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October pulled a trick on economists who had expected the U.S. would be treated to a slowing job loss. Instead, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this morning that 190,000 jobs were lost during the month, helping push the unemployment to a surprising 10.2 percent.

Surveys of economists had predicted the numbers would be closer to 150,000 to 175,000 lost jobs and an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent. The spike pushed the unemployment rate to its highest point since April 1983 and the job loss was the 22nd consecutive month of declines. keep reading…

The 20 billion in tax cuts for homebuyers and businesses to help create jobs and revive a sluggish housing market is about to be signed into law today. The legislation, which provides up to 20 weeks in additional pay to more than 1 million people who have lost or are in danger of losing jobless aid, extends until spring a tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time home buyers and adds smaller credits ($6,500) for some who owns a home.

Along with the homebuyer credit, the package contains another $10 billion tax break that allows companies that suffered during the last two years to use recent losses to reclaim taxes paid in the previous five years, when times were good.

This is huge news and good news for recruiters too. keep reading…

Yahoo, Beth Israel Deaconess, and Hyatt each handled the recession and the prospect of layoffs differently. Hyatt, says branding/culture speaker Lizz Pellet in the video interview below, deserves a big thumbs-down.

keep reading…

What do you get when you search your name online?

Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.” keep reading…

Toby Nathan joined us on our webinar series to discuss the importance of establishing a personal brand, tips for doing so, and tools you can use to facilitate the process.

Watch it here!

Find the right candidate and close the deal. When asked about their value-add to an organization, most recruiters will respond with the previous statement. However, the recent passing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 has fundamentally changed the way the recruiting profession must view compensation. Now, not only must recruiters focus on finding candidates and closing deals, but we must more closely partner with compensation professionals to put the right deal together that will protect our clients from future litigation. keep reading…

In what is by now an open secret, Google is hiring 200 recruiters and sourcers for a one-year gig.

Details are sketchy, but Dave Mendoza did post an email about the hire to his site Six Degrees From Dave. The email is from a recruiter for Nelson Staffing and says the firm got a contract from “A Major (and pretty exciting) employer in the South Bay here in N. CA.” The email doesn’t name the employer, but it says Nelson needs to find “200 upbeat and enthusiastic recruiters and sourcers for them — by next week.” keep reading…

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The economy grew 3.5% in the last quarter, signaling a definite end to the recession and the start of a recovery. That’s great news, but look closer and it doesn’t seem that there’s much to celebrate yet. Six-tenths of a percent came from spending by the federal government and another 2.2% from residential construction and auto purchases. The latter number is directly linked to the cash-for-clunkers and the housing credit. That leaves only 0.7% from private industry. This is why we’re not seeing any growth in jobs. The economy is growing because it’s being propped up by taxpayers (and the Central Bank of China) instead of by real growth in GDP. In some places this is known as a ponzi scheme. keep reading…

Two labor-related reports this week offer no evidence that the recession Wall Street believes is over really is, at least so far as workers are concerned.

The Conference Board’s monthly Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series reported that online job postings dropped by 83,000 in October. The number of newly posted jobs dropped by 24,000. keep reading…

The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson is about an emperor who hires two swindlers to create a new suit. The emperor presides over a kingdom of prosperity and peace and is pretty concerned about appearances. The swindlers manage to sell him a new suit of invisible material that they claim is visible only to those worthy to lay eyes upon him. Once it is “finished” they drape him in pantomime and he proceeds to swagger naked amongst his minions only to called out by a child who says “the emperor has no clothes!” The moral of the story is that none of his loyal inner circle bothered to tell him he was naked. It had to be a kid on the street who didn’t have anything to lose to point out his folly.

In today’s age, the fable is a metaphor for those in HR who are unwilling to state an obvious truth to a higher up out of fear of appearing stupid, sacrilegious, or politically “incorrect.” They would sooner let a company’s reputation stick out buck naked than tell the truth about the company culture and reputation. This is co-dependency with a superior who wants Yes-men, not accountable partners.

I arrived at this observation because I am always struck by the stark difference between what companies think their employees think about them and what they tell me when I interview them. I also am always shocked about what those employees will say on Twitter, Vault, and any other number of “pink slip” sites about these top-rated employers. I wonder if anyone in competitive intelligence, PR, marketing, or HR ever reads about the fallout of bad managers making bad decisions, including furloughs, reduced hours, wearing double hats, etc. When did having a bad reputation not count?

I’ll give you an example of something that happened to me at Wal-Mart. keep reading…

Financially battered Workstream has changed leadership again, bringing back its co-founder and board chairman Michael Mullarkey as chief executive officer. He replaces Steve Purello, whose resignation was announced this morning. keep reading…

How do you convince cynical executives to fund a social network recruiting effort?

It’s hard to argue against the statement that social networking (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is an extremely hot topic in business. But I have yet to find a single CFO or senior executive willing to fully fund a comprehensive social network recruiting strategy based merely on the fact that it’s a hot concept.

Even when budget is made available, most organizations need to develop measures to help direct spending into the right efforts that will provide them with the highest recruiting impact and ROI. There is no escaping it: making a compelling business case must become a priority for social network recruiting champions.

In this article, I’ll provide an outline of the four basic business case steps covering how to secure funding during these tight economic times.

Business Case Step #1: Identify the Potential Benefits of Social Network Recruiting

Provide targeted executives with a list of potential benefits and then simply have them select the ones that (if proven) would be compelling enough to positively influence their decision. Have them eliminate benefits that, whether true or not, wouldn’t influence their decision.

