A complete discussion of the intricacies and technicalities of validation, discrimination, adverse impact, and differential prediction is beyond the scope of the words I am writing today. Suffice it to say that this case has placed competing priorities in the use of testing in the spotlight. These competing priorities are using fair testing while striving to eliminate discrimination in hiring. While title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has attempted to provide some guidance in relation to these competing goals, the Ricci case has laid bare some critical issues that in my opinion certainly call for the government to re-evaluate and modernize the standards it has set.

We are mandated to use valid tests. Valid tests can often lead to minorities being hired at lower rates than those of other races. This is seen as OK as long as the test has been validated, because in theory this means the test is job-related and job-relatedness is the standard by which the legality of testing is determined.

However, what are we to do when sticking to the use of validation — as we have been asked to do — creates a situation that actually inhibits the goal of ensuring diversity and fairness? This has been a thorny issue for those of us in my profession for a long time. There is no magic bullet. The dissenting opinion in this case led by Justice Ginsburg rallies around the idea that the spirit of diversity and fairness should be the highest standard to which we aspire in hiring. It is hard to argue with this point … except for the fact that there are technical issues which can stand in the way of our achievement of this goal.

So, what does all this mean for hiring in the corporate world? I offer my humble answer to this question as follows:

Don’t Panic -- Police and fire testing is the most highly scrutinized type of testing known to mankind. Don’t panic based on the results of this case. Do use this as a time to think about your use of testing and where it may leave you exposed.

Validate, validate, validate -- In this case the validity of the test was upheld. In my mind the validity of the test, while an issue, was not the main issue at hand. The only reason the city tried to throw out the test was because it ended up being counter to its goal of diversity. Despite this, I cannot stress enough the need to validate all testing that is used to make employment decisions. It is the cornerstone of best practices in testing and provides the documentation you will need should you find yourself in court. Without such documentation, you are toast! As an added bonus, validation is the process that provides awareness of issues such as adverse impact. You may not even know you have a problem unless you take the steps to validate. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse!

Look at the bigger picture -- I agree with Justice Ginsburg that the overall goal of eliminating discrimination is the highest standard to which we should be held. In the corporate world this becomes an issue of fairness in hiring practices across the board. One of the biggest ways to guard against problems while working to achieve diversity is to look at the demographics of your workforce vs. those of the available workforce in the area. If these do not look about the same, you have a problem. This problem can be rectified by actively recruiting for diversity. Diversity training programs are OK, and of course I support them, but the best thing to do is to put your money where your mouth is and be aware of your demographics and seek to hire diversity at all times.

Seek out testing that has been shown to reduce adverse impact -- The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures pretty much lay down the law when it comes to testing. A key part of this doctrine is that one should always seek out tests that are known to have less adverse impact. We know that cognitive tests have the most adverse impact while also providing the best predictive accuracy (i.e., validity). Resolving this conundrum remains the crux of the issue, with the Ricci case as firefighter tests are highly cognitively loaded. In the real world I feel this issue is best addressed via awareness of what is required for the job and by seeking out selection procedures that we know can test cognitive traits while displaying lower levels of adverse impact. If you guessed that I was going to recommend simulations as the best way to accomplish this goal, you are correct! The issues of this case are yet another piece of evidence that clearly demonstrates the value of simulations over more traditional types of testing.

I look forward to the discussion that my opinions generate and I am glad to see my corner of the hiring world getting its brief exposure in the national media spotlight. I certainly hope that the awareness generated should serve as a catalyst for change.

Ruling 5-4 in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, the court’s majority said just because a disproportionate share of whites pass a test does not make the test discriminatory. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said invalidating test results because of the statistical racial outcome, “… is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute.”

Now, before an employer looking at the racial makeup of those who passed and failed a promotional exam and, almost certainly, other types of employment exams, can decide to throw out the results because it fears a discrimination lawsuit, it must have “a strong basis in evidence” to believe the test is discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its amendments.

Employment lawyers reacted with caution, saying the 92-page decision, including a dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will take time to digest. Their initial impression, however, is that the court appears to have tempered if not invalidated the 80 percent rule of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That rule states that the selection of a group at less than 80 percent of the group with the highest rate will be considered by the EEOC as evidence of discrimination.

However, the Supreme Court ruled statistics are not enough to show disparate impact. The decision says, “… a prima facie case of disparate-impact liability — essentially, a threshold showing of a significant statistical disparity …  and nothing more — is far from a strong basis in evidence that the City (of New Haven, Conn.) would have been liable under Title VII (for discrimination) had it certified the results.”

Merrily Archer, an employment lawyer in the Denver office of Fisher & Phillips who was previously with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, says the decision appears to be “completely at odds with the EEOC guidelines.”

Merrily Archer

“What does it mean to say an employer needs a strong basis in evidence?” she says. “My concern is an employer in the trenches. How is an employer going to apply this?”

“I disagree with the decision,” Archer adds.

A second attorney, who asked not to be identified because he had not completely read the opinion, suggested that the “court has muddied things up. The 80 percent rule was pretty straightforward for an employer: If you didn’t hit that percent, you had a problem.”

Today’s decision came in a case from New Haven, Conn. brought by a group of  white and Hispanic firefighters who scored high enough on a promotional exam to have been appointed to one of several captain and lieutenant openings in the department. No blacks were in the promotional group, although they made up about 30 percent of the department’s workforce in 2003 when the test was given.

Although New Haven spent tens of thousands of dollars hiring consultants to develop the promotional exam and validating it, the city’s Civil Service Board refused to accept the results, essentially denying promotions to the successful test takers. It heard testimony over five days that the test was deficient and that a less-discriminatory test existed. In the end, the city’s decision was based largely on the statistical results, which showed the promotional exam had a disparate impact on blacks.

Kennedy’s decision invites employers to engage stakeholders in the planning, design, compilation, and validation of these exams, but doesn’t require any particular process to be followed in the development and selection of a test. Once the test is given, though, the mere statistical results are not enough to invalidate it. Writes Kennedy:

“Nor do we question an employer’s affirmative efforts to ensure that all groups have a fair opportunity to apply for promotions and to participate in the process by which promotions will be made. But once that process has been established and employers have made clear their selection criteria, they may not then invalidate the test results, thus upsetting an employee’s legitimate expectation not to be judged on the basis of race. Doing so, absent a strong basis in evidence of an impermissible disparate impact, amounts to the sort of racial preference that Congress has disclaimed, §2000e-2(j), and is antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race.”

The court’s decision is a victory for the firefighters who sued and a slap to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. She was one of three appeals court judges who issued a one-paragraph ruling upholding the city’s decision. The brevity of the decision as well as the notoriety of the case has become an issue in  her confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

Lead plaintiff, Frank Ricci, became a sympathetic figure after telling the Civil Service Board that he had dyslexia and had paid a neighbor to read onto tape the study materials.

In the aftermath of ERE’s successful social recruiting summit two weeks ago, we might assume that talent acquisition professionals are on the cutting-edge of the latest and greatest in recruitment technology. Many best practice organizations are turning their backs on traditional sourcing tools in favor of mobile recruiting, social networking, and search engine optimization. One thing is certain: the talent acquisition system market is one of dramatic change and innovation. Both during strong and weak economies, investment in talent acquisition systems remains a priority for best practice companies looking to gain competitive advantage and secure a solid talent pipeline of both active and passive candidates.

When it comes to technology, companies have a unique advantage in today’s economy. They are in a position to ask more from their current technology providers and competitive options abound. Solution providers are responding by offering more features both through product development and strategic partnerships with companies such as Jobs2Web and Jobfox.

Yet, such opportunities raise critical questions. Are more features truly better? Do companies need innovation or just improvements in existing features and functionality?

In March 2009, Bersin & Associates launched a research study about talent acquisition systems to answer these and many other questions. We conducted a survey to obtain opinions from talent acquisition customers about the performance of their primary talent acquisition systems. We also wanted to delve into customer satisfaction, implementation challenges, and general trends. The research initiative also included interviews and briefings with 17 talent acquisition vendors.

Highlights from this research will soon appear in our upcoming newsletter on talent acquisition.

Here’s a brief preview of what we found.

