The Garden State (NJ) Council won a Pinnacle Award from the Society for Human Resource Management for its military career transition program. Developed in cooperation with Tip of the Arrow and officials at New Jersey’s Ft. Dix, the program is aimed at helping returning Iraq war veterans translate their military training and experience into the language of civilian recruiters.

ERE wrote about the Ultimate Warrior Career Workshops and Job Fair in August. Some 500 military soon-to-be discharged personnel attended the workshops where volunteer recruiters worked with them in groups and one-on-one, in sessions covering everything from writing a resume to preparing an elevator speech.

As the announcement of the award notes:

“More than a provider of “feel good” moments, the program’s goal is to share expert HR knowledge and insights about job searching and interviewing by delivering a broad scope of information and one-on-one attention for each service member.”

Sherrill Curtis, an organizer of the program, said in an email after the awards were announced that the program in New Jersey is growing, with colleges and universities signing on, as well as expanding with more volunteer HR coaches.

“With a local SHRM chapter in Indiana also winning for their similar program,” Curtis wrote, “we are well on our way with SHRM national support for drawing in volunteer HR professionals as career coaches from across the U.S.”

The second military oriented program to be recognized was organized by the Evansville (Indiana)-Area Human Resource Association in cooperation with the Indiana Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. Besides offering career counseling and connecting employers and transitioning military directly through referrals and job postings, the Evansville-Area SHRM affiliate asked its member employers to list the certifications they require for various jobs. In turn, the military in the area is now offering opportunities for its personnel to earn those specific certifications.

SHRM also recognized programs to retain young workers in New Orleans; a Texas career fair specifically for workers with criminal records; a telethon-like seven-hour TV broadcast by two chapters in North Carolina that provided on-air counseling and assistance to about 1,100 callers; a job interview training program for high school seniors in Pennsylvania; a job counseling program for single-parent women and families receiving public assistance in New Mexico; a “Workforce Readiness Toolkit” for individual job seekers and employers in New Hampshire, and a SHRM chapter leadership preparation and training program.

More details on each of these programs and the Pinnacle Awards are available here.

Well you can.

It’s called: Show more appreciation and give more recognition.

I had an experience recently that reminded me of how often even really smart managers neglect to use these simple practices, and by doing so, miss out on the morale-boosting, engagement-inspiring results they bring.

Not showing appreciation or giving recognition also carries a significant price tag. In fact, lack of appreciation was cited by the Department of Labor as the No. 1 reason employees leave their job.

How Often Have You Gotten a “Thank You” or “Way to Go!”

Think of your own experience as an employee over the years. Think of how rarely if ever you had a boss express appreciation when you went the extra mile, worked extra hours, or did an exceptional job on a project.

Think of what a “motivation killer” that was. Even though you still worked hard and did a great job because of your work ethic and professional pride, your heart was just a little less into your work.

You probably cared just a little bit less.

Teaching Employees to Care Less

After a while, the cumulative effort of being taken for granted reaches the tipping point, and the loyal, hard-working employee becomes what Gallup calls ROAD Warriors — Retired On Active Duty — or they simply look for more appreciative pastures.

Here’s What Not to Do

Recently I finished up a project helping an organization improve its onboarding process for salespeople. One of the managers in this company — I’ll call him Justin — played an essential role in helping me understand the day-to-day realities and requirements of their new salespeople. Not only was he helpful, but he was also very generous with his time, telling me never to hesitate to call if I needed more input or feedback. Throughout our working together, I made sure Justin knew how much I appreciated both the quality of his insights and his willingness to give of his time, despite his onerous workload.

When I finished the project, I told Justin I would write a letter to the Senior VP of his department, letting him know how helpful Justin had been, and what specific qualities Justin demonstrated that were so useful.

Before sending the letter out, I emailed Justin a copy—in part as another way of letting him know how much I appreciated his help—and to let him know what specifically he did that was so helpful.

I then sent the letter on to the senior VP.

You Gotta Be Kidding!

A couple weeks later, I e-mailed Justin to see what the Senior VP said to him about the letter.

Nothing.

Not a word.

Wake up Dude!

As I think about this senior VP, who is a brilliant individual, I can’t help but think, “You had this opportunity spoonfed to you to praise one of your hardest working, most dedicated, and most innovative managers and you blew it. Come on! Wake up!”

A Missed Opportunity

Here was a great opportunity for the VP to not only express appreciation and recognize a high-value employee, but also a great opportunity to communicate that he values the specific behaviors demonstrated by the manager.

This is one of the under-recognized benefits of showing appreciation and recognition: when you acknowledge—with specificity—the good work that you notice, you reinforce it.

Mindfulness Time

OK, so what to do with this simple little cautionary tale? Practice paying attention for opportunities to express appreciation and recognition.

To prime your brain for this, you might want to think about the various people you work with right now. Think of those people who stand out in terms of how well they do their job, how easy they are to work with, how “internal customer friendly” they are, or who act in other ways that make your life easier and better. Then, one by one, consider:

1. What they do that you appreciate.
2. How they help make your job easier or help you maximize your productivity.
3. What they do exceptionally well.
4. What about their personality, their way of being, you appreciate.

How to Put This Awareness to Use

-Be on the lookout for opportunities to express appreciation. It can be as simple as:

“Connie, I was just reading an article about appreciation and the article was suggesting that you think of people who are especially helpful and to let them know that … and I thought of you immediately. I SO appreciate how easy you are to work with. If something needs to get done, you do it. You never complain or make it sound like an imposition. I really appreciate that.”

“Krista, I was just reading an article about appreciation and the article was suggesting that you think of people who do something you really appreciate and to let them know that. So I thought of you. I starting thinking about how much I appreciate the fact that you really listen. There aren’t a lot of people who truly listen and want to understand what the other person is saying, and I so appreciate that you do. Thank you for that. It means a lot to me.”

-If an employee in your organization, a client’s or a vendor’s organization does something really helpful or simply has a history of being a pleasure to work with, let their boss know.

-Catch yourself taking people for granted by not acknowledging what they do, and rectify it. Be on the lookout for opportunities to say “thank you” and “I appreciate that.”

Here’s the Best Part

Both research on gratitude and our own life experience shows us that when we give someone a compliment, when we express gratitude, when we do something kind, we feel better. So, becoming more generous with gratitude and recognition doesn’t just make other people feel better. It’s a great way to keep your own morale high.

Diversity means difference. Difference can show up a lot of different ways, but within the context of work we can probably focus primarily on identity diversity (age, race, gender, geography, etc.), cognitive diversity (different thinking styles, mental orientations, and mental tools), and behavioral and communicative diversity. Diversity and inclusion work at its core is about sustainable and profitable practices — especially the effective and efficient identification, support, and deployment of talent to achieve business objectives.

Not only is there still need for clarity on what diversity and inclusion are, we should also get clear on this business case stuff. Do not be confused by what you have heard or read claiming that there is no business case for diversity, or that the business case is somehow fuzzy. Hogwash. Again, organizational diversity and inclusion work are largely about successfully finding, keeping, and using talent, which is increasingly business critical. The business case for diversity and inclusion is alive and well.

A specific business case is dependent upon the organization and the nature of the actual investment, but a few of the sources of value (explored in more depth in the December 2009 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) a case can be built on include:

Competitive Advantage

For more and more organizations in more and more industries, innovation is the new opportunity for competitive advantage. This is no secret, as there has been a great deal of discussion and analysis regarding the evolving role of innovation. Innovation is about more than just bringing new products or services to market. It also includes other aspects of business, such as approaches to collaboration, talent management, and engaging new markets.

