You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in. — Heraclitus

There’s a huge controversy that raises itself now and then here in the Recruitosphere and that’s the idea that one type of candidate (passive) is better than the other (active). The thinking goes along the lines of “If they’re looking, there must be a reason they’re looking!” There’s probably something wrong with the guy.

On the other end of the spectrum glistens the shiny new: that person popularly known as the “passive” candidate. The accompanying reasoning goes something like: “If he’s out there and nobody’s talked to him before, I’ll be the first one at the table to get the best (and biggest) portion.”

In reality, both lines of thought are problematic.

I’m reminded of the Clay Walker country song line, “What’cha gonna do, When the new wears off And the old shines through…?”

In defense of the actives, there are good people represented in the mix – and they’re going to turn up in some of our “passive” searches anyway. It happens the more thorough we become in our sourcing skills. I try not to leave anyone “behind” when I’m phone sourcing, unless the customer asks for a specific number out of a certain company.

The reality is, passives aren’t always truly “passive” and actives aren’t always “active.” Some “actives” have gone to ground, so to speak, and are fully engaged in another job that really gives them those desirable “passive” characteristics again that are so highly regarded nowadays. Skipping over them in any job search is a mistake. Keep in mind that anything we put out on the Net is going to stay out on the Net, regardless of our efforts or desire to remove it. So if someone has a resume, say “out there” somewhere, at some time, he or she could turn up in a future search regardless of whether they’re looking at the present time or not.

There are passives who really aren’t passive at all. They know what they’re doing to market themselves. They know how to glisten beneath all that fallen snow that assures they’ll be the first snowflake picked out of the landscape. This is the person who’s active on the net, who does a lot of posting (or a little) that includes a lot of biographical information that, at first glance, appears innocent. It’s not, usually. Those tagline signatures that give us names, titles, addresses and phone numbers should be approached with some hesitation. The question to ask is: “If I found them, who else hasn’t?”

I know it’s exciting when your Boolean search ferrets out that exact title in the exact location that the job is calling for and it appears that all you have to do is dial the number and confirm that the guy’s still there. I know very well that temptation to end there and call it finished.

Don’t! Doing this is short-shifting your customer as well as yourself. This little “gem” you uncovered as a result of your knowledgeable Boolean entry (you did work so hard to learn Boolean, didn’t you?) sometimes is tantamount to someone’s resume being posted out there – it screams, “Hey recruiter, look at me – I’m what you want – call me for your new job opportunity –I’ll make it easy – here’s my office number and my cell!”

No one understands that you have given everything. You must give more. — Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

“Foul!” you cry. “They’re mine to find!”

Yes, they are yours to find if that’s all you’re interested in finding. That “passive-active” usually has a team of coworkers he interacts with everyday. The best way to set that little hard rock into your job setting is to build his organization out around him. And that usually means (actually I don’t know of any other way) that you must get on the telephone and call him, or call his Administrative Assistant, or call his manager, or call the guy in the cube next to him, or call someone in the Mail Room who delivers mail to him and his group everyday, or call the VP of Engineering’s Executive Assistant, or call someone, anyone that will give you the names of the other people in his group!

Chances are they’re the truly passive candidates in the mix!

You must remove (at least one hand, momentarily) from the alphabet portion of your keyboard to dial that number. These days, and it’s going to become ever-more-important moving forward, you must become an active names sourcer vs a passive names sourcer! If you don’t do this your research will suffer the consequences as more and more people are learning (and depending) on Boolean to fill their searches. Set yourself apart by honing your telephone techniques. They’re the ones that are hardest to master and they’re the ones that return the most unique results! They’re the ones that give you the only advantage to finding the truly passive candidate – the guy sitting at his desk doing his thing, 8 to 12 hours a day, too busy to even think about another job. The guy who doesn’t “post” for ulterior reasons or isn’t listed in some fabulous online gathering. He’s the guy who’s gainfully and masterfully employed doing what you need him to do for you – go get him!

Keep in mind the overall quality of the pipeline. Proactively adding both passive and actives into it at the same time is going to give you a healthy mix in the end.

(Bear with us as we work out the kinks with this new technology; the audio starts off a little rocky but should improve — at least a little bit — after a minute or so.)

In fact, the best way I know to learn about radical new approaches and innovations is to examine the best practices from organizations operating completely outside your industry. I call this practice of adapting “unheard of” practices from other industries parallel benchmarking.

It is known as parallel benchmarking because you are learning from completely different industries that still, however, share a parallel problem. The practice that I am suggesting that your firm consider is from baseball and involves “trading” surplus talent with other firms.

If you want to make dramatic improvements in business practice, you need to study how best-performing firms in completely different industries attack your problem.

If you want to go beyond merely talking about outside-the-box solutions, consider changing your approach and focus on “likely to be laughed at” talent-management solutions like those emerging around Twitter and YouTube, and developing a “talent trading” program.

Almost all firms at some point have a surplus of employees that results from changing business conditions. Unfortunately, the typical approaches for getting rid of surplus employees are cost-containment approaches that provide no payback to the firm.

The most common approach, where corporations lay off surplus talent, is a lose-lose approach. You release talent and get no remuneration for it, despite having invested in it for years via salaries and training. At the same time, you also incur huge costs because you pay for severance, outplacement services, and damage to your employer brand reputation.

But what if there was a solution where instead of releasing talent, you could exchange or “trade” talent with other firms and get something of value in return? Now that would be a talent-management breakthrough that would make any CFO smile.

Trading Employees Is Not Uncommon

Firms routinely loan employees to initiatives with their strategic partners and joint ventures; not-for-profits periodically exchange talent when their funding priorities or levels change; and federal agencies exchange employees on both a short-term and permanent basis using interagency exchanges and loans.

The military also periodically exchanges talent among the different branches of the services in order to fill talent needs or to acquire knowledge or best practices.

While the practice is common in each of these instances, the benchmark industries to study with regards to the practice are professional sports and entertainment, where trading is a required business practice.

Sports Trading Is a Perfect Model

If you managed the Yankees or Manchester United and you had an excess of skilled players in a particular position, you would make a deal and trade that talent to another club for players in a skill area where you had a significant need (or for cash). In professional sports, managers who simply release talent are considered as failures because they got nothing in return.

In Major League Baseball, for example, trading between teams in the same league and between different leagues is such an integral part of the talent-management process that trading isn’t given a second thought. Incidentally, the most desirable and high-impact trades don’t involve “losers,” but rather, top performers. These sports franchises are just like any business enterprise — they are for-profit corporations striving to maximize their talent ROI by always getting something of value … for something of value.

A Business Example: The Value of Trading Employees

Let’s assume you were a computer firm like Apple, and you wanted to get into the music business by developing a music player. You could train your current employees who have computer backgrounds, but that would be time-consuming, expensive, and difficult because no one at your firm really knows the music industry.

At the same time, another firm, like Sony, that was going through tough times might have surplus talent with extensive knowledge of the music industry. Because Sony might be interested in gaining a better understanding of Internet video transfer and the process of innovation at Apple, Sony might be willing to trade some of its excess music talent for individuals involved in the Internet video transfer or innovation process at Apple.

Because the traded employees from Apple’s video-on-demand set-top box division would be going into a high-priority area at Sony, they might be excited and willing to accept the trade. The Sony employees facing a layoff would probably be thrilled, both with the chance to be sought out by experts and with their renewed job security at Apple.

Advantages to the Corporation

In addition to the obviously higher-talent ROI, there are other benefits that can accrue to an organization that develops a trading process, including:

• Expanded talent acquisition opportunities – mutually agreed-upon trades can be easily made with large customers or strategic partners. In contrast, direct recruiting from them is simply out of the question because it would damage the relationship. As a result, trading gives you an opportunity to acquire talent from organizations that were previously off-limits.
• You may get the entire team – in recruiting, you acquire individuals who are independent and haven’t worked together as a team. However, in cases where a company is closing down a facility or a particular area of business, trading might provide you with an opportunity to acquire or “lift out” an entire intact team. Bringing on a cohesive unit might enable them to get up to speed almost immediately.
• Acquiring best practices – because you’re trading with high-performing firms, not only do you get talented individuals but with them, you also get the opportunity to better understand and learn the best practices of the “sending” firm.
• High-quality talent – because poor performers are generally excluded from trades, if you make accurate trade assessments, you will be getting quality, trained talent. This talent’s shortcoming is that the firm has a surplus of talent or skills in that particular area (using a basketball analogy, you’re getting a talented seven-foot center merely because the team already had one more seven-foot center than they could carry on their roster). Trades can also include a “return” clause or a penalty if the traded employee turns out to be less than they were billed as.
• Delaying is possible – in the case where an organization doesn’t currently need more talent of any kind, the two exchanges of employees need not be simultaneous. The “sending” firm can delay their selection and receipt of their talent to a more opportune date (an employee to be named later).
• Fewer negatives – there are fewer retaliation issues and legal problems associated with trades because they are negotiated and all of the parties involved have agreed. In contrast, direct recruiting from competitor firms can result in back-and-forth raiding, which can generate lawsuits and drive up salaries.
• Fewer turnover surprises – employees may see layoffs coming and go to another firm with little notice. In contrast, if they see that you’re actually trying to help them find a better opportunity at another firm, they may be a little less active in their job search. And with a trading process, you have sufficient advance notice of who is leaving and when, which makes it easier to prepare for any vacancies as a result of lost talent. When large-scale raiding is going on, corporations need to put significant resources into retention.

