But when clouds roll in, suddenly many things are revealed. We are now in such a time.

This morning I went to my favorite bookstore in San Francisco and sadly learned it is closing in a few weeks. The age of books is probably over; their manufacturing process consumes water, trees, toxic inks, and gasoline for transportation. We now have a new model — e-books delivered via the Kindle and Sony Reader and even via the iPhone.

Not as satisfying to us old guys, but the way it will be.

Manufacturing plants close for several reasons including automation, lower consumption, and more efficient processes. Durability, recycling, and re-using change the economic model.

Cars last 10-15 years now, can be largely assembled by robots, and are increasingly recyclable. Furniture, houses, most material things only need replacing due to the pressure of fashion. The cycles of fashion will slow and sustainability will be our watchword.

So what does all this have to do with recruiting?

Maybe everything. If talent is an increasingly rare resource, we will need to sustain, develop, and engage people more than we have in decades.

Employers will hire fewer people as regular employees and then make sure they are taken care of. The age of disposable people, although hard to see right now, is also over. We will hire more carefully and develop more completely than we have. This means recruiters will have to be better at assessing candidates and at aligning personalities to corporate cultures. Many jobs will be performed by contracted employees, leased employees, and consultants.

But these people will also be working for organizations that nurture and value them. We could be entering a very good time with better opportunities for many people.

Finding people with specific skills will most likely become less critical for some positions and more critical for others. The recruiting models will be far more complex than they tend to be now. Good employers will try harder to anticipate needs and re-skill workers as much as they can. It will simply be a cheaper alternative to hiring. Internal transfers and movement will increase along with this and recruiters will be finding and placing people from inside companies as well as from outside.

If you are a recruiter today, what should you do? What does the future look like?

First, I believe there will be a need for fewer of us overall, but those who remain in the profession need to build a set of skills that are deeper and more strategic than they are today.

Here are some of my thoughts depending on whether you are currently working as a recruiter or if you have been laid-off and are thinking of changing careers.

If you are working today…

1. Plan on settling down at this one employer for at least five years. Make a personal commitment because the rapid turnover of the 1990s and early 200os is ending.
2. Nothing new in my advice here, but learn the business of your business. Recruiters should not be as interchangeable as they seem to be today. What core value do you provide your organization that I couldn’t? Usually this would be a very thorough knowledge of what your company does, of its technology, processes, and competition. Sometimes this is gained by spending time outside of recruiting as a worker in some other function. Rotations or temporary assignments are great. Take a class, talk to the CFO, CEO, CTO, CIO, or whoever holds knowledge around your products and services. Learn what the key culture elements are for success. Study successful employees and try to determine why and how they are so successful.
3. Broaden your skills beyond recruiting. Learn the basics of employee and career development and succession planning. The best recruiters will have interchangeable skills — they can develop people one week and recruiters the next. These two functions are merging rapidly and may eventually be considered as a set.
4. Of course, continue to build your technical recruiting skills. Learn Internet search, social networking skills, and candidate relationship management. Stay up-to-date with emerging technologies and skills; the traditional skills are valuable and useful but they will not be enough to remain competitive.

If you are unemployed today…

1. Make sure you are ready to commit to at least a five-year learning and working stint. As I say above, the time for job-hopping is over. Pick an industry that is growing (medical devices, computer security, financial planning, auditing, and government services) and learn the technical side of that business.
2. Try to get a job in that industry in any capacity to learn the business. I don’t think you can be a successful recruiter if you have never worked in the industry you are recruiting for. This is contrary to what many recruiters believe, but I think the emerging successful businesses will demand this depth of knowledge. They may outsource recruiting of administrative positions, but the good jobs will go to the most knowledgeable recruiters.
3. Don’t let any recruiting skills you have slip. Stay up-to-date. Perhaps volunteer to help others who are job-hunting. Help them rewrite their resumes, plan a job hunting strategy, or prep them for an interview. This way you keep your skills sharp, learn what to look for in candidates, and even pick up industry knowledge.
4. Stay optimistic. This is not the time for self-pity. Reflect, learn, volunteer, and stay active in your job search. Unless you are starving, eventually choose a job where you feel comfortable making a long term commitment and then get to work learning all you can.

If there is anything I know about what’s coming it is this: we are in a new era when learning the new and forgetting the old will be a primary skill.

Grasp new ideas, even if you don’t at first understand them. Waiting will just put you behind a huge wave that will be hard to surf.

My best example is Twitter. This seemed like a pretty limited and, frankly, dumb tool when I first saw it two years ago. But I could see that it had potential. If enough people began to use it, it presented a novel way to engage candidates and connect with them. I presented it at a recruiting conference as a potential recruiting tool and was met with skepticism and even some disapproval.

Today, it is becoming a mainstream tool for recruiting and search. It is even being touted as a replacement for Google!

Time waits for no man, as the saying goes, and it has never been truer.

Let’s try to find some clarity. I’ll write about Google here. Though other search engines are similar in many ways, each has its own syntax, somewhat different from Google’s.

Google syntax does, of course, implement Boolean logic, though in a limited fashion. It’s not what I want to talk about here; I’d like to talk about the additional, “non-Boolean” part of Google. Google syntax (shall we call it Googlean?) contains much more than an implementation of Boolean logic.

There are operators and special characters that instruct Google on how to use keywords in a search string. One doesn’t need to learn about all of the operators to become successful in one’s searches, but adding a few operators to your search will help quite a bit. Here I’ll cover some operators that I think are a must for a serious web sourcer’s toolbox.

Part 1 of 2 “Googlean” and Special Characters

One very important special character is the minus “-”, and in fact the minus works as part of the Boolean logic implementation. If you use it in front of a word, no spaces in-between, then it will mean “NOT”: -jobs

(But if you write 7-3 in your string, Google will make a different guess and use its calculator instead — try it!)

Most Special Characters Are Ignored

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is trying to search the web for certain characters. In the majority of cases Google simply ignores special characters such as “@”. If you think your string with a “@” finds you this character in the search results, try to replace it with another special character of your choice and you’ll see the same results.

You almost never can search for any of @#$%^&*()=+[] and other special characters. There are some exceptions; for example, you can search for C# (a programming language), but these exceptional cases are few.

Quotation Marks

If you put a phrase in quotation marks, Google will look for the whole phrase. As an example, you could search for “Database Administrator”.

Interestingly, Google will recognize the operator OR within the quotes. You can search for
“Database Administrator OR Developer”
and you will find pages with either “Database Administrator” OR “Database Developer”.

Here are some sample uses.

Got a job post to work with? Use quotation marks to find out who is competing with you. Pick a several-words-long phrase from the job description, put it in quotation marks, and search for it on Google. You will land on all web pages that advertise the job.

Or, if you see a job description posted by a recruiter and you are interested who the client is, do the same as above, and you are likely to find the same job post made by the employer.

Looking for a person? If the person’s name is rare enough, putting it in quotes and Googling it may help. I also use Google advanced image search with the “faces” option and often land on the person’s blog or homepage.

Asterisk

Asterisk * is a very mysterious symbol in Google. Though it formally means “some words,” in reality (or is it better to say in practice?) it stands for “one word or very few words.” (The symbol * does not stand for a part of a word on Google as it does elsewhere.)

Here’s a quick example showing how it works. Search for “Oracle * Administrator” (plus keywords) and you will find Oracle Database Administrator, Oracle Discoverer Administrator, etc.

The asterisk * is actually a very powerful tool. Here are some uses.

If you are looking for an email pattern for a company or are trying to collect email addresses, you can use
“email * companyname.com” or
“mailto * companyname.com “

Since the symbol * typically stands for one word, you can add more asterisks to these strings and get different results.
(”email * * companyname.com” etc.)

