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.

Do you hire almost exclusively based on unstructured interviews? Interviews provide a great opportunity to communicate directly with candidates. However, interviews that do not use some form of structure to ensure that questions are job-related and that all applicants are evaluated using a common set of parameters are not very effective. If the cornerstone of your hiring process is an unstructured interview, think about making some changes. These include adding a structured interview or at least supplementing your existing interview with an assessment that can provide you with standardized, job-related information about each applicant.

Do you have high turnover at one or many key positions? Turnover cannot be completely eliminated. But even a slight reduction in turnover can equate to significant savings. Assessment has proven to be an excellent way to reduce turnover, especially when one has some clues as to the reasons why turnover has become an issue.

Do you have a high volume of applicants? Almost everyone is experiencing very high applicant volume. While this is often looked at as a negative because of the extra time and effort required to evaluate so many applicants, it can allow you to be very choosy. Assessments provide you with a tool to help you do two things. First of all, a good assessment can help you eliminate the bottom 20% of applicants: those who would end up being miserable failures. At the same time, assessment can help you to identify the cream of the crop. It can be automated so that recruiters and hiring personnel are able to focus their attention on a slate of applicants who have the best chance of success.

Do you hire for potential and then train/develop? Assessments are excellent indicators of raw ability. Many folks in the assessment world will tell you that the smartest person almost always does better on the job (I don’t always agree, but that is another discussion). It often makes a lot of sense to hire based on the raw material that someone brings to the table and use post-hire training and development to figure out how to best apply what each hire brings to the table. Assessment is an excellent part of this plan because it provides a relative measure of raw abilities.

Are you worried about the legality of your hiring process? No one is going to answer “no” to this question. But posing it is a good way to make the point that those organizations who do not use assessments at all are actually putting themselves in more potential legal jeopardy then those who use a well-thought-out assessment strategy that follows best practices. If your hiring process is audited, every part of it is going to be considered a test. So, the use of unstructured methods that are not based on a job analysis and other forms of due diligence are not going to hold water. By choosing a valid, relevant assessment and by treating all forms of evaluation as a test that evaluates all applicants consistently, you are helping to ensure the legal defensibility of your hiring process. By doing the things that provide legal defensibility, you are also helping to ensure that your assessment system provides value because it is evaluating things that are essential for job performance.

Do you have a unified competency model that cuts across the employee lifecycle? If your organization has invested heavily in a competency model that espouses your values and the various things that equate to success within the organization, then pre-employment assessment may be a good idea. Think about it: if you are looking for a stable set of characteristics that allow you to evaluate the contributions made by employees, then it makes sense to hire based on these same characteristics. These things may vary a bit from job to job, but looking for indicators that an applicant has the “right stuff” as your company defines it makes sense.

Does good job performance boil down to one or two really simple things? Entry-level positions in which a few basic things can make all the difference in the world are great candidates for assessment. For instance, at many hourly jobs the ability to provide good customer service, be honest, and show up for work when scheduled can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Most assessment providers have collected enough data to allow the creation of measures that do an excellent job of predicting these types of work outcomes. Simple assessments can make a big difference when it comes to helping companies to hire workers who can get the job done.

The purpose of the questions I have posed here is not to offer any specific prescription in terms of what type of assessments to use or how to use them. Rather, I hope to stimulate some thought about some of the ways that assessment can add value for your organizations. The choice of what assessment is best for a given situation and the strategy for employing assessment is something that requires careful thought, planning, and expertise. Those of us who help companies develop well-thought-out assessment strategies can attest to the fact that it’s worth the effort.

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.

He first posted about the situation the other day, writing:

“In a bit of strange and disturbing news, fabulis discovered today that someone(s) at Citibank had decided arbitrarily to block fabulis’ bank account due to what was described to us on the phone as “objectionable content” on our blog.”

Today, with the situation escalating, Goldberg reported a Citibank manger told him a compliance review found the blog “content was not in compliance with Citibank’s standard policies.”

TechCrunch and GigaOm, among others, are picking up the story, suggesting Citibank is homophobic. In a comment on Hacker News, Goldberg discounts that.

Citibank has so far made no public comment. A person in the press office took my name, number, and email, and said someone would be in touch.

Incidentally, fabulis has some heavy-hitter investors who just last month put $625,000 in initial funds into the company. Among the investors, The Washington Post, Allen Morgan of the Mayfield Fund, and Don Baer, vice chair of international PR firm Burson Marsteller.

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.

As was the case with the early days of the H1N1 virus, hospitals, pharmacies, schools, and clinics turned out to be the primary disease vectors. By the time the health care system began to effectively respond, the virus disappeared.

Roughly half of the children between the ages of 6 and 16 died in the pandemic. Proportionally, it was smaller than the Spanish Flu epidemic of the early 20th Century.

The point of developing and using scenarios is to focus planning in the right places. Any forecast of the future is bound to be mistaken. Rather than trying to “get it right” by making a perfect forecast, scenario planning requires us look at and discover things that matter even if it is uncomfortable or, at first, unimaginable. Contemplating great changes give us the opportunity to see both our blind spots and the places where we should invest our energies.

We know for sure that the next 10 or 20 years will contain big surprises that force us to recalibrate. One way of thinking about history is that it is just a series of these big surprises that turn everything upside down. The purely disruptive nature of a possible pandemic can help us understand where our systems need fortification.

If you want to read more about the way unexpected things shape reality, Nicholas Taleb wrote an insightful book called The Black Swan. Examples include: Viagra, 9/11, Harry Potter, First World War, Beatles, the PC, Google, recent financial collapse, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rise of any successful religion. History is dominated by sudden, lasting changes wrought by deeply unexpected events.

Economic growth in the Northern hemisphere is driven by the two kinds of capital: financial and human. Population growth (which has the tendency to keep the average age of the population low) fuels economic growth when financial capital is available. Money is the fuse; population is the explosive. With less new human capital moving into the system, economic growth must be reconsidered.

Since the average age of most industrialized cultures is climbing (the U.S. remains a partial exception as long as immigration policies continue to liberalize), taking a large chunk out of the potential workforce would have a number of effects:

• Anything resembling retirement as we know it would vanish immediately.
• The competition for new workers would rapidly accelerate.
• Employers would invest heavily in the training of new workers.
• Bad hires and turnover would not be tolerated because of scarcity and expense of replacements.
• Attention to quality in the hiring process would increase.
• Workforce planning (how to make do with the available labor supply) would become a central strategy issue.
• Time off to nurture and protect the remaining children would become immediately important.
• Those who could continue to reproduce would be encouraged to do so (tax and other social incentives).

In a globally imbalanced case like this (high damage in the North, low damage in the South), an even greater emphasis on international outsourcing and recruiting would emerge. As we are learning, effective outsourcing requires a clear description of the required services and effective contract management on both sides. In the wake of the disaster, we would have to learn quickly to overcome the current hurdles for effective outsourcing. The Western trend to outsource non-strategic services allowing the company to focus on what differentiates it would expand.