Despite our affection for the myth of the lone genius, innovation does not take place in isolation. It happens at intersections. It happens when different experiences, perspectives, professions, organizations, and cultures rub up against each other. Without an understanding of, and some appreciation for, the value of difference (in opinion, identity, culture, profession, perspective, etc.) organizations will be hard-pressed to drive sustained innovation. Frans Johansson examines several great examples of this in The Medici Effect, including the story of the great Bletchely Park collaboration, where an incredibly diverse group of characters gathered to break the German coding system during WWII.

Demographic Changes

We are approaching a point where racial and ethnic minorities and women will represent 70% or more of new entrants into the workforce. Organizations that are not good at attracting, engaging, and retaining women and people of color need to fix that quickly, or they are going to be competing for a shrinking percentage of the available talent. Companies that only fix part of this will find themselves with costly retention and engagement problems. Real commitment to workforce diversity is no longer optional.

Talent

Regardless of our intentions, diversity is one of the social variables that can drastically diminish our ability to actually identify talent. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell shows us an example of this from the world of art. In the not-too-distant past, classical music was largely the domain of white men. “Women, it was believed, simply could not play like men. They didn’t have the strength, the attitude, or the resilience for certain kinds of pieces. Their lips were different. Their lungs were less powerful. Their hands were smaller. None of this seemed like prejudice at the time. It seemed like fact, because when conductors and music directors held auditions, the men always seemed to sound better than the women.”

As part of the push for legal protection, benefits, and fairness in hiring, musicians wanted the audition process to be formalized. This included erecting screens between the auditioner and those evaluating them. “In the past 30 years, since screens became commonplace, the number of women in the top U.S. orchestras has increased fivefold.”

Some of the women who stood out the most in these new auditions were the same women that had auditioned numerous times before the screens were added without making the cut.

I am not talking here about hateful people intentionally discriminating against others. That is another topic altogether. I am talking about human nature getting in the way of our identification of talent. If we want to improve our ability to really identify talent, we have to be aware of the influence of human nature and work to offset it as individuals and organizations.

People, teams, and organizations that are indeed serious about talent must also be serious about diversity and inclusion. Once, again, I am not talking about being tolerant or being sensitive. I am talking about understanding the value of difference and understanding what can easily and quietly get in the way, regardless of our intentions or our character.

The future of your organization may very well depend on it.

It’s built by the same people who launched Zoho People, a low-cost talent management system we wrote about a while back.

Like People, Zoho Recruit handles all the basics, and then some. You can create a posting from a req, publish it (manually) to your own website, export it to other sites and, of course, manage all the inbound resumes and applications.

Zoho’s basic service is free. A premium service costs $12 per user per month. Don’t worry that the free service is a stripped-down shadow of an ATS. The principal differences between the pay and free services are storage size, posting volume, and resume parsing.

For a staffing agency with a healthy business, or a volume employer accepting resumes, paying the premium would be worthwhile for the parser alone. It’s eGrabber’s well-regarded ResumeGrabber.

There are plenty of nice touches that you’d expect to get only in a pay service. Things like candidate locking for staffing firms with multiple recruiters and offices so none is inadvertently competing internally. Documents can be attached to contacts and reqs; notes and logs are included, with everything integrated for easy retrieval. And you can export all your data — yes, including the documents — in multiple formats.

Resumark.com

It had to happen sooner or later that someone would offer to pay jobseekers to be jobseekers. Resumark is paying candidates $1 every time their resume is downloaded from the site.

Now, this isn’t a brand new service; Resumark launched last year. However, it was updated and relaunched in Septmeber with a more active job posting and search. It also has a Twitter account. But with unemployment now over 10 percent, Resumark is becoming more aggressive in promoting its unique resume collection technique.

Says Andrew Kucheriavy, Resumark founder,  “With the traditional model, job websites get resumes for free and then sell them to employers. With our model, employers actually pay job seekers for their resumes. All job seekers have to do is post resumes. We handle the rest.”

Jobs can also be posted for free on the site. Listings are redistributed to all the major search engines and are sent to jobseekers based on their interest.

How does Resumark make money? By charging you for resumes. It has a PPP model so you only pay for the resumes you want. It uses Google search, so it will help if you are adept at Boolean strings. Otherwise, sifting through the results won’t be a lot different than a typical Google search.  But for as little as $3 a resume, you may find the investment worthwhile.

CPICJobs.com

This is not a site that most recruiters will ever consider, but we include it here for two reasons: it illustrates just how niche-y job boards are becoming (and how plentiful), and; the two companies involved have singularly entertaining names.

“Federal Concierge, LLC and JellyBean Blue, LLC. co-launched a niche job board solution “CPICjobs” on a new website: www.CPICjobs.com,” was the opening line of the press release drawing my attention to the site.

CPIC, incidentally, is shorthand for Capital Planning and Capital Planning Investment Control. The press release notes that practitioners have such job titles as Capital Planning Analysts, Enterprise Architects, Exhibit Writers, Portfolio Managers and Earned Value Management Professionals.

The organization’s latest outlook is even more hopeful than the one issued just a month ago. Today’s report says that the U.S. economy will grow at an annual 3.2 percent GDP, half a point higher than the NABE’s October forecast.

The economists say the recovery will be lead by the  housing turnaround already underway, which will gain momentum next year, and by business investment in equipment, software, and inventories.

“While the recovery has been jobless so far, that should soon change,” said NABE President Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University. “Within the next few months, companies should be adding instead of cutting jobs.”

Consumers, however, are unlikely to open their wallets anytime soon. The 48 economists participating in the survey expect “lackluster consumer spending gains over the coming year.” Instead, consumers will continue saving, averaging 4 percent during 2010.

The unemployment rate, now at 10.2 percent, is expected to hover there through the first half of next year, declining only slightly — to 9.6 percent — by year’s end. The report said that next to the size of the federal deficit, unemployment over the next five years was the biggest concern of the economists on the survey panel.

I applaud these comments. They have been a long time coming. But in many ways they are like advising Robert Reich to grow taller: easy to say, but doomed to disappoint. The formula for fixing these recruiting problems is threefold: 1) if you cannot define it, you cannot measure it; 2) if you cannot measure it, you cannot control it; and 3) if you cannot control it, you have a 50/50 chance of being wrong.

Defining Requirements

Most executives tend to measure performance by results. But wise ones know by the time results are posted, the activities that produced them are ancient history. Frustration ensues because even executives cannot control performance after the lights go out and everyone has gone home. It must be controlled in the moment.

Do you remember the old joke about the man who prays many years to win the lottery? Eventually, he hears God say, “Give me a little help here? Buy a ticket!”

Well, how does this sound? After years and years of praying for improved employee performance, God finally says, “Give me a little help here? Start accurately assessing important job skills!”

Buying a ticket or accurately assessing candidates are the only thing an employee, manager, or recruiter can control. The rest is out of our control. As a professional psychometrician (i.e., one trained to identify and accurately measure KSAs needed to perform a particular job), I can attest that nothing, I repeat, nothing has a better ROI than implementing an accurate hiring program.

But wait! There’s more! You also get candidates who think it is more professional; it’s exactly what the DOL recommends; every candidate is treated equally; turnover is reduced; individual performance rises; and, training decreases. Can anyone name other organizational program that can do all that?

