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Here is what is going on this week around ERE:

• On Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET on our sister site FordyceLetter.com, tune in for the fourth episode of Jeff Kaye’s Fordyce TV show, Next Level Live. On this week’s episode, Jeff along with his special guest Karen Pickens, focus on the top 10 ways to maximize your current team today.
• On Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET, sign up for our free webinar on Cross Border Recruiting led by Microsoft’s International Staffing Manager for China and Thailand, Chris Gootherts. Chris will examine the challenges of global recruiting in 2009.
• Keep your eyes on the site on Tuesday.  Shally Steckerl, Maureen Sharib, and Glenn Gutmacher will take to task those recruiting managers who are looking to save a buck by getting cheap (or free) training.

Hundreds of you are getting ready to come out to San Diego in two weeks for ERE Expo 2009 Spring.  There is still time to reserve your place.  And the search and placement recruiters are signing up for our third annual Fordyce Forum 2009 taking place in Las Vegas from June 10 – 12.

Have a great week, and feel free to leave any questions in the comments section below.

by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

For many in corporate staffing, contingent labor management is an unpleasant activity often relegated to the lowest-cost outsourced service provider the organization could find, mainly because no one internally wanted to deal with it.

The work is largely considered mundane, process-oriented, and as a necessary overhead cost that provides little or no value.

If you work now or have worked in an organization that views contingent labor management this way, you work or have worked in an organization that has no clue about the future of strategic talent management!

Contingent Labor Taking Over?

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For those of us who like to pass on any little morsel of optimism we can find …

First from Barron’s today, which writes:

There are signs of stability, if not recovery, in temporary staffing, which some say is a leading indicator for the wider labor market. ‘From a duration point of view, the correction in the temporary labor market is getting very close to where it’s supposed to turn around,’ says Tig Gilliam, CEO of Adecco North America. … the ASA Staffing Index has stabilized for the first two months of the year after falling to a low in the last week of December.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Hefferlin, who knows his stuff and who we’ll see in June, wrote in an email today:

“We should be near the (stock-market) bottom, which typically occurs months before the economy levels. The fact is, everyone is worn out from bad news, and about everyone who was going to sell has, so the path of least resistance may continue to be up … Many indicators are compared with year-ago numbers. Existing house sales down 8.2%, New ones off 48%. As these numbers improve (existing house sales have, due to repos selling briskly) that means the economy is leveling … The average $170k house is getting very close to where the average family ($50k median income) can afford one. The bottom must be near … There has never been a better time to buy a car (inventories are at their peak), and gas is dropping again.”

Analytics is a hot idea that will likely be topical for a decade more, much like competencies and employment brand were (and are). The best selling book on the subject is Thomas Davenport’s Competing on Analytics. The term “analytics” — if you want a really sophisticated definition — just means “let’s crunch some numbers.” One of the reasons it’s topical is that our internal systems are capturing far more numbers than ever before.

In recruiting, to the extent analytics have been used, the focus has been on internal recruiting processes. Recruiting departments want to reduce cost-of-hire and time-to-fill and thus may apply some number-crunching to find where they can make improvements. However, the big payoff comes when recruiting can affect operations by improving quality of hire. The recruiting function needs to make the effort to shift its focus from the comfortable world of its own operations and instead spend more time in partnership with the business units to see how recruiting can make a difference there.

Nowhere is analytics more important than in the recruitment of front-line workforces. Robert Yerex, chief economist at the workforce-management vendor Kronos, points out that in many industries the number of front-line workers is so large that you can easily get enough data for sophisticated analysis, and even small improvements add up to very large savings. The recruiting function is a particularly important part of HR for the front-line workforce because these workers typically don’t stay that long. The organization is counting on recruiting to get people who hit the ground running and fit sufficiently well that they don’t leave after the first few weeks. If recruiting fails at this then it creates a huge cost for the organization.

There are many ways analytics can help recruiting functions improve the quality of front-line workers (and we’re getting into details in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership). Let’s just look at one (as shown in the graphic above as an example) to give you a flavor.

A simple analysis of retention by source of hire can show recruiting how they should aim its sourcing efforts and even lead to quantifying how much extra value one source creates compared to another due to higher retention. This analysis might completely overturn conclusions of a typical cost per hire analysis since retention can be so valuable to a company that it overwhelms the different in cost in using a particular source.

It is very hard to find an organization today that is not trying to stay lean during these challenging economic times. There is no reason that you should expect anything less from your recruiting video.

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Something strange is happening in Maitland, Florida. Workstream’s stock has jumped 1000% since the end of the year when it closed at a barely perceptible 2 cents a share. And that was before the current market run-up, so the increase is more than just a coattail phenomenon.