Recruiting would also depend on international resources and immigration. Cultural and language adaptation would accelerate.

The use of scarce resources always requires careful attention to needs. Rationing can be formal or informal. Shortages teach us how to invest in and care for things that may have been taken for granted at other times. You could expect this change to result in:

• More attention to education
• Deeper involvement in onboarding
• Extraordinary effort to guarantee that each new hire became productive and engaged.

The quick, back of the envelope, analysis focuses on three things:

• Strengthening the accuracy of the hiring process’ estimates of a new hire’s success
• An increased focus on outsourcing non-essential functions
• A new emphasis on investment in the people of an organization.
  

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This research is sponsored by Pinstripe Talent.

To read the rest of the series:

• Five Scenarios: I Introduction
• Five Scenarios: II The Trends
• Five Scenarios: III The Marketplace
• Five Scenarios: IV The Future Matters
• Five Scenarios: V Guild Cities
• Five Scenarios VI: Invasion of the Shallybots

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

The two biases are the recency and primacy bias effects.

The recency bias error occurs when an assessor (i.e. recruiter, hiring manager, etc.) is overly affected by information that was presented later (more recently) rather than earlier in any given selection process. In contrast, the primacy bias error occurs when an assessor’s selection is made based on information that was presented earlier (primary information) rather than later in a process. And although the effects appear symmetrically opposing, the research shows that they occur because of different reasons, and that their implications can differ drastically. They are not equal but opposite.

An exemplary candidate who shows up late to an interview but does well on the interview itself may suffer the consequences of the primacy effect. A candidate who shows up on time, does well but says something toward the end of the interview that can be described as intensely negative, might suffer the consequences of the recency effect.

The body of research points to two process models on how decisions are made in the interview process. The first we will describe is the step-by-step (SbS) decision-making model, and the second is the end-of sequence (EoS) decision-making model. We call those models response modes.

The step-by-step decision-making model is where a decision-maker evaluates a candidate incrementally and develops a view of that candidate. That view becomes the “anchor.” Then as more information is presented, the new information is added to the anchor view and a new anchor (hence new view) is formed. This process occurs until all segments of the interview process are completed. With every new anchor and every new set of data about a candidate a new anchor is formed.

The end-of-sequence response mode is self explanatory. Judgment on a candidate is withheld until the final stage of the interview process.

The best example to understanding bias effects comes from a study performed by Scott Highhouse and Andrew Gallor of Bowling Green State University and Indiana University respectively. In their article titled “Order Effects in Making Personnel Decision Making” published in Human Performance in 1997, they performed a study to understand where bias effects take place.

In short they found that in a long interview process, regardless of the complexity of the interview and decision-making type (response mode) of the decision maker, that primacy dominated. In other words, the term we commonly use for our initial cognitive anchor, “first impressions” dominated the views of the interviewers of the applicants.

In the case of a short interview process, the results depended more on whether the decision-making process was EoS (end of sequence) or SbS (step by step). In simple and short interviews where the decision was withheld to the end of the process, primacy dominated. In short and complex interviews the most recent information presented by the applicant dominated when judged by the interviewer. In a short step-by-step decision making process the most recent information always outweighed the first pieces of information.

As a talent acquisition consultant, the results make perfect sense in my practice. In the larger scheme of things human beings are fairly predictable. When we are presented with a large amount of complex information quickly we don’t have time to make step-by-step evaluations and we reserve our decision to the end. In that case, the most recent information seems to be the best, and a bias effect occurs toward the most recent interviews in judgment and possibly the most recent candidates interviewed. When the process takes a long time, we become mentally tired and we simply rely on our first impressions of a given candidate and tend to choose the applicants we interviewed earlier in the process. In the case of a simple and quick interview process, we simply judge quickly, and primacy dominates.

The recruiting leader then needs to implement a system and process to mitigate these effects if they wish to hire effectively and to help their hiring managers judge both accurately and precisely. I’ll talk more about that in the Journal.

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.

Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to flex to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not.

Here are some of the issues, paradoxes, and changes that recruiters and human resources are faced with. These have already complicated the employment market, created confusion, and made your job more difficult. There is very little we can do about many of these trends. Others will require you to become more creative and targeted in sourcing. And success in dealing with some may require you to be more persuasive than you have ever been with both your hiring manager and with candidates.

Flexible Working Times

Every one wants to work when they want to, whether that is at night, weekends, or during what we call a “normal” working day. Mothers want time with their children and would like to work when the kids are sleeping or in school. Others are more productive in the wee hours and want to sleep in the daytime. And still others want to vary their schedules depending on their mood or family needs.

Individual contributors who can work alone are most likely to be able to find work with flexible schedules. People who might enjoy such flexibility include data-input people, researchers, web developers, programmers, and others whose work spans time and is done individually.

Some organizations allow flexibility within defined parameters or with prior approval. Only a few are truly open to a varied, unpredictable schedule even if work is done in a timely way and all deadlines are met. My own website is coded and maintained by a person who has a full-time job that gives her flexibility and control over her time.

More firms are offering flexible working times and slowly are focusing on results rather than time as the measures of performance.

It will be tough to convince very good people to work for organizations that do not allow flexible work. Employment branding and messaging should be clear about the time requirements, and you should target an audience where flexibility might not be a critical consideration such younger men and single folks who do not have children or other responsibilities. You can also target baby boomers who have grown up in a business world without flexibility and are comfortable with that.

Multiple Jobs

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines multiple jobholders as people who are either hourly or salary workers who hold two or more jobs, self-employed workers who also hold an hourly or salary job, or unpaid family workers who hold an hourly or salary job as well. Currently official figures indicate that about 5% of Americans fit this category.

Organizations still expect and seek loyalty, even though they have shown their employees little of that when times get tough. Young workers, especially Gen Ys, often do have more than one source of income. They rarely make that public. They know it would be frowned on or even be the reason for getting them fired. There is very little a recruiter can do about this, but if you reject those who you suspect of having multiple jobs you will significantly reduce your candidate pool and the quality of that pool.

Virtual Work

Having employees working from home or from remote work centers is common, and more employers are allowing this due to a variety of converging reasons including the desire to save energy, increased travel times, skill shortages, and a global workforce.

Over the past decade so many companies have encouraged virtual work that it almost expected. People are comfortable working with their laptops and smart phones and have access to Skype accounts and collaborative workspaces. All of these tools make working away from a physical place practical, convenient, and cheap.

There is no doubt that this form of employment will grow rapidly and may make up as much as half the U.S. workforce within a decade.

Generational Mindset

As many have written, there are large differences in attitudes about work and time between the three major generations in the workplace. Baby Boomers (those over 45) are generally traditional and are comfortable with being physically at work, in an organization, and working an 8-hour or longer day.

