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.

1. Cost per hire is a misguided metric that is at best useless, and at worst, can harm the organization. While tracking costs and spending wisely is essential, to divide that cost by the number of hires makes no sense. Instead, track costs in total and focus on reducing them if you’re not hiring as many people, or you can prove an improvement in productivity without a degradation in quality. Reducing quality while reducing costs is a strategic mistake for the sake of a tactical gain.
2. The HR/recruiting department must take company-wide responsibility for quality of hire. Forget the mantra of shared responsibility. If some line manager blows the hiring decision, who has to clean up the mess and find a replacement? While HR/recruiting doesn’t make the hiring decisions, it needs to make sure that the proper decisions are made. This is comparable to finance owning the budgeting and investment analysis process. Finance doesn’t spend the money, but it makes sure the money is spent wisely. Having an audit function in place to validate that the right hiring decisions were made is one way to make sure the process is adhered to.
3. Measure quality of hire on a financial basis. The financial benefit of hiring someone in the top third vs. the bottom third is at least twice the compensation of the person. (Here’s a recording of a recent webinar with a handout including the actual calculations for this.) This benefit is due to increased productivity, less management effort, higher-quality work, and far less turnover.
4. Calculate the ROI of any new recruiting or sourcing initiative on an ROI basis. To do this, figure out how many people you’ll be hiring in the top-third instead of the bottom-third. (Email me if you want to walk through this calculation.) If the minimum financial impact of a top-third person is two times his or her compensation, it’s pretty easy to figure the gross financial gain of this. Compare this to the cost to obtain the gain in order to determine the ROI of the program.

I’d like to add a fifth topic to this list of quality of hire maxims: make your vendors prove quality of hire improvements before you spend any money. No one should be excluded, whether it’s a new ATS or investing in web 2.0 social media or whatever product-of-the-month comes along. If it doesn’t improve quality of hire on an ROI basis, don’t waste your time or money.

Proving a quality of hire improvement is no easy thing, but just going through the effort will get you to think about it at a strategic level.

For example, talent hubs, prospect pools, CRM, and social media are the current craze, and some actually can improve quality of candidate. However, getting better candidates doesn’t mean better hires. I advocate an early-bird sourcing strategy. This means getting candidates before they enter the job-hunting market, or during their first week looking for a new job. This is a huge competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, if you wait a week to call or you make them jump through hoops to talk with someone, you’ll lose them. Now add into the mix hiring managers who blow the interview or who can’t recruit top performers to join the team. So even if a new program offers better candidates, if your backend processes aren’t changed, you won’t improve your quality of hire.

To improve quality of hire, consider everything collectively: sourcing, screening, recruiting assessing, and closing. For now, and for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume your backend is in great shape, and just consider how you could make your sourcing vendors prove an improvement in quality of candidate. The premise is that if you invest in the vendor’s offering, the candidates you’ll be seeing are of a superior quality than what you’re now seeing or you would see by using some alternative.

The ROI calculation would be performed based on the assumption you’ll be hiring more people in the top third than the bottom third. If they can’t justify a quality of hire improvement, which is a strategic impact, then you’re left with the more tactical approach of using cost savings or productivity enhancements to justify the effort.

With the focus on quality of hire improvements, here are some ways you could get your vendor to validate their programs:

