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We’ve heard people talk about the challenges of recruiting with social media — you may come across information that’s discriminatory, and shouldn’t be used to make a hiring decision, such as that a job candidate is pregnant or hoping to become pregnant.

But what happens when employers find information on Facebook or Twitter they may object to — such as that a candidate is a fan of Planned Parenthood or National Right to Life — information that depending on individual state laws, may not make for a discriminatory hiring decision? This information may not spark a lawsuit, but how much will personal lives enter into selection decisions?

Raghav Singh, Ryan Estis, and I discuss below. keep reading…

Pity those poor New Yorkers. Slammed by Wall Street’s meltdown, alarmed by a photo shoot for a presidential plane, and struggling with more cases of swine flu than the rest of the U.S. combined, is it any wonder the populace is feeling stressed?

Now the rest of the country may be sharing the pain (think Detroit or South Carolina or Oregon), but in typical New York fashion the city’s workers believe they have it worse than anyone, anywhere else.

In a survey by — of all companies — the maker of Tiger Balm, 74 percent of New York office workers say they feel more stressed than those who live elsewhere. In addition, the survey reports that six in 10 of the surveyed office workers are spending six or more hours a day at their desk, “and more than half (53 percent) say that this time at work causes stress and physical pain, particularly in the neck and shoulders.”

(Guess what product is good for easing that pain. Helpful hint here.)

Also contributing to that stress, say 62 percent of the workers, is the beating their savings and retirement accounts have taken.

So how do New Yorkers cut expenses? Says the survey, “… more than half (57 percent) of residents report cutting down on ’self-pampering’ indulgences, such as massages, hair maintenance, and manicures, while looking for more affordable alternatives to manage and relieve their stress-related pain. Despite cutting down on such luxuries, over two-thirds (69 percent) still believe that a massage can help relieve stress-related pain.”

In Middle America, that would be called a Cadillac problem. Here’s how they cut expenses in Omaha.

It’s hard to believe, but ERE has been running a community for recruiters for more than 10 years. In that time online communities have radically changed, morphing from from listservs to forums to today’s never-ending cascade of social networks.

Our community has evolved as well, expanding to include over 50,000 recruiting professionals, and growing more every day. Today, I’m proud to announce the next step in that evolution of the ERE community — community.ere.net.

When you check out the new community site, you’ll recognize many of the same discussion groups and people that you have followed for years, but you’ll also see lots of new features.

Some of the features that I have been using the most are:

• The new activity feed. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring how to make this more visible on our home page, because it does a great job of showing just how much activity is happening in real time.
• Voting. Finding ways to separate the wheat from the chaff has always been one of the most challenging aspects of running a professional community like ERE.net, and the new voting system will let the community collectively decide which posts bubble to the top.
• Blogs. A select few have had blogs for a long time on ERE.net, but now every ERE member will be able to express themselves in their own personal space.  We will be featuring the best of the blog posts more prominently on the site.
• New discussion emails. We’re trying to cut down on the number of emails that you get from us, so we’ve consolidated our community emails into one community newsletter that will be easier to navigate and read.

Jim — who did a great job developing the site with Hunter — put together a video to introduce you to the features of the social network. Check it out, and then give the new features a try! keep reading…

Mark is a hard-working, top-notch recruiter for a Fortune 1000 company. He is located in Silicon Valley, one of the hardest-hit areas in this recession, with unemployment approaching 11% — much of it among educated professionals.

Over the past year, despite the recession and corporate layoffs, he has survived and has even hired a few people. But, he recently approached me very concerned. In a conversation with one of top executives in the company — a person he has a very good relationship with — he learned that he was perceived as a “super-doer” and as a great person. The executive told him that most senior managers felt he was not strategic. They had kept him because they needed somebody there to handle the few openings they had and he had good relationships with everyone. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

It is rare to get this kind of candid feedback and, although it hurt, it did motivate Mark to try and make some changes. He really did want to add value and he knew he had the skills and insight to get better candidates in front of managers. He just wasn’t sure what they wanted — or if they even knew themselves.

