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.

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.

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!

Jim, Hunter, & the rest of the ERE team will be spending the next couple of weeks responding to your feedback and making changes, so don’t be shy. Tell us what you think and how we can make this a better tool for you to share your ideas and connect with other recruiters!

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.

Action #1: Start talking the language of business. Good recruiters know what business problems exist at the strategic level and also what the hiring manager is afraid of or doesn’t have people with the right skills to do.

She focuses on underlining how a candidate can alleviate that fear, increase sales, invent new products, or help the organization achieve a specific objective or goal. The best candidates have the skills and experience to quickly make a difference. A superb recruiter can show how past candidates with certain skills were successful, or not successful, and use that as a lever to influence a hiring manager’s decisions.

It is critical to build a reputation of presenting candidates that are easily seen as being able to make a difference to the business.

Step #2: Begin understanding and explaining the employment market. This means they gather data on the supply of certain kinds of talent and on the projected internal and external demand for that same talent. They use the Internet, job boards, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and local employment agency data, and they create a picture of the supply chain. They compare that to the demand that is projected for specific jobs within the organization. And they educate management about the marketplace.

Most hiring managers have little experience in the job market and, if they are longer-term employees, have nothing to calibrate the supply and talent situation against except their own past experience. It is the recruiter’s job to spread the word, educate, and use facts and data to back up their position. The decision on whether to go out to search for a particular skill set or to train someone internally may depend on how deeply the recruiter understands the market. Over the next decade this skill set, augmented with technology, will be a core competence.

Step #3: Start focusing on offering sustainable solutions. There are two components of creating a sustainable talent solution.

First is to become known as a wise user of resources and as someone who practices frugality. Often this can be accomplished by reducing the number of recruiters while maintaining or increasing the level of service through taking advantage of technology, or by reducing the use of external recruiters.

And second, it is working with managers to help them do more with fewer, but maybe better, people. Your philosophy should be to help contain headcount, to push back on hiring managers who open new positions, and really seek to understand why they need to do this. By engaging in conversations with them over work responsibilities, the skills of other employees, and the need to be cautious in a tough economy, a recruiter can get a reputation as a thoughtful and strategic person who really cares about the organization’s success.

Step #4: Start gathering, interpreting, and using data and metrics to make decisions. I have written a number of columns about measuring the value and the ROI of recruiting. The recruiter of tomorrow will be facile and comfortable thinking strategically about numbers and goals. They will be able to take pieces of data and using knowledge that is partially tacit and gained by experience as well as analytical skills, and weave them into projections and models of human capital costs and opportunity and growth. Rather than just collect efficiency numbers, they will also collect effectiveness figures and use all those numbers to draw logical conclusions that support their decisions. They will also use this data to show the value of recruiting to the success of the organization.

Step #5: Learn to sell. What more needs to be said. A great recruiter will close almost every candidate and will work to overcome objections, build relationships, provide flexibility, gain trust, and work toward compromise. These are the things good executive recruiters have always done — but how many really great ones are there? This is a skill that can be learned, even though some are born with a gift and do this quite naturally. However, good sales skills will be of high value over the next decade.

If you ever want to change perceptions and move yourself up the ladder of respect in your organization, these are the actions you will need to start doing. They all involve skills you can learn and grow. These are skills like those in karate or golf — they take constant practice and determination to build. They pay big dividends.

“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.

Nothing is imminent, Embrescia adds. The economy is a factor, but not much of an obstacle to selling the more desirable addresses. If the address registry were opened up tomorrow, Embrescia tell us he could sell millions. “We could do it,” he says, though the company has “refrained from that.”

Up to now, the domain (to be discussed further in the June Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) has been issued almost exclusively to companies, which use the extension with their corporate name as in www.cocacola.jobs. Most companies appear to simply take job seekers right to their career centers, bypassing the company’s homepage and the sometimes challenging navigation. A few, like ATT.jobs, make a greater effort to appear the site is independent.

When Employ Media and its partner in the venture, the Society for Human Resource Management, proposed the creation of the domain, they argued that it was needed to encourage the use of company job sites, make it easier for job seekers to find company-specific jobs, and provide a measure of quality assurance for job seekers that the job sites were legitimate and not some scam to collect resumes. They received approval for .jobs in 2005 and the first of the site came on line late that year.

Under the agreement Employ Media has with the agency that oversees Internet naming — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — .jobs domain “registrations are limited to the legal name of an employer and/or a name or abbreviation by which the employer is commonly known.” There are other requirements, including one that the applicant for an address subscribe to the SHRM code of ethics.

The rules can be modified, but it appears it would require SHRM’s acquiescence. No one from SHRM could be reached to discuss the possibility. However, Embrescia insists that the overriding requirement is that dot-JOBS sites “have to be used for HR content,” which, he said, is what a 90210.jobs address or an occupationally focused one would be for.

Recruitment consultant Gerry Crispin, who served on SHRM’s advisory panel on the creation of a dot-JOBS extension, says opening up the registry defeats its purpose.

“If this action is taken it will be the death knell of the domain,” he emailed us from SHRM’s staffing conference in Las Vegas. Crispin called it “Just another commercial effort to squeeze dollars from employers and mislead job seekers. Disappointing that resources were never devoted to marketing to the jobseeker.”