1. The smell test. The idea behind this is that it doesn’t make much sense to conduct any type of rigorous analysis unless the vendor’s approach seems logical. For example, one major job board vendor told me at Onrec (Chicago, November 2009) that candidates from her board had lower turnover than from the other major job board for the same job. Not surprisingly, she didn’t know why. This fails the smell test. On the other hand, one vendor told me that candidates in their network were more passive than those in the most well-known network since a person couldn’t join to get listed. The CEO then went on to say that people could only get listed in their network if they were mentioned at least three times in some independent Internet article. This passes the smell test. Of course, you still have to do the analysis to prove that the candidates are better.
2. The before and after biggest stack test. Before you decide to consider any vendor, take 100 candidates at random from your current sourcing process and divide them into three piles. Pile A is comprised of those you absolutely would consider in depth. Pile B is filled with the maybes. Pile C is filled with those you wouldn’t ever consider. Now measure the height of each stack. In a pilot of some type, take another 100 candidates sourced based on the proposed process and divide them into the A-B-C stacks. If the A stack has increased in height and the C stack has decreased, you’re on your way. Now calculate the percent increase in the size of the A stack by the financial impact of each person to determine the total impact. From this you can easily calculate the ROI of the new process. Of course, you could conduct some type of rigorous statistical analysis to validate the results between the two groups, but if the A stack grows significantly, you’ll probably get the same result. If you don’t want to do this yourself, have your vendor show you the statistical results of other clients they’ve done this for.
3. The side-by-side stack test. Using some type of quick pilot test, select 100 candidates at random using the new process and 100 candidates using your current process. This is better than the before-and-after test above, since more things are the same, especially labor market conditions. Now divide the candidates in the A-B-C stacks as above and compare them as before. If the A stack is significantly bigger using the new process, you’ve got a winner. You can compare competing vendors the same way. Find out who has the biggest stack of A-level candidates.
4. Use metrics that indirectly measure quality of candidate. This is a variation of the A-B-C stack approach. If you don’t need to review as many resumes to find someone worth interviewing, it means you’re seeing a higher percentage of better candidates. So start tracking this. Also, track the percent of candidates sent to your hiring managers who are actually interviewed. This is one way to track the quality of your sourcing programs and the quality of your recruiters. Start asking your candidates how long they’ve been looking. If you’re seeing them a few days after they’ve started looking, it means your advertising is highly visible. Now compare the quality of these people using the A-B-C stack approach to determine if the best people are seeing your ads first.

There are many other ways to measure quality of candidate, but the point is that you should make your vendors prove it before you proceed. This is still just the first step. Even if the vendor has proven a quality of candidate improvement, you still must do at least two more things. First, compare the offering of competing vendors who claim the same quality of candidate improvement doing the same thing. There might be a newer approach that is less costly, more efficient, or more effective.

In this case, go with the vendor that brings in the best candidates most efficiently, rather than most cheaply.

Second, ensure your backend processes, including the interview itself and your hiring managers, are capable of reeling in and hiring stronger candidates. This is where most sourcing programs and new recruiting initiatives fall flat. That’s why it’s important to consider quality of hire from an end-to-end perspective, not just at the quality of candidate level. If you ignore the rest of the process, you just might wind up with a lot more great people you won’t be hiring.

In fact, most of the C-suite has seen their base take a hit, says Compdata, which surveyed some 5,000 organizations across the country to compile its proprietary report Executive Compensation. CIO pay is down 2.1 percent while COOs are down 11 percent.

But unless you happen to hold one of those titles, don’t get all weepy over the news. The average CEO is still earning $346,000 in base pay a year. COOs average $214,000 and CIOs average $175,300.

Only CFO base pay was up. Not much — barely 1 percent — but it was up. The press release from Compdata doesn’t say what the average CFO earns, but it does offer some industry examples: “The average base salary of a Chief Financial Officer in the insurance industry is $232,200, while CFOs in healthcare earn $208,900. The utilities industry pays their CFOs $194,900 on average, compared to those in banking and finance, $191,500. CFOs earn the least in the not-for-profit industry, $173,900.”

Lest you think that these numbers are skewed by the inclusion of some of those highly compensated C-people, even modest-sized firms with 500-1,000 workers pay their CEOs an average of $361,300. At a company with under 100 workers the CEO averages $264,700.

The $600 report has much more information than this, of course. It covers 65 job titles — including HR — and has the data arranged by region and industry, covering bennies like company cars, travel expenses, stock options, and the more usual health, life, and other insurance coverage.

If you decide, despite the decline in salary, to climb up the alphabet titles, keep an eye on your company’s succession plan. Or, if there isn’t one, get one started.

Korn/Ferry says more and more companies are developing them; so many, in fact, that the giant talent management firm issued a press release saying it has seen a 400 percent surge in its CEO succession planning consulting work. And that’s just in the first six months.