Recessions bring the luxury of free time, and created an opportunity for him to do some research. Mark spent a few days talking to various managers and asking what they thought an ideal recruiting function might offer them. What would “strategic” look like to them? And, also, what was wrong with being a good executor? He also probed a bit into how they really evaluated candidates and employees.

He was a little surprised to learn how many managers saw recruiting jobs as cushy and overpaid. They felt almost anyone could post a job and whittle down a bunch of candidates to a few that were suitable. They relied almost totally on their own hiring experiences for reference, even though many had been hired decades before. None of them knew much about the employment market, nor had many of them ever thought about the potential value of a clear and comprehensive talent strategy. Their complaints about Mark really reflected their own ignorance and stereotypes.

And, that’s why Mark was talking with me and asking how he could change their perceptions. Was it even possible? Or should he just move on?

Neither I nor anyone I know has a silver bullet solution. But there are five specific actions that anyone can take to change perceptions and build a reputation for adding value. If Mark wants to stay at this organization, here are some things that he could start doing that would raise their image of him. keep reading…

The manager of the dot-JOBS domain is weighing the possibility of opening up the registry to allow regional and occupational names.

“What would you do with it if you had nursing.Jobs,” wonders Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media. He says he has made no decision. But his question is not idle musing. Embrescia tells us he’s been doing a sort of informal survey of opinion as he talks to corporate recruiters and others.

“I’m just talking to people in a very low, quiet way. The way I’m talking to you. Asking them what they think,” he says.

Internet addresses could be issued for regions — say California.jobs or, to use Embrescia’s example, Malibu.jobs. Or, he says, “We could give anyone who has a business plan one for their zip code.”

More likely is that the addresses would go to job boards, social networks, or other organizations, he says. keep reading…

Can a situation ever arise where a company is too successful for its own good? Scott Pitasky from Microsoft addressed this very question at the ERE Expo 2009 Spring in San Diego.

While Microsoft is one of the greatest success stories in modern business, Pitasky said that success can cause a company to become complacent. When this occurs, companies may become set in their ways and fail to adapt with the times. As he simply put it, “you can’t just know what you know.”

Not content to let this happen, Microsoft has made numerous efforts to stay ahead of the game, including its Web 2.0 initiatives for which the company recently received an ERE Recruiting Excellence Award. Microsoft’s Marvin Smith will be covering this in greater detail at the ERE Expo 2009 Fall.

As the presentation went on, Pitasky covered some of the ways to transform your staffing organization “from checkers to chess.” In other words to know where you want to go and think ahead, in place of a more reactionary approach. Pitasky continued on this topic and discussed ways to dramatically change the focus of your company’s workforce within five years.

In addition, an important point was made about the necessity of knowing not just about your company’s demand, but the available supply. By using a funnel methodology, Microsoft developed a system of quickly finding which candidates are qualified for interviews, narrowing down the market, and saving valuable time. Elaborating on this, Pitasky covered Microsoft’s index for quality of hire, helping to identify the most effective sources of hire.

Lastly, the importance of telling your company’s story was made clear. The crucial question brought up was “do you want to create your employment brand or do you want to let someone else do it?” Pitasky discussed some key strategies for using your employment brand to communicate with people in a way that is relevant with them. Watch these highlights from the presentation to learn more!

keep reading…

The lawsuit between two Eagan, Minn. staffing software and services vendors has been dismissed.

Neither TempWorks nor its upstart competitor Avionte would discuss the terms of the settlement, though John Long, Avionte founder and president, said in an email, “Can’t disclose any terms, though I’d like to. The result was as expected and we are pleased with it.”

TempWorks CEO Gregg Dourgarian said about the same thing: “We’re delighted with the outcome.”

The two companies sued each other last year, with Avionte claiming in a state court lawsuit that TempWorks was badmouthing it to clients and was sending them letters demanding they stop using Avionte software. TempWorks countersued in federal court, charging Avionte had pirated parts of its staffing software.

All the players know each other, and though Eagan is a Minneapolis suburb, it’s small enough that the principals might run into each other. Long was previously president of TempWorks, and one of the company’s original employees. His partner and Avionte Chief Technology Officer Phi Ngo had been a senior analyst at TempWorks. Sandeep Acharya, chief operations officer, had been TempWorks director of consulting services. And Samar Basnet, chief software architect at Avionte, had been a senior software analyst for TempWorks.

