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“It’s a really unique situation where you have someone who is at a crossroads personally and professionally.” — Elliot Wilson

If living and working in this economy of disappearing jobs, tiny budgets, and little recruiting is getting a bit old, then perhaps you have arrived at your own personal crossroads. This metaphorical location is the intersecting point where what used to work for you in the past ends and what you will need to change in order to be successful in the future begins. As I see it, you have only two options:

1. You can continue to do what you are doing and wait for the economy to “get back to normal.”
2. You can make some fundamental changes to your core assumptions of how businesses that survive will operate so you might survive as well.

Personally, I have grave concerns about Option 1 because no one knows exactly what the new “normal” might be, and for all we know, this aberration might be the new “normal” and will remain such for years to come. If you share my concerns, please consider the following thoughts: keep reading…

Talk about win-win. There’s a job networking event tonight in San Francisco where everyone comes away with at least a new pair of designer jeans.

!IT Jeans is giving away jeans that retail for around $65-$70 a pair to everyone who shows up with proof they’re unemployed and proof they tweeted or posted to Facebook about the event at Lime, a retro-60s restaurant and bar in San Francisco’s hip Castro district.

With the jeans carrying names like “Hottie,” “Industry,” “Dream Diva,” and “Studio,” don’t expect to see any resume-carrying, tie-wearing, business-suited, job-seeking mid-managers at this event. But it also doesn’t look to be just a group of 20- and 30-year-olds surprised to be out of work. Judging by the profiles on the MeetUp site that the Bay Area Job Seekers & Professionals Looking to Network group calls home, there’s a curious mix of talent coming to make contacts and learn how to get into consulting, which is the theme of the evnt.

According to the description, “This event will also focus around the theme of ‘Creating your Consulting Career,’ which simply put, means how to focus your job search efforts on consulting positions instead of permanent positions.”

One of the sponsors of the networking event, the MeetUp group is organized by Mark Thomas, CEO of the equally curious job site, WorkYourCareer. It’s a sort of job board that incorporates classic job postings with an interview auction. Participants apply for a job in the usual way, with one exception: neither application nor resume may carry contact information. If an employer shows interest, the job seeker is invited to bid for an interview. The top bid gets the pick of interview time, with other bidders winning slots until they’re filled.

And yes, the job seeker must pay; most credit cards are accepted.

Thomas, whom we couldn’t reach, also has MoneyBackJobs.com. Pointing back to WorkYourCareer, it seems to have faded with the recession. Its business concept, though, is similar to the many bounty programs that have been tried over the years. Job seekers who accept a job with an employer participating in the MoneyBackJobs program get paid between 4 and 10 percent after 30 days on the job. There are some hoops they have to go through, but the concept is fundamentally bounty.

Tonight’s event, however, is free and open to all job seeking members of the MeetUp group or co-sponsors Pinkslipmixers.com and Slipsquad.com, both of them national networking groups for the laid-off and unemployed. Recruiters from IKON, LOLApps, Jobspring Partners, and Magley & Associates are expected, says Slipsquad.

(Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1, Part II, and Part III. Next week, installment five of this series will address tools and tips you can use to improve your job rotation program.)

This series of articles started out listing the pain points that many organizations are experiencing today as a result of rotation-based development initiatives rooted in history and antiquated by Henry Ford’s standard.

It then progressed into program goals and key elements that characterize more modern second-generation programs under development. Last week’s installment explored the many program variations that are expanding the scope of rotation programs, making them more relevant as tools capable of addressing retention, motivation, and productivity improvement.

This week’s installment looks at emerging best practices and program metrics that can be used to assess your program’s performance.

Best Practices in Job Rotations and Internal Movement

Over the years, many firms have used job rotations in a variety of formats.

The most famous firm that has used internal movement for development is General Electric, but other firms have developed some best practices that can also provide learning.

keep reading…

One of the largest employers in the world has embraced cloud computing for HR in a way so big that Siemens AG will have one of the largest, if not the largest, enterprise cloud computing deployments in the world.

The lucky beneficiary of the German electronics and electrical engineering giant’s decision to replace its multiple talent systems globally is SuccessFactors, which will see most of its performance and talent management modules deployed to Siemens’ 430,000 employees in 80 countries and 20 languages.