Gen X (those between 30-45) is also comfortable working in traditional ways, but they are more open to virtual work and demand flexibility for their family.

But Gen Y (those under 30) are the change agents. They do not really want to work for any organization but especially those with layers of hierarchy and reams of policies and procedures. They want flexible, virtual work and are more likely to have multiple jobs. They are the hardest to recruit and the hardest to retain. Yet, they are the future of most organizations as Baby Boomers age and move out.

These are just a handful if the trends that will make your job both more critical to organizational success as well as much harder than ever before. Your only advantage is to be aware and find ways to cope with these trends and the changes they require as soon as you can.

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.

2. Why should recruiters care about candidates?

Nick Price says that there is a temptation in this economy to go the easiest route even though it may hurt the candidate experience. He throws down to recruiters who treat candidates poorly, saying, “Those in recruitment have a responsibility to manage this — not just for the sensible approach to managing the organisation’s reputation, but also out of respect for the person who is applying for a job.”

Are workloads too demanding for recruiters to do a great job at candidate care?

3. Is there an easy way to find creditworthy candidates?

Mark Walker writes in the forum, “Does anyone have any suggestions when it comes to sourcing candidates with satisfactory credit? My employer requires that applicants have no collection items, charge-offs, liens, etc. Basically all accounts on the credit report need to be up to date, no past due accounts. We don’t check or look at credit scores. Due to the economy it has been a challenge finding Call Center Reps and Financial Counselors that meet our credit check requirements. Any suggests?”

Have any tips for Mark? Leave a comment for him in the forum.

4. Covering traveling expenses for out-of-town candidates

Sarah Widner asks the forum, “With the economy the way it is, how typical is it for employers to pay for travel for out-of-town candidates? Are there any statistics on this?”

What is your experience with paying for travel recently? Is it tougher to convince execs that it is worth the money? Give Sarah some feedback on her question.

5. Featured group: Corporate recruiters

The corporate recruiter group on ERE was created by Irene Wolinski and features corporate recruiters sharing best practices and being a sounding board for tough recruiting assignments. Two of the more recent discussions have revolved around how to best create a new hire orientation video and how to get average cycle time data for recruiting. If you’re a corporate recruiter and need a group of people to bounce ideas off, this is a great place to start.

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

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.

In the second year of the project, we switched vendor partners because a broader and more powerful solution became available. Fortunately our new vendor partner was nimble and flexible because our solution in year three is very different than in year two. And I do not expect to have a final version of this vendor’s solution because year four will offer some exciting new opportunities. The truth is that we do not know what we don’t know. When we shifted vendor partners two years ago, we did not realize that a different situation existed until it was introduced to us. I am not certain we even had the words to ask for that solution. I suspect technology solutions are going to appear next year that not imagined today—and they will be released in beta.

The Internet has made a well-chronicled transition from being a place to obtain information to a place to engage in social activities. The places people gather are called Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. People are aligning socially with their interests and share publically their personal information. Information that used to only be obtainable by the black ops researchers and sourcers is available to all with some Internet research. Each of these virtual gathering places has rules of engagement, and community members are expected to respect them. If the migration of people to the virtual social sites continues, most of the target audience that we need to reach out to will be online and visible.

Looking at recruiting in the 21st century requires an understanding of how the traditional components of recruiting have changed. Sometimes I think that if we had a new pair of glasses, then change would be easier. We tend to see things though our old glasses. The frames fit our face well and feel familiar and comfortable. The lens may be scratched, but if we hold our eyes just right, we miss the flaw in our vision. But the new glasses offer a challenge: what if things are not as they appear? What if the clarity in our vision makes us uncomfortable? What if we see we have been wrong and made mistakes? What if? What if? What if?

I invite you to put on a new pair of glasses and view recruiting. You will see a bit of old school — some major influences and a number of components that make up recruiting in the 21st century. These glasses can correct our vision to clearly see the recruiting opportunities.

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.

So, naturally, there are plenty of places to “rate your boss.” A Google search turns up a quarter-million sites where that phrase appears with the first few pages full of places to submit a rating or review. One of the better known is Glassdoor, a site you better check regularly if only to know what your hot prospects already know.

Now, indie publisher Heliotrope Books has decided there’s a market for these stories; enough of a market and enough stories that it has decided to issue a series of books called Jobs of the Damned. The samples above are likely to be among the 200 to appear in the first volume, entitled appropriately, The World’s Worst Bosses.

Heliotrope is collecting these stories via a contest. Each week readers will vote on the best story of the week, which gets $200. Judges will pick the top three stories out of all the submissions. First prize is $2,000.

Before you go writing your own story of a monster boss (mine would be of a CEO who weekly berated his C team in language for which mom would have washed out his mouth with soap), before you go rushing off expecting to win, know that Heliotrope is charging authors $10 for each submission. It’s almost a no-lose proposition for the publisher, which judging from the number of submissions on the website, looks to be almost breaking even on the weekly contest.

There’s no way of knowing how many of the stories are true. Authors can remain anonymous if they choose. Don’t expect, however, that this is the place the disgruntled can get even; no names or other identification is permitted.

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?

I can think of a few. And so has BrightMove, which last month released the latest version of its ATS. The company doesn’t attract a whole lot of attention, probably because it’s been focused on staffing and on the smaller end of the corporate market.

Don’t let that fool you into thinking BrightMove isn’t right on top of things. The new release is heavy into social media, offers a comfortable level of work process customization, and emphasizes analytics to a degree that rivals that of enterprise systems. The other front-of-the-class features include a background prospecting tool for staffing and RPO firms that matches hot prospects to advertised jobs on corporate sites and on-click candidate research.

I took an hour-long demo Friday with BrightMove founder and CEO Dave Webb, and COO Mike Brandt, who drove. There was plenty to like about the new version and plenty of reasons for even a small shop to come up with the modest monthly fee. (As with all SaaS HR technology, pricing is per user and varies. But figure on around $100 a month with discounts for volume and contracts.)

But what especially impressed me were the analytics. I can’t imagine any recruiting operation that wouldn’t benefit from knowing which source provided the most number of placed candidates. Then layer on the cost of acquiring those candidates and compare it to all the other sources.

Useful? I think so. Even more though would be to do that same analysis by candidate skills. In the first analysis, I would expect Monster and CareerBuilder to yield the greatest number of candidates and placements. That’s just a function of their reach. But let me narrow that down to specific skills and I might just find that referrals from other placed candidates is an even better bet.

“We really opened this up, ” Brandt said. Not every manager or agency owner is going to need or want to do the same kind of deep diving into the data that I might (I actually find it fun), but BrightMove makes it possible for them to do as much as they need. As Brandt said, analyzing the data in various ways makes it possible to “come up with a new way” of focusing the business.

“This is where we really feel like, man … we can really help them make a difference in what they are doing,” Brandt added.

