For sure, there are plenty of others doing the same in their own corner of the recruiting business. Jobvite just seems to be a little quicker. And it manages to work with the spirit of the trend.

For instance, 18 months ago Jobvite launched an app for Facebook and LinkedIn that made it possible to match a job to an employee’s friends and contacts. That employee’s friends and contacts could also opt-in to match the job to their friends and contacts and, well, you get the idea. Jobvite Source, as it is branded, is a lot truer to the spirit of social media than simply tweeting jobs.

Today’s announcement by Jobvite is no different. The company has streamlined its recruiting platform, Jobvite Hire and Jobvite Source adding extra functionality to the integration with social media. Now, a recruiter, hiring manager, or an employee can customize Jobvite Source to post only some jobs to each of their social networks. An automatic scheduler is available to time the posts.

That can be a useful feature for an individual, but it’s even better for recruiter and company pages. No one need lard up their Facebook wall or LinkedIn profile with a continuous stream of job ads. The scheduler lets you target as well as time and limit the posting of openings.

Targeting of the Jobvites has also been improved so that now a recruiter can match job openings to employees, rather than sending an opening to the entire workforce.

Jobvite Source will also distribute jobs across some 300 social networks and the like. And the Jobvites can be redistributed via Twitter.

The analytics may be the most crucial piece of everything Jobvite does. Regardless of how many times a Jobvite job is posted, reposted, forwarded or retweeted, the source is tracked. So a recruiter or hiring manager will know what network, blog, referral or what have you produced the best results.

There’s a free version of Jobvite Source called Jobvite Share that can do many of the things that the commercial version discussed here does. It’s limited, though, in the number of channels and contacts that can be handled in one sitting. The commercial version automates practically everything.

No one expects that it will come anywhere close to the 431,000 jobs that were added to the U.S. economy in May. That growth was fueled almost entirely by the hiring of temporary census workers. Remove them from the count and May saw about 20,000 new, private sector jobs.

In fact, the estimates are that the economy will have lost jobs during the month as some of those temporary government workers were laid off. Because the Census Bureau employment is skewing the numbers, the focus since April has been purely on the number of private sector jobs created.

Initial estimates were that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics would report somewhere between 115,000 and 150,000 new, private sector jobs in June.

However, economists were also expecting that the ADP numbers (produced from ADP’s payroll reports) would show June added about 60,000 private sector jobs. In May, ADP said 57,000 jobs were added.

So the 13,000 new June jobs reported in this morning’s release were a surprise. It caused a blip in stock prices and a rise in 30-year Treasury notes as investors sought safe havens. It also prompted analysts to rethink their expectations of Friday’s monthly employment report.

According to Marketwatch, Merrill Lynch cut its estimate from 150,000 new private sector jobs to 125,000. Credit Suisse went from 115,000 to 75,000 new jobs.

The lowering expectations matched the public sentiment as measured by The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index., which was also released this morning.  An aggregate of responses from a survey of 5,000 households, the Index dropped 9.8 points between May and June. It was the first decline since February.

“Increasing uncertainty and apprehension about the future state of the economy and labor market, no doubt a result of the recent slowdown in job growth, are the primary reasons for the sharp reversal in confidence,” says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. “Until the pace of job growth picks up, consumer confidence is not likely to pick up.”

In that area, The Conference Board said the number of online job openings being advertised improved in June. The Help Wanted On-Line Data Series reported 4,154,128 job openings were online in June, an increase of 19,600 from May.

Every CEO, manager, and corporate investor knows that hiring the best people is what ultimately drives an organization’s long-term success. Yet the recruiting metrics most companies employ evaluate efficiency rather than quality. Metrics like “time-to-fill” and “cost-per-hire” only tell us about the process, not its impact.

What matters most is how new hires perform and how much they contribute to your organization’s growth and goals. “Top” performers can exponentially increase your productivity and profitability, while those with lower standards can damage your bottom line and plummet your reputation. Those numbers far outweigh how much time it took to fill their position. Yet the question remains: How do you evaluate the quality of your hires?