Traditional Improvements

Our research found that many organizations are not interested in advanced features available in talent acquisition systems. Organizations need to consider their unique hiring needs and overall talent processes before feeling pressured by the glitz and glam of today’s talent acquisition systems. Many companies want the basics — requisition management, improved user interface, applicant tracking, and search capabilities.

Improvements in ease of use and configurability remain a priority for the majority of organizations (see chart at the top of this article, or email me if you have trouble viewing it). Although not always a “must have,” every survey respondent identified enhanced search features as a priority. The good news is that many of the solution providers are focusing on search functionality and enhancing to give users the ability to search for duplicate candidates and to save searches.

Even though many organizations today operate on a global playing field, more than 20% of respondents said they were not currently interested in global capabilities such as multi-language support, time zone support, or localization and currency support.

Innovative Improvements

However, our research also found that some organizations, such as 7-Eleven, are eager to bring innovation to their talent acquisition processes and looking for technology to support search engine optimization, web 2.0 career sites, and social networking.

The use of social media has exploded in the talent acquisition arena over the past few years. While most solution providers avoided this area in the past, they are beginning to see customer demand in support for features leveraging video, social networking, and RSS feeds.

Forty-one percent of respondents indicated that Web 2.0 capabilities are a “must have” when it comes to advanced features. While Web 2.0 capabilities, particularly integration with social networking, are one way to improve employer branding, talent acquisition departments are also beginning to recognize the benefits of search engine optimization when improving the quality and volume of traffic to your corporate career site.

As today’s talent acquisition system market continues to evolve, solution providers are making dramatic changes to their product roadmaps in order to meet the current and future needs of their customers. Companies are looking to technology solution providers to act as partners rather than suppliers, and listen.

I’d welcome hearing what changes would you like to see from your talent acquisition system provider.

• Later today at 2:00 p.m. ET, sign up for this week’s free webinar, Taking Control of EVP: How to Measure, Manage and Improve Your Employment Brand Presence led by Mitzi Adwell from The Newman Group. We’ll explore tactics for defining the attributes that differentiate your organization in the eyes of candidates and employees, highlighting those differentiators through your marketing and communications efforts to candidates, and opportunities for improving talent operations to bring those differentiators to life.
• Friday is the last chance to take advantage of the ERE Expo 2009 Fall early bird discount. This year’s event, returning to the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, FL from September 9 – 11 features presentations from Adidas, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, American Cancer Society, Fifth Third Bank, and many more. Topics include everything from employer branding, onboarding, and several topics focused on social recruiting.
• We’re going to add a new session to our Fall Expo agenda. It’s going to be a closing session on social media — an all-star panel including DaVita, Sodexo, Adidas, and others, moderated by Susan Burns. It’s just one more of a group of sessions we’re having on the topic, including one by Marvin Smith from Microsoft, a couple of legal sessions, a presentation on developing a social-media recruiting strategy, and more.
• Also this week, our Editor-in-Chief Todd Raphael talks to Alan Strauss, who’s doing a talent-acquisition project for Lockheed Martin and is well-connected in the D.C.-area corporate recruiting community, about bringing in “A-players” to corporations; what the best recruiters are doing to keep their jobs; and what sorts of questions recruiters should be asking their customers to become more influential and strategic.
• There have been 12 new postings during the past week on our recruiting job board. If you are looking for a new opportunity make sure to check it regularly and also follow new postings on Twitter at @recruiting_jobs. And if you are looking to add to your team, remember 30 day postings are only $25 through August 1.

Have a great week everyone, and for our US readers I hope you have a great 4th of July weekend!

Video conferencing is not only a practical nice-to-have capability, it is a necessity for any modern recruiting organization charged with recruiting truly top talent around the world. Remote video interviews provide numerous benefits. One of the most difficult to ignore in these tough economic times is the fact that they are dramatically cheaper.

When it comes to video-conference interviews, organizations still have two options: high quality fixed facility interviews, and lower quality flexible location interviews. The latter requires only that the candidate have access to a decent broadband Internet connection and a low-cost webcam. When purchased in bulk, a number of webcams are available at prices less than $15 per unit. Based on my experience, I predict that within a few years the “interview from anywhere” approach will become the standard practice for all but final hiring interviews.

Literally hundreds of firms have already begun using video interviews, and usage patterns are climbing at a significant pace. While first-movers adopting the approach were predominantly in the high-tech and communications industries, today usage crosses nearly every industry. Organizations like HP, Microsoft, Google, Tyco, Whirlpool, Rio Tinto, E*Trade, PepsiCo, UCLA, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and Broadcom are marquee customers of leading solution providers.

If you doubt that this approach will truly grab hold, just look back at the uphill battle that phone screens had to fight before they became the de facto standard first step in the assessment process.

The Business Case for Adopting the “Interview from Anywhere” Approach
Increasing the number of candidates available to interview and cutting the cost per hire are two major benefits of adopting the “interview from anywhere” approach. In tough economic times, the travel costs that result from flying in multiple candidates for interviews is a highly visible expense, especially when you consider that a majority of the people brought in will not result in a hire. For companies that recruit nationally or internationally, travel-related expenses can easily account for 50% of all recruiting costs.

The second and perhaps the most significant business benefit of remote interviewing is that it dramatically increases your candidate pool. For many organizations, tough economic times limit the talent pool dramatically to local candidates. However, since there are no travel costs associated with the “interview from anywhere” approach, firms with limited budgets will be able to consider top-quality candidates from outside the region. Ease of scheduling is another significant reason why the quality and the size of the talent pool increases; no longer will attending an interview be a major time suck. Even the volume of local candidates will likely increase as remote interviews will not require them to lie to their boss and disappear for a day.

Additional Advantages of “Interviewing From Anywhere”
There are many additional advantages associated with the interview-from-anywhere approach, so if you’re having reservations about the concept, here are some additional points to consider:

1. Interviewee and interviewer performance — because candidates are not rushed to get back to work or fatigued from hours of driving or airline travel, they are more likely to be relaxed and excited about the opportunity to present themselves. The net result is that the candidates perform more like their normal selves. In cases where the interviewers need to travel in order to ask questions during the interview, they too will be refreshed and better able to sell and excite the candidate.
2. Almost-live view — with broadband and the latest generation of webcams, the quality of the video is quite high. Unlike telephone interviews, facial expressions and body language can be readily seen, something that hiring managers rate as a “must-have” feature. Your ability to sell candidates that are in high demand may also be improved because they can effectively see and feel the excitement of the interviewing team.
3. Lower dropout rate because of multiple interviews — if your organization requires multiple interviews on different days, that multiplies the amount of travel and the scheduling difficulty associated with hiring an individual. Allowing the candidate to “interview from anywhere” and after work hours reduces the amount of scheduling and travel stress that routinely builds up over multiple interviews. Taken together, they reduce the likelihood that a currently employed candidate will drop out halfway through the process due to fatigue or their unavailability.
4. Faster time-to-fill — a great deal of the delay that plagues many organizations in making a hire can be associated with the time required for travel and to find an opportunity for the candidate to get away from work without raising suspicion. Requiring all of the interviewers to be in the same room also can delay the scheduling of interviews. If managers are willing to hold interviews at night, on weekends, or on holidays, they may be able to do all the interviews back to back. Holding the interviews closer together or even back to back also makes it easier for comparisons to be made between candidates. Taken together these factors may significantly shorten the time it takes to fill open positions. This can mean less lost revenue (as a result of the extended vacancies). Reducing the delays in making a hiring decision (prominent in traditional interviewing) might also mean that many of the quality candidates that are in high demand will not drop out of the process before it is concluded, because they were not forced by the time delays to accept other offers.
5. An improved candidate experience — most people in recruiting routinely say that they want to improve “the candidate experience,” but forcing candidates to lie to their boss and travel multiple times is not a positive experience. It may impact their willingness to accept an offer and what they tell their colleagues about your firm.
6. Ethical issues — for currently employed candidates, asking them to come in for an interview during work hours (on company time) can cause ethical concerns among the best candidates. In other cases it may force them to use sick days, personal days, or vacation time. They may also feel that they are letting their team down by being absent from work during the time that they are traveling and interviewing. Conducting interviews from home outside of work hours can help alleviate these pressures. Also, because there’s no travel time involved, the candidate doesn’t have to add the travel time to their excuse for not being at work.
7. Green concerns — using technology to reduce travel certainly reduces much of the carbon footprint and the environmental impact related to a job search. For environmentally conscious candidates, this may be a major selling point and an illustration that your company is focused on sustainability.
8. Family impacts — having to travel and be away from their family (with no guarantee that they’ll actually get the job) may discourage even unemployed individuals from applying.
9. Administrative costs — candidates who must physically visit the facility generate an expense because they must be cleared through security. There may also be scheduling issues and a cost associated with using conference rooms for the interview. These costs, although small, escalate as more individuals are physically brought to the facility.
10. Employer brand image — offering this new approach may garner media attention and positive comments on the Internet. Together they may encourage more individuals to apply. By showing respect both for the candidate’s time and the needs of their current firm, you may also build goodwill in your image.
11. Manager scheduling availability — using this approach, hiring managers can also interview from almost anywhere without having to be in the office. As a result, they are more likely to be able to easily find time for interviewing, further reducing a major barrier to speeding up time to fill.
12. It uses available technology — it’s important to realize that the technology involved has improved since the last time you may have contemplated video conferencing. If you use a vendor, there is generally no need to purchase additional software or web-related technology. In addition, because laptops, wireless networks, and mobile phones can generally be used, manager resistance decreases because they don’t need to use new hardware or technology.
13. More are comfortable with remote interaction — because many managers and candidates are now frequent users of online social and business networks, they are now generally more comfortable and experienced than in the past with interacting with individuals who are not in the same room.
14. Global capability — relatively cheap long-distance communications and the Internet allow this process to have a global capability.
15. A recruiting advantage — by being the first to offer this approach, your firm will develop a competitive advantage over other firms struggling to “offer something different.”
16. You can maintain the “physical meeting” option — no matter how many remote interviews you hold, you can still reserve the option to interview the candidate in person for the final interview.
17. Minimal price — even if you use a vendor, the price per interview will most likely not exceed $200. There are also free options if you have your own technology function.
18. Facility tour — in lieu of a physical walk around, virtual tours and team member introductions can still be provided to the candidate via a web video.
19. Vendor availability — most early adopters of the interview-from-anywhere approach are using a vendor to facilitate the process. While most support video from anywhere, a few focus on higher quality video experience and require the candidate to visit a studio. Some of the vendors to consider include: GreenJobInterview, iViioo, HireVue, and Candidate Quality Management.
20. Additional uses — in addition to using the interview from anywhere process for external hiring, it can also be used for internal transfers and vendor selection.