Please note that since Google ignores special symbols, including the symbol @ in your strings is not necessary.

Here’s one of my favorite sourcing “tricks.” You can look for phrases and land on blogs, forums, and homepages, not resumes, but this may put you ahead of the competition if they only look for resumes.

Here are examples of Google searches for phrases. This would bring up pages written by people who work or used to work for or have something to do with Accenture. (Replace Accenture with your target company name.) Add your keywords to these strings to narrow down the searches:

“I work * Accenture”
“I am * Accenture”
“when I * Accenture”
etc.

You can use phrases as a research tool. You can be really creative!

Note that we didn’t even use Boolean logic in these last few examples but we got interesting results.

Tilde ~ and Plus +

Tilde in front of a word means any word “like” this word. It needs to be used with care since you have no control over what Google may think is “like” your word. However, if the number of results is small or if you suspect you may not know of some synonyms for your keyword, using the tilde may help.

The plus sign in front of a word tells Google to use exactly this word. This may be useful for two reasons. One, Google typically ignores what they call “stop” words, meaning very common short words like “the” or “in”. If you put a plus + in front of the, it will be included for sure. Two, Google “auto stems” which means that it will look for some variations of a word you include; if you search for manager it will show results with management as well. Put a plus in front of manager and the results will contain exactly this word. (Sorry, this may sound a little too technical, but it’s important to understand how your results are put together.)

Here is a good summary of using special characters.

Part 2 of 2 Google Operators

Let’s take a deep breath, stretch, walk around a bit, and move on to the second part of my story, Google Operators.

Operators are special words that Google recognizes that instruct it to treat keywords in a special fashion.

X-ray

The operator site: tells Google to look only within a specific website; this is commonly referred to as X-raying.

How can you use it? As an example, there are certain sites that are likely to have resumes posted, such as resumebucket.com
On Google, search for
site:resumebucket.com <your keywords>

to find resumes. I would search for
site:resumebucket.com Java weblogic

to find resumes of people with those skills on the site resumebucket.com.

inurl:

This operator tells Google to go only to the pages that have a given word in their URL (URL means “web address”). Since all LinkedIn profiles have either “in” or “pub” in the addresses, we can search for LinkedIn profiles like this:
site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub <keywords>

Let’s combine this with the phrase search we discussed previously. Here’s an example:

site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available <your industry and/or location keywords here>

The string
site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available SAP ~Consult
will look for profiles that have the word SAP and a variation of “consult” such as consultant or consulting.

intitle:

…will be the last operator to discuss today. It tells Google to look for the given word in the title of a web page.

Since the introduction of social networks, we have started searching for “profiles.” Profiles on a given network often have a similar structure to the page titles and/or URLs. If you figure out the structure, you could use it to look for profiles from a given site or a network. Here are a couple of examples, in addition to the LinkedIn example above.

Look for someone on social networks:
site:ning.com intitle:page <name here>

Look for resumes on craigslist:
site:craigslist.org inurl:res <keywords>

There are many more Google operators (see here for descriptions) but you can get very far by using just the ones I have mentioned.

If you are interested in the subject, please join our network called (as we now know, somewhat inappropriately) Boolean Strings Network. We discuss all sides of web searches and sourcing there. See you online!

Bassat, who founded Seek in 1997 with his brother Andrew, joins 229 other men and women under 40 years of age who were selected, according to the Forum, for their “professional accomplishments, commitment to society, and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.” Also on the list are golfer Tiger Woods, Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube, and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. Primarily composed of business leaders, the list also includes government officials, artists, writers, and educators from 71 countries.

Seek is publicly held and listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. In addition to the job board in Australia, Seek also runs the largest job board in New Zealand and is a leading shareholder in Zhaopin, one of the largest job boards in China. It also has job board holdings in Brazil and owns training, testing, and education firms in Australia.

That’s partly because a lot of companies have already cut. In December, 39% of companies said they’d already done layoffs; now, 52% say so.

Meanwhile, the percentage of the 245 large U.S. companies surveyed last week that say they froze salaries more than tripled from the December survey to this one.

This is a fine strategy for making friends, but absolute nonsense for a recruiter (I had another word in mind, but it would have been politically incorrect.)

After some initial chit-chat, the only interview questions a recruiter or hiring manager should ask are ones that provide trustworthy and reliable data about whether the candidate has the skills for the job.

Canned Questions and Pickled Answers

Why do so many people miss the obvious? Anyone involved in hiring knows there is a big difference between acing an interview and acing a job. Furthermore, as we all know, working in a job we neither like nor have the skills for is a painful experience. I can understand this kind of clueless interview recommendation coming from an inexperienced hiring manager; but, should we accept this advice from someone who either passes himself off as an expert or who recruits for a living? After all, screening applicants based on job qualifications is the recruiter’s job, isn’t it?

What Do You Know and When Did You First Know It?

Asking the right interview questions requires knowing first what to look for. And, if recruiters have to resort to qualification questions like, “What is your greatest accomplishment?” or “How would you describe yourself?” or “What is your greatest strength or weakness?” it’s a sure sign they neither have a clue how to identify specific job skills nor how to measure them. Any determined applicant will rehearse answers to questions like these. Any experienced recruiter knows, at best, they serve as knock-outs.

I once worked with a “professional” recruiter who claimed he had a better way to ask interview questions. He drew close, looked around to see no one was listening, and whispered, “How would your best friend describe you?” (With great difficulty, I choked back a description I really wanted to use to describe him).)

I can just envision the flood of nasty-grams I am about to receive from recruiters in angry disagreement; but, I did not invent this stuff any more than Newton invented gravity. Best-practice interview techniques are supported by thousands of peer-reviewed investigations conducted by hundreds of experts. So, if anyone wants to argue, here is a list of roughly 200 universities. I’m sure they would love to hear your opinions!

Knowing What You Need

If knowing what to look for in an applicant seems so simple, why do so many people get it wrong? For one thing, it’s not as simple as knowing the results you want to achieve. Results do not tell you how a job was done — or even who did it — they are the scores at the end of the game. They do not tell you what the player did, when or why the player did it. Just knowing results leads to assumptions about the skills used to achieve them. You need more; otherwise your assumptions will lead to hiring mistakes. Let’s use Tiger Woods as an example.

Woods’ objective is to use the least amount of strokes to put a little white ball into 18 little holes. These holes are inconveniently located amid trees, sandy pits, hills, ponds, and grassy patches. The total number of strokes is the desired result; but, Woods is only partially in control. Between his first whack and last plop, Woods has to confront temperature, humidity, wind, clubs, lawn maintenance, equipment, other players, onlookers, physical conditions, and a host of other factors out of his control — any of which can affect his score. The same is true of job-holders.

Although we treat other people as if they are in total control of their performance, we reserve the right to make excuses for our own behavior. Psychologists call this fundamental attribution error. That is, you are totally responsible for whatever happens to you … but I am entitled to blame others for whatever happens to me. Attribution error interferes with hiring decisions every time we hear a candidate tell us he was unsuccessful. Fundamental attribution error addresses only one part of the human condition; halo is another.

Humans tend to use snippets of information to make sweeping assumptions about other abilities. This is called the halo/horns effect.

What? You misspelled the word disenfranchise? You must be a complete doddering idiot who needs help tying his shoes!

What? You reduced the overall consumption of paper clips in your last job? You are obviously qualified for our presidential suite!

How often have you heard someone suggest the first two minutes of an interview make or break a candidate? Do you honestly believe someone’s entire career-skill set can be measured in two minutes? The halo/horns effect causes us to make errors both for and against every candidate.