Dr. Norbert Kleinjohann, head of corporate information technology for Siemens, says in the press release announcing the deal, “The enterprise cloud computing business model is a strategic direction for us. It not only lowers IT costs, and creates faster end-to-end processes, but can also grow with our requirements both globally and locally.”

SuccessFactors says the Siemens deployment will include its compensation, goal, performance, and recruiting management, career development planning, variable pay, and succession planning tools. SuccessFactors willl replace Siemens’ existing multiple talent systems globally. keep reading…

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

• There will be no Fordyce TV this week as the Fordyce Letter team will be in Las Vegas for the third annual Fordyce Forum conference. If you are in the area and interested in coming by, drop me a line. The conference takes place from Wednesday to Friday at the brand new M Resort Hotel.
• On Thursday at 2:00 p.m. ET, sign up for this week’s free ERE webinar: Social Networking – The Future of Your Recruitment Strategy, led by Susan Burns. This webinar will provide you with an approach to crafting a world-class recruiting strategy to guide your organization and strengthen your competitiveness for talent – today and tomorrow!
• Susan will then be traveling out to California next Monday, June 15 to serve as the chairperson to the first ever Social Recruiting Summit. While the event is sold out, make sure to clear your calendar as the summit will be live streaming online, both here on ERE.net and SocialRecruitingSummit.com.The event kicks off at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET with the opening address led by LinkedIn’s Co-Founder & CEO Reid Hoffman. Check out the full agenda here.
• Last week, we finalized the acquisition of Jobboarders.com in partnership with Jason Davis. Jobboarders is a great online community made up of over 1,200 members who work in the online job board industry. Read some more about this exciting acquisition in my post from last week.
• If living and working in this economy of disappearing jobs, tiny budgets, and little recruiting is getting a bit old, Howard Adamsky will have some suggestions for you on Tuesday.
• There are 8 new recruiter job postings on jobs.ere.net over the past week. Remember you can follow new opportunities on Twitter with @recruiting_jobs. And job postings are only $25 through August 1!
• We just added a new speaker to the ERE Expo 2009 Fall conference agenda, Richard Hamilton from Fluor, who will join others like the EEOC, Adidas, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, American Cancer Society, Fifth Third Bank, and many more on this year’s speaker faculty. Make sure to sign up by July 3 to secure your early bird rate, and if you didn’t get my email about a special ERE subscriber rate, let me know and I will send you the information.

If you have any other questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. Have a great week!

You know by now the passion we have at ERE about creating online communities that add value to the professional lives of recruiters. In addition, I try and participate and keep up with the many of the other valuable communities which exist in our space.

One of those that I have followed and supported as a sponsor for the past few years was Jobboarders. Started back in 2007 by job board consultant Chris Russell, Jobboarders has grown into a community of over 1,200 members which offers a lot of value to those in the job board industry.

So when the opportunity to purchase the community was presented to us by our friend Jason Davis, we jumped on it. Together with Jason, who will bring his enthusiasm and expertise in building communities, we are excited to have the opportunity to take Jobboarders to the next level.

For those of you who already participate in the Jobboarders community, you won’t see any drastic changes. So if you work for a job board, check out all that is offered over at Jobboarders.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics surprised economists when it reported that job losses in May slowed dramatically over the previous months. The 345,000 job loss was the lowest since September and about half the rate of the previous six months.

The number was 180,000 less than a Dow Jones Newswires survey of economists predicted. It was also significantly less than the 565,000 jobs Wanted Technologies said were lost in May.

Stocks rallied on the news immediately after the market opened, but turned negative in part the Associated Press reported, on a rumor that the government’s job loss number was wrong. The Labor Department said the numbers are correct.

Despite the encouraging job loss numbers, the BLS report showed the unemployment rate rose to 9.4 percent, a little higher than had been expected. The rate, up half a point over April, grew the number of people out of work by 787,000. Officially, 14.5 million people were unemployed in May. Of that number, 21 percent have been out of work for 15 or more weeks. These long-term unemployed, as the government calls them, have now reached 4.5 percent of the entire U.S. workforce, a percentage not seen in the 51 years the data has been collected.

“There is pretty good evidence that the recession is bottoming,” Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist of ChannelCapitalResearch.com, told the AP. “The real question is the type of recovery. Just because we’re reaching a bottom doesn’t mean a bounce is imminent.” keep reading…

If you’re like some corporate recruiting leaders before the current downturn hit, you had your staff balanced with a solid mix of regular full-time staff, supplemented with contract staff to get you through the hiring peaks.

