ERE.net

A new technology platform, combining the functionality of Salesforce.com with Facebook, has opened the door for development of new referral and sourcing applications. The platform debuted at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com user and developer conference held in San Francisco earlier this month.

Jobs4MyFriends, a new Facebook application created by Appirio, is one of the first applications created on the new platform. It extends a company’s ability to use employee networks to generate referrals, according to Ryan Nichols, Appirio’s VP of product management.

Onboarding programs rank high on the list of HR programs that get little respect or attention. When managed well, onboarding programs can have a dramatic and measurable impact on employee productivity, retention, employment brand, service/product quality, workplace safety, and future hiring success.

Unfortunately, most onboarding programs are poorly designed and even more poorly executed. After years of researching and advising firms on developing best-practice programs, I have found that there are 15 key factors that can literally kill any chances of onboarding programs demonstrating a positive impact.

The Root of the Problem

Most corporate onboarding programs are designed from the HR administrator’s perspective. The goal and focus is to ease the administrative burden on HR and to drive compliance activities, not to ensure that new hires can reach expected levels of productivity in the shortest time frame possible.

As a result, most programs have boiled onboarding activities down to all but the bare bones of administration. Every new hire, transfer, or merged/acquired employee gets the same information, on the same timeline, via the same channel.

Doing so has made administering onboarding easy, cheap, generic, consistent, and utterly useless. The result is that most onboarding programs frustrate new hires and hiring managers.

While the concept behind onboarding is truly simple, delivering world-class onboarding is anything but easy and generic. If your current approach demonstrates any of the 15 onboarding program killers described below, you’re missing the mark and need to start over:

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Many execs put industry experience at the top of their criteria list for sales-management candidates.

“The successful applicant will have 10 years experience in the widget industry.”

Hogwash!

The end result of this approach is that companies hire the industry retreads.

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A C-level shakeup is underway at Zoom Information (profile; site), the parent of ZoomInfo, that appears linked to financial challenges at the business information search engine frequented by recruiters and marketers.

Sources tell us that Sam Zales, president and CEO of BuyerZone, a B2B supplier network and business lead generator, is reportedly about to be named president of ZoomInfo. He will replace Bryan Burdick, whose new role is unclear. The move has not been announced and neither Zales nor Burdick returned calls.

Burdick has been president at the company since April 2006, joining from Monster Worldwide where he was chief marketing officer – TMP. Zales has been with BuyerZone since 1999. He became president and CEO in July 2000. In 2006 BuyerZone was acquired by Reed Business Information.

Both BuyerZone and ZoomInfo are based in Waltham, Massachusetts, not far from Monster’s home in Maynard.

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Wharton Prof Peter Cappelli hit this one out of the park.

Although “I’m betting that this downturn will become nasty fast,” he says, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a recruiting department that could have too much time on its hands should be axed.

He argues that before recruiting-department pink-slips get printed, companies should:

• Figure out what the chances are that next year they’ll need recruiters who really know their company.
• Then calculate what it’ll cost to hire such recruiters next year if the company has laid off its critical recruiters and needs to start from scratch.
• Lastly, decide whether it might be better off just keeping who they’ve got.

It’s an exercise that could and should be done in another departments on the proverbial chopping block.

I thought that this week I would try something a bit different to spark a conversation and perhaps get some deeper understanding of issues we are all dealing with or probably will be soon.

Over the past almost two weeks I have been in Europe leading workshops, working with a few clients, and presenting to recruiters from Germany, France, the U.K., and The Netherlands. We all face the same issues. Some of these are generational differences, an aging workforce, lack of loyalty, difficulty to engage and attract new college graduates, the economic recession, and growing talent needs in some areas with meltdowns in others.

I picked out one challenging area: that of how to deal with diversity and the generations.

In a workshop I held a couple of days ago, one of the scenarios we grappled with was whether diversity is growing or lessening and the role generational differences play. I presented them with the following scenarios and asked them to discuss (argue?) and challenge each other on which of these is closer to their experience and belief.

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Recruiters who don’t communicate with recruiting source representatives are passing up opportunities to drive efficiencies up, and cost of hire down. That’s because many sources will organize recruiting events, publicize them, and connect recruiters with candidates free of charge.

Yet recruiting source representatives say they rarely hear from corporate recruiters, only receiving infrequent calls when a recruiter needs to fill an immediate opening.

Says Bev Principal, assistant director of student employment services at the Stanford University Career Development Center: “If I meet with a company representative during the summer, and receive information about its entire breadth of career opportunities, not just the immediate openings, I can pass that information along to students during career counseling sessions or I’ll remember to invite that company to participate in specific career events here on campus.”