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!

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.

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:

“What exactly needs to be done in advance so that when the time comes, the recruiting function has the capacity and capability to dramatically ramp up recruiting?”

Benefits of Having an “Explode Out of the Box” Strategy

Whether the turnaround in your industry comes this year or next, it’s critical that you have an operational plan and strategy to prepare for it when it does come.

The reasons why it’s critical for you to develop this “explode out of the box” strategy include:

• Competitive advantage. During economic recoveries, organizations that can react quickly can pick up market share from competitors not quite as agile. This is especially true if your organization isn’t the largest or the most well-known in your industry.
• “Right time” advantages. The key is to “ramp up” recruiting at the “right time,” rather than being too early or too late. If you start active recruiting too early, you’ll leave a large number of recruits waiting in limbo before you can take action. If you start too late, you’ll miss out on the first movers (i.e., forward-looking talent who is among the first to be willing to assume the risk of a new position and firm).
• Free time. Although your budgets might be lean and hiring may be frozen, this “lull” is a great time to rethink your past approach. Once the frenzy of new hiring begins, there will be little time to think strategically and to develop a workable plan. This lull time will also allow you to identify new and emerging tools (mobile phones, Twitter, social networks, talent communities, etc.) and to adapt them to your company’s needs.
• Recruiter availability. If you plan accurately and act quickly, you’ll have your pick of the top available recruiters. Having a well-designed plan might, by itself, attract some of the best recruiters who have been frustrated when they had to operate in an ad-hoc environment.
• Lower costs. If you plan in advance, you will be able to attract some of the best recruiters at relatively low salaries. In addition, you might be able to secure low-cost deals with vendors before increased demand drives up their prices and limits implementation availability.
• Training and education. It is certainly true that hiring managers and some of your recruiters might be a little rusty. A great plan will allow you to improve your training and education processes so that everyone “gets up-to-speed” precisely at the right time.
• It’s a global competition. If your company is one of the many that has a global reach, it’s likely that the talent wars will heat up in certain geographic regions (or product areas) long before an overall turnaround occurs. If your plan includes elements that allow you to “explode out of the box” in these hot areas, you can help your company much sooner. You can also use these micro-targeted areas as a testing ground for your new plan.
• Strategic image. By being forward-looking, you might improve recruiting’s image as a strategic function.

Elements of an Effective “Explode Out of the Box” Recruiting Plan

If you’ve been a manager in recruiting for any significant period, you’ve already been through one or more up-and-down cycles. I’ve been through a half-dozen of them and from my experience, it is relatively easy to identify the elements that must be upgraded following a prolonged downturn. The key elements of a great turnaround plan include:

• Strategic goals. Revisit your current recruiting goals and make them more business-like. That means narrowing your goals and making them more focused on business impacts. These goals should include ramping up from little activity to maximum capability in 30 to 60 days; prioritizing jobs based on their business impact; hiring more top performers and innovators; improving the employer brand; and making managers more effective at hiring while reducing the time they must devote to it. Whatever goals you develop, make sure they are strategic and measurable.
• Strategic metrics. Shift the recruiting department’s focus away from operational metrics and toward business-impact metrics. You will need a metric for each strategic goal that you have set. Focus on these six strategic business-impact metrics: Quality of hire; innovation from new-hires; revenue loss due to position vacancies; the cost of new-hire turnover; diversity in management positions; and employer brand impact (you can’t attract the very best without a consciously developed and effective brand image).
• Executive buy in. Because recruiting doesn’t operate in a vacuum, recruiting leaders must realize that their plan needs to be developed with input from HR, executives, and hiring managers. Of all the executives, the CFO and COO are the most important because they control requisition freezes and recruiting budgets. The CFO must also be involved in developing the process to calculate the potential revenue loss that could result if the recruiting function is not adequately prepared with an “explode out of the box” plan.
• Prioritize positions. When hiring is “unfrozen,” it unfortunately often follows an illogical pattern. In some cases, the number of “low business impact” positions that are opened up may exceed the number of mission-critical openings. If this happens, it’s imperative that you have already prioritized business units and positions to ensure that you focus the most resources and your best recruiters on the high-impact positions. If you do this in advance and make it well-known, politics and loud “whining” will have less of an impact on your efforts.
• Competitive analysis. A critical part of the plan is to analyze your “talent competitors.” This includes forecasting when they are likely to ramp up, which jobs are likely to initially focus on identifying, and what tools they are likely to use.
• A timetable. An effective plan includes a timeline with key milestones and accountabilities. As a result, everyone knows “what to do” and “when to do it” after the “explode out of the box” recruiting plan is activated.
• Prepared managers. Even though recruiting designs the hiring process, it is a fact that managers do the actual hiring. If you expect your managers to be more effective at hiring, include an element that demonstrates the dollar impact of weak hiring. Once you get their attention, you need a process and support material that painlessly educates them about best practices among hiring managers; they will have their own “turnaround” issues in addition to recruiting, so begin this effort before the turnaround begins.
• Identify precursors to a turnaround. Part of your turnaround plan should be examining past turnarounds in order to identify warning signs which would allow recruiting to more accurately predict when hiring within your firm is most likely to open up. Work with the CFO and COO to identify those early warning signs.
• Identify applicants’ expectations. Any economic downturn can have a measurable impact on the expectations of potential applicants. It’s a mistake to assume that their expectations and their “decision criteria” for selecting a job have remained the same. Instead, survey a sample of the most desirable potential applicants to identify their current wants, needs, and expectations.
• Retention. Include a retention component in your plan because as the economy opens up, you are likely to experience as much as 50% increase in employee turnover as a result of your competitor’s expanded recruiting efforts. This means that you need to identify the specific employees that are most “at risk” of leaving. Then you must develop both a retention and a “blocking” strategy to directly counter your competitor’s recruiting and branding efforts.
• Rebuild your brand. There is no more powerful recruiting tool than building your external employer brand image. Under this plan, your branding efforts should be an ongoing process that “virally” spreads your message by having your managers and your best employees talk about the aspects that make your firm a great place to work. Develop plans to spread your message on the Internet, as well as at professional conferences and in the media.
• Re-energize your referral program. There is no more effective way of rapidly ramping up your recruiting capability than by convincing your employees to become 24/7 “talent scouts” as part of your employee referral program. The best referral programs focus on proactively seeking out top performers for referrals and on educating their employees on how and where to identify the best. The best also change the focus away from monetary rewards and toward reinforcing your employee’s critical role in helping to “build the team,” so that both they and their colleagues have a continuous opportunity to work alongside the very best.
• Build a talent pool. After branding and referrals, the next most powerful tool for preparing for an upturn is to build a talent pool for key positions. This means pre-identifying potential applicants and building relationships with them, so that when a position opens up, you already have a list of names of individuals that are both qualified and interested in your firm.
• Your recruiters and tools. Develop the capability of rapidly increasing the number of recruiters you have available. This element of the plan might include options for utilizing contract recruiters, outsourcing options, the use of agencies, and finally, by getting other HR professionals within your firm to contribute a few hours per week to the recruiting effort. In addition, the plans should be “scalable” to meet the different levels of recruiting volume that you might face. You will also need to “up-skill” your recruiters, so that they know how to utilize the many emerging Web 2.0 and marketing based recruiting tools. You might also need to plan for “new” positions within the recruiting function, including experts in building talent communities, metrics/analytics, employer branding, social networking, and mobile phone recruiting.
• Recruiting territory. The current mobility of the U.S. population is the lowest that it has been in 60 years. As the turnaround begins, more individuals will be willing and able to physically move to get a great job. As a result, your plan should expand the geographic scope of your recruiting beyond what is currently feasible.
• Budget and resources. There is a significant time lag between when recruiting has to dramatically increase its capabilities and the point in time where the CFO gets around to fully funding those recruiting activities. So include numerous cheap and no-cost options for branding, sourcing, screening, and making convincing offers. Part of the plan should include leveraging other people’s time, so that your firm’s employees and managers can initially pick up some of the recruiting load (i.e., employer referrals, social networking, recruiting at professional events, and boomerang hires).

Final Thoughts

The current lull in recruiting activity is a great opportunity to develop an “explode out of the box” recruiting plan that gives you the capability to ramp-up recruiting from nearly zero to extremely high levels almost overnight. It’s inevitable that you will need this type of plan, so the only remaining question is when is the best time to develop it?

In my experience, if you wait until the day when requisitions begin to be unfrozen, it will be too late to do an adequate job. Also, don’t wait until you have sufficient budget resources to hire a consultant to help you; just having a plan will build you instant credibility within HR and among senior managers. If you develop a really effective plan, you will actually prevent a great deal of stress on both yourself and your recruiting team because you will be well prepared for any problems that might occur during the turnaround.

I’ve outlined the key elements that you need to include in the plan, so the next step is up to you. The time to act is now!

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.

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.

Lastly, don’t forget to check out the ERE Job Board. There aren’t as many listings as there were before the recession, but there may be a match!

Best of luck, and let us know how we can help.

“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.

Employees who seem anxious to be “reached”: Every once in a while you’ll come across a directory where, it seems, nearly every employee offers up a cell phone to the listener. You have to ask yourself why this is. Is this company policy that the company is encouraging their employees to “stay available” for calls from the outside? What’s it saying? Recently I did a thousand names for a sales drive out of a provider of energy services, and there was a plethora of people offering their cell phones to the caller.

I checked the company’s ”Estimated Fiscal Earnings per Share” for 2009 and it was listed as “very high” and “high” for 2010. I wonder if there’s a connection between what appears to be a pretty high level of employee engagement, at least from the outside, and the financial forecast. Hmmm … I wonder if that company is paying the cell phones bills of those they seem to have on 24/7 “call”?

Employees who sound “engaged”: I have a running disagreement with the Recruiting Animal about being able to “hear” engagement. He says I’m nuts; I insist it’s so. I am at present doing the phone tree of a global medication delivery and specialty pharmaceutical company, and there is very little information offered (beyond the owner’s name) on the individual voice mails at the company, and the messages seem curt and rather official; as in “I’ll call you back when I have the time (if ever…).”

Checking the financials, I see the company has dropped from an astounding P/E ratio of near 60 in late 2007 to a P/E ratio of 12 today. Hmmm … I wonder what happened. That’s a big drop in today’s strong pharma/biotech space, crash or no crash.