The company didn’t offer a number, but it did say, “This is more than twice the number of succession planning projects in the prior two years combined.”

It currently is at work on more than 25 CEO succession planning projects.

“With increased government business regulation, the turbulent business environment and real-time examples of corporate boards that did not have immediate CEO replacements at the helm, we are seeing a significant increase in corporate boards planning for CEO succession,” said Joe Griesedieck, vice chairman and managing director of Korn/Ferry’s Board & CEO Services.

1. Instead of going to a career fair to find your next top tier hire, get your manager to realize that great people have to be recruited. “If you needed another QB like Tom Brady, would he stand in line at a career fair, or answer a want ad online, in the paper, or on your website? No, you have to call his agent who gets him interested and to the table to talk. I’m that agent.”
2. When a hiring manager and HR want to make a lowball offer because the recession has made everyone more desperate, but your candidate is employed, here’s what you say to get them to reconsider low-balling. “When a kid is getting ready to go out high in the draft, do you think about what the lowest package is that he will consider? No, you make him the best offer you can afford to make or you pass on the pick. No one who is good is going to be happy or accept a low-ball offer.”
3. When a manager wants to look around at all resumes and candidates on the planet even though the very best candidate just interviewed and wants the job: “It’s kind of like picking a starter instead of second string. When you see someone who is going to be the key to your bench, you don’t hesitate to look around in case someone else might be better; you add them to the team in the first string. Just because he is first doesn’t mean he isn’t the best.”
4. When a manager wants to change the position or add unrealistic job functions to a new role: “It’s not like there aren’t people like Deion Sanders who can play offense and defense and the entire length of the game. It is just extremely rare to find someone who will do both. It would be better to find a great cornerback than an average cornerback who can also return a kick.”
5. Instead of letting a team do too many jobs for too long and asking them to double that for the “good of the company,” consider this: “Even the best players need to feel like they have back up, have time to recover, and like to play one position very well. Do you think that you may risk losing your best players if you play them too long?”

I know a lot of people who will think it is very funny that I would ever remotely write about football because I don’t give a hoot about it. And I also know that managers don’t want to be talked down to or reduced to silly analogies. But there is some truth to the fact that language and cultural barriers account for the majority of miscommunications. Finding the common ground in what interests them may be the entry point toward showing them what you got.

You can choose to have some or all your tweets posted to your LinkedIn groups and vice versa. This is a boon for recruiters who now can more easily reach their entire network with news of jobs and opportunities, while job seekers can use it to enhance their personal brand.

“More and more, people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a video he made with LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.

Stone likened the deal to “bringing the peanut butter and the chocolate together to make the perfect combination,” which explains our use of the otherwise inscrutable graphic from the LinkedIn site.

The two services, of course, serve different purposes and different constituencies. Twitter users tend to be younger and tweet about social activities. LinkedIn is very specifically focused on business networking.

The integration takes these differences into account, giving Tweepl a choice where there tweets go. Use either #li or #in to post your tweet to your LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn messages will generally go to all your Twitter followers, unless you choose to post only to LinkedIn.

I tried to set this up several times last night and this morning, but got error messages. Some of them were the usual Twitter overloaded kind, but the others were likely the result of the rollout. According to the original announcement, the integration will take a few days to complete, accounting for the lack of a setting on Twitter itself for the LinkedIn connection.

You can also set up an account on Ping.fm. This is a free service that lets you organize all your social media sites so you can post to some or all simultaneously. In addition to LinkedIn and Twitter, the Ping network includes Facebook, Diigo, Yammer, Plaxo, MySpace, and 39 other sites.

The LinkedIn/Twitter integration comes on the heels of announcements over the last couple of weeks that Twitter messages will now be indexed by Bing and Google. Search results now include tweets.

There is no question that in many instances a video for job candidates can convey a message to potential employees. What I do question is how effective the message is conveyed. Is the right message in the right video? The answer to this question is often unclear when viewing a real job preview video. Unfortunately, quite often the real job preview video will miss the mark in delivering a real job or position preview and instead incorporate the goals of the recruiting video.