To summarize, there are many insidious forces actively at work whenever applicant, recruiter, or hiring manager meet: silly interview questions; fundamental attribution error; halo and horns; unclear expectations; and, assuming results and skills are related. It’s a mystery why more hiring decisions aren’t disasters!

Systems and Solutions

Think of job performance this way. Every employee has to confront certain kinds of situations. Generically, these situations require a combination of one or more of the following abilities: cognitive ability (e.g., mental horsepower); planning/organization; interpersonal skills; special skills/abilities; and, specific motivational components. It gets confusing when you try to evaluate more factors than these.

For example, if you have been trained in behavioral interviewing, you probably noticed that after four or five questions, you start getting the same answers. Or, if you asked a candidate separate questions about solving a difficult problem, making a tough decision or analyzing data, you begin to hear the same story. That’s because problem solving, decision making, learning, and analysis are often so entwined that it’s difficult if not impossible to separate them. Being impossible to separate means it is almost impossible to measure them individually. Instead, it’s better to look at them as a package called cognitive ability.

Ever hired a psychologist to administer tests to an applicant only to find the report awash in personality factors and character evaluations? Well, unless your psychologist has been trained in how to evaluate job skills, he or she can only do what they were trained to do: provide mental-health evaluations. Evaluating applicants’ mental health takes you right straight into conflict with the Americans with Disabilities Act. All you really want to know is whether the person has the skills for the job.

And another thing: avoid fuzzy concepts like business savvy, budgeting, tough mindedness, or drive to achieve. Fuzzy terms and hiring mistakes go together. One rule of thumb is if you cannot measure a job skill in a few minutes, then it probably is so complex that it cannot be accurately measured until the person is on the job a few months. Take leadership. Has anyone ever seen a “leadership”?

Leadership is the ability to bring a collection of individual skills together at the right place, the right time, and under the right conditions. More often than not, the skills vary with the situation. Sometimes they might require interpersonal ability, sometimes they might require analysis and correct decision making, and sometimes they might require planning. Leadership is not something you can see in a few minutes. It is a result of many things happening over time. Even the traditional leaderless group discussions that so many assessors are so fond of suffer from halo (e.g., extraverted people tend to perform better than introverts).

Interviews as Tests

It helps to understand that every problem has three components: 1) a stimulus; 2) an employee response; and, 3) a result. If you have tracked this article so far, you should understand that learning all three components are important to knowing whether the applicant has the job skills you need.

Vendors who sell behavioral interviewing programs often train participants on how to ask for background information, to probe specifically for what the candidate did or said, and to verify the results. These activities go by many acronyms (BEI, BBC, STAR, ABC, and so forth); however, regardless of the term used, the most important goal in behavior interviews is gathering sufficient information about all three components so applicant faking is minimized and specific applicant skills are clarified. Accuracy leads to better hiring decisions.

Simulations, pencil and paper tests, case studies, planning exercises, and the like, follow the same stimulus-response-result pattern. The main difference is you control the stimulus and know the result you expect. That improves accuracy.

Conclusion

The recruiting field is awash in nonsense and bad advice. This leads organizations to hire too many wrong people and reject too many right ones. Experts estimate this cost ranges anywhere between 20% to 50% of base salary. Being passionate about a hiring methodology and knowing it is valid and reliable are not the same thing. If a product or report seems off-target, ask to see studies proving scores actually predict job performance, look at the vendor’s professional credentials to see if they belong to the right associations (SIOP), or simply ask if the product was specifically developed to predict job performance. A vendor making claims that sound too good to be true are no different than the emails announcing your lottery winnings. A little common sense and education makes a world of difference.

Steven Rothberg

As you might already suspect, internship opportunities for college students this year have been severely curtailed. Numbers are hard to come by since many internships are informal or are called something else. However, Steven Rothberg, founder and president of CollegeRecruiter.com tells us his site has about 10,000 jobs categorized as internships, which is half what it was a year ago.

“The number and quality of internship opportunities are significantly down this year over last,” says Rothberg, noting that it appears the majority of those available are unpaid. Again, no hard numbers on paid vs. unpaid internships — “that’s impossible to track,” he says — but from his conversations with employers, “They are either eliminating the program entirely or they’re eliminating the compensation.”

This comes at a time when the competition for what used to be called summer jobs has rarely been keener. Because companies across the U.S. have been retrenching, this spring’s crop of graduating seniors will face a tight job market. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) issued in October showed employers expected to hire the same or fewer students than they did last year.

“Overall, hiring looks flat for now and some employers are indicating some movement to cut back,” Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director, said when the report was issued. “In August, approximately one-third of employers said they were going to trim their college hiring; in our current poll, however, 52 percent said they were going to adjust their college hiring downward.”

Now, four months later, that projection looks almost optimistic. Thus graduating seniors who would have entered the labor force in years past will now be competing with juniors and sophomores for internships, says Rothberg.

“This Spring’s going to find a lot of college seniors taking unpaid positions,” he told us. “If they can’t get a paying job, they’ll be looking for the experience for their resume.”

Richard Bottner

Richard Bottner, founder and president of Intern Bridge, a consultancy that helps SMBs develop and administer internship programs, tells us, “This is a year unlike any other year.” He’s referring not only to the scramble for jobs by college students, but to the opportunities for recruiters.

“Recruiters have a bigger advantage this year than in any other year that my generation has experienced,” says the 24-year-old. “It used to be more balanced” between internships available and the students seeking them, he explains. Now, “recruiters will find it easier to find better talent. There’s a lot more competition out there for every internship.”

He laments the conversion of paying positions to unpaid because it takes out of contention students who simply must earn money for school. On the other hand, Bottner says it makes even the low-paying positions far more attractive.

“This is a year that many of the smaller companies should be able to compete for really top talent, if they don’t cut out the pay,” says Bottner, who has been advising the small and medium sized businesses he focuses on to “pay what they can, but pay.”

Though Rothberg’s view is that it is better to offer an unpaid internship than none at all, he, too, says recruiters with paying jobs should brace for the onslaught of applications. “They’ll have their pick,” he says, even if their company isn’t one of the big names.

His advice to students is to take a job “any job and then intern part-time.” Even fast food jobs, Rothberg suspects, will look better and better to college students as the end of semester nears. “Any job that is associated with a paycheck will be a cool job,” he predicts and most students “would rather get the experience than nothing at all.”

Both men do agree on this: Companies that hire interns now will be better positioned for the eventual recovery. Says Bottner, if the internship is well structured, something Intern Bridge can help ensure, then “the student the company hires and who gets something valuable from the experience is going to be a prime prospect later on.”

• On Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET, our sister site FordyceLetter.com, will be presenting the second episode of Margaret Graziano’s A Keen Sense of Recruiting Fordyce TV show. No need to RSVP to this one. Just go to www.FordyceLetter.com on Tuesday. If you missed Margaret’s first episode, you can watch it here.
• Sign up for the next in ERE’s free webinar series taking place Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET — The Changing Role of the Recruiter, led by Dave Szary.
• This week, keep your eyes on the site to find out the hidden gift your Gen Y employees are offering you (hint: canary).
• If you missed Melissa’s announcement last week, we are coming to hang out with Chicago area recruiters at our next meetup on March 11. Tell your friends and colleagues.
• There was quite the response to Kevin Wheeler’s article last week about a Candidate’s Bill of Rights. Make your opinion known in the comments section.
• For all you social networking junkies out there, connect with other ERE members on Facebook and LinkedIn. Also you can follow ERE and FordyceLetter on Twitter.

We are also another week closer to the start of ERE Expo 2009 Spring in San Diego. Check out the growing list of companies who will be there.

Have a great week and feel free to leave any questions you have for me in the comments section.

