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

• On Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. ET over on our sister site FordyceLetter.com, Fordyce TV returns with the second episode of renowned speaker and trainer Jon Bartos’ “The Talent Game”. In this episode, Jon will share the seven levels of business development and how to prosper in each.
• Also for those of you on the search and placement side of the business, there are less than two weeks left before the start of the third annual Fordyce Forum conference in Las Vegas from June 10-12. Speakers at this year’s event include many of the leading trainers, producers and billers in the search industry.
• On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, sign up for this week’s free webinar, Future of Recruiting and Sourcing 2009: Second Annual Knowledge Infusion and ERE Survey led by Elaine Orler and Jason Corsello from Knowledge Infusion. Elaine & Jason will take you through the results of the second annual survey so you can learn how your peers are reacting to vendor consolidation, restructuring, new technologies, and the dramatic effect of economic influences.
• While you can no longer purchase tickets to the sold out first ever Social Recruiting Summit, taking place on June 15 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, you should clear your schedule as most of the sessions will be live streamed over the Internet. The event kicks off at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET with LinkedIn Co-Founder and CEO Reid Hoffman’s opening address. If you want more information about the live stream, just drop me a line.
• Our editor Todd Raphael is hard at work on the July/August issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership including a legal article about contingent workers, as well as a great one by BASF’s Michael Kannisto on his 10 predictions for the coming year, for recruiting leaders.
• If you haven’t already, check out the agenda for the upcoming ERE Expo 2009 Fall conference and exposition taking place September 9-11 in Hollywood, FL. We have just added some exciting new speakers such as the EEOC speaking on employment discrimination and new media. And if cost is an issue, feel free to contact me and let me know if I can help fit it into your budget.
• If you are looking for your next career opportunity, make sure to follow ERE’s recruiting job board. There have been 8 new positions posted in the past week. You can also be alerted as new postings come in by following @recruiting_jobs on Twitter. And if you are looking to add to your team, 30 day job postings are only $25 through August 1 so post your job today.

If you have questions about any of what I mentioned above, feel free to leave a comment below. Have a great week!

If it wasn’t for hiring managers, recruiting would be so easy. But, alas, this is not to be. Instead, we can either confront them head on, or put our heads down in despair, and find still other perfectly qualified candidates they still won’t like. Unfortunately, too many recruiters fall into this endless productivity-draining black hole, and wonder why the latest new sourcing wonder drug quickly loses its effectiveness.

If you’re like me, I don’t like doing searches over again. Early in my recruiting career, this was the driving force behind the creation of Performance-based Hiring — a tool for taming hiring managers. I offered its use to hiring managers for free by suggesting a simple trade-off: they’d see better and fewer candidates from me if they followed some simple steps. Most agreed. As a result my search firm got as many assignments as we could handle, since we were the only one using this performance-based hiring process. It also worked.

With the goal of taming hiring managers in mind, here are some of the basics of Performance-based Hiring. Try them out if your hiring-manager clients want to see too many candidates, can’t decide among the best, or exclude these best ones for bad reasons: keep reading…

A troubling new report from ExecuNet says executive longevity continues to decline at just the time companies most need an engaged, knowledgeable C-suite at the helm.

The survey of some 5,000 executives, search consultants, and corporate HR professionals says the average tenure of a business executive declined 15 percent between 2005 and 2008 to an average of 2.3 years. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of the HR professionals surveyed say their company has knowledge management and succession plans to address the loss of management skill.

“It takes roughly three years of deep entrenchment in a job to reach peak performance. With executives spending less time in organizations and often being judged on short-term stock price performance, they stop short of reaching their full potential,” says ExecuNet Vice President and Executive Editor Lauryn Franzoni.

While the economy may have tamped down the voluntary turnover rate for 2009 — executive recruiters expect their searches to be down 14 percent for the first half of the year –  it has also increased the length of time executives spend searching for a job. The report says executives now expect to spend an average of 10.1 months looking before landing. keep reading…

In the July/August print publication Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’m spelling out my “10 predictions for the coming year.”

If you’re a recruiting leader who subscribes, you’ll get those 10 in the postal mail. For now, here’s one: the traditional career path and all its assumptions (such as that the MBA is the ticket to success, and it’s the only path to the top) will be gone. keep reading…

Like tens of thousands of seniors across the U.S., Eric Barker graduated this month with no job.

