record for the number of new customers. Our results highlight both the growing demand for talent management solutions in large and small companies regardless of the economic environment,” said Michael Gregoire, Chairman and CEO of Taleo.

Total revenue grew 9% to $354 million, from $324 million in the comparable quarter of 2007, boosted by a favorable exchange rate. Even without the benefit of the exchange rate Monster grew revenue by 4 percent. Wall Street analysts had estimated revenues would come in at $361 million.

International sales fueled the company’s growth during the quarter, as it has for the past year. While revenue from North American operations fell by $10 million during the quarter to $164 million. But sales elsewhere in the world jumped 34 percent (23 percent when you exclude the effect of currency exchange rates). International sales now account for 44 percent of company revenue.

Much of the financial news was expected by stock traders. Monster shares closed at $17.74, down 2.4 percent on the day, and rose slightly in after hours trading, when the numbers were released.

The company also reported settling a federal class action suit brought on behalf of shareholders who claimed they were mislead by the company’s practice of backdating stock options. That settlement and one previously announced resolves most of the shareholder litigation.

The Trovix acquisition was more of a surprise. Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi called the purchase “a game-changing development.” “(It) complements nicely our ongoing investments in product, sales, and customer service, as well as the extension of our business into new areas and geographies,” he added.

Trovix launched as an ATS vendor in 2002, implementing artificial intelligence to analyze reqs and candidate resumes and match them in ranked order. The matching technology was refined over the years and in 2007 Trovix introduced its own jobboard where standard job postings and resumes and jobseeker information were matched.

In the announcement of the deal, Monster explained its rational for acquiring Trovix: “The combination of Monster and Trovix enhances Monster’s value proposition to employers by adding speed and efficiencies to the recruiting process, resulting in an improved return on investment for employers. The technology will also benefit job seekers, who will receive more relevant, targeted job postings.”

“The implementation of this technology will allow Monster to provide unparalleled match capabilities, taking us beyond keyword search into contextual search,” says Darko Dejanovic, Monster’s Global Chief Information Officer and Head of Product.

At least for now, Monster will continue to support existing Trovix customers.

Monster has also announced the acquisition of Armees.com, a French military site similar to Monster’s Military.com. No price was announced.

Finally, Monster said it has entered into arrangements with vendors Cornerstone OnDemand, a provider of on-demand, E-learning and training services, and HireRight (profile; site) an on-demand employment screening solutions provider.

Cornerstone will provide online courses in general business, desktop applications, and IT topic. HireRight will offer employers the opportunity to purchase background screening services as part of its current candidate management experience on Monster.com.

• Dartmouth College graduates have the highest median salary in the country with a Total Cash Compensation of $134,000;
• Colorado School of Mines has the highest median salary of all schools west of the Mississippi, excluding California, with a median Total Cash Compensation of $106,000;
• The University of California Berkeley is the state school with the highest Median Total Cash Compensation of $112,000.

These are just a few of the tidbits from the 2008 Education and Salary Report sponsored by Payscale (profile; site).

The just released report offers up such datapoints as the top salary potential by variety of school, most popular jobs by degree or major, and top schools by pay potential according to geography.

Our favorite category? Top party school pay potential. And the winner in this category is University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This is a data rich report that has a statistical validity and a relatively high confidence interval for a survey of this kind. It’s a great resource for high school counselors and the results are sure to surprise more than a few corporate recruiters. Marketing and technical writing are among the more popular jobs for English majors and with median salaries in the mid-sixties, they won’t have to live in an attic room forever.

Neil Romano, assistant secretary, office of disability policy, told the ILG conference today that people still believe the myth that disabled people are receiving plenty of money and don’t need to work. On the contrary, Romano argues: the disabled are innovators who crave the chance at developing products others may not have thought of.

“The marginalization of people with disabilities starts very, very early,” Romano said, speaking from personal experience as a dyslexic. He said every job he has ever received has been from word of mouth, because his disability prevented him from successfully and correctly applying for jobs. “I completely messed up the health care forms at the Department of Labor — so much so that I wasn’t covered for two months,” he jokes. (Romano also tells the endearing story of when he called his mother to tell her the White House nominated him to his job, only to hear his mother respond, “do they know you can’t spell?”)

Disabilities are a running theme of this year’s ILG, with many speakers arguing that disabled job candidates are the next wave of diversity, the next band of talent largely shut out of the workplace, as women and blacks once were.

On the exhibit floor, the Job Accommodation Network is evaluating employer websites for their accessibility. JAN is likely to be busy in future months as the government takes a closer look at the multimedia running on career sites. SSB BART is one private company also in this field.

Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman, the 120,000-employee maker of radar, missile defense, laser systems, satelite systems, and more, is making a special effort to hire the severely disabled. It’s recruiting from job fairs, military facilities, and via word of mouth. “There’s no big list of everyone who’s been injured and is out looking for work,” Northrop HR director Mike Jones says.

Because it’s often hard to translate military skills — for those you who do not offer positions driving tanks — Jones says he’s looking at his effort as “reverse recruiting,” examining candidates’ skills and then seeing where the company may be able to place them.

Northrop expects to hire about 15,000 people this year, and has something like 2,000 different types of jobs open now, from HR to systems administration to secretarial to accounting.

Taken at face value and looking at traditional work styles and jobs, there is some validity to these stories. Human resources people, recruiters, and some business people will affirm the shortage anecdotally. But it’s hard to find real examples and real numbers.

