ERE.net

Monster lost money in the 2nd quarter of the year, but by so small an amount it was mostly ignored by after hours traders, who bid up shares by 2 cents following a guardedly optimistic conference call with analysts.

Reporting Monster lost $1.4 million loss on $223 million in revenue, CEO Sal Iannuzzi said he was nonetheless “cautiously optimistic” about the job market. While he discounted any notion of a quick recovery, he told analysts on the financial call, “We are seeing encouraging signs of stabilization.”

Speaking of the company’s customers, he said they seem to be turning away from further job cuts and there’s even some signs of increased recruiting activity. keep reading…

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. –Parker

The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be happy as kings; and you know how happy kings are. –Thurber

I am not sure of why, but many recruiters I know are not very good with money, myself included. Perhaps it’s the stress of the business or our belief that we can always make more that allows us to use money as a balm to soothe our aching souls. This is unfortunate because there is nothing less valuable then money you have just spent. (Honestly, which first-year agency person does not have his Porsche picked out?)

The following ideas can preserve precious resources and give you a sense of control and dominion in these difficult times. This list is by no means comprehensive but it is good starting point in terms of employing the belief that a penny saved really is a penny earned. If you try to do this and it is not painful, you are not trying hard enough. keep reading…

As a (once and future) corporate recruiter “actively looking for his next opportunity,” (translation: unemployed and hitting refresh on Indeed.com), I’ve had the opportunity, for the first time in my career, to experience life across the desk, as one of the unwashed masses yearning to breathe free.

Interesting paradigm shifts have occurred. An interview has gone from a job function to an event worthy of a phone call to mom; I no longer screen my calls, and in fact, am excited when the phone rings; and, of course, the worst of it all: I’ve become the target of a billion-dollar industry of profiteers who promise to give my search the winning edge, but they’re no longer contingency recruiters on biz dev calls. That, at least, would represent a career opportunity.

Let me be clear: I actually admire those who have figured out a way to monetize providing services to the unemployed. Most marketers would probably, conducting a SWOT analysis, point to the fact that categorically, those without jobs who are “actively looking” likely lack disposable income. But, you see, that’s capitalism in action.

Perhaps the most common service offered is professional resume writing. These services promise that, for anywhere between 400 and 800 dollars, a professional resume writer will not only critique your resume, but also work with you to create a resume guaranteed to “break through the clutter” by using better verbs to craft the “story of your career.” Corporate recruiters, apparently, have very strict guidelines for formatting on a resume, and a secret code known only to them and somehow cracked by the Professional Resume Writer’s Association. I must have missed that workshop at ERE, but I suppose so too did a lot of my colleagues, who I have seen commit such violations to code as cut and pasting resumes off of Monster into Word or forwarding horrifically misformatted LinkedIn profiles to hiring managers.

Since there seems to be an interesting amount of conspiracy theory around how recruiters read resumes (if they do at all, since apparently, talent acquisition systems are to candidates what the Meadowlands are to Jimmy Hoffa), I hope to add to the body of knowledge and present, from first-hand observation, how recruiters read resumes. And we do. Hundreds of them, every day, but there’s a method to our madness: overstaffed, overworked, we’ve developed a short-hand to get through that resume. It involves a few simple steps. keep reading…

It could be an uncomfortable 60 minutes tomorrow for Monster‘s CEO when he presents the company’s 2nd quarter numbers during a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

Yahoo Finance says analysts are expecting Monster to earn a penny a share on revenues of about $225 million. Last year for the same quarter, the company had sales of $354.3 million. In the first quarter of this year, Monster had a loss.

I have no particular insight on what the revenue and expense numbers will be. Instead, I’m looking at traffic numbers released by comScore the other day that show Monster’s job audience grew 6 percent in the 12 months since June 2008. Meanwhile, the number of Americans visiting all career services and development sites grew 10 percent.

That means Monster captured only 60 percent of the category’s growth. CareerBuilder, the leading job board by traffic and North American revenue, saw its traffic decline by 1 percent. Among the big three general job boards in the U.S., only Yahoo’s HotJobs bested the category growth, growing at a brisk 23 percent.

However, the clear winner among the top 10 most trafficked sites is Indeed.com, which grew at a blistering 59 percent. The job search engine now ranks fourth among the most trafficked job sites, according to comScore.

