• 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 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:

Throw away the job description. We all know that lists of skills, duties, responsibilities, academics, required experience, and industry background are useless for attracting, screening, or selecting top performers. Hiring managers know this, too. So the next time you take a search assignment, ask the hiring manager what the person needs to do to ace the performance review. Then ask what the best people do differently than the average people in the department. Then ask why a top person would want this job. Then ask the manager if she’d see someone who could do all of this work successfully, even if the person didn’t have all of the skills and experiences listed on the job description. (If the manager says “no,” read this article on how to take the assignment.)

Don’t take the assignment until you know the job. Since you’ve thrown away the job description, you can’t leave the room until you have a complete understanding of what the person taking the job must do to be successful. To do this, take every item on the traditional job description and ask the manager what the person must do with it to prove superior competency. For example, if the manager says the person must have three to five years of industry experience, ask what will the person do with this on the job. This is how you convert job descriptions into performance profiles.

Train your managers to focus on performance early in the interview. In addition to the resume I ask candidates to separately summarize two different accomplishments related to the job — one team-based and one as an individual contributor. I then ask the manager to review these during the first 30 minutes of the interview. By having the hiring manager focus on the candidate’s most comparable job-related accomplishments early-on, the interview is more focused, and emotional biases are minimized.

Go out of your way to minimize the impact of first impressions. More mistakes are made in the first 30 minutes of the interview than any other time due to the impact of first impressions. The tactic described in the point above, about focusing on performance early on, offsets this to a great degree. For one thing, the candidate is more confident since she has prepared the write-up. In addition, you should desensitize the manager ahead of time if you perceive a potential first-impression problem. Having the manager conduct a phone screen before the personal meeting can also be extremely helpful. You might to suggest that the manager measure the “first impression” at the end of the interview when he or she is more objective.

Prep your candidate. Here’s a short sample of a video I send to my candidates to prep them before their first interview. As you’ll see, the idea behind this is to minimize candidate nervousness, allow them to ask job- and performance-related questions, and to recognize that there is a formulaic way to answer questions that will overcome the typical weak assessment skills of hiring managers. A formal prep is one of the best ways to minimize the impact of hiring managers who aren’t well trained.

Out-fact your manager. The one-question fact-finding interviewing process was developed to give recruiters enough information to disprove false conclusions. The idea behind this question is to ask the candidate to describe a few significant job-related accomplishments in great detail. The fact-finding process involves getting details, dates, metrics, org charts, and examples of going the extra mile. If you do this for two to three different accomplishments, you‘ll have enough information to challenge any false assertion. From a recruiter’s perspective, accurate information is the only defense for conclusions based on intuition, biased first impressions, or narrow assessments.

Don’t let managers conduct the first interview alone. Unless it’s structured, pre-planned and focused, the initial one-on-one interview can quickly become an irrelevant or personality-based discussion. Making matters worse, if the candidate makes a positive first impression, the interviewer asks easier questions, and if the candidate falls short on the first impression hurdle, the interviewer asks tougher questions. For every new client, I ask to lead the first round of interviews to avoid these problems. You should, too. A well-run panel interview also avoids these pitfalls, since small talk is minimized and structure is ensured. A good lead interviewer can also watch out for — and reduce –  temporary candidate nervousness, by quickly intervening.

Use a multi-factor assessment. Practically speaking, untrained interviewers — like most hiring managers — are unlikely to glean much insight into the candidate’s ability to do the real work required for job success. While technical competency is part of this, it doesn’t represent a complete assessment. For proof, consider the fact that when new employees underperform, it’s typically not due to technical weakness; rather, it’s because of weak team skills, lack of motivation to do the work, or a problem with the hiring manager’s style. To address this, broaden the selection criteria and ask each interviewer to focus on a subset of these factors. A formal debriefing is part of this type of evidence-based assessment process. Here’s a link to the 10-factor candidate assessment template we train managers to use to formalize this approach.

Consider this: if you send in one less candidate per search using some of the techniques above, you’ll increase your productivity by 20-30%! If you use them all, you’ll double your placement rate and be the most sought-after recruiter on your planet.

Taming hiring managers is the big 500-pound gorilla in the room. Yet, somehow in our quest for the next silver sourcing bullet, we ignore which side of the desk we should be aiming our guns at.

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.

So if they’re anywhere close to the industry average, executives are spending about a third of the time they’re with a company searching for a new company to join.

The executive summary of the report itself doesn’t speak to that situation, though it does show that 73 percent of the executives are finding networking the most effective way of finding their next job. For another 10 percent, responding to job postings produced results, though the report suggests that fewer and fewer of these executive-level jobs find their way online.

“The sheer volume of résumés -– both qualified and unqualified –- that recruiters get from public postings, particularly as more candidates compete for fewer jobs, is staggering, and they find it prohibitive to post those jobs out in the open,” says ExecuNet President and Chief Economist Mark Anderson. “Recruiters tell us they don’t want cold calls or emails; they want someone to refer you to them.”

While recruiters can be choosier than ever right now, they expect to see an executive hiring boomlet in the second half of the year — big enough that they expect searches to be down only 4 percent for all of 2009. That prediction is consistent with what happened in the search industry in 2003, at the end of that recession. The optimism is also reflected in the latest ExecuNet’s Recruiter Confidence Index. In decline since the beginning of 2007, the index rebounded from a low of 26 percent to 38 percent between February and March.