Certainly, anyone trying to hire a surgeon in North Dakota, a Starbucks barista in Oklahoma, or a stock broker in Alaska may have to look long and hard. But if you are looking for these folks in urban areas or places with significant populations, the number of qualified applicants increases substantially.

After all, it has never been easy to attract skilled professionals to rural areas, and it has become even more difficult as people leave the country for large cities. Rural parts of the world are emptying into cities — especially those located in coastal areas or those with significant educational and cultural activities.

Richard Florida’s books on the Creative Class point out in stark numbers and colorful graphs and charts the shifts in population away from some less desirable (and often semi-rural) cities and toward others that offer the lifestyle and engaging employment desired by the emerging creative class.

Sure, thousands of baby boomers are poised to retire over the next decade or two and, yes, there are somewhat fewer young folks behind them; but is that really going to be a problem? And will the number of boomers who choose to retire reach the predicted numbers?

Studies I have seen indicate that boomers will most likely defer retirement for some time because they have not saved enough to make retirement possible or because they remain healthy and want to continue working.

We will most likely also need fewer people to reach the same productivity levels of today.

The nature of work has changed dramatically. Today only about 2% of Americans grow food or work on farms. This is truly amazing considering the amount of food produced and exported. Farms have grown much larger and are more automated. Completely automated, GPS-guided tractors cultivate fields that used to take a dozen men and several dozen horses to plow.

I was recently at a copper mine in Chile where GPS-guided ore trucks will soon obsolete the need for drivers. The widespread adoption of the Internet and its associated applications has simplified many work processes and will continue to reduce the number of people needed in many areas of the economy.

Manufacturing, too, has moved to automation or outsourcing. It was the 20th century’s economic backbone and required a huge supply of raw manpower. For the most part, workers needed to be equipped with little more than a high school education and a willingness to do hard physical labor.

But today only about 11% of workers remain employed in manufacturing and those workers are more skilled and experienced than at any other time in our history. Automation and outsourcing have replaced thousands of semiskilled jobs and the need for raw manpower has reached very close to zero.

So it is unlikely that there is any broad-based shortage of traditional talent or any need for drastic measures. Any shortages that may exist can be attributed to geographical location, the nature of the work, and the pay scale.

I am a believer that when the time is right, the solution appears. If organizations were really feeling the pain of shortages, they would have started training programs, raised wages, and lobbied educational institutions to change curricula. None of those things have happened on a wide scale.

And many of the solutions are expensive and socially or politically inconvenient. For example, as it becomes more and more difficult to find people willing to work for relatively low wages, retail stores are reducing the number of sales associates. They have installed systems that let customers do their own check out. And, without much additional trouble, they could install scanners that would use bar codes to bring up information about a product and answer customer’s questions. I think it is likely that we will see a “black box” retail establishment at some point, but no one would accept it today.

There are hundreds of other areas where automation could reduce the need for or replace humans if the costs were justifiable and it was socially acceptable.

Business has a responsibility to ensure its supply chain of talent and has gradually been putting programs into place to do this. Over the past decade there has been increased interest in internal leadership development programs, internships, and similar development activities. Companies are investing in diversity programs, training, college recruiting, and retention activities to ensure the supply chain.

The challenge for government is to find ways to partner with business to retrain and re-skill thousands of people who are no longer needed in traditional occupations. Educational systems from high school to university are not meeting the needs of our economy and make false promises to students by implying that they will be employable after graduation.

Recruiters know that neither a high school diploma nor a college degree is enough to ensure a job offer. Most occupations require extensive training and take years to master, but we have not built bridges between education and work.

For most people, figuring out how to get a job with no experience is the most significant challenge they face. This should force organizations to build bridges, which could be internships, short-term work assignments, part-time work, apprenticeships, and so forth. This means we need to lobby for changes in human resource policies and for changes in employment laws that limit their ability to build these bridges.

Our current employment system is based on the assumptions that workers need protection, are victims, are not able to work or make decisions for themselves. We need to wake up to the fact that the workers we need and want to hire are making choices every day about who to work for and why. They are opting for employers that provide training, ongoing development, personal growth opportunities, and flexibility.

The concept of a talent shortage is based on projections that assume tomorrow will look like today. It is also largely based on a mindset that arose out the manufacturing era when masses of unskilled, compliant labor was needed.

We now need fewer, but highly skilled, creative and independent people to propel us forward. This is the real talent shortage we face.

That alone surprised us, since we have this sense that most lower-level workers are in their 20s and 30s and came of age at a time when casual was already the norm.

The corker, though, is that this self-same survey had bosses saying casual attire was perfectly fine. Only 40 percent thought it hurt productivity.

Remember we said this was an unscientific survey. Conducted by FPC, a national franchise search firm, the survey had 9,105 responses collected anonymously from workers who visited the site. Researchers and pollsters can legitimately argue that it is not random and self-selecting.

Caveats aside, we would have guessed that the bosses were the ones ready to go back to suits, skirts, and ties. And though a bare majority (51 percent) of the workers said going back to formal business attire would be a step backward, our guess would have been something like 90 percent would feel that way.

Interestingly, only in chemical, biomedical, and pharmaceuticals did workers and bosses agree that casual attire hurt productivity.

By asking themselves these questions, he says, you can reduce the number of people considered “applicants.” This can help employers better comply with the rules. (If you can show that you hired 20 women out of 25 applicants, that’s generally better than saying you hired 20 women out of 25,000 applicants.)