The reasons are simple: with the current economy driving revenues down dramatically, many senior executives are examining how to plan ahead in order to increase their firms’ capabilities, reduce costs, and survive the economic chaos likely to continue for some time.

Organizations need an effective talent management plan that will allow them to “explode out of the box” at the first sight of economic recovery, yet one that doesn’t threaten economic sustainability in the short term.

While most in talent management are continuing to react with stale cost containment approaches developed decades ago, strategic talent managers are stepping forward with robust workforce planning solutions and new work models that account for the significant changes in both how people work and live that have occurred in the last 20 years.

If you are interested in doing more than talking about being strategic, here are some recommended action steps to help improve your organization’s workforce planning.

What the Heck is Workforce Planning?

It might seem like a simple question, but there is little to no agreement among HR and talent management professionals as to what constitutes workforce planning. To some, it’s mostly an administrative activity that reports on historical changes to headcount and forecasts likely changes based on historical trends (i.e., headcount planning).

To others, it is a more strategic effort designed to forecast talent needs, talent supply, and the ability of existing HR programs and activities to align the two.

The more strategic variant looks at both internal and external trends and predicts what will be needed to recruit, develop and redeploy “just the right amount” of talent to meet specified business needs. The definition of workforce planning I prefer is:

“Workforce planning is an integrated and forward looking process that is designed to predict (what, when, how much) will likely happen in talent management and then to provide action plans that will cause managers to act in the prescribed way. As a result of the planning process, managers will be able to avoid or mitigate people problems, take advantage of talent opportunities and to improve the “talent pipeline,” so that your organization will have the needed “people capabilities” required to meet your business goals and to build a competitive advantage over other firms.”

Goals of Workforce Planning

Once again, not everyone agrees on what workforce planning is, but generally speaking, there are eight major goals for workforce planning that everyone should agree make sense. These goals relate to an organizational capability to:

1. Reduce labor costs rapidly without negatively impacting productivity.
2. Identify and prepare leaders and managers for future openings.
3. Fill “sudden vacancies” in key roles immediately with capable talent.
4. Maintain a flexible contingent workforce.
5. Proactively move talent internally to maximize the return on talent.
6. Target retention activities on key talent.
7. Identify mechanisms to rapidly hire needed talent.
8. Increase the overall productivity of the workforce.

Key Programs within Workforce Planning

There is no standard array of programs that define every organizations’ workforce planning effort. No matter what you end up doing, your programs will largely fall into one of two areas.

The first area focuses on increasing organizational capability through talent, and common programs in each area include:

• Forecasting the future needs, talent availability, and potential talent problems.
• Succession planning and leadership development.
• Forecasted recruiting plans.
• Workforce innovation management.
• Retention planning.
• Immediate “backfill” planning (To fill sudden openings in key positions).
• Internal re-deployment and “right job” placement planning.
• Merger and acquisition integration plans.

The second area focuses on decreasing labor costs, and common programs in each area include:

• Contingency/contract labor workforce planning.
• Workforce outsource planning.
• Reduction in force planning.

Benchmark Firms

In my experience, these are the firms to study:

• Microsoft
• KLA Tencor
• Valero
• WellPoint
• U.S. Marines
• Google
• Eli Lilly
• Qualcomm
• Intel
• GE
• P&G
• Booz Allen
• Toyota
• NASA
• Starbucks

Workforce Actions That ‘Fit’ the Current Environment

The most effective workforce plans are not developed over a long period and then implemented all at once. Instead, while some plans are being developed, talent management leaders simultaneously take action to resolve immediate needs.

If your company is struggling in the current economic environment, five of the key action steps that you should consider immediately are listed below.

Action Step I – Labor cost containment/headcount reduction

I am not alone in forecasting the fact that the decrease in revenues that businesses are facing will continue for at least another year. Whether that actually happens or not, it’s always a good idea to prepare for the “worst-case scenario” and hope that your plan is not needed.

Start with position prioritization, a process that identifies which key positions, key individuals, and key skill sets will have the most business impact during the next two years. Once you prioritize, you can then focus on retention, redeployment, and development efforts on the most impactful positions.

A related step is to develop a process to effectively identify and “control” all forms of labor costs throughout the organization (that includes full-time employees, part-timers, contractors, consultants, strategic partner labor, and outsourced labor).

The next step involves developing the capability of reducing “labor costs” and headcount in the lower priority positions. That might include “mock layoffs” and designating lower priority positions as “contingent labor” positions. Other options to consider include labor wage arbitrage (moving labor to lower-cost areas) or outsourcing with contracts that allow you to rapidly reduce outsourcing costs as your needs decrease.

Action Step II – Increase the internal movement of key employees

As business needs change, it’s important to develop processes that don’t leave the internal movement of talent into the “right job” to chance (as most internal job posting system’s do). I recommend that you develop a proactive redeployment process and plan to move your top performers and highly skilled individuals out of less essential business units and into units and jobs where they can have a greater impact.

The goal is to make sure that you don’t have a “Michael Jordan” playing “baseball” within your organization, when his impact would be significantly greater if he was proactively moved into “basketball.”

The right job can be defined as having your top performers and highly skilled individuals:

• Doing what they do best;
• With the right skill set for the job and business unit;
• With the right tools, resources, and motivators;
• With the right manager; and
• With the right teammates.

Action Step III – Increase the retention of key employees

Most organizations literally “forget” about retention during tough economic times because they assume that their employees will put security over external opportunity.

Unfortunately, that would be a mistake because the seeds for foundation of top performer turnover begin long before they decide to leave the firm. “How you treat your current employees now,” will directly impact their willingness to stay later on when the economy turns around. If your firm has been using hiring freezes, pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs recently, your key employees are likely to be frustrated and overworked. It’s also true that some firms have learned to continue hiring while simultaneously releasing employees.

This “churn” means that recruiters in some industries, firms and regions are still targeting your very best.

The best retention plans first identify the things that excite and frustrate your key workers and then provide a plan for increasing their level of excitement, challenge, learning, and opportunity within the firm.

The last but most important action step is to develop a “bad manager identification program” because bad managers are the number one cause of employee turnover. [For more information on setting up a Bad Manager Identification Program, click here.]

Action Step IV – Reinvigorate your succession plan

If your firm has undergone layoffs, hiring freezes, and reductions in college hiring, you are likely setting up your organization for a future “talent pool gap.” What this means is that by failing to hire and develop talent over a period of even a few years, there simply won’t be enough available talent to fill future management leadership positions when growth begins. This will slow promotions because there just isn’t anyone internally to replace them. This will make the predicted “leadership gap” even worse.

The best course of action is adopt your own “churn” approach to maintain some minimal level of hiring and development to minimize the possibility of any future internal talent pool gap. A related option is to implement a talent SWAP approach, where you continually “troll” for top talent and then replace bottom and average performers only when you find an exceptional replacement.

Action Step V – Prepare to “explode out of the box”

The final action step is to develop a plan that enables your firm to have sufficient talent to enable it to “explode out of the box” the minute that your firm’s revenues begin to turn around. That means retaining your very best recruiters on staff and having them focus on developing Web 2.0 recruiting tools. It’s equally important to maintain the two most-impactful recruiting programs, employee referrals, and employment branding.

Develop a “boomerang” program that tracks and maintains a relationship with the very best employees you must release. The goal is to be able to almost immediately rehire some of the proven talent that you lost.

Final Thoughts

The basic premise of workforce planning is that it’s better to be prepared than surprised. It might seem counter-intuitive to try to plan during times where uncertainty is so high, but that would be a mistake.