A provider of SaaS HCM software and owner of 6FigureJobs and personal career consultant Allen and Associates, Workstream was bleeding red ink last year. Its obituary was all but written after its deal to be acquired by payroll processor Empagio fell apart.

But in July the company reported ekeing out a small quarterly profit, earning an EBITDA of $.5 million. For the fiscal year (which ended May 31) the company lost $52 million, with more than half of that coming from a downward valuation of goodwill.

Now, as of the last report filed with the SEC covering the 2nd quarter which ended Nov. 30th, the company had shaved $5 million from its operating expenses and cut its quarterly loss by 77 percent compared to the same quarter in 2007. Revenue, though down, was off by about 25 percent compared to the same quarter the year before. The half-year numbers were equally impressive. The company is losing money, but CEO Steve Purello has managed to cut the losses by close to two-thirds from the previous year. keep reading…

The comic strip on the left is NOT how you want your onboarding process to go.

We were joined yesterday by recruiting thought leader Elaine Orler of Knowledge Infusion to discuss onboarding with a limited budget. With budget cuts becoming widespread in many companies, onboarding is unfortunately a process that often gets cut.

Elaine revealed that an effective onboarding process will reduce turnover in the first 30-90 days and increase productivity among new hires. In addition, effective onboarding can help your brand and reputation.

New hires form opinions of your organization starting on day one. Through bypassing redundant forms and busy work on the first day, new employees are more likely to form a positive opinion of their new role. By welcoming an employee into your business culture as soon as possible, you are in turn preparing them to succeed at their job.

Throughout the course of the webinar, Elaine covered onboarding strategies that included extending existing technology, improving collaboration and communication, and introducing new tools that can help onboarding efforts.

By using a “conversation ecosystem” with third party applications like Facebook, Twitter, and blogging, it’s possible to quickly engage a new hire into the social community of your business environment. Also, by implementing a mentoring or “buddy system” with existing employees, you can acclimate new employees to their roles. In addition many of these strategies cost little to nothing.

At the conclusion of the presentation (about 40 minutes into the video) Elaine answered a plethora of questions from the audience. Among the topics covered were how to onboard current employees into new positions, the challenges of onboarding across different countries and cultures, and different strategies for onboarding across generations. View the slideshow and archived video of the presentation below to learn more!

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It has been like shooting fish in a barrel. The HR profession has been under fire from all quarters lately for not being “strategic” or a “helpful partner” to organizations. Many comments have been made in the ERE forum that make this point. In response, I have to say, I think you’re passing the buck.

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PricewaterhouseCoopers has launched a career toolkit with videos for college students and downloadable worksheets to help students develop career plans.

The toolkit resides at the company’s pwc.tv site (beware of mildly irritating and repetitive music). PricewaterhouseCoopers partnered with Lindsey Pollak, a career development specialist, to create the site. Pollak is also doing a career blog for students to ask career questions on the site.

The initiative began as a workshop PwC put on at Ohio State University and at University of Texas-Austin. It filmed the workshops and put the videos online. All told, it took about four to five months from concept development to getting the toolkit online.

PwC will hire about 3,000 college grads this year.

Years ago, I was interviewing for a Vice President of Sales position with a mid-sized services firm. Everything was going well with my interview with the CEO of the company, and then the question came. It is the favorite question of CEOs everywhere. Yet, it is also the most ridiculous question to ask a Vice President of Sales candidate in an interview.

“So, how much revenue can you drive for us this year?”

I thought it was a joke, but he wasn’t joking. Maybe it was a trick question — no, it wasn’t. So, I said, “Before I answer, may I ask you a few questions?” He acquiesced…

How many salespeople can I hire?
What is the marketing budget?
What is the travel budget?
What is the budget for cost of sales?

To all of these fundamental business questions, the answer was, “I haven’t decided yet.” Very quickly what I initially thought was a joke became an interview nightmare. Red flags were waving in front of my face telling me to run from this opportunity as fast as I could.

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The stuff’s just now beginning to hit the fan over the incendiary comments of Rutgers University academic Richard Beatty to a conference of CFOs Monday.

Under the title “Memo to CFOs: Don’t Trust HR” CFO magazine says the professor blasted the human resources profession for working without useful analytics, and contributing so little that, in the words of the article’s author, “typical human resources activities have no relevance to an organization’s success.”

Beatty dismissed efforts at employee engagement as having “no evidence” to show it produces a meaningful return. Training to improve low performers he all but called a waste of time saying “Low turnover isn’t necessarily a good thing. Think about where you might want to disinvest.” And efforts to become an employer of choice he called “silly.”

As you might expect, HR professionals were quick to take issue with the professor’s remarks.

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Those of you who have kept up with my writings over the years know that I firmly believe that simulations are the future of pre-employment assessment. Over the years I have dedicated a good deal of thought and practice to understanding how technology can be used to begin creating the next generation of simulation tools.