“We’ve been tracking their confidence level since the last recession, and their confidence has always been a leading indicator of the economy and executive employment,” Anderson explains. “During the last recession, we saw recruiter confidence quickly strengthen six months ahead of the recovery.”

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.

We’re already seeing signs that many long-held assumptions about what success looks like are now open to interpretation. Forced to get creative, companies are now reviewing the long-term effects of traditional staffing models. Buying talent from competitors fills jobs quickly, but those people don’t always stay. Fighting for a top MBA grad at the best school may give your company bragging rights, but does the expense associated with managing them (and their expectations) yield a good return on the investment?

While some managers used to be convinced that there was no talent within their own companies, many are now taking a closer look at internal candidates when filling key jobs. Career paths are now often about moving sideways, not always up. As each and every hiring decision is placed under greater scrutiny, hiring managers will become more flexible in finding ways to get work done.

What would once have been an open job that would have involved an in-person pitch from a retained search firm, a parade of candidates, a consensus-driven decision, a nasty attempt to address a counteroffer, and an expensive relocation, might now simply involve a qualified long-term employee working remotely.

Faced with the reality that their jobs might be eliminated despite good performance, employees will be more open to lateral moves and developmental assignments. And companies, desperate to fill key roles, will be willing to give them those opportunities.

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.

Before we get into our Q & A, you should know that Barker himself is a bit unconventional and certainly no amateur. His undergraduate degree is in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an MFA in entertainment production from UCLA before working in Hollywood for 12 years as an independent screenwriter and media developer whose deals made it into Variety on occasion.

And a note of caution: Be nice to Eric should you meet him. His LinkedIn profile mentions that he’s a mixed martial arts/Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner who has trained with champions.

ERE: How long have you been looking? Are you currently employed? What’s your specialty or type of job?

Eric: I just graduated MBA school (May 18), believe it or not. My background is in media and entertainment — it’s all I’ve ever done. From writing screenplays for Disney and Fox to transitioning Spiderman creator Stan Lee’s superheroes to the web to marketing the Wii for Nintendo, helping companies bring people great entertainment has been my thing. Now that I’ve completed my MBA, my focus is product marketing/product development for companies involved in the media and entertainment space.

ERE: What made you decide to buy an ad?
Eric: I thought it would be unconventional and innovative. I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin’s work. The old model of marketing is changing. It’s trickier to reach people and to reach people effectively. I took this to heart not just in my marketing work, but in how I market myself. You know that old saying, “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.”

ERE: Why did you pick Facebook for the ad?
Eric: Facebook was the perfect place for me to put my ad. It gets enormous traffic, it’s inexpensive, allows you to precisely target your advertising, and provides you with solid metrics with which to track your efforts. Plus I think people enjoy going there, spend a lot of time there, and are in a good mood while they’re on the site. And most importantly: nobody else was doing what I was doing. That was key.

ERE: What is it costing you?
Eric: No more than $10 a day. Usually under five. I can control my bid price and set a cap on my daily spend. Starbucks puts a bigger dent in my wallet than promoting myself online does.

ERE: What kind of response have you gotten?
Eric: 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. My ad got tens of thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks and more than 20 people contacted me with offers of assistance. More than that, the quality of the interactions is very high — people were impressed with the concept.

ERE: Had any solid bites? Interviews?
Eric: No interviews just yet but plenty of solid interaction, lots of buzz, and most importantly, I’m making good contacts.

ERE: Do you have a sense as to whether this approach might work for others? Why do you think so or think not, as the case may be?
Eric: I think this could definitely work for others. The market could quickly get saturated, of course, but given proper targeting this is a good way to reach the right people cheaply and passively — to work on job-hunting even when you’re sleeping. But past the method itself, you need to have something to offer. In the end, it’s all about the value proposition. But if you’ve legitimately got something that the company needs, this can be a great way to reach the right people with minimal effort and expense.

ERE: What other approaches have you tried to finding a job?
Eric: You want me to reveal ALL my tricks?

ERE: Is this something you would or will do again?
Eric: Now that this method is getting exposure, a lot of people may start doing it and it won’t be quite as innovative. I’ll just find another unconventional way to reach employers — but if my personal marketing keeps going this well, hopefully, I won’t need to. :)

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.

If Janedis is right — and many economists agree with his prediction of a slow recovery and a soft improvement in hiring — then more recruiters will be experimenting with search engine marketing and with social media recruiting, since the pressure to fill jobs won’t be as keen as it was just 24 months ago. If they find success there, then Monster and its competitors won’t be able to bump prices and discounting will be the norm.

With that scenario in the background, Janedis writes, “We think MWW’s business will have earnings of $0.69 in 2012, or 52% below the $1.43 peak in 2007. We are currently modeling 10.6% operating margins in ‘12 vs. mgmt’s previous target for ‘08 of 25%.”

As a public company, Monster’s finances are reported on a quarterly basis. Yahoo, which owns HotJobs, is also a public company, but chooses not to separately disclose HotJobs revenue, instead including it with the company’s overall numbers. CareerBuilder, owned by newspaper publishers and Microsoft, is not required to report publicly, but it does voluntarily provide its quarterly North American revenue. For the first quarter, CareerBuilder said it brought in $141 million. That was off 27 percent from the same quarter the year before.