Were the analytics the only gee-whiz feature, BrightMove would certainly be worth trying out, especially since you can do that for free without giving up what you have now. However, the social media tools aren’t to be overlooked.

BrightMove has job posting and candidate research features specifically for social media. The company has correctly read the interest in reaching the denizens of those sites, even though there’s only faint evidence at this point to show social media recruiting is as effective as, say, posting to a job board. (Before you write those nasty comments, go read the Source of Hire study study just released by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler).

Nevertheless, the service is there and it can be used for reaching passive candidates and building profiles of candidates.

Being small, BrightMove clearly is trying harder. The company brought out a version of the ATS for RPOs which it brands BrightMove Quantify. That’s the one Brandt demoed. There are also flavors for staffing and corporate recruiters.

Because it’s small and getting notice can be a challenge, BrightMove announced a couple months ago that it would credit back 25 percent of the month’s fee to any customer unhappy with the support and service they get. BrightMove has also been forming partnerships, most recently integrating TalentHook’s spidering capabilities into the ATS.

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.

Narrow-minded People Instantly Dismiss Sports Analogies

Many leaders/managers in HR hate sports analogies; it’s one of the key differentiators between them and other corporate leaders. Maybe it’s because in sports there is such a strong emphasis on competing and delivering results, and softer factors like values, effort, equal treatment, and “giving poor performers another chance” are relegated to the sideline. Senior corporate leaders outside HR realize that success in sports requires more than physical talent. It requires great managers, excellent training, a winning strategy, great tools and technology, and mental toughness. Books written by CEOs routinely include sports analogies, and their speeches are frequently peppered with sports terms like teams, coaching, “crush the opposition,” “give me the ball,” etc. Successful sports heroes and coaches also see the similarity because they frequently write books on leadership targeted exclusively for business consumption.

Olympic recruiters successfully attract the very top performers away from their careers, their families, and even their professional sports team salaries for an opportunity to literally “work for free” in a job with a less than a 5% chance of earning a shiny medal with zero resale value. Whether you like sports analogies or not, the Olympic recruiting model warrants your attention.

Valuable Recruiting Lessons That Anyone Can Learn From the Olympics

The four main lessons that corporate recruiters can learn from the Olympic recruiting include branding, sourcing, assessment, and top grading.

Let’s begin with lessons that can be learned in the area of branding. There are two basic approaches to branding any employer. The first approach is the “what we say” approach. It’s named that because in the vast majority of organizations that employ it the brand position and subsequently all brand messaging is developed by a relatively clueless group of HR committee members who paint the organization as they would like it to exist versus how it actually exists or how it would need to exist to attract the right talent. Organizations practicing “what we say” branding place messages in highly controlled situations including on billboards, paid advertising, glossy brochures, and on corporate websites. The weakness of the “what we say” approach should be obvious…the messages are not credible among the target audience and are dismissed as nothing more than traditional corporate propaganda.

The second approach to branding is the “what others say” approach, where organizations accept that employment brands are developed through direct/indirect experience with the brand, and that the most credible brand messaging is developed and spread by the target audience itself. The Olympic team relies on “others,” namely former Olympians, spreading the word about the prestige of becoming a member of the Olympic team. Their message is spread virally and is not controlled. Just as with any major corporation, some former Olympians share their negative experience. Relying on others to spread your message is cheaper than an advertising-supported approach, but more important, virally spread messages are viewed as more credible, more believable, and more real by the people the brand needs to influence most. (Viral messages are rarely perfect, pristine, PR packaged, fluff pieces!)

The U.S. Olympic Committee has done an exceptional job influencing a brand that positions becoming an Olympian as an opportunity to do “the best work of your life.” As a result, young athletes line up for the chance to become one, often investing every penny earned into training to become even better. Once a team member, they dedicate hours to working hard, often with little or no pay and a miniscule chance of success. A few go on to earn big endorsement deals, but a much larger contingent work hourly jobs with companies like Home Depot to earn a living. In the corporate world, Zappos is a great example of how an employer brand message can be effectively spread using the “what others say” approach.

Olympic Sourcing Excellence

Attracting or sourcing athletes to apply to the Olympic team is also a practice that corporate recruiters should learn from. The Olympic team doesn’t post openings on Monster.com or procure booths at job fairs; instead it uses referrals by current and past team members, and uses sports association teams as farm teams. Olympic recruiters recruit for positions that offer no pay, require hours of intense work, provide few benefits, and offer little chance of reward. (There isn’t much demand for curling champions in the advertising world!)

Olympic recruiters focus on the excitement of the work and the thrill of the competition. They highlight the opportunity to work with and compete against the very best. The pitch is simple: becoming an Olympic athlete isn’t a job, it’s an honor, a privilege, a dream, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In the corporate world, although many know of Google’s free food and perks, it’s actually the excitement and challenge of the work itself that is the most under-sold attribute of the job.

A Candidate Assessment Approach That Everyone Should Copy

The Olympic assessment process for selecting candidates for the team is a process that every corporation should strive to emulate. You can classify the two basic approaches to candidate assessment as either “word-based” assessment or “performance-based” assessment.

Almost all corporate assessment uses the word-based approach. People often use the phrase “anyone can lie with statistics,” but the fact is that most people prefer to misrepresent or lie “with words” as opposed to numbers. The vast majority of corporate assessment processes rely on analyzing words in every stage of the process from resume screening to interview to reference checks. Candidates who successfully use the right words, tell the right stories or give the right examples, are often selected without ever having to prove they are the best performer.

Behavioral interviewing is a commonly used tool that relies heavily on candidates weaving a tale about past reaction to specific circumstances, discounting the multitude of factors that render the circumstances completely incomparable to those the candidate will likely face on the job. Overall, relying so heavily on words to make your assessment probably means that those most skilled in the use of words are likely to get the position, even if the position itself doesn’t require a great deal of wordsmithing.

The Olympic assessment process is superior because its assessments are based solely on performance under actual job conditions. The “job content” or results approach doesn’t care if you are eloquent, if you went to Harvard, if you have 10 years of experience or if your mom is the head coach. You only get on the team if your performance exceeds that of all others. In order to ensure consistent performance over time, some of the Olympic teams even require outstanding performance over a series of events in order to be selected. Because the Olympic assessment approach is clearly laid out in advance (there are no surprises during it), and because it is almost 100% objective, an extremely high percentage of candidates are willing to fully complete the assessment process without complaint.

There are several lessons that the corporate world could learn from this performance-based assessment process, namely:

• Allow zero tolerance for hiring errors. The performance of every new hire must be assessed and a failure analysis must be conducted whenever you hire someone who doesn’t end up performing to team standards.
• Spell out the assessment process so that candidates know what to expect and what is being assessed.
• Use real job content simulations to assess actual probability of performance. Give candidates a real problem that everyone has agreed on in advance as to what constitutes poor, good, or a great performance. The problem should be selected from among those problems that the new hire would face during their first few months. In cases where it’s not possible for safety reasons to put the candidates through an actual problem, verbal simulations should be used to ensure that the candidate can at least “walk you through the complete steps” of an excellent solution. In the corporate world, almost all airlines already assess pilot candidate performance via virtual simulators.

