Here are two of the articles in this ongoing series, for those who want to catch up with the bandwagon.

Part 1: The Financial Impact of Not Hiring the Least Best

Part 2: Should the Recruiting Department Be Charged With Financial Malfeasance

The root cause of the problem seems to be the lack of a CEO-driven talent strategy, combined with some CFO-like financial rigor. Most companies have talent-related mission statements, but these rarely convert to a strategy. If they did, cost per hire would be tossed out, replaced by some quality of hire metric.

For some reason converting the “talent is #1” mission statement into a real strategy with real tactics seems all but impossible unless a big employer brand is driving it. That’s why the CFO needs to get involved by looking at the financial impact of bad hiring decisions. Gallup is doing a lot of work in a related area, by directly examining the huge financial impact of worker satisfaction and engagement on earnings. Something similar should be done on the hiring front, since this is where the problem originates.

Every hiring decision has a direct financial impact. The best people save money and produce more. To calculate this profit impact at the hiring decision level all you need to do is to compare the profit contribution of a well-above average target employee to the person being hired. I suggest using the top third of your current employee base as the target, and compare all future hires to this level. The difference represents the opportunity lost in dollars. Calculating this is not hard to do.

In Part 1 of this article series, I presented a model that involved multiplying revenue per employee by some reasonable estimate of variable contribution margin. This results in average variable profit per employee, or APE. Since all employees are not created equal, it’s reasonable to estimate that the top third of the people you hire generate 20% more APE than the average, and the bottom third generates 20% less. This 20% difference is D in the model. Some might argue that D is greater than 20%. Few would argue it’s less. For calculating the financial impact of not hiring a top-third person, it’s a reasonable floor.

For example, Amazon’s APE is approximately $140,000 per employee. (Send me your stock ticker symbol if you’d like to see your company’s calculation or go to my blog to see how to calculate this.) With D equal to 20%, it means that each person in the top third generates $168,000 in APE and each person in the bottom third generates $112,000. This is a difference of $56,000 per person. The simple math equation is “Lost profit=2D*APE.”

For most companies the profit lost by hiring someone who winds up in the bottom third instead of the top third ranges from $50,000 to $100,000 per person. (This is valid for typical staff-level positions, with a multiplying factor on top of this depending on management level and position importance.) If you do this 100 times a year, this turns out to be a lot of money — a loss of $5 million in per tax profit using the $50,000 impact.

Now for the big picture strategy and financial impact part. Instead of multiplying the lost profit by 100, substitute one third of the people you expect to hire in the next 12 months. The reason: one third of the people you hire in the next 12 months will wind up being in the bottom third of your workforce. And for most of you, this number is a lot bigger than 100.

Of course, no one goes out of their way to hire someone who’s going to wind up in the bottom third, but somehow it happens anyway. Usually this is due to weak systems, the pressure to fill positions, ineffective sourcing, weak technology, incomplete assessments, overburdened recruiters, and/or hiring managers who can’t assess or attract strong people. A hiring strategy designed to measure the financial ROI of each hiring decision would have minimized the impact of these mistakes, especially if someone on the CFO team was involved in the pre-hire calculation.

This all starts by thinking about each hiring decision as part of a bigger, “raising the talent bar” hiring strategy. If you’ll be hiring 1,000 people over the next 12 months it’s obvious that 333 people will wind up being in the bottom-third. Shifting just 100 people into the top third will earn your company at least $5 million in additional pre-tax profit, and your average talent level will increase. If it costs you less than $500,000 per year to pull this off, it becomes a pretty big ROI, so making the business case is pretty easy.

I’ll present the actual calculation to measure new hire ROI in the next article in this series, but for now I’d like to suggest there are some things you need to consider first. Here’s my short list:

1. Do you have a maximize-quality-of-hire hiring strategy in place now that drives decision-making?
2. Has your average talent level improved over the past 10 years? Why, or why not?
3. Do you tend to hire the best person available at the time given budget, comp, and time restraints or the best person possible without the restrictions?
4. Is your sourcing targeting the 85% of candidates who aren’t looking, or is it focused on the 15% of people who are looking? Which group has the greatest number of top people in it? Is your sourcing budget being spent as wisely as possible?
5. Are your recruiters and hiring managers able to find, assess, recruit, and hire the top third at your current comp levels? How could you improve your quality of hire without changing your comp plan? (Hint: convert jobs into career moves, rather than lateral transfers.)
6. What is actually driving your company’s talent strategy? Don’t be surprised to discover it’s some mashup of your comp plan, a cost per hire metric, your ATS, legal team, and your antiquated processes. Your answer to question 3 above provides some insight to this.
7. Without making any excuses of how hard this is to do, how are you now measuring quality of hire? (I suggest using a talent scorecard which compares all candidates against a company’s top-third performance metric.)

Last question: should the recruiting department’s performance be measured by some productivity and cost metrics, or by how well it helped raise the company’s talent bar? Obviously, a lot of things would have to change to excel at both, but maybe that’s a good place to start.

This got me to thinking: what can we take away from this kind of competition? Have we learned anything after nine seasons of watching a singing champion chosen this way?

Well yes, there are some pretty big lessons we can take away from American Idol — especially if you’re in human resources.

At its core, American Idol is all about finding and promoting the very best talent — something that HR leaders do for their organizations every single day. But, how the show ultimately goes about finding and promoting the best talent leaves a lot to be desired, and it raises some issues that every HR person should think about in their own talent development process.

So, here are three talent management takeaways I gleaned from American Idol:

The highly-competent-but-safe candidate doesn’t always make the best hire.

This year’s American Idol winner — Chicago’s Lee DeWyze — is a solid and competent singer, but he’s not very exciting. Lisa de Moraes in the Washington Post described him as “the franchise’s third consecutive Super-Safe Kinda Beige Rocker Boy winner,” and she’s right. DeWyze is the kind of hire you make when you’re afraid of making a mistake.

And that raises a good question: are you satisfied choosing someone who is “safe” and won’t get you into trouble, or, do you go with the flashier choice who may have not only more upside, but perhaps some downside too? This year’s Idol runner-up, Crystal Bowersox, has over-the-top talent and style to burn, but she’s also is a single mom with dreadlocks and numerous tattoos who doesn’t really “look” the part of an American Idol. People like her can make you look really good, but, not everyone else may agree.

This points to an management truism worth remembering: safe but unexciting choices yield safe but unexciting results. If that’s what you are looking for in your organization, then go to it. But, if you want to push the envelope and stretch for something better, you need to work on overlooking the flaws and quirks that many highly talented people bring to the table. If you don’t, you end up with someone like Taylor Hicks — the safest and most forgettable American Idol winner ever . How hot has his career been lately?

A committee approach to hiring doesn’t always yield the best candidate.

Lots of organizations like to have candidates get interviewed and evaluated by a slew of different managers before everyone weighs in with their opinion. It’s a “safe” talent acquisition approach.

American Idol works this way, too, with the judges and nationwide voters all weighing in on who they believe is best. It’s a time-honored approach, of course, but hiring by committee rarely yields the best candidate. For every superstar like Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson, you get a slew of middle-of-the-road winners like Ruben Studdard, Chris Allen, David Cook, and Hicks.

Idol would do well to limit the nationwide voting until late in the season, letting a smaller group of smart and insightful talent managers — the judges –whittle down the group until the final four or five are left. Doing this would surely help keep more of the highly talented but less traditional candidates in the candidate pool longer, and maybe, give one of them a chance to win.

Your company would also be better served by limiting the vetting of candidates to a smaller group of four to five key decision-makers rather than running potential hires through a gauntlet of managers up and down the food chain. I bet you’ll find this approach not only leads to making better decisions about talent, but is less stressful on the candidates and your organization.

You need to ask yourself — do I hire for competence now or for growth potential down the road?