Building upon this I am of the opinion that you can many times “hear” the overall health/wellness/attitude of a company by the expression (or non-expression) on the employees’ voice mails, which are the company’s outward facing (vocal) image. One or two calls aren’t going to reveal this but a few hundred certainly will!

What % of the workforce is female/male: If you’re looking to promote equal opportunity in your organization, a good way to do that is to look to the leaders in your industry who successfully challenge the glass ceiling. One thing I found interesting in a recent “survey” of mine in a major consumer goods company was the prevalence of females over males 3:2. I think that’s saying something, and I also suspect (wage differentials being what they are in reality; let’s not kid each other) the savings just might be traveling to the company’s bottom line. Yup, maybe so. I just checked and the Estimated Fiscal Earnings per Share for ‘09 is “very high” and the outlook for 2010 is “high.” Hmmm …

It’s a diversity smorgasbord: A company that is light years ahead of your own in understanding and adapting successful methodologies that create for them a workforce that encourages diversity to better serve a heterogeneous customer base is one in which it just might pay you extra dividends to investigate ts member base.

It can be a watershed: Let’s take one voice mail nugget I retrieved recently out of a major U.S. based consumer products company. Upon dialing the extension “4725″ I heard, to my delight, a British-accented male describing his current work situation:

“Hello, you’ve reached Nigel Mickelson. As of Monday, February 2, I will be relocating to the Paris office, working on the home health care business. I will not be working on toothbrushes anymore. If it’s a toothbrush-related matter now, call Sean Lytle at x3651 or if it’s a brand-related matter please call Shirley Arora at x2111 who will be taking over from me in oral-based. Thank you and have a good day!”

Are you kidding me? You just made my day if I was looking for a brand manager out of one of the major consumer products brands (Arora) or a (probable) marketing manager (Lytle). You also told me the date you were transferring to Paris, along with the day, and checking my handy-dandy calendar that I have taped to the wall in the back of my computer I see that it is from this year. I now know you’ve been in Paris approximately three months total and the information you just relayed to me about the others is probably very near real-time.

In addition, you gave me names and extensions for two other people inside your company, saving me the time it takes to dial each one. (By the way, I’ll dial them anyway just to make sure the info is true and/or I audibly picked the names up correctly, and also that they’re still there, since three months can be a good amount of time for something to have changed!) Not only did you give me all of that, but you created a mini-version of your own resume for me if I was so inclined to pursue you on the merits you mentioned.

The fact that the names you mentioned in oral care all have extensions far removed from one another bolsters my growing suspicion that your company does not place people in the same groups one next to the other in the phone tree. Darn. When people in marketing lie next to each other in the same set of extensions, it becomes a matter of shooting fish in a barrel to find the others. It could be that the way your directory is assembled was done on purpose, though I doubt it. It’s more likely a result of an old phone directory that has morphed itself to spread all over the place over time with departing and new, incoming employees.

Something that sounds dumb but maybe isn’t? Going to that dark place in my character that wants to “judge” people there’s another “telling” event residing on employee voice mail messages and it’s an indicator of how the employee “thinks” on the inside. One such clue is when the employee has occasion to tell the caller that s/he is “away” for a specified time. The manner in the way s/he “reports” the event is telling, I think.

Employees love to enumerate, on their VoiceMail machines, the days they’ll be away from the office by (usually) stating the “start date” and the “end date” of their away times. These dates usually do not include the weekends on either side of the start and end dates, so their away time “sounds” much shorter than they actually are. (By the way, when they leave these messages many times they also leave a name — sometimes several names — of others in their department who can “help you” while they are away. This is why calling around holidays is an especially lucrative “hoe” technique in this particular farming exercise.)

Moving on, and warning you beforehand, you may not agree with what I have to say below. You may, in fact, find it repugnant to your own viewpoints.

“This is Rebecca LovestoSunandDoesItEveryChanceSheGets.”

Wow. Not only do I know that Rebecca is probably of Southeast Asian descent (they’re about the only ones with sixteen syllable names) but she also tells me she’ll be “away” May 11 (a Monday) through April 15 (a Friday) masking (she thinks) the fact that she well may have taken the preceding Thursday and Friday as “sick/personal days” and/or the following Monday/Tuesday as well to pull herself together.

I say this because I’ve heard enough voice mail messages that do not coincide exactly with the dates on the calendar when I am calling. For instance, I might get that message on the preceding Wednesday and/or as late as the following Wednesday, timeframes that don’t really make much sense.

So, in reality, we may have an employee who has a propensity to string “sick/personal” days onto the front and back of vacation times, with five days of paid turning into nearly two weeks.

“You’re pickin’ the doo-doo with the chickens,” you’re thinking.

Think so?

Is it a result of prudent planning on her part? Probably. On that note, it’s likely that she has all her vacations mapped years in advance using calendrical calculations to get her hiatus requests in early.

Is it an untoward absence expense to the company? More and more today I see discussion in the industry about what sick and personal days are costing companies in real time dollars. Back in the days of wine and roses maybe we could afford it. These days, while the world continues to flatten with much of our global competition accustomed to greater working hours and harsher conditions than what we have here in the U.S., these tendencies employees have to cherry-pick on their benefits are going to draw more and more attention from the finance office. Did you know some HR departments report up to the CFO’s office?

