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During tough economic times there is intense pressure on all functions within the business to re-think their current approach in an effort to become more competitive and aggressive all while containing cost.

Unfortunately, many recruiters and recruiting leaders choose an opposite path, becoming more conservative in their approach. When markets head south and fear about economic issues grip the populace, consider a counter-cyclical recruiting strategy that sends a clear message to everyone inside and outside your organization that talent truly means something to your organization.

One controversial yet extremely public, effective outside-the-box recruiting approach you might consider is “proximity recruiting.”

You Must Do Internet and Physical Recruiting

Even with the tremendous growth of Internet recruiting, not everyone is actively surfing the Internet looking for a job or combing through their email in anticipation of your generic form letter introduction.

Reaching a greater percentage of the population relevant to your job searches often requires using at least three channels to reach them, one of which should be physical. The underlying concept of physical recruiting is a simple one, just as robbers target banks because that’s where the money is! Recruiters need to target physical locations where a large number of potential hires can be found.

While nearly everyone in recruiting is familiar with the dreaded job fair, there are numerous other approaches to physical recruiting that are far more effective and fun. One such approach is “proximity” or event recruiting. Proximity recruiting at professional events (tradeshows and seminars) is clearly becoming more mainstream, but one location in particular really elevates the visibility of your efforts and qualifies as “outrageous.” The location? Across the street or in the parking lot of talent-competing firms in trouble.

Proximity Recruiting with a Taco Truck

If you have been paying attention to the business press lately, you are probably aware that Internet giant Yahoo! was planning to lay off approximately 1,000 employees worldwide, the greatest percentage of which would come from its Silicon Valley headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

What you may not know is that despite a multi-year trend of notable voluntary exits by key employees, Yahoo! is still considered by many to employ some of the greatest engineering talent in the industry. This talent is extremely valuable to hundreds of upstarts working on next-generation technologies.

Yahoo!, like many organizations planning a reduction in force, kept its plans secret until the day when the axe actually swung. Because employees knew pink slips were coming, but no real guidance was offered as to who would be impacted, more people were concerned than would actually be cut.

Seizing on that fear and the actual swinging of the axe, Tokbox, an upstart enabling free voice and video calling over the Internet without any software download, engaged a proximity recruiting strategy that some may consider outrageous.

While pink slips were being handed out, Tokbox executives were setting up a taco truck across the street from Yahoo’s corporate campus, offering employees affected (and anyone else that wanted to chat) a hot lunch and information about employment opportunities.

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“Broader, fresher, deeper.” Take that as the ZoomInfo (profile; site) mantra for 2009. ZoomInfo’s new president Sam Zales does.

Six months from now, ZoomInfo users can expect to see data that is “deeper, broader and fresher,” Zales told us in an interview today, a week after assuming his new job. More than just more, the data will be better parsed, compiled, and structured, he pledges, so that a recruiter finds Sam Zales the CEO, “not Sam Zales who worked at GM.”

“Our core product is data,” Zales declares, detailing his first task as “How to increase (its) breadth, depth, and freshness.”

Reengineering the data collection system will fall to William Wechtenhiser, who was recently appointed to the new position of vice president of engineering. Jonathan Stern, ZoomInfo founder and CEO, will retain the chief scientist title, but Zales said the company believes it is important to have “somebody on the ground, here, in the U.S.” (Stern is based in Israel.)

The accuracy of the ZoomInfo data has been one of its most nettlesome problems. Where competitors like Hoover’s use human editors to vet the accuracy of the data, ZoomInfo relies on computers to do the sifting and sorting. While Hoover’s is hardly flawless, ZoomInfo has such bloopers as listing the CEO of Merrill Lynch as Junji Okabayashi. (John Thain is Merill Lynch CEO. Okabayashi is CEO of a Japanese joint venture of the company’s.)

Fixing those kinds of problems will not be easy. Google has some of the best brains in the industry at work to improve search intelligence and develop what is generally referred to as the semantic web. But, as Google founder Larry Page has said, “We’re a long way, long ways from that.”