During times of turmoil, almost any forecasting and planning will produce higher business impacts than reacting to unforeseen events without a plan. Fortunately, if you’re personally interested in workforce planning, you’re likely to find that no one actually has the formal authority to “own it” at the present time, so you can seize the opportunity and become known as the person who can see around corners. During turbulent times, you will find that no one will be considered more valuable than someone who is not “surprised” by the future!

Free Workforce Planning Handbook: If you are interested in reading in-depth about workforce planning, I have compiled a number of articles into “The Workforce Planning Handbook,” a 240+ page electronic book which is available at no cost for evaluation purposes at www.drjohnssullivan.com. Once registered and logged in, click on “Publications,” then click on “Draft Books.” It’s free to download.

Once again referrals have turned out to be the leading source of external hires in the annual CareerXroads source of hire survey. In 2008, 27.3 percent of the external hires made by the 45 large employers who completed the survey came from referrals made primarily by employees, but also by alumni, vendors, and others.

Corporate web sites — a destination and not an actual “source,” insists the report — was second with 20.1 percent of the external hires coming from there. Rounding out the top three were job boards, which accounted for 12.3 percent of the hires.

No big news in those results. For the last several years the survey that CareerXroads principals Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conduct every January has consistently found referrals accounting for about 3 of every 10  external hires made by the participating companies.

What is different this year is that 38.8 percent of all openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

“We found that very interesting, ” says Crispin. “That’s the highest number since we started this survey eight years ago.”

His explanation is that despite hiring freezes, critical openings still have to be filled. But, now that’s being done internally and the  jobs the transfers leave are simply being absorbed by the remaining staff.

In the report, Crispin and Mehler put it this way:

“… the significant increase in the proportion of internal to external fills in 2008 versus 2007 (28%) is at least partially due to the deteriorating economic climate during 2008. We think this conclusion is further supported by the survey respondents’ estimate that the number of contingent workers employed by their respective firms decreased from 18% in 2007 to 10% in 2008. Clearly the data reflects a shift in emphasis to filling internally and squeezing external hires.”

The report also notes that some of the surveyed companies are filling almost half their vacancies by internal promotions and transfers. That’s something those companies should report on their career sites, Crispin and Mehler say, since it evidences their commitment to career development.

The survey report also identifies a few new trends and strengthens trends first noticed in previous years. Most notably:

1. Third party recruiters and agencies as a source of hires have been in decline since their zenith in 2005 when the survey indicated 5.2 percent of hires came from there. In 2008 that number had fallen to 2.7 percent, a decline exacerbated by the overall drop in hiring.

   “Don’t place your bet on this side of the market having much of an upside when the economic climate reverses. It won’t,” the report says.

2. CareerBuilder has overtaken Monster among the job boards (28.9 percent vs. 23 percent of the total hires coming from job boards), but the report calls it a pyrrhic victory. “We believe this SOH has indeed peaked and predict it will diminish in the future.” However, the report suggests that all of the big, national boards are losing share to the niche sites, which collectively accounted for 36.2 percent of the hires coming from job boards.
3. Perhaps not surprisingly, not one of the surveyed companies said it planned to increase hiring in 2009. Showing the depths of the downturn, the companies collectively expect to hire 15.7 percent fewer employees this year than last.

Recruiters have come to regard the annual CareerXroads Source of Hire Study as a sort of guide by which to measure their own company’s sourcing. However, Crispin and Mehler caution that, “we seek to stimulate discussion about staffing issues rather than encourage blind acceptance of data at face value.”

The report is compiled from data reported by 45 firms (out of more than 200 invited to participate) who collectively filled 309,600 openings last year.

Note: The chart accompanying this post has been updated to include two categories omitted from the previous version.

LinkedIn is now allowing group members to post job openings at no charge. The jobs are separate from the group discussions and have their own channel. Only other members of the group have access to the jobs, so while that reduces the overall visibility, it makes it possible to highly target job openings.

If LinkedIn announced this feature anywhere, we missed it. Nor could we find anyplace on the site itself explaining how it works. What it looks like, though, is the job posting rules are the same as participating in a discussion. Only members of a group can post a job. And the jobs aren’t included in the main, fee-based job board.

So this looks to us like more of an opportunity for specialty recruiters already participating in groups where they fish. It’s also likely that recruiters may start joining more groups.

We suspect that eventually LinkedIn will open up the group job boards to anyone for a fee. But that’s just a guess.

Senior Financial Analyst-DARIEN, CT

Sr Financial Analyst. Salary 60-70K plus 6% bonus.

They are looking for 5 + yrs exp. Do not want candidates who are overqualified who will settle for les money. They are NOT seeking resumes of Wall Street Brokers and others candidates who are willing to settle for less. There is a train station 3 blocks away and 50 minutes from Grand central. Ideal candidates come out of Manufacturing with hands on Accounting exp.

As I read their analysis, it seemed evident that the lessons learned about what makes a company innovative could be directly applied to the recruiting industry. With this perspective in mind, here’s how I’d translate business and product innovation into recruiting ideas.

Some of them are wild and crazy, but then again, they might just work.

Innovative Recruiting Lessons Loosely Interpreted from Fast Company

The order shown below is my ranking of the ideas themselves. The Fast Company ranking is also shown.

1. Amazon #9 on the Fast Company list. Innovative idea: developing the Kindle ebook based on the idea that you should focus first on your customers’ needs when delivering products and services, not some preconceived idea of the way it should be. Application to recruiting: if you want to hire top people, first figure out how they find career opportunities, why they engage with a company to evaluate a specific opportunity, and why they select one job over another. This seems so obvious, yet when I look at how most companies write ads, screen candidates, keep them interested, and make offers, it’s great advice. Maybe you should be reading this on a Kindle.
2. Intel #6. Innovative idea: created teensy chips for targeted market applications. Application to recruiting: stop posting big, boring job ads on career sites. Instead, use Twitter and micro blogs targeted to narrower audiences, or push your jobs using aggregators to specific functional sites.
3. Team Obama #1. Innovative idea: empower your customers to participate more actively using the latest online technology. Application to recruiting: create talent communities. This is a search engine optimized talent hub grouped by job class that’s easier to find than an individual posting, and certainly more inviting. This micro site funnels candidates to a prospect pool to be nurtured using some CRM tool. To capture their attention, prospects can interact with recruiters and hiring managers without applying, just to get more information. What an idea! Imagine allowing customers just to look around and easily compare products before buying one? Now that’s a recruiting idea worthy of consideration.
4. Google #2. Innovative idea: continuous innovation. Application to recruiting: always improve what you’re doing, use consumer marketing concepts to reach people before the competition to establish a competitive advantage, and try stuff out even if it doesn’t work. Application to recruiting: just about everything you do now should be reconsidered. It fact, maybe have the recruiting and sourcing department report to marketing or be run by someone who is customer-focused?
5. Hulu #4. This is the TV-on-the-Internet company. Innovative idea: make a site that’s easy to use and fun, and easy to create by getting rivals to work together. In this case, Fox and NBC Universal. Application to recruiting: make it easy as possible to have prospects find your site and get engaged. As part of this, maybe recruiting should have its own dedicated IT staff. There are just too many rivals for the corporate IT department’s attention, so this way you could try more new things faster.
6. Apple #5. Innovative idea: offer great design, charge premium prices, don’t stop innovating, and be green. Application to recruiting: Make your jobs different than the competition; offer something unique; sell on career growth, not compensation; and be green.
7. Hewlett-Packard #12. Innovative idea: partner with non-related companies in order to offer your customers a unique and custom product experience. Application for recruiting: Partner with non-traditional organizations outside your company to attract a different type of prospect. For example, you could partner with Trump Casinos and invite recent MBA grads to a poker championship (it’s been done by Harrah’s) or develop some type of online competitive interactive game for your sales reps.
8. Cisco #5. Innovative idea: continue to act like a start-up. Application to recruiting: don’t be bureaucratic. This means HR, comp, legal, and the OFCCP shouldn’t be driving the design of your hiring processes. This doesn’t mean you’ll be out of compliance, it just means you won’t be boring.
9. Pure Digital Technologies #7. This is the company that makes the Flip video recorder. Innovative idea: make the product easy to use and offer customers a chance to interact with it by customizing it. Application to recruiting: rather than have prospects find a specific job, drive them to a talent hub of all comparable jobs. At this warm-up page let them interact with recruiters, find related jobs or have them design an “ideal job” by describing the work they enjoy the most and are great at. Then let your ATS bring forth what “best fits” for them. At the extreme, maybe let candidate’s create their “ideal job” and then repackage the jobs you have open to fit this.
10. Ideo #10. This is the top design company on the planet. Innovative idea: the company has grown from just designing products to transforming systems to designing for behavioral change. This means adapting the product or service to incorporate a benefit, like saving the planet or at least getting better gas mileage. Application for recruiting: stop thinking about just hiring people to fill jobs, instead, think about offering careers. You’ll need to understand the behavior criteria your prospects use when looking and comparing positions to start this process. To implement it, you’ll need to apply every one of the ideas mentioned above.