No one expects you to be an overnight expert, but you can begin by using a basic rule of thumb. Divide job requirements into six general factors (i.e., mental ability required to learn and make decisions, organizational ability necessary to implement projects and plans, interpersonal skills necessary to deal with people, associated attitudes, interests, and motivations, special occupational knowledge required, and essential physical abilities). For each factor, identify the level affecting job success or job failure.

Clear and concise definitions are not optional.

Are you doing this already? A sure clue is relying on position descriptions, hiring managers who cannot agree on whether a candidate is qualified, or hiring managers who insist on seeing multiple candidates so they can compare them to each other instead of to the job.

Measuring Applicants

Picture this: A candidate applies for a job; he or she presents a resume, more than half of which, Sullivan says, contain lies; you have a few hours to ask questions about past job experience (which will probably be exaggerated); you may call a list of pre-screened references (who will probably lie to you); give a test borrowed from a training class (that has no proven link to job performance but people seem to like); get together with hiring managers to argue about whether a candidate is job-qualified (where everyone seems to have a different opinion); and, tentatively ask managers six months later whether they made a good decision to spend wisely tens of thousands of organizational dollars (expecting them to be honest). Sound familiar?

Is it any wonder why senior executives are always re-examining the value of HR? Why external recruiters have trouble differentiating their service from internal ones? Why organizations get sued for unfair employment practices?

What? You don’t use assessments? You only use interviews? You think the DOL guidelines are only for dummies? Keep reading.

Assessment is just a fancy term for measuring or evaluating job skills. Resume screens are assessments, as are application blanks, interviews, reference checks, tests, and photographs. Anything used to identify job-qualified applicants is an assessment. So, as Sullivan recommends, should recruiters use more assessments? Sorry, folks. That is like recommending fish swim more often. If you have asked a candidate a single question, you have used an assessment.

Now that you know you are an assessor, come to grips with the fact that gut feelings and unstructured interview assessments deliver reprehensible results. You don’t need more questions or interviewers. You need better tools.

Step on the Scale, Please

Hiring managers seldom have weeks, months, or years to observe and evaluate candidate skills … only a few minutes or hours. So, how does one get accurate and reliable data about whether a candidate has job skills? It helps to divide assessments into two classes: asking questions informally (i.e., person to person) or asking questions using a formal approach (i.e., pencil and paper or web-based format).

For people already familiar with structured interview technology, you can think of it as either asking the candidate to recount a situation, action, and result; or, formally controlling the situation, the possible range of actions, and using a standardized scoresheet to evaluate results. The objective in both cases is the same: evaluate whether candidate performance would lead to successful job performance.

An example of a poor assessment tool is a wife who asks her husband if she is getting fat. A foolish husband will size her up and render an opinion. A wise husband will instantly clutch his side, fall on the ground and scream, “Dial 911! I think my appendix has ruptured!” Measuring body weight based on opinion is irrelevant and dangerous. The same is true of assessments.

In choosing a set of hiring tools, always keep in mind that assessments that predict job performance are not the same as style or type assessments. Legitimate vendors are anxious to show documented proof that their assessment scores directly lead to employee performance. Illegitimate ones are not. Either way, the user, not the vendor, is solely responsible for assessment use.

Now let’s talk about the compelling power of human nature (or, why unstructured interviews persist). As pointed out by S.M. Colarelli and M. Thompson in the September 2008 issue of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, early humans lived in small bands of about 150 people, where physical survival depended on quickly sizing up someone based on face-to-face or word-of-mouth communications. People who made faulty decisions under these conditions often died before they could pass-on their gullibility gene. On the other hand, people who made better face-to-face survival decisions lived to have offspring who shared the same skills. Let’s acknowledge the force of nature.

Although most recruiters are not exposed to mortal situations, how often do you hear them say they want to get to know the candidate personally? Or a hiring manager say they know in their gut if it’s the right person? These are ancient survival techniques unconsciously doing their job. They have no place in recruiting. Once a hiring manager or recruiter decides the candidate is not Hannibal Lector considering whether to invite them to lunch, they should start accurately assessing skills leading to job performance.

Control

Controlling the hiring process does not mean asking managers to complete smile sheets or to rate results (results, if you remember, may or may not be a product of the “hows”). You need managers’ objective feedback about the new employee’s on-the-job hows so you can compare it to the data from your original assessments.

Start by using the six factors I recommend earlier. This model will provide a template for asking questions and comparing actual performance with measured performance. Look for things you might have missed, need to better evaluate, are duplicated, or unclear. Then make informed changes. Improving quality of hire is a TQM process applied to people skills.

Research has long shown choosing people with the right skills depends largely on clear definitions, measuring hows twice, using different assessment methods to measure the same hows, using multiple assessors, and measuring a full range of critical job skills. How do you get started? Well, you could hire a full-time psychometrician like the big organizations do, you might rent a expert for a few weeks to get started, or you might start using the system described above.

This completes the human performance cycle. If you cannot define it, you cannot measure it. If you cannot measure it, you cannot control it. If you cannot control it, you have a 50/50 chance of being wrong.

In other words, there is only one way to get there from here.

Last week

This week my attention turns to why the recruiting function cannot — and should not — be the primary executor of social media activities, as well as tips for getting the rest of the organization to help out.

A List of Reasons Why Recruiters Can’t or Shouldn’t Do It All

There are a variety reasons why recruiters shouldn’t be expected to handle most of the day-to-day aspects of social media recruiting and communications.

Some of them include:

• The volume is unmanageable — given the normal recruiting load, if you need as few as 10 prospects in order to generate a single hire, the total number of contacts and the number of messages that a single recruiter would need to generate a trusted social relationship would quickly become unmanageable. Having the communications load spread across many employees makes the required volume more manageable.
• Less available time — because recruiters are already stressed and overworked, unless they are released from their regular recruiting duties, they will have very few hours available to lurk on social networks. In direct contrast, many of your employees are likely to be already spending dozens of hours each week on such sites, some of it outside of work hours (thus making it free). By using this already committed time, you can multiply your impact by leveraging the time spent by your employees.
• Recruiters are less authentic — most candidates don’t find recruiters to be as authentic or credible as those that work in the department where the job is open, because recruiters don’t actually do the job. In addition, everyone knows that recruiters are salespeople and have been known to oversell positions.
• A recruiter’s job-specific knowledge is limited — the very best prospects will seek specific information about a job. They will ask questions that the average recruiter just can’t adequately or convincingly answer because they don’t actually work in that job. Employees working in that team are well versed in the jargon and they know more about both the good and bad points of the actual job, the manager, and the work team.
• Recruiters provide a limited learning opportunity — employed individuals who are not actively seeking a job need to justify to themselves and to their boss the time they put into any external professional relationship. One of the justifications for external relationships is the potential to benchmark and learn, in order to do your current job better. Obviously there are more opportunities to learn and to improve when you network with a peer, compared to when you network with a recruiter.
• Social media efforts must be customized — recruiters can certainly over time learn how to use social networks and social media. Unfortunately, not all professions have equal access to social media or use social media in the same matter. In most cases, a one-size-fits-all approach will have a limited success because the approach that works on Twitter won’t work as effectively on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Because professionals in every job family also approach social networking differently, it may take someone in each individual field to know the best social media approach for that job family.
• Videos show the passion — videos and pictures are an important way of communicating on social networks. Unfortunately, no recruiter would have the time to create recruiting videos or to take compelling worksite pictures for each individual job opening. In contrast, individuals working in the field would be much more willing to frequently create and post work-related videos. Even though individuals who work in the job might make less professional videos or pictures, they are likely to be more compelling and authentic.
• Capturing competitive intelligence — although some recruiters understand their role as competitive-intelligence gatherers, many recruiters wouldn’t know what to do with valuable business information if they were to run across it. In contrast, your employees and managers who are well-versed in their fields will know what competitive intelligence questions to ask and what to do with any critical usable competitive intelligence information that they might obtain while social networking.