The purpose of this article is not to provide a detailed outline of the virtues of simulations (please refer to some of my earlier writings for this type of information). Beyond this, the crux of the issue is that simulations offer some really nice advantages over simple employment tests. These advantages include:

• A high degree of candidate engagement. Simulations are more fun and engaging then simply filling in radio buttons.
• A high degree of accuracy. Since simulations are miniature replicas of the job for which a person is applying, scores on simulations are likely to be strongly correlated with actual job performance.
• A realistic job preview. Simulations provide candidates with the opportunity to try out the job in question and allow applicants who do not feel the work is for them to remove themselves from consideration saving time and money.
• An employment branding tool. Fun and engaging hiring practices can really help reinforce an employment brand. Considering the trend in gaming and computer simulated environments, this may offer a competitive advantage when it comes to the coming generations of job seekers.
• Reduced bias. Simulations offer a way to help reduce bias and subjectivity in the hiring process due to their realism.

In order to better understand the future of job simulations for selecting employees, let’s take a quick look at the past and present state of affairs.

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A year ago, Baylor Health Care System launched a keyword marketing campaign, buying ads on a variety of search engines. After 11 months of what began as an experiment, Baylor has generated 12,455 applicants at an average cost per applicant of $3.35.

“It’s worked very well for us,” says Baylor’s HR Communications Director, Eileen Bouthillet

Baylor’s story was told Monday in the Wall Street Journal, which also detailed last fall’s seasonal hiring push by United Parcel Service. Both companies told the Journal that search engine marketing produced more applicants at a lower cost than did print.

“We’re cutting newsprint wherever we can and trying to move more to online media,” Matthew Lavery, corporate workforce planning manager, told the Journal. “Google is outperforming other online media.”

Bouthillet, who provided us with updated cost per applicant figures, says Baylor worked with TMP Worldwide’s Dallas office to develop a campaign and track the source of the applicants. By far, keyword buys on Google, Yahoo, Indeed, and SimplyHired yielded the largest number of candidates at the lowest cost. But the job boards also performed well, even if they were 7.5 times more costly per candidate.

CareerBuilder job postings were responsible for 52 percent of all the candidates coming from the job boards, which, cumulatively, had a cost per applicant of $25.43.

Compare that to the $403.14 Baylor spent per candidate on print.

Bouthillet also improved Baylor’s career center to make listings and the specific specialties more friendly to search engines, which also made them easier for candidates to find. Working with her staff web specialist, Bouthillet crafted custom landing pages for the keywords. So instead of a generic nursing page, she and her communications staff created pages for all the key nursing specialties being sought.

Optimizing the career site and job listings, she told us, was “kind of a no-brainer. We got better placement on the search engines and that helped drive candidates.” The Baylor name was also a draw.

The next step in the program is to track the hires. “It’s horribly inaccurate when candidates self-select,” Bouthillet acknowledges, which is why the TMP-crafted campaign embedded source tags into each component. Now, she and TMP have been pushing Taleo, Baylor’s ATS vendor, to incorporate TMP’s tracking tags to track both source and cost of hire right down to specific keywords, sites and whatever campaign media are used.

Effective onboarding is essential to any company’s success when new hires are brought on, yet it can be one of the first programs to be cut from the budget during a recession. By using creative techniques to advance the onboarding process, you can expect to increase your return on investment, enhancing the experience for new hires and improving employee retention.

Join recruiting leader Elaine Orler and I for tomorrow’s webinar, as we explore how to get the most out of your onboarding process in these difficult times. We will be examining methods to develop onboarding without raising costs, such as implementing new technology to increase collaboration and data sharing.

Elaine will be taking questions after the presentation to respond to your thoughts and concerns about onboarding. Make sure your company realizes the importance of effective onboarding to ensure employee retention. We still have plenty of space so sign up today!

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Wednesday, March 11th
2:00 – 3:00 PM EST
Register Here
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If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at brendan@ere.net.

Speed misreading the title of the press release led us to think happy thoughts of working as a bartender off Piccadilly Circus or as a cafe host on the Left Bank. Alas, the name is JobsinHubs, not pubs, and it refers to a network of job sites for English speaking expats in Europe. Most of the jobs are for professionals in finance, logistics, and IT, though there are enough other openings to prompt us to take a look at our resume, er, CV.

The network was founded in 2006 with a JobsinCopenhagen site. Now, with the recent launch of a London-focused site, the network has 18 Jobsin sites.

The Belgium-based network sells postings on a pay-per-click basis, which is currently .5 Euro per click, or .65 cents American at today’s exchange rate. The company says it gets over a million pageviews and 250,000 visitors a month searching its listings. Oddly, from an American perspective, seekers don’t post resumes to be searched. Most likely the result of privacy rules in Europe, which vary from incredibly strict to the merely tough.