We’ll be discussing these and other innovative recruiting ideas on my Recruiter’s Wall blog. So join and participate. There’s only one criteria — be innovative!

As I review the other innovative ideas on the Fast Company list, there seems to be a number of common themes or principles that stand out as guidance. For one thing, all of these ideas are innovative. As obvious as that sounds, being innovative is hard, because you’re fighting the status quo.

So if you want to be innovative, expect lots of naysayers, a bit of ridicule, and some grief.

Start small. Being innovative doesn’t mean copying someone, it means being first, but copying can help to prove your point and establish your bona fides. Trying out lots of different ideas until one sticks also seems to be part of being innovative.

Continuous change and constant renewal seems to be another aspect of this.

What’s also interesting is that these companies have always been innovative; it’s part of their corporate DNA. So it’s not a surprise to see any of them on the list. This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg problem for recruiting, then. Can a corporate recruiting department housed in HR ever become risk-taking and innovative?

Perhaps not, but since all of these companies are doing fairly well from a competitive standpoint, being innovative certainly has a significant ROI that can be demonstrated. Maybe it will take some gutsy person to make an innovative pitch to the CEO to get the process started. This alone is pretty innovative, so show some guts and get going.

“Talent Pipelines.”

“Talent Networks.”

All of these buzzwords describe the same thing — the idea of building a community of individuals whose skills you will need before there is an immediate opening for them. The idea is to strengthen the bonds between these people and the organization so that when the need arises, it’s a simple matter of picking up the phone.

In theory, of course.

In practice, I’ve seen too many software solutions aimed at creating these “communities” turn out to be little more than databases with candidate names and contact information. I’ve seen too many companies fall in love with the idea (which is a really good one), but not put in them time necessary to implement them in a way that realized the concept’s potential.

This Tuesday, I attended a NY Recruiting & HR Network Meetup and had the pleasure of hearing Linda Paul, the Director of Team Development at Meetup talk about her work.

As background, Meetup is a software company that enables group organizers to create and manage events.  It helps people organize more than 100,000 face-to-face events each month. Its site is simple to use, and with only 58 employees the company, has developed a passionate fan following.

With such a devoted base of users, it’s not a surprise that many people want to work at Meetup. In a classic example of eating its own dogfood, Linda has developed the Working@Meetup group in order to develop relationships with potential employees.

The group currently has 424 members. Each month Linda organizes a face-to-face Meetup with 25 new people from this group at the Meetup headquarters. Those attending the Meetups get the chance to talk to current employees, get wowed by their cool office space (which is just up the block from ERE’s not-quite-as-cool digs), and get a feel for the culture of the company.

Early in the program, Meetup was getting a lot of very excited and very unqualified people signing up for the events, so it adapted. The current process prequalifies people to make sure that they are local and have skills in areas that the company needs before they can join the group.

The candidate experience is a seamless interaction with the Meetup brand; they sign up via the company’s product; get to tour the office, and meet the team. The people at Meetup get the chance to evaluate a group of prospects, develop relationships with them before they are critically needed, and leave a great impression.

Meetup found a way to run their program without expensive software, and they also did not forget that there’s no replacement for good, old-fashioned human touch.

Its program is simple, but I think it’s a great example of a company that’s done things right.

I’d love to see other examples of organizations doing this well. If you know any, let me know in the comments!

1. What’s the most stressful job? Now the second most stressful? And the 3rd?
2. How about the best job in the U.S. to have? 2nd best?
3. What’s the worst?

Some of the answers in the Jobs Rated Report issued by Adicio will surprise you. In the stress area, Adicio rated surgeon and airline pilot as first and second most stressful jobs respectively. Considering that one has a job where a little uh-oh can be a life or death matter and the other never knows when a routine day at the office might turn into a landing in the Hudson, I can buy the stress rating. But photojournalist as the third most stressful job? Well, hmmm.

The best job? That would be mathematician, says the report, with actuary and statistician filling out the top three places. That rating had me flashing on the Monster commercial from 1999. The black and white one with the kids saying things like, “When I grow up I want to file all day.”

I don’t know about you, but I have never, ever heard anyone tell me they wanted to be an actuary when they grow up. Pilot, yes. Doctor, of course. Even photojournalist.

When I lived near the mountains I knew a lumberjack who loved his job and worked at it every summer when he was off from his winter job as a teacher. Bad career choice for him since lumberjack is rated as the worst job in the United States, because, says Adicio, “lumberjacks perform backbreaking physical labor in an unpleasant environment.” It was the physical labor that appealed to my acquaintance. And, whatever you may think of cutting down trees in a forest, it is a forest. What’s not to like?

For some truly nasty jobs check out Discovery’s Mike Rowe. With remarkable weekly tenacity he tackles jobs like diaper cleaner, animal rendering worker, and worse. Lumberjack looks better by the minute.

Adicio, however, assures us that its ratings system has a methodology to it that involves assessing the 200 jobs in the survey on dozens of factors, including physical demands, job hazards, and whether you have to deal with the public. Income is but one of the five core components, so a surgeon’s $309,000 salary isn’t enough to offset the stress factors. Even though a mathematician earns less than a third of the average surgeon, they can simply erase their mistakes.

These kinds of ratings are more fun than serious science. As a quick look at the dozens of comments that have been posted to the CareerCast report pages shows, what constitutes the “best” job is entirely in the eye of the holder. As one of the posters notes,

“It’s true — being a statistician is a great job. I’m so glad to see it in this list. I think it should be higher than mathematician though, since it has broader application areas.”

Yet another, looking at the same list, says,

“I would love to know why there is not one creative job on there. Those jobs above would make me poke out my own eyes.”

Poster Chinook sums it up nicely,

“A fisherman or a logger, just because they have, according to this list, a bad job, doesn’t mean it is a bad job. In fact, most fishermen and loggers enjoy their jobs immensely, and wouldn’t trade it for the world. Conversely, just because you have a high-ranked job here, doesn’t mean you enjoy it. One could downright hate said jobs. I could never be any of the first 20. My ideal job list is completely in the back one hundred of the list.”

As much fun as the jobs-rated report is, it does offer hints about Adicio’s coming out. The software technology company that for years specialized in providing classifieds platforms for the newspaper industry launched CareerCast.com a few weeks ago. It rounds up the job listings from Adicio’s publishing and niche partners into a single portal that is replete with career information, news, blogs and resources.