Both HotJobs and CareerBuilder are beset by the same problems as Monster, though HotJobs may be even worse off. Its staff has always been smaller than either Monster’s or CareerBuilder’s and, because of its alliance with hundreds of U.S. newspapers, which are in the throes of the worst advertising depression in their history, we think its revenue has been hit even harder. CareerBuilder long ago built an independent outside and telemarketing sales force. So even though it, too, is partnered with Gannett, Tribune, and McClatchy media properties, it is far less dependent on their sales staffs.

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.

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.

In my coffeehouse discussions and conference-conferring, I have found common ground among HR professionals in my discovery of requisition creep. It truly exists. And in my reams of undocumented data, a few trends have emerged. It becomes a study of human behavior that would make Jung proud.

The first of these theories is caused by a common human defense mechanism when faced with adversity: Denial. Like a change-management project, poor financial results often take time to be absorbed and interpreted by an entire organization. But there are always those managers who choose to only hear what they want to hear and disregard any other information as unimportant or incorrect. You know: the same person who closes their door and ignores the alarm during a fire drill.

I’ve worked with these types of managers, and it’s as if they do not allow themselves to believe in what’s happening in the world around them. An example of this would be a time I reminded a manager attempting to get his requisition opened that all requisition approvals were under heavy scrutiny. He retorted that his project was not affected by the cost-containment measures because it was too important to the business. Unfortunately, he did not get his requisition approved, but attempted to manipulate our recruiting team to begin sourcing for the position regardless of the status of the opening. He felt if he found a qualified applicant he would be able to garner support for approval of the offer and the requisition. The recruiting team did not support his efforts, and he later was disciplined for working with an outside agency on the opening.

I read a similar story about a CIO who wielded his authority to support a project during a down cycle in his business and pushed through several hires to support the project. He essentially placed a bet on his career and was subsequently terminated when the project was unable to show an immediate return once implemented. I am not sure these managers wear rose-colored glasses, but they definitely wear a heavy set of blinders.

The second of these theories is caused by either a blow to the head or some other mind-altering event that creates disconnect from reality: Blissfully Ignorant. It is the opposite of chicken-little; a perpetual high of positivity that prevents any negative or constructive information to come through. It’s not inherently a bad management trait, but if left unmanaged, it will limit the logic or rationale of the manager. This also can be seen in the manager who can’t say ‘no’ or who can’t terminate poor-performing employees. They believe that it will always get better.

These managers have similar characteristics to those in Denial but have one clear distinction: they can’t stop themselves. A good example of this is when I was working with a Director who could not help himself from approving requisitions for his team. We had just sat together in the same management meeting where a hiring freeze was announced, and direction was given to put everything on hold. No new requisitions could be opened until further notice. Not a day later, a requisition with his signature came across my desk. When I questioned him, he remarked that he had no choice. If he did not approve the requisitions for his team, they would leave. He was a solid manager with a strong team but he lacked leadership skills. He improved later with coaching and development but is a good example of the manager who would rather ignore than face reality.

The third of these theories is caused by group thought and the gravitational forces of attraction: Herd Mentality. I do not intend to compare managers with Water Buffalo, but I dare to compare them to Wal-Mart shoppers the day after Thanksgiving. Managers operating under Denial or Ignorance often stand alone when attempting to push their openings through. The Herders do not act alone and wait for an invisible trigger to push their openings through. Typically the trigger is rumor that a manager in denial or ignorance attempted to get their requisition approved. I think they must figure en masse that some of them will be denied but that many will get through. This is an interesting strategy during a hiring freeze where most job requisitions require executive-level approval; bombarding the executives might work. I must admit it never worked in the organizations I worked; however, it was interesting to observe.

Inevitably business conditions improve and/or attrition causes the approval of requisitions in the organization. Because hiring freezes are often the precursor to layoffs and HR is often viewed as a cost center, the function is typically impacted, with recruiting being an easy target. And HR is often left flat-footed to respond to the recruiting needs when they arrive. Strategic HR leaders have a few options in their cache to answer the call of business.

The obvious solution is to hire recruiting support. But recruiting support has evolved from the agency-dominated period of the 80s, through the fledgling Internet onslaught of the 90s, into the post-modern (err recessionary) period of Y2K. An HR director can literally select from a menu of organizations and services to help with recruiting, and can order the combination plate or a la carte. However, with the evolution of recruiting support, the advancement of technology, and the proliferation of talent acquisition tools and techniques, one thing remains constant to drive effective talent acquisition programs: human labor. Nothing can replace experienced recruiters. It’s like attempting to build a business without sales or marketing professionals.

To strip it to the core, an HR director has three options to study when developing a recruiting strategy that requires recruiting labor to drive the process: full time, contract, or outsource. Each solution has its advantages and disadvantages; however, each will suffice to drive the process predicated upon the budget, culture, expectations, and demands of the business.

Hiring a full-time recruiter is a well known approach. The benefits of full-time recruiters are that they are a part of the culture, they drink the Kool-Aid, and the business intelligence gained stays with them. The challenge of hiring a full-time recruiter during a down business cycle is the irony that a job opening might not be approved. It is important to note that the salary and burden, including facilities, systems, and advertising spend (e.g. job boards, databases, etc.) all adds to the expense of this solution.

Hiring a contract recruiter is another well-known approach and offers similar benefits to that of a full-time hire but offers greater flexibility in cost. Notice it is not a burden; rather, the hourly rate paid is deemed a cost of doing business and typically an easier sell to management during down business cycles. However, although the labor cost is flexible, the requirement of facilities, systems, and advertising spend can be viewed as a detriment.