Questions about the Process

If you’re skeptical, you probably have some questions about the trading process.

Here are some typical questions and their answers:

• Who would want these surplus employees? – in baseball for example, the highest quality talent are the most frequent trade targets. Surplus in this case merely means you have too much of it, not that there’s anything wrong with it. In almost all cases, these are valuable employees with important skills; they just happen to have skills (or work in a job) where the firm has more than enough labor available. In the case of a facility closing, these may be exceptional individuals who are just not willing to relocate.
• Why not just recruit them away? – traditionally when a firm sees “talent” that it wants at a firm, it merely attempts to recruit that individual or team away. Unfortunately, recruiting can be expensive and time-consuming. If your firm has a weak recruiting team, it won’t be able to acquire the same quality of talent as it could get from trading. It’s also important to remember that if you focus exclusively on recruiting individual talent, you still have done nothing to limit the millions in losses that occur when you lay off surplus talent that you’ve invested in over the years, without getting a penny in return.
• Won’t employees refuse the trade? – obviously your employees could refuse the trade because employees cannot be “owned” by their employer. But it’s important to note that it’s fairly common for key baseball players to have formal “no trade clauses.” However, all that these restrictive causes really mean is that you have the burden to make a convincing case to the employee that the new situation will be better for them. In other cases, obviously employees who are facing layoffs wouldn’t require much convincing, while others could be given a bonus for accepting the trade. Incidentally, traditional recruiting of “currently employed individuals” always includes a significant “convincing” element (to convince them to leave one firm for another), so that same convincing process just needs to be adapted to this trading approach.
• Who should be involved in the trading effort? – normally the trading process should be managed by the recruiting function. You should start by making the business case to get managers and the CFO on board. The trading process itself requires managers and a personnel function that can accurately identify surplus talent within your own organization. It also requires a trading team with the capabilities of assessing the quality and the value of talent that is located within other organizations. The head negotiator must be capable of putting together a “win-win” trade, where both teams and the player are clearly convinced of their direct benefit. Managers should be rewarded for successfully trading away surplus talent and for acquiring excellent talent in trades.
• Who should we offer in trade? – firms should develop surplus talent or redeployment lists that “look forward” at the firm’s talent needs at least one year out. In addition, a component needs to be added both to the workforce planning and to the performance appraisal processes to identify individuals who we cannot afford to keep or retrain. The retention, redeployment, and development teams should also be asked to identify individuals that are likely to leave (and thus offered for trade) because of the restricted opportunities within our firm.
• What should we ask for in return? – obviously the key to a great trade is that both sides perceive that they are getting great value (and this is even more important when trading with customers or strategic partners). The key to success here is to work with your trading partner to get them to pre-identify what they would consider to be the most desirable talent and skills. If you target firms that are in trouble and they can’t handle more employees, the trade might include a significant cash settlement rather than an equal “talent for talent” trade.
• Which firms should we trade with? – start by looking at “best practice firms” within your own industry. Then look at “parallel industries” that use similar technologies, that have similar customers, or that have equal or faster innovation and growth rates. Also target firms that are seeking to expand into your industry.
• Are there typical “sports trading” options that I should utilize? – many managers are big sports fans, so they almost instantly understand the “sports trading” mentality, and because sports coaches are experienced in arranging difficult “trades” for outsiders, it’s a good idea to try some “sports” trading options to improve your trading success. Here are eight ideas to consider:

1. 2 for 1 exchange – propose a two “B” players for one “A” player exchange.
2. For a player to be named later – propose accepting a surplus employee now in exchange for an opportunity to have one of equal value (but unnamed) at a later date.
3. Offer a slate – instead of offering a single employee trade, instead offer a slate of candidates from both firms.
4. Pay a fee – offer to accept a fee in cases where the firm is willing to accept your talent but it has little desirable talent to offer in return.
5. Delay the transfer – offer to keep the traded employee on your payroll for a limited period of time until the “receiving firm” is ready to orient and train them.
6. From major league to AAA – if you are a well-known firm, seek out second-tier firms or smaller sized firms that would be thrilled to get anyone from a top firm for the prestige or in order to learn their best practices.
7. Ask for deal sweeteners – when negotiations are stuck, directly ask their team to propose a list of potential “deal sweeteners” to move the negotiations on. Also try to identify in advance any deal-breakers.
8. Best practice for talent – offer the firm the opportunity to learn one or more of your firm’s “best practices” in exchange for their surplus talent.

Final Thoughts

Large-scale layoffs are a negative ROI business practice because you are giving away a resource in which you have invested millions. Not only are you giving them away, but you have no control over where they go.

In fact, released employees might go directly to your competitors, further compounding your losses. A better approach would first provide you with some control over where they go, as well as provide your firm with a direct quid pro quo for this released investment.

Initially, the idea of trading surplus talent with other companies might seem outrageous, but the practice has proven to be a winner. If you want to make a quantum leap in performance, it only makes sense that you need to make a quantum change in your business practices.

As crazy as it might initially sound, if you’re in a labor-reduction mode, a formal talent-trading process may be the highest ROI activity available to you!

• Sign up for this week’s free webinar on Wednesday at 2:00 p.m: How Job Satisfaction Drives the Job Hunting Process led by Lou Adler. Lou contends that once the economy begins recovering there will be a huge unexpected spike in voluntary turnover which will result in companies scrambling to fill these replacement hires. Learn when this spike will occur and what you can do about it now to get ready.
• In this week’s articles, are you ready for the inevitable increase in turnover you’ll experience before long? Find out if you’re ready: John Elliott of the healthcare organization Dartmouth-Hitchcock will have an exercise you can do this week. Todd Raphael uses some new technology were trying out to interview Jeremy Eskenazi about what’s going to happen to laid-off recruiters as hiring picks up. And David Szary writes about building “pipelines.” Everyone talks about them, but everyone’s got a different definition.
• ERE Expo 2009 Fall is just over a week away. I hope to meet you personally in FL, but if you aren’t able to make the trip, you aren’t totally out of luck! Once again we will be live streaming many of the sessions right here on ERE.net. Stay tuned for more information on the stream schedule later this week.
• Stay tuned for more information coming this week about the next Social Recruiting Summit to take place in New York City on Monday, November 16.
• We are looking for speakers for our Spring ERE Expo conference in San Diego. Really cutting-edge corporate recruiting folks. If that is you or if you have a recommendation, let Todd know. Todd is also always on the lookout for writers for the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, corporate recruiting leaders, ideally at medium or large companies, since that’s who the readers are.
• We’re getting going on the 2010 Recruiting Excellence Awards, which will take place in San Diego in conjunction with the Spring Expo. We’ll get the updated information on the website soon. Let us know if you have any suggestions as to how to improve the process this year, or if you’d like to serve as a judge.

Enjoy the last few days of summer, and if you have any questions about what I have posted, please leave them in the comments section below.

“The novelette of their experience in the military,” says Sherrill Curtis, doesn’t always translate clearly.

Agrees Carl Blum, “The hardest problem they have is translating their military experience into civilian language so a recruiter can understand what they have to offer.

Curtis, Blum, and Blum’s partner in an organization called Tip of the Arrow, Bob Deissig, and Sgt. Major James Clark were the prime movers of a program last month at New Jersey’s  Ft. Dix called “Ultimate Warrior Career Workshops and Job Fair.”

They had plenty of help. The Garden State (New Jersey) SHRM council signed on early to the project, supplying dozens of recruiters, supplemented by career coaches from the state’s professional association, and representatives from federal agencies and area colleges.

But this was no ordinary job fair, although some 70 employers showed up and Blum tells us 200 of the participants expect offers.

What made this different were the one-on-one counseling sessions and workshops that prepped the servicemen and women — and some dependents — for the next day’s recruiter meet and greet.

