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While assessment can be beneficial in most situations, it is better suited for some scenarios. I’m going to highlight a few situations for which I feel assessment really is a good fit.

There are all kinds of assessments (anything used to evaluate an applicant and make decisions using the results of this evaluation is considered an assessment by the U.S. EEOC) and my purpose is not to make specific prescriptions; rather it is to present some food for thought. So, if your answer to any of the questions below is “yes,” consider using some form of assessment. keep reading…

Update: Citibank issued a statement this afternoon apologizing for the blocking of fabulis, saying: “Citibank sincerely apologizes to Mr. Goldberg for this misunderstanding. This situation had nothing to do with the content of his web site and any comments by our staff to the contrary were incorrect; we are reviewing what happened. This was a technical issue about missing documentation that is required for new business accounts. Once we resolved the situation, we unblocked the account immediately.”

In our last episode Jason Goldberg, the erstwhile founder and CEO of what was once Jobster (now Recruiting.com), had moved to Germany as chief product officer for Xing. The business-oriented social networking site bought Goldberg’s startup SocialMedian for $4 million at the end of 2008 and he went along.

To bring you up-to-date, the ever-restless Goldberg left Xing a year later after it was acquired. He moved back to New York to oversee the development and launch of yet another startup, fabulis, a social networking site for gays. His blog has the details.

Goldberg is now back in the news, blasting Citibank for freezing his company’s bank account. keep reading…

For a nice overview of the scenario planning process and this project, take a listen to this podcast. Then, brace yourself. This scenario is somewhat disturbing.

In the beginning, they thought it was the flu. As the school year started, complaints of fever and respiratory problems stretched the capacity of the health care system. Fall is a busy time in countries with relatively modern health care. This time was different.

As September dragged on, fatalities multiplied. By the middle of October, three million people, virtually all of them children, had died from the Pandemic. The desperate programs to create a working vaccine produced failure after failure.

In November, the American death toll was nine million. The rate was doubling each month. Other countries in the Northern hemisphere were experiencing similar levels of decimation of their children. The damage was smaller in the southern hemisphere because the health care and education infrastructure is less developed.

By Christmas, half of the school-age population, 18 million children, had succumbed to the mysterious disease. Fifteen million mourning families. Infrastructure overloaded beyond imagining. keep reading…

This week we took a look at role based assessment and how new tools can help you determine if a candidate is right for your organization by classifying them into team based roles. Dr. Janice Presser explained how each role can be determined and what they can contribute to your team. For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

In the April 2010 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I have an article about two very important bias factors in the hiring process. I’ll talk about them in detail and give you ideas for preventing them.

For now, I wanted to give you just a quick overview.

The two biases are the recency and primacy bias effects. keep reading…

Bill Wall was faced with two choices: take a job he didn’t really find interesting, although he was well-qualified to do it, or continue to try and build up his fledgling Internet design company. In the end he was able to do both by convincing the boss-to-be that he could do the majority of his work virtually and by agreeing to a lesser salary.

Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skills — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals. keep reading…

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Top 5 reasons to use a recruiter regardless of market conditions
2. Should recruiters care about candidates?
3. Is there an easier way to find creditworthy candidates?
4. Covering traveling expenses for candidates
5. Featured group of the week: Corporate recruiters

1. Why using a recruiter always makes sense

Kirk Abraham argues that using a recruiter makes sense no matter what the markets are doing. Kirk goes on to say, “In most cases, this is a contingency environment.  This means, the recruiting resources are deployed on the front end and it doesn’t cost the company a nickel until they decide to hire someone.”

Do you think there are instances when companies don’t need a recruiter? Weigh in now.

keep reading…

In addition to a shortage of talent, Microsoft E&D has identified three trends that impact recruiting and have caused us to see a new way of looking at recruiting solutions.

1. Technology seems to be in beta
2. The Internet has turned from informational to social
3. People (customers) are in power

In the April Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’m going into more detail about this. But for the abridged version, let me say that technology is changing at a mind-numbing pace. An interesting phenomenon is that solutions are being released in beta, as opposed to waiting for the final version of a product. In beta, the solutions are continually improved until another better solution is developed. And then the cycle continues as the new solution is offered in beta release.

At Microsoft E&D, we began a three-year program with a hypothesis that we could use technology to enhance the human touch and create a better experience for prospects and candidates. We found a vendor partner that offered a potential solution, but we understood we were in uncharted territory and needed to be nimble with respect to change. keep reading…

Gail Washington quit her job at a university in Dallas when her boss chose to belittle her, rather than help her solve a problem.

Music Teacher at a Brooklyn preschool must be careful not to say “ladies room” around her politically correct boss for fear the fangs will emerge.

Courtney should have expected problems when she ran into her boss at a party. “Drunk and drugged, Michael passed out into a flower box and broke two of his ribs.”