Firms like Toyota and GlobalEnglish make potential hires actually work on problems with a real team. These tryouts serve a dual purpose. They allow the candidate to demonstrate their results, as well as giving the candidate a better opportunity to more accurately know what they are getting into.

“Top Grading” Really Works

In Olympic recruiting and selection the goal is to have 100% top performers in every role.

In the corporate world, “top grading” is the term that many use for this strategy of staffing. A significant number in HR argue against the top grading approach, proposing that it is too expensive, that there are not enough top performers available, or that managing a whole team of top performers is simply too difficult. I find it interesting that I have yet to meet a single top performer who doesn’t support a top grading approach where top performers who are also team players are the sole recruiting target. Top performers almost universally want to work alongside and learn from the very best and they see average performers as a distraction from overall team excellence. In the corporate world, Google is the next example of a corporation wanting to put top performers in every role and to drive away average candidates.

Final Thoughts

If you are watching the Winter Olympics, it’s easy to view the games as merely entertainment. However, if you look behind the scenes at the processes that support the teams, you’ll see an extremely sophisticated recruiting approach that rivals any in the corporate world. It’s a long-term process that literally started years ago and that will begin again as soon as the Olympics end. The process is so effective, that in the case of the U.S. team, it will most likely result in the most medals of any team in the world. Their talent acquisition process really is that good and it is certainly worthy of being copied by any corporation that strives to be world-class in recruiting.

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.

In a recent public report it compared the impact nine variables had on improving quality of hire and time to hire. Interestingly, at least according to their research, accurate interviewing and assessments had no impact on improving quality of hire. Regardless, it is a gate to pass to get into the game. The top three for improving quality of hire were the need for a strong recruiter and hiring manager partnership, a clear understanding of job needs, and the recruiter’s ability to convert candidates at every step, from prospect to hire. This last point has to do with keeping the candidate engaged, overcoming concerns, presenting the job as a career move, negotiating offers, and keeping the competition at bay.

Leading some credence to the Recruiting Roundtable results is a report from Leadership IQ documenting a three-year survey it conducted with 5,247 managers covering more than 20,000 hires. The big conclusions — 46% of new hires fail within 18 months, with only 19% totally successful. The biggest surprise of them all was that the interviewing methodology used didn’t affect the results. I find this confusing, since I know that conducting an accurate assessment is a necessary, even though it’s not a sufficient aspect of improving quality of hire. The report went on to suggest that managers overvalued technical skills instead of evaluating other aspects of on-the-job performance, including motivation, emotional intelligence, coachability, and temperament. This alone indicates that the candidates were not interviewed properly, and to some degree, puts in doubt some of their other conclusions.

So while there is some data out there that contradicts published research from some of the top names in academia, it’s hard to believe that accurate assessments aren’t important, since without having a qualified and motivated candidate, you’ll wind up with a bad hire. Perhaps the problem is associated with curvilinearity, meaning once a threshold level of sufficient capabilities is met, recruiting skills takeover as being far more important in improving quality of hire.

The academic research does suggest that while a validated and structured interview is important, it might not be all not that important in the overall scheme of things. For example, the often-cited Schmidt and Hunter study reports that the combined correlation coefficient for a structured behavioral interview and GMA test is .63. In practical terms this means that only 36% (square of the correlation coefficient) of the candidate’s predicted on-the-job performance can be explained by these two factors, leaving 64% of job performance due to other factors. I’m surprised that more has not been made of this critical point. By itself, this might be the explanation as to why the Recruiting Roundtable and the Leadership IQ reports that interviewing accuracy has much less of an impact on quality of hire than would be expected.

Taking a different perspective entirely, in some cases, an accurate assessment can actually be counterproductive, especially when good people refuse to move forward until they make the determination the job offers a career move. This is why I suggest putting the necessary assessment process later in the hiring process to maximize the end-to-end conversion rate without compromising quality. Of course, this is a moot point when the supply of quality candidates exceeds demand, a rare situation in normal economic times.

Adding to the supply shortage dilemma, many of the best people — especially those with significant upside potential — are looking for career moves and learning opportunities. In these cases they might not have the requisite skills, knowledge, and abilities, and could be excluded for the wrong reasons. This relates to the classic potential vs. experience trade-off problem.

On another level, the relationship between interviewing accuracy and quality of hire is further distorted since they are separate and unequal tasks. If you are using the lens of maximizing selection accuracy as your primary objective, you might overlook the bigger challenge of hiring the best people possible including those who aren’t looking, those who have more potential than experience, those who have a different mix of skills, and those who have multiple offers. Each of these factors requires a rebalancing of the sourcing, recruiting, and selection process in order to maximize quality of hire. This is pretty much what the Recruiting Roundtable results indicated.

When supply is less than demand, a myopic maximize-assessment-accuracy objective leads to the potential for sub-optimization, or sacrificing the whole for the sake of one its parts. I experienced this problem firsthand early in my pre-recruiter career. Many, many years ago, in a place far, far away, I was involved with negotiating company transfer prices with a brake plant that wanted to sell spare parts to Ford and GM, rather than to an internal axle assembly plant, since it got a better prices by going rogue (external). This caused corporate earnings problems since the parent company not only made more money selling completed products, but worse, never had enough brakes to meet the demand for completed axles. It took six months to figure out the problem and develop an internal transfer pricing system to make sure the brake plant did the right thing. This is similar to having accurate assessments, but not enough good people to be interviewed. As a result, you’re left with assessing a population of people without any top performers in it, making the conclusions suspect. Some of the research mentions this as a potential problem with their data.

The way I see it, this apparent assessment vs. quality of hire controversy involves three big issues:

1. The fact that most assessments – even good ones – don’t cover the complete range of factors involved in measuring top performance. Some of these include subordinate and managerial fit, intrinsic motivation to do the work required, achievement of comparable results, trend and consistency of performance over time, and the ability to work with and influence teams of comparable size, level, and functional makeup. Measuring these multiple times and in multiple ways can increase assessment accuracy.
2. Ignoring the idea that the assessment is only a subset of the hiring process, not the complete hiring process, and that the linkages are not generally seamless. Just because someone is judged a top performer doesn’t mean the person will be hired. Problems here relate to recruiting skills, the hiring manager’s ability to attract a strong person, the career aspects of the job in comparison to competing opportunities, and the compensation.
3. Fundamental problems with how the interview and assessment process is implemented and how hiring decisions are made. Problems here generally involve lack of clarity with respect to the actual performance needs of the job, lack of hiring manager training, the use of a yes/no “add up the votes” decision-making process, not using evidence to make the decision, using a narrow band of selection criteria, and over-valuing presentation skills, affability, and intuition when making the decision, among others. Eliminating these is an essential aspect of the hiring process.