But unlike every one of those tens of thousands, the newly minted MBA from Boston College took the unconventional step of running a job-wanted ad on Facebook.

“You know that old saying,” he wrote us explaining why, “If your stock broker knows so much, how come he isn’t rich? I think the same thing goes for marketing: ‘If that marketer is so good, he’d better be able to market himself.’”

So that’s just what this marketer did. His target is Microsoft; the work is entertainment, and; the results? Well, no job yet, but a boatload of contacts, lots of buzz, and offers of help from people like Glenn Gutmacher of Arbita and JobMachine. “Considering this was just a little experiment in unconventional job hunting that cost about a half hour of my time and less than $50, it’s been insanely successful,” Barker says. keep reading…

Monster’s stock price took a hit this morning after Wachovia Capital Markets downgraded the job board’s securities to an “underperform.”

The stock price dropped 8.7 percent at the opening from Friday’s close of $12.45. It has since recovered and at midday in New York, the last trade price was back to where it was.

However, the comments by analyst John Janedis accompanying the downgrade may have a lingering effect. In downgrading the stock, Janedis bases it on his belief that “the slope of the eventual recovery will be flatter than anticipated.” He doesn’t see much economic steam being built until 2010. Even when hiring does begin to perk, the company’s “future earnings power will be below the last peak due to structural changes in the industry.” The discounting that all the major job boards are offering now will have have a significant impact, Janedis says.

Though the note doesn’t provide details, the structural changes that recruitment advertising is undergoing include the shift to niche job boards, an emphasis on employer career sites with search engine marketing to drive traffic directly to the company site, and a flirtation with social media. Had it not been for the economic collapse, the flirting might now be a full-fledged relationship.

keep reading…

Pete Kaiser, CEO of the Kaiser Group, talks about how recruiters can benefit from dollars allocated in the recent government stimulus package.

Kaiser, a former recruiter who operates “one-stop” shops for the government; explains how employers can use the government to find everyone from military veterans to IT employees. keep reading…

Creep is defined in the dictionary as “to move stealthily and cautiously.” This description accurately portrays that of a hiring manager’s movements when gaining approval to open a job requisition during a hiring freeze. I am not sure if camouflage and face paint are required to slip their job requisition through the process, but the image suffices to illustrate the cunning necessary to get it done.

Hiring freeze is a subjective phrase which does not hold the same definition as the game “freeze tag” played on most playgrounds. Managers are not good at holding still for very long, and often work in slow, deliberate movements emblematic of practicing Tai Chi on the front lawn in the morning. It is easy to see them standing there, but unless you stick around and watch their collective movements you’ll miss the outcome of their efforts.

As HR professionals managing in a very challenging economic environment, it would seem that the definition of “freeze” would have stronger interpretation now than in cycles of the recent past. But similar to patterns of behavior in prior hiring freezes, we see the inevitable Requisition Creep. I have uncovered three theories (no research conducted) to help describe this phenomenon and lay out some ideas on how HR can best respond to this event as well as prepare for the eventual economic recovery. keep reading…

At least for those of you based over here in the States, this is a well deserved short work week, so I am going to post this today. There will be no ERE Daily on Monday, in observance of Memorial Day. However, there is still a bunch of things happening around the ERE world next week:

• On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, sign up for this week’s free ERE Webinar — Brand of Be Branded: How to Use Social Media to Market Your Career Identity. Nationally syndicated career expert and workplace consultant, J.T. O’Donnell will show you how to take your personal branding and professional development to a whole new level.
• For those of you looking for your next recruiting opportunity, 10 new jobs have been posted to the ERE recruiters job board. And if you are looking to grow your team, job postings are only $25 through August 1. Let’s all help get our fellow recruiters back to work!
• For those of you on the search and placement side of the business, there are only a few short weeks until the start of the third annual Fordyce Forum conference. Join and learn from other big billers, search firm leaders and top producers from June 10-12 in Las Vegas. And, if you are looking for a discount, drop me a line!
• Also in a few weeks, the first ever Social Recruiting Summit kicks off from Google HQ in Mountain View, CA. Last week, we made a very exciting announcement that LinkedIn Co-Founder and CEO Reid Hoffman will be delivering the opening address to this sold out event! But don’t worry, even though you can no longer purchase a ticket to the event, we will be live streaming Reid’s session and many other ones both on ERE.net and the Social Recruiting Summit site so clear your calendars for Monday June 15!
• And it isn’t too early to reserve your spot at ERE Expo 2009 Fall taking place at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, FL. The earlier you book, the more your save with our early bird discounts and, if you need a little extra help during this tough economic time, you can let me know.