Determining Quality of Hire: Across Your Organization

If you were to deduce a formula for calculating how well your organization is hiring overall, it would look something like this:

Quality of Hire = (PR + HP + HR) / N

• PR = Average job performance rating of new hires
• HP = % of new hires reaching acceptable productivity with acceptable time frame
• HR = % of new hires retained after one year
• N = number of indicators

Example:

• PR = Average 3.5 on a 5.0 scale = 70%
• HP = Of 100 hires made one year ago, 75 are meeting acceptable productivity levels = 75%
• HR = 20% turnover = 80% HR
• N = 3
• Quality of Hire = (70 + 75 + 80) / 3 = 75

The result is a quality level of 75% for new hires made in one year throughout an organization. Calculations can be modified to reflect hires made by quarter, bi-annually, or in increments of two, three, five years, etc. It all depends on how much or how often you choose to measure and report.

This formula gives a good indication of how close or how far an organization is from reaching its collective hiring goals. However, filling in the variables can be a bit tricky.

Determining Quality of Hire: Per Individual Hire

When we sit down and break down the above formula, we begin to see where calculations are cut and dry, and where they need further attention and work. “Number of indicators” and “number of hires retained” are easily quantifiable. But variables like “job performance” and “acceptable productivity” need to be further defined before they can mean anything numerically. How do you turn “job performance” into a number?

Most organizations use a numeric rating system to evaluate the performance and productivity of new hires. On a scale of 1 to 5, how well is Hire B performing X? This requires clearly outlining a position’s expectations and objectives, and what Xs are important to assess according to your organization’s goals. X = new business leads generated. X = number of sales increase. X = number of findings submitted. You define the criteria. Only then will “quality” take on significant, measurable meaning when you tally up your hiring scores. The key is tying your talent management strategy and measurements to your business objectives and results.

Keep it as simple as possible. Don’t try to include too many X-factors in your metrics program. That can get overwhelming or dilute decisive outcomes. Work with key stakeholders (CFO, top managers, hiring manager, etc.) to ensure credibility. And tie revenue per hire to dollar impact across your organization whenever possible to demonstrate the value of high-quality performers.

And keep track of your hiring progress! Identify a baseline. Measure annually (using your new handy-dandy formula). Note your best hiring sources and factors that indicated new-hire success (as well as those that didn’t). Share your results and reward your recruiters and hiring managers along the way.

Because the best way to know you’ve reached the top is to look back and see how far you’ve come.

Long-term reliance has a slow, grinding positive feedback loop that in time can become a dependency, and actually preclude the vision necessary to see other alternatives.

We know that the momentum of high-speed travel makes it hard to change direction, or even to see clearly where you are going. In the same fashion China’s high-growth economic trajectory, and low-cost labor model, may fit the bill for a blind-spot when it comes to the future. This is not the least of China’s many Black Swans, but it is a big game-changer.

The source of the reliance is the well over 100 million people who make up China’s production line workforce. Clearly, it is impossible for anyone to summarize the lives of these hard-working people, but the commonalities are there, and could be worth exploring.

Let’s call our representative Ms. Qiu. She is a 39-year old woman from the Sichuan province who, at the age of 19, was more than happy to leave her village and move up to the “Big Smoke.” She dreamed that she would make money, find a husband, learn some useful skills, and live a bigger life. At the very least the city would offer her something to do, which was not true, and is not true, of her home town.

Ms. Qiu was not a spoiled, fickle individual, and she could endure privations that many of us would consider very harsh. Like most women in this scenario she succeeded in her own terms and, after 20 years, she is married with a child.

Her daughter, Bing Bing, lives in Sichuan with her grandmother and grandfather, and goes to school every day with the expectation of six people on her shoulders (4-2-1). Bing Bing is very likely to succeed academically and will not want to work in a factory. Mom and Dad are doing everything they can to make sure her life is even bigger than theirs.

For Bing Bing’s mother and father, it has been 20 years of hard work in the textile and electronics industry. Mom got to be a Production Cell Leader, and Dad got to learn about plastic injection component tooling, and has been re-classified as a skilled worker.