The portal represents a departure from Adicio’s long-held insistence that it wasn’t in the publishing business. For years it enabled its partners to form alliances on any basis they wished and upsell listings. They could also upsell local listings to a national network, which job seekers accessed through their local site. However, Adicio resisted creating a single national destination.

CareerCast.com as a national jobs portal makes a lot of sense. It’s easier to market a single destination; search engines can find things more efficiently; and job seekers expect it. Not having a single destination site for all those jobs was probably a concession to the thinking of its newspaper clients who fretted about protecting their franchise. In the interim, of course, Monster, HotJobs, Beyond, and CareerBuilder (among others) have built their own networks. Meanwhile, the print side of newspapers has little left to protect.

Tony Lee

As CareerCast now plays catchup with other jobs portals, I suspect we’ll be hearing more from Adicio in the coming months than we have in the last several years. The company’s put its chief alliance officer Tony Lee in charge of CareerCast. Certainly a smart move, considering he helmed the Wall Street Journal’s online classifieds, including CareerJournal, for many years.

Lee knows recruitment and tells us the CareerCast model changes nothing about the Adicio approach. There is no standalone national buy. The only way for an employer’s job posting to appear on CareerCast.com is for the employer to place an ad with a local or niche site. You can do it through the portal or directly through the site. (There are about 500 of them.) Prices vary widely. The New York Post gets your ad online for $150. LawJobs.com charges you $600. Targeting and audience account for most of the price differential. From the employer standpoint, CareerCast.com is an added value.

Some of these sites also participate in regional networks, to which a local listing can be upsold. All of them can upsell into the national network (which is different from CareerCast.com since the network can only be accessed from a local site.) There are also cross-posting opportunities where an ad on one site can be cross-posted to another site for an additional fee.

It has a nickling and diming feel to it, but Lee says it’s effective and efficient since employers target their jobs, reducing applicant volume by buying only some sites and increasing it by “going national” when they need to. The fuzzy part is how CareerCast.com fits, since all the jobs are aggregated at the portal.

Making this work, particularly in the face of the established networks, is going to be a challenge. Perhaps Lee’s job should have made the stress-test list.

From email to caller ID to voice mail, recruiters can now employ and hide behind electronic shields that are virtually impenetrable by ordinary candidates. Job boards have promised exposure to more potential employers and an easy one-stop experience for job hunting. What candidates actually get, especially in a depressed job market, is inclusion among thousands of others who have similar backgrounds or job aspirations. Rather than gain exposure, their resumes become buried.

Email makes submitting a resume and communicating with a recruiter or hiring manager easier than ever, but in reality the huge volume of email most recruiters receive causes them to ignore and neglect candidates more than ever. Voice mail has become primarily a way of avoiding speaking directly to candidates.

So much of the technology that aids recruiters has actually increased candidate frustration and disenchantment with the corporate recruiting process. Mistreated, ignored, and often frustrated candidates are not likely to say good things about us or our organizations. They may be easy to hire, but they will be hard to retain.

It would be in our own self-interest if we developed and promoted a candidates’ bill of rights that spells out how they should be treated and what they should expect in their search for a new position. There have been attempts to create these in the past, but none have gained much interest. In good times, unfortunately, neither candidates nor recruiters have much motivation to create such a document. Perhaps in this period of uncertainty and frustration such a document can flourish. If there is no collective effort to create a bill of rights, it would be a competitive advantage for any company to create its own such document and use it on their career site and in their promotion to candidates.

The level of frustration is growing. The longer the recession continues, the deeper this will become. Candidates are not asking for a lot — just basic guidelines and an understanding of how we make interview and hiring decisions. They are seeking some understanding of what the process and timelines are for a position and how your organization goes about its hiring. This is not a lot to ask, but I have not seen a single corporation that spells this out at any level.

Using ideas from RPOs, Accolo, and the American Staffing Association, below I have suggested several possible categories where candidates’ rights could be explained and guaranteed. Your organization may not choose to use all of the categories, but providing information or guidelines for any of them would be a huge step forward.

Honesty and Authenticity

The first category would focus on ensuring that the status of a position was honestly stated. It would ensure that all advertised positions were really open and available to job seekers, and would indicate how committed the hiring organization was to filling the open position with external candidates. It would clearly state if the positions would be open in the future or if internal candidates were being considered first.

Accuracy

The second category would focus on accuracy in describing the position. It would list the competencies, skills, or other specific attributes that will be key in making a hiring decision. It would be clear about whether or not the position requires relocation or whether it can be performed virtually. Ideally it would also contain some indication of how success will be measured.

Complete Information

An additional category would guarantee that candidates will be fully briefed on the organization, hiring manager, and position prior to any interview. They will be provided with links to appropriate websites or other information useful in preparing them for an interview.

Process

A fourth category would provide some indication to the candidate as to how the interview and hiring decision will be made, who will make it, and approximately when it will be decided. It could indicate the selection criteria or the process by which the position will be filled. It could explain the interview or selection process.

Status

The fifth level would inform applicants about the status of their application and where in the process they are, and would provide them with a guarantee that they will be given a reason as to why they were not being considered. It would let them know how soon after an interview they will be notified of the result and what that notification will contain.

Confidentiality

A final category would outline the type and level of confidentiality. Ideally it would entitle candidates to security and confidentiality of their personal and professional background and data. It would require a candidate to give permission for that data to be shared with anyone outside the organization.

While I am a believer that as an industry we should adopt such a document, I urge you to consider doing so as a way to differentiate yourself from the completion and as a powerful way to build candidate loyalty and your employment brand.

Thanks to our sponsor Wolters Kluwer, we will be hosting our Meetup on Wednesday, March 11th from 5:30- 7:30 p.m. at the fabulous Westin Chicago North Shore Hotel in Wheeling.

To spice up the night we are even going to have a theme! In honor of St. Patty’s Day and also to be eco- friendly, the theme is green. Wolters Kluwer will be providing environmentally friendly goodies and tips that will help you be a “greener” recruiter. And feel free to sport some green attire!

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When: Wednesday March 11th 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Where: Westin Chicago North Shore,
601 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Wheeling, IL
Attire: Casual
Cost: FREE! Drinks and Appetizers, our treat

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Our Meetups are a laid-back way to network with recruiters and HR professionals in your area. This will be a fun and valuable evening and I hope to see you there.

Please RSVP in the comments section below so everyone can see that you’re coming.

If you have any questions, please email me at melissa@ere.net.

Right now, the business climate happens to be a little frightening. Since it looks like things will be like this for a while, I’d like to offer some thoughts on something that you’re certain to encounter in the next few months: a notable increase in executive referrals.

Anyone who spends time here knows that employee referrals are a simply fabulous way of bringing talent into your organization. The benefits are legion: employee referral hires are cheaper, pre-screened, more likely to be successful, increase employee morale, etc. A well-run program that delivers a consistent experience to both the candidate being submitted, and the person doing the submitting, will pay for itself many times over.

Executive referrals are a little different . . .

They come in three general categories. First, are the referrals that are simply sent to, say, the CEO’s office by strangers hoping for a leg up on the hiring process. I find that they usually arrive at my desk in batches, the time and date they were received stamped on the top, and sent along whenever the executive assistant felt like it was time to get them off their desk.

Second are those from an executive who has been brought in to lend some firepower to a referral. These often arrive in e-mail from a senior-level executive, and if you start at the bottom of the e-mail chain, you see that the first note is a “Hey Charlie, remember me?” note to the executive, in which the sender forwards a resume, and asks for help in “getting it to the right person” for consideration. Typically, Charlie does not know the person being referred.