Tips on Getting Employees Involved

It’s generally not too difficult to get employees to begin social networking or to modify their current social media behavior if you clearly demonstrate to them the impact and the contribution that they can have. Unfortunately, once they agree to participate, the only option that most employees have to learn is through trial and error, which is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating!

Some of the action steps I recommend to help get employees involved and productive include:

• Ask them — ask your employees to help the firm in identifying potential candidates, in building relationships, and in strengthening the company’s employer brand image online.
• Educate them — make them aware of how their participation can be beneficial both to them and to the company’s recruiting effort. Let them know the range of actions and the minimum and the maximum amount of time you want them to contribute each month. You should also educate their managers so that they also see the unique value that they can contribute without distracting from their current job duties. Also provide your employees with examples and stories that illustrate the factors that make your firm a great place to work at.
• Leverage other business units — coordinate the social media recruiting effort with other business functions that are already advanced major social media users like marketing, product branding, and customer service. Not only can this help to avoid spreading conflicting messaging, but also ensure that all learning relating to effectively using social media is shared.
• Provide profile templates — every social network requires you to provide a profile of yourself. Rather than making each employee learn on their own the best ways to become visible on social media, instead provide them with tools to guide them. Start with “fill-in” templates of effective profiles that are individually designed for each major site that they can use to get started. Also provide side-by-side samples of great, average, and poor profiles so they can actually see the different factors that differentiate a great one from a weak profile.
• Provide contact-building approaches — because every different social media site has different capabilities for identifying and making new “friends,” educate your employees about the most effective approaches on each site. Educate them about how to use surveys, post questions, join and form groups, etc. Also help them with sample “first-contact” templates and successful approaches for overcoming resistance. Employees might also have to be educated about the different approaches that are required to contact and recruit in-demand currently employed individuals vs. the approaches that work effectively for active job seekers.
• Tell them where the best prospects can be found — don’t force them to learn the most populated social media sites and groups for their particular job family through trial and error. Instead, use your recruiters and external vendors to identify the sites where the best in each individual job family can be found. Continually update them as the popularity of different sites change and don’t forget to include live networking events (i.e., university alumni, professional association, and social club and community events) as part of your recruiting strategy.
• Offer coaching help — compile an experts directory and webpage, so that your employees can seek out and get effective coaching and advice when they run into a problem or an opportunity. External coaches and other vendor services can help both employees and recruiters remain on the leading edge of social media recruiting practices. Develop a process to regularly provide tips to your employees (for example, how they can link the various social media sites together (i.e., Twitter with LinkedIn with Facebook), so that they minimize the number of times they need to shift between the various sites).
• Use other technology tools and channels — empower your employees to use each of the wide variety of technologies and communications channels that perspective candidates might use. This might include the mobile phone platform, video sites like YouTube, online forums, texting, blogging, RSS feeds, etc.
• Global opportunities — don’t forget to educate your employees about the unique social media sites (and how to operate on them) that are popular in other regions or countries where your firm is heavily recruiting.
• Ask them to notify you when they come across negative messages — it’s quite likely that your employees will be among the first to come across negative or brand damaging messages about your firm. Encourage them to notify the manager of employer branding whenever they encounter negative messaging.
• Inform recruiting when others try to recruit them — encourage employees to help the firm learn how competitors are using social networks to recruit. Ask employees to contact central recruiting whenever they are approached in a recruiting context on social network sites. This has two purposes. The first is so that your firm can learn from the approaches of others. The second is that the retention function can use this information to develop blocking strategies to counter their social networking recruiting moves.

Focus Your Contribution

If you shift the burden of most day-to-day recruiting communications on social network and media sites to your employees, clearly define the remaining strategic role of your recruiters. Briefly, some of the social media related activities that should remain the responsibility of recruiting include:

• Prioritizing jobs and candidates — recruiting should prioritize key jobs and the ideal candidates, so that your employees will know where to best focus their recruiting related efforts. Employees should also be educated as to which professions and what types of candidates are not likely to be as active on social networking sites.
• Posting job openings — the posting of open jobs on the most appropriate social media sites should remain a centralized activity. Employees should also be encouraged to repost openings on unique sites that only they might be aware of.
• Employer brand image — recruiting should maintain control and ownership over developing, managing, and measuring employer brand strength and in identifying and countering negative messages. Recruiting should also monitor employer rating sites like glassdoor.com and Vault in order to identify and then effectively bury or counter negative messages on these critical sites.
• Search engine optimization — corporate efforts to increase your firm’s visibility on search engine results should remain centralized.
• Developing metrics and the business case — the recruiting function should own social media metrics and the process of building the business case. They should also periodically audit efforts using mystery shoppers, feedback loops, and best-practice sharing processes in order to continually improve social media results.
• Technologies related to social networking and social media — recruiting leaders should identify and assess emerging technologies, software, and vendor services.
• Converting prospects into hires — although employees will play a major role in identifying and building relationships with prospects, recruiters should still handle the remaining aspects of the recruiting process that lead to conversion.

Final Thoughts

In my experience, it’s hard to find a single major corporation where the executives and managers are not excited about the prospects of social media recruiting. There are many benefits associated with implementing an effective social media recruiting strategy. Unfortunately, a majority of organizations are progressing without selecting a strategy and are painfully learning through trial and error.

If you want to fast-forward your learning, you need to adopt an employee-centric strategy today.

Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business.

If you haven’t tried it for yourself, go here and test it out. What you’ll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different — and better — than the typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and concepts. A bookkeeper doesn’t need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley; a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you’re going to get CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with accountants and … you get the idea.

It’s “the world’s best search engine,” said Monster’s Javid Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine “that really helps you stop searching.”

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali explained.

It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate results. Monster showed this off during the demo using “business development manager” for the search with the result that all nine listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer: the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants will be of higher quality since an ad won’t just turn up in a search because it happens to contain the seeker’s keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved, know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845 for a two-week access. Right now, it’s a bargain at $260 for three days of searching in an area.

It’s also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a specific keyword in a resume. And it won’t store search histories for OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it’s a big step. For Monster, it’s a $100 million-plus step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35 million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It probably won’t be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than on bookkeepers.

Why can’t they do that now? They probably could, but the technical management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search. But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you’re looking for a CFO, you don’t want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That’s worth something.

Some business concepts worth considering when developing a hiring strategy:

1. When business conditions change, your strategy has to change along with it.
2. Tactics don’t drive strategy; strategy drives tactics.
3. Strategy drives the planning process. The plan drives the tactics.
4. Plan. Don’t react.
5. If you have the time, worry about the forest more than the trees.
6. You can’t push on a rope.

With this as a backdrop, it seems that most HR/recruiting departments don’t have a fundamental hiring strategy in place that ties directly to their company’s business strategy. If they did, it would seem, as a minimum, that requisitions would be categorized by the impact the job has on the company’s strategy. Some jobs would be more critical than others. Workforce plans would be developed to build pools of potential candidates for these critical jobs long before they’re needed, and hiring managers would be intimately involved and trained on how to find, assess, recruit, and hire the best prospects.

A description for this type of hiring strategy resembles something like this:

Maximize Quality of Hire Strategy: hire A-level talent for all strategic and critical management positions and the top-third for all other positions, without compromise. As part of this, offer careers, not jobs, at every level in the company.