Blum and Deissig, who founded Tip of the Arrow, began working with returning soldiers at Ft. Dix last year. Retired from careers in staffing and search, they both quickly discovered that while the men and women they met had held positions of leadership and responsibility, they were not skilled at explaining to a recruiter how what they did had value in the corporate world.

Blum told a story about a 24-year-old National Guardsman returned from Iraq who described himself as a clerk who had also been in charge of a security detail.

“I had to draw it out of him, really talk to him about what he did,” Blum says, learning the soldier had traveled Iraq returning money recovered from captured terrorists to their victims. In another assignment, he was in charge of protecting teachers and students from attack.

Saying he was a military clerk who also had worked security wouldn’t have meant as much to a corporate recruiter as explaining he was entrusted with a small fortune in cash and was responsible for the lives of a classroom full of children. Putting it that way, Blum says, lets a recruiter know that the soldier in front of them has integrity and has handled more responsibility than any job they may have is likely to require.

When Blum and Deissig connected with Curtis, who heads the state council’s Workforce Readiness committee, they found a firecracker of organization who mobilized the council and local chapters to provide the training the military personnel would need to launch successful civilian careers.

“I saw bright, articulate people,” Curtis reports. But like so many workers in the civilian world seeking a career change, “they have a very difficult time explaining what they are, what they have done, and how it applies.”

Career coaches and professional recruiters met one-on-one with the nearly 500 personnel — many of them  Army — who attended the workshop the day before the job fair. The volunteers would review resumes, teach basic job hunting techniques — there was a how-to session on career networking — and even do role-playing to help the job seekers get a feel for interviewing.

There was a panel of experienced, senior recruiters to answer audience questions on everything from what to wear to concerns about military related disabilities. International recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a principal in CareerXroads, talked about using technology for job searching. He also set up a LinkedIn group to carry on the day’s work.

The goal of the workshops was to get the military job seekers ready to “meet with an employer with confidence and articulate what they have done and how it applies to their job,” Curtis adds.

Curtis and Tip of the Arrow, which was founded to provide just that kind of help, are hoping that other state SHRM councils will pick up on the project and hold their own workshops and job fairs, with the Ft. Dix program as a model.

Personality Assessments
I have always been suspicious of self-rated assessments, as candidates know the job they are interviewing for and can guess what to say or not say. Many studies, such as the one recently published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment (They Don’t Do It Often, But They Do It Well: Exploring the relationship between applicant mental abilities and faking, Julia Levashina, Frederick P. Morgeson and Michael A. Campion), have shown that self-assessments are indeed faulty:

This research [on fake personality measures] consistently demonstrates that candidates are able to fake personality measures by recognizing the correct, job-related, or preferred answers, and artificially inflate their scores.

Scary, right? Well, it depends on who is doing the cheating. Many candidates who have gone without a job for six months or more will tell you that it is good to know how to play the system in order to get a job.

Biodata Assessments
Some organizations may agree that personality tests can be faked, yet still believe in the strength of their biodata assessment. Are they correct in doing so?

First, what is biodata? Biodata is a commonly used term in industrial and organizational psychology for biographical data. Biodata is defined as “… factual kinds of questions about life and work experiences, as well as to items involving opinions, values, beliefs, and attitudes that reflect a historical perspective.” The basis of biodata’s predictive abilities is the axiom that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

Biodata has an advantage over personality or even interest inventories, as it tells you the past behavior of a person, and from there it can predict one’s future actions … assuming one tells the truth!

How Many Cheat?
A newly released study from Julia Levashina, Frederick P. Morgeson, and Michael A. Campion on real candidates in real job application situations will give us the answer.

And this is a serious study, as 17,368 applications were analyzed across many different job categories (general management, economic and political analysis, public relations, etc.) with an innovative but strong way to detect the fake. Also, it is important to note that “candidates were warned that their responses could be verified and that any attempts to falsify information could be used as a basis for not employing them.” Thus, it was not a laboratory experiment.

So, how many are fakes? How many among those 17,368 applicants were trying to fake their way in?

The researchers divided the applicants into three groups, which we have taken the freedom to name:

Complete liars: 173 candidates (1%)
Fakers: 1,389 candidates (8%)
Stretchers: 4,168 (24%)

In short, a third of the people you will see will pretend to have done many more things than they actually have. In practice it could look like this:

These examples look obvious, and are for the sake of fun and illustrating the point, but they are probably what you can read on a resume or hear during an interview. Some strategies can help you uncover the hoax. We will cover them at the end. But the question still remains: Does cheating work?

Does Cheating Work?

Statements used in the research assessments were not as obvious; they were experiences or behaviors important to successful job performance. These included interactions with others, adaptability, initiative or persistence, leadership. These are less easy to fake. For instance, when you first move into a new place, how much time do you spend exploring your new surroundings (5 = a great deal of time; 1 = very little time)? They were capable of cheating, but how well did that work in favor of the fakers?

The research on this is clear: all groups of fakers “obtained higher scores on the biodata measure.”

Interestingly, the research showed that people with higher levels of mental abilities fake less often, but when they do it they get significantly higher scores. In short, the clever fakers are the ones benefiting the most.

So, we can safely predict that once job seekers learn that stretching the truth on applications and interviews works in their favor, they will continue to do it more. Thus, if today we see one in three people stretching the truth, tomorrow we may see one in two.

Talent Acquisition Response

Of course I/O psychologists will combat these statements by saying that they use empirical rating versus rational rating procedures. In short, more is not always best and other techniques prevent the fakers from winning. Incorporating other testing strategies should therefore be the first step, but it’s best to not take a chance, so I advise complementing such techniques with the following three simple and cheap strategies:

1. For verifiable facts (i.e. Harvard MBA) perform a verification (academic, employment, etc). Not only will you avoid a bad hire, but you’ll prevent potential brand erosion and embarrassment.
2. For results or behaviors that require one to have expertise (i.e. “recoded and secured the whole encryption software”), if straight technical assessments aren’t possible, make sure that a technical person (on your staff or outside if it is very unique) is part of the interview team to cross check the candidate to validate the expertise. At a minimum, a telephone interview or video conferencing should be performed if a face-to-face meeting is not possible.
3. For results or behaviors where you can learn the jargon quickly (i.e. manage the on-time on-budget new ATS implementation), I recommend colleagues rate the candidate and or perform a reference check 2.0. These can be used as well for the previous section if you question the achievement level or the personality fit of a candidate, as technical competence is not always synonymous with performance and integration.

Armed with these tools, the next time you have three finalists in front of you, you will have the certainty of not picking the fake one.

The Conference Board, which issues some of the most watched economic indicators in the U.S., reported that consumer confidence jumped 14 percent between July and August. The Index, which hit a low of 26.9 in March, has more than doubled since then and now stands at 54.1. It’s still slightly below the 54.8 posted in May, but the rise was considerably greater than the 47.9 economists had expected, according to Bloomberg News.

Employers mirrored that confidence in a CareerBuilder / Robert Half survey that said 53 percent of businesses polled plan to hire full-time workers in 2010. The Employment Dynamics and Growth Expectations Report prepared by the two companies found 40 percent of employers planning to hire temporary or contract workers and 39 percent expecting to hire part-time workers.

The report, which has been issued annually for the last five years, found that the positions first to be filled will be in technology, customer service, and sales. Also on the list are positions in marketing/creative, business development, human resources, and accounting/finance.

Most the hires will be either entry-level (say 28 percent of the hiring managers surveyed) or staff-level professionals (32 percent). The traits most valued in a new hire? Employers cited multitasking, initiative, and creative problem-solving.

“Companies already are identifying the key skill sets they will need in new hires to take advantage of the opportunities presented by improving economic conditions,” said Max Messmer, chairman and CEO of Robert Half International. “Firms that cut staffing levels too deeply may need to do significant rebuilding once the recovery takes hold.”

Perhaps anticipating the recovery, perhaps because so many companies have already made cuts, employers are throttling back on layoffs, says outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“We see more and more signs that the economy is beginning to turn around. While it is too soon to expect a massive hiring binge that will move some of the nearly 20 million jobless Americans back onto payrolls, the pace of job cuts is likely to continue its downward trend,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

In January 241,749 job cuts were announced, the highest since January 2002, according to the firm, which has tracked planned layoff announcements daily since 1993. But the announced job cuts have been declining since.

The August numbers are still being counted, but the firm said it expects the four-month total from May through August to be significantly lower than the 711,100 it counted from January through April.

“Year-end job cuts are likely to increase from the levels recorded during the summer months, which typically see fewer job cuts, but we will probably not return to the levels reached between January and April,” says Challenger. “Job cuts are expected to continue the overall downward trend in 2010, when we might actually begin to see some small improvements in hiring.”