But maybe you weren’t quite as fortunate, and your crew was heavily loaded with regular staff recruiters, who were going full steam to keep up with the incredible hiring requisition load. Or maybe you have shed the contractors, but even your remaining staff is struggling to stay busy. Unfortunately, now that the economy has gone south, they’re running half the req loads they once did. Not only are they questioning their own job security, but you’re constantly fending off queries from your boss, the rest of HR, and maybe even the CFO as to just what the recruiters are doing, and why should you be maintaining the same staff you had when the current workload has shrunken so dramatically. Sounding familiar?

Hopefully, back in January of this year, you took Lou Adler’s sound advice that “hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.” Perhaps you’ve done just that, and are now well positioned to address any coming business increase. Or possibly you didn’t get that opportunity, or your business still hasn’t begun to bounce back.

In any event, you do have alternatives — methods you can use to gainfully deploy your staff resources in ways that clearly, and measurably, demonstrate their ongoing value to the business. The challenges will be different, depending on the size of the company you’re in. In a small firm, you are likely to have more latitude in initiating change — but possibly fewer resources available. In a larger firm with more resources, you are likely to need to build a support coalition of colleagues, business partners, or executives to create the right atmosphere for change. But in either situation, it’s critical that you build the “business case” — show the ROI through well-tracked and supportable metrics.

In my more than 20 years of recruiting leadership, predominantly in hi-tech, I’ve had ample opportunity to face this challenge, given the cyclical nature of that business. And as you can imagine, I willingly responded to a blog posting earlier this year asking other recruiting veterans for their experiences in facing the same issue. 13 of us shared our stories, from a variety of industries and backgrounds. The following are a few snapshots of some of the proven practices and strategies that have been successfully implemented by others to preserve their key recruiting assets during previous business slowdowns.

Some of these are creative twists on previous themes, while others represent really out-of-the-box thinking. [NOTE: All of them are predicated on the assumption that you know your staff --- their skills, strengths/weaknesses, and backgrounds. If you're new in the role, you might want to begin with a resume review and light career discussion with each of them.]

I do hope you find some of the suggestions below fascinating, creative, and useful. I will be presenting a seminar/workshop on this very subject, and with a lot of additional detail on implementation, at the upcoming ERE Expo in Florida in September, and we’d love to see you there. keep reading…

Our recruiting team has been examining its existing processes. This evaluation discovered that even though a firm foundation existed, each recruiter managed the recruiting life cycle differently. With this realization, each recruiter was charged with blueprinting their individual process. They presented their findings and through a collaborative workshop, developed a uniform recruiting workflow that created standardization at each critical recruiting touch-point. They also focused on increasing and improving dialogue with the hiring managers.

The impact of these changes, which I’m writing about in the July/August issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, resulted in the team’s ability to deliver a consistent and recognizable recruiting experience, facilitate increased communication opportunities with hiring managers regarding their position/candidate status, deliver a consistent approach from which accurate and objective metrics can be applied, and allow for dynamic job postings (which increase candidate interest more than standard static postings).

With the process reengineered and hiring managers fully engaged, the recruiting team had a better understanding of the positions they were working on and are able to more quickly respond to the managers’ needs. This positioning allowed for the final phase of the process improvement effort: pipelining talent. With a better understanding of our business owners’ needs and a process that dramatically shortened our time to fill, the recruiters were able to become proactive instead of reactive. keep reading…

Experienced companies with HR and IT professionals who have been through a system acquisition process before probably won’t find much help at CompareHRIS. But for the thousands of companies whose employee management system consists of file folders and outsourced payroll, the site is as good a place as any to start when the time comes to upgrade.

Industry consultants may beat up on us for saying that, since the process of identifying company needs and finding and evaluating vendors is, or should be, far more complicated than checking off a couple dozen boxes. But, as the saying goes, when you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.

That’s what we like about CompareHRIS; it’s a starting place for those who don’t know where the trailhead is. keep reading…

A little over a month ago, I announced the launch of ERE.net’s new community. Since then, we’ve received a lot of great feedback on how we can make a good thing even better, and I wanted to share a couple of the new things we’ve been working on.

One of our goals with the new community is to reach out to the entire recruiting profession to participate in our conversation, not just those who visit the website each day. (Don’t worry — we’ll always love you best!) To that end, we’ve opened up the conversations on ERE.net in a couple of new ways. keep reading…

What makes a good candidate different from a bad one? What defines a high quality candidate? I can’t count the conversations I have had with recruiters on these questions, and few have had answers.