While this is worthy, it seems that most hiring managers react rather than plan, and most don’t have a clue about how to assess and attract the best. HR/recruiting exacerbates the problem by focusing more on cost than quality, giving recruiters so much to do that they become mere paper pushers, and/or jumping from one sourcing idea to another in the vain search for the silver bullet.

Few companies are immune. While defining this type of hodgepodge hiring strategy is not easy, the one being used at your company probably resembles a combination of one or more of the following:

1. The transactional, minimize cost per hire strategy: find anyone who is actively looking who meets the job description at the lowest cost in the shortest period of time using the cheapest approaches possible.
2. The silver bullet strategy: try out every new sourcing idea with the hope that it works better than the last, and now tarnished, silver bullet.
3. The eliminate-the-worst strategy: put as many barriers as possible to eliminate the worst with the expectation that good people will be attracted and persevere because we have a great employer brand and an easy-to-find career site.
4. The proprietary talent pool sourcing strategy: build a talent pool of diverse talent and hope that a few people raise their hands when they’re emailed a boring job. (Note this is actually a pretty good sourcing strategy if coupled with better messaging and a career-focused assessment and recruiting process.)
5. The vendor-driven (aka the comp- or OD- or legal- or IT- or OFCCP-driven) strategy: let’s forsake all our responsibility for hiring and let our vendors tell us what to do, or let some bureaucrat, technocrat, or lawyer tie our hands.
6. The post and pray: post boring jobs on as many boards as possible with the hope that a good person inadvertently sees it.
7. The incomplete strategy: let’s do something really well, but then mess it up by not completing the process. Example: finding top-notch prospects who opt-out of the process early due to one of the following: application process is burdensome, recruiters don’t know the job, managers who are weak interviewers, offers that are uncompetitive, etc.
8. The “I’ll know it when I see it strategy” — aka the hiring manager-driven strategy: let hiring managers do whatever they want to do with heavy reliance on the job descriptions and the manager’s good sense of what success looks like. As part of this, recruiters are just told to send over as many candidates as possible who meet the specs.
9. The knock-out question or survivor strategy: this is a version of the “eliminate the worst” strategy, but starts by asking people a bunch of silly questions that only leave the desperate as survivors.
10. The hide-and-seek arrogance strategy: make it extremely difficult to find job postings, make it more difficult to apply, and require all candidates to bow down to the hiring manager if they’re fortunate enough to be granted an interview.

Of course, no one every starts out with this type of hiring strategy in mind, but somehow, piece-by-piece, this is what it evolves into. Part of the problem is letting the idea of the moment drive activity. As a result, we can often unknowingly affect the final outcome for the worse. This is called sub-optimization. For example, in today’s paper I just read that Orange County (California) is planning on widening its main freeway system into Los Angeles. Unfortunately, LA County is not planning on expanding the junction, with the result just moving the traffic bottleneck north by 10 miles.

Something like this happens every time a new sourcing process is implemented without considering the end-to-end impact. Problems like these can be minimized when there’s an overarching maximize-quality-of-hire strategy in place that everyone adopts. Then every subsequent action or decision can evaluated on how it impacts this strategy.

If you want to implement a maximize quality of hire strategy, you should first go through each step in your current sourcing, interviewing, and recruiting process and see if it’s counterproductive in some way or preventing the best people from consideration. With this as a framework, develop a two-pronged action plan. The first part involves stopping doing the things that prevent you from hiring the best. The second part involves implementing new processes based on how the best people look for new careers, how they compare different opportunities, and the criteria they use to accept an offer.

While I’ve been contending that HR/recruiting must take full responsibility for quality of hire, developing the strategy, plans, and processes is at the core of this. Of course, getting managers on board is the most difficult challenge here, requiring executive-level vision and support to be successful. A strong metrics and feedback program tracking everything pre- and post-hire is the essential piece that ties it all together. Developing, implementing, maintaining, and monitoring this maximize quality of hire strategy is what I mean by ownership. In my mind, maximizing quality of hire is the most second most important function of HR/recruiting. The first is developing and maximizing the talent already on board. Everything else pales in comparison.

I suspect that the aforementioned twit, er, Tweeter was trying to look cool rather than gain anything practical from using Twitter instead of other modes of communication. After all, e-mail is so 20th century, and as for the phone — that was invented in 1876. Who would want to admit they used one? Might as well resort to carrier pigeons.

Let’s Go Surfing

Recruiters have a tendency to jump on the latest technology without fully appreciating its benefits or ramifications.

The newest entrant to the recruiting world is Google Wave, soon to be the solution du jour. By this time next year you’ll be told that if you’re not using Wave your career as a recruiter is likely to disappear faster than a burst of flatulence in a hurricane. You will be done with; finished; gone the way of Pontiac and Lehman Brothers — and deservedly so.

So what is Google Wave? Its inventors describe it as what e-mail would be it had been invented today instead of back in 1971. E-mail was a product of its time — an electronic version of postal mail — just faster. Back then the bandwidth was very limited so the best that could be done was send out small amounts of text. Its purpose is to send messages. It is a collaborative mechanism of sorts, but the constant back and forth of e-mail chains can get out of hand very quickly, the chaos increasing exponentially the more people are involved. Enter Google Wave: much better suited to a collaborative work environment than e-mail. A user who sends out a wave creates a workspace shared with all the people that receive it. The participants can add text, pictures, links, maps, etc. Everything is visible to everyone as it happens because all activity is logged in real time since the wave is stored on a central server instead of individual computers. Wave also keeps the activity organized and searchable. Wave brings together the functionality of just about every social media application and online communication tool. You can read everything you ever wanted to know (even if you didn’t) here.

Wave has some appeal for recruiters, not the least of which is that it’s free. As a collaborative tool it can help with activities like group interviews, evaluating candidates, writing up job requirements, etc. That’s the low-hanging fruit. Thinking more broadly, if an employee sends out a wave to a group of friends, then a recruiter could surf it (I just coined a term) to engage with them: an instant social network. Make it reach a large enough group and you could have a tsunami. Maybe not — that has too many negative connotations. Nobody wants to be associated with that. On the flip side, a bunch of disgruntled candidates sick of the shoddy treatment they got could get together and unleash one to wreck some company’s employment brand. That would be a Katrina. The possibilities are endless.

Diamond in the Rough, or Fool’s Gold?

Of course, the path to social media nirvana isn’t all roses. For all its faults, e-mail has some great features — like being able to ignore it or respond on your own time. Wave is a real-time application, which means it demands real-time attention. That can limit its appeal. Not everyone wants to be engaged all the time.

E-mail had another reason for gaining in popularity so fast. It did something that was very familiar and didn’t require a fundamental change in behavior from users. There’s a reason e-mail icons have a picture of an envelope. Using Wave well will require people to make some significant changes in behavior. Collaboration in real-time is not a normal everyday activity.

How much will Wave change recruiting? Impossible to predict. It’s just a tool; no more, no less. It’s only as good as the people who use it. Some recruiters will undoubtedly find creative ways to use it but for many it will only be a distraction. It will generate a lot of buzz and have some value in some circumstances for some people. What is absolutely certain is that it will not be a silver bullet solution for recruiting. There are none.

Get your account, and when you have it, let’s go surfing. Don’t wipe out.

The RightThing, an RPO, acquired AIRS, a technology and training firm, in 2008. About the same time, CareerBuilder launched Personified, a recruitment consulting and outsourcing business. Two months ago, recruitment technology vendor Taleo acquired Worldwide Compensation, a comp management technology and services provider.