It is true that the brilliance of their dreams waned as they grew older, and eventually melded, not clashed, with reality of their lives. This has been easy enough to accept because, apart from a few setbacks, things have improved steadily. Ms. Qiu, or Mrs. Li as she is now called, did find her beau in the city, and she did have a child, one that is actually going to complete high school.

This was a first for her family, and it makes her proud.

Mr. Li was lucky to get into a company-sponsored training program and is set to become a qualified tool maker. His family sees him as a very solid, reliable provider, and in the future he will be in the position to offer an employer a skill-set, rather than accept whatever manual work he can get. The biggest issue for him is that he can make his own future, something that his own father could not even have dreamed about doing.

Mr. and Mrs. Li are not big on strikes and they don’t want to rock the boat. They understand the higher expectations of the younger generation from an intellectual point of view, but not emotionally. They don’t feel it. These kids coming up seem too assertive and a little too spoiled for their own good, but at the same time they are not sufficiently arrogant to imagine that everything they went through should be repeated in an indefinite loop. Mr. Li has made a decision to try to ease tensions but it’s hard to hold back motivated young people when they have made a decision to do something.

Fly in the Ointment

But just when you thought things had come to a hard-fought, manageable stasis, with a predictable increase in salaries, and a definite increase in conflict in the workplace, the flow of nice, hard-working Sichuan youth is grinding to a halt. That decline itself is accelerating and the resulting change will be fast, demographically speaking.

The next generation of Ms. Qiu’s and young Master Li’s are not entering the workforce as expected because they were simply never born. For the few who are coming onstream, many will not follow the same path as their parents, as amply illustrated by the Li’s success in getting Bing Bing through school.

Unskilled workers are effectively vanishing from the workforce. The new generation is slowly switching to the professional workforce but many are falling into a black hole when they graduate because the economy cannot use their skills yet (hyperbole alert).

The lack of a transition generation, through qualified skilled labor, is the problem that has yet to be seriously addressed. This is still a big surprise to me. China’s government may come across as technocratic but the Chinese culture is Confucian, and the emphasis there is on everyone becoming a “scholar.” This has contributed to an economic model that will be hard to transition.

Not impossible, just hard.

(Tip ‘O the Hat to Going Native)

Last fall, the company introduced 6Sense for resume searching in a product it branded Power Resume Search. Not long after, it launched Job Search, enabling job seekers to search for jobs using 6Sense.

Don’t confuse a 6Sense match to the traditional keyword match. Old school keyword matching does little more than search for certain keywords and rank the results on frequency and sometimes proximity. More sophisticated features allow you to take into account years of experience, and even career progression.

The 6Sense technology is more sophisticated yet. It can handle concepts. It looks for connections among skills, career progression steps, and responsibilities, and weighs the factors in aggregate. So if you are looking for a bookkeeper, 6Sense isn’t going to give you a CFO, even if bookkeeping is among the listed skills. Unless, that is, you decide otherwise.

Officially unveiled this morning, Monster Applicant Matching comes at a time when employers are being overwhelmed by applications for every position they post.

“With employment rates still recovering, employers have been overwhelmed with job seekers applying for their positions.  Our customers asked us for the ability to use our semantic search technology to help them instantly identify the best qualified applicants,” says  Darko Dejanovic, EVP, global CIO and head of product at Monster.

The company also reported that it has introduced 6Sense in Canada and the United Kingdom, it’s in beta in France, and will be launched in Australia later this year.

The technology is built out of the core of the matching software developed by Trovix. Monster acquired the startup two years ago for $64 million and then spent more than a year and millions more reworking the technology before introducing 6Sense last fall.

The company didn’t say whether or what it would charge to use Monster Applicant Matching. It does charge a premium for Power Resume Search.

How a company approaches the recruiting process and treats candidates during that process says a great deal about the culture and, in turn, reinforces the culture. For example, how a company treats candidates during the recruiting process teaches those candidates a great deal about how to succeed in that company.