For as long as I can remember, recruiters have focused on cost as the primary measure of their effectiveness and value to the organization. The most popular recruiting metric has been cost-per-hire, and recruiting functions justify their existence by showing how much less expensive they are than an outsourced solution.

This, however, has begun to change. keep reading…

Sometime this month, perhaps even today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down a ruling with potentially far-reaching implications for employers.

So much has been reported and written about the case of Ricci v. DeStafano that it’s almost impossible to have missed the story of how 20 New Haven, Conn. firefighters were denied  promotions although they came out on top in civil service tests for lieutenant and captain. Eighteen of the top scorers were white; two Latino. None were black, although the city is 37 percent black and blacks made up 30 percent of the fire department in 2003, when the test was given.

When the city’s Civil Service Board got the results, it feared certifying the test would expose the city to a Civil Rights lawsuit on the basis that the test had a disparate impact on a protected minority. But not certifying the results meant an almost certain lawsuit from the successful candidates who might claim, as they later did, that they had been discriminated against based on their race. A part of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to “alter the results of, employment related tests on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.“

The Morton’s Fork faced by the board was underscored by its 2-2 vote on certification, an outcome that meant the test results were not certified. keep reading…

Hiring salespeople from the competition always seems like a no-brainer, but there are many pitfalls with this hiring strategy.

Life would be grand if we could sprinkle a few seeds in the ground, fertilize, add water … and a great salesperson would sprout. This is truly a pipedream, but one often pursued by small business owners and sales management executives in their quest to find great sales talent. Rather than grow their own, they attempt to steal the crops from their competitors. Why not — their competitor is much better at growing a sales organization than they are. They will grab some magic from their competitor’s land and they too can enjoy great success.

When did the competition begin building a better sales organization than your company? Before you harvest their crop, consider these five myths when hiring your competitor’s salespeople. keep reading…

Robert Johnson, Morningstar’s associate director of economic analysis, talks about whether the economy really is improving, when unemployment may peak, the U.S. government’s economic stimulus package, wages, raises, and more. keep reading…

Just because, Eric Shannon is launching JustJobs today.

It’s a jobs search engine in the vein of an Indeed and SimplyHired, though Shannon will insist, with some justification, that it’s not just another clone. Instead, if you notice similarities to Craigslist, that would please him.

“I’ve been a fan for many years,” says the founder and president of LatPro. “It’s simple.” keep reading…

New logo

Kenexa

Here’s a math teaser for you: i X e = s. Solve for “s.” The answer is success, which is what Kenexa promises from its solutions that multiply the individual by the environment.

Like math or not, you’ll be seeing that formula wherever you see Kenexa since it’s a key ingredient of the HR software company’s rebranding.

In a press release today, the company says, “The formula will be rolled out in the company’s website, collateral, and other materials. Kenexa has also unveiled a modern corporate logo that reinforces its new look and feel, and emphasizes the “X” in the formula. The new logo is reinforced by the tag line: ‘HR Success Multiplied.’”

The old and new Kenexa logos are shown here. And if you want even more, check out the company’s new print ads. You can ignore the pop-up box unless you want to provide your info.

TweetMyJobs

Barely five months old, this Twitter-based job service is hitting on all cylinders. Besides thousands of job channels that tweet and retweet jobs fitting an industry and an geography, TweetMyJobs actually has a modest business model charging as little as 99 cents to send a job posting to specific job channel followers. Recruiters can also get resume tweets if they choose, and anyone can follow the general message group.

Now comes TweetMark, a cool service that lets an employer incorporate a brand with their tweet. For $99 a year — free until the end of June — a company gets a custom Twitter page that incorporates its logo or whatever branding message it chooses. When a job is tweeted to the appropriate job channel, the branding element gets incorporated with the 140-character text and appears on the recipient’s device.

Thought you couldn’t get images with Twitter? So did we. But TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski is clever enough to have figured out a work-around. Here’s his explanation: “The logo is not in the tweet, but since it’ll be tweeted on the custom Job Channel, it will be associated to the tweet by default.”

OneWire

Startups, especially job board and candidate matching startups, don’t usually launch ad campaigns that involve TV and radio. A little SEO, some keyword buys, and maybe a press release or two. But OneWire is making a bigger splash with a commercial that’s supposed to be launching today in New York City and a few other major, east coast financial centers.