Next week: Part 2 will cover more advantages of live video interviews, some potential problems, and ways to improve your in-person interviews by changing the “where and when.”

I’ll also make the contention that only a few companies are ready for this shift and none of the predictions below are far-fetched.

For one thing, they’re now being successfully tried out today in some form by big-time companies. More important — they work, especially on a recruiting-ROI basis. I define this as the quality and impact a candidate makes divided by the cost and effort to find and hire the person. (Email me if you’d like to review this Recruiting ROI calculation.)

To further validate some of the more “off the wall” predictions, I’ve tied the major points to an online survey. The results are currently posted, providing an instant view of where your company stands in comparison to your competition.

With the idea of getting ahead of the recovery, here are my 2010 New Year’s predictions for sourcing and recruiting:

1. Job boards will soon be archaic. Major job board advertising will continue to decline as corporations finally realize that posting individual requisitions on these boards targets “C+” type talent. Money spent here will be reallocated to sourcing programs that actually work.
2. The talent hub and spoke model will dominate active candidate sourcing. Requisition-based advertising will be replaced by bundling similar jobs into talent hubs. Traffic will be driven to this hub via a variety of ever-changing sourcing spokes (blogs, niche boards, social networks, user groups, specialty sites, etc.).
3. Sourcing spokes will come and go. This search-engine-optimized “talent hub and spoke” model will dominate active candidate sourcing with new spokes, like Twitter and Facebook, coming and going. Jobs2Web and TalentSeekr seem well-poised to dominate this market in the short term, with First Advantage’s HireEngine, among others, entering the fray.
4. Applicant tracking systems will eventually react and adapt to the new model. ATS’s will finally re-architect their systems to adapt to this new dynamic sourcing model, but they will not be the driver behind this change. So expect to continue to be disappointed with lag times of one year or more.
5. Companies will be unprepared for the spike in turnover. There will be a six-month spike in hiring as a result of a big jump in voluntary turnover once the recovery begins in earnest. The current pent-up demand for new jobs will finally be unleashed then, as nearly everyone enters the job hunting market. Expect counteroffers and compensation to increase.
6. Twitter will not become the silver bullet. Twitter will be one of the spokes in the talent hub model, but not a dominant source of candidates. However, it will be a very useful means to spread the news about open opportunities to a company’s prospect pool. Here’s a very short survey you can take that validates this.
7. Effort will increase to source passive candidates. Passive candidate sourcing and recruiting will become more aggressive, since this represents 70% of the population (based on surveys indicating that 20%-30% is active). In the short term, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and Broadlook will be the primary tools used to find passive candidates, in combination with strong recruiters to drive the process to closure. However, the ERP (see below) will become an increasingly important driver of this.
8. Just-in-time hiring and virtual recruiters will soon arrive. Companies are now building proprietary databases of top talent nurtured by CRM (candidate relationship management) workflow systems. These systems are now becoming more robust with the addition of advanced workflow design and auto-responders. This will result in an online “virtual recruiter” automatically converting prospects into interested candidates. Avature and First Advantage’s Talon seem to be leading the pack here.
9. The employee referral program will become the primary driver for future sourcing. The traditional ERP will be transformed into a far-reaching network of top talent by integrating it directly with tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. This way the ERP will quickly become the prime source of prospects for a company’s proprietary talent pool.
10. There will be increased focus on implementing “Hiring A-level talent” training for both recruiters and hiring managers. Recruiting, interviewing, and hiring A-level talent who have multiple opportunities requires strong recruiters and sophisticated hiring managers. Few corporations can pull this off without a significant investment in the proper training. (Email me for info on who does this best.) This void will keep external recruiters in business by hunting down companies that haven’t figured out how to do this.

Peering into the future, it’s pretty clear that sourcing active candidates will largely rely on a search-engine-optimized talent hub and spoke replacing traditional requisition-based advertising. More important will be the use of proprietary talent pools powered by a “virtual recruiter.” This capability will provide companies the opportunity to hire truly passive candidates before they enter the market. For those companies that haven’t built these models, and to fill specific critical needs, there will be increased reliance on advanced passive candidate recruiting approaches including continued use of external agencies.

As I indicated earlier, I don’t think any of this is too tough to predict, since most progressive companies are already moving in these directions.

However, too many companies think this can all happen without the total involvement of the executive team and every single line manager. This has been the weakest link in the chain in the past, and my prediction for the future is that it will continue to be the problem. I have seen very little effort to get hiring managers totally engaged, and because of this, hiring top talent will still be problematic, despite the efforts of HR and recruiting leaders and some innovative technologies.

Calling the mass distribution of job postings “problematic,” Chad Sowash, VP of business development, says DirectEmployers will be changing its terms of service in a way he expects will not be popular. “Will the answer to this problem be a popular remedy?,” Sowash asks. “Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook, not so good.”

Sowash could not be reached to clarify his blog post. The implication, however, seems to be that DirectEmployers intends to impose some restrictions on the use of its job listings by aggregators.

That could pose an interesting challenge since DirectEmployers lists a number of job boards as partners, including the two biggest aggregators online — Indeed and SimplyHired. Neither of their CEOs could be reached, so we can’t say what they might know about this development or if it will even affect their sites.

I suspect it won’t. At least not directly. Both Indeed and SimplyHired are more than redistribution partners to JobCentral, the DirectEmployer job board. Their brand and job links appear prominently on the search results pages of JobCentral, so a search for accounting will turn up the matching jobs from DirectEmployer members, while a sidebar widget lets job seekers know they can find more jobs from the two aggregators and Google, too. Click into them and their jobs appear on a JobCentral branded page.

What Sowash is complaining about are the job boards that have built their traffic off JobCentral’s feeds and by leveraging postings collected by SimplyHired and Indeed and, to be fair, a few others, though the former are the 800-pound gorillas. Both SimplyHired and Indeed make it a snap for a startup job board to go live with hundreds, even thousands of listings. That builds traffic, which a startup uses to sell job posts.