Given all of the survey evidence, the academic research, and my own personal experience of dealing with top performers and also-rans over the past 40 years, I would not discredit the necessity of a thorough interviewing and vetting process. However, I do believe that the traditional behavioral interview is far from the perfect solution, and could be a contributing factor preventing companies from improving quality of hire. There are interviewing and assessment solutions available that have been proven to be more accurate, but without better sourcing, a great recruiter, a clear understanding of job needs, and a strong recruiter/hiring manager partnership, you won’t be much better off. In this case, you’ll just be more confident you’re hiring someone in the half that makes the top-half possible.

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.

Contemporary software development processes emphasize incremental progress rather than grand vision. While the “big idea” is certainly an important force, tools like the scrum methodology focus on the delivery of high priority results in an iterative environment. (Translation: keep your eye on what’s important.) Older approaches to technology projects echoed their industrial roots. The big project/big picture approach with a cascading series of “waterfalls” worked to get a man on the moon. It doesn’t work as well when you want to make daily forward progress.

So, we will increasingly inhabit a world that is riddled with bots. These one-task-at-a-time bits and pieces of automation will increasingly hold the responsibility for Internet filtration. To the extent that a job req is designed to fill an empty slot (find a replacement worker), bots can be developed on a case-by-case basis. The technique doesn’t work as well when the job is brand new or the organization is small.

That suggests a world with lots of job boards, sourcing bots, and highly targeted advertising networks.

There’s an incredible temptation to think of the future as more of the past with a little something extra. Even asking a question like “What is the future of recruiting” assumes that things will continue to behave similarly. More likely, lots of little things will get automated and we’ll develop architectures and nomenclatures for the new structures.

Hadoop is the network architecture that underlies the calculation speed of Google and Yahoo. By organizing around single-instance problems spread across many, many servers, the framework produces quick results to one-off problems. It’s another aspect of the move to solving micro-problems rather than their imponderable macro cousins.

There are only a few instances of scrum methods and Hadoop implementations in the recruiting and HR space. Rest assured, they are coming and will be the foundation of the next waves of change. The essence of the approach is to take a lot of bite-sized moves to produce change.

In the Shallybot scenario, tens of millions of little alerts and triggers are constantly going off as you move through time and space. Potential employers know you by characteristics and have set thresholds for paying for your attention when they need it. At the same time, sourcers, working at complex dashboards, monitor availability and requirements while they continue to try to discover novel answers to oft-repeated queries. Selection bots use behavioral indices that resemble credit scored background checks to winnow the funnel.

As the tools create ever-refined personalization, recruiting becomes less and less standardized. Nuances for regionalization, industry specifics, cultural attributes, and other factors. In the Shallybot future, recruiting produces better matches as a result of 10,000 little things rather than one big one. It’s the opposite of the eHarmony for jobs.

This research is sponsored by Pinstripe Talent.

To read the rest of the series:

• Five Scenarios: I Introduction
• Five Scenarios: II The Trends
• Five Scenarios : III The Marketplace
• Five Scenarios: IV The Future Matters
• Five Scenarios: V Guild Cities

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.”

Another key finding — and one recruiting managers and HR executives should take to heart (a subtle way of saying, “Fix it”) — is that 30 percent of the respondents were clueless about the size of their contingent workforce.

Technically speaking, the survey choice selected by the 30 percent was “do not know and cannot even guess” the size of the contingent workforce. Of those who did report a size, the average was 13.6 percent of the workforce was contingent.

However, the large number of respondents who couldn’t even guess is troubling. Crispin and Mehler warn that “staffing leaders not in touch with this contingent (workforce) are likely to fall behind. If predictions that contingent workers could become 25-35 (percent) of a company’s workforce in the next few years are correct, then the business plans and staffing functions have a ‘disconnect’ that must be addressed.”

The bulk of the report deals with the source of hire of full-time workers.

As Crispin and Mehler have reported for the last eight years, referrals are the largest source of external hires. Not only were 26.7 percent of the external hires made from referrals from employees (who account for the biggest share), vendors, alumni, customers, and others, but referrals are an efficient candidate source.

“The yield for referrals is one hire for every 15 referrals, making this category the most efficient source by far,” say Crispin and Mehler. “The growth of social media could change the dynamic of referral, and firms need to re-examine their efforts to stay ahead of the curve.”

Next to referrals, corporate career sites, at 22.3 percent of the total external hires, produce the most hires.

This is a category that has caused Crispin and Mehler to hold their nose even as they list it as a source of hire. In every one of their reports on the subject, they counsel that corporate sites should be considered a “destination” and not a source.

Their reasoning is that candidates get to the company site from somewhere else; perhaps from a search engine or a job post link or an email from a friend. As the authors write, “So when more than one in every five external hires is attributed to the firm’s career website you can only imagine how many other sources were also involved.”

Personally, as I have seen more and more effort being put into corporate career sites (Microsoft, for instance), I’ve begun to think it may be time to reconsider them as true sources. So it was interesting to see Crispin and Mehler wave the white flag on this.

“Ok, we’re over it,” they write. “We’ve accepted the notion from our colleague  Elaine Orler, Talent Function Group, that ‘source’ should be viewed as a channel. We like the nautical feel of this imagery and that it evokes a desire to map the entire course — the waters, shore, shoals, and narrows as an aid to navigation.”

A few more details from the report:

• Job boards accounted for 12.3 percent of external hires, which translates into 6.3 percent of all hires.

Say the authors, “Every respondent reported success in hiring employees from job boards. We wanted more and designed one question to tease out the number of hires attributed to each job board. Unfortunately only 61% of the respondents can track back to specific sites.”

Don’t count out job boards, they add.

• Direct sourcing accounted for 6.9 percent of the external hires. This year, direct sourcing includes social media, SEM and SEO, the corporate ATS, and mining external databases for leads.

Write the authors: “We asked respondents to enter the number of hires they could attribute to social networks and related SEM strategies such LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Entice Labs, Jobs2Web, and “other.” The total reported, fewer than 500 hires, represents less than 1% of external sources.”

An added observation: LinkedIn accounts for 60 percent of all hires attributed to social media.

There’s much more great information in the whitepaper than I can hope to include here. It’s so detailed and so full of suggestions and recommendations that Crispin presented the report in a one-hour webinar today. If you missed it, the webinar will be archived and made available here.

The free whitepaper will be posted to the CareerXroads site shortly, if it’s not already there now.

One caveat, which is especially important if all you do is read this summary and glance at the chart: source of hire reporting is not entirely reliable and, as they say in the commercials, your results may vary.

Or, to quote Crispin and Mehler, “There are dozens of reasons why source-of-hire data is replete with errors. Dr. John Sullivan pointed out as much in his excellent September, 2009 ERE article. He argued that source of hire was the first step in developing functional excellence. In his usual understated style he noted, ‘It’s (SOH) almost always wrong’. We agree.”