At the other end, and surprisingly still among the top 10 sites, is Brassring.com. Traffic there dropped 11 percent over the year, a not-surprising turn considering the site became a job board for Kenexa since its acquisition by the HR software firm at the end of 2006. What is surprising is that the site still gets 2 million unique visitors a month.

Monster’s traffic growth is particularly troubling for the company, which relaunched the site in January with a big marketing push, including, in February, its first Super Bowl commercials since 2004. Much of Monster’s first quarter loss — some $27 million — was attributed to the big marketing push.

CEO Sal Iannuzzi told analysts when the 1st quarter numbers were released that the millions spent on marketing were already showing results. “We are gaining market share,” Iannuzzi declared. “We are declining less than the competition.” keep reading…

This recession has been merciless to recruiters. I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotal evidence indicates that thousands of recruiters have been laid off and that hundreds of recruiting agencies have closed their doors.

Sometimes the recruiters who been laid off have just been unlucky enough to have worked for an organization that is failing or in an industry that has been strongly affected by the recession. Yet, others have been laid off partly because of performance or attitude. Many recruiters remain tactical, and fail to grasp how strategic their function is to a firm. Many have remained working for leaders and organizations that do not appreciate how much they could contribute to the success of the business. And even fewer have become leaders who take command of the recruiting process and forge a function that competes effectively against other organizations and consistently supplies their organization with quality talent without relying on the use of extraordinary measures.

In my many years in the profession I have only known a handful of these people. Most corporate recruiters become recruiters by accident and leave the profession for some other HR or related field after a short stay. Their stay is a roller coaster of half-completed technology implementations, high staff turnover, muddled objectives, and often leaves a legacy of unhappy hiring managers. To achieve even the simplest objectives, they have to use outside resources, employ a large number of recruiters, or seek to outsource the function.

Unfortunately HR has not positioned the recruitment function as strategic, nor has HR realized that the role of talent manager, aka recruiting and development leader, is emerging as one of the most potentially needed (and influential) professions within the organization.

Generally, those recruiters who lead the effort to supply scarce talent are filled with bad habits and uncertainty that create a revolving door of leadership and produce lackluster results.

To change this and move toward a position of respect and strategic leverage, recruiting leaders should examine their own behaviors and thoughts and see if they reflect any of the habits I list below. If so, now is the time to change. keep reading…

Every time I encounter customer service that is so bad that I just have to write an article about it. (I call it cheap psychotherapy). You see, I think most organizations cause their own problems because they hire the wrong people to represent them on the phone.

In this article, I refer to my experience turning in a leased car. I always treat the companies I encounter anonymously; let’s just say this organization’s first name rhymes with “smells” and its last name rhymes with “cargo.”

Its logo, a cute little stagecoach pulled by a team of fast-moving horses, is so engaging that one can almost smell the sweat and manure. But enough about sweat. Let’s talk about manure. keep reading…

Facebook‘s 250 million members would be a recruiter’s gold mine except for one thing: there’s a bouncer at every entrance and there are 250 million entrances.

The analogy doesn’t hold up perfectly because friend collecting is a Facebook pastime, and if you ask around you can almost always find someone to let you into any network. But it’s still not recruiter friendly. Unlike LinkedIn, where the search tools were designed with recruiters in mind, Facebook’s tools seem intended to discourage sourcing.

Yet those millions of Facebook members are too tempting a target to resist. Since the beginning of the year Appirio and Jobvite have both come up with applications that connect HR tech systems of their own or their partners with Facebook. Both however, are intended for corporate recruiters using either Salesforce or Jobvite’s recruitment system. Both focus on referrals.

InSide Job is different. It’s a Facebook application that individual users choose to deploy, making them searchable and findable to other InSide Job users.

The idea came to Lorne Epstein, a career recruiter, as he tried to get contacts out of LinkedIn for free.

Says Epstein, “They charge $10 for an email (there are corporate accounts, but he’s talking about an individual search) and there’s 40 million profiles. Facebook has 250 million and it’s only getting bigger.”

So Epstein, author of You’re Hired! Interview Skills to Get the Job, came up with a simple way to connect recruiters with Facebook users, and job seekers with the people who might be able to help them get a job. keep reading…

CareerBuilder says unemployed older workers are having a tough time finding jobs. A survey released last week says only 28 percent of workers over 54 laid off in the past 12 months found new jobs compared to workers 25-34 who are quicker at finding work. In that age group, 71 percent found a job within 12 months.