These are but three of a collection of appalling stories about psycho bosses, unwanted sexual advances, dysfunctional corporate culture, and too-sensitive workers. They appear on the aptly named Jobs of the Damned website. The first two stories are winners of a $200 weekly prize, while Courtney’s tale is on pace to be this week’s winner.

Stories like these pop-up periodically on the Web. Everyone has them. keep reading…

In the world of recruiting technology, there’s not much difference in the core functions of one ATS from another. All of them need to receive, parse, store, track, and retrieve candidate information. If they can’t do that much, use Excel and a filing cabinet.

So where these systems differ is in how well, how fast they perform these functions and how easy they make it on recruiters and hiring managers to use them. Then come the features everyone uses like job req approvals, posting, redistribution, candidate ranking, EEO tracking, and the features some people use like calendaring and CRM for relationship building, talent pool creation, third-party vendor integration for background checking and assessments and so on.

In 2010, even the free ATS’s (think MrTed’s SmartRecruiters or Zoho Recruit) offer many or most of those features. So why would anyone pay for a recruiting management system? keep reading…

Olympic photo © VANOC_COVAN

You will never become a world-class recruiter if you restrict your learning to benchmarking against other similar corporate recruiting functions. Great recruiters can and do learn many things by studying completely different business functions like sales, marketing, branding, supply chain management, quality control, and customer relationship management. In addition, great recruiters proactively try to learn from non-business industries as well, including universities (top student and sports recruiting), political campaigns, and even cloudsourcing initiatives.

Olympic teams are one of the top five recruiting “centers of excellence” that reside outside of the corporate world. The others include professional sports franchises, entertainment production firms, not-for-profit organizations, and the U.S. military. Even firms considered recruiting superstars like Google, Zappos, DaVita, Deloitte, and Microsoft can learn valuable lessons by studying the recruiting process used by Olympic teams. Obviously these “outside your box” Olympic recruiting strategies and tools must be modified to fit your own business situation, but it takes pure arrogance to automatically assume that great recruiting is restricted to the corporate world. keep reading…

John Sullivan wrote a great piece on ERE a few months ago, titled Five Ugly Numbers You Can’t Ignore. John’s article pointed out public research indicating fundamental flaws with the interviewing and assessment process used by most companies.

As a result of John’s article, I participated in a series of animated discussion on these ERE pages regarding the relative impact of increased interviewing accuracy on improving quality of hire. Now I know the academics among us get excited when they believe that better assessments directly correlate with increasing quality of hire, but according to the Recruiting Roundtable — a well-respected research group — research suggests this is not actually true. keep reading…

We were joined this week by Gerry Crispin as we examined how sources of hire have changed in the past year. Learn how to collect source of hire metrics and what the most effective sources of hire are for your organization. For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with yet another entrepreneur who imagined that the future revolved around the “eHarmony for Jobs.”(The idea was tired a couple of years ago.) I regaled him with stories of Intellimatch, itzBig, JobFox, and 40 other matching services. They all planned to use structured profiles and assessment tests to ensure a fit. The primary problem with these schemes is that they always require too much investment of time (from candidates and employers alike) to actually work. The secondary problem is that the investment required to make the technology make sense is measured in billion$, not million$.

Lots of forecasts for the future of recruiting and HR focus on phenomenal breakthroughs in technology’s ability to personalize and match environments. That’s probably not really going to happen in the foreseeable future. The triple disciplines of sourcing, attraction, and selection will continue to require human intervention at the decision making point.

Some commentators are beginning to notice that the world is already heavily served by a bot-mediated culture.

Forget about HAL-like robots enslaving humankind a few decades from now; the takeover is already underway. The agents of this unwelcome revolution aren’t strong AIs, but “bots” — autonomous programs that have insinuated themselves into the Internet and thus into every corner of our lives. Apply for a mortgage lately? A bot determined your FICA score and thus whether you got the loan. Call 411? A bot gave you the number and connected the call.

Highway-bots collect your tolls, read your license plate, and report you if you have an outstanding violation. Bots are proliferating because they are so very useful. Businesses rely on them to automate essential processes, and of course bots running on zombie computers are responsible for the tsunami of spam and malware plaguing Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, bots will be the majority users of the Net by 2010.

We are visible to bots even when we are not at our computers. Next time you are on a downtown street, contemplate the bot-controlled video cameras watching you, or the bots tracking your cellphone and sniffing at your Bluetooth-enabled gizmos. We walk through a gauntlet of bot-controlled sensors every time we step into a public space and the sensors are proliferating. – Paul Saffo (See here (long video), here (book) and here for a crisper understanding of the bot-mediated future.)