Make no mistake about it — employers are watching — and listening, ever on the lookout for advantage. Your attitude is conveyed in your voice and in the things you say (and don’t say). Words are powerful and creative. Be on guard you don’t create the wrong image with yours.

On the down side: Who’s young, who’s not: They wonder how ageism has such a stranglehold on our psyches. I know this is a controversial area, and many don’t want to talk about it, but ageism exists and is thriving in our modern society. If you don’t believe it, just watch Simon’s obnoxious and smarmy reaction to the news that Susan Boyle was 47.

He wasn’t the only one smirking — watch the early audience reaction to her.

You know how the requirement gets masked in the job order: “We want someone “entry level” who can “grow” into a role.” It has occurred to me that culling through a sterling company’s phone tree permits the listener to “hear” and unlawfully select/discriminate for age in the area of employment. It doesn’t make it right (and very well could suffer legal challenge soon) but it’s a fact of life that ageism is prevalent throughout our society and maybe this is one small way, like social networking carrying the danger of biased selection, that ever-so-subtly (or not!) contributes to its accomplishment.

I hope you’ve enjoyed some of my viewpoints as presented above (controversial and picayunish as some may seem) and you may have other observations as well. I am very interested in hearing them. Sure, some of the information gleaning I describe is, admittedly, interpreted by intuition. But if it wasn’t for our intuition, in many instances, where would we be?

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.

The government says the “quits rate,” which it calls “a barometer of workers’ willingness or ability to change jobs,” is at its lowest point in eight years. According to the BLS, only 1.5 percent of the working population of the U.S. voluntarily left their jobs during February. That translates into 2 million workers.

So, much as recruiters treasure passive hires, those 4.4 million new hires in February included a substantial number of workers coming from the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that companies are still hiring recruiters? A quick of check of SimplyHired and Indeed shows tens of thousands of jobs with the keyword “recruiter” or “sourcer.” A quick check of those listings show that a fair number are in healthcare, one of the few still-growing sectors. But there are also plenty of recruiter positions in IT, finance, a few in retail, and, of course, with staffing firms.

Incidentally, everyone is getting into the recruiting act. NBCPhiladelphia.com, the city portal of the local NBC TV station in Philly, is featuring companies with jobs paying in six-figures. Check out the comments that some users have posted, including the one where a job-seeker makes a pitch.

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.

U.S. News & World Report each year publishes a list of those jobs it sees as “ahead of the curve,” but these are mostly jobs that are already here and growing. This past December, for example, a couple of its emerging jobs were data miner and healthcare informatics specialists. Other jobs are being enhanced or enlarged as a result of the slow economy. These include car mechanics whose utility has suddenly increased as people keep their cars longer. But I am more focused on the jobs that will emerge in five or more years.

Academic institutions are very poor at identifying emerging careers, and most academic majors are traditional. This lack may be for the best, as the best preparation for skills that are not yet known is a broad and basic education. If we are lucky, we may see a return to a four- or five-year basic degree that is not in anything particular — just an arts or science degree that will be followed by more specific career development in a discipline. What we have learned over the past 25 years is that skills change as fast as do fashions. Skills such as semiconductor process engineer, analog recording engineer, HTML programmer, or BASIC programmer have all gone away or morphed into very different occupations. Function-specific engineering knowledge changes every three to five years, and whatever you learned in school is most likely obsolete before you are employed. Technology makes stability impossible, and anyone who is in school today had better be able and willing to quickly adapt and learn new skills.

Some of these emerging careers will require cross-functional multi-skilling. These careers might include those dealing with cloned human beings or genetic mining and engineering. We are already starting to grow polyester-like material from modified corn plants that consume no petroleum. We can clone humans and will at some point soon. Who is equipped to deal with the moral, ethical, and psychological issues that will arise?

Recruiters are at a special place in all of this. You will be asked to find, attract, and recruit people into careers and occupations that are new and vaguely defined. You may be ethically challenged and forced to deal with your own beliefs as requests roll in.

Are you prepared? Here are a few tips on getting ready for tomorrow’s job market.

Tip #1: Know where you stand ethically on issues of genetic engineering and related areas. What are you willing and able to support? The issue will not be whether these careers emerge — they already do exist is some form. The real issues will be whether you are skilled enough to recruit people into these fields and whether you are willing to do so.

Tip #2: Scan the market, read as widely as you can, and stay abreast of the trends and career developments that emerge. We are well into the age of genetic manufacturing and I urge you to read the work of Juan Enriquez — bestselling author, businessman, and academic, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. His books are fascinating as are his talks at TED. Watch one of his TED videos here.

Tip #3: Always be flexible and ready to embrace and champion new careers. Learn what you can and keep at the edge of your field. One day a hiring manager will approach you with the request to go find someone with a skill set that you have never heard of. How would you approach that? Are you ready for tomorrow?

Over at the Future of Talent Institute we are embarking on a new and ambitious project to identify some of the jobs that are less obvious but that will be important to the economy over the next decade. Based on some of the trends we see as major, such as sustainability, genetic engineering, and intercultural mixing, we expect to identify a number of careers, jobs or specialties that will fuel growth and employ many over the next 10 to 15 years.