Sowash calls the mixing of redistributed listings with those sold by the individual site cross pollination. “Many job sites receiving this clean job content (from JobCentral) would then mix it with their own making it seem organic to their site (cross pollination),” writes the Chad.

Where the practice begins to become objectionable to Sowash is when these job boards provide feeds of the same jobs to the aggregators. If I’ve got Sowash’s chronology correct, what happened was that as JobCentral made its content available directly to ever more job boards, they, in turn, were uploading it to Indeed, SimplyHired and others as if it was their own, causing a massive duplication.

Inconvenient, but nothing technology isn’t addressing by scrubbing the data, something the job search engines routinely do. The scrubbing isn’t perfect and duplication occurs, but it’s not out of control.

Yet duplication, and job-seeker experience are the issues Sowash cites as reason for the forthcoming changes to JobCentral’s terms of service:

“Although you do expect site owners and designers to think about job-seeker experience, and the use of content that didn’t truly belong to them. Reports of sites using interstitial ads to capture job seeker information, required registration for application, and then repackaging the exact same, now highly duplicated, content and submitting it to other job sites as their own has become an issue for job seekers, employers, and many of the verticals.”

The new terms might limit who gets JobCentral feeds. They are likely to outline how the content is to be used and very possibly restrict its redistribution beyond the initial site. There are plenty of possibilities and, as things are today, not many negatives for the companies who list their jobs on JobCentral. The last thing most employers want are more applicants.

But somewhere down the road, when the U.S. economy recovers and workers who are now hanging on to jobs they had been planning on leaving do quit, recruiters may start bandying about that “war for talent” phrase. Then, the broad nets will again be in vogue and redistributed job postings will look like a positive.

In the meantime, JobCentral could be sparking a trend. Eric Shannon, CEO and founder of LatPro, the Hispanic diversity job board, posted this comment to the Chad’s blog entry:

“Many job boards would not exist at all without these feeds. But, I have recently come to realize as well that just as many job boards would not exist without the traffic obtained by redistributing the same feeds to multiple aggregators. It’s a clever way of building a business out of nothing. I have also been debating whether to post on this topic.

Recently I have had job board owners try to peddle large feeds as their own (probably came from you) and other job boards pushing the limits in a variety of ways on what constitutes a real job.

For years, my frustration with this murkiness in our marketplace has driven my search for the right path for my company.”

We’ve got the Fall conference in Florida well stocked with social recruiting sessions, if you missed the event we just had. Marvin Smith of Microsoft will be presenting; there’ll be a couple of legal-related sessions about recruiting using Facebook and other sites; Knowledge Infusion is talking about putting together a social-media strategy; and we’ll be adding another social media session in the coming days. Shoot me an email if there’s specific information on the topic you’d like. In the meantime, a few of the videos are below.

A Conversation with LinkedIn Co-Founder & CEO Reid Hoffman

Ubiquity & Authenticity in Social Media with Laurie Ruettimann (Audio Only)

Awesomest Job Search Ever! with Sacha Chua

LinkedIn Networking with Shally Steckerl

Online Employer Reputation & Social Recruiting with Shannon Seery Gude

Social Recruiting Summit Wrap-up

New LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner

LinkedIn named a new CEO today, as expected tapping its president former Yahooer Jeff Weiner for the job. Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn founder and its first CEO, moved out of the CEO job he re-assumed in December after a company shakeup. Hoffman will become a full-time executive chairman.

Weiner’s chief focus, according to a report on TechCrunch, will be to create “an independent public company, with three key revenue sources: premium subscriptions, corporate solutions, and advertising.” All three revenue streams are already in place, generating enough cash to bring the company to relative profitability. All that’s necessary to catapult the company into solid margins is an upturn in hiring.

Weiner is former EVP of Yahoo’s Network Division, the unit responsible for the company’s search, mail, and other key operations. He left in June 2008, during the company’s brain drain. Weiner joined LinkedIn in January after a stay as executive in residence with two VC firms.

His appointment as president came after Dan Nye, LinkedIn’s second CEO, left in December. Hoffman retook the CEO reins he had relinquished to Nye not even two years before.

In a press release, Weiner says, “Working closely with Reid and the team over the past six months exceeded all of my expectations coming into the company. I couldn’t be more excited about our progress to date, and the opportunity ahead of us.”

Hoffman, meanwhile, says in a blog post he will concentrate on “some big picture strategic issues for Linkedin — how Linkedin evolves to become more and more essential to professionals seeking to stay informed and find the right resources to accomplish their tasks fast and effectively.”

So… Why am I bitter?

1. It is not God’s gift to Talent Acquisition. With all of the posts on this site and others, you would think that Social Networking is a gift given from above as if we have been in drought for the past 100 years. For those of us with jobs to fill, the gift is the enormous amounts of candidates at our fingertips coming from every media known to man right now. The best people are always hard to find. However, with a little work using a variety of different means, we can find them! I don’t need to Tweet to get results. Maybe I’m just not cool enough to be a Tweeter-Tatter.
2. It is not the most difficult thing to grasp or learn. Every day as you read through the blog, you see about 80% of the posts dominated about ‘how to use social media.’ Really? Here’s a tip: Hop on the tweeter box and start typing about how much you know … or how great the hamburger you just had was. It doesn’t matter: make it interesting (or not, for that matter) and you’ll probably get some increased web traffic, a few candidates that you have no interest in speaking with, and become ERE-famous for being a great social-networker!! Congrats! OK, OK … I’m being harsh now. Seriously though, if you can navigate the Internet and are a member of one social media outlet, it’s not that difficult to learn a second. Or you can search “10 tips on being a great social networker” … I think you’ll get about 100 different blogs/articles.
3. It doesn’t work for everyone. Allow me to give you a scenario from my world: Let’s say I’m looking for a Project Director with an Engineering Degree who can and has managed a multi-billion dollar healthcare facility. Further, he/she needs to have a P.E. License (Professional Engineer), be LEED AP Certified (environmental), and international project experience, among many other things. Am I going to find this person by tweeter-tattering? No. In fact, if I tell someone like this to follow me on the Tweeter, the response I may get would go something like this: “Oh yes, I love those speakers too.”
4. Stop Already! Enough is enough. I’ve always had a general thought about recruitment (aka Talent Acquisition — the fancy name we give ourselves … I like it). It’s not difficult to be in our world… Our job isn’t that tough. But … it is time-consuming, and it does take a bit of salesmanship. Not everyone has that natural salesmanship in themselves. Last, you should know your market, whether that be construction, engineering, IT, finance, etc. This is all-too-difficult for some to overcome. With that said, do we need 20 more articles on how to use Twitter? If you don’t get it by now, it may be time for a career change. I hear AIG is a great place to work!

Disclaimer: I’m young, I’m hip, and gosh-darnit people like me! As opposed to a dinosaur who doesn’t understand social-media … I get it. Some of you tweeters out there do get results. If you’re doing mass-hiring for customer-service positions, looking for a great business developer, or even looking for a software guy/gal, it may work for you! I also understand that there are many 3rd-party folks, business owners, website developers, etc., who are trying to get their brand out there … I get it! It probably works great for you. But for the every day recruiter, depending on your business, it seems like anything more than 10% of your day spent on a few of these outlets would be a waste of time. Yes, it is OK to use these means; but let’s just all calm down a little, take a deep breath, and get some work done. Happy hunting!

P.S. Does anyone know how I can get updates about what Cameron Diaz did today? I can’t seem to find a good source. Oh … wait … never mind …

(Editor’s note: Sometimes we see great blog posts on ERE.net, and when we do, we publish them here with the permission of their authors. This post was originally on Scott’s blog.)

Not likely, say observers of the market (here’s just one) who have warned of the demise of the newspaper Help Wanted for years. The Conference Board, which once used the volume of employment ads in 51 of the nation’s newspapers as an index of labor health, discontinued its Help Wanted Advertising Index in July 2008. The Board explained the decision this way, “Because print advertising no longer comprehensively captures changes in labor-market demand, The Conference Board will focus its efforts on other indicators that better reflect today’s labor market …”

Earlier this month the Newspaper Association of America released the results of the first quarter newspaper revenues showing all categories down. But no classified category is down more than recruitment, off 67.4 percent from the first quarter of 2008. That’s a near disastrous showing, made worse because 2008’s first quarter was itself down by 35.4 percent from 2007.