In the early 1990s, a certain company, which we’ll call Asteroid Systems, was infamous for its recruiting process: candidates were called back for interview after interview. This process could take weeks, and attempts to call and get information about the process were ignored. Those who were eventually hired had learned the lesson that decisions should be made slowly, that everyone needs to have input, and that it was better to take an arbitrarily long time to make decisions than to make a mistake. This was reflected in how the company did business. While their market was hot, it wasn’t a serious problem, but when competitors moved in, their inability to make rapid decisions or risk mistakes lead to major problems. The candidates who got tired of waiting and went elsewhere were sufficiently invisible to the employees that they did not provide disconfirming evidence for the success of their policy.

Meanwhile, the Wasabi Corporation had a slightly different approach to recruiting. In its case, the people who called constantly and generally made pests of themselves were the ones who were called in for interviews. If you were passive, they didn’t want you. Employees at Wasabi learned from day one that if you wanted to get things done, you needed to take action, and that taking action was rewarded. For the most part, this worked out pretty well for Wasabi. They did have some problems with employees being so pushy that it was difficult to get them to work together, but they were able to solve that.

A brief caution here: do not assume that the best way to hire is therefore to ignore passive candidates and just call in the people who keep making noise. Wasabi’s method worked for them in that time and place and because it connected to the appropriate elements of its culture. If you attempted to just graft that approach on to another company, the results would probably not be so pretty. A common mistake is to take a mechanism from one company and graft it to another. That can work well when the two companies have similar underlying values and beliefs, the why of culture, but can be disastrous when those underlying values and beliefs do not match.

It’s not easy to avoid being like Asteroid Systems. The more enmeshed you are in the culture of the company for which you recruit, the harder it will be. Fish do not discover water, and people who spend their days within a culture tend to take it for granted. This can make it difficult to recognize the subtle and indirect effects of your recruiting approach.

That said, there are some questions you can ask that will at least point you in the right direction:

• What are the values of the company? How do you know?
• What does the perfect employee look like? Why do you believe that?
• How will you know when you’ve found the right person? What areas of that definition are subjective? What does that subjectivity tell you about the values and beliefs of the organization?
• How does the hiring process reinforce the behaviors your value and discourage those you don’t? How might it do just the opposite?
• How will you know if the people you failed to hire were actually the qualified people?
• How are you measuring the success of your recruiting process in the short-term and in the long-term?
• If you were to view your company as a system of interacting parts, how would your subsystem interface with the rest of the company?
• If you believe you have a culture problem, what are the resources available to you to deal with it?

There are no right answers to these questions. The only wrong answers lie in not taking the questions, and the influence of organizational culture, seriously.

Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Based on the registration response and volume of questions submitted during a recent ERE webinar on Making Your Employee Referral Program Work Smarter, clearly many organizations have retooling their programs on their agenda. With nearly a question a minute coming in from the hundreds in attendance, responding to all simply wasn’t possible. What follows is Part II of the public questions that were submitted (grouped, combined, and summarized) and our brief response to each. Part I is here. Looking for more detail? Use the comments functionality following this article to let us know and we’ll do our best to develop future content along those lines.

Employee Referral Program Management-related Questions

Who manages ERPs in most organizations?

Amongst the organizations in our best-practice sample, it is much more common for the employee referral program to be managed by a dedicated program manager as opposed to a program committee made up of recruiting department staff. This is a key differentiator between best-practice programs and typical programs, many of which are unmanaged or managed by committee.

How much time do best-practice firms dedicate to this, a lot of the suggested elements seem resource heavy? Is this a full-time job within most organizations?

In most organizations ERP management is not a full-time job, but that is because in most organizations ERPs are unmanaged! We don’t really concern ourselves too much with what most companies are doing; we are, however, very interested in what best-practice companies do! Even in smaller best-practice organizations, managing the employee referral program is a dedicated task. In larger organizations not only is the role of program manager a full-time role, it is most often one supported by a multi-disciplined team. The key thing to remember here in that in most organizations less than 5% of the total recruiting budget is allocated to the ERP, which on average produces 1:4 hires. Best-practice firms simply realize that since ERPs produce one of the best yields of any source, it makes business sense to reallocate funds formerly earmarked for less-effective sources. In our best-practice sample, the percentage of the recruiting budget associated with employee referral averaged 31% in 2007.