I’d love to hear from any of you who have ideas about this or see emerging trends, careers, or occupations. We’ll give you full credit for your insight.

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.

For this Meetup, which will be held at Stout NYC, I am working with our sponsor Wolters Kluwer again. The NY Recruiting & HR Network Meetup group — whose events you should check out on an ongoing basis — will also be lending a hand to get the word out. With the help of these two groups and a very fun venue, the night is sure to be a hit and great chance for mingling.

To add to an already awesome night, we are throwing in some info on how to be more eco-friendly in your workplace every day. And you can even take home some earth friendly goodies … Go Green!

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When: Tuesday May 12th, 5:30-7:30pm
Where: Stout NYC, 133 West 33rd Street, NY, NY
Attire: Casual
Cost: There is no cost to attend
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If you have any questions about this Meetup or any others, please email me at Melissa@ere.net, and make sure to RSVP for this Meetup in the comments section below!

I hope to see you there!

Not only are companies reducing the size of their workforce, they are cutting back on everything related to HR: recruiting, training, and development; recognition efforts; and any other kind of employee engagement program. A recent Vault survey of corporate recruitment professionals showed that more than a third of human resource departments are experiencing layoffs. Sixteen percent of respondents said the cuts affected more than 25 percent of the HR staff.

The last thing the HR community needed was last month’s cruise missile launched by Rutgers professor Richard Beatty. The academic blasted the human resources profession for working without useful analytics, and contributing so little that “typical human resources activities have no relevance to an organization’s success.” The article’s title was a blow by itself: “Memo to CFO’s: Don’t Trust HR.”

One veteran HR colleague acknowledged that there are plenty of inadequate HR people out there, just as there are weak CFOs and accounting folks. At the same time, she reminded me that there have been plenty of studies linking employee engagement to higher productivity and revenue growth (though she acknowledged that proving a causal effect is more difficult than merely linking the two). At this point, it shouldn’t be necessary to prove that engagement has value all the way to the bottom line. Unfortunately, it still has not sunk in for many executives.

Full disclosure: I am a CEO who was skeptical of HR as a young manager, but became absolutely convinced of its importance as the engine of a big organization’s hiring, appraisal, and development processes. HR can be at its worst when managing the mundane, bureaucratic necessities of a company’s workforce but when HR is seen as business partner and change agent, the role becomes critical — as important as running a finance division. Yes, I do put the HR leader at the same level as the CFO in a large organization.

If you are an HR decision-maker whose company leadership doesn’t share my perspective, here’s how to fight back.

Make sure you are measuring employee satisfaction and employee engagement. You have access to your company’s employees, and knowing where they stand is more important than ever in a downsized environment. If you already have the measurements, make sure you are using them to drive awareness and action in your company’s C-suite.

Communicate the efforts of your team with the CEO and the CFO — along with other top leaders — and communicate the value proposition (ROI) of satisfaction and engagement. It’s not only about retention (which company leaders may be lackadaisical about, given the job market); it is about performance. Chances are good your company is asking more of employees nowadays; their level of engagement is critical to meeting productivity goals. Bottom line: you have to fight a tendency of top management to take surviving employees for granted in this environment.

And look, if you’re an HR leader, you’re probably are going to have to make some cuts yourself — if you haven’t already — to keep in line with the times. You have to step up and make contributions to cost-cutting pressures, while also demonstrating the clear value HR can play in helping to retain company stars, identify and eliminate the hopeless, and manage the productive and tactical engagement of the rest. Staying focused on these kinds of initiatives will position you as an MVP in your organization. Counterintuitively, recruiting is vital even in times like these because the quality of your company’s personnel will be the key to thriving through the recession and outmaneuvering the competition.

Still, this is not a time when anyone in your organization is going to be eager for training, performance evaluations, and the like. “We have ‘real’ work to do,” is the refrain from the corner office to the rank-and-file. Yet training managers is more important than usual given the current churn at most companies. (As we all know, bad managers are the #1 reason people leave an organization.) Now more than ever, it’s critical for HR advocates to market the value propositions behind HR activities. Best practices which have become normal routines (inertia?) will not cut it in this environment. Everyone is feeling enormous pressure, and HR activities that feel bureaucratic will be targeted unless you re-sell the benefits upfront.

Metrics matter now more than ever so be tracking key deliverables such as time-to-fill, average tenure, tenure by diversity category, and tenure by age demographic.

Finally, if you are among the unlucky who have found themselves out of work, here are some suggestions for getting back into the game:

• Make a list of achievements with metrics to substantiate your ability to deliver for an organization. You need to demonstrate achievements in your retention and hiring figures as well as activities related to succession planning.
• Reach out to other HR executives and recruitment professionals to gain a different perspective on the market. It’s easy to get insulated, especially when you may not pursued work for yourself in a number of years.
• Conduct some research regarding HR best practices — freshen up your knowledge portfolio. SHRM is a great resource. Also, this might be a good time to get SPHR- or PHR-designated.
• Be open to interim positions and consulting projects. Also, be open to “downgrades” in title, salary, etc. It’s a time when many are taking a step back to stay in the game.
• Networking for HR and recruitment professionals is as important as it is for everyone else in this environment. And, be open. You probably have many transferrable skills, including strategic planning, employee development, and management, that can be applied in a new position, perhaps not in a formal HR departmental structure.
• Treat this like a job. Seriously: get up early, get dressed, and get to “work” and keep hunting and networking into the evening. This is no time to slack off.