However, improving the currency of the data will be a step forward.

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Recruiting departments will continue to be under pressure to cut staff. Wayne Cascio, a professor of management at the University of Colorado in Denver, has done research on which approaches to downsizing work best. His research on downsizing can be found in his book Responsible Restructuring: Creative and Profitable Alternatives to Layoffs.

We asked Dr. Cascio to share his insights with ERE.

ERE: What is the single most powerful thing a recruiting department can do to protect its staff, even when the number of recruiting requisitions has fallen dramatically?

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About the only ones who ever thought the troops would suck it up with vim and vigor after a layoff were the corporate suits.

Now comes a study from Leadership IQ, a training and research firm, that bears out the conventional wisdom. Three-quarters of layoff survivors say their productivity has declined while customer service has worsened. The survey also found that 69 percent of the remaining workers believe the quality of the company’s products or services has declined since the layoffs.

The company’s survey of 4,172 workers who kept their jobs after a layoff also found:

• 64% of surviving workers say the productivity of their colleagues has also declined.
• 81% of surviving workers say the service that customers receive has declined.
• 77% of surviving workers say they see more errors and mistakes being made.
• 61% of surviving workers say they believe their company’s future prospects are worse.

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Tom Snyder, the tough-nosed director of operations at Great Company, had a big decision to make.

Like so many other executives faced with poor sales and a slow economy, Tom had to reduce staff or find some other way to reduce costs. The CEO was a traditional guy and assumed that the first cuts should come from administrative areas — particularly human resources. But he left the final decision up to Tom.

Tom has already decided to reduce the number of human resource generalists and to find an outsource provider for payroll, benefits administration, and some other similar functions. But those changes were not enough. He needed to find additional savings and recruiting was the most expensive function that remained.

Tom realized that recruiting was an essential function and even in tough times, they needed to recruit certain key people and replace those who decided to leave. He respected the head of recruiting and wanted to ensure that he stayed with the company. But he was also a good businessman and he wasn’t certain they really needed the number of recruiters they had, given the lower levels of hiring. He was also thinking about outsourcing the function — or parts of it — to reduce costs.

Great Company was located in a coastal area with 4,000 employees globally — most of them in this location. It produced medical devices that were fairly recession-proof, but growth had slowed tremendously. The CEO wanted to trim costs and improve efficiency, but he wanted to emerge from the slow economy ready to grow immediately.

John Tully, the Director of Recruiting, led a team of 15 people. Four sourced candidates and maintained the CRM tools and communication processes, another four were administrative and scheduled interviews and did reporting and other tasks, and the remainder were general recruiters with a broad range of skills. John was an exceptional contributor. Tom had praised him at a recent communication meeting in a rousing speech about how HR could actually deliver if they had more people like John on board.

Tom was somewhat upset that events had led to this.

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I couldn’t help but wonder: who are these two third-party agencies Kevin Wheeler is talking about, around 7:30-ish minutes into this interview? The ones he says are delivering candidates at a single price, on a routine basis, on a quick turnaround? In case you were wondering, too: they are Accolo and Decision Toolbox. keep reading…

What test instrument can quickly assess a candidate’s personality preferences; is cheap; available to almost everyone; marketed by dozens of vendors under a variety of names; and, is recommended “unreliable and untrustworthy” by most testing professionals? Yes, there are others, but I was referring to the DISC.

(Although this article focused on the DISC, you could apply its comments to any test, assessment, interview, exercise, role-play, and so forth used to separate qualified from unqualified applicants.)

Some Background

DISC development began in the early 1900s when the Army asked psychologist William Marston to investigate why different soldiers who received the same training behaved differently. He published a report about 10 years later entitled “Emotions of Normal People.”

As far as we know, Marston’s objective was to describe “mental energy”… not assess and classify people for a job. Shortly afterward, another psychologist used Marston’s theory to develop a pencil-and-paper test. It asked people to choose between pairs of adjectives (i.e., which adjective is most like you and which adjective is least like you); then it added items together and reported scores for dominance, extraversion, need for security, and need for structure. (Remember that Marston was NOT trying to hire the most qualified people for a job — just explain normal behavior.)