Whatever the agreement, neither company apparently had to give up products or clients. Both companies told us they are continuing to sell their front- and back-office software and other services. “Avionte is definitely continuing to sell our products and business,” says Long.

TempWorks, which broadened its offerings a few years ago, has been moving strongly into payroll services, according to Dourgarian.

“We got a ton of business taking customers away from ADP,” he says, attributing it to the economy which has forced companies to cut expenses. TempWorks, he explains, provides equivalent payroll servicing, but at much less than what ADP charges. And, he points out, it integrates with the TempWorks staffing software.

Avionte’s CEO, meanwhile, says the company’s software business “has been great” (tripled year over year last year, doubled so far this year).

Avionte was founded in 2006; TempWorks in 1994.

Everyone knows that recruiting is currently in a down cycle, but there is no doubt firms will again need to recruit significantly to fuel growth and replace aging workers.

But do you have a plan that will enable you to explode out of box immediately as the downturn ends?

If you don’t have a feasible recruiting turnaround plan, you may be hurting your organization.

Research shows that the majority of recruiting organizations don’t have a documented recruiting strategy, let alone one specifically developed to deal with a recovery of the macro-economy. While one could argue that it’s difficult to plan when you don’t know exactly when things will improve, such an excuse is just that, an excuse.

Scenario planning, or a what-if analysis, prepares you to handle the turnaround no matter when it occurs.

As a recruiting manager, ask yourself — before one of your senior executives asks you first: keep reading…

Here is what is going on around the ERE world this week:

• On Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, our sister site FordyceLetter.com debuts the newest show in the Fordyce TV lineup — The Talent Game with Jon Bartos. Jon will uncover the truths about the talent market and why your clients need you now — more than ever before. If you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing Jon speak or reading his articles, you won’t want to miss this!
• On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, this week’s free ERE webinar features Lizz Pellet, CEO of Emerge International, presenting: Creating a Sustainable HR Function for the Future. You will understand and define what green means to HR and how to plan, organize, and execute in this area.
• Friday is the deadline to save $100 on the first ever Social Recruiting Summit, which will be taking place at the Google World HQ in Mountain View, CA. The response has been tremendous and you won’t want to miss out on this.
• Speaking of events, make sure you check out ERE Expo 2009 Fall taking place in Hollywood, FL from September 9-11 for you corporate recruiters and Fordyce Forum 2009 in Las Vegas from June 10-12 for those of you on the search and placement side of the business.
• Also this week, Raghav Singh, Ryan Estis, and Todd Raphael will discuss what recruiters will do with the controversial information they’re finding about candidates on Facebook and Twitter.
• Are you on Twitter? If so, make sure to follow ERE_Net, FordyceLetter, and Social Recruiting Summit! ERE also has a Facebook fan page and a LinkedIn Group, some other ways to connect with your fellow ERE readers.
• If you are in the NYC area, mark your calendar for May 12 to attend our next free ERE recruiter meetup. Come for some great networking with other NYC area recruiters.
• Please take a minute to take the Future of Recruiting and Sourcing survey, and help our friends at Knowledge Infusion.

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

I saw a list that Publishers Weekly ran of publishing-industry employees who’d been laid off. And I thought: we need to do this. For recruiters.

There’s no need for anything fancy — we know that a lot of people are recently out of a job and want to make it easier for as many recruiters as possible to find a new gig.

So let’s do this super simple. If you’re a recruiter and you’re in the job market, leave a comment with your:

Name

Email address

Former title

Former company

Location

Feel free to leave additional details as well if you’d like.

We are getting emails and calls every single day from very capable friends in the industry who are being laid off or having contracts come to an end. There’s no shame in looking for a new job in this economy.

keep reading…

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful.” ~ Alan Alda

What kinds of things can you learn in a company’s telephone directory?

If you have a company you admire (Hey! I’d hire just about anyone from there!) it might profit you immensely to spend some time (especially now — what else have you to do?) doing some voice mail mining by tediously calling through each number of a company’s internal dial system.

Recently I wrote an article here on ERE called “Direct-Dial Directories: How to Research Staff via Phone Numbers” that has become one of the most e-mailed articles on the site.