Anyhow, the three questions:

Are you front loading your “willingness questions?” An employer, Silberman says, “need not ‘consider’ candidates not willing to perform the job,” such as people who (depending of course on what’s needed for the specific job) aren’t willing to travel, work overtime, work weekends, or work at a specific salary. An employer could set up a special email address for applicants, he says. When candidates send in a query about a job, an employer could set up an auto-reply email asking them such “willingness” questions. If candidates get weeded out, the employer, Silberman says, doesn’t need to consider them to be “applicants.”

Are you strategically using data-management techniques? An employer can arbitrarily decide to consider the first, say, 20 people who applied for a job. If there are 20,000 other applicants who the employer didn’t consider, that’s generally fine, Silberman says. An employer can do the “last in the door” method (consider the most recent applicants for the job) or “first in the door” (consider the first people to apply), or randomly choose a certain number of people to consider.

Are you properly designing and using “basic qualifications”? You shouldn’t require an accounting degree, for example, for an HR job, if it’s not necessary. You shouldn’t require a college degree just because it’s a common practice to do so in job ads; there should be a reason for such a requirement. Qualifications should be objective, such as “two years’ experience” and should not be comparative, such as “one of the top 10 accountants in the city.”

The bottom line, Silberman says, is that when it comes to compliance with the job-applicant rules, what matters is not just who you’re hiring but who is being considered in your pool of applicants.

President Bush appointed Earp, a single mother of a teenage son, to her current term in 2005.

She says the “agency has no illusion” that it can tackle all of its huge workload. Instead, it hopes to bring about workplace change through disparate impact cases. Expect the EEOC to focus specifically on technology and tests used by employers in the hiring process.

Also, Earp:

–Says that people with some Asian and African accents are sometimes “viewed as put-offs.” People dwell on the fact that they’re Japanese-Americans or another nationality and ignore the content of their words.

–Says Hispanics see this as “our time” and expect to be taken very seriously.

–Gets a kick out of a new Bloomberg flex-scheduling policy that coincides with a lawsuit against the company.

–Lashed out at those who believe “corporations are inherently evil.”

–Says, not-so-jokingly, of the EEOC: “The one thing we do really well is prosecute employers.”

(Watch out, though, for the fireworks expected at Friday’s shareholder meeting when almost anything may happen.)

For the past several months, senior managers and top-level executives have been leaving the company in numbers large enough to attract attention from bloggers and tech writers. In June TechCrunch published a list of 114 director and VP level personnel who left Yahoo!, many in 2008. Not long after the site published another story saying Yahoo! could see another 100 senior people leave in three weeks, after options vest worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The company’s official comment on its loss of senior leaders is: “Yahoo continues to be a leader in our industry and remains a unique, exciting, and important place to work even as we experience the attrition that’s to be expected in the Internet industry.” Bloggers scoffed at that comment.

We noticed, however, that the list contained only two HotJobs expatriates: Dan Finnigan, formerly general manager and now CEO of Jobvite (profile; site), and Mike DeLuca, who was VP of sales.

That’s either good news meaning HotJobs staff is happy and mostly unaffected by the morale issues swirling around the search part of the business. Or it means that HotJobs, historically a poor cousin to other parts of the Yahoo! empire, just isn’t getting much notice in the blogosphere either.

We suspect it’s more of the former, though “happy” may be too subjective an adjective. Certainly HotJobs has staged a stunning turnaround in the last two or three years. Traffic to the site has doubled and is growing, instead of declining. Revenues are up, thanks mostly to the hundreds of newspapers that have thrown in with the site as their job board partner.

Yahoo! doesn’t break out HotJobs revenue separately. So it’s not possible to say with precision how much it has grown since the launch of the consortium in late 2006. However, with around 800 newspapers participating to varying degrees, revenue can be expected to have tracked at least some fraction of the site’s 50 percent growth in traffic.

Some companies have made hires that way for years. It’s just that those “special” candidates are the boss’s relatives. For the rest of the world, the new site is an experiment in anonymous sourcing. It’s called Scopings and it sort of reminds us of those old computer dating programs. Candidates put in a little bit of information about themselves; employers put in a little more information.

The computer compares the candidates to the job description and suggests possible matches. Then the courting begins.

Only when both of you show enough signs of interest is the cloak of anonymity dropped.

That’s the essence of the site. As might be expected it has bells and whistles to manage the courtship, including the ability to create “rounds,” which are elimination questions. These rounds of questions can be done online or by phone. The downside to the latter is that you have to listen to a bunch of voicemails. The plus is that you get a taste of a candidate’s communication skills without an interview.

Scopings is both a site and a service. Candidates can stumble upon Scopings to register and set up a scope, creating a database that will be owned by Novologies LLC, the Brooklyn company behind the site. (For the moment, Scopings is offering jobs only in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Boston.)

Or employers can engage Scopings to handle one or more reqs. In that case, Scopings becomes the candidate entry point for applying, anonymously of course, and let the matching begin.

What we like about the concept is that a candidate who is not actively looking, but may be receptive, can ask the recruiter or hiring manager enough questions about the job and the company culture to know if it is something worth pursuing. That works the other way around, too.