In dollars, the drop means America’s daily newspapers took in $205.441 million in recruitment advertising from Jan 1 through March 31st. Compare that to the $119 million Monster took in from its North American job postings or compare it to CareerBuilder’s $141 million for the same period.

You don’t have to be a math wizard to see that just two online sites — the two biggest, to be sure — took in more job posting revenue than did all of the nation’s 1,400 or so daily newspapers. The newspapers also took in $3.1 billion in online revenue, with employment ads accounting for a piece of that total.

The accompanying chart shows the rise in employment advertising through 2000; its sudden drop with the tech crash of 2000 and then 9/11; it’s improvement into 2006; and, now, what is likely to be its final decline.

So definitive has been the crash of newspaper employment advertising that many newspapers are running help-wanted ads only on some days, rather than seven days a week. The Chicago Tribune, an owner of CareerBuilder, became the first major market daily to curtail recruitment advertising, when in early 2008 it decided to run ads only two days a week.

The rapid decline in newspaper employment advertising coincides with recruiter sentiment that newspapers don’t provide the same value as online job boards, employee referral programs and, increasingly, social networks.

In 2006, ERE in collaboration with Classified Intelligence surveyed several hundred recruiters visiting ERE and found they considered print advertising to be the least effective means of attracting candidates from among the five choices. Those choices were employee referral programs, job boards, career fairs, print, and social networks. We asked the decision-makers among the survey respondents about their spending on various media in 2006. Some 43 percent expected to spend less that year on print, while about that same percent expected to increase their spending on social networking sites, referral programs, and job boards.

The numbers bear out those predictions.

That’s the glass-half-empty look at print recruitment advertising. If there is a half-full point of view, it’s not evident. We could point to ads in The New York Times, Las Vegas Review-Journal, and a few others that list available openings and point to online sites for more information. The Chicago Tribune does something similar with ads it runs for CareerBuilder during the week.

Recruitment advertising agencies that used to earn 15 percent commissions on newspaper ads that cost upwards of $3,000 on a Sunday have embraced other media, generating fees from buying online advertising, designing online campaigns and building career sites, and managing search engine marketing campaigns.

Executives from these agencies no longer spend time placing what used to be called in-line display ads in the daily newspaper. Now, they advocate using newspapers for integrated campaigns and for special events like on-site open houses and career fairs, where a wide net is desired.

How do you use newspapers for recruitment? Or do you? When was the last time you ran an ad in the newspaper and what was the result? We’re anxious to hear from you. So we encourage your comments on this issue as we prepare a more in-depth article on the use of newspapers for recruitment advertising.

Post your comments below or email me directly by clicking the link at the top of this story.

New Vault

The new Vault came out of the vault this morning, and while it bears a family resemblance to the old site, it’s got deeper content, greater breadth, easier navigation, and enough improvements big and small that collectively they make the site more useful to more job seekers at a time when they need it most.

“Today, Vault is taking a major leap forward to provide our ambitious, educated audience with a faster, more comprehensive and personalized experience,” is how Vault president and CEO Erik Sorenson announced the release of the new Vault.

Founded in 1996, Vault has ever since served professional school students, recent grads, and, in increasing numbers over the years, mid-career professionals in the fields of finance, law, accounting, and consulting. Before consumer-generated content became a buzzword, Vault tapped into employees at major firms and companies in the U.S. who provided insider views of the work environment. They also helped Vault compile its salary information, its numerous surveys, and its famed company rankings.

Now, the new Vault maintains that same approach, but has expanded its reach to 400 professions, and the industries it covers from 40 to 200. Its company profiles have grown even more broadly.

The discussion groups remain, as do the blogs that have been added in the last few years. The discussion board is where questions about the software developer culture of a company to the financial stability of another company can be asked and where users will get answers. Curiously, Vault did not jump into the Web 2.0 networking stew. That was a deliberate decision, Sorenson told us, in answer to our emailed question:

“Our main focus as a company is to gather and distribute valuable exclusive content as efficiently for our users as possible, as with My Vault, so that’s where we put our resources to start. Our discussions and message boards remain popular. However, we look forward to continual improvement of the user experience and we expect that to lead to increased social media functionality over time.”

Here’s what else he told us:

The former Vault.com homepage

Q: What were you looking to achieve with the redesign?

A: Vault’s delivery of “insider” career information has been very successful for more than 12 years. However, this is the first major overhaul of the site since it was introduced in 2001, and it was clear to us that the current site had become a barrier to continued growth. The new Vault features an entirely new approach to navigation, functionality, and branding. Our goal was to provide a much faster, more comprehensive and personalized user experience. At the same time, we are providing a better environment for our recruitment branding and advertising partners.

Q: You’ve expanded the content offerings significantly. What drove that decision? What do you expect will be the result?

A: Two reasons:

First, Vault historically has been very strong in certain core areas — law, accounting, banking, and consulting. Our goal is to build on that core by providing our users with the same quality and depth of information in a vastly expanded number of other industries and professions. We are especially focused on expanding in areas that are very active today — government, green/energy, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals.

Secondly, we are providing our users up-to-the-moment news and commentary about companies and industries. The news about certain companies — and how that news impacts recruitment — is very important to both passive and active job seekers. We feel that the combination — in-depth, insider information curated by our editors, and timely, topical news — is an exceptional benefit for our consumers.

A: Who are your users and how do they use Vault?

Vault.com has about 2.5 million monthly users, and our content is available to more than 5 million additional consumers through universities and libraries. Our users are educated, ambitious, and talented. That’s why hundreds of premier corporate recruiters like Goldman Sachs and Deloitte have partnered with us for years, and 75 new company recruitment leaders have signed on since the first of the year.

Q: Has Vault’s business model changed? What is it and how does it work today, in an environment where so many resources are available.

Vault’s business model has not changed. We have a very diversified model, which has driven our stability and success for years. Vault has three primary revenue streams: 1. Recruitment advertising; 2. Subscriptions (Note: Vault charges $9.95 a month for its premium content); and 3. Licensing of our content to institutions, like libraries and universities. Of course, we also offer career services, like resume review and career coaching.

Regarding the number of resources available today, we feel that Vault is unique in the marketplace. We have breadth and depth of insider content — gathered from nearly fifty thousand surveys each year. Importantly, it is curated by our experienced team of editors — not just raw content with no context or credibility.

Here’s an economics major from the University of Southern California who hasn’t held a job for longer than a week since graduating in 2005. On his website he admits, almost eagerly, that he went on 40-plus interviews and didn’t land a single offer in his field.

His lament is all too familiar to unsuccessful jobseekers: “I never received feedback from any employers.”

So the lanky 28-year-old began taking any job he could find. He tutored elementary school kids. Was a volunteer cross-country coach in Chicago, painting stairs, doing a little accounting, and some other jobs to pay the rent. When the cross-country job ended, he took another job in Indiana. And then another.

His resume now lists jobs as diverse as agronomist, hydrologist, cook, rodeo announcer, Border Patrol agent, and boilermaker. If you’re reading this during the fourth week of June 2009, then you’ll see 39 different jobs listed. This week he’s working as a furniture maker in Pennsylvania’s Amish country.

By now you should have concluded that Seddiqui is no mere discouraged worker. Some of you may even have seen him interviewed on CNN or local TV. His website lists more than 150 TV and print stories about him. He figures he has done more than 500 interviews.

“The objective,” Seddiqui says on his website, “is to travel all 50 states to work 50 different careers in 50 weeks. Sound Crazy??? I’m on a mission to explore various careers, environments, and cultures that America has to offer.” His quest is to sample work representative of each state, hence the corn farmer in Nebraska, logger in Oregon, and wedding chapel coordinator in Las Vegas.

Living the Map is the title of his own take on that quintessential American journey of self-discovery — the road trip. Like so many others, he was driven in part by curiosity, despair, and the freedom that comes, as Kris Kristofferson wrote, from having nothing left to lose.