As a result, says CareerBuilder, 63 percent of the 55 and up group have applied for lower-level jobs, including entry-level positions and even internships.

That’s probably not much of a surprise to recruiters; 37 percent of them told CareerBuilder they have received applications for entry-level jobs from retirees and workers over 50.

What may well come as a surprise is the rise in older workers and the impact the recession is having on their ranks.

Layoffs and job losses have hit the younger workers hardest. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the 18 months since January 1, 2008, the number of workers in the 25-54 age group has declined by 5.1 million. For workers over 54 though, there are 624,000 more working. In fact, there were gains in the number of older employed workers in every age group the BLS tracks except one — 55-59 year olds who saw a modest decline of 79,000 in the 18 months.

Before you point out that the sheer number of older Americans has been rising, which is certainly true, consider for a moment the participation rate. Based on a monthly survey conducted by the U.S. Census for the BLS, the participation rate is independent of population size. It describes the percent of various population groups in the labor force.

The data shows that for the last 10 years, more and more older Americans are working. Since 1999, the percent of working Americans 55-64 has grown by 10 percent, while the over 64 age group has jumped — and that’s an apt word — by almost 40 percent. Contrast those changes to the 25-34 year olds who have declined from 84.6 in 1999 to 82.9 percent for the six months ending in June.

In the 61 years for which the BLS has data, this many older Americans have never been employed. In the mid-50s the percentage began to rise until 1967 when, at the peak, an average of 62.3 percent Americans aged 55-64 worked. The percentage began to decline until it bottomed in 1986 at 54 percent of the age group working. There it remained, rising modestly until the recession of the 90s when it started its upward climb.

keep reading…

David walks into Mr. Stevens’ office for a first meeting. He shakes Mr. Stevens’ hand, opens his briefcase, and proceeds to lecture about the greatness of his products. The harangue lasts about 45 minutes. As he continues to talk, David packs up his materials, again shakes Mr. Stevens’ hand, and walks out of the office.

He’s barely out of the building when he calls his sales manager to debrief on the meeting. “I told him about our latest products and all the great colors that it comes in. It was a great meeting … I talked the whole time … We are going to get this deal!”

Anyone who has been in sales for even a minute can see the glaring flaw in this meeting. keep reading…

Control freaks hate community. And most recruiters are control freaks. Ergo, recruiters hate community. Perhaps my deduction is a little harsh (and purposely attention-grabbing). Maybe a better way to describe how many recruiters feel about community is that they are suspicious, or at the very least skeptical.

To suggest that recruiters are control freaks is not an epiphany or an “ah-ha moment,” as being controlling is one of the traits that make recruiters good at our jobs.  We are managers of a set of projects called search assignments or requisitions and are required to direct a volume that easily reaches the double digits. And we need to control as much as possible to be successful.

Recruiters like the idea of community and having a relationship with prospects and/or candidates. But when recruiters take a deeper dive, they begin to understand that some of the conversations that transpire in community are outside of their control, they lose some enthusiasm. So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome?

In my upcoming Fall 2009 ERE presentation, I am weaving five topics/questions/discussion points into the storyline. One discussion point is “Web 2.0 solutions proclaim that this is the new way to pipeline candidates into a private talent community. What is a talent community and how do I build one? In this article, I will deal with the “why” of talent communities.  And if you are in Florida in September, I will discuss the “how to” at length. keep reading…

For many organizations the time is right to build capability within the talent acquisition function to recruit executive level talent. Globalization combined with aging leadership demographics imply that a majority of organizations will need to recruit a record number of external leadership candidates in years to come, the cost of which would be prohibitive if traditional third party executive recruiters were widely used. If your organization is contemplating bringing executive search in-house, you need to develop a plan that covers several key elements. Those elements include assessing various executive recruiting models, making the business case to senior leaders, identifying potential problems, and putting together metrics to measure/demonstrate the effectiveness of your executive search function. keep reading…

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

• Fordyce TV will resume next week with a brand new episode led by Lynn Hazan. If you missed last week’s episode on perm fee negotiations, you can catch it here, along with all of our other past episodes.
  