Hiring an outsourced recruiter is a novel approach that offers a blend of the benefits of contract and full-time without the high cost. Not to be confused with retained executive firms or agency recruiters who provide a limited slate of candidates for a fee calculated by percentage of annual salary, outsourced recruiting provides recruiting labor to drive the process in partnership with HR and the manager. And it can be broken down into parts such as just sourcing support or full-life cycle. All business intelligence gleaned from the search is reported, and systems, facilities, advertising costs are all part of the fee. The detriment to outsourced recruiting is that it is a low-touch approach in that most outsourced recruiters are located virtually.

I ask you, what kind of manager are you: in denial, blissfully ignorant, or a herder? Of course, this was a satirical look at workplace behavior during a down economic cycle, but the good news is that all cycles rotate and business growth will return. Whether or not you agree the phenomenon of Req Creep is real, down times are often good times to experiment and pilot new services. Those who innovate and prepare for the inevitable positive rotation will find themselves ahead in the race for talent. The war for talent ended with layoffs; it will inevitably turn into a race for talent in the next upswing — another observation worth exploring over coffee!

• 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.

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?”

It ranges from the whole lack of follow-through when it comes to the candidate experience to hyping job descriptions way out of proportion (sheer hypocrisy, IMHO, when we complain about exaggerated resumes!) How many times can I say to my professional network that hiring managers generally write job descriptions, and unless a recruiter is really knowledgeable about the industry and the job, s/he has no idea why two “requirements” may be mutually exclusive, or that sometimes a company will use a generic description to build a pipeline, or that perhaps the organization has an internal candidate lined up but for legal reasons has to post the job externally? It’s getting really old, really fast.

And in my own search for a position in the last several months I am appalled at the lack of what I see as “professional courtesy.” If I have a phone screen or in-person interviews with a member of an organization for a recruiting position, and you don’t give me the courtesy of answering my email or phone call a week later to follow up on my candidacy, why on earth would I consider working for you? Obviously you don’t value the candidate experience.

Yes, we are swamped with resumes and our sourcing may be falling by the wayside. Yes, our hiring managers are being incredibly slow to respond to us and candidates are getting desperate. Yes, we may even be concerned about riding out this economy. But many of the pains the candidates are feeling are not new, they are not unique, and as a profession we are giving ourselves a bad reputation, worse than even it was before. My own rule of thumb is that if a candidate has spoken with anyone from my organization (phone screen, for example) they deserve a politely worded email or phone call to let them know they are no longer a candidate for the position.

If organizations are laying off their seasoned recruiters in an effort to save money, they are doing themselves a huge injustice when job descriptions and situations like the ones outlined above become more commonplace than not. Recruiters should be some of the most valuable gatekeepers any organization — be it corporate, non-profit, or agency environments — has in their arsenal. And part of that gatekeeping responsibility lies with the recruiter to push back on badly written job descriptions. It goes to the “account management” portion of our profession. We are the experts at what we do, and our hiring managers should respect that knowledge and work in partnership with us.

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.

First of all they tend to get old very quickly, and the data about the people is frequently not current and often not even usable at all. While no one that I know of has done actual research on the quality of the data in corporate resume databases, I know from experience and from working with many clients that it is poor.

The second problem databases have is that they tell you very little. All a recruiter knows about the candidate is whatever is in the resume/profile itself. There is no additional information, no personal observations, and seldom any useful reference data. Because the resumes have been added mostly through impersonal methods, the candidates are unknown to the recruiters. This means that the qualification and assessment of a candidate begins after the resume is retrieved (assuming it is retrieved, which is very seldom) and may take quite a bit of time, assuming the candidate can even be contacted. Candidate quality is often poor, and the time to find candidates can become very long, especially for hard-to-fill positions.

Most recruiters do not really actively use their talent databases and instead turn to Internet search, cold calling, or hire a sourcer or a third-party recruiter. In effect, a talent database is a legal storehouse, suitable for printing reports and showing compliance, but of little practical value in hiring — especially the hard-to-find candidates.

You might make the case that a good recruiter should know this and develop his own community of candidates. It might be possible to maintain data on and build relationships with 50 to 100 potential candidates, but doing that would be a full-time job.

What makes the talent community I am talking about different is its ability to take advantage of technology to achieve levels of personalization that could not be achieved without it.

There are three distinctive features of corporate talent communities that make them more valuable than databases.

They can serve as initial screeners: A talent community is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, candidates who come to the corporate Facebook fan page and then are referred to a targeted career site are likely to be much more interested in your organization than someone just dropping by the career site to drop off a resume.

Interest is a type of screening, and combined with the right tools a career site can quickly assess a variety of things, including aptitude for the job and skill level. People who achieve certain scores or meet other criteria can be referred directly to a recruiter. This way no one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

This ensures that everyone who ends up in the talent community has been evaluated at some level and knows that they meet the basic requirements for employment in your organization. They have had a positive encounter, although that was entirely or almost entirely without actual contact with you or any other recruiter.

Years of experimentation and use of these tools show that most candidates respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements and are often surprised to get a phone call or personal email from a recruiter because the software has alerted the recruiter to the quality of candidate.