In most seasons, the American Idol winner reflects someone chosen for solid competence right now over someone who may have more upside in the years to come. That’s why last year’s most talented and colorful Idol finalist (Adam Lambert) was passed over for someone with a lot less potential (winner Kris Allen). Other highly talented but less polished Idol candidates, like Chris Daughtry and this year’s Siobham Magnus, seemed to suffer from this, too.

Except in very rare cases, high potential tomorrow is always preferable to solid competence today, but many HR leaders and talent managers don’t agree. Making the safe choice won’t get you in trouble and may help the organization immediately, but going with the high-potential candidate is likely to yield a lot more if you can afford to be patient. In other words, you won’t build superstars taking the safe road, and isn’t building an organization of superstars what it is all about?

Yes, American Idol is all about top talent winning out, but like a lot of things in life, it’s less about finding the very best talent and more about finding someone who is highly talented and acceptable to a large group of constituents. It leads, in the end, to all-too-many vanilla choices, and while that may be acceptable for American Idol, it’s not the optimum way for you to get the very best talent into your organization.

In other words, you need to hire like Simon Cowell. That’s a tougher way to go, but in the end, you’ll have a lot better talent — and bottom-line results — to show for it.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

I recently finished reading the book The Power of Nice. I especially liked this book, because not only was it written by two very successful women, it was written by people who work in the advertising industry. I work in the advertising industry, specifically in the niche area of human resource communications.

As I was reading this book, I felt reassured in knowing there are people who do believe that doing right by people and treating them with respect should be a given, and not an exception to the rule. What the two authors, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, espouse in their book is similar to something that I read in the book How to Become a Rainmaker. Both books talk about how the importance of being nice is a good thing to do as a respectful human being and how this action can carry over into building and elevating your business relationships. What helped me to truly appreciate The Power of Nice was thinking about the people I have met during my career and the impressions they made on me, some of those impressions were good and some rather bad.

In this same vein is the multitude of comments, articles, and blogs I have read recently describing the way people are treated during the application and interview process.

Personally, I’ve not had the need to hire anyone over the past 18 months, but I do remember a time when I was actively interviewing. My needs were always for the same type of position: account manager. The title “account manager” is one of those universal job titles that transcends across many industries and can mean a multitude of different duties depending on the company and industry. I can remember receiving more than 100 resumes each time the position was advertised. In all honesty, 50-60% percent of the resumes were from people who were either overqualified, underqualified, lacking any relevant experience for the position, or seeking a salary much higher than what was clearly stated in the ad. As the hiring manager, I always felt very discouraged by this, but through this disheartened feeling I always thought about how these job applicants must be feeling. I remember being out of work early in my professional career and how deflating that feeling was. I don’t envy the unemployed.

For the obvious reasons, I wouldn’t hire someone who was not appropriate for the position, but there was something I could do and I made a point of it. That point was to contact each and every person who sent in a resume, whether they were a qualified candidate or not. Not that I relish giving people bad news, because I don’t. Now, I should also point out that my company uses an ATS that has an automated function which e-mails job applicants on their status, including the proverbial “no thank you message,” but having past experience with being on the receiving end of never hearing from a person at the company where I had applied, I made the conscience decision that I would pay these people the professional courtesy of communicating with them. So in between my daily tasks, I would contact the job applicants and hopefully speak to them live. In some instances I did leave a voicemail message, but always left my name and number and a best time to reach me so if that person chose to, he/she could call me back for a more in-depth conversation. Many of the people I spoke with, even when told they were not going to be invited to interview, actually sounded grateful that I called. One person said it was “refreshing to know there are companies out there who care.” Even in the face of rejection, I found that job applicants would rather know and have closure than not know the status of their application.

With all this said, I know that in today’s wacky economy, the number of resumes that are being sent way outnumber the amount I received 18 months ago, so I’m not implying that the HR department is being negligent. This department is doing more with less like any other department. What I am asking is this — HR, could you please take a moment to add a personal touch to your recruiting communications? It would mean so much to the job applicant and enrich the value of your worth to them. It also shows genuineness in that you care about the people who touch your organization, and in return your show of goodwill will reinforce your company’s employment value proposition and strengthen the brand image.

1. Are all candidates equal?

“Of course not,” Crispin said. Because of this reality, he says, we should not be investing in the same experience for all candidates. One of the primary factors that goes into determining the priority is the scarcity of the skill set that you are recruiting for. He also said that serious industry leaders have to be looking at changing the scarcity of talent in fields that they depend on. This means reaching into educational systems to ensure they have talent for the future.

2. What do you measure?

Crispin shared a poll that showed that 43% of respondents didn’t believe their candidate experience was good enough to spread virally. 28% didn’t know at all. To him, it showed the necessity of having to know what to measure before you evaluate your current stance and how you move forward in your candidate experience process.

He also asked if candidates who have a better experience eventually become better employees. Will job candidates go out of their way to recommend qualified friends to a company that has rejected them? These sort of measurements help bring clarity to your candidate experience process.

3. Do all candidates become employees?

Crispin believes that many recruiters focus on only the selected employee in the candidate experience equation. What he urges recruiters to do is realize that most of your candidates won’t become employees and even fewer are coming on as full-time employees. He argues many more will be added on a contingent or contract basis, and candidate experience is critical for these people as well.

What are the consequences for employers? What are the long-lasting changes the recession has wrought on the recruiting and retention of workers? There are several, say industry leaders, vendors, suppliers and individual recruiters.

Foremost, probably predictably, is the need to rebuild recruiting programs. Beyond that, there are almost as many opinions concerning the recession’s impacts as there are people I asked about it. Some predict that the cuts to job board spending will be permanent; others say social media recruiting will become a key sourcing tool, others suspect it will never amount to more than a minor tool; most expect that recruiting will be held to a higher standard of performance and economy.

Out of all the predictions and expectations — those I solicited and those I came across in discussions and blog posts and even tweets — I distilled four broad trends. You can read about these in more depth in the July issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. For now, here’s a brief look at these trends.

More will be demanded of recruiting efforts as employers focus on ROI.

The data shows that worker productivity rose during the recession even in the face of such demoralizing necessities as layoffs, wage freezes, and cut or limited benefits. Recruiters will be pushed to hire more of the kind of workers who can maintain the momentum, and will be increasingly judged on the performance of their hires. The emphasis to control costs won’t abate, sending recruiters looking for alternatives to traditional sourcing channels. Among the beneficiaries will be pay-for-performance job posting, SEO, and corporate career sites.

Reliance on RPOs and staffing firms will grow.

This is a controversial trend in that there’s not general agreement it has longevity. The RPOs right now are flush, as employers who gutted their recruiting departments suddenly find themselves in a hiring bind. Smaller companies, who may have relied on a generalist to handle recruiting, are making first time calls to RPOs. Mary Delaney, CEO of Personified, CareerBuilder’s RPO and recruitment consultancy, says the agency’s revenues jumped dramatically in the first quarter as her 120 recruiters conducted an ever-increasing number of searches.

The question is: can the RPOs hang on to the new business and gain acceptance as a replacement for in-house recruiters, or are the services destined to be mostly supplemental?

Assessment usage will expand as companies struggle to make better hiring choices.

Whether it’s done in house or outsourced, candidates are undergoing reviews that are more rigorous and demanding. And as the stakes get greater, so does the testing. Forbes reported this week that “psychological scrutiny and rigorous simulations are fast becoming a requisite part of the interview process.” The magazine said that a two-day CEO assessment can cost as much as $25,000 per candidate.

Retaining and promoting talented workers will present unique problems as senior staff delays retirement.

Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau, says boomers are now expecting to work beyond the traditional retirement age of 65. A Rand study says that the proportion of workers ages 65-75 is expected to rise to 25 percent this year, up from 17 percent 20 years ago.