• There is no ERE webinar this week, but you can sign up for next week’s free webinar on Adjusting Talent Acquisition to a Changing Operations Model, led by Robin Ritter from General Mills and Kristy Sidlar from FutureStep.
• Our Editor-In-Chief Todd Raphael is working on the September issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. All of the articles have come in and he’s just working on some minor cleanup and the layout/graphics with our designer Barbara. We’re thinking this may be the best issue of the publication so far. We’ve got Richard Newsom from Fifth Third Bank, talking about how the company boiled down their recruiting metrics to a single “stock price” measure. John Zappe is covering customer services issues with recruiting technology. Lisa Edwards is writing about whether recruiting A-players really pays off. Keith Halperin proposes a new recruiting model. And more. So subscribe before August 15 to make sure this is your first issue. In addition, the issue will be distributed for free to all attendees at the upcoming ERE Expo 2009 Fall conference in Hollywood, FL.
• Speaking of the Expo, make sure you register before August 7 to get the $200 early bird rate. In addition, ERE subscribers can save an additional $200 by using product code FL09ERE. If you haven’t seen the agenda featuring over 20 corporate recruiters, practitioners, and thought leaders, check it out now.
• There are still a few weeks to take advantage of $25 job postings on EREjobs. If you are looking to add to your team, your posting will not only be displayed on the site for 30 days, but also in the ERE Daily email newsletter, the ERE homepage, and through the @recruiting_jobs feed on Twitter. And if you are looking for your next opportunity, check the site often and follow the Twitter feed.

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

Recruiting measurement is something we all strive to perfect — that magic number that answers many of our professional life’s little mysteries; the key that opens the door to recruiting issues and then tells you how to solve them. Many of us have tried to find that ideal fit for our organizations, but seem to come up with only pieces of the puzzle. After all, there are only so many processes that can be measured — and are these all-encompassing?

Recently, Fifth Third Bank created a simpler, single metric to represent Recruiting Operations: the Recruiting Stock Price. I’m delving in-depth into that metric in two places: 1) the Fall ERE Expo and 2) in the September Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. But I wanted to give this wide audience a preview. keep reading…

Over the past few months I’ve been making some not-so-bold predictions about the demise of job boards and the rise of the “hub and spoke” sourcing model for finding a better class of active candidates. Rather than repeat the prognostication here, I’d suggest that despite the shift to this new and improved sourcing model, in the long run it might not really matter.

Here’s why: from a practical standpoint, only 20 to 25% of candidates are actively looking at any one time. This is a high-end estimate, with 15 to 20% more likely, and in normal economic times probably around 15%. This means that 80% of most candidates aren’t looking.

So despite my current fondness for Jobs2Web, and the possibility that TalentSeekr and First Advantage’s HireEngine will become powerful talent hubs, I’m concerned that too many recruiting managers are aiming at the wrong target. It doesn’t take a lot of brain power to prove the case that there are more top-10-15% performers among those people who aren’t looking than those who are. So why are we spending so much effort to find candidates we don’t want to hire, even if we’re doing it more efficiently? keep reading…

Recruiter of the year Dan Hilbert must have found the smartest 4th graders on the planet for his OrcaEyes focus group. He says that it took them no time at all to navigate through the OrcaEyes console, generating reports on the cost of vacancies in an Exult Energy division and on the financial impact of an 80 percent improvement in time to hire for that group.

After taking a whirlwind tour through some of the things OrcaEyes can do, I have no hesitancy in admitting that “I’m not smarter than those 4th graders.”

Of course the significance of those reports was lost on the kids. Hilbert just wanted to make sure the navigation was easy to use and the red-yellow-green alert system easy to understand. And they are.

But it’s those reports that make the $200k a 20,000-employee firm can spend on OrcaEyes seem like a bargain.

Before I get into how, here’s a bit about the what, as in just what is OrcaEyes? Hilbert describes it as HR System Management Software. You can think of it as ERP for HR. Either way, the system provides an overarching view of how human capital impacts the enterprise. It does this by connecting to a company’s existing business systems — hooking into finance, sales, operations, supply chain, or an ERP (if there is one), the HRIS, HRMS, and whatever others may be there.

OrcaEyes crunches the data it extracts from these systems and combines it — for certain uses, like recruiting and salary setting — with data Hilbert obtains from such external sources as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census, and private data providers. Thus, in an instant, literally, an HR recruiter and a division VP can tell the cost in lost business for staffing shortages in the North Sea unit of Exult Energy’s refining and petrochemical division.