They are much more personal and dynamic: Candidates actually perceive talent communities as very personal. If the talent community is set up well, candidates will frequently get emails and other messages about jobs and about the status of their own candidacy. They may receive periodic requests to update their personal information and keep their address and email current. This means that information is up to date. Candidates can add more information about themselves, and recruiters can ask questions about specific skills or interests. All of this information is kept in the candidate record, and any recruiter can access this. If a new recruiter stats recruiting for a position, there may be many candidates in the community who she can learn a lot about very quickly.

Talent communities are like living organisms. They are always changing and becoming more mature and sophisticated. Recruiters may have never met a person face to face and yet know much more about them than if they have had two or three personal interviews. This computer-aided interaction, as well as testing and assessment, can provide hiring managers with a very complete picture of a number of candidates.

They are far more flexible: All of this means that talent communities are far more flexible than databases. Candidates who may have applied for one position are frequently referred to different ones after the recruiter knows them better through the interaction and testing. One candidate may be an ideal candidate for several positions, and fewer candidates get pigeonholed into a particular channel and thereby missed in the search.  Vigorous and thorough screening and assessment means that quality is as high as it can be and even higher than the quality that comes through employee referral or headhunters.

It is getting easier to set up talent communities every day. Tools such as LinkedIn or Google groups may serve as rudimentary communities. Tools such as Ning can be modified and put to work as active communities. Some organizations build their own.

Communities of candidates are powerful and reduce the need for special sourcing or the use of outside recruiters. They can increase the number of positions a single recruiter can handle and provide higher quality candidates in a shorter time. They always trump databases.

But the hardest part is not the technology or the screening and assessment tools or the acceptance of the idea by candidates. What proves to always be the hurdle that is hardest to overcome is the resistance of recruiters to using the tools and embracing the concept as a way to do what they do better than ever.

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.

Still, the results ring true (a comment that must be like a poke in the eye to our statistics professor). They jibe with other nursing surveys in the areas of demographics and career motivation. And (here I go again professor) there’s no reason to think the students who frequent CampusRN are much different from other nursing students, besides being more attuned to the Internet and willing to take a survey.

More directly of interest for recruiters, though, are the findings of how students seek or expect to seek jobs when the time comes. As might be expected from a survey conducted online, digital sources dominate, with 83 percent of the survey takers mentioning one or more online sources. Half mentioned healthcare or nursing specialty job boards.

Career fairs also were mentioned by half the respondents as a place to look for work. Clinical rotations are also a source of jobs and leads for 40 percent. In fact, in the report written by Hodes, rotations and externships were found to be among the most effective ways a student has of finding out what it would be like to actually work for a particular employer. “Clinical rotations are perceived as very effective at conveying a realistic perception of work environment,” says the report.

There are plenty more nuggets for recruiters. For instance, you won’t find most of these students by doing a resume search; 60 percent have not posted anywhere. Of those who have, 20 percent have posted to CampusRN, while 12 percent have posted to Monster and about the same to CareerBuilder and HotJobs.

Pay close attention to your career site. Almost 80 percent of the respondents said they look there for information about prospective employers. They notice what you don’t have. Somewhat more than a third of the students say these sites lack crucial information such as career development, benefits, and continuing education offerings.

Don’t want your career site to go into detail about some of those things? You should know these students spend an average of 3.6 hours a week on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and CampusRN2RN. The survey doesn’t say what they exactly do there, but at least occasionally asking about an employer would be a good guess. (There goes that A we got in statistics.) After all, 43 percent of the students are willing to hear from a recruiter connecting with them via a social network.

The report includes a section entitled Recruiter Checklist. Scan it, if all you have time for is a quick read.

• 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

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.

I want to especially thank our sponsor Wolters Kluwer for all of their help and all of the wonderful goodies they gave out. And thank you to The NY Recruiting & HR Network Meetup for joining us.

I hope to be having another Meetup soon, so stay tuned to find out more information.

If you have any questions about our Meetups, or sponsoring a Meetup, please email me at melissa@ere.net.

• 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

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.”

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.

Gary Zukowski, president and founder of TweetMyJOBS, says “Working with eQuest will enable thousands of new job opportunities to be delivered instantly to job seekers, and will allow corporations to utilize Social Media as a cost-effective and efficient recruitment channel.”

Zukowski launched the site early this year and set up thousands (4,000 at last count) of channels that jobseekers can pick from to get Tweeted when a job comes along fitting their interest and their chosen geography.

Now, eQuest will directly send new job postings to TweetMyJOBS. The deal allows eQuest customers unlimited Twitter postings.

Recruiters can also post to TweetMyJOBS directly, once they sign up. Individual Tweets are 99 cents each per day with discounts for three-days up to 30 days. The 140-word-max messages typically contain a brief job title, location, and an address for the complete job listing.

There’s also a free resume service. Followers of tweetmyresume get notified whenever a new resume is posted.

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.

Figure 1: How important are the following to you in achieving your employer branding objectives? (rank in order from 1 to 7 (1=least important, 7 equals most important)

The survey also found while 31% have a strategy, it can be developed further. Importantly, 37% of companies have already begun work on developing their employer brand strategy. A small percentage of respondents (13%) said their company does not have an employer branding strategy (see Figure 2). These companies may be in the early stages of developing a business case for investment or the department responsible for managing the employer brand may be having difficulty engaging the CEO and senior managers to allocate resources toward the strategy.

Figure 2: Has your company developed a clear employer branding strategy?