How many people should be dedicated to the employee referral program for the program to run optimally?

Obviously, the size of the team needed depends on the size of your organization and the design of your program. Ideally, you look at what activities you need to accomplish to generate the flow needed to produce the number of hires needed and calculate how many man-hours will be consumed to accomplish that. For best-practice firms, even smaller ones, it’s not uncommon to have at least three people dedicated to the effort and to rely on help from recruiters and shared administrative staff. A better rule of thumb is that if the source is producing 50% of hires, it should get 50% of the sourcing resources.

You have repeatedly mentioned a dedicated referral team. What roles comprise this and what is each responsible for?

While there is no standard structure for an ERP management team, most of the organizations in our best-practice sample rely on a combination of roles that include:

• Program Manager (strategy, design, performance modeling/reporting, integration, etc.)
• ERP Communications (workforce segmentation, campaign development/execution, core process communication, broader program marketing)
• Program Coordinator (primary contact, referral screening/routing)
• Program Administrator (reward administration, data entry, conflict resolution)

There is a pretty equal split in our best-practice sample between organizations that maintain ownership of a candidate within the program through disposition and those that transfer or route a referral to a line-aligned recruiter for disposition. In organization that maintain ownership of the candidate, program coordinators are often full life-cycle recruiters allocated to the ERP.

Can ERP principles and approaches be used internationally with the same results?

As few as five years ago, it was difficult to put together a global referral program that was executed consistently across borders, but that is not the case any longer. Around the world, especially in fast-developing economies, ERPs are either the dominate source of hire or the fastest-growing source of hire. Globalization of management practices, largely Western in nature, is also widespread. Remember that social network adoption is also widespread around the world, and that many of the activities behind top-notch referral parallel top-notch networking. The key to success is to institute a consistent program around the world while still allowing for some local flexibility, particularly in communication and reward structure.

Can you give provide more context around why the percentage of top-performing employees referring is a key metric?

A best practice is to proactively approach your employees and ask them for referrals. Most firms that run the data find out that the very highest-quality referrals come from top-performing individuals working in that job family. Given this, it only makes sense if you are going to proactively approach employees and ask them for referrals, that you first approach those who are most likely to know and have strong relationships with other top performers (your top-performing employees in that job family).

I would like more details on recommended software packages for tracking and managing referrals.

While we have many great relationships with a number of vendors, we are vendor-neutral and do not recommend one solution over another. However, we are fanatical about pointing out that vendors must develop products for mass-market appeal, and what benefits the masses is rarely effective for best practice firms.

That said, administering a best-practice ERP is work-intensive and technology can and does play a major role in making it feasible. While we disagree with the design of some aspects of products available today, we champion others.

Most of the solutions developed specifically to support ERPs today either focus on enabling email/social media-based campaigns or administering the application workflow. The modules from the major ATS providers focus more on the latter, using a model of engagement we detest, but provide stronger workflow management. The vertical specific solutions focus much more heavily on campaign management and social network sharing, but often lack robust tracking and administration functionality.

A third category of solution, CRM systems, often provide robust functionality on both fronts, but are complicated to get running and not always developed specifically for use by recruiters.

There are literally hundreds of existing and stealth-mode ventures developing products to support social recruiting and employee referral, many of which will launch products in 2010. While we would love to tell you about them, that might get us in trouble! Firms you may want to check out with products or services available today include: SelectMinds (sponsor of the ERE Webinar), Jobvite, IdealHire, Peerlo, LinkedIn, TMP, Jobs2Web, and your major ATS providers.

Can you share what some of the admin processes are that differentiate best-practice firms producing 45% or more of external hires from referrals and typical programs?