Principal says she regularly e-mails students about recruiting events, and sends a monthly newsletter to engineering students. If she has information to share about an employer or its job opportunities, she passes it along.

John Weitzel, internship coordinator at El Camino College, says that employers are often disappointed in student turnout when they schedule a last-minute campus recruiting event. He starts promoting the retail holiday job fair, for example, when students first return to school in mid-August, and companies like FedEx and Disney set up campus recruiting visits a year in advance. FedEx is on the students’ radar screens because it recruits on campus every Monday.

“Not every student knows what they want to do when they finish school,” says Weitzel. “If I know Northrop Grumman has jobs other than engineering, like grant-writing and marketing, I can talk about those opportunities with students who seem suited for those careers.”

Even sources that provide experienced candidates can be better used through proactive planning. Olin King, site manager for the West Covina office of the California Employment Development Department, says that employees who lose their jobs due to offshoring receive special benefits and retraining, and he can sway them toward specific courses — if he knows local employers have hiring needs.

“We can set-up recruitment sessions, where we’ll line up the candidates and employers can come to our office to interview,” says King. “There are opportunities for employers to provide career advice to 300 experienced workers at our older and wiser seminars, which cater to job seekers 40 and older. We also bring education and employers together to fulfill specific needs in the community, but the only way to do that is through collaboration, and I just don’t hear from corporate recruiters.”

ManTech International needs information technology workers with security clearances and Inova Health System needs registered nurses; both companies are partnering with the Army Reserve as part of a new program that gives private-sector employers access to nearly 250,000 reserve personnel and 785,000 reserve retirees.

The Army Reserve Employer Partnership Program was launched in April, and 48 companies have signed agreements guaranteeing an interview to interested reservists, who are either beginning or ending their duty or who want to change careers. In exchange, the Army is providing training and in some cases even customizing the curriculum to meet the needs of private employers.

“A good example of how we’re adapting our training to help meet the hiring needs of private employers is what we’re doing with truck drivers,” says Col. Dianna Cleven, who manages the partnership initiative for the Army. “Army truck drivers drive under some pretty austere conditions, and we’re talking with the commercial licensing authorities to make sure Army drivers can pass the commercial certification test.”

After conferring with employers, the Army Reserve is focusing on providing additional training courses for careers and trades where candidates are in short supply. It’s even considering adapting its West Point leadership curriculum to provide private-sector managers who are also reservists with leadership training.

Cleven says that employers should expect and prepare for the reality that reservists will be called for duty, because the demand for their services is not expected to diminish anytime soon. Currently, active reservists can be called to serve 12 to 15 months once every five years.

As America honors its military veterans, there’s news about the difficulties some vets have finding a job. A CareerBuilder (profile; site) survey says 1-in-6 vets report spending six months job hunting after leaving the service. About 1-in-10 say it took them a year to land a job.

Of the 750 vets surveyed for the report, about 20 percent said the biggest challenge to getting hired is the difficulty employers have in understanding just how transferable military skills are. Some of the vets also said they were at a disadvantage because they lacked a college degree, good interviewing skills, or there was just a lack of appropriate jobs in their area.

However, the news isn’t as bleak as the survey might imply. Bill Scott, with military recruitment specialist Bradley-Morris (profile; site), told us, “In our view, we still see this market as strong for veterans.” The U.S. economy has slowed hiring generally, acknowledges Scott, the firm’s VP of marketing and business development. But there are ”many opportunities (for veterans). There are employers who want to hire veterans.”

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We ran a live video feed of the ERE Expo (join us for the next conference in the spring!) last week on our site, and lots of recruiters who could not be with us in person tuned in — at one point we had over 400 live viewers! I couldn’t be happier with the way that our little experiment was received, and we got some great suggestions from the viewers on how we can improve for the next time around.

The response got me thinking — why limit this to only the ERE Expo? There are plenty of great conferences and events in the industry that visitors to ERE.net would be interested in learning from.

Today, our friends at the Global Recruitment Conference will be holding their event in Amsterdam, and we’ll be streaming it live (with chat!) on our home page. They have a great agenda, so it should be fun and informative. Obviously, there will be a big time difference for those of us in the United States — the feed will begin at around 2:15 a.m. and go on until 11 a.m. Eastern time (see below for the full schedule.) This is less than ideal, but hey — this is live, and the show must go on!

Finally, here’s an offer to all of the other companies out there that produce conferences for recruiters. If you are up for it, we’ll gladly stream your event live on our home page! You’ll get the same treatment that we gave to ERE Expo. That’s exposure to the recruiting industry that most companies would kill for, and we’ll give it to you for free — all we’d ask is that you cover Brendan’s travel expenses so he can manage the cameras.