Getting it Right the First Time

We suggest six key areas to focus on to ensure you develop an employer brand strategy that will assist you achieve your program objectives.

Determine how employer branding is viewed inside your company
You should define what employer branding means to your company.

Your employer brand is “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers, and other key stakeholders).” Employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement, and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.

If you take too narrow a focus on employer branding, it is likely to end up as a departmental project that’s not aligned with the overall business strategy. For example, if you believe employer branding is only about recruitment, it is likely your organization will have already closed up shop on employer branding as a result of the economic downturn while competitors who understand the concept are continuing to invest resources as part of a long-term employer branding strategy to attract and retain talent.

Define employer brand objectives and project scope
Defining your objectives up front will save you time and money in the long run and keep your program on time and on budget. Companies have different lifecycle stages and therefore will have different objectives at various stages. Your objectives may be related to the whole employer brand program or a specific employer brand project (e.g. establishing an alumni program or employee referral program). Your objectives may include integrating the cultures of two companies during a merger, decreasing staff turnover rates, increasing volume of hires for a summer recruiting campaign, improving candidate quality, or reviewing and updating your career website to appeal to graduates.

The relationship between HR, marketing, and communications
Ownership of the employer brand strategy is often a gray area that should be clearly defined so all key stakeholders achieve consensus and are united in the objectives. To obtain both budget and buy-in, human resources often has to drive employer branding through internal education and awareness building.

While some level of oversight or standards adherence is natural and may vary depending on the organization, the employer brand is a long-term, strategic talent management endeavor. The strategy and messaging are designed to attract/engage/retain talent, which clearly sets up a strong case for collaboration between human resources, marketing, and communications (e.g. marketing/communications can offer some compelling strategic support such as website analytics and target-market segmentation).

In instances where there is a lack of collaboration, power struggles ensue, projects can be delayed, and creativity/strategy minimized to the detriment of the outcome.

Discovering your employer brand
The key to developing your employer brand strategy is to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the organizational culture, work experience, key talent drivers (engagement factors), external perceptions, leadership vision, and management practices. Operating from this position of intelligence supports the construct of a message platform that is authentic, compelling, differentiated, and that will be internally embraced, appropriately received in the external market and consistently delivered upon by the organization.

This can be supported through quantitative research (e.g. survey mechanisms) and qualitative research (e.g. focus groups, leadership interviews, roundtable meetings). It’s also an ideal phase to do some competitive intelligence gathering and benchmark against available insights. In this era of increasing transparency, the organization’s external reputation can be considered through both external focus groups and/or some level of online reputation audit to determine ‘what is being said’ about the organization via web channels (blogs, social networks, and corporate rating sites such as JobVent).

CEO and senior management engagement
It pays to have conversations about your employer brand with the CEO and senior managers in the early stages of developing your strategy. The Employer Brand Institute’s global survey found engaging with these key stakeholders is very important in achieving employer branding objectives (see figure 1) and could be conducted using a roundtable forum on employer branding. Areas for discussion could include:

1. How will a stronger employer brand support our business strategy — M&A’s, growth, consolidation?
2. What kind of culture do we have? How consistent is it across geographical and divisional boundaries?
3. What behaviors are felt to be most characteristic of the organization? What are the moments of truth when your organization is at its best (and worse?)
4. What is the most useful way of segmenting the employee population in terms of their cultural characteristics and distinctive needs?
5. How consistent are the messages we are communicating internally and externally about our organization as a place to work? How do we inform our vendors?
6. What are the most effective channels of employee communication, both top-down and bottom-up?
7. Which positions are most critical to our success and what are we currently doing/need to do to attract, engage, and retain them?

Communications planning
There is a plethora of offline and online media channels available to communicate your employer value proposition to your target audience, including web, print, social networks, events, PR, alumni events, etc. The rate of growth of these channels can be mind-boggling and while their use may not fit the stereotype of a conservative company that has been around for 100 years, it pays to test these sites for benefits or risk losing ground to your competitors. Who would have thought three years ago a micro-blogging platform where only 140 characters can be used in communicating a message would be used successfully by companies such as Zappos (the CEO has over 590,000 followers!) to communicate with their target audience. Taking a strategic approach toward your employer brand will ensure your team is able to assess these innovations as they appear while maintaining focus on the longer-term objectives.

The key is to test and trial these channels and arrive at a communications strategy that provides maximum impact and efficiency for minimum investment. There is no point building a presence on Facebook if you don’t allocate the resources to respond to messages from the community that has joined your fan base!

Companies like Standard Chartered Bank and Phillips ensure a consistent brand is communicated globally through recruitment communications with changes for local nuances such as language. This not only ensures clarity in brand positioning; it saves on design costs and increases campaign speed to market.

Have a solid understanding of cultural diversity in communicating your brand to your target audience. Just because the messages were tried, tested, and validate by your U.S. workforce doesn’t mean you’ll get the same level of buy-in when suggesting to regional offices they use the same set of communication collateral. Your own workforce can be helpful in determining what works best in their region and the assistance from a local vendor may also add value.

Some final thoughts

In the absence of a clearly defined strategy your employer brand strategy is likely to fall flat. Taking a strategic approach to your employer brand program is likely to result in CEO/senior management engagement and allocation of the resources required to effectively build competitive advantage like companies such as Google, PwC, and McKinsey & Co have consistently achieved over time and that regularly rank highly as ‘best places to work.’

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.

