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Up at 6am. 15 points. Hit the snoozebar once. Minus 5 points. Brush your teeth for three full minutes. 50 points (with a bonus from the toothpaste maker). Right-sized healthy breakfast. 25 points.

Arrive at work on time. 25 points. Attend all meetings on time. 75 points. Make meeting contributions recognized by peers. 100 points. Return all emails and phone calls. 25 points. Healthy lunch. 30 points. Walk after lunch. 50 points. Make five calls (or widgets or requisitions or whatever) as described in objectives. 40 points. Stay 1/2 hour later than usual. 25 points.

Take public transit home. 70 points. Watch TV (an enormous point bonanza). Bush teeth for three full minutes. 50 points (with a bonus from the toothpaste maker). Get in bed early enough to earn the well-rested points bonus in the morning. – Adapted from Design Outside The Box

It’s the logical extension of performance management programs. By coupling frequent-flyer style points systems, game design, and performance management, the world has become points crazed. Work performance is ranked along with every other aspect of life.

The points system allows companies to identify and harvest their true fans. They compete in every aspect of life for the opportunity to build an “authentic” relationship calibrated by measurement. Payment for the consumption of advertising, which in 2010 is already somewhat expected, has exploded into a global preoccupation. keep reading…

ERE webinar regular Elaine Orler joined us again this week to cover how to get your recruitment technology up to speed for the economic recovery. For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

If you are wonky about economic indicators and labor market stats, this is your lucky week. No fewer than than three reports came out today; one came out Monday; a fifth — the highly anticipated monthly unemployment report — is due out Friday morning.

Today’s reports, considered a harbinger of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ unemployment report, are decidedly positive in that “less bad” way we’ve been seeing since late summer.

The most authoritative of the reports came from the Federal Reserve, which reported in its so-called Beige Book that “economic conditions continued to expand” in February, despite severe snowstorms that held back activity.

The book,  a summary of economic conditions in the 12 Fed districts, said consumer spending increased, though the snowstorms had a limiting effect. Loan activity was “soft,” said the Fed. “Most Districts indicated that banks remained cautious about lending.”

Not surprisingly, the Fed reported an uptick in hiring or a slowdown in layoffs in some of the federal reserve districts, but “labor markets generally remained soft throughout the nation, which resulted in minimal wage pressures.” keep reading…

Did you know that ERE has a group on LinkedIn? Check it out!

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

1. The only danger in mobile recruiting?
2. Is your recruiting quaint?
3. Talent acquisition metrics
4. The big disconnect
5. Whose responsibility is it to check references?
6. Featured group of the week: Recruiting leadership forum

1. The danger of mobile recruiting? Not doing it.

Kristine Rhodes writes “Recently, I asked my client partners why they declined using mobile marketing as part of their recruiting strategy in 2009. I heard everything from “It’s just hype,” to “It’s intrusive,” to my personal favorite “It’s dangerous.” So I thought I’d share some quick facts to dispel the myths, and provide a few ways to ease into a mobile strategy.

Are you trying to get mobile recruiting initiatives completed this year? Take a look at Kristine’s post and add your own comments.

keep reading…

I have spent days with clients who are struggling to find a balance between the demand being placed on them and the resources they have. While this is a very old story, it is being written in a new way. Prior to this recession, most organizations were willing to add people — whether contractors or regular — without much issue. The focus was on time to fill and perceived quality, not on cost or sustainability.

Today is a different time and the focus for many CEOs is building a sustainable organization that can avoid the layoffs and bad branding that accompanies them. They are at least hoping for a workforce that is balanced between regular employees and those who work part-time or as contractors or consultants. Every recruiting vice-president, director, and manager should have a similar objective.

Having a lean workforce means having the right team and working seamlessly with RPOs, third-party recruiting agencies, and contract recruiters. It means redefining what an internal recruiter does and what skills they need to have. And all of this depends on the soundness of your recruiting processes and technology backbone.