“I felt like I had no opportunities,” Seddiqui told a reporter in Greensboro, N.C. “Now, they are endless. This has opened so many doors for me.” He’s gotten several book and movie offers. A book was always in the plan; a documentary may be in the works. And he’s putting together a series of videos on each of the jobs.

Lining up the jobs was hard in the beginning. He left his parent’s home in the San Francisco Bay Area last September only after lining up five week’s worth of jobs. The next few jobs were easier, thanks to the website detailing his exploits, which gave him some legitimacy. The media exposure now makes finding work easy. A racing crew in Indianapolis came looking for him.

Every job has been a paying one. For some he trades work for room and board. But, as he told Fox News, some jobs have paid him into four figures.

When his adventure is all over, which should be just before the end of August, Seddiqui says he may pick a career from among the jobs he’s held. If he does, it isn’t likely he’ll have a hard time landing a position. He’s had offers from most of the places he has worked. That rodeo announcer job, though, didn’t work out.

If you look at the roots for the business terms company and corporation, you find a common theme. “Company” shares its root with the word for companion, while “corporation” essentially means to unify in one body. At its simplest, the message that these words intend to convey is one of coming together. What complicates things is the purpose for which the members come together. For example, in most cases it’s a lot easier to come together for a party than it is to come together for something like jury duty. Now let’s apply this idea to interviewing.

When most people find themselves in the job market, their first thought is to get another job as soon as possible. They’ll think about what it means to be a part of the company later. Little do they know that this mentality is actually doing them a lot more harm than good. Without intending to, they could be sending out a message to recruiters and their potential employers that more or less says, “You are just an obstacle between me and my money.” As recruiters, it’s in our best interest to help candidates put their best foot forward and remind them of what companies are looking for.

What they are forgetting is the fact that the company has needs too. That’s why they hired recruiters. This is important to remind candidates whenever they are brought in for an interview, and especially so in this economy. Companies are not sitting around saying, “Wow! What are we going to do with all this money? Let’s find someone who needs it and give it to them for eight hours of their time a day.” And this takes us to the second word clue — the word hire.

To hire means, “to engage the services of one or more individuals in exchange for compensation.” This means that the hiring company, while conscious that candidates have certain salary requirements for their services, puts the actual service part first. That means that recruiters and candidates should too. When interviewing, one should always keep in mind that the company is speaking with people because they believe that they could offer a potential solution to their challenges.

This understanding is the platform upon which the relationship with a company begins and is sustained. And ultimately, it is the cardinal rule for interview success.

Articles about how to navigate through an interview are in no short supply, but without following this first rule candidates are reducing their chances for success.

The following tips, when combined with the above understanding, will enhance the interview experience for candidates and ideally reduce the interval between interviews and making a placement. Advise candidates to:

1. Study the website and job description and write down any questions that arise.
2. During the interview, listen for the needs of the company and be ready to discuss how they can offer a solution.
3. Ask the question, “What has been your greatest difficulty filling this position?”
4. Ask for a business card(s) from the person/people interviewing them and try to agree on an appropriate timeframe for following up.
5. Offer to open their network to the organization.

Helping our candidates to cultivate these habits benefits all parties involved. Recruiters are relationship managers and solutions brokers by trade. So doesn’t it make sense to get potential employees and employers on the same page?

No matter how enthusiastic your employees are about participating in an internal movement program, they are bound to be somewhat frustrated if there aren’t a wide variety of assignments available for them to choose from. Even if you successfully excite your managers and other rotation program participants, you can’t automatically assume that they know how to identify or develop exciting assignments or rotations.

As a result, the rotation program manager needs to design a process and provide managers with a variety of suggestions and tips in order to make it easy for them to create internal movement projects, assignments, and rotations. This section highlights over 20 of the approaches that I have found to be effective in helping managers create more and better rotations.

Approaches to Help Managers Identify New Projects and Assignments

The various approaches that can help managers either identify or develop rotation projects can be classified into four broad categories that include:

1. Piggybacking off of existing business processes
2. Soliciting help from individuals and groups
3. Creating information sources and events
4. Other miscellaneous approaches

Category I — Piggybacking Off Of Existing Business Processes

The basic premise here is to take existing business processes and tools and to use them to identify potential short and medium-term projects. Some of the approaches to consider include:

A manager’s “to do” list — every manager creates some variation of a “things to do list,” so this list is a great place to start when looking for projects. Encourage managers to go over their list once a month. They should identify the things that need to be done that employees from other areas or functions might be able to carry out — things that they simply do not have the resources to complete. By providing managers with a checklist of factors for identifying potential projects, it will make it easier for them to “visualize” the projects that are most likely to help them achieve their business goals. The factor list for identifying new rotation projects should include:

• Projects related to their high-priority goals
• “Things that are not getting done” and that will likely languish without outside help
• Problems that require a relatively small number of hours to complete
• Projects that can be done by outsiders with less experience or knowledge of the function
• Projects that can be done remotely
• Assignments that require few resources or budget dollars
• Projects or assignments where “outside thinking” (that would more likely come from an outside the function person) would be most beneficial
• Planning and research-related projects that are almost always “put off” until there is adequate time to begin them

Goals, budgets, and strategic plans — managers should be periodically encouraged to review their list of yearly goals and their budget in order to identify potential problems or opportunities that might be amenable to rotation assignments. They should also be encouraged to look at plans and forecasts to identify upcoming opportunities that could be “started on” by outside individuals participating in a rotation assignment.

Converting contractor, part-time and internship projects — managers should be encouraged to periodically look at both their current and their past list of short-term projects that they have assigned to contractors, part-time individuals, or even interns. Managers should first consider reassigning some of these projects to rotatees. In addition, managers should be encouraged to look at these lists of previous projects in order to stimulate their thinking toward developing similar or even follow-up projects that can be done by current employees who need growth opportunities.

Teaching assignments — because one of the best ways to become an expert is to develop the capability for teaching others what you know, the development function should be asked to identify a number of teaching and coaching assignments each quarter for rotatees.

Category II — Soliciting Help from Individuals and Groups

Ideas and suggestions that fall under this category relate to providing direct help and support to managers.

Assignment development consultants or mentors — consider providing managers with a list of “assignment development consultants,” i.e. other managers who have volunteered to help others find and develop assignments. In my experience, most managers who have had success with job rotations are more than willing to help their peers develop similar assignments. The list might also include some individuals who have been trained to be peer mentors from the development function.

Recently developed leaders — make it an integral part of all major job rotations for the individual in the rotation to look for additional assignments both for others and for themselves. Even after the rotation assignments are complete, these individuals should be asked to continually “scout” for future opportunities for others.

Mentor suggestions — mentors throughout the organization should be asked periodically to help identify or develop rotation assignments.

Affinity groups — solicit the support of corporate affinity and diversity groups in identifying both projects and individuals that could benefit significantly from participating in the rotation program.

Corporate alumni – if your organization has a corporate alumni group, ask them to help in identifying possible rotation assignments outside the organization.

Retiree groups — if your organization has a corporate retiree group, ask them to help in identifying possible rotation assignments both inside and outside the organization.

Senior executive projects — because working directly with the CEO or with other top executives is always stimulating and exciting, these individuals should be asked to provide a targeted number of assignments each quarter.

Employee-generated projects — in many cases, the best source for identifying projects are your employees. Encourage managers to hold periodic meetings with their employees in order to educate them about the availability of “help” from individuals on develop assignments. The employee should be provided with a list of previous projects and a template to help them understand the characteristics of a great rotation assignment. Employees should also be encouraged to network with their professional contacts at other firms to identify rotation assignments that they have found to be stimulating or impactful. In addition, managers should encourage their own employees to propose their ideal departmental or external rotation assignments.

Approach top performers — use “forced-ranking,” bonus lists, or performance appraisal results to identify your organization’s top-performing managers. Approach these top performers directly and ask them to help to identify and develop rotations.

Assign interns — hire more select current college interns from college academic programs that teach leadership development and train them how to seek out possible projects and rotations.

Category III — Creating Information Sources and Events

Suggestions that fall under this category cover creating rotation-related information sources.

Provide examples of previous assignments — providing managers with a list of past successful projects can help stimulate thinking. By looking through the list they might see a project that causes them to think “I need that.” When possible, this list should also include examples of projects from other firms (especially customer firms and strategic partners) that were identified through benchmarking.