You’ll win because your event will front and center in ERE.net, and we’ve already seen how much buzz that generates in the industry and blogosphere. Visitors to ERE.net will win because they will have the opportunity to see a piece of event from afar. And when the recruiters who visit our site win, so do we.

Call me!

Here is the schedule for the next couple of days:

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Eleven Tril is the equivalent of 9.5 months of our Gross Domestic Product ($14.3 Tril a year), or 2 1/2 months of the world GDP! ($54 Tril). And while we are in the throws of a seemingly major recession, there will be a lot of jobs created.

Yes, $11 Tril has been or is planned to be injected mostly into the world banking system, starting with the Bear Stearns bailout in March, and more recently the $700 billion bailout bill passed by Congress. European central banks are contributing an estimated $2.8 Tril, and our own Federal Reserve some $5.6 Tril to offshore banks, mostly in “swaps” (our dollars for their currency) to unclog the world banking system which almost ground to a halt in early October. This will regenerate loaning ability, and letters and lines of credit. While Q4 might be the worst since 1980, this avalanche of money suggests a quick recovery starting in Q1 or Q2 of 2009.

A small percentage will go directly back to taxpayers in a second round of rebates, some to help 3 million subprime “victims” keep their homes. This has spawned a “cottage industry” of loan mitigation and modification services, sadly sometimes employing the same subprime brokers who orchestrated the crisis.

Eleven trillion is a lot of money, and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created, a lot of them in banks, regulatory authorities to monitor disbursements, and loan modification companies. Yes, many are being laid off, but many will find new jobs created by this massive flow of money.

My suggestion to fellow recruiters looking for new business? “Follow the money.”

What’s worse than losing the presidential election? Winning it three days before the unemployment rate jumps to 6.5 percent after the U.S. economy loses another 240,000 jobs.

That bit of bad news was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirming fears that the economy is in a recession that is only deepening.

Yet for the recruiting industry, Jeremy Eskenazi, founding principal of Riviera Advisors (profile; site), says, “I think this whole recession is different than in the past.”

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As we mentioned, Monster moved to the New York Stock Exchange today. A couple of videos from today feature Monster’s CEO Salvatore Iannuzzi. In one video, on CNBC, he says, “When everyone says things are bad, it must mean it’s pretty much the time when things will start to turn around. So I’m more optimistic than negative.”

Similarly, in a Bloomberg video, embedded below, he notes that “the slowdown has been going on for nine months or longer … and I’d like to think we’re somewhere in the middle” of it, headed toward the end.

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Monster Worldwide (profile; site) began trading on the New York Stock Exchange today and promptly saw its stock price move up.

Monster previously traded on the NASDAQ. It’s stock price closed at $12.01 a share on that exchange Friday. Today, it ran up almost 10 percent in the first hour of trading, before settling back to $12.81 (a 6.66  percent increase over its Friday close) when this item was posted at 11:45 a.m. ET. (Current price here.)

Monster Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi announced the company’s move to the NYSE during the quarterly financial conference call Oct. 30.

“We believe,” he said, “the New York Stock Exchange is a prestigious platform for Monster, a platform that is committed to integrity in governance, innovation and global growth. These are exciting times for Monster and our move to the New York Stock Exchange is consistent with the goals and strategies and values of the new Monster.”

He also announced during that call, attended by financial analysts, that he would be purchasing $1 million worth of Monster shares and CFO Tim Yates would buy $500,000 worth. Iannuzzi bought 72,000 shares on Nov. 4th at prices ranging from $13.77 to $13.99. Yates bought 36,000 shares that same day at prices ranging from $13.81 to $14.00.

On October 29 at the ERE Expo 2008 Fall, Michael Marlatt shared his impressive view on the future of recruiting as the world becomes more and more immersed in wireless technology.  The dream of being able to access information from virtually anywhere is already within our grasp.  Don’t be left behind, watch these highlights to stay current with the competition.

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Part one of this series talked about the increasing importance of succession planning and development of talent during tough economic times.

It defined succession planning and why recruiters can and should play a role in a modern, world-class succession planning program. Part one also concluded by listing a series of metrics to evaluate existing programs based on their usage and design.

In part two, the focus will shift away from discussing what makes a great program to covering metrics that demonstrate what a great program accomplishes.