So far, so good.

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“Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.”
Sloan Wilson

“Try not; do.”
Yoda

We recall a time back in late November 2002 when, out of shear pain and frustration, Howard wrote Recruiting Today: Good People in Difficult Times.

As we read it now, its content and tone seem strangely familiar. We hear the same fear and grief from so many today as in those miserable days gone by. Lost again, adrift in a sea of uncertainty, anguish, and doubt. Revenue, stability, normalcy — once again threatened as we seek a road out, a spit of land where we can rest and think of why so many of our lives have been disrupted. First-time angst for newer recruiters; multiple times for others.

As with most misery, there is pain and that sense of unfairness. The feeling of “why me?” comes to mind. Yet entitled as we are to these dark feelings and tendencies toward self-pity or rage, good news looms in the distance, and his name is Barack Obama. Seeing him just before his victory speech, we could not help feeling that in just the right light and posture, our soon to be president smiles the same smile with which Jack Kennedy warmed, charmed, and challenged us in 1961. That might seem like long ago, but time is meaningless when you are in trouble, and make no mistake — as a country, we are in big trouble.

So despite all that is broken, we have much to celebrate.

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If you think any plans to increase hiring is good news, then get yourself a copy of the Manpower quarterly employment outlook for 2009. (Link at bottom.) Even though two-thirds of American companies expect no change in their workforce numbers during the first quarter of 2009, 16 percent say they’ll be hiring.

A year ago 22 percent predicted hiring gains. Curiously, about the same number of companies expect to reduce the workforce in the 1st quarter as did last year. Thirteen percent now say cuts are coming compared to 12 percent a year ago.

It’s in the big, wide middle where the numbers have shifted. The 67 percent of the companies that say they’ll neither grow nor shrink is almost 12 percent higher than a year ago. In the outlook for the 1st quarter of 2008 Manpower said 60 percent of the surveyed companies foresaw no workforce changes. What changed were the number of hiring companies.

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Groucho Marx once said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.” Some recruiters feel similarly about candidates. They don’t want anyone who shows the least interest in joining an organization like theirs. They reject these applicants out of hand while searching out the true gems. These recruiters bypass “active candidates” while concentrating on those ever sought after, much-prized “passive candidates.” The question I have to ask is, what’s so great about passive candidates?

We spend so much time pursuing the passive candidates that we overlook the ones knocking on our door. Something about the stigma of someone who’s out there looking. But in this time when literally tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs, it’s crazy to assume that everyone who is out there looking for a job is “damaged goods.”

Some people I’ve met even look for reasons to devalue the candidacy of active candidates who are still employed. I’ve heard recruiters question why people are responding to ads while they still have a job. This train of thought goes something like, “In this day and age if you have a job, why would you be considering making a move? Are you about to be fired or laid off?” What is it that makes us question the motives of people looking for jobs? Aren’t we making our jobs harder by only looking for the flaws in active candidates? I’m all for screening applicants, but lately I’ve seen recruiters time after time shooting themselves in the foot.

Are we back in high school playing “hard to get”? As Todd Raphael put it when we were discussing this topic, “It’s a silly game where a candidate is supposed to be pretending they’re not looking.”

And what makes someone a passive candidate anyway?

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It takes little effort to convince active job seekers to apply for jobs; however, the same cannot be said for currently employed top performers.

The difficulty in getting individuals actively engaged in their industry and performing at top levels to apply increases significantly during tight economic times because even the best-of-the-best are more reluctant to leave the relative security of their current job.

If you want to overcome a candidate’s reluctance and increase your recruiting function’s “convincing capability,” consider a friends program. It can add a powerful convincing tool to your arsenal and leverage your best employees to help you sell your opportunities to hard-to-convince targeted talent.

