ERE.net

Strategic workforce planning is a relatively new concept and practice for most organizations. Many firms have a simplified form of workforce planning in place which is focused on replacement of people in current positions and functions. It is a rare experience to find an organization that has thought through its future needs and balanced those needs with a mix of both hiring — internal and external — along with development.

Why the Need

Growth and recession are hard to predict. Neither are typically gradual or linear. There may be a sudden need to add dozens or hundreds of employees in new business areas or in different parts of the world. Or, there may be a sudden shift in products that makes many employees redundant. Economies can suddenly slow and business can evaporate quickly. Replacement planning does not deal well with any of these scenarios. And this is why typical workforce planning is looked on with scorn by many human resource professionals as well as business managers. keep reading…

A SHRM advisory group is being asked to approve changes allowing non-company names to be awarded a .jobs Internet address.

The approval is a crucial step in opening the door for the .jobs extension to be used with occupational, geographic, and other names, which a private organization wants to use to launch tens of thousands of new job boards.

There’s no announced meeting date for the advisory group — officially known as a Policy Development Process Council — but a public comment period closes Friday, April 9. There is a discussion board for comments.

Although the plan by Direct Employers to create a “Universe” of job boards has been the subject of ERE articles and a special meeting at the organization’s headquarters in Indianapolis in January, there’s no evidence of a public announcement of the amendment.

Indeed, the only mention of the amendment and the call for comments is on www.policy.jobs, a website that was first registered on Feb. 16th. The Society for Human Resource Management, which is responsible for ensuring compliance with the .jobs registration eligibility requirements, has a link to policy.jobs, but it’s deep on SHRM’s “Copyright & Permissions” page. That may be why there isn’t a single comment on the discussion board. keep reading…

What a fun week in the community. I can’t wait to see more of you in person at the #socialrecruiting summit in May (pst… this is the last week to get the early bird discount).

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

1. Inhouse recruiters: ignore Facebook at your peril
2. Confessions of a Job Seeker: What I Learned!
3. Typers and Talkers
4. Oregon Law Bans Use of Credit Reports for Employment Screening
5. Diversity Firms — Know of any good ones?
6. Featured group of the week: Dallas/Ft. Worth Recruiters

1. Inhouse recruiters: ignore Facebook at your peril

Katrina Collier writes regarding the importance of not ignoring Facebook, “Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search, written by ReadWriteWeb‘s Marshall Kirkpatrick, summed up the importance of this beautifully: “What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the Internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about.” So what “tiny little updates” are being written about your company and are any of these preventing you from attracting and hiring great talent?

Is Facebook an essential part of your branding and attraction strategy? If not, would a shift in traffic numbers with Facebook in first place change your mind? Drop a line in the comments.

keep reading…

If you have read parts one through three, you already know that despite a down economy, a good number of organizations documented the need for innovation and made the business case for change in their organizations. The focus on supporting applicants using mobile technology was common, as were efforts to improve quality of hire, plan more effectively, and drive retention.

Notably absent from this year’s awards: a major focus on diversity. For the first time since the awards program’s inception, not enough applications were received in the category to enable adequate comparison. Did diversity drop in importance, or have diversity recruiting efforts become so embedded that organizations no longer evaluate them on a standalone basis?

In this final installment, I’ll look at the practices of two organizations that pulled their practices together to make the case as to why they should be considered the Function of the Year. keep reading…

Monster’s stock closed slightly up today, despite being downgraded by Goldman Sachs.

The company’s shares gained 2 cents a share to close at $16.53. It closed Monday at $16.51.

Analyst Ingrid Chung, one of Wall Street’s star analysts, changed her recommendation to a “sell” Monday, saying the recruitment ad company was losing market share to competitor CareerBuilder, while pricing in the job-posting business as a whole “will never fully recover from the contractions brought on by the recent recession.” keep reading…

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of products in the marketplace promising solutions to managing applicant flow. But, how do you know which ones to use, and, which ones to trust? Let’s start with the trust part.

Wrong-Headed Testing

I’ve found that many people think they can author a screening test by sitting down, making a list of questions, and adding up the answers. Sorry: that approach is likely to deliver unstable results, have nothing to do with job performance (e.g., neither overall nor specific), and will probably deliver false information. Professionals always start with a good theory of job performance. keep reading…

Jobster, the company most famous for burning through almost $55 million in venture capital while it searched for a business model, has been sold to Zapoint.

An excited  Chris Twyman, Zapoint’s founder and CEO, told me the acquisition fills a void in his company’s portfolio. By acquiring Jobster’s 800,000 profiles and, especially, its 250,000-280,000 active users, Zapoint simultaneously fills a void in its own talent network and it gains the data to enhance its external skills mapping.

Zapoint is a talent management and career-mapping service that enables employers to see the strengths and weaknesses in their organization, based on internal employee profiles. Its free skills assessment tools allow career-oriented users to map their skills, background, and career progress and compare themselves to their industry peers. The profiles users complete become part of Zapoint’s Talent Network, which is searchable by recruiters. keep reading…

In parts one and two of this series we covered the best practices of the winner and finalist in the employee referral, employer branding, and corporate career site categories of this year’s ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. It’s hard to capture using just a few bullet points the degree to which organizations selected have thought through their efforts, but as you are reading through the series, I hope you are comparing your organization and contemplating how you stack up. The one thing that separates nearly all winners from the rest of the pack is the relentless application of learning to improve existing processes or devise new ones.

This installment will cover the college recruiting, retention, and strategic use of technology categories. keep reading…

The 9.7 percent U.S. unemployment rate was unchanged in March, but the economy added 162,000 jobs, the largest one-month increase in three years.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly employment report this morning, confirming the job growth most economists were expecting. However, the number was lower than the 200,000 new jobs that had been expected. The shortfall was attributed to Census hiring that was significantly lower than the 100,000 workers that were forecast; 48,000 were hired.

The Wall Street Journal found good news even in the lower jobs number. The private sector job growth of 123,000 was higher than predictions, offering evidence that government hiring was not the primary engine of growth. keep reading…

About a year ago, a colleague — someone I admire and respect a great deal — introduced me to Brightkite.com. I can’t resist a new tool, so I immediately checked it out.

Essentially, Brightkite, like its competitors in the location-based social networking space, allows users to tell others where they are, using real-time geolocating technology. Why, I wondered, would I want to know where my online (or even real-life) friends were at every minute of the day?

Turns out my colleague was a year ahead of his time. keep reading…

We all know that employee referral programs and networking are the prime means to find top quality talent. However, this takes time, effort, and the hands of a very skilled recruiter to be productive. It appears this won’t be the case much longer, since we’re now heading toward a technological tipping point. keep reading…

SHRM has finally declared what all of us have secretly fretted over ever since the first “thought leader” said recruiters have a role in business outcomes.

“HR was never going to get a place at the table. The table was a myth,” confessed a spokesperson for the global Society for Human Resource Management. Explaining the decision of the 180,000 member organization to disband, the spokesperson declared,  “HR is dead. We see no reason to continue on with this charade.” keep reading…

In part two of this four part series covering the ERE Recruiting Excellence Award winners, we’ll take a look at how leading organizations are positioning themselves via employer branding and telling their story via their career websites. Always popular categories, this year drew numerous applications as more organizations realized the power of differentiating themselves in a highly competitive labor market despite economic turbulence around the world. keep reading…