Where reactive companies only see threats and danger, forward-thinking companies perceive exciting challenges and opportunities. Rather than sit by and wait for the walls to fall, they take advantage of the situation in order to gain momentum so that they can experience a breakthrough. They know that the marketplace is like a seesaw and that when one side is going down something else is coming up. Furthermore they understand that The Economy is not a cause, but rather an effect.

If companies keep this in mind, they may very well find themselves in a position to make significant gains during this time. For hiring managers and recruiters this could mean finding a stellar candidate who may have otherwise been unavailable.

Below are five powerful reasons why companies that want to come out on top will continue to develop their candidate pipeline.

1. Pipeline development is part of their growth strategy. You don’t wait until it snows to gather firewood, and these companies don’t wait until they need a hire to start identifying candidates who are equipped to be a part of their company’s success.
2. They know that long-term hiring success requires a process. It is a lot easier to keep a fire going than it is to start one, so these companies will start an ongoing dialogue with candidates with the intention of making an offer when the time is right.
3. A developed candidate pipeline removes major competition from the equation. When the time to hire arrives, these companies either have their offer prepared or they are at the top of the candidate’s mind. This reduces the chances of a salary war.
4. Having qualified candidates on hand minimize delays in production. Sometimes unforeseen events can cause the ball to be dropped. A developed and managed candidate pipeline allows these companies to rebound quickly and efficiently.
5. A company that is actively recruiting is considered a strong company. By continuing to engage prospective candidates, these companies strengthen their own company brand among others in their industry and remain aware of other trends within their market segment.

I’m sure that these five reasons are not all encompassing. Just think of them as food for thought the next time you hear “The Economy” being thrown at you as the catch-all answer for why people are not moving forward.

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.

Despite the current economic lull, consumers and top talent around the world expect organizations to continue innovating. No matter how well-staffed you may be, talent shortages or gaps will arise due to unexpected turnover, retirement (yes, a few people are still retiring), introduction of new technologies, and global expansion.

Now is the ideal time to restructure and re-engineer your internal movement processes to help mitigate the risk of key talent shortages. Fortunately, making such processes more effective is a relatively easy task.

The Definition of Intraplacement

As mentioned in Part 1, “first-generation” internal movement programs traditionally relied upon voluntary application by employees to jobs posted internally, except for a relatively small percentage of executives participating in rotation-based executive development programs.

Under such programs, internal movement really meant the permanent movement of individual employees into vacant jobs. This very narrow approach leaves out numerous developmental opportunities that are more in line with how work actually gets done today (i.e., projects).

If you’re attempting to re-engineer your process, start with a name change (i.e., Intraplacement) and a broader program scope.

Consider defining your new program as “an integrated set of corporate processes that are designed to proactively increase and broaden the options for re-assignment of critically skilled individuals based on rapidly changing business need projected talent ROI.”

The primary goal is to measurably improve employee productivity and innovation by increasing “right assignment” placements (i.e., right person, with the right skills, in the right assignment or job, at the right time).

The nature of the assignments may be part-time, temporary, seasonal, or permanent. Assignments may focus on individuals (i.e., individual movement) or groups/teams (i.e., redeployment).

Additional goals may include improving retention, accelerating leadership-development, driving best-practice sharing, improving recruiting, and intra-function cooperation. Intraplacement borrows and adapts its strategies, processes, and tools directly from external recruiting.

The Benefits of Adopting Second-Generation Internal Movement Systems

There are many reasons why firms should invest in Intraplacement. Improving internal movement can positively impact a broad range of business and HR issues, including sudden business problems, seasonal surges in workload, workforce productivity, employee retention, development, and individual motivation.

I) Business benefits and impacts

• Business results. Effective systems improve business results especially in the areas of sales, product improvement, and customer service.
• Increased productivity. Because highly skilled innovators and top performers are placed in “the right job,” the effectiveness of these individuals is multiplied.
• Better business-cycle fit. In larger organizations, some parts of the business are in different lifecycle stages (i.e., seed, start-up, established, expansion, decline, and exit). Proactive and targeted movement better ensures that an individual is placed in a business cycle where their skills and interests are a better fit.
• Increased innovation and idea generation. Moving individuals into new situations provides them with an opportunity to “view things as an outsider” and to propose new approaches that insiders might not see.
• Best practice sharing. As more individuals rotate between business units, the likelihood that best practices will be shared rapidly increases. Increased internal movement can result in the cross fertilization of ideas between previously isolated business units.
• Increased agility and flexibility. Having the capability of moving talent from areas of low return to areas of high return increases organizational agility, as well as the ability of management to shift resources as needs change.
• Better understanding and cooperation. By rotating individuals between disparate business units, individuals from both units can learn to better understand and appreciate the perspective of others. For example, purchasing professionals can better understand the problems faced by the individuals who have to operate under purchasing guidelines if they occasionally rotated into those business units.
• Improved contacts and relationships. Increasing internal movement allows individuals to build their contacts and to strengthen their relationship with individuals outside of the direct team.