Two Videos Two Audiences

The best way to think about the differences in these videos is to consider the analysis most consumers process when they are looking for a new car. On any given night, there is no shortage of car and truck commercials on network television. These commercials focus on selling the most attractive features of their model and attributes related to their brand to reach a very wide demographic of potential consumers. The most striking aspects are highlighted to a target demographic. A typical commercial contains messages on saving energy, safety, reliability, GPS and satellite radio, and warranties. The viewer is provided several features with few details, given the focus and time constraints. A recruiting video is not all that different. The organizational brand is showcased along with values, community involvement, and the mission of the organization, to attract potential candidates who will have an affinity to the messages being presented.

When a consumer is interested in researching specific features of a car model, a manufacturer’s site will often provide several brief videos that address those options in more detail. You can find out how the components operate alone and as part of the vehicle. A real job preview video should follow the same format. An ideal preview video should break down several of the key aspects of the job that is being discussed. The discussion should present a candid discussion an idea of what the day in the life of the position is like. Focus on a specific aspect of the job; talk to someone in the field actually doing the job. There should also be some discussion on how the job fits into the mission of the organization.

Wrong Message, Wrong Audience

A real job preview video will lose its utility when it is diluted with too much branding. There are certainly elements of branding that can coexist within an real job preview video, but the focus must be on giving the viewer a clear understanding of the job being displayed. You should communicate what the employee will be accountable for in the job. This is often done in a “day in the life” format for the position being discussed.

A recruiting video also runs the risk of delivering the wrong message to the wrong audience. Some videos fail to take advantage of their brand, and assume that viewers will make the connection. Other videos fail to discuss their culture and mission and how employees play a vital role in their organization. Some videos communicate the culture and mission well but focus on just one business unit to the detriment of others.

Two Goals of Two Videos

Keep in mind the goals of each video. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the goal of a recruiting video is to recruit employees. This is usually achieved by selling the brand, communicating the culture and values of the organization, as well as the mission. The goal of the preview is to match the right people with the right jobs as well as increase retention and lower turnover. The preview should be performed in a style that generates interest while discussing the realities of the position being discussed. Genuine real job preview videos discuss both positive and some challenges of the position. Giving a realistic glimpse of the culture and the mission of the organization will go a long way in retaining talent.

“Soon hundreds of thousands (and, eventually, millions) of geographical .jobs domain names will come online,” boasts the website, Universe.jobs. It’s home base for what the partners are calling The Dot Jobs Universe, a heady name for the job boards that will officially make their debut in January.

These boards are powered by the DirectEmployers Association, a recruitment focused consortium of employers that includes many of the top brands in the U.S.  The job boards will have occupational or geographic Web addresses or addresses that are a combination of the two.

Some of these are already launched. There’s NewYork.jobs, Boston.jobs, India.jobs, and more. A video on the Dot Jobs Universe site offers other possibilities; FloridaNursing.jobs, for instance.

Employers who are members of the DirectEmployers Association will have their jobs posted to these sites automatically, with their corporate logo, at no cost. Non-members who own a .jobs address will also be permitted to post jobs for free.

There’s no indication on the site of what happens to employers who are neither members of DirectEmployers nor holders of a .jobs address.

When I spoke with Sowash a few weeks ago, he said they might have to pay a posting fee or have some limitations. “The rules haven’t been hammered out,” he said then.

However, the partners are selling premium placements on the sites. At rates ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 an employer can buy a listing position for a year on one or more sites. The more sites you buy, the lower the per site cost.

Placement.jobs explains how it works and takes your order. Members of DirectEmployers get preference in ordering these premium positions. A webinar is scheduled Nov. 17th to detail the .jobs Universe and the premium positioning program.

The relationship between DirectEmployers and Employ Media has raised eyebrows and apparently prompted enough questions that Ray Fassett, VP of operations and policy with Employ Media, felt compelled to blog about it.