The third scenario is quite different. In this case, the executive is referring someone that they know personally, or have at least met. Sometimes there is an expectation that someone will “reach out to them” for a conversation, or (in some companies) that they will be brought in for an “exploratory” interview. Depending upon your company culture, there can be tremendous pressure to hire these referrals. I once worked for a company where the second-in-command was trying to get a job for the boy who mowed his lawn. He insisted upon accompanying the young man to any interview that he had. Imagine scheduling an interview with a 19-year-old kid for some summer help, and having one of the most powerful people in the company walk into the room along with him!

The reason for this article is that you are about to see Scenario 3 a lot! One and two are easy to manage — I typically draft a polite note to the person being referred, personalize it with their name and the executive involved, and invite the candidate to visit the careers webpage and build a profile. I then forward a copy of that e-mail to the executive involved so he or she knows that follow-up occurred.

Under normal circumstances, Scenario 3 is rare. However, the current tough economic times will make it much more common — if more people are looking for work, and there are fewer jobs, they’re more likely to use an executive connection they might have in order to give them a competitive advantage. These interactions are very tricky.

Years ago I worked in a large recruiting organization that was led by a remarkable leader. After some months, this person appeared to take an interest in my career, and I was chosen for some great developmental assignments. One day, this person approached me, and handed me a resume. It was a resume from her best friend’s son. He was finishing school, and she wanted me to “keep his resume in mind” for future openings.

While this young man was bright, his experience was in an area slightly different than what we typically hired new college grads for. To make a long story short, I eventually did find a job for him in the company. While that might sound like a success, it took time, and things were never quite the same between me and the departmental leader after that. She believed I was a promising recruiter. If that was the case, then why was it so difficult for me to find this young man a job? Clearly, her best friend’s son was a star (in her mind), so the problem must have been with me.

If that was the outcome from actually finding an executive referral a job, imagine what happens if you don’t find them a job! Managing an executive referral is time-consuming, politically risky, and rarely leaves everyone satisfied. One or two per year is a manageable volume (you probably have a resume like that on your desk right now!), but you’re certain to see many more in the coming year. The time to start planning how you’re going to handle these referrals is now.

Here are some tips to help you come away looking like a business partner, instead of the goof who can’t find the CEO’s best friend a job!

Decide Now How You Want the Process to Work and Have Conversations

Your executives may have no idea how often you receive resumes from their colleagues. Schedule time to talk about this, and let them know you’re committed to bringing great talent into the organization. Ask what they’re expectations are regarding the referral of a friend. If you have the opportunity, try to have the conversation with as many executives as possible. Make sure you know what they expect to happen.

On a related note, be sure your HR leadership is included in these conversations. For one thing, they’re an important business partner, and it’s critical that you are both on the same page. Often, the resume in question will go to an HR VP, and then to you. Make sure these referrals don’t become a game of “telephone,” with you sending a polite note while the HR VP promised that an exploratory interview would take place!

Offer Options and Recommendations

After listening to your customers, offer some possible alternatives. Do they really want exploratory interviews? Who will be on the interview schedules? What sort of expectations does that create? In other words, will it make things worse in the long run to have someone in if it turns out that simply by examining the resume it’s evident that there is probably not a place for this person? What if you agree to reach out to the person each month for a status update? What about a process for maintaining a slate of executive referrals, and reviewing their credentials against open jobs at their level? My experience has been that it’s easy for an executive to send over a resume — after all, you’re in charge of Staffing. Why can’t you just hire this person? Helping your customers understand what’s involved in finding a match, managing tight headcounts, and understanding the minutia of work authorization, competencies, and salary expectations is a worthwhile exercise.

Insist Upon Shared Accountability

How often have you received a call or a note from someone in your organization who knows a “great executive recruiter you should really be working with”? Rather often would be my guess. I suspect you’ve been asked to meet with people from executive recruiting firms to “explore ways of working together” and “discuss opportunities for them to help you with your executive hiring.” While I genuinely appreciate the chance to meet new vendor-partners I’ve not met before, often there is an expectation on both the part of the recruiter (”Susan said you’re the one who makes the decisions about executive searches”), and the person who introduced them to you (”George is a great recruiter — after all, he found me!”). Suddenly, you’ve become the person who is “not willing” to give them one of your searches!

In the same way, executive referrals can paint you as the villain. Insist upon some measure of mutual accountability from the person sending the referral. Would they be willing to hire the person into their own department? Would they be willing to network within the company at their level to locate potential opportunities for the person they are referring? Making the placement a shared effort can go a long way in building your credibility as a consultative business partner instead of someone who “finds a place to put people” for senior leaders.

Communicate What You’ve Done

Once you establish a process that everyone agrees upon, make sure you keep the executive who referred the candidate informed. As I look back to my earlier example of my department head’s best friend’s son, I don’t think anyone had any idea how many calls I made, or how many meetings I had with various hiring managers to discuss this young man’s qualifications. It might very well have looked like I didn’t do anything at all to find a job for that candidate. Once you agree to a plan, communicate your activities regularly so the executive knows what actions are being taken.

Report Back Results

Executive referrals are extraordinarily complicated. They require many hours of your time, and take some pretty sophisticated maneuvering within the organization to ensure all parties walk away satisfied. For every hour that you’re shopping a resume around the company, or meeting face-to-face with candidates, that’s an hour you’re not focusing on getting your company through these tough economic times. It’s important for your leadership (and your HR partners) to know how much time this activity requires. It’s also important for them to appreciate the return on investment it generates. If you end up spending 20% of your time on this activity, and it ultimately results in no hires, it’s critical that your customers know this. Often this leads to a mutual appreciation for the resources the activity consumes, and can lead to some new approaches for handling these referrals.

Your executives are well-networked, and can give you access to fabulous talent that you might otherwise miss out on. Executive referrals are an important mechanism for getting this great talent in the door.

This activity is time-consuming, though, and politically charged. It’s also certain to take more and more of our time in 2009. Invest some time into working with your leadership to create a plan that meets everyone’s needs, and you’ll find that this activity can actually become one of the most enjoyable parts of your day.

Omni Job Board Network Inc. is a product of CML Offshore Recruitment, a recruitment and staffing agency on Grand Cayman Island. It describes itself as “a specialist offshore recruitment and temping agency offering Accounting, Legal, Insurance, and IT Jobs in Bermuda, Grand Cayman, the Cayman Islands, BVI, Dubai, Hong Kong, the Channel Islands, and beyond.” CML is part of Cayman Management Ltd.

The press release announcing the launch of Jobs-in-New-York.com says Omni has spent the better part of a year developing the network. The company says it has acquired “5,000 high-value domain names” and “now boasts one of the most comprehensive and valuable domain name portfolios in the online recruitment industry.”

Omni joins several other job board networks including Beyond.com, which operates what is probably the largest with some 15,000 titled sites. CareerBuilder, Monster, and HotJobs all have extensive networks with company-owned and co-branded partner sites.

Considering that estimates of the number of job boards in the U.S. exceed 50,000, why launch yet another site, let alone a network that may number thousands more in time?

We didn’t reach Steve McIntosh, CEO of CML, though Colin Doylend, CML’s manager of marketing and public relations, with whom we briefly spoke, told us “We’re looking at expanding as fast as we can.”

The press release explains a bit more:

“The Omni network has been created by a team of former recruiters, web developers, human resources, and marketing professionals who had become disillusioned by the high cost and inconsistent results they experienced with traditional job boards.”

Posting a job to the site costs $100. Jobs posted to one of the sites in the network are automatically reposted to other relevant boards.

Oh, one more thing. The CML agency site has a webcam link with a view of George Town Harbor. Forget the job boards. That’s a way better recruiting tool.