A Groundbreaking Program

The concept was developed in the late 1990s at Cisco Systems by Michael McNeil, whom I consider to be the father of employment branding and modern marketing-based recruiting.

The program is based on the premise that everyone wishes they had “a friend” inside a firm they could call and get the real, honest scoop on the job and the firm prior to applying. When the program was first launched, it was so innovative and different that Fast Company magazine wrote about it, as did a number of other management publications.

US West, now Quest Communications, employed a similar program. The approach was one I applauded at the time because it specifically addressed the insane level of competition for top talent that firms were encountering and acknowledged the impact of providing a better candidate experience on a firm’s success rate. While the program would probably not be as effective today if it were plucked from history and implemented exactly as it was, it could very easily be modernized to be even more effective today given the advancements in person-to-person and person-to-group communication technologies.

Employees as Supplemental Recruiters

“Friends programs” are similar to employee referral programs in that they both solicit your employees’ help during segments of the recruiting process. The premise is a simple: you get a small group of targeted employees to volunteer as “recruiting boosters” to communicate directly with preselected potential or current applicants who need an extra boost to excite them. The employee agrees to communicate with them (usually on the phone) for a short, honest conversation about their job. The applicant can view the opportunity to talk directly with someone in their job as having a friend that works at the company. Also, the informal nature of the conversation with a “friend” is less threatening because it’s a conversation among colleagues or equals and is more about addressing the talent’s issues versus those of the employer.

The friends concept is powerful because it utilizes the best salespeople for convincing hard-sell individuals…top employees who currently work in the job. Current employees in the job are more convincing because they “live” the job every day. They can discuss at length how the work actually gets done as opposed to the summary the job description provides and the overly rosy characterization of the work environment recruiters push. The willingness to coordinate an honest/candid conversation makes the company more credible.

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There’s a lot of gnashing of teeth over at Cheezhead.com about Friday’s CareerBuilder layoff. According to reports by some of the nearly 100 posters to the site, the Chicago-based job board terminated about 15 percent of its 2,100 person workforce.

There’s the usual venting over who was kept, who was let go, and what company executives supposedly said about attritioning versus layoffs. However, there are also a substantial number of comments that express understanding, if not outright support, for the layoffs.

Got Let Go But Not Livid voiced a not uncommon view: “I worked at CB for years and was very shocked when I got word I was being released. I understand today had to happen, at least from what I see with the economy and company. However, I do think that if the company is hurting, everyone has to make sacrifices.”

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Two things’ll be happening to the federal government in just a few years, says The New Republic magazine: 1) Several hundred thousand government employees will retire, and 2) The feds will find out there isn’t a pipeline of employees ready to take over.

Who’ll be needed:

• People to work on the bailout
• Possibly, health care bureaucrats
• Air traffic controllers
• Social Security employees

As the recession deepens and job losses set records, the finger of blame, which has up to now been pointed at the bankers and Wall Street brokers — and, of course, the politicians — is inevitably turning to include outsourcing and U.S. immigration policies.

Within hours of BusinessWeek posting the story about the loss of 533,000 jobs in November, posters were complaining about the number of H-1B visas and other work permits the government is issuing. The Huffington Post’s special recession site has a give and take on the subject with the dishers outnumbering the defenders of temporary workers.

The criticism of U.S. foreign worker policy ebbs and flows with the economy, but it never entirely goes away. Witness the furor a year ago over the illegal immigration bill debated in Congress and eventually killed in the House of Representatives, despite the support of President Bush.

In 2005, in the midst of the national recovery that was especially strong in the IT sector, the USA president of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) warned, “The drop in computer programmers and rise in managers reflects the trend toward offshoring of programming jobs and the resulting need for professionals to manage outsourced projects.” Gerard A. Alphonse added, “…offshoring not only contributes significantly to U.S. high-tech unemployment, but also suppresses wages.”

The issue even came up early in the presidential election when both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama signaled they weren’t sold on outsourcing and might end tax breaks for companies that offshore.