The oddest diversification, though, has to be TalentHook’s launch of a directory of, ahem, gentlemen’s clubs and their entertainers. The company that provides resume search software to hundreds of employers now lets you search for what less euphemistically are called strip clubs.

Gentlemen’sNightLife.com claims that it has “information on over 2,400 clubs and their performers.” I did not test that claim, at least not thoroughly, though I found that the performer list was limited to only a handful of cities right now, including Las Vegas, TalentHook’s headquarters.

I did find a number of fields you won’t find in TalentHook Sphere, a resume sourcing tool that searches out resumes from the public web and pay boards. On TalentHook Sphere you find fields for experience, salary, and education, among others. On GentlemensNightLife you search for breast size, butt, and body, among others.

It looks to be a membership site, since there is a signup page and a member login. So the searches I was able to do might be limited as a preview.

I emailed Phil Gonzalez, owner of both GentlemensNightLife and TalentHook, but he didn’t get back to me.

Then, in the year 1405, it got smart and created a position of a night watchman to keep an eye on the city and identify fires.

The watchman’s job was to climb the 153 stairs to the top of the cathedral tower and at each hour from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m., he would call out in four directions, C’est le guet; il a sonné l’heure (“This is the nightwatch; the hour has struck”).

Apparently the night watch was effective, because the tradition still continues today!

The buildings in the city are no longer made of wood, and technology has largely eliminated a fire risk. So why does the city still employ a night watchman?

There are probably a few reasons to keep the tradition in place, but I believe that the main reason can be summed up in one word: reassurance.

I’ve never met someone who didn’t enjoy a little reassurance. In this case, the people of Lausanne like the safe and comfortable feeling of knowing that someone is out there keeping an eye on their city.

From a recruitment context, candidates in your hiring process also want reassurance. They’d like frequent updates on the status of their application. They want to know that their resume hasn’t been lost in a black hole. They want to understand the next steps in your interview process. They want to know when they’re no longer being considered.

If you believe that reassurance is important, how can you use that knowledge to improve the candidate experience? What technology can you implement to provide candidates with self-service access to check the status of their application? How can you clearly set the expectation with candidates so that they understand the timetable and steps within your recruitment process? How can you improve your communication with candidates as they move through the stages of your process?

I encourage you to implement a “night watchman” strategy within your recruitment process to provide reassurance and to offer an added level of service to those candidates with an interest to join your team.

TweetMyJobs, one of the first job distribution services to use Twitter, is now using the service and its followers to promote itself.  TweetMyJobs is running a contest that has a plasma TV or $500 as its grand prize and the only requirement for winning is to watch a video and enter. So far, so traditional. Here’s where the social media aspect comes in: The winner will be the person who accumulates the most points during the contest. Points are earned each time a person clicks on a unique link to access the TweetMyJobs site.

Contestants are emailed a unique link that can be tweeted, posted to Facebook, and shared on over 20 other social sites. The more friends, followers, and connections you have and can convince to click the link, the more points you earn.

It’s a clever contest that TweetMyJobs founder Gary Zukowski says will cost him less than $2,500 and will “show just how powerful social media can be.”

“By using social media we will reach thousands of targeted individuals in a cost-effective manner. It mirrors the service we offer to our clients,” adds Zukowski. TweetMyJobs earns its money by tweeting job postings to job seeking subscribers for a fee.

Zukowski’s contest comes amidst a boom in the use of social media for job hunting and branding. No less an authority than outplacement specialist Challenger, Gray & Christmas is counseling job seekers to profile, post, and tweet.

“We feel that these new networking tools are essential and now advise all of the job seekers going through our program to open LinkedIn accounts and to consider other services such as Facebook and Twitter,” says CEO John Challenger.

The firm cautions job seekers — and this is good advice for recruiters, too — that the various social media are not interchangeable. Nor, says Challenger, will they “replace the face-to-face connections that are critical to a successful search.”

The Challenger announcement cites a recent Jobvite survey that found some 80 percent of companies using or planning to use social networking sites for recruiting. LinkedIn is already heavily used for that purpose, but Facebook recruiting now attracts 59 percent of recruiters, according to the survey. Twitter is used by 42 percent of recruiters.

Because of the pervasive use of widgets and apps, it is possible now for a Twitter message to be simultaneously posted to dozens of sites. Likewise, Facebook status updates can be tweeted automatically, with apps then reposting the tweet to other social media including, say, LinkedIn.

Hence, the warning from Challenger that, “Social networking should be used cautiously.”

He also counsels that online networking is not the only tool. “These online connections are superficial at best. It takes a lot more work to turn them into meaningful relationships that can advance your job search. In the end,” says Challenger, “face-to-face meetings are still the most effective relationship-building tool available.”

Which brings us to Eric Barker. Remember him?  He’s the freshly minted MBA so eager to work at Microsoft that he took out an ad on Facebook to make his pitch. I wrote about him in May.

I got an email from him a few weeks ago. Still no Microsoft job, though he is optimistic: “Did hear from a MSFT recruiter. We’re trying to place me but we haven’t found the right fit yet.”

However he did land a leading role in Facebook Fantasies, an official anthology of Facebook stories, where he is the subject of one of the chapters. The book publishes in February.

I don’t need to fight

To prove I’m right

I don’t need to be forgiven.

–Baba O’Riley

“Why is this taking so long” is one of my favorite hiring manager questions. The best answer is to not have it asked in the first place. Sadly, it makes the recruiter have to justify their existence with a flurry of undocumented and ill-prepared remarks on past activity while feeling awkward and flat-footed. All in all, it is not a fun time.

I believe that we can avoid this awkward question in almost all cases, but before we discuss how that is done, let’s look at four sample answers to that question. These answers are not good ones and should be avoided. (The answers below might be accurate, but we need to be sure that candor and objective conversation take a back seat to organizational politics.)

1. It is taking so long because it took you four weeks to finalize the position profile. Not a great answer. Managers like to see themselves as decision-makers (especially those who so clearly are not) as opposed to individuals who need input from 37 team members before they approve a position profile.
2. It is taking so long because you take forever to respond to the candidates I submit. Not so good either. Managers have endless reasons for taking too long in terms of response time, but personally, I do not care what those reasons might be. Twenty four to 48 hours is all it should take. If you need more info on the candidate, I will get it for you. If you do not need more info, make a decision; do you want to see the candidate or don’t you?
3. It is taking so long because you do not get back to me after candidate interviews. Avoid this answer! Having the candidate die of old age waiting for the manager to think, discuss, compare, contrast, evaluate, reflect, confer, plot, map out, or my personal favorite, “sleep on” is pitiful. (DOD, big pharma, and biotech can be glacially slow). Once again, 24 to 48 hours to make a decision. Do you want to move forward or not? (A client once told me he had to “ponder.” I hate ponderers.)
4. It is taking so long because you change the position profile twice a week. Once again, no good! I have far more respect for managers who tell me they are not sure of what they want or they need assistance in defining the position or whatever. Under those circumstances I can help in a host of ways, but don’t keep changing the profile because hitting a moving target makes recruiting all the more difficult. (Beware of the manager who tells you the profile changes endlessly due to the “fluid and changing needs of our organizational objectives.” Those people are clueless.)
5. Bonus Answer! It is taking so long because of all of the above! This is the worst possible answer because it simply points out the horrific shortcomings of many managers that do not seem to go away. Recruiting is a partnership, and partnerships do not work unless both parties pull their own weight and come to an understanding of what must be done, when it must be done, who is going to do it, and a clear sense of urgency.