The Wall Street Journal reported this month in its Economic Forecasting Survey that economists expect, on average, the economy to lose just under 27,000 jobs a month next year. While not exactly a recovery, it’s a huge change from the 70,000 monthly job loss they predicted in July.

However, if you actually count the number of economists who predict that jobs will either not be lost or will actually be added, the number is slightly larger than those who predict continued job losses.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its employment report for August next week, Sept. 4th, just in time for the Labor Day weekend.

The Northern Lights have seen strange sights,
But the queerest they ever did see … – The Cremation of Sam McGee

While they may not quite compare to the sight spoken of by the nameless narrator of Robert Service’s famous poem, nonetheless some of the tales I’ve heard lately of interviews certainly give Cremation of Sam McGee a run for its money.

By far the most dramatic was the interviewer who spent the entire interview reading email. When the candidate tried to get the interviewer’s attention, the response was, “We multi-task here.”

The interviewers who ask technical questions and then say, “That’s not how I would solve the problem, so you must be wrong,” are, sadly, so common that they don’t even rate.

I must confess that when I heard the first story, I was left speechless. Here’s an interviewer trying to convince a candidate to take a job at a company and is treating that candidate with a total lack of respect. If that’s how the person behaves when the candidate isn’t working there, how will he behave when the candidate is working there? That’s assuming, of course, that the candidate takes the job.

Now, it’s highly likely that some people are thinking that there must be a mistake in the previous paragraph: shouldn’t it say that the candidate is trying to convince the company to hire them? Sure they are; however, it’s a two-way street. The company clearly needs someone to fill a certain position, even if it’s not that specific person. Conversely, that person needs a job, even if it’s not that specific job.

But wait, it’s a terrible economy! Does the candidate really have a choice?

Surprising as it may seem, yes they do. If one company is hiring people with a given skill set, odds are others are as well. Companies hire because they believe that the value of bringing someone in exceeds the cost: in other words, they see a potential, or actual, source of revenue. Well, there are a lot of companies out there; if one finds a valuable niche, you can bet others will too. Pretty soon, they’ll be competing for the available pool of talent. The best people will go where they are most respected.

Of course, once a company has successfully hired someone, there’s the little matter of keeping the person. Economies have a nasty habit of suddenly getting better. People who feel that they are being badly treated at their current company are the most likely to jump ship when things turn around. The worst time for a company to lose people to the competition is, by a rather amazing coincidence, when business is really starting to ramp up. The company that establishes a huge lead at the start of an economic upswing may not become the dominant player, but that’s the way to bet. The company that lags risks being doomed to second-rate status, if it survives at all.

During the last downturn, the CEO of one midsized technology company told several employees that he wouldn’t give them raises because, “It’s a terrible economy and you have no where else to go.” Within a month, each of those people had found new jobs at significantly higher rates of pay. Although the employees were eventually replaced, the cost to the company, in terms of lost productivity and ramp-up time for the new people, was huge. Their competitors dethroned them from their once dominant position in their market niche. The company now no longer exists.

It is, therefore, extremely important to remember that trying to take advantage of a downturn is penny wise and pound foolish. The hiring process is the first glimpse that prospective employees will have of your company and its culture. Right from the start, it’s critical to present the right image. That means that:

• As obvious as it may seem, apparently there are interviewers who don’t realize that they should give candidates their undivided attention. Would you hire a candidate who spent the interview reading email or IMing?
• The company needs to understand who it’s looking for and know how to recognize that person. Bringing candidates back for one round of interviews after another only sends the message that the company doesn’t know what it’s doing.
• Tests, puzzles, or other problems presented to the candidate to solve must be presented by employees who are capable of understanding answers other than their own. It’s not a battle of wits: the goal is to see if the candidate can solve the problem, not if they can read the interviewer’s mind. Interviewers who will only hire candidates less skilled than they are doom the company to mediocrity.

If you want the best people, you need to treat them with respect from the very beginning. When it comes to treating people with respect, it’s never different this time around.

You can check out some of our ERE employees from Florida who will be attending the Meetup by going to their profiles on our new Community. The Fordyce Letter Editor, Elaine Rigoli, our Director of Marketing, Scott Baxt, and our Marketing Manager, Ryan Frazier.

The Meetup will be held at the gorgeous Westin in Hollywood, FL, which is also the location of this year’s ERE Expo. If you haven’t been to the Westin, I highly recommend being there because it’s an amazing location and it’s sure to be a great night.

——————————————————————————–
When: Thursday, September 10th, 5:15-7:15 p.m.
Where: The Westin Diplomat Resort and Spa, 3555 South Ocean Dr, Hollywood, FL.
Great Hall 4
Attire: Casual
Cost: FREE!
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Because this Meetup is going to be held during the time our Expo is in town you will not only have a chance to network with locals, but people from all over the country including leading vendors in the industry.

All you need to do is RSVP in the comments section below, print out the entry ticket by clicking on the link, and show up. And if you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to shoot me an email to melissa(at)ere.net.

I hope to see you there!

Entry Ticket

Amazingly, that’s what Fellows and Associates has done. And just to make sure you get it, the firm issued a press release over the weekend discussing the video.

“The aim was to find an idea that was provocative in order to elicit a response and maximise the video’s potential for spreading virally whilst maintaining a balance of responsible advertising” says Fellows and Associates Managing Director, Pete Fellows.

I don’t know about the provocative part, but the viral part seems to have fallen flat. According to You Tube stats, the “Goose Attack At Wedding” video has not yet broken 1,000 views after 7 days online. Compare that to the branding video for Caterer.com that I wrote about in July. It got almost 38,000 views on its first day.

The press release notes that “Fellows and Associates are the first UK recruitment firm in the Intellectual Property sector to experiment with viral video advertising.” But issuing a formal press release isn’t quite what viral marketing is all about, even if it has gotten some online mileage.

On the other hand, when you’re launching a new business into a competitive market, any publicity is good publicity. We wrote about it, didn’t we?

It’s an innovative program which kills two Nestle birds with one stone: using social media (online user-generated videos) to market candy, and providing job experience that potential employees may not get elsewhere.

Nestle’s Daniel Jhung, who manages the Butterfinger brand, launched the program in June after he had been hearing and reading about how cynical young people were about jobs and employment — Gen Y’s feeling that the job market was rotten, and that many big-corporation jobs were pretty dreary anyhow. Plus, Jhung figured Nestle could stand to learn a thing or two about social media from the Gen Y-ers.

He did a pretty wide sweep for candidates. It included the HotJobs job board (Nestle and Yahoo are tight); colleges; casting-call agencies in New York and LA; film schools; the Improv chain of comedy clubs, and more. After getting about 450 applicants in three or four days, that was enough to shut down the search.

Nestle narrowed down the field to a top-10 list in each city, and had each produce a video. From there, it interviewed two per city, and made its final selection.

A.J. Mayers is a FUNtern in Los Angeles. He heard on the radio that Nestle was having an in-person event to talk about the opportunity. He couldn’t make that, but did follow-up when he saw a posting for the internship on Craigslist, which pointed to HotJobs.

The University of Texas-Austin grad got the internship right before he got brought on at MTV. Because the Butterfinger gig is flexible, and can be done during off hours, from home, or at the beach (where he has passed out candy bars), he opted to take both the internship and the MTV job. There’d be no need to commute from his West Hollywood home to Santa Monica for MTV and then back to Nestle’s building, which could’ve been hellacious. Plus, Mayers was looking for experience in the entertainment industry and wants to be a TV producer, and for Nestle, he gets to make videos as part of an online user-generated video contest. The contest is part of Nestle’s re-introduction of its “Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my Butterfinger” tagline.

Mayers, whose Butterfinger stint ends at the end of August, is making a last video that will be a “very fun, dancing, High School Musical-esque production,” he says, “with the Butterfinger man dancing around. It’s funny, silly. It’s my way to go out with a bang.”

Other FUNterns are in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York. They’re doing different kinds of work revolving around promoting the candy bar and the video contest. The Chicago FUNtern is headed to BYU when the internship is over; the New York intern, who is also working for a wireless company, is also headed back to school. The Atlanta intern is doing the internship as part of some time off she’s taking to explore freelance projects.

Jhung didn’t say who might at some point be offered jobs from the group, but did mention that Nestle is considering one or two of them, pending among other things, the remaining videos they make. My guess is that AJ is one of them (if so, it’ll be interesting to see whether he picks MTV or Nestle; he mentioned to me that MTV is part of his TV-industry career path, and doesn’t sound eager to leave). Anyhow, below is one of his videos. Perhaps I should warn you that I’d give it a PG-13 rating.