The answer to this question really is what we have been writing about for sometime, but quickly summarized they are as follows:

1. Programs are formally chartered and managed
2. Program strategy developed to specifically support segments of the overarching staffing strategy
3. Program measured against specific pre-developed goals and objectives
4. Prioritization of jobs (limited program scope or differentiated rewards)
5. Prioritization of inbound candidate flow
6. Formally developed program communication strategy and viral messaging framework
7. Proactive approach and priming of employees for referrals
8. Minimized front-end bureaucracy (simple process to invoke for all parties, few policies)
9. Leverages referrer throughout process
10. Empowered with technology
11. Measured from every angle
12. Allows participation by broader group of stakeholders
13. Delivers exceptional candidate experience to all parties involved

Legal, Diversity, And Tax-related Questions

Are there legal concerns with stating we would like employees to refer a greater number of diverse individuals?

The primary answer to this question is that you must look at your ERP as a sourcing channel just as you look at other channels. All firms that have an affirmative action program must by definition reach out to targeted groups. I can think of few organizations that do not attempt to influence diversity of candidate slates by reaching out to venues that offer skewed diversity pools. As long as you assess candidates from the ERP just as you do candidates from other channels, you are not discriminating by asking the employee population to help increase the diversity of your candidate pool.

What are the tax implications of paying a bonus or giving a gift related to non-employee referrals? Often companies like the idea of getting referrals from vendors or people outside the company but they don’t know how to handle the tax issue.

First you need to realize that some of your vendors, customers, and corporate alumni will make referrals without any promise of a reward, if you ask. Apart from that, paying rewards, be they cash or gifts, to non-employees does create a taxable situation that will increase the complexity of the transaction. However, before you dismiss the idea, ask yourself “does dealing with the complexity of paying an outside individual cost more than the value of the hire that will be produced?” In most cases, capturing a few extra fields of data from a referrer to enable tax reporting and triggering the reporting process will cost the organization less than $100 in administrative time and processing per hire. The key is to always weigh the tremendous business benefit generated by a great hire against any minor administrative pain; the benefit will win every time.

On the one hand, recruiters get to have fun again, doing what they do best: recruiting workers. On the other hand, it means downsized staffs will have to cope with increased workloads.

Today, The Ladders, the job board for $100k minimum jobs, begins offering its contract customers a sourcing service that promises to deliver at least five, and up to 10, best-fit candidates within 48 hours.

Operating out of the company’s New York City offices, talent specialists will comb through the 4 million+ Ladders resumes to find the best matches for a particular req.

Alexandre Douzet, Ladders co-founder and president, told me last week in a pre-release briefing that FitFinder, as the program is called, was developed to help recruiters save time. For the last six months FitFinder was tested by several Ladders clients. After more than 2,000 searches, Douzet said the feedback was that the process works. Three out of four candidates were highly rated, while the 48-hour turnaround target time met client needs.

FitFinder doesn’t just match candidates to reqs. Douzet said the talent specialists consult with the recruiter — and sometimes with the hiring manager — to get a better understanding of both the position and characteristics of the desired candidates.

I asked Douzet if in the testing there had been any reqs with no suitable candidates. One, he said, explaining it was such a specialized type of job that there were few qualified workers anywhere. It won’t be often, says Douzet, that the talent specialists come up empty-handed. The Ladders’ 4 million resumes account for 25 percent, he said, of the 16 million high wage earners in the U.S.