II) People-management related and HR-related impacts

• More talent is available. Because individuals are proactively selected and moved faster, there are more and better qualified individuals available to managers with sudden or new strategic needs, than when individuals self-select themselves for movement.
• Higher retention rates. Rapid movement minimizes frustration and burnout. People working in their “ideal job” are unlikely to find a superior opportunity outside the firm.
• Leadership development. Multiple on-the-job learning opportunities are likely to develop leaders faster and more effectively because the development assignments will include opportunities to lead more teams under a variety of circumstances.
• Increase motivation and excitement. Not only is the individual more excited because they have a chance to grow, but each permanent internal movement also provides an opportunity to “back fill” that position, further motivating others to strive for promotions and transfers.
• Increased learning. As individuals move more frequently not only will they gain more knowledge but they will also develop mechanisms for learning faster when they enter future situations.
• Increased technical skill development. Moving between diverse projects provides an increased opportunity to develop current technical skills and to learn new skills.
• Increased exposure for top talent. Increased movement across broader areas allows more managers a chance to work with top talent. This provides individuals with more opportunities to be coached by multiple managers while giving individual managers a chance to observe and assess talent they might someday want to add to their organization.
• Reduced time to fill. Transferring people internally allows you to just fill jobs faster; assessment can be done more quickly because you already have a great deal of information about a current employee’s skills, performance, and weaknesses. Because few internal candidates reject internal offers and it takes them less time to accept, the overall hiring process takes less time.
• Decreased time to productivity. Your current employees already know the culture, the company jargon, and they already have a range of contacts. As a result, internal transfers and promotions can begin the job sooner because they don’t need a great deal of orientation, and they don’t need to give notice before they begin learning.
• Lower cost of hire and salary. Internal searches don’t require expensive external advertising and other recruitment costs. External reference checks are not needed and interviews can often be shorter. Internal candidates generally have no other external offers, so there is less likelihood of a bidding war and they are less aware of market salaries.
• Lower “job failure” rate. Because you’re hiring individuals who already know the culture, the job failure and termination rate is generally lower with internal transfers. External hiring costs are significantly higher than the cost of internal transfers.
• Improved employer brand image. Having a high-promotion-from-within rate generally improves your external brand image as a good place to work because you focus on the needs of your current employees. The increased security that it offers to current employees can also help your image.
• Allows for more entry-level hiring. By filling most jobs internally through transfers or promotions, you allow the firm to do almost all of its external hiring at the entry level. This is a good thing because entry-level jobs are cheaper to fill, have a larger candidate pool, and give the firm more time to train and assess “unknown” external hires while they are in jobs where they can do less damage.
• Decreased need for layoffs. Having a large percentage of your workers with a broad set of skills as a result of frequent movement means they are more capable of moving into new jobs or business units. This added capability and flexibility means that more workers can be transferred rather than laid-off from business units that need to be reduced or shut down.
• Individual employee benefits. Workers get more opportunities for development and learning as well as a faster overall career movement because they are proactively placed in the “right” job.

Before you implement any new process, identify the benefits that a firm can receive when the process is operating perfectly. The manager in charge of the process should set a specific program goal for each benefit. They should also identify a key metric for measuring and for assessing whether that benefit or goal was actually met.

Ways to Increase Program Participation

Despite this impressive list of benefits for both the company and the employee, you might still encounter some difficulty in getting managers and employees to fully participate in an Intraplacement program.

Some of the successful approaches for increasing participation that you should consider include:

• Business case. Work with the CFO’s office to demonstrate the ROI and business case to individual managers you want to participate. Make sure they clearly see the impact of participation to their own business results and career advancement. If possible, show how quickly an under-performing manager can improve under the program.
• Program champions. Get a senior executive, CFO, or key business unit manager to “champion” the program as a spokesperson. Let them use their visibility, political power, and influence to spread the benefits of the program. Encourage top-performing managers and employees to speak about the program.
• Recognition. Hold a recognition lunch or dinner sponsored by the CEO for all of the managers and employees who participated in the program. Plaques and certificates can also be handed out.
• Rewards. Making program participation and developing talent part of the bonus formula and promotion criteria will get the attention of your managers. Give lower priority or limit participation by managers who abuse the program.
• Communications. Sending periodic reminders to managers in the communications format they prefer can be effective, if you don’t overdo it.
• Reports. Including “ranked” program participation rate metrics in your standard financial reports not only makes your program more visible but it also serves to “expose” those managers with minimal participation. At the same time, it encourages low performers to ask those at the top of the list how to do better. Also show the correlation between program participation and meeting business results.
• Assignment design help. Provide direct help to managers in developing highly desirable project assignments and their descriptions. Provides samples of excellent (and weak) assignment descriptions, and offer coaching for those managers struggling with the process.
• Leadership development. Work with the leadership development program to make your process an integral part of the development program for new leaders so that they learn how to use it. Make the number of successful rotations that an individual employee has completed a key selection criterion for identifying high-potential employees.
• Top-quality replacements. One of the key reasons why managers are reluctant to participate is because they fear losing productivity when one of their key people rotates out. As a result, if you want to encourage managers to “release” their employees, even for a short period of time, you will need an effective “backfill” process that helps the manager to quickly replace their “lost” skill set. This might include a process for identifying those employees a manager is likely to lose and a process for training replacements.
• How-to materials. In addition to developing program materials that explains the process, these materials should be “pre-tested” with a sample of hiring managers in order to make them clearer and easier to understand. These materials should be available in a variety of formats.

Next Week in Part III: Common Problems Associated With Internal Movement Programs

Author’s note: I am putting together a guidebook tentatively called The Job Rotation, Internal Movement and Stretch Assignment Handbook. If you have job responsibilities in these areas and are interested in volunteering to be an initial reviewer, please contact me at JohnS@sfsu.edu.