In other words, rather than a huge, monolithic big brother, it’s more reasonable to expect something like a swarm of little tools: Shallybots. keep reading…

The ninth Source of Hire report from CareerXroads is out and it shows the impact of the U.S. recession on hiring patterns over the last few years while offering some encouraging news about hiring in 2010.

The whitepaper’s top-line findings show that, on average, 41 of the nation’s larger companies filled just over half their vacancies in 2009 by internal transfers and promotions. This is the largest percentage since CareerXroads first reported the data in 2002.

For 2010, however, 48 percent of the participating companies expect to hire and hire robustly. The prediction is for 29 percent growth in hiring. Only 10.8 percent of the surveyed participants expect to higher fewer workers this year. Compare those percentages to the Source of Hire report issued last year at this time. Then, 100 percent of the companies predicted they would hire fewer workers.

“The spike in internal movement is a strong artifact of the recession and suppressed many other sources of hire,” says the report, authored by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, founders and principals in the recruitment-oriented CareerXroads consultancy. “Expect internal movement to fall to more normal levels in 2010.” keep reading…

This is an exciting time for ERE. We’re just a month away from the start of both the 10th Annual ERE Expo and our newly acquired SourceCon in San Diego, and both are going to be the largest since this recession began. (You heard that right — when’s the last time that you were at a conference that was growing?)

I’ve got a couple of new announcements about what’s happening here at ERE:

First, I’d like to welcome Lance Haun to the ERE team as our Community Director, with a mandate to reach out to the recruiting community and increase participation on ERE.net. Many of you may already know Lance. He has been an active and well-respected figure in the HR community for years, and he already has some great ideas about where to take our 50,000 member community next. Lance has a post up about how he landed the gig on his blog.

Second, I’m pleased to announce that ERE Media has acquired the Creative Excellence Awards from Landon Media.

The CEAs have been a fixture in the recruitment advertising world for decades, recognizing the best and most creative work in the field. They have a long and storied history. They were founded by the agencies themselves in an era when recruitment advertising revolved around the newspaper classified section. On a personal note, my first job in this industry was at TMP Worldwide. I remember the buzz and excitement around the CEAs every year, so I am excited at this new addition to the ERE portfolio!

Our first task as we put our stamp on the CEAs will be to make sure that they reflect that real work in recruitment communications today no longer just done in the newspapers, but across many media, and especially online.

The Creative Excellence Awards are going to be held in October at the upcoming ERE Expo 2010 Fall conference in Florida, and in the coming weeks we’ll provide more details on the CEAs and how to be considered.

2010 is looking like it’s going to be be a big year, and it’s only February!

Imagine 70 or so of the largest job boards in the U.S. volunteering to disclose their site demographics and user details and have all the data made available to the public? For free. Identifiable by job board.

Not going to happen, I agree.

But in the United Kingdom, that’s just what has been happening since 2002. Coming together as the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey, dozens of the job boards there participate in an annual survey that profiles their users, segmenting them by industry, occupation, age, income, job-hunting behavior, and more; 40 categories in all. The data is combined with traffic information from each of the participating job boards.

This month NORAS will report the results of its October-December 2009 survey which collected data from the users and owners of 70 of the UK’s job boards, double the participation from the previous survey.  These include such major UK job boards as Fish4Jobs, GuardianJobs, and eFinancialCareers, the Dice-owned site. keep reading…

There are three reasons to do a succession plan, and identifying a replacement for the CEO and select top executives is only part of one of these reasons. The three reasons are:

• Replacement for key employees
• To support anticipated growth
• To address and deal with talent shortages

Unfortunately, however, succession planning is too often considered an exercise, a means to an end, a human resources task to be checked off and moved into the done pile. This is absolutely the wrong way to think about succession planning. keep reading…

Unless you have been living off the planet Earth, you have probably already read or heard about several mechanical failures in Toyota automobiles that led the auto maker famous for quality to recall nearly nine million cars worldwide. In addition, poor handling of the issue in the public eye has damaged the automaker’s brand reputation and caused sales to decline to their lowest point in more than a decade.

This think piece wasn’t written to inform you further about the mechanical failures, but rather to reflect on the following premise:

Toyota’s current predicament is a result of poorly designed practices and weak execution on the part of the human resource department! keep reading…

Yikes! Here it is two days before Valentine’s Day and not a romance story in sight on ERE.

Let me remedy that with some tales from the gurus, starting, appropriately, with the good news from HRGuru (by Monster) that “office relationships are no longer taboo.” In the how-to article, HRGuru notes that 58 percent of workers have had an office romance (quoting Vault and not, understandably, the CareerBuilder survey I’ll mention in a minute).

Citing another survey, the article says almost everyone thinks it’s OK to date a co-worker. But date a boss? No way say workers, with women (at 82 percent) much more opposed than men (73 opposed).

Sadly, the very next issue addressed in the article is sub-headed “Sexual Harassment Claims.” keep reading…