In it I describe the technique of “farming” a company’s telephone directory — an activity that can be performed on just about every major company in America from the comfort of your own desk and telephone. Toward the end of the article I mention a few things that a directory reveals, these being only a smidgen of the type of information that can be extrapolated from a company’s telephone directory. Following are some other “tidbits” of valuable information that a directory might yield. keep reading…

Who says no one’s hiring? Certainly not the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which earlier this month reported that 4.4 million Americans got jobs in February. That’s only slightly less (and February is a short month) than the 4.5 million new hires in January.

Fortune magazine recently posted a listed of 28 companies on its Fortune 100 list that have openings for at least 150 jobs. Topping the list is Wal-Mart, which, Fortune says, has “thousands” of jobs ranging from clerk to store manager. Bank of America, which has had layoffs and drooping revenue, is looking for 1,860 workers in all areas.

Prudential, which made the list, is seeking 235 new employees in a variety of corporate positions including  actuarial, market research and analysis, operations, and administrative.

We happened to catch a careers pitch for Prudential flashing on the company’s digital billboard in Times Square, of all places. (The company is headquartered across the Hudson River in Newark, NJ.)

Company spokesman Peter Price tells us recruitment shares billboard time with other company units and messages. So it’s not exclusive, but it is part of the “broad net” the company casts.

To be sure, the number of hires nationally is well off the recent high, which came in July 2006. Then, 5.63 million workers were hired. And the new hire rate has declined over the last year, especially in the Midwest, South, and West. Some industries have been hit harder than others. As you might expect, hiring dropped most sharply in retail, hospitality, finance and insurance, recreation and entertainment, and (this may be a surprise) in government. keep reading…

Technology in its broadest sense, along with discovery, is the driver of new work and jobs. Each new discovery, every new software tool or programming language, every new product creates new jobs and requires new skills. As people began to unearth bones as they plowed fields in England, the science of paleontology emerged. As computers grew, so did the number and type of computer languages and the programmers and analysts that make them useful.

Each recession gives rise to hundreds of new careers and entirely new job functions as old ones are made obsolete. Car assembly people, for example, are a dying breed, and not many will survive this recession. Other jobs that are at the end of their life cycle include ordinary bank tellers, cashiers and checkout clerks, and even many call center jobs.

But, on the other hand, the 21st century will bring hundreds of new jobs. Already I can envision the time when we will need experts in installing and improving artificial organs, in implementing green energy strategies, in installing solar and wind energy systems, in fixing electric and hybrid vehicles, in mining the Moon and Mars, and in navigating and understanding deep space. But we will also need people who are more skilled at virtual relationship building and in working across cultures. Social networking managers as well as network facilitators and builders will be a growing sector of the economy. Psychology and sociology are clearly going to be adapting and changing to a global, intercultural world. In the shorter term — say over the next three to five years, many jobs are already being identified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States and by other groups. keep reading…

photo by Jeff Greenberg

It’s that time again — Meetup time! And this time I am bringing the Meetup to my hometown, the Big Apple! NYC is also ERE HQ so you’ll get the chance to meet others from the company. keep reading…

Warren Buffett declared it: this “is an economic war.” He likened our current situation to WWII. If you work in human resources as a recruiter, trainer, and/or diversity expert, that puts you squarely on the front lines. After several happy years of growth — including a marked increase in upper management’s appreciation for the “employer of choice” and employee engagement concepts — the battle of retrenchment is engaged. keep reading…

SimplyHired is cracking down on sites, especially job boards, it believes are gaming the system by posting phony listings, repackaging listings from other sites as their own, or which use so-called black hat tricks to improve the organic positioning of their jobs and thus increase their clickthrough traffic.

“We are trying to make sure the jobs in our index are as high quality as possible,” explains Gautam Godhwani, co-founder and CEO of SimplyHired, a search engine for job listings. “People are actively gaming the system,” he says, telling us that those who refuse to change are being removed from the search engine’s index.

That means that a job which previously would have been found by searching SimplyHired will now no longer appear there. For a small job board which depends on the visibility provided by the search engines, being excluded may not be quite a death sentence, but it can mean a huge drop in traffic, which can translate into an equally big drop in revenue.