In practice, we wonder how many recruiters will take the time to provide anything but stock answers. It’s seems unlikely that a hiring manager would engage in a Q and A with prospects whose identities (and complete CV) they don’t know. Even today, when every run-of-the mill ATS system has the ability to acknowledge receipt of an application, candidates complain of the recruitment black hole. So expecting a recruiter to respond thoughtfully with a personal note to anonymous candidates has as much chance of happening as a politician making good on their promises.

• Monday’s Question of the Day
• Building an ATS From Scratch
• Search Engine Marketing
• Sendouts vs. PCRecruiter
• Candidates Going Out of Their State for an Interview

Monday’s Question of the Day
After reading a post by Jason Buss, I wanted to know if the ERE community thinks that job boards are obsolete. Understandably, this is a sensitive topic for many recruiters. Ryan Reddy, Amanda Blazo, and Eric Smith feel that without job boards recruiters would have to do their own sourcing and question if that would ever happen. David Templeton believes they are already obsolete since most leads are weak and agrees with David Boller that you need to look at other tools to source candidates. John Ruffini sums it up best by stating, “If you are mining resumes form the Internet job boards and that is your main source of candidates, in my opinion you are not a recruiter. There is some value to that, but the art and science of recruiting is achieved by traditional sourcing and networking, and finding the talent that your client cannot and will not find through any other means.”

Building an ATS from Scratch
Christy Grimske is considering a homegrown ATS instead of investing in a solution provider. Is this a long-term solution? What should she consider? The consensus is that Christy should save her company time and energy by seeking a low-cost ATS vendor. Taccara Ohaeri suggests a vendor with a 30-day free trial. Mike Connors advises Christy to consider support and maintenance. Who will be there to deal with unexpected problems? Jake Stupak, who has experience with many companies in the same situation, comes to the rescue and offers some questions to consider around implementation, testing, and installation. He recommends a few vendors, including Salesforce. Christy is very pleased and decides to invest in Salesforce. We would love to hear an update, Christy!

Search Engine Marketing
Reva Levin wants help determining the pros and cons associated with Search Engine Marketing, specifically buying Google and Yahoo! keywords on a pay-per-click model. Most responses were in favor of SEM. Mike Jenkins outlines the benefits and links the pay-per-click model to advertising. He also believes that “Search Engine Marketing is a nice short term strategy compared to the long-term, high investment approach of Search Engine Optimization.” After several positive comments from ERE members, Steven Rothberg wonders if this optimism in SEM is to have clients appear on the first page of the Google search or a shift toward pay for performance (pay per click) instead of pay for placement. Ernst Feiteira and Alison Engelsman both offer advice on effectively using Search Engine Marketing, stressing the importance of tracking and measuring the process. Alison warns that a client’s ATS can be the biggest impediment.

Sendouts vs. PCRecruiter
The never ending question of what ATS is the best continues here…this time comparing Sendouts and PCRecruiter. Unfortunately, you won’t find a unanimous response from this crowd. Both Sendouts and PCRecruiter are user-friendly, according to Lori Fenstermaker and Rosemarie Brooks. Stephanie Huff recommends PCRecruiter for its email integration but also suggests looking into Taleo at a similar price range. The only negative comment about Sendouts came from Juntee Terrenal, who felt that the solution “de-personalizes communication to your clients and prospects.” Pam Claughton and Mark Anderson prefer cBiz and Amanda Blazo concludes that in order for any investment to be effective, “you need to use it 100% of the time.” I will add my 2 cents…if you are looking to invest in an ATS, make sure you identify your unique hiring needs. It would be beneficial to create a list of “must-haves” and a list of “nice-to-haves.”

Candidates Traveling From Out of State for an Interview
Coral Blankenship asks, “Is it common practice to pay for the flight, hotel, and expenses for a candidate to travel out of state for an interview”…even if the company does not cover relocation costs? David Rees and Alison Fielo Worth say “yes” and candidates usually understand that they need to cover relocation. Moises Lopez asks us to consider that most states require companies to reimburse candidates. Tami Gold says that communication is critical, while Angelique Kearney and Michael Peterson take a different approach, looking at the job position and interest in the candidate.

Recruiters and sourcers have a wealth of options at their fingertips to find, reach out, and connect with active and passive talent. Every recruiter and sourcer has a different set of sites, tools, and communities that they use to find their talent. This is what I like to refer to as the “recruiting portfolio.”

A recruiting portfolio can be comprised of countless sites and tools.

Job boards include Monster, Careerbuilder, and Dice. Classifieds include Craigslist and Kijiji. Social networks include Facebook and MySpace. Business networks include LinkedIn, Doostang, and XING. Major search engines include Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, while niche search engines include exaLead, Clusty, and Technorati. Microblogs include Twitter and FriendFeed. Niche career sites include DiversityJobs and TheLadders. Free job boards include Google AdBase and Lee Hecht Harrison. Listservs include TheRuthieList. Online groups include Yahoo Groups, CollectiveX, and Ning. Video sites include YouTube and 5min. Name search sites such as Jigsaw, Hoovers, Pipl, and even Spoke. Tools to use including Talenthook, Infogist, and Broadlook. Podcast sites such as Talkshoe and Podcast.com.

The list of options goes further into Digg, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, LiveJournal, Scribd, universities, news sites, state employment sites, virtual reality sites, associations, technology councils, training sites, blogs, and countless more.