I’ll demonstrate why there is a confluence of factors that make this a “perfect storm” of opportunity if you implement a countercyclical hiring strategy.

I’ll start out with three analogies that show how this current economic lull is an outstanding opportunity to fill your forecasted senior management vacancies that will result from baby boom retirements.

Analogy #1 — Understanding the Perfect Time to Buy

Any manager who has participated in a significant volume of corporate purchasing negotiations realizes that there are economic and competitive factors that make a particular period the “perfect time” to get the best deal. The “best deal” means a procurement opportunity where, with little effort, you are likely to get the best quality, the broadest selection, and at the lowest price.

The five factors that provide a “perfect deal” opportunity include:

• No competition — when your competitors aren’t buying.
• High availability — when the available quantity or volume of the product is high so that sellers have a surplus.
• High-quality — when the quality of the product is high.
• Low cost — when the cost is low (because of the high supply and the low demand).
• Low supplier power — when the weakened bargaining power of the seller has made them more open to concession in terms.

For many markets, it’s a “once in a generation” perfect-storm opportunity when these five factors occur simultaneously. While many nations do not have a labor shortage, many including the United States do have a talent shortage.

If your organization has struggled in the past two decades to find top talent to fuel growth initiatives, this temporary respite in competition for labor should be leveraged to the hilt.

Procuring high-quality talent at low cost and with minimal effort would certainly make you a hero among senior managers with mounting volume of work to be completed.

Analogy #2 — Understanding the Perfect Time to Acquire Exceptional Sports Players

Let’s assume for a few minutes that you run a professional sports team. You would quickly realize that the best time to build a sports franchise by recruiting enough star players to give you the capability of winning the championship would be when most of the following “five factors” are present:

• No competition — the other top teams aren’t recruiting, so no one else even bids on top talent.
• Talent costs were low — because no one is actively bidding, the costs of acquiring any available talent would be low.
• High-quality talent available — an opportune time to recruit would be when there were a number of genuine superstars available and in addition, there was also a large volume of high-quality talent available across all of your key positions.
• The players lack power — whenever there is a lack of competition and few open positions, even exceptional players become amenable to considering and accepting job offers that they would not have previously been considered.
• Everyone is recruitable — and most important, all in the case where all no trade clauses have been made null and void, you could literally “take” any player from any team without any remuneration or legal restrictions.

Actions that you would take when most or all of these factors occurred would include:

• You would over-hire players — should this “perfect storm” confluence occur, the opportunity would undoubtedly excite both you and your managers. It would probably also cause you to expand your recruiting, so that you would “load up” with talent, even in positions where you were already satisfied with the talent you currently had.
• You would designate “evergreen jobs” to ensure you never have a shortage of great players. For these few roles, you would continually recruit and hire exceptional talent whenever it was available at a reasonable price. The logic would be simple. In the sport of baseball, you could never have “enough” pitchers with an ERA of under 3.0. If you “own” all the talent, your competitors can’t. If you had “surplus talent” in key positions, you could just adopt new approaches to take advantage of the available talent.
• You would make immediate “opportunity hires” — if the team that you managed was a professional golf team, you would have previously assessed all of the top talent in your league. As a result, you would not need a lot of time to decide who you wanted to hire and who you didn’t.
• You would directly “raid” other firms when they are weak — unlike in professional sports, there are no restrictions on recruiting away top talent from competitors, so you would develop an active poaching process to take their best players when their team was at its weakest.

Analogy #3 — The “illogical” current corporate recruiting strategy

In 99.9% of all corporations, if Tiger Woods (or his equivalent in business talent) walked into your recruiting office and you did not have an open requisition for his specific position, you would literally send him away. Because the economy is down, corporate recruiting is stuck in cost-cutting mode. It isn’t doing any significant sourcing or hiring and the CFO may in fact have already decimated the recruiting team.

Most would classify this current time period as “bad times” when you lay low to avoid getting the recruiting budget cut even further. You certainly wouldn’t view this as the best time for recruiting in a generation.

All the Factors Point to a Great Time to Recruit

The purpose of these three related analogies is to demonstrate the identifiable factors that make it a perfect time to buy. You might be surprised to learn that whether you’re buying products or sports stars, the factors that make it “an ideal time to buy” are strikingly similar.

Currently, top talent is abundantly available; at no other time in recent economic history has the pendulum swung so far toward the advantage of the employer.

Unfortunately, most corporate recruiting leaders haven’t taken advantage of this opportunity. Perhaps the leaders in corporate recruiting are too close to the situation to actually see the tremendous opportunity that is facing us today.

Because revenues are down, today isn’t the perfect time to do large-scale hiring, so implement select “surgical hiring” where you selectively build your organization by hiring a relatively small number of exceptionally talented individuals for your key positions.

In the following section I’ve provided the most important factors that should cause you to begin countercyclical hiring.

The Perfect Time for Recruiting

• Competitors are out of the market — almost no one is in the talent market right now. Most firms have instituted a hiring and/or a budget freeze, which means the competition for talent is ridiculously low. They won’t need to enter into a single bidding war for top candidates when the talent competition is out of the marketplace. In addition, you might feel relatively alone among corporate recruiters, if you choose to visit college career centers.
• High-quality talent is available — in some downturns, only low-quality talent is laid off by corporations. However, during the current downturn, because of a large number of recent mergers, facility closings, and the complete elimination of some major firms, the amount of extremely high-quality unemployed or underemployed talent available around the world is at an all-time high. Even currently employed top talent who have jobs haven’t been treated very well during the downturn, and a record number of over 60% of these fully employed individuals are open to new opportunities.
• Costs are low — the lack of competition and the down economy have forced the price of available talent in almost all positions back down to reasonable levels. New referral approaches and Internet and social networking recruiting tools have also reduced the cost of recruiting talent. Taken together they have dramatically decreased the cost of adding talent.
• Talent is amenable — the lack of available job opportunities has “shifted the power” away from talent and toward corporations to the point where top talent will consider job opportunities and options today that they would have rejected as little as two years ago.
• The coming retirement wave — the dramatic reduction in stock prices and 401(k) values has temporarily postponed the upcoming wave of retirements. Despite this delay, these retirements will come eventually and if the economy turns around suddenly, firms may very soon be faced with a tidal wave of retirements. Because large-scale retirements may begin in as little as a year or two, now’s the perfect time to “stockpile” and develop possible replacements for your most experienced managers and technical talent.
• The coming retention problem — if your organization is among the many that have undergone layoffs, frozen hiring, reduced budgets, and maybe even cut salaries through the use of furloughs, the odds are that your current employees are overworked and stressed. This less-than-perfect treatment coupled with the fact that many of the “new generation” of employees have little to no loyalty to a single firm will result in a dramatic increase in turnover as soon as more external opportunities begin appearing. Obviously, you should begin retention efforts immediately but it may not be possible to remove the “bad taste” that your current employees experienced. Expand your recruiting efforts to find replacements and realize that new hires are likely to be more loyal than most employees because they are now seeking security and they would certainly remember the fact that you “saved them” during a period when no one else would even look at their resume.
• Remote work is more feasible — the unwillingness of some talent to relocate has limited a firm’s talent options, but the increase in knowledge work coupled with the currently available technology makes it possible to allow top recruits to work at home with no loss in productivity.

Other advantages to countercyclical recruiting include:

• There are benefits if you “begin looking early” — the competition in the market for products and services has not slowed down in the slightest. As a result, companies are now planning numerous new technologies and processes to increase their productivity. By hiring now you provide new hires with enough training and development time to be up-to-speed as these new technologies come online. Hiring individuals before you need them also gives them a chance to adjust to your corporate culture. Hiring a surplus of talent will provide you with an opportunity to “release” employees or new hires who can’t meet productivity goals. A final advantage of beginning your recruiting search early is that even if you merely stretch out the time period over which you are actively looking for talent, you automatically increase the odds that one or more top individuals will become available during the extended search time.
• So what if you hire too many? — can you imagine a sports team having too many stars of the caliber of Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, or A-Rod? With this exceptional talent, you could more easily beat your competitors. I once saw a general manager at Agilent Technologies respond with astonishment when an HR manager suggested that it would be a problem to have a “surplus” talent in our number-one, high-impact position. The GM responded without hesitation that “would be a nice problem to have.” If we had too much talent in that position, “we would just try new things because of our increased capability.” I hope that you can see that, yes, there would be some added costs in “over hiring” but the opportunities and benefits would far outweigh those costs.

Update Your Recruiting Strategy with These Seven Elements

Hopefully the analogies and the eight factors listed above have convinced you that now is the time to rethink your approach to recruiting.