As you can see, the answers to this question are not pretty. With this in mind, let’s look at some ways to avoid it.

1. Agree to a contracted time to fill. Meet with the manager to discuss the position profile and set an agreed-upon time to fill. Agreed upon means that you and the manager agree to a timetable. For example, if 45 days to fill an engineering position is agreed upon, that’s fine, provided nothing foreseeable will interfere with progress. On the other hand, 45 days is not OK if the manager is taking a thre-week vacation during that agreed upon time-to-fill window and will not be available to interview. Make sense?
2. Start aggressively. If you have a 45-day agreed time to fill, don’t wait 30 days to begin to source candidates. Start fast and start hard. Keep in mind that it is always easier to slow things down than to speed thing up. No one is ever sorry they are ahead of schedule.
3. Keep it moving. In recruiting, the ball is always in someone’s court, so do your best to see that that ball is not in yours. Do whatever you need to do as quickly as possible without compromising quality. Be sure that you are always waiting for the manager as opposed to the manager waiting for you.
4. Document activity. In my career, I have learned that I was never sorry that I documented activity even if I never needed it. In a world where data points can be very helpful, it is a great idea to just keep a simple running log of key activity on candidates, timetables, and anything you deem as important. Not a ton of work; just 4 or 5 minutes a day. You might not need it, but if you do, it will be a great thing to have handy.

Now, why not seek out and ask your most uncooperative hiring manager my favorite question:

Why is this taking so long?

Pretty cool, eh?

A new study from outsourcing research firm Everest Global suggests that while the recession is reducing the size of RPO contracts, interest is growing, especially among employers with 8,00-15,000 employees.

“RPO buyers are attracted to a value proposition with cost reduction and scalability elevated due to the current economic climate, followed by improvement of recruitment processes, access to best-of-breed options and technologies, and enhanced employer branding,” said Katrina Menzigian, Global’s VP of  Research.

Growth has been strongest among high tech and telecom firms, with the largest employers — those with more than 15,000 employees — accounting for about 60 percent of the business. North America and Europe are the focal points, but employers with a global presence are adopting RPO for their overseas operations.

In the report — Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) – Moving Beyond the Pioneer Stage — Menzigian and her co-authors observe that one of the challenges buyers and RPO suppliers have is confusion over just what recruitment process outsourcing is. The report notes that buyers consider RPO to be “synonymous” with staffing and headhunting. Though there are certainly significant similarities, RPO, say the authors, “is a much more strategic decision that requires buy-in from senior executives and a long-term partnership with the supplier to achieve business output and outcome.”

Because of the lack of clarity, RPO market entry by staffing and recruiting firms is common, though many lack the expertise, the report says. It cautions buyers and counsels suppliers that they must educate their customers about the differences between RPO and other types of recruitment outsourcing.

Perhaps the broadest message in the report is that RPO is not a niche, interim service to address a short term recruiting problem, but an increasingly important part of a company’s recruitment strategy that depends on a close working relationship between buyer and supplier.

“There are multiple drivers moving this forward,” Menzigian told me. While the anemic recovery has gotten more employers looking at outsourced recruiting, rather than adding in-house recruiters, Menzigian said another consideration is the technology. Not all companies necessarily want to manage an ATS or invest in upgrades or replacements.

The technology, therefore, is an ingredient in the strategic recruitment decision process.

If, though, there is one point to emphasize, Menzigian says it’s that the RPO space is a dynamic one, with more companies entering the space as the business grows.

The sheer volume of potential directions to follow is confusing, daunting, and at times, just plain overwhelming. While some organizations have stuck a stick in the sand and are pushing forward with a defined approach, the majority of efforts currently underway will fail for one key reason: they rely solely upon a small handful of individuals attempting to maintain visibility in a sea of content growing exponentially.

Relying upon a social media coordinator, online brand ambassador, or a team of recruiters dedicating only a portion of their desk time to social media initiatives dooms such efforts to stumble and underperform. Such efforts produce corporate fan pages on Facebook, where the only comments ever visible are sanitized “PR” posts and boring job announcements! (I actually viewed one such page last week where the only wall post visible was a notice from the organization’s legal department advising visitors to the page not to post negative comments!)

Delivering an engaging, interactive, authentic, and personalized experience requires a scale of participation that the limited resources of the recruiting function simply cannot provide. The alternate approach, the one most likely to drive success, is an employee-centric approach that relies on your employees to build and manage relationships and the recruiting resources to coordinate, influence, and support their efforts.

The 12 Most Common Social Media Strategies

Most recruiting managers fail to think strategically when they develop their approach to social media recruiting. In fact, if you want to test someone’s depth of knowledge of social media recruiting, simply ask them to list the range of strategies that corporations can pursue. Most recruiting leaders will respond that they either don’t know enough about social media yet, or ramble off how they are adapting historical marketing efforts for delivery via social media.

As a corporate advisor, I’ve seen what a lot of organizations are up to, including initiatives already live and others currently in development. To help frame the discussion about this topic moving forward, I’d like to categorize the efforts into the following strategy categories:

Limited Scope Strategies

• The “laissez-faire” social media recruiting strategy — a do-nothing strategy where efforts are not managed or coordinated.
• Reference-checking strategy — a strategy that employs social media solely as another source of information during the reference-checking process.
• Post-and-pray strategy — a strategy that leverages social media as nothing more than another channel to broadcast employment opportunities to.
• Employer brand management strategy — a strategy that focuses on using social media to evaluate and influence the perception of the organization as an employer by distributing content about the employee experience via social media channels.
• Hybrid strategy — A hybrid strategy recognizes a need for different approaches to drive different types of activity supporting unique aspects of the organization. It uses components of nearly all strategies presented here.

Broad Scope Strategies

• Centralized social media recruiting strategy — a common strategy that employs recruiters as the sole agents of the organization and relies upon them to carry out full-spectrum activities including direct sourcing, relationship recruiting, employment marketing, employer brand assessment, and employer branding.
• The employee-centric recruiting strategy — a powerful “full spectrum” approach that exponentially increases the visibility of the organization in social media by using all employees as the agents under the direction/influence of the recruiting organization. (This strategy is the primary focus of this article.)
• The “talent community” strategy — a variation of the employee-centric strategy that has a longer-term focus on building communities and relationships based primarily on professional learning.
• Outsourced management strategy — A strategy that employs a third party such as a marketing or PR firm to manage a significant portion of the effort.

Organizational Strategies

• Banned social media strategy — a strategy that seeks to minimize the impact of social media for better or worse by blocking or severely restricting access to social media throughout the organization.
• Social media committee strategy — this strategy recognizes that where social media is concerned, the needs and wants of numerous organizational stakeholders may cross and seeks to coordinate efforts and more effectively marshal resources.
• Distributed social media strategy — a strategy that provides organizational guidelines on social media usage, but that permits units/groups within the organization to plan, develop, and execute initiatives without oversight.

Organize Your Employee “Army”

Few would argue against the fact that implementing a program to manage and increase the organization’s presence on social media is a hot topic among managers and executives. While the most advanced work is being done in customer service functions, marketing, product development, and HR leaders nearly everywhere are at the very least exploring the possibility of using this new channel of communication.

The majority of early efforts by recruiting leaders struggled to produce meaningful and measurable results, but from experimentation comes innovation and learning.

The primary driver of failure among early adopters wasn’t lack of interest or individual effort, but rather lack of scale!