“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.

We say surprising because as far as we can tell, SimplyHired is now the only jobs search engine with a minimum ad spend, and the highest overall minimums of any search engine.

Indeed.com, SimplyHired’s rival and the leader in traffic between them, has no advertising minimum. Search giant Google also has no minimums for its Adwords program.

Meanwhile, SimplyHired also instituted a new flagging system that lets jobseekers report a particular listing.

All this has caused enough confusion to prompt a couple of job board owners to suggest SimplyHired was now charging $500 a month to have listings included in the index.

“We are not charging to have listings included in the organic search results,” Godhwani insists. What’s happened, he says, is that two different company teams have been in touch with some job board operators. One team, apparently, is scolding the operator for the quality of the listings, and threatening to remove the listings from the index, while the other is detailing the new advertising minimums.

Simone Emmons, owner of three job boards that have now been delisted by SimplyHired, was the first to post about the advertising minimum. She tells us SimplyHired had issues with some of the listings on one of her sites, but claims that even though she made adjustments, listings from her sites no longer appear in the SimplyHired search results. She suspects it’s because she decided against meeting the new ad spending minimums.

There are a few things interesting here, all of which should matter to recruiters who place job postings on commercial services.

First off, the fracas over the delisting of some job boards amounts to the airing of some of the industry’s dirty linen. Know that old saw about which came first? In the job board business, that’s no mere intellectual puzzle. To attract jobseekers, you have to have jobs. To get employers to pay, you have to deliver candidates. (Ignore the candidate quality issue just now.) So for years startup job boards (and even a few with some maturity) have been copying listings from other sites, and passing them off as their own.

There’s nothing new about this practice. When print was the advertising medium of choice, small newspapers and free advertising papers routinely copied the classifieds from the big dailies. Today, it’s just a whole lot easier to do digitally.

Ironically, that’s pretty much how the job search sites — SimplyHired included — operate. The difference is that they send the jobseeker back to the originating site. Because the search sites now attract millions of jobseekers a month, job boards and employers actively work to get included in the index. Even a small job board can now claim access to those millions, thanks to Indeed, SimplyHired, Google, and others.

Godhwani says it’s when the job boards purloin listings that SimplyHired draws the line.

“We have received complaints from employers that clicks (jobseekers) are going to sites where they never posted a job,” he says, describing one way SimplyHired has of finding out. Another is when the job boards themselves complain. “We’ve actually had job boards complain to us,” he notes. And then there are other, technical ways of inferring that jobs are being repackaged, but he didn’t get into those.

Sites that refuse to stop the practice are being removed from SimplyHired’s index, says Godhwani. There are also other reasons for being delisted as we noted in the beginning. These include popular job descriptions for real or more often fictitious jobs that have been written in such a way that they rise to the top of search results. (Legitimately done, this is merely search engine optimization.) The idea is to get candidates to click through to the job board site where they can then be pitched for a resume or forced through a series of pop-up ads.

If there is a real job at the end of the road, the employer’s brand can be hurt by the association with the job board.

Posting a job ad to get click throughs to a site where, says Godhwani, “they are going to milk the jobseeker” will get the offending site banned.

While monitoring has been going on since SimplyHired was launched back in 2005, it is curious that the crackdown and the flagging system were introduced at the same time as the new advertising minimums. Incidentally, the minimums don’t apply only to new advertisers; some existing customers — like Emmons, for instance, if she hadn’t been 86ed entirely — also are subject to the $500 monthly requirement.

What’s the criteria? It applies, Godhwani says, “to problem accounts.” These, he defined for us, as publishers and ad buyers who “overwhelmed” the sales team with too many service requests.

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.

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.

Sodexo is one of the largest employers in the world, and yet it flies under the radar when it comes to staffing. Sodexo staffs food and facilities management services around the world, and employs over 120,000 people in North America. Imagine that req load.

Sodexo didn’t have to imagine. To add to the confusion, it recently changed its name, which means new branding, new marketing, and new search terms. So in December of 2007, curious about the blogosphere and the impact of social media on staffing, it launched its first blog. Sodexo Careers is written on Blogger, and covers issues of staffing and HR, but also corporate citizenship, technology, and culture. It’s the number one search result on Google for “Sodexo Careers,” beating out the careers site on Sodexo.com.

The blog started out private, but after a month of internal monitoring, got the green light to go public. The Staffing team didn’t have much marketing help in the beginning, so the task fell to Kerry Noone, a marketing associate with a background in branding to manage the social media duties. The blog success led Kerry to create a Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter presence, complete with hiring groups, touchpoints, and most important, live recruiters managing the action. For each site, the goal was to establish a presence, understand candidate expectations, and meet them.