How can a recruiter or sourcer manage their recruiting portfolio? Here are some helpful suggestions:

1. Stay organized. Make sure you are up to date on the talent you currently have access to in an internal company database, or in electronic folders and emails on your desktop.
2. Get internal referrals. If your current company has a referral program in place, great. If not, pull out the phone directory and start introducing yourself.
3. Get to know the ins and outs of each site or tool you currently have access to. Build up a solid understanding of each one so you know what you already have available at your fingertips.
4. Build a presence in social and business networks. Set up profiles on dozens of these sites and invest an adequate amount of time on each. The more time put in will help to develop a solid network and get well-connected on each one.
5. Diversify. Each site or community has its own unique audience. Discover what works for your needs and what doesn’t. The best way to do this is by trial and error.
6. Join groups. Engage people in discussions on Yahoo and Google Groups. Check out Ning, and RecruitingBlogs. Follow people out on Twitter.
7. Stay ahead of new sites and tools. Do this by paying close attention to blogs such as TechCrunch, and one of its sites, Crunchbase. TechCrunch is a blog dedicated to reporting about new technologies and new companies in the technology space. The site brings a ton of information on new products, services, and tools that anyone in recruiting can use. It’s almost as if the site was designed for the recruiting and human resources communities.

For those of you who have forgotten what goodwill is, here’s a very simple Wikipedia definition: “The value of a business entity not directly attributable to its assets and liabilities.”

Goodwill comes down to a matter of your company’s reputation for treating employees fairly, addressing their needs creatively, and managing their work/life balance with flexibility — and then being able to retain those employees versus other companies competing for the same labor pool.

One company I know treats its employees as if they are children. It constantly holds the expectation that its workforce can’t be trusted, doesn’t have the company’s best interests in mind, and need to be watched constantly for any possible infractions of company policy. This sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it?

Another company does its best to make sure all its employees adhere to a very strict schedule of Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with no exceptions, even though more than half of its employees perform duties not tied to the company’s hours of operation and some can easily perform their job from a home computer. There are some control issues going on here!

Finally, another firm, in professional services, maintains that as an “informal” policy it expects all of their employees to work very long hours because it can’t afford to hire additional staff — and, well, that’s what it has always expected from anyone who wants to work there This sounds very appealing to a semi-retired Baby Boomer, doesn’t it?

All of these companies have one thing in common. They will all struggle to maintain an adequate workforce and go the way of the dinosaurs if they don’t change their ways. As the labor supply decreases in the coming years, retaining top talent will be more than a simple matter of the employer who pays the most gets the talent. The dynamics of what keeps employees engaged will be no different in 2025 then what it is today. The four cornerstones of why employees stay with a company are: they feel appreciated for their contributions, positively challenged by their responsibilities, offered benefits that make sense for their lifestyle, and have successfully struck a balance between their career and their personal life.

Reassess your goodwill now and ask yourself, “how healthy is my company’s reputation with our workforce?”

There isn’t any one right answer to the goodwill question. While concierge services and on-site day care may be positives at one company, they may mean little at another. A short work day and telecommuting may also be treated differently from one group of employees to another. Goodwill doesn’t have to cost a lot to build, but it can be expensive to lose, when you consider the cost of your revolving personnel door, constant retraining of new employees to replace the old, employee theft as a result of discontent, and lost business relationships built over time by your workforce.

Think about the companies today with the best professional reputations, internally and externally, such as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, to name just a few. A great place to get a hold on your company goodwill is by gaining an understanding of the details of what inspires and keeps your employees happy. It will be the companies positioning themselves today on the four cornerstones of employee goodwill who will capitalize on the top talent of tomorrow.

“We believe that companies are beginning to realize that the value proposition of the large, generic job boards (Monster/CareerBuilder/HotJobs) is waning, at best, as they increasingly provide a large volume of low-quality candidates. With recruiter in-boxes being filled with the equivalent of “resume-spam,” these large job boards are becoming less effective and eliminate many of the efficiencies of the online model. We believe that growth in these generic job boards is slowing, with online postings moving to niche job boards that are geographically or vertically focused (StepStone and Dice), or to sites that offer a pay-for-performance or “all-you-can-eat” pricing model (SnagAJob).

Second, we see the recruiting process becoming more complex and believe that recruiters will be spending an increasing amount of time on “employer-branding” initiatives, which target passive candidates and employee referrals. Here, companies will look to leverage their existing employees or alumni groups as a valuable source of new candidates. In fact, studies show employee referrals to be one of the largest and most cost-effective sources of new hires. Popular social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook bring the power of an extended network to the recruiting process, although it’s still very early and a highly manual process. We think that social networking sites are becoming more and more like job boards. In fact, one HR manager to whom we recently spoke views the content on these sites as more valuable than those in a resume, as the content is public and therefore verifiable, and more current than the profiles listed on a job board, which could be more than a year old.”

A less-known alternative, the group targeting approach focuses on attracting a specific group of individuals who share something in common (i.e., Hispanic software engineers or fabric patent holders). Group targeting is common in political campaigns and product advertising but is rarely used effectively in corporate recruiting.

Convert Teachers Into Corporate Employees

There are several large groups of employed persons who are routinely interested in a major career change, including nurses, soldiers, and yes, teachers. However, there is no more highly qualified group of potential employees to recruit than teachers.

Before you howl about the social impact of “raiding schools” and hiring away all the teachers, remember that you can opt to limit your recruiting to retiring baby boomers, those recently laid-off, or teachers who have determined they no longer wish to teach.