In the scramble to get competitive over the past few years, many recruiting functions accumulated technology and threw together recruiting ideas and processes with little coordination or deep thought. When you are in the midst of a war for talent it becomes very difficult to approach things in an orderly or careful way. You think, someday I’ll take the time to integrate, evaluate, and eliminate. Well, the time has come. keep reading…

I saw a tweet this morning:

Coffee is the second largest item of international commerce in the world. The largest is petrol.

It got me to thinking (as many Twitter remarks do). Both are types of fuel and both can be argued to be drugs. My mind raced across the words to pull some lesson about telephone sourcing from them and settled on the fact that “names” are a raw material that, like oil and coffee beans, can be transformed into a commodity that fuels a staffing process like no other activity I can think of. One of the acronyms attached to the word fuel is “combustion.” Raw names can combust your staffing results.

Many years ago, when I first started sourcing, I’d harp and harp at Bob (my husband) that what TechTrak really needed was a database. It would drive me crazy thinking about these “names” I was uncovering on a daily basis and the growing pile beckoned me, over and over, to think about them, almost unceasingly.

“Think about it, Bob! These are names of people in the world somewhere. These people possess valuable skills (raw material) that others can use. The knowledge in their heads is priceless. It’s a shame to let them just fall away without capturing them (and the information they possess) in some sort of database that can be used for other things…” It kept me awake nights.

“But databases are a lot of work…” he’d remonstrate, looking up from the book he was reading. “Who’s gonna put all that info into a database?” he’d demand, adjusting his easy chair. Then, in 2003, LinkedIn launched with the brilliant idea of putting the world to work and one of my reasons for living (to torment Bob telling him so) was born.

LinkedIn is so simple. It’s just a database that collects names using the voluntary efforts of others — the raw material that sits in the ground until it’s pumped out and transformed into a wildly popular commodity. To do this, however, you have to grasp the enormous potential that lies within the raw material and you have to have the skill to unlock it. Most people don’t have that skill: the ability to communicate.

As hard as it is to understand in this day and age of “communication” in one way we are more isolated than ever. keep reading…

Where have all the .JOBS job boards gone? Gone to enhancements and improvements every one.

DirectEmployers took down its job boards a few weeks ago, while it makes changes to the platform.

Bill Warren, executive director of DirectEmployers Association, blogged about the changes his team is making to the platform listing four specific areas — social media integration, accessibility, job posting — tagged for improvement. These are in response to feedback DirectEmployers has received since the first sites launched last October.  A fifth reason he cited was “Building out tens of thousands of additional domains.”

In a conversation this morning (Pacific time), Warren told me the original expectation that January would be the official debut was a little too ambitious. As late as meetings January 28 and 29, Warren was still predicting the imminent launch of 25,000 .jobs domains.

But refinements arising out of discussions at those two meetings, attended by a handful of recruiting leaders, including Peter Weddle and Gerry Crispin, postponed the launch.

“It’s quite a project, as you can imagine, ” Warren told me. keep reading…

Spock of Star Trek fame was famous for pointing out things that were completely illogical, which leads me to believe he would have had a field day examining corporate recruiting practices. Of all the things that we do in corporate recruiting that are difficult to logically justify, my vote for the least logical is use of the “best available talent” model. When most organizations characterize their approach, they leave out “available” and say that they recruit the best talent, but the truth is they often hire what they perceive to be the best among the shallow pool of candidates who happen to be looking for a job when the job becomes vacant or is newly created.

Illustrating the Problem and the Opportunity

Two years ago I co-authored a book entitled Catch Them if You Can with Canadian recruiting leader Greg Ford. Greg had the great idea to educate managers about the critical success factors of top talent sourcing by sharing the lessons all great recruiters eventually learn through a narrative rich with fishing analogies.

For this illustration, assume for a moment that you like to fish (this may be easier for some readers than others), and that you have access to a lake that is open year round and regularly stocked by the local fish agency. Using a logical thought process, you have several factors to consider before you head out, one being when to fish. Four options come to mind: keep reading…