• On July 13, ERE community members will be coming together across the globe to attend a series of local meetups. These meetups will be locally run and organized by the people attending them. To date 94 cities across nine countries featuring 600 people will be coming together to meet and network. Want to see what is going on near you just click here and sign up!
• We have finalized our 2010 fall events schedule, and everything will kick off with the fourth #socialrecruiting summit. Following up on a highly successful event last month in Minneapolis, we will be heading out west on September 13 at Microsoft’s Corporate HQ in Seattle. This event, which will break through the social recruiting hype and bring you real-life case studies that are currently in use at companies, will feature Chris Hoyt from Pepsico as the chairman. Learn more at http://socialrecruitingsummit.com.
• We just announced last week that the next SourceCon event will be taking place on September 28-29 at The International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. I am pretty sure you will be hard pressed to find a cooler venue for research and sourcing professionals to learn and play than the Spy Museum, and a better group of speakers to learn from.
• Capping it off will be the annual Fall ERE Expo, once again returning to the beautiful Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, FL from October 26-28. Featuring over 30 corporate recruiting practitioners and thought leaders, you won’t want to miss this year’s event. And you can save $400 on the registration fee through July 16. Visit www.ereexpo.com for all the details.
• For the past few years we have teamed up with Jason Corsello and Knowledge Infusion for their annual Future of Sourcing & Recruiting survey. If you haven’t already, please take a few minutes to take the 2010 Knowledge Infusion & ERE Future of Recruiting and Sourcing Survey, and share your perspectives to help the talent acquisition community better understand and navigate this challenging environment.
• If you are in the recruiting ad agency space, time is running out to apply for the 2010 Creative Excellence Awards (CEA). The CEA has been recognizing excellence in recruitment advertising for over 30 years and this Friday, July 2 is the deadline to apply for this year’s awards. If you haven’t already, check out the full list of categories and apply online at http://www.ceawards.com/2010/.
• The past few weeks have also been very exciting around our parent company, ERE Media. Earlier this month in Las Vegas at the annual Fordyce Forum conference, we announced that Amybeth Hale will be joining us as the new Editor of The Fordyce Letter. The Fordyce Letter, which ERE Media acquired back in 2006, has been delivering its monthly newsletter for over 30 years, and now features additional content online at www.fordyceletter.com. Many of you may already know Amybeth, who has applied her eight-plus years in the recruiting and sourcing world by writing for both The Fordyce Letter and ERE.net in the past, and has been the editor of SourceCon’s The Source newsletter. If you are on the search and placement side of the business, you will certainly want to check out what Amybeth has planned at FordyceLetter.com.
• About a week and a half ago we quietly turned live our newest media property, TLNT. This site is something you will want to tell your colleagues in your HR department to check out. It’s covering comp, benefits, training, and all HR management issues — aka “The Business of HR.” The site is edited by John Hollon, who until recently was the Editor of Workforce Management magazine & workforce.com.

If you have any questions about what I have posted above, please leave them in the comments or drop me a line. Have a great week!

Litigation vs. ROI

Litigation threat has down-the-road implications for developing sound hiring and promotion processes. Attorneys seldom work for free, and you do not have to lose in court to lose money.

I have never personally met an attorney who was experienced in job analysis, conducting validation studies, or documenting assessment processes. I’m sure there are a few, but it’s generally not their specialty. Attorneys are trained to know the law and to argue persuasively, not design, develop, and validate selection systems. The corporate attorneys I have worked with fully appreciate the benefit of a well-documented job analysis, validation study, and assessment process. To quote one of them, “I would much rather defend <this process> than the one we use now.”

Remember, in the litigation world, making a persuasive argument is more important than making a good employment decision. However, in the organizational world, if you don’t make a good employment decision, you get to pay twice: once for litigation and forever for low performance.

No Better Than Chance

We said earlier that people tend to think interviews and tests are two different things. Fortunately, for them at least, interviews fly under the validation radar because most folks think of them as conversations. Unfortunately, once an unstructured interview has screened out the blatantly unqualified, it has a long history of chance-level hiring decisions. Think of it this way: after the candidate has passed on unstructured interview, you might just as well ask him or her to pick a marble from a jar filled with 50 red marbles and 50 blue. Blues are high performers. Reds are low. Unstructured interviews are a significant blind-spot. We all know that.

Validation Designs

You don’t need to know the details, but you do need to know there are different kinds of validation. They include predictive designs where everyone takes a test, the scores are ignored, and job performance is later compared with test scores; concurrent designs where job-holder scores are compared with job performance; individual comparisons; group comparisons; group averages and score distributions; measuring job content; evaluating mental constructs; assessing OTJ performance criterion; examining the face of the test; and, so forth.

I prefer predictive designs using OTJ performance, but organizations seldom have the patience to wait; designs using current employees suffer from technical problems (see range, below); and, defining performance is always an issue no matter what design is used.