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!

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.

The results allow recruiters and employers or, for that matter, anyone, including the competitors, to see, for instance, that executivesontheweb.com and exec-Appointments.com have the largest percentage of users who are CEOs or company owners at 12 percent and 11 percent respectively.

Because of the sample size you can do cross-tabs. Those are the nifty refinements that make it possible to see which sites have, say, the largest number of CEO/owners between 25 and 34. (Which turns out to be eFinanciaCareers, though it happens this is a category where the sample size is too small to be statistically certain.)

The value of having data like this is readily apparent. As the NORAS site itself explains, “Using NORAS you can target the right online audience, increasing applications from relevant best-fit candidates, while reducing irrelevant and time-wasting applications. NORAS is the route to maximizing return on investment and making online recruitment as efficient and effective as possible.”

In the U.S., you have to sleuth out such information for yourself. Big customers can get data directly from the major job boards. Most of the bigger job boards have some demographics information available publicly. However, it’s nowhere near as detailed as the NORAS numbers, nor do you have the added assurance that someone other than the board itself has vetted the data.

You can buy traffic data and some demographics from one of the analytics companies such as Nielsen, Hitwise, or Comscore. If you want free data, your alternative is to use a site like Compete.com or Alexa or Quantcast, all of which have significant limitations.

Otherwise there is no counterpart in North America to NORAS.

• 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.

Succession planning is a talent and organizational improvement initiative that enables a business (i.e. your organization) to grow and thrive now and in the future.

Businesses and organizations can neither succeed nor grow without management talent. It’s really that simple. What’s not as simple is developing, nurturing, and grooming your talent pipeline.

We are coming out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Sure, the unemployment rate is still high, which makes some executives believe that the talent pipeline is strong … when they need a management/executive resource, all they will have to do is pick up the phone, post an ad, or look on sites like Monster and CareerBuilder, and snap, their talent needs will be resolved. Heads up: many of your competitors are seriously positioning themselves for growth and are truly hoping you continue to believe this.

Good talent is hard to find — in both good and bad economies. It’s hard to find because talent is a combination of skills, behaviors, motivation, organizational fit, and passion. And that is truly hard to find, especially when a fast hire is needed (yesterday).

Consider the three reasons for a succession plan in more detail.

Reason One: Replacement for key employees

Many people we’ve talked to believe the only reason to do a succession plan is to have a replacement picked for the CEO and perhaps one or two key executives. This is clearly one of the reasons to do a succession plan. The more complete reason is to have replacements identified (and in the process of being prepared) for all key positions within the organization, not just the CEO and key executives. This is often referred to planning several levels deep,” that is, executives to departmental managers and division leaders; those roles that are necessary (even if not obvious) to keep critical business going.

Remember, executives set strategy, and managers implement strategy. You need strength in both areas to succeed.

Executives and managers will leave. They may leave to take another job; they may be fired; they may retire, they may become ill, they may leave because of a spouse’s relocation. When an executive or manager’s vacancy is anticipated, a smooth transition is possible, simply because there is time to manage the transition. It is when the vacancy is unexpected that a challenge exists. Maintaining continuity is important and it results in less cost and less service disruption.

As the economy improves, growth will occur and an organization can only support and sustain growth if it has the talent to manage the growth.

Reason Two: Support anticipated growth

This is different than the replacement strategy noted above. In this case, new positions are needed to support growth initiatives. For example, growth initiatives could be:

• Expanding current products or services into new markets;
• Creating new products or services to introduce into the marketplace;
• Initiating new ways to market (i.e., viral marketing) your products or services

When anticipating growth, identify internal talent and also build and maintain a talent network comprised of viable candidates who currently work for other organizations.

Reason Three: To address and deal with talent shortages

Talent shortages occur even in a down economy. Examples include pharmacy managers, nurse managers, engineers, and sales representatives. If a pharmacy manager resigns in a hospital, research shows that finding a replacement can be extremely difficult. How will the organization respond? What strategies will be put in place to avoid a lengthy leadership void? This may require promoting candidates before they are fully ready for the position. While this will only be done when there are no viable options available, who you select and how you support the candidate’s transition should be thought out in advance. Knee-jerk placements — fast hires and “not ready for prime time” (unless there is an integration strategy) hires — do not often fair well.

Succession planning is a process and not an event, and it is a process that is critical for all organizations whether they are anticipating turnover and vacancies, planning for growth, or working to adjust to talent shortages.

To manage the process effectively, we recommend the following steps:

• Assign responsibility for succession planning to the executive team members (and make its success part of their evaluation process)
• Identify needs/key roles currently and in the future that reflect several layers deep
• Develop and use methods/tools/techniques for identifying employee competencies and aspirations
• Implement a structure for developing potential successors
• Implement a structure for transitioning successors to and in new role(s)
• Identify and emergency or interim process to fulfill a role if for some reason the potential successor does not work out.
• Align your recruitment initiative to succession planning by forecasting key needs and interviewing for growth orientation and adaptability
• Evaluate plan effectiveness and update the plan as required, at least annually

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!

To Find the Root Cause, You Must Look Beyond Gas Pedals

The mechanical issues plaguing eight Toyota models are not the result of human resource professionals assuming product design roles and producing faulty accelerator pedals and onboard computers, but anyone who has studied failure analysis knows that the breaking point of a product or service is seldom the underlying or root cause of the failure. Using the sinking of the Titanic as an example, the damage caused by the hull colliding with the iceberg ultimately sank the ship, but the collision was the result of a series of poor decisions to travel too fast given weather conditions. While hull design flaw contributed to catastrophe, the root cause of the problem was human error.

In any situation where employees fail to perform as expected, investigators must determine if the human error could have been caused by factors beyond the employee’s control. Such external factors might include actions by senior management, lack of adequate information or job training, faulty inputs to the process, or rewards that incent actions not in line with documented goals.

If you believe in accountability, you have to accept that human errors that lead to corporate catastrophes could be the result of faulty HR processes, most notably those related to acquiring, developing, motivating, and managing labor. Returning to the Titanic example, had the owners of the Titanic implemented rewards for safety as well as speed or hired a captain more detail-oriented, there would have been no crash that dreaded night.

Weak HR Has Been a Major Contributor to Other Notable Failures

Weak people-management practices have been attributed as the primary causes of failure in a number of notable cases. At Enron and Bear Stearns for example, reward systems that incented dangerous behaviors easily overpowered the effect of control systems designed to prevent fraud and ethical breaches. The mass killings at Fort Hood would not have occurred if the Army had better linkage between performance management and critical incident reporting systems.