I want to wish everyone a nice holiday weekend, and if you have any questions about any of this, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a senior manager/director-level IT professional who was recently laid off. He was moaning about poorly written job descriptions, and what he was telling me bothered me. A lot.

There was the “CIO” position calling for a high school diploma and two to three years of experience. He actually emailed the company and found out it was a startup with fewer than six employees. They were really looking for a network admin and thought a flashy title would attract someone entrepreneurial. OK, this is obviously an amateurish company that has no clue how to write a job description to save their lives.

But what about the global telecom company that was looking for a software manager who had a requirement of “5-7 years experience using .NET 2.0 or above.” In Seattle, I can tell you exactly when .NET became “the platform.” In 2004. My friend spoke to the recruiter, and she told him that he didn’t have enough .NET 3.0 experience; the hiring manager wanted someone with at least five years of experience with .NET 3.0. But 3.0 has only been around for three years or so. We are only on version 3.5 now. My friend tried to explain that to the recruiter, but she obviously had no understanding of the technology she was recruiting for.

As a recruiter, I have friends and colleagues constantly asking me “why do companies do this?” keep reading…

Subtle as it may seem, there is Grand Canyon of difference between a database of prospective candidates and a community of talented prospective candidates.

Recruiters frequently tell me they have a talent community, when further investigation reveals that they have a huge database of people they do not know at all. These databases have been built up using impersonal methods including the career website, profiles gathered through the applicant tracking system, and perhaps referrals from other employees.

Databases suffer from two major problems when it comes to being effective recruiting tools. keep reading…

A new survey says students choose nursing because they want to help people. But the money doesn’t hurt.

The student nurses who frequent CampusRN by a margin of 4 to 1 say  they chose a nursing career for altruistic reasons. Even after a year or two of chemistry, biology, anatomy, and other challenging classes, 98 percent said they would still choose a healthcare career.

At the same time, 54 percent of the students taking the survey said salary is their No. 1 consideration in picking an employer. Close behind are hours and schedule, benefits, and the quality of management and staff, each with 45 percent.

CampusRN, which, as its name suggests is a niche career site for nursing students, conducted the survey in conjunction with Bernard Hodes. As do most of these online surveys, the report cautions not to draw far-reaching conclusions since the 661 respondents came exclusively from the CampusRN site and chose to participate, coaxed by a contest and $5. keep reading…

Rick Fletcher, of HRchitect, talks about:

• Which recruiting-technology vendor is the “red-hot category killer”
• How the economy’s doing, when it comes to the recruiting field
• What ever happened to Vurv customers
• How to tell if your potential vendor is in bad shape
• Vendors such as SAP, Workday, Deploy, Taleo, Kenexa, iCIMS, nowHIRE, SilkRoad, HRsmart, and others
• What Kronos is doing right
• Buying a niche product vs. a talent-management suite of products keep reading…

It was another great night in NYC! Our Meetup last Tuesday was a huge success with just over 100 guests.

With the addition of a short presentation from Joe Laur, vice president of content at Greenopolis.com, the night proved to be a fun and educational event for all. We also had a raffle to add to the evening. keep reading…

Sodexo recruiter Angela Guidroz and I talk about:

• Recruiting veterans
• Whether Sodexo has actually hired anyone who it connected with via social media
• What to do with fewer jobs and more time
• Personal lives and corporate lives on Twitter keep reading…

Just days after its former Chief Operating Officer was convicted of stock fraud, Monster Worldwide has agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle charges brought against the company by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC accused the company this morning of filing false statements about the granting of millions of stock options and failing to properly account for their issuance. In the complaint filed in the District Court for Southern District of New York, the SEC alleges “Monster filed false and materially misleading statements concerning the true grant date and exercise price of stock options in its annual, quarterly and current reports, proxy statements and registration statements.”