Part B: Plan Output or Success Measures

Group 3 – Output measures of plan success

The best plans have goals (and measures) that cover each of these areas:

1. Percentage of all management positions filled by internal candidates (this is the broadest measure of development success because it covers all management and leadership positions). A high rate of internal placement (vs. external hires) can be considered as an indication that development efforts have been successful.
2. The success rate of external hires over internal moves for plan jobs. Good development should result in a higher success rate (performance and retention) for internal moves.
3. Percentage of interviewees for plan positions whose positions are designated as ideal jobs for stretch assignments. Ideally, 100% of the interviewees for open plan positions will be “on” the succession plan.
4. Percentage of actual movers on the plan, where “movers” are the individuals who were actually transferred to or promoted into any designated plan position. Ideally, 100% of those actually selected from the interviews will come from the plan.
5. Percentage of movers without the most tenure in the job. Natural movement generally means the candidate with the most tenure will receive the nod. Effective succession planning periodically selects a “not so obvious” candidate from those being interviewed.
6. Percentage of movers from another department/business unit (again, “natural” movement generally means most positions are filled from within a department).
7. Percentage of movers who jumped a level (natural movement generally means promoting individuals “up” one level). Successful succession planning occasionally promotes individuals more than one level up.
8. Percentage of “on plan” movers who get promoted again (if a promoted individual is promoted again within three years, that can be considered as an indication that the first promotion was successful).
9. Percentage of movers placed in their targeted business cycle. Innovators are placed in departments or business units that require innovation (i.e., start up business units). On the other end of a business cycle, efficiency experts are placed in cost-cutting or commodity business units, where their skills are a better fit to the business cycle that the unit is in.
10. Percentage of job openings predicted accurately (successful plans prepare the individuals for movement at a designated time. Plans that successfully forecast openings within six months of their “projected time” are more effective than those that prepare individuals well before or way after they are needed).
11. Percentage of jobs with a defined back-fill person for sudden openings. In some plans, having “backfill” replacements are considered to be a separate plan element. Effective plans have pre-identified qualified and tested individuals that can immediately fill a sudden “unplanned” opening, without a loss in productivity.

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What’s happening in your recruiting department in the downturn?

Are you cutting headcount in the department? Or, is your company slowing down the hiring of new recruiters, but not cutting existing recruiter jobs? Is your budget being cut or frozen?

Or, is it business as usual, and growth continues?

Post your thoughts.

From October 15 to 24, 2008, Towers Perrin surveyed human resources executives and staff at more than 450 companies, asking what they’re likely to do now that the economy’s quite a bit less peppy than it was. Seventy-nine percent of the companies have more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Progressive companies are now implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) sourcing programs to ensure they have a ready pipeline of top talent once the economy recovers. This will provide early adopters a significant competitive advantage and an increased share of the best talent.

In fact, these are the same companies that everyone else will be benchmarking in 2010 and beyond. So if you’d rather be the presenter at ERE Expo instead of sitting in the audience hearing about what you should have done, here are some things to consider as you begin implementing a JIT sourcing program.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, supply chains became very sophisticated with concepts like material requirements planning, demand-pull procurement, Kanban, and just-in-time sourcing becoming commonplace. Recruiting is now starting to apply these same supply-chain ideas to improve the quality and timing of hiring efforts. This parallels the increased application of advanced consumer marketing and advertising concepts to recruitment advertising. It is the adoption of techniques from these two fields that makes JIT sourcing possible.

The basic concept behind JIT sourcing is the development of a dynamic candidate database of resumes and prospects. On top of this is a drip marketing program nurturing and engaging with this database on an ongoing basis.

When jobs become available, appropriate candidates in the database are notified and invited to evaluate them. As long as the database is filled with enough high-quality candidates and if primed properly, enough people should raise their hands for consideration. This means that jobs could be available for interviews within hours after a req is formally opened.

Even better, a recruiter could query the database ahead of time to determine whether there are enough candidates available to meet upcoming hiring needs. If not, sourcing programs can be accelerated to meet future supply needs.

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Two of the banking and financial world’s big names have begun laying off workers, says Bloomberg .com. Word is that 12,000 workers, possibly more, will be axed over the next year. Wednesday,  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. began informing some 3,200 employees – 10 percent of its workforce – that they will soon lose their jobs. Citigroup Inc., started issuing notices earlier this week to the first of the 9,100 workers – 2.6 percent – it plans to let go.

Meanwhile, Monster’s Employment Index was down 10 points in October. That’s a 20 percent decline over where the index stood a year ago.  The index is a monthly gauge of U.S. online job demand based on a count of online job listings from thousands of corporate and commercial job boards, including Monster (profile; site).

No surprise that hiring has slowed. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas says employers announced another 112,884 job cuts in October.

Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its employment counts for October.