What makes this site worth a look, besides the possibility of finding a job in a glamorous city, is how JobsinHubs tries to makes things easy for job seekers. Adjacent to the listings are icons for maps, company info, emailing the listing to others, LinkedIn (to find company employees in your network), Wikipedia, and more. Some of the links produce no or nearly no results. But we think the idea is worth emulating by other job boards.

A few years ago, one of my clients, a large, well-known financial institution in the U.S. (yes, it’s still around), gave me a search that required we recruit from two distinct geographic areas. I assigned one recruiter to the northern (more difficult) area and another to the southern (easier) locale.

As the search progressed, it turned out the northern-area recruiter far outperformed her southern-focused colleague, even though the latter was more experienced. As interesting as this was as a case study, the more pressing goal for me was to satisfy my client’s need. So I began a process that looked very closely at the struggling senior recruiter’s tactics and results. I worked closely with him to improve his process. I evaluated his spreadsheets and figured out whom he was calling and in what context. I helped him identify easier targets, and we reviewed his pitch. Soon his performance improved, and while he was never quite able to hit this project out of the park like his northern counterpart, he was able to meet his goals.

This experience taught me how valuable, effective, and important hands-on performance management is. We live in a world of shrinking budgets, limited resources, and must do more with less. While good management is always important, in difficult times, it is essential. When everyone is being asked to do more with less, as managers, you need to roll up your sleeves and be more hands-on than ever before.

The first thing to do is to ensure that your recruiters are well-trained in your systems and processes.

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Almost daily we get news of another online recruitment service launch or job board startup. Some of the more useful we write about.  By far though, the majority of these are me-toos; one more entrant into a field so crowded you can’t cross cyberspace without tripping on one of them.

Occasionally, though, we come across a site worth sharing. Here for instance are three of the more browse-worthy.

Labor Insight

This is a cool site even if you have no interest in employment analytics. If nothing else, you’ll be wowed by the site’s interactive, graphical displays and ease of use.

Starting with a map of the United States, a simple mouseover of the states gives you such basic employment information as household income, and size of the labor force. Click on a state and you see what cities have the most online job posting activity, an indicator of how robust the local economy is. Drill down, and Labor Insight will list every posted job in the time period you pick.

There’s also a search by company, which will tell you what company has posted the most jobs online during a given period. Or what company has posted the most jobs in Alabama, or check trends in occupations by ONET code (Occupational Information Network) or … well, you get the idea.

The site is a product of EmployOn, LLC, a jobs technology company, that provides jobs searching and matching, data structuring, and other services to education, government, and others. Laborinsight.com is a natural offshoot from the job scraping, and data structuring EmployOn does.

Even if you don’t think you have any use for such business intelligence (if you think that, we suggest you think again), try out the site. The three-day free trial tells us that this is not going to be a free service.

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One of the signs of a great community is when its members are willing to help each other out.

Our good friend Susan Burns has graciously put up 35,000 of her own Delta SkyMiles to help someone get to ERE Expo 2009 Spring in San Diego at the end of the month.  That will go along with a free ticket to attend the event.

All you have to do is answer one question on how the economy is affecting your talent strategy. Answer the poll on Susan’s Blog, Talent Synchronicity by clicking here.

Susan, thanks for your continued support of the recruiting profession and the ERE community!

It’s true! Although some of us have been preaching this for years, it’s amazing how some top executive search firms have buried their heads in the sand and continue doing business as usual.

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Let me apologize upfront for this “rant” on HR’s failure regarding workforce planning, but I can’t think of another time where human resources as a profession appeared to be floundering to the point where it’s embarrassing itself.

All you have to do is read the paper on a regular basis to see that many firms and their respective HR departments are struggling to find ways to reduce labor costs. Rather than implementing sound and well-established workforce-reduction plans, HR and talent managers appear to be making it up as they go, all in an attempt to avoid layoffs.

More often than not, they are utilizing ineffective and often damaging approaches like furloughs, pay cuts, and voluntary buyouts. After years of clamoring to get a seat at the table, many HR departments are demonstrating why they shouldn’t have a seat; they struggle to deal with a predictable and reoccurring problem, economic downturns, and the related need to dramatically cut labor costs.

At least to me, the lack of a long-established plan of action at most firms is an unnecessary embarrassment when it should be a significant opportunity to stand and deliver.

Déjà vu All Over Again

The lame reaction by HR departments around the world wouldn’t be nearly as embarrassing if it weren’t for the cyclical nature of the economy and the fact that organizations have faced downturns every few years since the emergence of civilization, most recently in 2001 and 1994.

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