If so, there are seven major elements related to countercyclical recruiting that you need to consider adding to your current recruiting strategy:

1. “Pre-need hiring” — this approach is where you build relationships and hire talent before you actually need it in order to provide ample time to develop and acclimate to your culture .
2. “Over hiring” — over hiring is where you purposely hire more talent than you immediately need in order to prepare for an “upturn” in demand. Alternatively, you can also use this as a stimulus to “swap” poor performing current employees with high-quality replacements.
3. Build a talent pool — a “talent pool” is a group of highly desirable talent that you identify, assess, and build relationships with over time, so that when an opening occurs, most of your sourcing and initial assessment is already done.
4. Opportunity hiring — this approach involves quickly “pull the trigger” and immediately hire superstars (that you have pre-identified and pre-assessed) immediately as they become available.
5. Most wanted list — this element is a combination of talent pool and opportunity hiring. Under this process, at the beginning of the year you select the top 25 (up to 100) most desirable individuals in your industry. You essentially “prequalify” them and you then spend the rest of the year trying to recruit them. As soon as one becomes available, you make a hiring decision.
6. Employer brand re-building — odds are that if your firm has undergone layoffs, furloughs, mergers, or bankruptcy that your external image as a “top place to work” has been severely damaged. Add to corporate actions the fact that numerous opportunities for employees (current and former) to share their perspective online have popped up in recent years and it becomes clear that nearly every organization needs an aggressive strategy to manage their brand perception online.
7. Approaches for identifying when your competitors are recruiting – “countercyclical” recruiting is where you recruit talent during times when other firms are out of the talent market. If you are not sure who is recruiting actively, have an intern check your competitor’s websites to see which jobs they are recruiting in high volume.

Final Thoughts

A handful of firms (Google, Slide, Microsoft, Principal, and HP) have to be recognized because they understood both the need and the opportunity to continue hiring during this downturn, even though they too may have been cutting their workforce.

However, the majority of recruiting directors haven’t taken advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime recruiting opportunity. I can only identify two major reasons for their lack of action.

The first is that they have just failed to be strategic and instead had a misdirected focus on cutting recruiting costs, rather than the more impactful strategic focus of increasing corporate revenues.

The second more palatable reason is that they understood the opportunity but they just didn’t have the capability of building an effective “business case” with senior management. That latter reason in one I’ll tackle in a future article.

• We are less than three weeks away from ERE Expo’s Fall conference taking place in Hollywood, FL from September 9 – 11. If you haven’t yet reserved your spot, register today and don’t forget to get your $200 ERE subscriber discount by using product code FL09ERE when you register.
• And with ERE Expo Fall so close, we are starting to get ready for the what will be the 10th annual spring conference, returning to San Diego from March 15-17, featuring the annual Recruiting Excellence Awards. If you are interested in submitting a proposal to speak in San Diego or serve as a judge of this year’s awards program, please contact Todd Raphael.
• Speaking of events, if you don’t follow us on Twitter you may have missed the announcement last week that we have secured the date and location of the next Social Recruiting Summit. Following June’s sold-out inaugural event, this one will take place on November 16 in New York City. Stay tuned for more details and registration information this week!
• On the site this week, a new writer Stephen Balzac discusses the lack of respect employees are giving candidates, especially during interviews. Yves Lermusi shows you some surprising statistics about who’s stretching the truth on resumes. Todd Raphael takes a look at a sweet internship (literally).

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

First, the headlines:

• A publicist for business law firm Proskauer Rose LLP reminds us that Sept. 8th is the deadline for federal contractors to sign up and use E-Verify, if they want to continue being federal contractors;
• CareerBuilder lit a match to BrightFuse, the business community site it launched 18 months ago, issuing a press release officially announcing it. At the same time, CareerBuilder released a survey saying 45 percent of employers have used social networking sites to research job candidates.
• Australia’s leading high-salary job board — www.sixfigures.com.au — introduces a new look and expanded career content today for its dues paying, high earning members. It’s also putting more news and content on the outside of the login wall.

E-Verify

This is the electronic employment verification program the U.S. Department of Homeland Security operates. If you haven’t used it, chances are you eventually will, since the government is slowly expanding its mandatory use and has made its voluntary use very attractive to employers.

The program is free and (mostly) insulates employers from legal sanctions for hiring undocumented workers if they have verified I-9 information through E-Verify.

Come Sept. 8th, federal contractors will be required to use E-Verify if their contracts exceed $100,000. Their subs, if they earn more than $3,000, will also have to use E-Verify. President George Bush first ordered the program in 2008, but between presidential extensions and a lawsuit, the implementation deadline kept getting pushed until Sept. 8th, a date expected to actually stick this time.

BrightFuse

This is CareerBuilder’s version of Facebook for business. Instead of content a job seeker may come to regret, BrightFuse offers a place for your face in a pantsuit. It’s a professional profile that can be used in place of a standard resume. Recruiters will like it since the data is neatly structured, making it conveniently available for digital capture.

It clearly shows a LinkedIn influence, what with the section for contacts and another for recommendations and the ability to create and join interest groups. It also has taken some cues from Facebook, allowing user to add Twitter feeds and RSS feeds to blogs. There’s also a tab for a portfolio to showcase work and a way to export elements of a BrightFuse profile to Facebook. Though with the CareerBuilder survey showing just how fast employers have embraced online backgrounding for candidates, some job seekers may want to keep their BrightFuse profile separate.

SixFigures

I can’t tell you much about this relaunch, except to report what was in the press release I got the other day. Here’s what it says about the site that may already be live when you read this:

“Due to growing demand by high salary earners for more specific career and industry related content, Six Figures is meeting demand by catering for additional aspects of a professional’s career, with career development, directorships, education and industry news forming a part of its extended offering. “

According to the PR, SixFigures has about 25,000 members, a seemingly small number until you consider that the entire labor force in Australia is only 11.2 million. How many of them pay the AU$66 a year wasn’t disclosed.

Incidentally, since the press release came from Australia, which is on the other side of the International Date Line, it wasn’t clear until today whether the new site’s launch date was Aug. 21 in Australia or in the U.S. It’s today, using the North and South American time zones.

In a recent ERE article, I made the point that “employment churn” (fully employed people switching seats) will increase dramatically three to four months before any pickup in overall employment. This unplanned spike in voluntary turnover will leave many companies ill-equipped to handle the surge, since most are not considering replacement hires in their new hiring forecasts as a big item.

Based on some recent evidence, I believe that this spike will be more significant that anyone realizes. Worse, this could happen sooner than expected, blindsiding unprepared companies.

Here’s some of the evidence supporting this view.

Over the past few months I’ve been asking people who are fully employed these two questions:

1. How satisfied are you with your current job?
2. Are you looking now for something better?

Interestingly, more people said they were satisfied than unsatisfied, but even those who were dissatisfied most said they weren’t looking right now, probably because there isn’t much worth looking at. We created a formal survey to validate this result, since the impact of this effect on your current and future sourcing plans is huge (here’s the link to the two-minute survey).

Overall, 75% of the people said they would consider something if called, but only 20% of the most satisfied said they’d take the call. You’ll find the detailed results after you complete the survey, but here’s the chart showing job satisfaction vs. job hunting efforts.

Basically, the conclusions drawn from this survey (when validated by more participants) mean you should stop all of your active candidate sourcing programs immediately and aggressively ramp up your passive recruiting efforts.

What the survey results seem to indicate is that just having a job is far better than not having one, even if the job itself provides little personal satisfaction. Since there are so few good jobs out there, it’s not worth looking for something else right now.

As you can see by the chart, less than 10% of those unsatisfied and extremely unsatisfied with their current jobs are aggressively looking. And why would they? We’ve all read about low-ball offers, the number of applicants applying for each job, and the demeaning aspects of looking for a job in the current environment.

Given this situation, it’s unlikely many fully employed people would be looking, risking the jobs they already hold. You can observe a similar effect by tracking the use of the word “jobs” in a Google search.

Last year, this number was about 3.5mm per day. It peaked in March/April at 7.6mm per day, and has been running at 7mm per day for the past three months.

While still a huge number, one could conclude that the steadiness is a result of people not finding anything new. I’d further conclude, based on the survey results, that most of the people looking for these jobs are either the unemployed or those just entering the workforce.

It’s also pretty easy to conclude that as soon as the economy recovers just a little, those least satisfied of the fully employed will leave first. This movement will then trigger the next rung of those slightly less satisfied to ramp up their job-hunting efforts.