Lets take a quick look at the facts:

• Resumes are highly subjective, and there is a lack of standardization for the information they present
• Resumes are loaded with embellishments and misinformation
• Resumes are hard to deconstruct in a way that helps facilitate automated matching
• Reviewing resumes causes a serious bottleneck in the hiring process that can tax the bandwidth of hiring personnel as applicant volume increases

Of course, resumes do serve an important function in that they provide hiring personnel with a concise package of valuable information. But the fact that they are a calling card that provides a high-level summary of an applicant’s qualifications means that they end up being used incorrectly. Using a resume as a top-of-the-funnel tool on which to base quick judgments about applicant suitability is a source of major error. The value of the resume lies more in its use as one of many sources of information to be reviewed as one deepens the dialogue with a candidate. For instance, a quick resume review is an excellent way to help one prepare for an interview with a candidate.

I am not alone in my opinions. Over the past decade, many of us have looked for tools that can solve some of the noted problems with resumes and thus serve as a viable replacement. There have been many attempts to provide such tools. At the heart of all these methods is some way to deconstruct the information presented on the resume into a set of searchable, matchable parameters. Some have used parsing technology in which information is evaluated using artificial intelligence. While resume deconstruction methods are a good start, they do not really support the replacement of the resume as a capabilities presentation. These methods are really just quick fixes to something that is fundamentally broken. Anyway, AI and parsing has really have failed to catch on in a way that suggests they represent the future.

A more promising approach to getting around the fundamental flaws of the resume is found in technology that involves a more “live” approach in which applicants are asked to manually enter information into fields that represent key types of information found on a resume (i.e., what skills do you have? How many years of experience do you have?). This essentially asks the candidate to parse apart their resume manually based on parameters that are deemed important by the employer. This type of exercise greatly facilitates the ability to match applicants to job openings in an automated way, effectively replacing the resume’s role as a screening tool. I really believe such methods have value, especially for those using job boards and career sites. These methods are still not a suitable replacement for the resume, as they don’t have the richness of information that a resume does.

So where does this leave us?

Enter web 2.0. The rules are changing again. I had a really great talk a few weeks ago with a friend who works for KODA, an interesting new online job seeker community that really captures the spirit of where we are going. We talked a lot about what her company is doing to build a community in which relevant information flows freely between members and potential employers. She educated me about some of the more subtle ways that new broad-based Internet technologies are changing the way people use the web to find and apply for jobs. I combine this discussion with what I am seeing from other new and interesting companies such as Brazen Careerist, a company based on the idea that social networking can change the way people demonstrate their ability to perform jobs, essentially allowing them to provide factually based capabilities presentations. It is clear to me that deep-seated change is on the horizon.

I am convinced that dynamic, interactive on-line profiles are the replacement for the resume. I bet every single person reading this article has a LinkedIn profile and most probably have a Facebook profile too. Let’s take a LinkedIn profile. It has everything a resume has, and more, including a summary of career history with detailed information about accomplishments at each major node in one’s career, and a thorough overview of skills, experience, and capabilities. The online profile is also a nexus for a web of complex, interrelated information giving it some things that a resume does not and never will have, including:

• The ability to verify information presented via input from other community users. This includes reference checking and testimonials.
• It’s dynamic, allowing the user to update info in real time and allowing for links to other relevant info housed in other places.
• It’s community oriented and allows input and commentary by others whose opinion is relevant.
• It’s flexible in that information can be extracted and tailored for specific purposes (i.e., presenting a skills profile or a summary of one’s work values).
• It provides a much richer way to present accomplishments and relevant information (links to an online portfolio for instance).

So, the online profile provides a venue for all kinds of information that can serve to showcase things that are directly relevant for a given job. As a champion for the use of assessment and a futurist, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that I think online profiles also provide a great opportunity to integrate important information about an applicant into their profile. Adding assessment results to one’s profile provides an opportunity to help summarize and categorize one’s values, traits, skills and abilities, providing employers with even richer information about an applicant while also providing a way for applicants to learn more about themselves. Imagine the ability for others to comment on and verify assessment-related information or for employers to quickly access a baseline of standardized, trait-based information describing a job seeker, and you are glimpsing the future!

If one thinks about the key tennants of web 2.0 it is clear that technology has provided the foundation for the phenomenon of social networking. The interconnectivity and access to relevant information about any subject under the sun that is now at our fingertips represents a new way of doing things in almost all aspects of our lives. Technology has had a “push” effect such that people find new ways to use technology to create new products and ways of getting things done. Once these are “pushed out,” the ones with real value are adopted and quickly gain critical mass based almost entirely on their value proposition to users. Why should we believe that the world of hiring will go against this trend and ignore the value provided by new technology? Trust me: it won’t.

We have a long way to go; there are some limiting factors to consider including:

• Reluctance to change.
• Fighting to become the standard provider. This stuff will work best if one company or venue becomes the standard. This will be a challenge as players jockey for marketshare.
• Job seekers are reluctant to pay extra. Many sites that offer upgraded profiles or extra information for a fee have not faired well. Any model in which the costs are not borne by the employer is doomed.
• Technological limitations. For the profile to really work well we will need technology and products that don’t currently exist. For instance, this model really requires the ability to “scrub” profiles found all over the web and repackage information for specific purposes related to hiring

Social networking and dynamic user profiles are still in their infancy. It wasn’t that long ago that you probably faxed your resume to someone. Twenty years ago the world wide web as we know it didn’t even exist. So, if 20 years from now, profiles haven’t replaced the resume; I will gladly eat my hat!! How old fashioned of me.

On July 13th, ERE Recruiter Meetups are going to be simultaneously run in cities around the U.S. It’s going to be a great opportunity for recruiters to meet and network with other recruiters in their area.

The Meetups are going to be locally run and organized by the people attending them — crowdsourcing at its best.

This means that we need your help, and here’s how you can pitch in:

• Visit the ERE Recruiter Meetup page and sign up for a Meetup near you. If you don’t see one in your area, start one up!
• If you know a great location (bar, restaurant, office) where your group can meet, add it to the Meetup.
• Help us get the word out! We don’t need a huge group in each city to get together, have a good time, and make great connections. It can be as few as half a dozen, but the more the merrier, so tell all the recruiters in your area about the Meetup!

…And of course, join us!

Now it’s not that I don’t want to be in someone’s pocket. (Preferably someone with deep pockets.) Unfortunately, no one has offered. And it’s cheeky, not to mention risky, to have to ask.

So it won’t be me that tells you Jobvite Share has matured a lot in the two months I first saw it at the ERE Expo in March. It was pretty cool then. Now, it’s even slicker. With just a few clicks you can send out a job post to your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn groups. Or send it to contacts from your address-book.

But since that sounds too positive, let me note that you actually have to click your mouse to make these things happen. And Jobvite Share is useless if you have no Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or LinkedIn networkers. Or if you have no address book and no jobs to forward. (Which begs the question of why you are reading about recruiting.)

If you happen to have some or all of these, then Jobvite Share makes it easy to send out the job post and track the results. Here’s an example:

You post a job and want to get it to your social and network contacts. But not to every one of them. Jobvite will let you create multiple links to the post, name them in way that best suits your needs, then send the post and the link to prospects who are a match.

You screen your address book for the right matches yourself, but for Facebook and the other networks, Jobvite will do the screening. It will match the job location, title, and some keywords to your friends, followers, or network based on their public profiles.

Here’s the downside. Jobvite Share isn’t clairvoyant. So if the job post isn’t very descriptive or some of your contacts have no or limited profiles, then the matching won’t happen. Matching, in any case, is elemental, which might be a reason to use the status update feature built right into Jobvite Share. You can tweet, update your wall, or post to LinkedIn right from the tool.

Once the message goes out, you get to track the views, the clicks, and the applies through the Jobvite Share dashboard. The analytics may be the best part of this, since you can test the response you get from different networks and even test different types of job descriptions to see which get the best results.