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Elaine wrote about today’s Employment Report for ERE’s sister publication, The Fordyce Letter, and there’s no other way to put it — it’s just awful across the board.

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Over the past two years, I’ve attended 15 different recruiting events and HR-related trade shows. Surprisingly, over 95% of the recruiting solutions presented had more to do with technology, sourcing, Web 2.0, assessments, and tracking data more efficiently.

Yet in our annual recruiter survey, 50% of most hiring problems are attributed to the lack of assessment, interviewing, and recruiting skills on the part of the hiring manager.

Taming this 500-pound gorilla is the big problem that should be addressed, not seeing more candidates who won’t get hired by anyone. From this cynical perspective, here are some ideas on how to tame your personal gorillas:

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Here is the final installment of our five-part series on updating your employee referral program. Today’s questions are related to specific program features mentioned during the webinar.

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The pay for performance model, so successful in other areas of online marketing, has been pushing into recruitment advertising for years. In one form or another, recruitment sites have been tinkering with the model to see what will work.

The aggregators (Indeed, SimplyHired and others) have pay-per-click models. BountyJobs offers a variation on contingent search. You can probably name dozens of other sites that have some form of pay for performance. The groundswell prompted Nate Swanson, then a financial analyst with ThinkPanmure and now head of investor relations for Taleo, to write: “We believe that companies are beginning to realize that the value proposition of the large, generic job boards (Monster/CareerBuilder/HotJobs) is waning.”

Now comes one more variant. Jobg8.com entered the US market last month from the United Kingdom, where it launched a job board candidate sharing market in the spring. It offers a twist on the pay for performance model by creating an auction for candidates.

This is strictly a between-job-boards market. Not even the employers posting positions need to know precisely where their applicants are coming from.

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

This article is the fourth in a five-part series on updating your employee referral program. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are online, and the last installment will run Friday.

Questions Related to ERP Impact on Organizational Diversity

24. Some employers are paying an extra bonus for a diverse referral, but only on executive or exempt positions. How do employees perceive this? Does that make diverse non-exempt referrals seem less important? Tying ERP bonuses to the diversity of the referral is a rather rare practice, but one a growing number of organizations are considering. While we do not have data from within those organizations that are already doing it, we do have data that indicates a surprising percentage of American workers are OK with the concept. Among the 7,400 employees that took part in our user experience study, 63% were comfortable with the idea of their organization incenting diverse referrals with a diversity tied bonus. In fact, employees are overwhelming comfortable with tying ERP bonuses to a number of factors including the level of the position being referred for (79%), difficulty of position to fill (75%), and post-hire performance of the referral (58%). Based on our research showing employee comfort with the concept and the business value of a diverse workforce, diversity bonuses are a concept we support.

    Unfortunately, legal counsel frequently objects to the idea, and implementing it can require that you tackle lots of internal political issues. Fortunately, we have found that merely educating employees that you’re particularly interested in diversity candidates can have an almost as powerful as a result, without the associated issues. While the EEOC has not issued any guidance on the issue, they are aware of several major corporations that have implemented the concept and have yet to take action against them, which may or may not indicate their position on the issue!

25. How do you communicate/promote “higher rewards” for diverse referrals? How do you avoid risk with discrimination?
    Assuming that the company’s commitment to diversity is already established and communicated, most of the work is already done. Your company already spends dollars targeted on diversity events and advertising to diverse populations, so spending money on diversity referrals isn’t such a big stretch or something that could be considered illegal. You start by educating your employees how regardless of their diversity status, they frequently come across diverse professionals who have the skills and experience that your firm needs. You then explain how your current approaches aren’t always producing the best results so you are trying this new approach.

    A few firms receive arguments relating to “reverse discrimination” but as in any case, you have to weigh the risks compared to the many benefits that accrue from referral programs that focus on diversity.

Question Related to Technology to Support ERPs

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We ran a webinar today with Elaine Orler and Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion about what changes we should expect from recruiting technology in the next year.

I learned a lot on the call, but one of the polls that we took really made me stop and think. Here it is:

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