OneWire, you may recall from our earlier post, is a job matching service for the finance sector. It works on brute force, getting as granular in its data collection as asking for GPA scores, and details about the specific size and reach of the deals an experienced financier handled or an analyst covered.

OneWire is the product of F.S. von Stade & Associates and its founder and president F. Skiddy von Stade. FSvS is one of the leading search firms for the finance industry.

HighFlyer

Speaking of job boards, this one’s a bona fide job board and the latest of the ever-expanding number of ever-so-hopeful challengers to the Monster and CareerBuilders of the world. Now a new job board launch is hardly big news. In fact, it barely qualifies as news at all. But with a seven-day Bermuda vacation as a come-on to job seekers to register, what’s to lose? Especially since the site practically swears that registration will take under a minute. (The press release announcing the launch actually says it will take less than 30 seconds.)

The bad news for job seekers is that we only found nine jobs on the site.

Buy a Domain

That may be a clue as to the decision behind the UK’s Employ Holdings Ltd. to abandon its plan for a network of U.S. job boards under the “Employ” banner. How do we know the UK job board operator has given up its U.S. hopes? Because it wants us to help it auction off its stock of employ-related domain names. These are such exciting names as EmployCaterers.com, Employlabor.com, and EmployConstruction.com. (Don’t bother clicking into them, they’re all parked addresses.)

Scott Taylor, director of Employ Holdings, emailed us saying, “My company was planning to tackle the USA online Digital Recruitment Marketplace in 2010 to capitalize on the economic recovery and establish ourselves throughout the USA, however as we have various projects underway it has been decided that we are best served concentrating on the UK and European markets at this point in time.”

You can contact him if you’re interested in buying the package — which is the way they’d rather dispose of the 40-odd domain group. If you bid, keep in mind that dot-com addresses for job boards may not be worth a whole lot. Especially once Employ Media starts selling dot-jobs addresses.

ERE’s CEO, David Manaster, recently caught up with Ted Elliott of Jobscience, a proud sponsor of the upcoming Social Recruiting Summit. Elliott, the CEO of Jobscience, took some time with us to discuss the increasing importance of social recruiting, what Jobscience is doing to take advantage of these trends, and how they are utilizing tools such as the iPhone to revolutionize candidate relationship management. Watch the interview below to learn more and don’t forget to watch our live stream of the Social Recruiting Summit on June 15th!

Follow Jobscience on Twitter

Follow the Social Recruiting Summit on Twitter

keep reading…

There’s good news on this, the first day of June. The Conference Board reports this morning that online job postings rose last month by the largest amount in more than two years. It’s the first increase in the Help-Wanted Online Data Series in six months.

In May, there were 250,000 more jobs posted online than in April. The 8 percent increase brought the number of advertised jobs online to 3,367,000. Though modest, the increase dwarfs the 21,000 job posting gain The Conference Board reported in October 2008.

“The May bounce in labor demand is a very welcome sign,” said Gad Levanon, senior economist at The Conference Board. “Labor demand typically leads the trend in both employment and unemployment, so positive signals on labor demand are always important.”

While some of The Conference Board’s four U.S. regions showed more improvement than others, all had more online jobs advertised in May than in April. This extended to the state level where 43 states had more jobs. keep reading…

(Editor’s note: This is Part III in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1 and Part II; next week in the conclusion to the series, look for best practices and program metrics.)

When corporate revenues are down or stagnant, talent managers typically shift their focus away from volume hiring to developing and improving existing employees.

Executives are always challenged to make the correct “buy or build” decision, but when hiring is frozen, organizations must place an increased emphasis on internal movement and job rotations to close critical gaps in talent supply and demand.

Unfortunately, many rotation programs are doomed from the start to produce mediocre results, because they employ a “one-size-fits-all” model that guarantees lower program participation rates.

As with most products and services, offering different program variations makes it more likely that your target employees will find a job rotation that fits their needs as well as the organization’s. Since the war for talent began more than a decade ago, the type of job rotation formats have expanded dramatically. It’s important to be aware of the various development opportunities available and the benefits and risks associated with each.

Here is a list of 26 different types of internal movements to consider.

Obviously, not every firm can offer employees all of these options, but it is not uncommon to develop programs that incorporate a handful.

keep reading…