This, in turn, will lead the next group to move up their efforts, and so on. Pretty soon, a minor increase in voluntary turnover will lead to a massive game of musical chairs being played out across the country. It will only take a little bit of new job creation to start this major movement.

This is not a far-fetched scenario, with the tea leaves pointing to something like this happening in the next three to four months. Surprisingly, very few companies are ready for this unexpected surge in replacement hiring.

If you think there is a possibility of this type of scenario impacting your company, here are four ideas you might want to ponder at your next recruiting staff meeting. (For more on this topic, check out my September 2 webinar called “How Job Satisfaction Drives the Job Hunting Process.”)

1. If you have any open reqs for experienced hires, don’t expect to hire any good people who respond to your ads. You’ll need to enter into the passive candidate market aggressively to fill these slots or ramp up your employee referral program. Here are links to LinkedIn and Broadlook webinars with some advice on how to use these tools to identify and call these people.
2. Call Jobs2Web, TalentSeekr, or First Advantage and ask them to create talent hubs for you for your most critical positions. There’s no OFCCP reporting required for these microsites as long as you’re just collecting prospects for broad categories of jobs. Here’s a link to a sample of how your CRM system can be designed to convert a prospect into a candidate using a series of auto-response emails without the recruiter even picking up the phone. We call this the “Virtual Recruiter”(sm). The talent hub with this type of drip marketing is the shape of things to come.
3. Figure out how you’re going to attract strong, fully employed experienced people who currently consider their current job as far better than anything you have to offer. Consider that these passive candidates also represent 80% of the total candidate market, and it makes no sense to continue spending 80% of your resources on the other 20%.
4. Become preventative. Figure out how to minimize the impact of voluntary turnover at your company. Minimize “disgruntled employee syndrome” in a period where jobs are going nowhere, salaries are being cut, comp increases are nonexistent, and benefits are declining. This is a tough challenge that needs to addressed, not ignored.

There’s a lot to chew on here, but if we’re moving through an inflection point right now, expect the ride to be comparable to a trip aboard the Enterprise through a black hole. Expect it to be much worse, if you decide to ride it out, without considering the consequences.

I understand this line of thinking. It’s simple, concise, easy to categorize. A “sexy” pitch. In fact, it’s the same line of thinking that leads to the idea that anyone who hangs out with a communist must be a communist sympathizer, or that someone who fires a woman must be a misogynist, or who is accused must be guilty in some way. In short, it’s dead wrong.

What’s wrong about it is it’s incendiary, irresponsible, and extreme. One-sided. And it’s not like I believe the opposite line of thinking to be true either (that all recruiting should be focused on those who are unemployed). Quite the contrary. I have a problem with that version as well. I’ve read a number of articles (such as in Workforce Management Magazine lately, in this recession, that imply (or even overtly state) that passive recruiting is a “shameful practice” and contributes to the distrust of corporate America by the many millions of workers who are seeking employment. Passive recruiting shameful? Again, this reasoning is as misguided as the CEOs above.

“To suggest that passive recruiting in the face of a high unemployment rate is unethical is a misnomer that fails to take into account the bigger picture,” says Dr. Cheryl-Marie Hansberger, vice president of strategic development for Delcan, a global engineering firm. “It is true that most industries are seeing an increase in the number of applicants per position; however, for our company this increase has not equated to larger pools of qualified candidates. Instead this increase creates an additional burden for lean HR teams as we spend more time processing unqualified applicants. The fact of the matter is successful companies use the most cost-effective means to recruit qualified candidates, whether it is a direct hire or a passive candidate, period.”

And this is what I’m not hearing much of in all the chatter out there — the middle ground — where the truth lies.

“Recruiters … want to fill the job perhaps more than anyone,” says Ginny Eagle, director of talent acquisition for T-Mobile. “If the requisition has attracted what appears to be top candidates, we look no further. If not, we source. Sourcing involves multiple activities to find the perfect candidate. Professional networking tools are used, and we often can’t really tell if someone is still employed or not because people are not updating their profiles when they first leave a job. They sometimes wait, so they don’t appear to be unemployed.”

One of the themes that I’ve constantly referred back to is, when it comes to recruiting, one size does not fit all. As mentioned above, great recruiting requires both active and passive strategies and, in short, good, hard work. As with most things, to say that something is all or nothing simply isn’t true. For instance, the idea that active recruiting involves “damaged goods” is simply not always the case. It takes a great HR person to know the difference.

“There is no denying that many share the opinion that the best people don’t get laid off. To me, this is a narrow point of view as situations certainly exist, such as our current economic environment, that put even the best people at risk,” notes Jason Farr, vice president, global talent acquisition, Coca-Cola Enterprises.
“I believe it’s important to not limit ourselves and to be open to all candidates.”

To be sure, there are candidates who have been laid off for performance reasons, and companies do use an economic downturn to mask laying off people for performance issues. In this instance, companies know there are a lot more active candidates in the marketplace and thus, they can replace the individual laid off quicker. As a result, there are certainly individuals with professional red flags in the marketplace, but the successful recruiter will have a balanced view of this.

And there are undoubtedly specific roles whereby the chances are that 90% or more of appropriate candidates will be developed through passive recruiting. For certain roles, in certain professions, there are simply not a lot of candidates, and the best people are employed elsewhere. “While passive recruiting is very costly, it is essential in industries that have large barriers to entry and, as a result, smaller qualified applicant pools,” says Hansberger.

“Those in the healthcare industry know this quite well,” adds Christine de la Paz, human resources director, Aurora Behavioral HealthCare. “We are specific to what we are looking for, and not only through our whim … the requirements are dictated by government bodies and accrediting organizations. After all, our RNs need to have a valid license.”

Thus if you’re a company looking for these types of people, you have to know where they are and be able to convince them to come elsewhere. To not adopt this approach for these key roles would be corporately irresponsible.

But a vital element in all of this is you don’t have to pursue only one strategy. The different approaches do require different skill sets. Active candidate recruiters tend to have a “post and pray” mentality and are very assessment-focused; passive candidate recruiters are skilled at sourcing strategy and research, among other things.

The key is that as recruiters and HR professionals, we have to develop skills and techniques to do both and should not necessarily be single-strategy focused. Some (dare I say many) roles will require both an assessment and sourcing strategy.

Notes Chelle Wingeleth, director-global recruitment services, Research in Motion Ltd, the developer of the BlackBerry mobile device, “It is incumbent upon recruiting professionals to design and pursue strategies to find the best talent quickly. In today’s market it is true that there are more active candidates; however, this does not mean that we can become complacent and rely upon one source. Posting a job so that active candidates may apply is not a silver bullet. What if the right candidate does not apply? A good recruiter will focus on attracting active applicants and, in parallel, search for passive candidates.”

A question bigger than all of this lurks, however: As staffing and recruiting teams have dwindled in companies and the recruiting specialists have left, where do we go to identify candidates?

The answer, as you may have guessed, turns out to be not one place but many places. They include everything from using outsourced providers to developing appropriate sourcing methods in-house (as mentioned above).

Ultimately, according to Wingeleth, “Companies and recruiters are striving to do the right thing. Who among us does not want to see unemployment go down? But, the reality of our situation is this: The national jobless rate is 9.5%. This means that 90.5% of Americans are employed. No line manager or company playing to win in this economy would say they want to ignore 90% of the potential talent. Put another way, who would only want to consider 10% of the possible candidates?”

Thus, as I’ve mentioned previously, if your ultimate goal is to increase your value to your organization, and be the best recruiter possible, you have to stay away from only-one-way-or-another, all-or-nothing mentality. In the end, in this economy, it may get you nothing.

Organizations worry about being perceived as offering a good balance between work and personal time.

Many career sites and recruiters stress the ways the organization addresses this through flexible work policies, family-friendly HR polices, child care, and so on. And, for many job seekers, finding a company that offers this magic blend is the Holy Grail.

While Jack was addressing women specifically and speaking about their opportunities for promotion and growth within traditional corporate America, he was reinforcing this assumption. He was heavily criticized for talking to women in this way, even though it is an accurate reflection of the thinking in most of traditional corporate America.

My problem is not with Jack as much as it is with the assumptions that work/life balance is based on.

We assume that work and family should be separated and that there should somehow be an equal division between the two, which is implied in the word “balance.”

The concept of work and life being somehow distinct from each other is a recent construct. There was no work/life balance in the 17th, 18th, 19th, or for most of the 20th centuries. Work and life were integrated and no one would have even thought to separate out what portion of farm life, for example, was “life” and what portion was “work.” Wives and husbands and children worked together as family units, producing food, clothing, or operating a small family business. Roles were assumed and cast off as needed and whoever had the ability or skill needed at a particular time did what was needed to be done.