Each site built on the success of the other profiles, and as Sodexo as a company got more comfortable with a site, individual recruiters begin linking to each other, supporting each other, and using personal profiles to create a lively and engaged hub for all of their hiring needs. What started as a single person writing turned into an organizational change that allowed each recruiter to use the company’s social media presence for their immediate and long-term hiring needs.

The focus was always on metrics. Traffic and hires were tracked as best as they were able (recognizing that hires often come from multiple sources). The result? A near tripling of traffic to the careers site by mid-summer, prior to the massive influx of resumes from the weakening economy.

• In February of 2008, traffic to the site averaged about 50,000 uniques per month. Three months later, that traffic was at 120,000 a month, and by August 2008, the three-month rolling average was at 135,000, with peak numbers reaching 150,000 uniques.
• These numbers only represent unique visitors to the careers site, and don’t count individual recruiter pages, fan pages, company profiles, or any traffic to the blog and other social media sites. YouTube alone saw over 60,000 video views in the first eight months of use.
• Hires can’t be tracked accurately all the way from the first contact to the eventual hire, but recruiters do report regularly on the importance of social media in the initial connection, through the employment process, and after the offer. Candidates are better informed, and anecdotally more engaged and more excited about Sodexo the company.

The effects of integrating social media into the Sodexo employment process are undeniable, but the startling part of their success came from understanding the effects of social media on the internal workings of the corporation. Having a successful social media program that is highly visible has led to a high degree of cooperation between the Talent Acquisition team and other divisions. Other sections of Human Resources, as well as Marketing, Sales, Diversity, and Corporate Communications, use the Sodexo social media presence to better launch initiatives and connect with clients. Internal resources look to the Talent Acquisition team for its obvious social media expertise, and the executives have a firm grasp on the value of the effort, measured against other costs like advertising, job boards, and recruiting fees.

Anthony Scarpino manages the division for Sodexo, and with the firm support of the overall head of Talent Acquisition, he has seen results that far outweigh the costs of implementation.  The campaign, made up of individual efforts (and light management oversight), has made Sodexo better at hiring the staff it needs. They are better recruiters because they actually carry on conversations with potential job-seekers in the medium the job-seekers wish to use. This conversation has helped teach Scarpino what job-seekers expect, and through that Sodexo has been better able to empathize and tweak the process for an improved overall experience. The result has been a steady increase in hires in the short time they have had the program working.

Most important, the success of the program has brought increased participation from the hiring staff. Recruiters aren’t forced into social media, but as they see results, they engage more and more, using the tools that best suit their hiring niche.

What Lessons Can Be Learned?

First, social media in recruiting may best be used at the individual level. Programs designed to give a company a presence online don’t work if they aren’t generating results for the recruiters in the trenches.

Second, supportive management is a key factor. The right amount of oversight and guidance is necessary to manage a system without dampening creativity and enthusiasm. In opening up to social media, Sodexo gave future employees avenues to speak with past and present employees. That’s a scary proposition for any company, especially one with so many employees, but the result has been a long-term positive reaction.

Finally, we see that it is possible to track the ROI of social media in staffing. Sodexo uses a mixture of branding and marketing metrics tied into standard hiring benchmarks.

The result in this case is an astounding increase in targeted traffic that once again shows that when social media is integrated into a company’s hiring DNA, good things happen. There are no silver bullets, but the earnest application of social networking can help your company put people to work.

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.

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?

I bring this up as an intro to Yammer, the social networking site launched last September that’s focused on connecting employees within the same company. Here’s an excerpt from its Wikipedia page:

If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?” The purpose is to allow co-workers to share status updates. You post updates on what you are working on. You can post news, links, ask questions, and get answers for people in your company. You can see most the most prolific people and the most followed people. It is a good way to discover who is the most influential in your company.

Unlike Twitter, one needn’t stay within the 140 character limit on Yammer. TechCrunch reported that 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for Yammer on the very first day it launched.

In January it raised $5 million to launch a stand-alone model to run inside a corporate firewall.

The data on the graphs, from Google Trends, is scaled to the average search traffic for each term (represented as 1.0) during the time from January 1, 2009 through April 18th.  Letters correspond to news references for each term. So for instance, Yammer a,b,c, represents: “Yammer ups bet on the Twitter for business market,” VentureBeat, Jan. 20, 2009; Yammer Asks, “What Are You Working On,” Instant Messaging Planet, Feb.19, 2009; Who Needs to Twitter When you can Yammer,” This is London, Mar. 30, 2009.

With Twitter in the news daily (Ashton Kutcher just surpassed 1 million followers) and offering people an opportunity to “Group Tweet” by forming a private group, my guess is that Yammer is going to face a hard time winning the internal knowledge sharing wars. I find it difficult to find the time to keep my status fresh across the digital frontier, and my efforts at consolidation just diluted the interest level of whatever I was posting.

A recent search shows I’m not alone. Here’s an excerpt from Ogilvy PR blogger Tanya Chadha: “I found Yammer useful when looking for immediate feedback or to quickly connect with colleagues. However, after a few weeks, I just could not find the time to continue updating my different statuses on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., and Yammer. I’ve switched back to airing my thoughts and communicating with colleagues full time on Twitter.”

As for me, I’m going back to segregating my virtual updates, secure in knowing that Twitter and Yammer are both running far behind Wolverine.