Employee Errors Were the Root Cause

BusinessWeek estimates that Toyota is losing $155 million per week as a result of their recent recall and in the weeks leading up to this article Toyota had lost nearly $30 billion in stock valuation. The long-term impacts of the root causes that led to Toyota’s current situation could cost the company hundreds of billions of dollars.

The mechanical failures were known to Toyota leaders long before corrective action was taken, and many close to the issue are indicating that the company took decisive action to hide the facts and distort the scope of the problem. The underlying problem of failing to act on this critical information in a manner consistent with Toyota’s brand is again a rewards issue similar to that at Enron. When the organization disproportionately rewarded managers for cost-containment versus sustaining product quality, it created the incentive for everyone involved to ignore the facts and to deny that a problem existed. Employees who are well-trained and subject to balanced rewards and performance monitoring systems would not have allowed the situation to grow as it did.

The Eight HR Processes That Contributed to Toyota’s Downfall

If the root cause of the problems Toyota is facing are failure by employees to make good decisions, confront negative news, and make a convincing business case for immediate action, then the HR processes that may have influenced those decisions must be examined. The HR processes that must at least be considered as suspect include rewards processes, training processes, performance management processes, and the hiring process.

1. Rewards and recognition — The purpose of any corporate reward process is to encourage and incent the right behaviors and to discourage the negative ones. It’s important for the reward process to incent the gathering of information about problems. It’s equally important to reward employees who are successful in getting executives to take immediate action on negative information. Key questions — Were rapid growth (sales have nearly doubled recently) and “lean” cost-cutting recognized and rewarded so heavily that no one was willing to put the brakes on growth in order to focus on safety? Were the rewards for demonstrating error-free results so high that obvious errors were swept under the table?
2. Training — The purpose of training is to make sure that employees have the right skills and capabilities to identify and handle all situations they may encounter. Toyota is famous for its four-step cycle — plan/do/check/act — but clearly the training among managers now needs to focus more on the last two. In addition, in an environment where safety is paramount, everyone should have been trained on the symptoms of “groupthink” and how to avoid the excess discounting or ignoring of negative external safety information. Key question — If Toyota’s training was more effective, would the managers involved have been more successful in convincing executives to act on the negative information received?
3. Hiring — The purpose of great hiring is to bring on board top-performing individuals with the high level of skills and capabilities that are required to handle the most complex problems. Poorly designed recruiting and assessment elements can result in the hiring of individuals who sweep problems under the rug and who are not willing to stand up to management. Key questions — Did Toyota have a poorly designed hiring process that allowed it to hire individuals who were not experienced in the required constructive confrontation technique? Were their hires poor learners that did not change as a result of company training?
4. The performance management process — The purpose of a performance management process is to periodically monitor or appraise performance, in order to identify problem behaviors before they get out of hand. If the performance measurement system included performance factors to measure responsiveness to negative information, Toyota wouldn’t be in turmoil today. Key questions — Was the performance appraisal and performance monitoring process so poorly designed that they did not identify and report groupthink type errors? Did Toyota’s famous high level of trust of its employees go too far without reasonable metrics, checks, and balances? Did HR develop sophisticated metrics that produced alerts to warn senior managers before minor problems got out of control?
5. The corporate culture — The role of a corporate culture is to informally drive employee behaviors so that it closely adheres to the company’s core values. Because these errors occurred under difficult driving conditions, it’s hard to blame the production group, which has a well-known reputation for Six Sigma quality in its construction. The negative reports came to functions like government, risk analysis, corporate and customer satisfaction. As a result, it is the culture within the corporate offices that need to be more closely monitored rather than assuming that the culture was aligned. It appears that the corporate culture created leaders so concerned with “saving face” and so adverse to negative publicity, that they for years postponed making the announcement of a massive recall. Key questions — Did HR’s failure to measure or monitor the corporate culture contribute to its misalignment? Was the corporate culture (the Toyota Way) so biased toward positive information that employees learned not to make waves, in spite of their professional responsibility to be heard on safety issues?
6. Leadership development and succession — The purpose of leadership development and succession planning processes are to ensure that a sufficient number of leaders with the right skills and decision-making ability are placed into key leadership positions. It is likely that the leadership development and the promotion process both failed to create and promote leaders who were capable of confronting problems and making difficult decisions. Key question — Was the leadership process at Toyota so outdated that it produced the wrong kind of leaders with outdated competencies, who could not successfully operate in the rapidly changing automotive industry?
7. Retention — The purpose of a retention program is to identify and keep top performers and individuals with mission-critical skills. Key question — Did the retention program ignore people that brought up problems and as a result, did these whistleblowers often leave out of frustration?
8. Risk assessment — Most HR departments don’t even have a risk assessment team whose purpose is to both identify and calculate risks caused by weak employee processes. Clearly HR should have worked with corporate risk management at Toyota in order to ensure that employees were capable of calculating the long-term actual costs of ignoring product failure information. Key question — Should HR work with risk-assessment experts and build the capability of identifying and quantifying the revenue impacts of major HR errors, including a high hiring failure rate, a high turnover rate among top performers, and the cost of keeping a bad manager or employee?

Final Thoughts

Toyota’s problems are not the result of a single individual making an isolated mistake, but rather due to a companywide series of mistakes that are all related to each other. So many corporate functions were involved, including customer service, government relations, vendor management and PR, that one cannot help but attribute the crash of Toyota to systemic management failure.

Unfortunately, in this case, the famous Japanese saying is true. “The nail that stands out” was not encouraged to be different, but instead it was “pounded down” to conform.

The key lesson that others should learn from Toyota’s mistakes is that HR needs to periodically test or audit each of the processes that could allow this type of billion-dollar error to occur.

Note: I invite comments about what other human resource factors may have contributed to Toyota’s downfall.

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.”

But that’s an HR problem. Oh, yeah. Most of us are recruiters, but oh so many of us also wear HR generalist hats and sooner or later will wind up dealing with some form of office romance or harassment issue.

I once had to deal with an issue where one of my best directors was involved with a subordinate who also was first rate. The two had kept it a secret for months; there wasn’t even gossip about them. I only discovered it accidentally. They eventually moved in together, changed jobs together. Alas, just months before their wedding, they broke up.

Fortunately, a CareerBuilder survey finds that for about a third of workers who date each other, the romance ends in marriage. Now that’s an employee benefit you don’t see on corporate career sites, unless eHarmony or Match have it there somewhere.

The CareerBuilder survey also found that co-worker dating is not as prevalent as Vault found it was. Only 37 percent of workers said they have dated a co-worker at some time during their careers, a data point in line with CareerBuilder surveys of past years.

Some other survey findings:

• “Eight percent of workers currently work with someone who they would like to date, with more men (11 percent) than women (4 percent) reporting they would like to do so.”
• ” Twelve percent of workers reported that their relationships started when they ran into each other outside of work.”

As you end your workweek and look forward to Valentine’s Day, let love blossom. Next week is soon enough to check your company’s sexual harassment and office conduct policies. Just make sure you do.