“Why has .jobs chosen DirectEmployers Association to lead this project?,” Fassett writes in a blog on the Dot Jobs Universe site. “By offering an answer to this question publicly, I think I can dispel some myths that have come to my attention from commentators in other forums.”

“Let me be clear that .jobs has not provided the DirectEmployers Association with an exclusive. .jobs has not provided DirectEmployers members with an exclusive. So let’s dispel these myths right out of the gate.”

Fassett goes on to list six points that apparently made DirectEmployers an attractive partner. These include its non-profit status, the quality of the management team, its board of directors, and the participation of Fortune 1000 companies.

The argument that there’s no exclusive seems weak, if not plain wrong. Rules on the Employ Media site itself say only company names can be registered; occupational and geographic names are “reserved.” While DirectEmployers doesn’t own the addresses for the new job boards, it manages them, collects the money, and provides special opportunities for its members.

There’s no evidence that other job boards or organizations were invited to offer proposals for making use of the occupational and geographical domains held by Employ Media. Indeed, there’s even some question whether they can be used at all.

Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, told me that DirectEmployers approached him with the idea for the universe of job boards. The conversation turned earnest about the time Embrescia publicly floated the idea of selling off the reserved names.

When Employ Media and the Society for Human Resource Management, which sponsored the domain, applied for the designation, they said a .jobs address would only be issued in the name of the requesting company. That condition — and others, including adherence to the SHRM code of ethics — was written in the agreement by the approving agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Steve Rothberg, founder and president of CollegeRecruiter, wrote in a post, “This new domain was promoted as only being available to employers to promote their own jobs. Clearly that hasn’t been the case.”

However, Gary Rubin, SHRM’s Chief Publishing and E-Media Officer, said in an email, “SHRM is responsible for ensuring that Employ Media is complying with the terms of their charter with ICANN… The names that you have cited such as atlanta.jobs and sales.jobs appear to be in compliance with the terms of the charter.”

ICANN’s Chief gTLD Registry Liaison Craig Schwartz told me in an email, “…it’s not possible for ICANN to police every name in every registry and more importantly it’s not our responsibility to do so. What ICANN is responsible for is to ensure that its contracted parties are in compliance with their agreements. To that end, I will be following up on your inquiry (about the appropriateness of the use of geographical and occupational terms) with the appropriate staff at ICANN.”

I put the same question to Embrescia: How is it Employ Media can allow these domains to be used, when the agreement with ICANN says, “These (geographical and occupational terms) restricted lists are in addition to the restriction that .jobs domains comprise only trade names or commonly-known names?”

He didn’t respond to the question. But in the blog post on the Universe.jobs site, Fassett writes, “The question for us has been, since inception, how can geographic and occupational names exist in .jobs to serve the interests of the global human resource management community? I admit many did not realize this question was out there…

“We are working in cooperation with SHRM. We are approaching our community as ICANN expects us to do. I also fully admit there is not a single definitive answer to this question. But there are answers. Our obligation is to select one or more.”

Whether we are talking about corporate strategy, HR strategy, or talent strategy, we are talking about probabilities. And the closer the desired outcomes are to today, the higher the probability that they will actually happen. But, rapid change makes planning less and less relevant, and recruiters, planners of all types, and organizations are trying to find ways to cope with the lower and lower probability of being able to predict anything.

Historically our plans have been based on an assumption that is increasingly in question: that most things are going to be the same or at least similar in the near future to what they are today. Planning has relied on consistency and stability and to some extent a simple world.

The Greek poet Archilochus wrote a poem about the fox that knows many things, and the hedgehog that knows one big thing. His point was that some of us — the hedgehogs — are inclined to hold one big idea or view of things and disregard all others. But some are more likes foxes that go from one thing to another easily and hold many divergent ideas at the same time. This seems to be the winning approach for this part of the 21st century.