The complaint was accompanied by a notice of the proposed settlement, which, in addition to the penalty, says Monster must also “consent to the entry of an order permanently enjoining it from violating the antifraud, reporting, recordkeeping and internal controls provisions of the federal securities laws.”

The SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office have been investigating Monster and its backdating of stock options granted to senior executives and others in order to make them more valuable. Last week, former Monster COO James Treacy was convicted by a federal jury in New York City of one count of securities fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, file false statements with the SEC, make false statements to auditors, and falsify books and records. He faces up to 25 years on the conviction.

In settling the case Monster is neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing. However, in the press release issued by the SEC, New York Acting Regional Director unambiguously said, “Monster misled investors by failing to report hundreds of millions of dollars of expenses. Backdating stock options made the company look like it had more money than it really did.”

The SEC said it took into account that Monster cooperated with investigators and that the company’s management has changed since the investigation began in 2006.

Four of Monster’s former executives were accused in connection with the backdating investigation. They are the late CEO Andrew McKelvey, General Counsel Myron Olesnyckyj, Controller Anthony Bonica, and Treacy. McKelvey, terminally ill with cancer at the time the charges were filed, was allowed a special deal in which he admitted his guilty, but not prosecuted. Olesnyskyj became a government witness in the case and pleaded guilty to a single charge. The SEC case against Bonica has not been resolved.

Monster’s brief statement on the settlement includes a comment from CEO Sal Iannuzzi who says: “This is an important step in closing an unfortunate chapter in the company’s history and putting the issue firmly behind us. Our current executive team has spent the last two years refocusing Monster on its customers and shareholders, retooling the day-to-day management, and overhauling governance in an effort to adhere to the highest standards.”

One of the largest job posting distribution services in the world is now pushing jobs out to Twitter followers.

eQuest has partnered with TweetMyJOBS to use the service to send targeted job postings directly to Twitter followers. eQuest posts something like 200 million jobs a year to more than 20,000 job boards. Now, it will send job notices directly to jobseekers who have opted in to the TweetMyJOBS service.

“eQuest is very impressed with the feature enhancements TweetMyJOBS has provided Twitter users,” said Larry Butti, Job Board Communications Manager at eQuest. keep reading…

Having a clearly defined strategy is the most important factor in achieving employer branding objectives.

That’s the takeaway from the Employer Brand Institute’s Global Research Study of more than 2,000 companies.

Engaging the CEO and senior management in the benefits of employer branding also ranks highly. Surprisingly, conducting internal and external market research ranked the lowest in importance, suggesting companies are rushing into employer branding without a clear direction of where they are heading.

The results of the global study should be a concern for CEOs where money invested in employer branding initiatives may be misdirected and/or misaligned with the business strategy. Most companies are in the early stages of developing an employer brand strategy that builds competitive advantage (globally only 16% have a clearly defined strategy), so the survey results provide some important guidance for leaders to ensure their investments are focused on priority areas. keep reading…

Everywhere we turn we hear about how “The Economy” is causing everyone to tighten their belts and hold off on making any decisions that may seem too risky. It has quickly become the catch-all answer for almost every difficult question that the corporate world is facing.

Q: Why are we letting so many people go?
A: The Economy

Q: Why is there a hiring freeze?
A: The Economy

Q: Why was it 60 degrees in December?
A: The Economy

Of course, not being able to afford to make a purchase is always a good reason to reduce spending, but there are always those necessities that no matter how tight our belt gets, we will find some way to get them. For the human body, food would be such a necessity. And for companies, it is good, hardworking people who keep the organization moving forward.

When times are slow, the typical company’s knee-jerk reaction is to slow down on all processes. Expenditures are categorized as either necessary or unnecessary and then prioritized. Finally, once every process seems contained and controlled, they wait to see what the rest of the world is going to do.

Now to some degree, prioritizing makes perfect sense. The challenge is to make sure you set the right priorities. But once you do, the key is not to wait and see, but to take action. keep reading…

Last week, Part 1 of this series introduced a number of pain points that render most corporate approaches to managing internal movement for development, retention, and talent ROI purposes ineffective.

In reality, most current approaches are relics from years of tradition, loosely defined, poorly integrated, and barely managed.

During this installment, I will build upon the goals and key elements of more effective second-generation programs discussed in Part 1 by focusing on the benefits of adopting second-generation approaches and methods to increase program participation rates. keep reading…