You need to register if you plan on using the analytics feature. Otherwise, no record is kept of you, but Jobvite will know some details, since it’s tracking where the messages are sent and how they are virally passed along.

It’s an easy product to use, even if the details on the site are more like IKEA assembly instructions. In the course of a half-hour drive by Jobvite Chief of Product Jamie Glenn and CEO Dan Finnigan, I had no problem following the process. And I am often not smarter than a fifth grader.

That said, I did think to ask why Jobvite would offer such a neat tool for free. Advertising, acknowledged Finnigan,who said it more elegantly than that: “We want users from any sized company anywhere in the recruitment funnel to tap into our products.”

So give Jobvite Share a try. Just don’t tell anyone I said that.

I was lucky enough to watch startup organizations identify critical job competencies, validate multiple testing methods, thoroughly evaluate each candidate, and hire only people who could demonstrate they had job skills. Needless to say, the results were awesome! Profitable in half the time; salesforces broke all previous records; turnover dropped significantly; and pre-employment training time shortened. Was it a miracle? No. Lke flossing and brushing, it was the product of best-hiring practices.

Did I invent best practices? No. Did I receive them from aliens while in an altered state of conscientiousness? No, the government published them in the late 1970s, as a result of the Civil Rights Act. It hired a panel of experts to develop a uniform set of hiring and placement practices governmental organizations could follow. It called it the 1978 Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection. But it’s 30 years later and the majority of hiring folks I meet still have no idea the Guidelines exist or have anything to do with their job. It’s as if they live in Lake Woebegon where all the men are strong, the women are good looking, and all the kids are above average. Why do a majority of people involved in hiring refuse to get with the program? I’ve come across a few reasons.

Quantity, not Quality

HR and recruiters are primarily concerned with managing transactions, or as one person said, “Filling seats with bums.” They know and understand work orders, placing ads, screening, and getting to know candidates; but, they pass off to the hiring manager responsibility for determining applicant qualifications. Wrong. Not only does this diffusion of responsibility results in an almost complete lack of quality control of incoming employees, it causes a major rift between HR and line management.

Best Practices Are Considered Optional

Less-bright people seem to think the ‘Guidelines’ are something that either does not apply to them, or are only used in EEOC or OFCCP challenges. Some people have commented to me with a straight face, “The Guidelines are only optional; we do not have to follow them” or “Very few organizations are sued.” Those ideas come from complete ignorance of what the Guidelines can do for organizations. Who, for example, can argue against thoroughly understanding critical job requirements, basing assessments on job requirements and business necessity, using only valid and reliable tests, and constantly monitoring adverse impact? Yep. The Guidelines are only optional if you don’t want to understand job requirements, ignore job requirements and business necessity, use crappy tests, and ignore adverse impact. That’s some option!

Non-Feedback Feedback

Follow up on hiring quality is also a serious shortcoming. Time and again I have heard recruiters claim they should do more follow-up on the quality of candidates. This is a problem. Managers are reluctant to publicly admit they hired the wrong person (i.e., admitting you wasted tens of thousands on a bad hiring decision is not exactly a career builder). External recruiters tell me they measure success one guarantee period at a time. (When will they learn longevity does not always equal productivity?) And, internal recruiters tend to rely on smile sheets (yep, another waste of time). Legitimate follow-up is impossible unless you compare pre-hire data with post-hire data. Don’t get hung up on words; an assessment is any method used to evaluate job candidates.

Fear of the Unknown

HR generally is risk averse, distrusts things they do not understand, has a limited budget, a limited staff, and its professional association seems to take the importance of good hiring practices for granted (an attitude I think will lead to its eventual demise). I knew one HR manager who refused to follow best practices because it would make her job harder. Gee, I wonder how management would feel about that attitude? Replace her with a fully competent HR manager, maybe? In addition, I’ve noticed that HR is quicker to adopt web-screening systems (i.e., manage applicant flow) than improve new employee quality. Good for them. Bad for the organization.

Good Luck Is Often the Product of Hard Work

Best-practices are hard. They require giving up comfortable alternatives. They require an admission that you can’t “break-into” professional recruiting any more than you can “break-into” medicine, law, or accounting. Hiring professionals must learn the technology of the profession. Best practices also make the recruiting job harder. Hiring is a probability game of identification, evaluation, and follow up. It takes a concentrated effort. Personal anecdotes of one-off results won’t cut it. And, sorry to disappoint, but reading articles might raise your awareness; however, it’s no substitute for going back to school, investing long years of practice, or having the bucks to hire an expert.

Unconscious Decision-Making

Human decision making is fundamentally flawed. People trust more what they know than what they don’t. They tend to remember when they were right, and forget when they were wrong. The need to become “comfortable” with a candidate is rooted in an evolutionary need to quickly assess personal danger, not evaluate candidate competencies. More often than not, when people base hiring decisions on personality, as opposed to skills, they make hiring mistakes. If you want to see how powerful unconscious factors are, read the comments associated with other ERE articles insisting “fit” and personality are the most important hiring factor.

Bad Practices Are Costly

The consequences of following bad practices include promotion pools that have too few skilled people; sending people to workshops to “fix” them; unnecessary EEOC and OFCCP exposure; bloated workforces that hemorrhage 20-50% annual payroll each year; weak competitive bench strength; and organization culture “drift,” to name a few.

There are no shortcuts. There is no easy solution. There are no magic questions. Any organization that wants to take command of its future must first take command of its workforce. If you find that getting managers on your side is a problem, invite them to a meeting or conference call with someone who knows and understands best practices. Let the Geek do the talking for you. If the call goes badly, you can both commiserate. If the call goes well, you can take all the credit.

The ad promotes the use of the planned series of job boards by the DirectEmployers Association. Against a snowy mountain backdrop, the ad lists a sampling of 18 of the planned “thousands” of job sites, among them Tokyo.jobs and Governmentconsulting.jobs.

“Coming soon!,” the ad promises. “List your jobs for free at thousands of locations.”

Technically, however, both the promise and the Internet addresses in the ad are premature. Under the rules by which the .jobs Internet extension was authorized, such names are not allowed. The rules allow only employer names to be used with a .jobs extension.

Whether the thousands of job boards ever come, let alone soon, is still to be decided. A SHRM-appointed group (the nine-members are the Policy Development Process Council) is studying a proposal to open up the naming rules to allow Employ Media to sell or (in the case of the DirectEmployers plan) “loan” geographic, occupational, and combination names.

SHRM is involved because it sponsored the creation of the .jobs domain as a way for employers to help job seekers find the jobs and career sites of specific companies. Five years after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved the creation of .jobs, only a few thousand of the addresses were sold. So Employ Media began looking for ways to broaden the appeal of the domain. That’s where DirectEmployers got involved.

The history of this is detailed in multiple posts here.

Gary Rubin, SHRM’s chief publishing, e-media, and business development officer and point man for the .jobs policies, said the ad was “most likely” placed by Employ Media. “Ads for .Jobs in SHRM publications and websites are placed and paid for by Employ Media,” Rubin wrote in an email. He speculated that it was created before SHRM formed the advisory council.

I sent an email to Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, asking about the ad, but have not yet heard back.

In an earlier email Rubin offered clarification on the comment period (comments can be posted here) and how SHRM is collecting HR community sentiment about the use of .jobs. He said the comment period would close Friday. Meanwhile, he reported that SHRM conducted a survey of its members to plumb their opinion on .jobs and its future.

The survey, Rubin wrote me was sent “to a sample that included approximately 1,400 HR generalists and 1,500 employment/recruiting professions. This quantity of HR professions sent surveys are sufficient to represent the views of the community.  It is a scientific survey, and the results will be tabulated for the Council.”

“The public comment application is for the sole purpose of informing the members of the Council on the perceptions of anyone in the community who chose to comment,” he added.