Project availability website — some firms (Whirlpool and Google are leaders here) have developed internal processes that “market” available projects on an internal website, so that internal talent can “apply” (or even bid) to work on short-term projects. An “available project” marketing process and website can stimulate managers into action by reminding them that others are actively developing project assignments. This website can also provide them with a range of project examples that they can use as a basis for developing their own.

Job rotation help website — develop an internal website designed specifically for managers that provides education and tips on how to develop stretch into teaching assignments. Include frequently asked questions and web links to help resources both within and outside the firm.

Job rotation forum — develop an online forum or listserv that allows managers to bring up issues and ask questions. Encourage managers, mentors, and leadership development experts to participate in the forum. Internal social networks “groups” can also be used to exchange ideas and questions.

Rotation wiki — provide managers with the opportunity to develop an internal “wiki” knowledge site on developing rotation assignments. A wiki, following the Wikipedia model, allows managers to build a knowledge base. This knowledge base will likely be more usable and credible, because it is built and enhanced exclusively by managers.

Characteristics of a great assignment template — in addition to a template that outlines which projects would be best for the manager, there should also be a checklist of the factors that make a project exciting to an individual employee. That checklist can be used to develop or to improve projects so that they are exciting, challenging, and attractive to employees. The rotation program should include a process for stimulating the managers’ thinking relating to the characteristics of a possible project. The characteristics that interest employees looking for growth or development were highlighted in a previous section entitled “elements of a well-designed individual job rotation” but a shorthand version of that list includes:

• The length of the project (short-term duration).
• The quality of the coworkers that you will work with.
• The amount of flexibility or input that the person accepting the assignment will have.
• The skills to be learned, especially if they are leadership, organizational, or people-managerial skills or skills that make an individual more promotable.
• The high-level contacts the individual will make.
• Whether new technologies or tools will be used.
• The visibility of the assignment in the organization.
• The impact the assignment will have on the business.

Remind managers about “always impactful” rotations — the rotation program manager should provide managers with a list of typical “always impactful” job rotations. Some of these “can’t miss” rotations include:

• Rotating overhead professionals into line functions to improve understanding and cooperation.
• Rotating technical professionals into HR in order to develop their understanding of people-management issues and people skills.
• Rotating individuals between highly interdependent business functions in order to improve communications, cooperation, and understanding.
• Rotating tactical employees into strategic planning and forecasting functions in order to improve their “big picture” vision.

Rotation development workshops — the rotation manager should design and periodically offer both face-to-face and web-based workshops in order to provide managers with help in identifying potential rotations and stretch assignments.

Category IV — Other Miscellaneous Ideas

Internal competitions — the manager of job rotations should consider setting up an internal competition to generate new projects and assignments from all of your managers, with recognition for those departments that develop the best quality and the most rotations for development. Periodically posting the success record of each manager and department might help spur their collective competitive juices.

Focus on growth departments — because departments undergoing rapid growth are the most likely to have a significant need for project help, the rotation program manager should target these departments for developing new assignments.

Rewards — one of the most effective ways of increasing the number of rotations is recognizing and rewarding managers for identifying and developing high-quality rotations and stretch assignments for employees outside of their team. Identifying and developing assignments could also be made a key bonus or promotion criteria. Quotas for each manager could be set in order to encourage them to identify and develop a targeted number of assignments and rotations each quarter.

Final Thoughts
Throughout this series of articles, I’ve attempted to highlight some of the best and emerging practices in internal movement. In a time where most companies are focusing on “building talent” rather than “buying it,” it is important that those in talent management shift their focus towards efforts that positively impact redeployment, development, and retention. “On-the-job training” has been and always will be the most effective tool for both exciting and developing workers. Now is an ideal time to revisit and update your program for creating and filling development assignments, stretch assignments, and job rotations.

• There will be no Fordyce TV this week, but we will resume again on June 30 with Jeff Kaye. However, if you are on the search and placement side of the business and weren’t able to make it to Las Vegas a few weeks ago for the third annual Fordyce Forum conference, you can still check out the slides of the presentations on our post-conference site. And save the date now, as the fourth annual Fordyce Forum will take place June 9 – 11, 2010 back in Las Vegas, so stay tuned for more info on that in the next few weeks.
• Last Monday, I and 225 of my closest friends, and thousands more at home participated in the first ever Social Recruiting Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. The event was a huge success where the discussion happened onsite, online, and throughout the social media world. Over 1200 tweets were sent out on Twitter throughout that day alone using the #socialrecruiting hashtag. If you missed any of the sessions, several of them are available here to view. Also check out this video that our chairperson Susan Burns and ERE’s production manager Brendan Shields put together on the Evolution of Recruiting.
• Remember, you can meet and network with others in the recruiting industry not just on our own community site, but also through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
• Time is running out to secure the early bird discount for ERE Expo 2009 Fall taking place in Hollywood, FL from September 9 – 11. Make sure you register by July 3 to receive the $300 early bird discount, and if you are an ERE subscriber, make sure to use product code FL09ERE to save an additional $200. The agenda features over 20 speakers touching on topics such as social recruiting, onboarding, metrics, employer branding and much more. View the full agenda here or download the conference brochure.
• There are currently over 15 recruiting positions posted in the past week on erejobs. If you are looking for your next opportunity, activity has been picking up on the board over the past few weeks so make sure to check the site regularly, or you can also follow @recruiting_jobs on Twitter. And if you are looking to add to your team, remember that 30 day postings are only $25 through August 1, so post your recruiting and HR positions today.

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

He sued under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which,  like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, prohibits discrimination, but which, unlike Title VII, hasn’t received the same attention from Congress over the years.

Gross won $47,000 from an Iowa jury. The verdict was upheld on appeal. But Thursday, in a historic employment decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the lower courts in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, declaring that it is up to plaintiffs to prove age bias was the reason for an adverse action against them by an employer.

The court’s decision throws out a long-standing rule by which an employee could prevail on an age bias claim if they could prove age was a factor, even if it wasn’t the only one. Once the employee plaintiff established that with evidence, it was up to the employer to show a legitimate reason for taking the action it did.

These so-called “mixed motive” cases reflect such real-world situations as where layoffs fall disproportionally on older workers who tend to have higher pay than younger workers. In that kind of case, replacing older workers with younger ones may be one of multiple reasons considered by the employer. To make a bias case, however, a dismissed worker previously needed only to show that age discrimination was a part of the decision. That shifted the legal burden to the employer who then needed to show that the decision — in this example a layoff — would have been handled the same way regardless of worker age.

The Supreme Court ruling, written by Clarence Thomas and decided on a 5-4 vote, invalidates this two-step process — shifting the burden of proof — and places the entire burden of proof on the employee.

“The burden of persuasion does not shift to the employer even when a plaintiff has produced some evidence that age was one motivating factor in that decision,” Thomas writes in his decision.

Congress amended Title VII when a similar court decision threatened to derail protection against race, religion, and other forms of discrimination. Age protection is not part of Title VII, but was enacted in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and was not affected by the Title VII amendments.

That point was made in the majority decision. “Unlike Title VII, the ADEA’s text does not provide that a plaintiff may establish discrimination by showing that age was simply a motivating factor,” Thomas writes in the opinion. “We cannot ignore Congress’ decision to amend Title VII’s relevant provisions but not to make similar changes to the ADEA.”

Advocacy groups such as the AARP were quick to denounce the opinion and called on Congress to overrule it with legislation.  Business groups, on the other hand, hailed the decision. Without it, said the National Federation of Independent Business, employers would have been subjected “to countless allegations of discrimination.”

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito joined Thomas in the majority. Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John Paul Stephens dissented.

Foreshadowing the Firefighter Case?

The split, along ideological lines, is a possible foreshadowing of the pending decision in Ricci v. DeStafano, the case of the New Haven firefighters who lost a chance at promotion when their civil service promotional test results were invalidated.

In that case (story here), not one black firefighter scored high enough to be considered for promotion, while 18 of the top 20 scorers were white; two were Latino. The Civil Service Board in New Haven, Connecticut, which conducted the test, refused to certify the results, meaning no promotions were given. The basis for that decision lies in the disparate impact test of Title VII.