The site’s FAQs do spell out the requirements, among them: “Provide unique and relevant content that adds value to the job seeker experience.” Black hat tricks are specifically prohibited: “Do not provide job content loaded with extraneous or artificially modified content (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc).” And the jobseeker who clicks through on a job ad can’t be required to register to see the full ad.

The crackdown on alleged bad practices (which can also include uncorrected, though innocent, technical flaws such as broken links), has gotten mixed up with a new, and surprising business practice requiring new advertisers to commit to a minimum $500 monthly spend. keep reading…

From the department of maybe-things-are-getting-less-bad: “layoffs, hiring freezes, and salary freezes may have finally peaked” in the U.S., Watson Wyatt says.

Watson Wyatt’s survey this month of 141 employers shows that 26 percent of employers plan to increase cost-cutting initiatives over the next 12 months, way down from 51 percent who said so in February. Of the companies who have avoided layoffs thus far, only 5% expect to start laying people off over the next year.

In a nutshell, the first two columns below are the nasty ones; the last two are the good ones. keep reading…

Curious as to the impact of social media on your search-engine profile? Try this experiment: Go to a search engine and type in “(your company) careers” into the search field.

If you’re most companies, you may get one or more entries that may or may not point a job-seeker to the correct website. If you’re a few companies I won’t mention, you sadly go to the archives of well-known recruiter blogs begging you to upgrade your site. For the company Sodexo, the first result is its blog, and the second is the careers site, and the rest of the page is profiles in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr. keep reading…

Entertainment giant Bertelsmann was named the No. 1 corporate career site in the U.S. and Europe, according to web recruitment research and communications firm Potentialpark.

The company released its top 30 corporate career site lists today for Asia, Europe, U.S. and elsewhere. As might be expected for a list developed by surveying business and tech students and grads, many of the top sites are banks, investment firms, tech, and pharmaceutical companies. Microsoft, which is in the midst of a major overhaul of its career sites worldwide, ranked 5th in the U.S. and was among the top 30 in Asia.

Bertelsmann missed the top spot in its home country of Germany. There Bayer, the pharmaceutical firm, topped the list. (Bertelsmann was 20th.)

Making the U.S. list depends on how Potentialpark analyzed the 102 corporate career sites it selected against criteria established by polling 2,159 students and graduates about “how they behave and what they expect when searching for careers online.”

Not surprisingly, Potentialpark’s survey found that 92 percent of the students and grads go online to research potential employers and career opportunities; 86 percent use company career sites.

Julian Ziesing, head of research at Potentialpark, says, “If you want to find all career opportunities that a company offers, you have to go to their own career website. Events, campaigns, contacts, assessments, career opportunities and application form — the best chance to find everything is to go straight to the source.”

None of the sites on any of the lists made the nominees’ list for a Webby. Webbies claim to be the “leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.” Winning a Webby is an honor. Out of 10,000 nominations, awards are given in about 100 categories. They are selected by votes from the 550 members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which sponsors the awards. There’s also a People’s Voice category which is just what it sounds like. This year’s winners will be announced May 5th.

Two of Potentialpark’s top 30 also won top honors in ERE’s 2009 recruiting awards. Both Ernst & Young and Microsoft won in two separate categories each.

There’s also a User’s Choice Awards run by Weddle’s. It’s a popularity contest that is more entertaining than instructive. The brand names invariably make the top 30, and because it imposes no limits on voting, the poll is susceptible to ballot stuffing, as the occasional placement among the top 30 by relatively low traffic job boards suggests.

It’s only April but I’ve already failed to keep my New Year’s Resolution. Back in December I vowed to consolidate my digital footprint. (If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you already knew that.)

Like the Berlin Wall, I was going to tear down the divider between my business and personal life. If my cousin wanted to LinkIn with me or my client wanted to friend me on Facebook, I resolved to accept every invitation. I updated my Facebook wall with my Tweets from my cellphone and posted the items to my blog and LinkedIn profile.

Unfortunately, like the marketing professionals trying to assess the ROI of social media, I haven’t necessarily seen any value at consolidating or keeping up with everything. Am I just trying to keep up with the times? keep reading…