In direct contrast, other major business process owners use a “data or evidence-driven” approach to determine not just whether a process is producing the desirable results but also to determine precisely at what step are the failures occurring. If you’re ready to shift to a more businesslike and data-driven approach that can help you pinpoint the “failure points” in your recruiting process, this article will outline what you need to do.

FPI (Failure Point Identification) — a process for identifying recruiting failure points

The technical term within the field of process reengineering for identifying the specific causes of process failure is “failure analysis” and when a significant percentage of a processes errors occur at a single stage or step, that is known as a “failure point.” As a result, I call the process that I have developed for identifying the weak stages of a recruiting process “Recruiting Failure Point Identification” or “Recruiting FPI.” Rather than trying to completely rebuild the whole recruiting process, the FPI approach helps you identify the steps that are contributing the most to poor results. In fact, it’s quite possible that the majority of your recruiting shortfall is occurring as a result of weaknesses in one or two, out of a dozen recruiting process steps. Unless you can accurately identify these failure points, you run the risk of wasting significant amounts of money and time fixing the wrong step. And by not accurately identifying and fixing these key failure points, you may be dooming your recruiting process to a long future of continuously disappointing results. There are three broad categories of approaches that corporations can use in order to identify the key failure points in any hiring process.

The three basic FPI approaches include:

1. Evaluating the steps in the recruiting process — in order to find failure points, locate the deluded individual step to determine if it is even being carried out, who is accountable for it, and whether there are  metrics for assessing the output of that step. I covered that approach in a related article.
2. Using a yield model to identify failure points — this approach identifies failure points by measuring the yields or the volume remaining after each step. For example, if at the interview step it takes 10 interviews to yield one offer (or a 10% pass-through rate) you know you have a quality issue when the normal pass through is 20%. Whenever the process manager encounters a significant decrease from the average expected pass through percentage at a step, they must take notice and analyze that step. I covered that approach in a related article.
3. Alternative approaches for identifying failure points — this last category includes two dozen alternative approaches that you can use to supplement the “step approach” and “the yield model.” In this article I’ll cover those remaining approaches that can be used for identifying failure points in the recruiting process. I have purposely provided “too many” approaches so that you’re not forced to select an approach that you are not comfortable with.

A list of alternative approaches (categorized by recruiting step)

Each of the major alternative approaches for identifying failure points are bullet-pointed here under the most relevant step in the recruiting process.

Step 1: The application classification step — is the problem originating here?

• Submit “perfect” resumes for screening — if you suspect your problem is occurring at the resume receiving or sorting step, you can test the effectiveness of this screening step by using dummy “perfect resumes.” By taking each of the critical job requirements and placing them into newly created résumés, you can in effect create a “perfect resume” that perfectly fits every requirement of the job. By submitting a variety of these “perfect” resumes under different names you can identify which percentage are actually received and are then classified as “qualified” (i.e. passed along for a phone screen). The percentage of these perfect resumes that should receive a phone screen should be close to 100%, and if it’s not, you will know right away if you have a screening problem (one firm found that 82% of their perfect resumes never made it to step two). Another alternative is to disguise the resumes of your own top employees and submit them to see what percentage of your own top employees would be rated highly by your own screening process (one firm found only two out of five of their top employees would receive an interview if they applied under another name). You can also include some clearly unqualified candidates to see if any (unfortunately) make it through to the phone screening process.
• A comparison classification of the applications — have one or more of your technical employees independently classify a large group of applications/resumes into qualified and unqualified categories. Then compare those results with those from the original classification done by the recruiter to see where the recruiter made mistakes in assessing unqualified applicants to be qualified and vice versa. You can also hire an external agency recruiter to do a similar comparison assessment.
• Use mystery applicants — one of the best ways to identify where problems are occurring in any customer setting is to use mystery shoppers. A similar approach, using anonymous applicants can be an extremely valuable tool for identifying process problems. This process (users have included DaVita and Publix Markets) allows you to hire trained customer service professionals to become applicants in order to assess first-hand at least the early phases of the application and recruiting process. The mystery applicant works best for high-volume jobs that don’t require a high level of professional level knowledge.

Step 2: Sorting applications into the right jobs — is the problem originating here?

• A comparison sort — have one or more of your technical employees independently sort a large group of received applications into what they consider to be the most appropriate open requisition. Then compare that job sort with the same sort that was originally done by the recruiter to see where the recruiter made mistakes in putting the wrong applicant with the wrong job.

Step 3: The phone screen step — is the problem originating here?

• Add professional assessors to the phone screen list — if you are concerned that problems are occurring during the phone screen or during the reference-checking steps, you can check the effectiveness of the process by using trained assessors. Start by periodically inserting the names of trained assessors among the real names to call for phone screens or reference checks. These assessors can take notes and use a checklist to identify potential problems with the phone screening or reference-checking process. Incidentally, just letting your screeners know in advance that a professional assessor may be on the other end of the phone line might by itself significantly improve their performance.

Step 4: The interview step — is the problem originating here?

• Survey candidates about the interview process — one of the best ways to identify problems with the interview is to survey a small sample of the applicants who participated in the interview process. Use a simple e-mail survey after the job has closed and ask them to identify problems that they saw and things that they would improve.
• Survey managers and recruiters about the interview process — survey a small sample of the hiring managers and recruiters after the job has closed and ask them to rate the overall effectiveness of the process on a 1 to 10 scale. Also ask them to identify problems that they saw and things that they would improve.
• Have HR professionals participate — periodically have an HR professional sit in on a random sample of interviews in order to identify what’s working and what isn’t.

Step 5: The offer step — is the problem originating here?

• Survey those who rejected our offer — identify problems with the offer process by surveying each of the applicants who turned down our job offer. Use a simple e-mail survey after the job has closed and ask them to identify problems that they saw with their offer and the process as well as things that they would improve. You might want to delay the survey for several months in order to improve the honesty of the answers.
• Survey new hires — during the onboarding process, survey all of your new hires. Ask them about the positive and negative aspects of the offer process, the interview process, and the overall candidate experience. Because they now work for you, they are much more likely to provide honest feedback so that the firm will be better able to recruit effective coworkers for them in the future.
• Survey managers and recruiters about the offer process — survey a small sample of the hiring managers and recruiters after the job has closed and ask them to rate the effectiveness of the offer process on a 1 to 10 scale. Also ask them to identify problems that they saw and things that they would improve about the offer process.

Other Miscellaneous Approaches for Identifying Failure Points

Some additional approaches to consider include:

1. Identify the dropout point of high quality applicants who you “didn’t hire” — nothing demonstrates failure more prominently than having a process that rejects or somehow loses the very best quality candidates. To check to see if you’re losing top quality candidates, periodically take one or two high-priority jobs. After the position has closed, compile all of the resumes of individuals who were not hired. Identify any of these individuals who would be classified as “high-quality” candidates and identify at which step that they dropped out or at which step you dropped them. Any step where you are losing more than one high-quality candidate must be further analyzed. By the way, if more than 10% of your “didn’t hires” (or whatever number you determine to be appropriate) are rated as high-quality candidates, you must assume that your overall recruiting process is failing.
2. Identify the dropout point of diverse applicants you didn’t hire — periodically take one or two high-priority jobs and after the position has closed, compile all of the resumes from diverse individuals who were not hired. Identify any of these diverse individuals who would be classified as high-quality candidates and find out at which step that they dropped out or you dropped them. The steps where we are losing any high-quality diversity candidates must be further analyzed.
3. Force-rank all applications and see what happened to them — select one or two high-priority jobs and have a hiring manager rank them and number each one from best to worst. Keep the numbers secret until the end of the hiring process. Then see if the person that you actually hired was in the top 10% of the initial ranking. Next, check to see at what step of the hiring process that you lost the remaining top ten percent of all applicants. If a significant percentage are lost in a single step, consider that step to be a main failure point.
4. Ask them to rate each step — give a small sample of applicants a rating sheet and ask them to rate the effectiveness of each step immediately after it is completed during their hiring process. Promise to keep their evaluation anonymous (or don’t open it until after the hiring process is over), in order to minimize any fear they may have of retribution.
5. Identify their frustration points — survey applicants and new hires in order to identify their relative frustration level at each of the steps in the hiring process. Even if their frustrations didn’t cause them to drop out at any step, it’s important to limit their frustration wherever possible.
6. Implement a complaint process — implement an anonymous web-based complaint process that allows applicants to anonymously make comments or to complain about each individual step, as well as the overall process. Then track the number and the seriousness of the complaints at each step, in order to identify the step where the most serious problems are occurring.
7. Survey them three months later — due a follow-up survey of applicants long after they have been rejected in order to see if after a long delay, they are more honest about problems that they encountered.
8. Use external experts -– hire an external recruiting expert to sit through the different steps of the process over several different hires. Use their assessment to identify which steps contain the most problems.
9. Force the step’s owner to periodically conduct an audit -– require the process owner of each major step of the recruiting process to develop an audit checklist, which covers all of the potential major problems that are likely to occur. Require them to periodically do a self-assessment or audit, so that they can continually improve.
10. Use common staffing metrics -– monitor common recruiting metrics like time-to-fill as warning signs. Look at the time that each recruiting step actually takes, and compare it to the expectation.
11. Focus on typical problems — overall, my research indicates that the root causes of most recruiting process problems come from the top of the funnel, as a result of poor sourcing. As a result, if you’re unsure, I recommend that you focus on sourcing problems first, such as over-utilizing sources that contain primarily active candidates, having no direct sourcing, and having a weak referral program.
12. Look for patterns — many recruiting leaders find that the same recruiting problems periodically return. As a result, try to identify these patterns so that you can use them to identify the most probable steps where problems are likely to return.
13. Benchmark other firms — you might find that other firms of a similar size in the same industry have already identified common problem steps. Although they might not be exactly the same, they might be a good indicator as to where to look further. Even if each step in your process is meeting your expectations, it might help to compare your level of expected results against other firms to see if your expectations are too low.
14. Calculate the cost of a bad hire — calculate the value difference in revenue between a great hire and a bad hire in the same position. Use that dollar amount to motivate everyone to continually improve not just the step that they own but also recruiting the overall process as well.

Final Thoughts

I’ve attempted in this series (see the first and second) of articles to highlight the importance of looking beyond the simple question of “is the recruiting process meeting its goals?” and to develop a process for identifying failure points at each step in your recruiting process. Unfortunately, most recruiting leaders have no formal process for pinpointing their problems.

As a result, I have also provided a long list of failure point identification tools and approaches that I have found to be helpful to me when I’ve been asked to audit a corporate recruiting process. Of course, every organization needs to select the tools that best fit their needs and their culture but the key learning is to have in place a formal process for periodically identifying specifically where your process is failing. This might require you to become a CSI-type investigator but at least you now have a long list of tools that you can use to quickly and accurately pinpoint though your problem steps.

The answer to that question is the essence of employment branding, which I define simply as the amount of attractiveness an organization has to an average candidate.

Try this experiment: ask five of your family members or friends to tell you what they think about working for X, and name a few organizations, including the one you work for. My bet is that they will not have a very clear idea about whether any of them would be good or bad. They may have an opinion about the product or service, but not about working there.

When I ask people about working for a particular organization, the answer I usually get is that they have no idea whether it would be a positive or a negative experience. In other words, most organizations have no employment brand at all.

A very few firms have a negative employment brand, probably because of recent media coverage (e.g. General Motors or Toyota) but which quickly fades into neutral territory. Another few enjoy a very positive brand image also because of media coverage or product excellence (e.g. Apple or Google) and which can be short lived as well.

The organizations that have developed and maintained an enduringly positive employment brand over several years can be counted on one hand. From a global perspective they include such firms as IBM, Intel, Disney, KPMG, Deloitte, and Microsoft. Other organizations may have local appeal or appeal to particular career segments , but probably lack broad, global strength.

So what makes a strong employment brand? Here are a few elements, but I would love your perspectives and thoughts to add depth to my thinking.

Time

First of all, the firms with the strongest employment brand have been around for a while. None of them could be called a startup, nor have they suddenly become popular. For example, I have not included Google in my short list because it has not demonstrated whether it will maintain its promises to employees over periods of growth and recession. It may eventually join the ranks of the few. Time will tell.

Hewlett-Packard lost its strong employment brand as it went through mergers, layoffs, and many changes of leadership. It has now stabilized and may be rebuilding a brand that was at the top of list throughout the 1980s.

Promises

So as we have seen, brand is ultimately built on promises — promises given and fulfilled over time, and even when times are bad. Apple promises to deliver beautifully designed, almost flawless products. Coke promises to make you feel good. And as much as organizations fulfill their promises, they become stronger as brands.

IBM is a classic example. Its employment brand was built on at least three promises: (1) long-term employment maintained even during recessions; (2) continuous personal development; and (3) respectful treatment as an individual.

Over the years some of these have wavered, but for the most part it has continuously hired, trained, retrained, promoted, and retained the best people it could. Even those who have been laid off have been treated respectfully and given decent separation packages — even before that was in vogue.

Meaningful Perks

Having a strong brand does not mean just offering lots of perks. Prospective employees understand that perks can come and go as times change. A few years ago internal child care was the rage, but now it is less important, and there is more of a focus is on fitness centers. Free food, entertainment, and other such benefits are nice but will not fundamentally change the impression candidates have of you.

Much more important than how many perks is whether the perks enhance your personal life or add to a sense of excitement or personal fulfillment. Google’s best perk is offering time off for charitable work. An employee can do something good for their community and themselves. Sending volunteers to Haiti or tutoring school children are better benefits than dry cleaning services or gourmet meal preparation.

Consistency

One of the most powerful brand builders is consistency. Does your firm offer a few things all the time, and has it picked a few areas where there is unwavering support? IBM’s philosophy and practice of developing employees has been a hallmark. Many are hired directly from college with no experience and no strong career goals. IBM manages to help employees find the career that most engages them and that returns the most to IBM. There are many internal training schools, opportunities to become technically stronger or become a manager. Employees can leave one career and start another all without leaving.

This has translated into a strong brand message: we will help you be whatever you want to be. And IBM has maintained this message for decades.

Creating an Employment Brand

Given all the money and time spent on building employment brands, not much real progress is evident. Some firms have earned awards such as a “Best Place to Work” award, which may help them get some candidate attention. A few organizations consciously embark on an employment branding strategy, but more often the brand is the outcome of decisions and policies enacted by leadership over time.

But to penetrate the minds of most potential candidates takes a focused effort, following the steps I have listed, executed over several years. Perks, short-term campaigns, and social media pages can help, but will not replace the hard work required to put in place an enduring employment brand.

Then again it may not be.

The Society for Human resource Management is collecting opinions on the wisdom of loosening the restrictions on what names can be linked to a .jobs Internet extension. In a May 8th email, SHRM’s Gary Rubin, point man for the group’s .jobs involvement, said the comment period would last “about three weeks.” The period opened May 11.

However, on the website set-up by DirectEmployers Association, key beneficiary of changing the rules, the association’s leader says: “The open comment period is open for 10 days only, through Friday, May 21st.”

Who’s right? I don’t know. The SHRM public comment page is silent on how long input will be accepted. I sent Rubin an email asking about the duration, and a few other questions, including why comments are not being made public, but haven’t gotten a response.

DirectEmployers is pitching hard for the change. Its launch last year of several dozen job boards was the catalyst for changing the rules.

The Dot Jobs Universe site has an eight-and-a-half minute video on the homepage talking about the virtues of allowing geographic or occupational or geo-occupational names. It espouses the DirectEmployers view of the events that began unfolding last year. The video doesn’t discuss the financial arrangements between DirectEmployers and Employ Media, the .jobs registrar, or its potential earnings from selling job posting enhancements.