With that guidance in hand, design a process that focuses on proving only those benefits that were selected as highly compelling.

keep reading…

In all the brouhaha about great new sourcing initiatives and Web 2.0 tools, how much have your recruiters and hiring managers improved their ability to hire great people, not average people?

In my opinion, we’ve downplayed what it really takes to be successful in our profession — recruiting, counseling, and closing top people who have multiple opportunities, and making sure our hiring manager clients don’t blow it.

To start refocusing on the right stuff, I’d like to nominate quality of hire as the metric to assess recruiting department performance, and relegate cost per hire to the second page.

I believe cost per hire is a misguided means to judge recruiting department performance. For one, it rewards the wrong things and ignores quality of candidate and quality of hire. For another, it’s far too tactical and narrowly focused. Worse, improving costs could degrade quality.

This is a strategic mistake of huge proportions that too many HR and recruiting managers miss entirely.

keep reading…

Aided by a $32 million income tax adjustment, Monster Worldwide reported it earned $33 million or 27 cents a share. Without the tax benefit Monster earned 1 cent a share, beating the Street’s guess the company would just break even.

Revenue, however, was $215 million, $8 million below what analysts expected. Sales in North America continued their recession-fueled decline, dropping 39 percent from the same quarter a year ago, and down from the $102 million in Q2 of this year. International sales were off 41 percent from the prior year, but off only 4.4 percent from the $89 million posted in Q2. An unfavorable exchange rate took a $7.4 million bite. keep reading…

In a joint venture with the manager of the .jobs domain, DirectEmployers has launched the first of what might become tens of thousands of new geographically and occupationally focused job boards all sharing a .jobs extension.

The new sites, identical in design and structure, made their appearance earlier this month. Among them are Atlanta.jobs, Boston.jobs, Mexico.jobs, and India.jobs.

“We just started pushing them out,” says Chad Sowash, VP of business development for DirectEmployers, a non-profit HR consortium, that has recruiting as its focus. Among its services is the Job Central job board, to which members can post jobs without additional fee.

“It’s a new playing field,” Sowash adds. “What this is going to do is allow thousands more, perhaps tens of thousands more” sites where job seekers can look for jobs. keep reading…

Dan Kilgore and Jeremy Eskenazi returned to the show to give us an update on trends and predictions we had discussed at the beginning of the year. We took a look at how the past few months have played out, how the trends have changed, and what we can expect for 2010.

Watch it here!

A new study from Watson Wyatt has pretty good news for employees who miss their old salaries and 401(k) matches, and shows that employers are just as worried about keeping people as they were before everything went all haywire on us.

Let’s start with retention. Take the percentage of surveyed employers (26%) who now say they are “significantly more concerned” about retention of key employees than they were before the economic crisis hit and the percentage (39%) who are “slightly more concerned” — add them together, and you find that almost two-thirds are more concerned about top-talent retention than before.

On to salaries, benefits, hours, layoffs, and hours. keep reading…

The British newspaper whose job board was hacked over the weekend is advising the half-million users whose information may have been accessed to buy identity insurance and notify credit reporting agencies.

An indignant Twitter post by one of those whose account with The Guardian jobs site was compromised says she received an email from the newspaper advising her of the illegal access and suggesting she subscribe to an identity protection service.

“got the guardian hack email – they suggest I buy identity fraud protection services. Hang on, who let people steal my information?” reads the tweet by Joelle Nebbe-Mornod, a technology consultant and former CTO now in the U.K.

The site itself gives no hint of the hack, until you scroll almost to the bottom of the home page where, under a heading of Workplace News, there is a short item headlined: Guardian jobs site – Security Breach. It links to a page of more detailed information. keep reading…

When Dr. John Sullivan said last week that employers have lost control of their brand, he likely wasn’t thinking of Sidewiki. Why should he? When the article was published Monday Sidewiki was not even three weeks old; Google launched it on Sept. 23rd.

But Sidewiki’s potential for deconstructing a brand is enormous. Unlike all the networking sites, Twitter posts, and job board forums where the disaffected go to vent their anger, Sidewiki makes it possible to post these comments directly to your site.

Just imagine the mischief a disgruntled job seeker or employee can wreak by posting their story directly to your site. Side by side with your video of happy employees talking about the fun and interesting work they do is a post — or multiple posts — from current and former workers denouncing your message as bogus.

If Sidewiki were to catch on and gain even a percentage of the users that Twitter has, the impact is easy enough to see.

Says Mark Hornung, senior vice president, strategy, at Bernard Hodes, “What that means for corporate employment sites is that they need to be monitored much more aggressively.” keep reading…

Some numbers indicate failure so clearly that you can’t help but pay attention to them.

For a minute, assume the role of a senior executive who has just been handed a business scorecard containing performance numbers in five critical business areas. After looking at the numbers below, would the data make you cringe?

• 70% of users are dissatisfied with the process.
• 50% of customers regret their buying decision.
• 46% turnover among new buyers.
• 46% failure rate of process output selections.
• A mere 19% are unequivocal successes (less than 1:5).

It’s Time to Face the Numbers and Facts…

Almost any senior executive would be alarmed upon learning that users were dissatisfied, failure rates approached 50%, and a significant percentage of your customers regretted their decisions.

Obviously, if the numbers listed above came from an important profit-impact function (supply chain, finance, customer satisfaction), everyone would be screaming for a complete rethinking of the entire process.

Unfortunately, the above metrics represent failure in the recruiting and retention elements of the talent management function. I have encountered no other business function that more completely avoids defining and measuring process failure than talent management.

Selection decisions are often about as accurate as a coin flip.

–The Recruiting Roundtable

Talent Management Failure Metrics Are In*

Here are more details on the five numbers provided above.

keep reading…