While in the Gross v. FBL Financial Services case the issue was age discrimination and the ADEA, the court’s conservatives have leaned toward making discrimination harder to establish. The Gross decision continues that trend and suggests Ricci could be decided in favor of the firefighters by the same 5-4 majority.

Of course, that’s just tea-leaf reading. The court has other options, including sending the case back to a lower court with specific instructions, should it wish to duck a decision in that emotionally charged case, complicated now by the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. She was one of three judges to sign off on the two-paragraph appeals court decision upholding the lower court’s ruling in favor of New Haven.

If you missed any of the sessions, several of them have been archived here.

Also check out this video put together by our chairperson Susan Burns and ERE’s Production Manager Brendan Shields, which kicked off the summit. The video tracks the evolution of the recruiting profession and the tools available to our industry from its primitive beginning to where we now stand. We don’t know what’s next, but we do know it isn’t too far away.

More than two-thirds of the working fathers with kids younger than 18 at home say they would prefer to work even if the family could afford to have them be Mr. Mom. If you prefer to see the bottle as half-full, here’s the other side: 31 percent of the dads surveyed by CareerBuilder say they would quit their jobs to stay home if they could.

Sounds almost progressive, yes? It would be if the percentages weren’t going down. In 2005, CareerBuilder found 49 percent of the dads willing to stay home. When the survey was repeated last year, the number had gone to 37 percent.

It’s possible economic uncertainty can be blamed for dads preferring to stay on the job instead of in the house. The survey doesn’t try to explain the decline, but it offers some hints. For instance, three-in-ten working fathers bring work home at least once a week, up from the 2008 survey when 25 percent reported doing that.

Perhaps a more telling stat is that 53 percent of dads say they spend less than two hours a day with the kids. That includes the 14 percent who say they spend an hour or less. No wonder, therefore, that half the surveyed dads admitted missing at least one significant event in their child’s life during the year because of work; 28 percent have missed more than three. Even Homer Simpson doesn’t do that.

“Many working dads have to contend with heavier workloads and longer hours as businesses struggle to do more with less,” says Jason Ferrara, senior career adviser at CareerBuilder and father of two. “It’s important to have a conversation with your supervisor. Employers are placing more emphasis on work/life balance through creative benefits that encourage employees to better manage their personal and professional commitments. However, nearly half of working dads do not take advantage of any flexible work arrangements offered to them.”

There is a bright spot in the survey. Though the number of dads willing to take a pay cut to spend more time with the family has dropped by 20 percent in a year, 30 percent of the surveyed fathers say they’d take a cut; 40 percent of them would accept a 10 percent cut.

CareerBuilder surveyed only working men. But what happens to the gender roles when dad is suddenly unemployed? The New York Times said this back in February:

“When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV, and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.”

Feeling guilty? Need some help? There are plenty of resources to help dads with that work/life thing. You could start here.

Meanwhile, what are the takeaways from the CareerBuilder survey?

Ties and dress shirts may be more welcome this Father’s Day than in the past. And moms can still be counted on when dad is wherever.

For you who have created social networks, what do you do to drive activity and success on your networks?

I recently asked that question over on LinkedIn. Let’s put the answers I got in groups, and talk a bit about them.

Participate in the conversation; follow up; create momentum; show up
Stay active and have a deep commitment

One respondent remarked, “You can stay ahead of 90% of the people by just showing up.” That’s the truth.

Make no mistake about it: creating and running a “social” network is work. It’s an everyday commitment; of the million or so Ning “social” groups (Ning is an online service that allows anyone to create, customize, and share a social network) that have been created on that network over the last year, about 80% of them are inactive or abandoned. This is partly because about one million of the platform’s 25,000,000 or so members one day got this hare-brained idea to create a network that, for some, was going to make them rich.

When the money didn’t emerge during the first week, they lost interest. Their commitment vaporized as their disappointment ballooned. Instant gratification rarely occurs on these networks and it takes a tremendous amount of blood, sweat, and toil to get these organizations up and running, and then another Herculean push to make them profitable. They’re processes, not events. Many failed because their creators did not understand on the front-end that in order to be profitable you may have to spend startup company hours on the site to make it happen. You have to show up — consistently — every day, and yes, even on weekends.

Be a psychologist
Strike nerves
Listen, a lot

Recruiting Animal says that playing a psychologist is ridiculous and dilutes the class purpose; I say it isn’t so. Phone sourcing is very much about understanding the human nature of the caller and the recipient of the call. These days, as troubled as people are about what’s happening in the world, a forum in which they can express themselves, ask questions, and have them answered (sometimes anonymously) goes a great deal toward helping people.

My followers have told me that there’s a great sense of relief knowing that they’re not alone in this historic downturn. When the economy rebounds, these people will remember and feel some commitment toward the sites and the people who run these sites. So in some sense of the concept, yes, the doctor is in.

Give up control; let others help you
Give back with advice, support, opinion, shared knowledge
Be honest and authentic
Be consistent with tone and messaging

People hear it immediately when you’re sending messages that are nothing but self-serving. Hey, I’m the Queen of Self-Serving, I know. I have to be — I’m self-employed.

But I like to think that I deliver enough value that my readers roll their eyes, chuckle, and pass over my not-so-subtle pleas to buy my stuff for the good center-of-the-plate content. Yet try as I do, I have some trouble with the giving-up-control portion; it’s hard for me, and I have to work on it.

I think I may have a trust issue — as in, I only trust myself to take care of me — but I realize that to be successful in this thing called social/business media, you need to place your trust in others. It is paradoxical then that during this economic downturn, some social media users are in fact placing their blind trust in others but you have to be smart about it. You have to know who and when to believe — including yourself.

Make membership in the community viral; strive for a critical mass for sustainability and autonomy
Reward contributors
Twitter new content
We are engaged but many business people are not

Many of us who run these networks lose sight of the fact that the majority of our target audience doesn’t have the foggiest idea we exist, or that networks like ours exist at all. No kidding. It’s easy to adopt a center-of-the-universe mentality when much of your waking and what could be sleeping hours are consumed with monitoring your sites, tweaking them almost beyond recognition and, all in all, being obsessed with driving your “numbers.”

Numbers are important, but not nearly as important as the “active” numbers who show up and participate on your site. Participation can take a number of forms — they may be “readers” who come for the content, they may be contributors who religiously bring content to share with others, or they may be gadflies who come to look around, land on a subject and then seek to create controversy. Many times gadflies are creating their own brands in the process, and that’s okay. I love these types: they’re the ones who drive traffic, in my opinion, and are fun to watch in action and help to, as my friend Steve Levy reminds me, “make life worth living.” In the future, I believe these last two types are going to be highly rewarded.

Highly focused niches = higher values
E-mail list of members at least once a month
Host a private, invitation-only event in a different city each month
Let other networks know you exist
Create content that is valuable to the target audience

This is interesting to me because I believe as “social” media evolves, tightly focused communities are going to deliver greater and greater values to their members. I think those are the ones to watch. Here on ERE I think the groups are true and reflective subsets of the community and I also think if communities like ERE would allow group moderators access to their own group members, much greater viability could emerge from them. Active group moderators would have more freedom to do many of the things listed above. This kind of hearkens back up to the “Give up control — let others help you” advice, doesn’t it?

The one above that says “Host a private, invitation-only event in a different city each month” is interesting. The transition from online to in-person seems to happen these days, as friendships that started online “evolve” into flesh-and-bone meetings that have the opportunity to evolve further into deeper relationships. This does not rule out the fact that online relationships can remain valuable and meaningful and evolve just like as these in-person meet-ups. It’s a new and emerging phenomenon in our society, but I see nothing wrong with people meeting one-on-one if that’s their cup of tea. But I also see nothing wrong with people keeping things online, especially for business. A handshake can be delivered either way for skillful marketers.

Become an advocate/evangelist
Nurture it like a garden

If you do many of the things listed above, your “brand” will emerge. After all, as we were talking about earlier, isn’t that exactly what you want from all this time you spend on these “social” networks? I love the garden-tending advice. That’s exactly what it is: a network is a garden that must be planted, sprinkled, fertilized, watered, flooded once or so a season, hoed, weeded, sprinkled again, hoed some more, hoed, hoed, and hoed. If you do all those things, your “produce” will be bountiful. But it takes time. A seed doesn’t pop up overnight.