What DirectEmployers calls a “beta test” was previously described by the organization and its executive director, Bill Warren, as a prelude to the launch of several thousand  — millions, DirectEmployers once boasted –more sites in February. In an interview with the Associated Press, Warren is reported as saying that 30,000 job sites would be launching by late March.

Even then however, Warren knew the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was questioning the use of the non-corporate names. ICANN, the Internet’s addressing authority, had sent letters regarding the DirectEmployers’ sites and cited the review procedure that is required before changes to the operation can be made.

SHRM is involved because it sponsored the request to create .jobs in the first place. Technically known as a top-level domain, the extension won approval based on the application by  SHRM and its partner, Employ Media, that a .jobs appendage would provide an easy way for job seekers to find corporate career sites.

The arrangement finally approved by ICANN in 2005 was that .jobs addresses must use the name of the employer. Other naming conventions are not allowed.

But with sales of the .jobs addresses flat, and only 7,848 active (according to the last report), Employ Media, the operator of the business, wants to be able to sell a .jobs address using almost any name. Thus, last fall’s initial test launch of several dozen job sites.

The sites were all pulled down in February after ICANN got involved and insisted that the procedures detailed in its agreement with Employ Media be followed. Among the requirements is a public comment period and a review by a council of involved parties.

Meanwhile, The Conference Board reported a slight decline in its Leading Economic Index. The one-tenth of a percent drop in April may turn out to be an aberration, especially since the numbers are usually revised in subsequent reports. However, it is the first decline in a year and follows March’s 1.3 percent rise in the Index.

The decline was softened somewhat by the continuing rise in The Conference Board coincident index, a measure of current economic activity. That index was up .3 percent, the largest rise since November.

Says Ken Goldstein, economist at The Conference Board: “These latest results suggest a recovery that will continue through the summer, although it could lose a little steam.”

It was the jobless claims numbers that really rattled economists and added to the worries of a Wall Street already jittery over yet another drop in the value of the euro. The Dow was off about 245 points mid-afternoon in New York.

Economists were expecting that the claims numbers would continue declining as they have since April 10th. Instead, new claims rose to 471,000, while the four-week average rose by 3,000 to 453,500. Averaging four weeks of claims smooths out sudden one-week jumps.

In what should be good news, the U.S. Department of Labor reported a 40,000 decline in the number of continuing claims. For the week ending May 8th, 4.63 million people were receiving unemployment benefits.

An additional 5.34 million workers — those who have exhausted the usual 26 weeks of state-sponsored benefits — are getting extended and emergency benefits from the federal government for the week ending May 1. The number is down 73,369 from the previous week.

A few weeks ago he took the desperate step of sending a plea for money to his LinkedIn network.

“It was a slow, downward spiral,” he told me recently. “I could see it happening, but I thought, ‘It will get better. I’ll find a job. Something will come through.’”

At 6.9 percent, Hawaii’s unemployment rate is among the nation’s lowest. For Nale, though, it hardly matters. “I don’t know where the jobs are,” says the one-time Manpower recruiter who two short years ago was being interviewed for his launch of a jobs TV show for the Islands. “I was a recruiter. You would think I should know how to find a job.”

His last TV appearance was as the central figure in a news story about Hawaii’s unemployed.

Nale’s story may among the more desperate, but his difficulty in finding work is not at all unusual.

A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management cited in Fortune found that 47 percent of out-of-work HR professionals who found jobs last year had been searching for 6 to 12 months. For 27 percent, the job search took more than a year.

Now comes the good part: CareerBuilder says there were 17 percent more recruiter job postings in the first quarter of this year. Even more hopeful was the 37 percent jump in searches on recruiter resumes.

Mary Delaney, CEO of Personified, CareerBuilder’s search and marketing arm, said demand for recruiters “is coming back very strongly.” Surprising even to her is that the uptick is not just in contract recruiters, but in full-time recruiting staff as well.

At The RightThing, an RPO, companies that “downsized their recruiting functions …  are now looking for ways to re-build capacity and expertise quickly,” says Terry Terhark.

“We are seeing a significant surge in urgent requests to rebuild recruiting capacity,” he adds, which means relying on The RightThing’s recruiters, besides hiring their own.

When I talked to John Sumser about the improving picture for recruiters, his take was that it will be a while, maybe a long while, before the recruiting groups can get back to even.

The layoffs of the last three years pushed out so many experienced recruiters that now there may be a shortage of them. With few companies hiring anyone, let alone recruiting teams, Sumser suspects that a good number of the unemployed recruiters turned to other work.

“We end up,” he said, “with an industry that needs to be trained from scratch.”

That has its downside, since companies will need to supplement their own recruiting efforts with RPOs and independents at least for a while. But it also gives employers an opportunity to realign recruiting efforts.

In fact, Qualigence CEO Stephen Lowisz has noticed companies are combining the task of sourcing with recruiting. He doesn’t say what he thinks of this, though he did note that “many companies hired ex-search professionals and created an in-house search function that has been both a cost savings, and in some instances, a documented improvement in candidate quality.”

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

1. Nix the Laundry List: Job Ads That Kill
2. Enough with old school thinking about job hopping
3. How to Source from Facebook Status Updates
4. Who is entitled to the fee?
5. Concerns about data stored on US-based servers?
6. 7 Habits of the Highly Effective Social Recruiter

1. Nix the Laundry List: Job Ads That Kill

Kevin Jenkins writes about job descriptions as de facto recruiting advertisements. He posts, “Requirements intensive (i.e., laundry list format) job ads serve no purpose other than to undermine your recruiting effort. They are pointless; that’s because a properly written job responsibilities section always delineates the skills needed to perform the work required and it does so much more effectively.

What do you think about these sorts of advertisements?

2. Enough with old school thinking about job hopping

Sandy Jones-Kaminski writes about how the old ways of thinking about job hopping are wrong. She says, “If a recruiter, HR person or hiring manager at a company you’re interviewing with gives you a hard time about the brevity of your employment with each company you’ve work for in, say, the past 5-10 years, politely thank them for their time, and either find another avenue into the company of your dreams, or just keep looking because in all likelihood that employer is not going to provide the right environment for YOU anyway.

Is old thinking about job hoppers holding your company back or is it simply a way to protect from unnecessary turnover costs?

3. How to Source from Facebook Status Updates

Shally Steckerl talks about sourcing via Facebook status updates. He writes, “This little gem of a sourcing tip was brought to my attention by my friend and colleague @joshuakahn, a brilliant social media thinker from Best Buy. (Here’s his original post) Josh writes about Will Moffat who built a tool called Facebook Search. It allows you to search status messages from Facebook: http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/

Give it a shot for your next search.

4. Who is entitled to the fee?

A forum member asks, “Our client ask us to find a contractor (HR professional)We produced a candidate that the  client wants to hire, turns out unbeknownst to us, this candidate was in through another agency and offered the role and turned it down because the hourly rate offered to her was low.

“Now 5 months later we surfaced the candidate at a much high rate for a role that  is 80% similar to the original role plus 20% more additional projects.

“Are we entitled to represent this contractor or advise our client to go back to the other agency.

What is your take?

5. Concerns about data stored on U.S.-based servers?

Another forum member asks, “We’re looking for a new system, and a number of the most popular are provided as a web based SaaS (Software as a Service). THis means the data is stored on the providers servers – and most are in the US.

“Here in Canada we have to guarantee the privacy of those whose information we have, and that we’re complying with all the provisions of Canada’s privacy legislation. But when our data is stored on a server in the US, my understanding is the Patriot act trumps Canada’s privacy legislation. So we’d be making privacy promises we can’t keep.

“Anyone else looked into this issue or have any thoughts?