I thought that was nice information to have, but no special feat since any CFO can do revenue averages per year-end headcount. But as every CFO and line manager knows, being down one position doesn’t translate into a direct or immediate loss of revenue. Depending on the size of the unit, other workers will pick up the load. keep reading…

There is a lot of confusion and uncertainty about social networking and its role in recruiting. Conferences and seminars are everywhere. ERE recently held a conference on social media at Google, and there are dozens of articles here on ERE and elsewhere that are touting the benefits of social networks. There are hundreds of social media blogs and websites as well, and an expanding number of social media applications and tools.

But the big questions for many are simple: What are social networks, what do they replace, and what makes them useful? keep reading…

The interviewee queried the Microsoft Hardware Interviewer: “What is Microsoft’s commitment to hardware?” The applicant continued: “While, Microsoft is known for software, what is your vision for the hardware business?“

This scene played out over and over. Sometimes the candidate would even be looking over the interviewer’s shoulder without noticing the poster proudly displayed behind the Microsoft hiring manager. Yes, after 25 years, we were still getting those questions.

That was two years ago. Since then, we have changed the perception of Microsoft Hardware. We have changed the brand Hardware@Microsoft. Hardware@Microsoft has become a profession. The average “person on the street” may not know anything about Hardware@Microsoft. But a target audience of engineers who work in hardware will know about the importance of hardware in terms of Microsoft’s business vision.

ERE acknowledged our work with a “Most Strategic Use of Technology Award” and industry thought leaders like Dr. John Sullivan called our work “pioneering.” (In fairness, this award was shared by a talented group of colleagues who created View My World and incidentally just launched a new careers site.) While being recognized by one’s industry is flattering, the real success of our work was in solving a business need in our division.

The story of making Hardware@Microsoft a profession was an answer to a critical business issue.

keep reading…

The list of companies offering resume writing, enhancement, and tracking continues to grow faster than you can say LinkedIn, with new vendors entering the market this summer. keep reading…

The Human Resources Commissioner for Chicago recently resigned. He had been originally hired to implement a hiring system free of politics. Apparently, the Commissioner had made some employment decisions that were influenced by politics, and then lied to the Chicago Inspector General about them. This was a great loss, given how high a priority the city’s administration placed on this project — being the result of a consent decree signed in 1972. But after he succeeded in freeing hiring from politics in the hometown of Rod Blagojevich, he was scheduled to find a cure for cancer and solve the global economic crisis. Tragic. Very tragic.

Interestingly, he had been scheduled to talk at a major HR conference about how he was implementing a hiring process free of politics. I believe it was labeled “Tilting at Windmills.” The commissioner was a political appointee, and not necessarily the best qualified person for the job. Of course he may very well have been the best candidate — the fact that the gentleman is the treasurer for a political action committee that contributed to the mayor and a key alderman couldn’t possibly have influenced his selection. Then again, he was perhaps not the best choice to be a spokesperson on acquiring talent. One might as well ask Joe Biden to speak at a Toastmasters convention.

So what exactly was the Commissioner supposed to do to make the hiring process in the Windy City free of politics? An independent review had identified some deficiencies in the city’s process that included: keep reading…

Now is the perfect time for organizations to bring executive search capability in-house. While the business case for this strategic shift has been clear for some time, ongoing cost-containment efforts combined with increasing demand for strategic staffing make now the perfect time to execute the shift and build out the tools/approaches needed.

In many organizations, executive search fees consume double-digit portions of the recruiting budget, yet produce results only 45% of the time. Few budget items are more costly and ineffective, but the motivations behind this shift are not solely monetary. Executing executive searches internally dramatically increases the business impact of the talent acquisition function and raises the visibility of talent acquisition as a key contributor to business performance significantly.

After all, what else in recruiting could possibly impact business results more than bringing in a high-quality, innovative executive capable of delivering market-changing increases in efficiency and effectiveness?

The increase in “face time” between talent acquisition and the executive committee further increases the function’s ability to sell the vision of the organization and sustain operations when budgets get tight. In the following section, you will find numerous arguments supporting the shift.

When you add up all the positive benefits, it’s hard to argue that there will be a better time to explore this strategic move. keep reading…