In most of the world this is still the case. It is only in developed nations that these artificial distinctions arose to meet the needs of factories where everyone had to be in a physical place for certain time frames in order for things to be made. It took England and the United States decades to get people accustomed to going to work at a particular time and staying for a fixed amount of time. The way we work today has never been an organic or natural way, and our fixation recently on work/life balance is only the latest manifestation of an old issue.

Where I think Jack was misguided was in not recognizing how rapidly the traditional corporate world is crumbling. Organizations like Facebook, Mozilla, and hundreds of other emerging firms are organizing in radically different ways. They are focusing on interdependence, on building networks and fostering relations between workers, vendors, and customers. Innovative firms realize that flat structures and open communication improve creativity.

So the good news is that many organizations are moving back into the world where work and life are integrated and where entire families may be part of the “team.” Technology makes this possible, and as high definition video, faster connections, and touch capabilities improve it will be easier and easier. At the most exciting startups, people are already seamlessly integrated into projects where roles frequently change as needs change and leadership rotates as project requirements evolve. Workers are able to be at home with their kids or spouse. They can be outdoors or indoors. And very often they can be physically far removed from the “office” whatever that is coming to mean. The emerging concept is that being in a certain place for a specific time is less important than achieving results and accomplishing goals.

While Baby Boomer managers are locked into the concept of physical space and time as keys to assessing contribution, younger workers have a different view. They realize that for personal as well as environmental and energy reasons, working from home is going to become the norm.

I am not downplaying how difficult it is to change the Baby Boomer attitude, but I am optimistic that as younger managers appear, as environmental pressures increase, and as younger organizations begin to generate significant revenue and employ more people, attitudes about work will change rapidly.

There will always remain work that requires physical presence — whether it is making something, caring for an ill person, or fixing your drainpipe. But less and less work requires a physical presence, and what remains may be done with greater flexibility and personalization than it is today. Our entire world rotates around an 80+ year-old concept that work is something done away from home, for a set amount of time, and should not be fun. Work is assumed to be only the means to have another life and as little of it as possible is good. The flip side to that is an assumption that work is what makes life meaningful and to do it with your partner, friends, or family is good. How many hours it takes to do it or where it gets done are far less important than the engagement and accomplishment.

Jack Welch was absolutely right if we are thinking about 20th century corporate life. However, Gen Y and those who follow are forging new territory and reinventing work — making it the engaging experience it should be where friends and families interact together all the time, teach each other, share workloads, and find emotional connections that have been purged from corporate life as we have known it.

Do you see what I see?
A star, a star
Dancing in the night,
With a tail as big as a kite.

–Do You See What I See, song lyrics

I was watching a movie a while back and I heard a line in it that has stuck with me and I think of often. It’s one of those file-markers I put in my brain at the time to think more about and maybe write about. I’m doing that now.

The movie was “Beyond the Sea,” a biographical film that took its title from the Darin song of the same name and was based on the life of singer/actor Bobby Darin, played by Kevin Spacey. It depicts Darin’s rise to teen idol success in both the music and film industry during the 1950s and 60s, as well as his marriage to Sandra Dee, played by Kate Bosworth.

Near the end of the movie Darin/Spacey is talking to his wife Dee/Bosworth about his career frustrations and what audiences want. It was the late 60s and Darrin’s successful 50s crooning was being made obsolete overnight by changing musical trends. He was confused and lost in his career. His wife casually made the remark, “People hear what they see.” In response, Darin successfully changed his presentation to accommodate a more modern audience.

As phone sourcers we rely on the telephone to deliver our “message.” What is that Gatekeeper “seeing” when you call her? Have you ever considered that what she is “seeing” is impacting what she is hearing and how she is reacting to you? Her reaction to you is informed by her intuition and her experience. It may also be informed by some extensive cross-wiring in her brain regions that represent abstract concepts … and who would have thought, anyway?

True, you’re going to run up against Gatekeepers who are young with not much experience to guide their reactions, but just as often, and more so these days I suspect, your task is going to be challenged by more experienced gatekeepers who are beginning to understand how their intuition guides their own decisions.
I doubt, though, many of them have an inkling about what I’m about to write about. That’s an advantage for you when you’re phone sourcing.

Research at the California Institute of Technology has shown that some people can actually “hear” what they see. It’s called synaesthesia — a genuine perceptual phenomenon where senses intermingle. It’s rare, but a more common form exists where a person is able to perceive numbers or letters as colors. The artist David Hockney is able to see color when listening to music. As the sound of a voice can be likened to music, is it such a far leap to ask yourself what color that receptionist might be “seeing” when she hears the tone of your voice?

Is she seeing red? We all know the association our culture has with the color red. Is a heightened aversion reaction like this impacting your sourcing efforts?

What if she “hears” the color blue and is washed over by the peaceful analogy of sensation that accompanies it? Do you think that would improve your results or lessen them?

Maybe she sees green. We all know what that’s associated with: go! Maybe it’s one reason some gatekeepers seem to cooperate with some people and not others. The question is, though, do all synaesthesia-affected gatekeepers see the same colors in response to certain tones? I suspect they might.

There is wide difference of opinion how common this is. I’ve seen estimates of 1/2000 and 1/20. It is genetic and also established that it’s more prevalent among females and that it runs in families. The chromosomal regions where the genes reside are known to contain genes associated with a variety of disorders, including autism, dyslexia, and epilepsy. My own family is marked by dyslexia.

I’ve always been acutely aware of how a person’s voice (and also many times, a person’s touch) impacted me viscerally. I can’t say that I see color, but I can say that I have a visceral reaction to certain voices (and sounds) that lulled my senses. The sound that comes to my mind right now is the sound of gum “popping” (some call it “smacking”). Most people find it annoying, but if there is someone chewing gum and making that “pop” sound every few chews, I’ll saddle up next to them just to listen. There is no drug in this world like it for me to set me into a catatonic state.

This sound sensitivity may be one reason why as a phone sourcer I am acutely aware of the Gatekeeper’s voice and immediately examine it when she answers (in a flash of a couple seconds) for clues as to her “ability” to help me. I admit, if I get a Gatekeeper on the phone whose voice I “enjoy” listening to, I’ll take more time drawing her out just because I like that visceral sensation she creates for me. I suppose it could be likened to a drug fix: I’m searching for them all day long!

Turning it around, I am often told how “nice” I sound on the phone. I interpret that as meaning that I probably have a good “phone voice” and might also be a contributing factor to why I get names using the telephone on most every call I make. It’s a theory, mind you; nothing scientific, but it’s a strong gut feeling I have. There’s more fire than smoke, I suspect, in this theory.

So, what do people tell you about your voice? Do you think of your voice as an asset, confidently using it in your work? I suspect those who do not like using the phone may not have had the positive experiences I’ve had with it. What do you think?

Silence is golden; speech is silver. ~ American Proverb

My brother-in-law visited the past week from New York City. He comes, usually, every August to stay a week or so with us here in part of the heartland of America, southwestern Ohio. That’s when the corn starts coming in and the tomatoes are ripe on the vine and he times his visits (I suspect) so he can eat like a king at our harvest table. We grow both.

I call it the Midwest; he argues that we’re not far enough west to be called mid-anything. Be that as it may, he is living in that peaceful twilight between the years your kids are grown and out of the nest and the beginning of the tsunami when they have grandchildren and those grandchildren become yours to keep a portion of some of your days. Or all of your days. Or every other day, whatever it may be.

Entering the room and gingerly turning over a naked doll-baby discarded and laying face-down on the floor with the big toe of his right foot, he sardonically declared, “Dead.”

I laughed just as the thing started babbling, googling, and burping, and leaving out sounds that normally are reserved for the nether regions of the body, all thanks to two D batteries in its back that are not yet dead.

“What did that thing cost?” he asked, warily eyeing the lifeless form on the floor that refused to stop emitting sound once prodded.

“Oh that’s a 50-cent Goodwill baby. If you go on Sundays, everything is half off if you’re over 50,” I answered.

Nodding at another smaller doll-baby sitting quietly in a chair across the room, he asked, “And that one?”

“Oh, that one cost about 10 bucks on sale at Kohl’s. That’s a store-bought baby. It doesn’t talk.”

“Doesn’t talk?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s why it cost more,” I answered with a wink.

And it occurred to me that this might be a good lesson for sourcing and recruiting.

How many of us think we have to talk our prey to death to get results? There are still a good number of people out there who think a good salesperson is a good “talker.” A good salesperson, like a good recruiter or sourcer, is a good listener and worth many times their weight in gold over a babbling fool.

Do you feel you have to do a lot of talking when you’re sourcing or recruiting? Why?