6. 7 Habits of the Highly Effective Social Recruiter

The final word comes from Omowale Casselle goes Stephen Covey on us and talks about effective habits for social recruiting. He writes, “As more and more companies begin to utilize Social Recruiting to achieve their broader strategic recruiting objectives. An important consideration is, what makes an effective social recruiter?

1. Be Present-This means establishing a presence on sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & niche) that are important to your target audience. The key is to strike the right balance between heavily trafficked and niche sites. For each site that you join, you are going to have to spend lots of time establishing your presence.

Check out the rest of the post and seven habits and let him know what you think!

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

You can imagine the texts, emails, tweets, and phonecalls I received the day the New York Times headline read, Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal. The irony of this article begins with that headline. If you were to pull up that article today, you would read a different and more correct headline: The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not?

The title of the article is really what bothers me.

Internships in 2010 are the most valuable experiences that students in high school or college can obtain. They are what set aside the strong job candidates from the weak. These experiences can dictate a student’s future, and a lack of internship can lead to lack of a job. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 70 percent of college students leave school with internships on their resume. This is a statistic that cannot be ignored. Internships, paid or unpaid, are necessary for students in order for them to succeed in their future.

A title that puts the words “internship” next to “illegal” sends a poor signal to students thinking about internships, parents supporting internships, and employers providing internships. It counteracts the message that career centers work endless hours to get across. Any article about internships must educate and must seek to inform an audience about the proper ways to structure a legal internship program.

Yes, there are exceptions. There are employers who run illegal programs. These employers need education. They need clear information.

I’ve spoken to plenty of experts in the field who are trading language about employers discontinuing their internship programs because the Times article concerns them. These employers may run excellent internship programs and because they don’t pay students, they think their programs are illegal — which is usually not the case.

I now introduce to you the cautious approach. It means to be careful, to be informed, to be knowledgeable before starting or promoting an internship program. Read the guidelines provided by the U.S Department of Labor, released since the Times article came out, aimed at clearly defining what qualifies a legal internship experience.

Make sure your intern isn’t treated as an employee. Your intern should not be directly generating revenue. Everything your intern does should be in their best interest and for a learning experience. Internships stem from apprenticeships. The student should leave the opportunity with a keen sense of how that industry is run and how to execute some of the daily entry-level tasks in that field. Be cautious. Know your information. Provide these students that learning experience that they deserve.

Internships are not illegal. Make sure your program is properly run.

Now to make matters worse.

At the ERE 2010 Spring Expo in San Diego I contended that we were in for a near-term hiring tsunami of major proportions, forcing companies to hire the C+ in droves. As the recovery accelerates, new hiring needs, an increase in voluntary turnover, and sideliners rejoining the labor pool will start a mad scramble to fill seats with anyone who looks like C+ person, much less a B+. In the national employment report issued on May 7th two-thirds of this tsunami forecast came true. The other third will become apparent in the next few months. It will cost your company even more mega-bucks if you fall into the trap now being set.

Practically speaking, there might not be much you can do about it, since most companies have mistakenly set up their hiring process to only hire C+ level people. In fact, in doing this they’ve also set up their processes to prevent the B+ from even entering the building, other than through the back door. Of course, your company was not so naïve. You knew the last few years were aberrations. You knew that anyone could hire above-average talent in a below-average economy, especially when the supply of talent exceeds demand. But things are different now.

Q1, 2010 was a tipping point. The excess of supply of talent will quickly reverse course, and finding enough B+ level people to fill your new jobs will be much more difficult. Worse, replacing a B+ person who voluntarily leaves for something better with someone of equal caliber will be near impossible.

To put some foundation to this over-the-top scenario, let me offer this definition of a B+ person: technically qualified, consistently delivers high quality results, can overcome most obstacles without making excuses, will take on tough projects, can work 24/7 in spurts, can deal effectively with all types of people inside and outside the company and the department, often takes the lead when problems occur, self-motivated, and doesn’t need a lot of direction. Add, if the person is a manager, a B+ managers hires only B+ or better. This is a great person. Imagine the cost of losing one, or not hiring one for each position in your company.

Now consider the criteria these B+, or better people use to compare opportunities and select which one to accept. It probably consists of these factors, but feel free to edit the list based on your company’s experience and the jobs you actually fill:

Selection Criteria of Top People (B+ and Better)

1. Growth opportunities — the job offers a chance to progress rapidly, assuming successful performance.
2. Job content and satisfaction — doing work they like to do.
3. Job stretch — taking on a bigger job rather than a lateral transfer.
4. Company-related factors — financial stability, brand, image, culture, and industry.
5. Work/life balance — a career opportunity coupled with a chance to have a somewhat normal life outside of the office.
6. Compensation and benefit package — while it doesn’t have to be the best, it must be competitive.
7. Hiring manager and the team — the hiring manager is a true leader who is going places and is a possible mentor. The team is professional and top notch.
8. Location — convenient if possible, but most places would be considered if the job offered a career move of singular opportunity. (Note: this must be only be discussed in the context of a very slow approach to evaluating multiple opportunities within the company).

Now, I’d like to prove my contention that most companies are not targeting these people. Instead they target the how the C+ level person looks for another job and selects one over the other. In the process this approach precludes the B+ from consideration. To gain a sense of this, just answer the following questions about your companies’ hiring and recruiting processes.

1. Do your job postings clearly define career moves or lateral transfers? If you emphasize skills and experience in your job descriptions, rather than learning and growth opportunities, you’re targeting the C+ person. This is the person who’s looking for a lateral transfer.
2. Do you have formal processes in place that allow the B+ person to engage with your company without having to apply? If you do, does it work? This means you identify who they are, and that you track your conversion rates.
3. Are all of your hiring managers open to conduct 30-minute “career discussions” with strong people who aren’t totally excited about working at your company and who meet fewer of the requirements listed on the job description? As the economy recovers, the best people will be reluctant to apply unless they have a chance to view your opening as a clear career opportunity, without having to make any commitments.
4. Is it easy for the B+ person to obtain all of the career-oriented selection criteria defined above? This is what they’ll use to compare different opportunities, and if you don’t formally give it to them, you’ll unnecessarily lose many of the best.
5. Do all your hiring managers, including those in the bottom half, know how to recruit and attract top performers? It’s hard for any manager to consistently hire B+ level talent without working hard at it. With the rush to fill positions, formal “raising the talent bar” programs can offset some of this move toward mediocrity.
6. Do you have enough people every B+ candidate meets who are part of your B+ career track program? Most companies have a high-potential program to ensure their top 5% get managed, promoted, and rewarded effectively, but few carry this through to the top 20-25% of their workforce. If you can’t prove you offer a career track, it will be difficult convincing the B+ candidates your career story is credible.
7. Do you have a top-down driven hiring strategy or bottoms-up? A bottoms-up strategy is top-candidate focused, aka customer-driven, designed to meet their needs at each step in their job hunting and decision-making process. Unfortunately, most companies have inadvertently and naively assigned this critical role to their ATS vendor and RPO in combination with their comp, legal, OD, and IT departments. For just one example, are your job postings uniformly manufactured by the ATS to meet legal needs or designed to appeal to the intrinsic motivators of a top person? To offset this poorly designed top-down process, a bunch of costly workarounds and special programs are required to minimize the disaster they cause.

While a few companies have effectively resisted the push to confirm to increased bureaucracy, most haven’t. They still use some mash-up of ill-conceived hiring ideas designed by the wrong people to hire the most available person, not the best person. The business and financial cost of this misguided process is far greater than the short-term satisfaction of getting a position filled on time, but somehow this impact is hidden from view. Just sum the total compensation of the C+ people in your company to gain a sense of how much this is costing your company every years. Maybe put it on chart and track this to measure your company’s overall hiring performance. So whether you want to track the cost of hiring a C+ rather than a B+, or not, it’s time to grab hold of your wallet. If you don’t, before you know it will be empty.