The world is not consistent, stable, or simple. Three-year and five-year plans are at best general, low-probability indicators of goals deemed desirable at the moment of creation. Any event might change those goals. The recruiters you hired in last year’s frenzied market weren’t needed months ago and may never be needed again. No one wants those HTML programmers who were in high demand just months ago. The sudden failure of banks, the quick economic fallout of 2008, or the seemingly sudden surplus of workers has changed many organizations’ plans. Falling home prices have made unaffordable property affordable. Fat savings accounts have become slimmer, changing retirement plans. And something as simple as the CEO leaving or the arrival of a new VP of HR can change the best laid plans.

So how can we deal with constant change and the need for fast action?

The best approach may be twofold: (1) develop an accepting attitude about change and a belief that change will lead to winning, and (2) design systems and approaches to deal better with change. Building skills that improve your ability to adapt is important to both personal mental health and to organizational success.

The change competencies are agility and resilience. A book that I highly recommend is called The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo. This short video will give you a sense of his perspective. In it he outlines why Al-Qaida is successfully beating the U.S. in Afghanistan and how Hezbollah is winning over Israel. Both of these groups have learned that they cannot succeed head on against a powerful foe like the United States or Israeli military, but they can win by being able to move fast, adapt to changing situations, take advantage almost instantly of any advantage, and break all the rules.

So what does this mean to us in recruiting?

Accept Change/Gather Information

Today everything from hiring managers’ needs to recruiting technology are a river of change. Wherever you step in today, it will be different tomorrow. Old rules are suspect; old thinking about competencies and job requirements need to be rethought. Part of a recruiter’s responsibility is to educate managers and candidates and encourage flexible approaches.

Social networks are a good example of flexible, readily tapped sources of candidates of all types — if you have mastered how to use them and have developed your own network. Rather than seek only people with particular narrow skills, include people with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills so that you can respond quickly to any request.

By using statistics and by gathering data about people and what competencies and mix of skills is most successful in particular applications or situations, recruiters and hiring managers can make better decisions about who to hire, who to keep as a regular versus contract employee, and so forth.

Develop Agility

Develop multiple scenarios that balance people against costs against expected outputs with consequent resources allocations, time requirements, and costs.

Invent processes that are flexible. Instead of planning a candidate’s interview schedule days in advance, explain that she will interview with a variety of available people. Get hiring managers to agree to accept opinions of a variety of potential interviewers. Or, let the interviewee and interviewer schedule themselves for mutually convenient times whether face-to-face or virtual.

Have on tap not-needed-now talent so that when needs arise suddenly, you can meet the demand with part-time, contract, or sometime workers. Know everyone internal to your organization so you can encourage them to move or use their network to find what you are looking for. Build networks and use them to create a workforce with multiple levels and a variety of skills that can be used when needed.

Insist that plans, procedures, and your own schedule are as flexible as possible. Use virtual tools blended with office-based and face-to-face tools and options. Blend, flex, and act quickly.

Remove barriers or policy. Reduce signatures and permissions. Put the candidate in control as much as possible and get out of the way. Act as a guide and coach, not a clerk.

Build Systems That Respond Rapidly

Instead of encouraging your firm to hire lots of regular employees, take a look at the current workforce and make some quantitative decisions on which roles add the most value.

Leverage all the Internet tools available to you from email, IM, and Twitter to your applicant tracking system.

Encourage departments and people to self-manage and organize. Provide resources to support a variety of directions and options.

Hedge Your Bets and Experiment

What-if analysis is a powerful tool for uncertain situations. Take time to develop a variety of possible scenarios for possible future talent needs. Try to incorporate unlikely possibilities like Shell did in the 1960s when it postulated that a cartel (later known as OPEC) might emerge and corner the world’s oil supply. Consequently, Shell developed a scenario (which was executed) of always preserving an exploration function within Shell and thus maintaining the ability to deliver oil without reliance on other shippers. This led Shell to be the only competitor to OPEC for years and added billions to its profits.

Hezbollah is perhaps best at experimenting. It tries a wide variety of tactics against the Israel army and then quickly adopt those that are successful. No one wastes time trying to fix things that didn’t work nor on improving those that do. The attitude is simple: use it as is until it stops working and then have several other approaches to try.

Nothing is stable or predictable, so neither should you try to be that way. Learn to thrive on change because it is the way of this century.