There are no “hands off” groups in recruiting. It is a recruiter’s job to target everyone who is interested, qualified, and available. Yet corporate recruiters have avoided targeting teachers, which is perhaps the largest group of potential recruits simply ignored.

The Ideal Target Group of Recruiting Prospects

So take a minute and think about the fabulous opportunity that exists here. First, forget the word “teacher” for a few minutes if you can. Instead, look at this group from an objective, non-emotional perspective.

The fact is that any group of individuals with the following characteristics would be judged as an ideal recruiting target:

• Highly educated. Teachers are a highly educated group, all having at a minimum a bachelor’s degree, many hold Masters and PhDs. Many have specialties in high-demand technical areas like math, science, computer science, and communications.
• Highly competent. As a group, they have excellent communication and presentation skills. They are well-organized, good at planning (i.e., lesson plans), and tend to be highly goal-oriented. They are used to working under pressure and no one can match their skill and experience in “doing more with less.”
• Adaptable. If you are concerned that they couldn’t learn a new job at your organization, be aware that these individuals are continuous lifelong learners. They love to read and they excel at research, so they have the capability of rapidly learning whatever a new job might require.
• They don’t focus on pay. Money is clearly not the #1 motivator for these professionals, so even if your organization pays only average wages, they won’t be frustrated or quit over a few pennies. Whatever you pay, even in entry-level jobs, it will likely be a raise for them over their current earnings.
• Seeking opportunities. In teaching, there are few opportunities for promotion or learning a new profession. The abundant breadth of opportunities in a large organization would be viewed by many as “a way out” of their seniority-based system with only one career track.
• Dedicated individuals. Few would argue against the fact that they are dedicated and committed workers. Even though they love their current profession, my experience has been that they will shift that dedication to a new profession, if they must leave their current one.
• Team players. They work in an industry that emphasizes collaboration and teamwork, so they transition easily into a corporate environment that stresses the same approach to work.
• Opportune timing. Because of their relatively low incomes, they are likely to be suffering disproportionately from the current strain from increasing mortgage payments, commute costs, and food prices. Obviously, the looming threat of budget cuts and layoffs within school systems make them even more eager to seek out opportunities with more security and income potential. In families where both spouses are teachers, the odds of getting at least one of them to jump to the corporate world is now quite high.

Take a Chill Pill

Before you out-of-hand reject the notion of targeting teachers, take a step back and think about it. It’s a standard practice for school districts to specifically target corporate employees in order to get them to leave corporate life and switch to the teaching profession.

So turnabout is only natural. I am not suggesting “raiding” the school system and stripping it of every teacher, because you might only hire a handful at most from any one school.

I’m recommending a cherry-picking approach where you target the very best who might need to move on because of finances or burnout.

Teachers are intelligent individuals who are free to make up their own mind on what’s best for them. By merely targeting them and offering them opportunities, you are in no way forcing them to leave. That is their choice.

Recruiters can not “steal” from any organization because employees are not “owned” by firms. It’s also not your firm’s fault that their school system and the citizens in their community chose to underpay and under-appreciate them.

Think of yourself not as a recruiter but as a “rescuer” doing nothing more than expanding their options. Under any definition of the word, it’s not unethical to approach them and make them aware of alternative opportunities.

Will They Be Successful In The Corporate Environment?

Teachers have been leaving the teaching profession in large numbers for decades. Most leave in a haphazard manner to a variety of new careers, but now is your opportunity to develop a formal process to target them as a group. The concept of targeting educational professionals is not new; Google in particular has successfully recruited numerous top professors to join its organization. One large Las Vegas hotel has discovered that elementary school teachers make the most successful bartenders (it makes sense considering that drunks many times act like third-graders!).

There are plenty of examples of teachers successfully making the transition to corporate work. Remember, many teachers already hold second jobs during the summer, so it is likely that they already have a broad skill set. If you are still unsure of their capabilities, remember that teachers are off during the summer and during long school break periods. This gives an organization that is unsure an ideal opportunity to hire them on a short-term or contract basis to assess their potential or to build their skills.

Which Jobs?

Obviously, you’ll have to look at your own firm’s jobs to determine where they would best fit. But remember, many teachers are specialists in math, science, and computers, so they could easily fit into technical jobs.

For others, tell them they must first prove themselves in entry level professional positions like customer service jobs, customer training positions, in call centers, writing manuals, in wholesale sales jobs and obviously, in HR training and development positions.

How to Recruit Them

Identifying teachers and principals to target is quite easy because they all join an association, have a teaching license, and are listed on their school’s website. Employer referral programs are the best way to recruit them because many of your employees already know them as a result of being parents.

Identify them through university alumni groups from Colleges of Education and through ads in teaching journals. Find them at seminars and teacher conventions, as well as online social networks and discussion forums. Because teachers are a tight-knit group, once you make several aware of your interest in teachers, the word will spread virally to others.

Final Thoughts

Recruiters and recruiting managers are constantly looking for large numbers of highly qualified but “untapped” talent. Step back and take the emotion out of it; it’s easy to see why there’s no more ideal group to target than teachers.

Yes, you should limit the number you hire and be aware of the community impact. But remember, you are a recruiter, not a member of the school board. Summer is the perfect time to begin. They are readily available for interviews and you will face no competition in recruiting them. What are you waiting for?

Still, the company reported losing $14.9 million in the last quarter and $39.4 million for the year.