Social media erupted as tools to facilitate interaction, and interaction in too many aspects of one’s life can be time consuming and exhausting! Fortunately there is an answer to this problem: don’t do it alone. Use employees to build relationships, and then take advantage of those relationships! It’s the same principle that makes employee referrals the No. 1 source of hire at most firms. Both programs rely on harnessing or leveraging other people’s time (OPT) to contribute to recruiting results. Because the ratio of employees to recruiters is extremely lopsided, using employee’s time results in a quantum increase in network size, visibility, and professional relationships that can drive future recruiting successes.

The added benefit: employees are better able to communicate in ways and on topics more valuable to their peers, which makes it easier for them to build successful relationships.

Microsoft’s industry-leading long-term community-building approach, which relies heavily on employee efforts (highlighting employee blogs, displaying ERP advertisement on employee profile pages, etc.), illustrates the direction that recruiting managers should take. Large firms like Google already rely heavily on their employees, and smaller firms have resorted to this employee-centric or employee-centered approach because they simply don’t have a significant recruiting team.

Before you waste a lot of time and effort and become frustrated, shift your recruiters away from doing most social networking and instead toward orchestrating and managing it. Organize your employees, managers, corporate alumni, and even your vendors to become an “army” of social media brand builders and recruiters.

A Close Tie-in With the Employee Referral Program Is Required

The foundation of any social media effort that is employee-centric must be a seamless tie-in with a world-class employee referral program. Without a direct connection, the majority of great prospects your employees identify will never make it into your recruiting process. Nothing frustrates your employees more than putting maximum effort into identifying a superstar who is interested in your firm and then finding out that the organization that asked for their help failed to follow up.

The handoff from employee to recruiter must be smooth and seamless so that the candidate isn’t “dropped” or doesn’t feel like they have been transferred from a caring and highly interested employee to an uncaring recruiter or recruiting process from hell.

To ensure that the back office is ready for your social media effort, audit your referral process for major flaws and ensure that social network referrals are processed in a way consistent with social network users’ expectations. The employee referral process should also be modified to allow employees to provide online profiles in lieu of traditional resumes when they’re not available. You might also add a feature that offers a small reward to network contacts who refer highly desirable names to one of your employees who are part of their network.

Up next week, I’ll discuss why recruiters cannot and should not be on the front lines of your social media army, and offer some tips on how to engage employees in your effort.

When promoting from within, do you select the person who is doing the best job in their current role? Do you promote the person you like the most, the person who has the most seniority, or the person who gives you attention and deference? It is not unusual to promote a good technical person or a good clinical person into a management position. Technology companies and healthcare organizations do this frequently.

If this is your current practice, then you are missing out on the opportunity to improve business performance. You may also be dramatically and unnecessarily increasing your cost of operations. This is hardly a good strategy in the current economy.

Look at the cost of a bad (mismatched) promotion:

• Time to become productive in the job
• Time to separate from being a peer to being a boss
• Time to learn the new political aspects of the job
• Turnover cost resulting from a bad promotion
• Lost productivity resulting from the turnover
• Recruiting cost to replace employees lost to turnover
• Time to become productive for the new hire

While cost is obvious, time is a valuable and non-renewable resource. A poor promotional decision is expensive.

Internal promotions should be approached the same way you approach external hires: formally. There are distinct advantages when promoting from within. The candidate knows the business, knows some of the politics (politics at the managerial and executive level, however, are different), and is familiar with the culture. But this knowledge alone does not qualify them for promotion. What qualifies them for promotion is a positive performance track record and a demonstrated ability or high potential (versus just interest) to take on additional responsibilities and succeed.

Here are five actions that organizations can take to prepare internal candidates for promotion:

1. Have a formal (or at least an informal) succession plan. Identify individuals in your organization who can fill current senior positions should the incumbent retire or leave, or new positions that are created due to growth, new product or service introductions, or new projects critical to the success of the company.
2. Implement a management development program to provide future promotable candidates the opportunity to take on additional and more challenging responsibilities. A management development program will serve to identify employee strengths, preferences, values, and potential derailers (risk tendencies) that will enable a best fit for positions available.
3. Introduce a valid and meaningful 360-degree evaluation. This will ensure that the candidates identified for promotion are truly qualified and not just good at managing up and managing their image.
4. Provide the future promotable candidates with a mentor to help guide them through both the tangible and intangible aspects of achieving success within the company.
5. Provide the newly promoted employee with coaching support to support the transition from a functional and technical focus to a manager with broader responsibilities.

Once the candidate is selected and promoted, their transition must be supported. It is reckless to assume that a candidate promoted from within the organization will automatically succeed and needs no further attention. Yes, they know the organization. But do they know how to manage and perform at a new level within the organization? Promotion doesn’t result in instant competence. A mentor or a coach are excellent ways to support the transition and prove to be a good investment.

Some candidates, however, will not have had the advantage of participating in a management development (i.e. “grooming and growing”) process. Some may never have held a management position. Some may have agreed to a promotion reluctantly.

Creating a formal talent integration process for newly promoted managers is a wise business practice.

Talent integration involves:

1. A formal transition plan to help the manager/executive integrate into the new position. Formal and purposeful discussion between the new manager/executive and their immediate supervisor on how best to work with each other and to define clear expectations regarding job performance and expected results.
2. Internal mentorship to help the manager/executive better understand how to deal with peers, how organizational politics work at the managerial level, and “how work gets done here” from a manager’s perspective.
3. Coaching (best done with an external/neutral executive/performance coach) — to help with the transition, especially for developing the management skills required in the new position (i.e. technical/clinical person being promoted to manager)

Recently highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, 26% of managers aren’t trained to manage, according to the Rasmussen Report. Now consider the even greater likelihood of this when technical people are promoted to management. For internal promotions to be highly successful, a rigorous internal promotion process must be established and a formal transition integration process must be put in place. The cost of not doing so is simply too great. Unless your funding and talent are abundant and not a concern, you can’t afford not to.

Social media is rapidly becoming more than just another tool in a recruiter’s toolbox — it’s an important part of the future of the talent acquisition profession. The goal the summit is to have an industry conversation about these tools, and talk about tactics and strategies that are already in the field and working, not pie-in-the-sky ideas. And even if you can’t make it, you can still participate in that discussion.

The stream will take place on the top of the ERE.net homepage through Ustream. There is nothing that you will need to download; just come to the site on Monday morning, shortly before we kick off the event at 9:30 a.m. ET, and you will see the box. You just need to click the play button and you will be all set. There is also a chat component there, so you can talk to others watching the stream, and even those in attendance in New York.

You will also want to check out Twitter for more great conversation from the event by following the #socialrecruiting hashtag and the @socrecruiting handle. The event in June featured over 1,500 tweets sent that day alone, mostly from those in attendance, so this is another great way to join the conversation even if you can’t make it to New York.

As I mentioned, the day starts at 9:30 a.m. ET as our summit chair Laurie Ruettimann kicks off the day, and introduces our keynote speaker Fred Wilson at 10:00 a.m. ET. Fred is the venture capitalist behind many of the names you know on the Internet such as Twitter, Indeed, del.icio.us, and many others. From there the day, which goes through 5:15, will feature sessions led by recruiters who have actually already proved success using social recruiting tactics in their recruiting strategy. Check out the full agenda here.

So make sure to clear your calendar for Monday, as this is certainly something you won’t want to miss. And if you are in and around the NY area or can get there on Monday, there are still (at least as I post this) a few tickets left to attend.