Only sketchy and incomplete numbers were released by the publicly traded company, so it isn’t possible to detail the company’s income and expenses other than to say the fourth quarter revenues were $7 million, up from the $6.2 million of the third quarter.

The company attributed the incomplete financial statement to an “on-going goodwill analysis.” “This item does not have an impact on EBITDA, revenues or cash,” the company noted in the announcement of its financial results. However, goodwill is a business asset that has to be adjusted if its fair value is different from the value carried on the books. Workstream valued its goodwill at $45.3 million in an April filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But in the financials it released Thursday appears to be anticipating a reduction of $13.6 million.

Regardless of the eventual accounting decisions, Workstream is a troubled company. Its operating expenses have exceeded its revenues every year since the company went public in 1999 and for two years before that as well. It is very likely to be delisted by NASDAQ, where it trades under the ticker symbol WSTM. To remain on the active exchange Workstream would have to lift its stock price to at least $1. It closed today at 16.27 cents. A planned merger with payroll processor Empagio fell apart in June.

Still, Chief Executive Officer Steve Purello says in the press release announcing the financial, “Workstream had a solid finish to its fiscal year.”

Purello could not be reached for additional details.

To compound this situation, we do this in an environment of constant change (shifting priorities, new requisitions, etc.).

If not managed properly, it is easy to lose focus, get de-motivated, and become non-productive.

To avoid this situation, most top sales organizations have a weekly “sales” meeting. Objectives of these meetings include:

• Make sure each salesperson has a focused plan of action for the week.
• Make sure each salesperson’s plan includes an adequate amount of measurable “outbound” activity.
• Set team/individual priorities.
• Discuss any administrative loose ends.

If, for some reason, you are not having a weekly “recruiting” meeting, start now. Based on the challenges outlined above, I can’t think of a logical reason why you wouldn’t.

In our research efforts, we have learned that the best sales organizations not only have meetings, but the salespeople enjoy attending them!

While the clear intent of these meetings is to get focused for a productive week, unfortunately, the majority of companies’ sales meetings are mundane, boring, and unproductive.

Most sales professionals view these meetings as a “necessary evil” to provide management with a status on progress toward their goals.

Indeed, during my 19 years in recruiting, I have attended my fair share of boring, mundane meetings!

To avoid falling into this trap, try the following meeting agenda/format. It provides structure and sets the tone for a productive, positive week:

Meeting particulars:

• Hold this meeting first thing Monday morning starting at 7 or 8 a.m. (depending on company culture, attendee’s personal schedules, etc.)

• Limit the meeting to no more than 15 participants. If you have a larger team, I assume there is some logical way to break the team into groups of 10-15 people based on line of business you support, geography, etc. There is no minimum required. If you have two people on your team — meet. If it is only you, meet with yourself.

• With today’s technology (conferencing, web meetings, video meetings), you can’t use “geography” as an excuse for not getting together.

• Keep the meeting to one hour. To keep the meeting on schedule, remember these tips:

1. The moderator is responsible for keeping the meeting positive and lively, but also on time! Every minute the meeting runs over, the moderator owes $1 (or some other form of motivation).
2. In addition, all late participants must donate $1 for each minute they are late (it is amazing how people become respectful of being on time when you adopt this policy).
3. This money can be used for a teambuilding event, given to charity, etc.

Meeting agenda:

Let’s start the week off right!

• Share a great, positive story from last week/weekend. Stories don’t have to be work-related. Personal, positive stories are the best.

• Business review. Review your current open positions. Discuss status, pending action items, next steps, etc.

• Discuss last week’s achievements. Each week, we recommend each person develop a Perfect Week. This is a list of billable/non-billable activities you would like to get done during the week. These action items can then get scheduled into your Perfect Day routine. At this time, have each person discuss the past week, including:

1. Overall week; how did things go based on what they set out to get done?
2. Top two or three most critical things they accomplished last week.
3. Maybe the two or three things that did not get done last week that will either become this week’s priorities, or, possibly removed from this week’s “to-do” list.

• Biggest frustration(s) last week. Let it out! We all have had weeks when things don’t go the way they were supposed to go. If your frustration is dragging into this week, ask your teammates for solutions to make it better/solve the problem.

• Visualize this week’s “Perfect Week” and post goals in a public location. Discuss the critical things you have to get done (billable/non-billable) to make this week a “Perfect Week.” If possible, have each team member post them in a central location (whiteboard in your office?) so everyone can see. As you go through the week, cross off the activities as they get accomplished. Crossing off tasks on a to-do list feels good and can motivate others around you.

• Visualize your “Perfect Monday.” Discuss the critical activities you have to get done today (Monday) to have a “Perfect Monday.” Being motivated and productive early on Monday can set the tone for the rest of the week.

• Education. Each week, have a person on the team (rotate this duty each week) discuss something we didn’t know about our clients, recruiting, and our industry. Make sure this discussion is no more than five minutes. Providing a “short” handout (don’t pass out War & Peace) people can take away and read is great.

• End with a positive thought (or two or three) for the day.

In order to accomplish these agenda items (on time), everyone must embrace and practice the Milo Frank habits about getting your point across in 30 seconds or less.

Have fun with this process. Each week, have a different person moderate the meeting. This is a chance for us all to come together and get motivated, focused, and ready for the week.

Your thoughts/comments on this subject are welcome. I hope your next weekly meeting is a great one.

Do you outsource the reference-checking process to a third party or your administrative staff?

Are you asking “legal” type questions (eligible for rehire, dates of employment) and a few innocuous “Can you tell me the strengths and weaknesses?” type questions?

These old-school reference practices do little more than irritate the reference you are contacting.

If you have the correct reference contact and the appropriate information, you can get do better.

How?

It starts with the candidate.

Explain to the candidate you have a vested interest in placing them. Let them know that the hiring manager expects us recruiters to say how wonderful our candidates are. Therefore, you need their help. Ask them:

Who is the most influential, senior-level person you know at your (past and present) place of employment that we would could contact and confirm all of the great things you?

Ask the candidate for specific examples as to how they saved or made the company money. Would their supervisor think they had a positive ROI? Why?

Examples of candidate statements:

For an accountant:

“In our accounts payable department I changed the contract terms with several vendors to 90 days, instead of 60 days, thus saving the company $50,000 in six months.”

Or for a technical developer:

“I developed a website which allowed customers to check the progress of their order. This reduced calls to our customer service line by 80%, thus reducing headcount and saving the company $50,000 per quarter.”

Also find out how the candidate would rank themselves against others who do the same sort of work — and why.

Example of candidate statement:

“I would rank myself number 2 out of 10 people in the accounting department, because my work was extremely accurate and I was always asked to do special projects.”

After you secure the ROI statements, call the reference and ask them to confirm or comment on the statements.

Example:

“Mr. Supervisor, John had stated that he saved the organization around $50,000 by modifying the terms with vendors in the accounts payable department. Is that accurate?”

This takes the pressure off the reference. They don’t have to — on the fly — provide evidence as to how the employee contributed. The reference is less likely to push you to HR, because you are asking them to confirm statements, not create statements.

Lastly, ask the reference if they would be open to speaking directly to your hiring manager if needed.

Next steps:

Provide these ROI statements on the submittal! Instead of you saying that the candidate is great, the candidate’s supervisor(s) is providing the data. Imagine if you had a quote from the CFO saying the candidate saved the organization $50,000, strategically modifying the accounts payable terms.

We assume grownups go to work on time, and do not lie about their dates of employment. Such details can be confirmed by the HR department, but capturing ROI information from a senior-level supervisor can positively influence your hiring managers to make a decision.

Willie is a progressive guy, usually the first to try out new technology or bring new ideas into a conversation. He was one of the first recruiting managers to adopt an applicant tracking system years ago, and he is an advocate of maintaining close relationships with candidates via email. He is just not sure how to go about implementing a Web 2.0 strategy or how to create a social network.

Willie’s organization is a construction company with over 1,000 employees, mostly all located in the United States with a handful in China setting up a new operation.

Despite the economy, they have lots of work. Many of their contracts are local and state government jobs that are funded by tax dollars and have strict deadlines. Revenue is excellent and the firm projects to earn more than US$1 billion this year. The future looks bright given the poor state of the U.S. infrastructure. They project doubling revenues within 5 years as more roads, bridges, airport runways, and water systems need to be replaced.

But Willie faces some major challenges.

The average age of employees is around 45 and the most valuable ones are the oldest. In fact, some of the key project supervisors and head engineers are approaching retirement and the CEO is worried about replacing them. As the competition for experienced project supervisors, civil, and mechanical engineers grows the pressure will definitely increase on his recruiting team.

His staff is centralized and large. He has two recruiters who focus on sourcing. They are expert at Internet search and generate a lot of names and potentially good candidates. He has another 10 recruiters distributed by function. Most of them are recruiting hard-to-find and hard-to-hire supervisors and engineers.

There are a few recruiters who focus on other types of hiring needs including IT and human resources and there are a few administrative and coordinating staff members to help out. Willie has resources, staff, and senior management confidence.

His senior recruiters are mixed in their interest in Web 2.0 and social networks. A couple of them are old-school and are opposed to any technology solution. They think that engineers and supervisors are not computer types and don’t surf around the web. They want to spend more time and resources on face-to-face meetings, attending conferences, and even dropping by construction sites. They would support adding more seniors recruiters.

But the rest see value in setting up a social network, especially if it could become a forum for discussing construction problems or for finding new projects. They are advocating a site that has lots of content and is less obviously a recruiting site and more of a site that generates interest and answers questions. They think it would be a way to begin attracting younger engineers and help them develop skills.

He has a colleague at another company that has used Ning to start a social network for prospective candidates. It really hasn’t been very successful. It has a few hundred members who are mostly passive.  They sign up and then never are heard from again no matter how many emails he sends or provocative chats he tries to get started. Willie suspects the problem may not be a Web 2.0 or social network issue, but more about how it is being used.

There are other factors that give him pause about social networks. For example, most people over 35 are not active on social networks, not everyone has the “Internet habit” and only log on occasionally, and some people are reluctant for privacy reasons to put personal information on the web.

But the looming retirements, lack of a strong current pool of qualified candidates, and projected robust hiring environment are real cause for concern.  Willie needs to ensure a supply of this talent for at least a decade. Current recruiting methods are working today (actually quite well) and any diversion might cause a problem.

So Willie’s woe is complex: Would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do).

What would you do if you were Willie?

I will collect your responses and print some of them (anonymously). I will also provide my own opinions about what Willie should do in a future article.

The agency lays out three examples of how discrimination can crop up in the recruiting-hiring-promoting process.