Just remember that there is no single type of validation. It varies with application; the number of people involved; the potential exposure for litigation; the importance of the job; and, so forth. One last point: Taking a broad-scope generic test, giving it to all job holders, and developing a high-group norm and a low group norm is not validation. Why? Validation requires a causal relationship. Like hemlines and the stock market index, other than moving together, if one does not cause the other, numbers do not make it valid.

Performance Considerations

Next, there is the problem of “what to measure”; that is, the data used to validate, or verify, the test actually works. This includes hard data like turnover, individual production, new account generation, business expansion, call time, customer satisfaction, and so forth. Hard data is always nice to have, but we have to remember it often conflicts, is part subjective, and part objective. Data taken from performance reviews are usually frustrating (i.e., useless). Everyone tends to look the same on paper.

We may have to make compromises and adjustments along the way, but, if test scores cannot be compared with performance, there is no way to validate the test. You might as well stop testing, buy a jar of red and blue marbles, and save your money. Your employees will be embarrassingly average, but I’m sure there is a sharp litigator somewhere who might be able to make an effective argument for using marbles.

Range Restrictions

Validation is always confounded by the problem of restricted range. Restricted range means differences between high and low performance among job among job incumbents will always be much less than among job applicants (e.g., think of skill differences between pro golfers and skill differences between people in the gallery). Ideally, we want to compare a broad range of test scores with a broad range of performance ratings.

Restricted range plays havoc with analysis because, instead of having the luxury of big differences between best and worse, the analyst must examine teensy-weensy test score differences and teensy-weensy on-the-job-performance differences.

Group-Size Prerequisites

I won’t go into statistics except to say that trust drops fast if the differences are small and there are insufficient people to evaluate (i.e., I prefer 25 people per factor); if you try to measure too many different things with the same test; if the test domain does not actually lead to or affect performance; if both performance and test scores are not normally distributed; or, if the groups are unequal, then you cannot trust your analysis. For example, comparing scores of five Pandas, 25 Penguins, 12 Puppies, 18 Kittens, and three Bunnies might give you impressive looking numbers, but they will be junk.

Assessment Is not a Four-Letter Word

I listened to an excellent webinar last week. It addressed accurate hiring and placement techniques. The presenters cited substantial payoff in ROI measured by turnover, productivity, training, performance, sales, and so forth. I’m sure many C-level executives would give up their Mercedes for a week in exchange for the financial benefits presented, but there were less than 100 people in attendance! And half those indicated they were already using assessments. What’s up with that?

I think the HR community considers assessments in the same class as toxic waste: dangerous, threatening, difficult to handle, and expensive. Well, let’s put that to rest. Assessment is just another word for “measurement,” and, measurement takes place every time a candidate is screened for a job. Don’t forget an unstructured interview is an assessment (although a rather poor one).

The webinar folks argued the same point I have been trying to make for years: accurate (i.e., validated) tests and assessments lead to better hires, and that leads to reducing expenses and increasing revenue. Is it expensive? Compared to what? How would you feel about an ROI of at least 100% within the first one or two hires? And, non-stop payback after that?

Organizational Handicapping

Here are some of the symptoms of using low-accuracy assessments, failing to validate the assessments you are now using, or selecting employees based on demographics instead of individual skills:

• Not enough people with the right KSAs for promotion (i.e., increasingly complex jobs require increasingly complex KSAs)
• Increased potential for litigation and adverse impact (i.e., decisions are based on personal opinions are less predictive than legally credible validated data)
• Frequent training requests to fix “broken” (i.e., unskilled) employees
• Weak bench strength limits organizational flexibility and reaction time.

The Final Product

I want to leave you with these thoughts. If test or interview questions are not validated, then it is not possible to know whether they work or not. There is no such thing as an EEOC or OFCCP pre-approved test. There is no such thing as a generic test validated for your industry (unless, in the unlikely event, you can show the two jobs require essentially the same KSAs). And, managers’ home-brewed tests are something to avoid like the plague. Finally, investing in validated tests, interviews, and assessments can yield the single best ROI of any organizational dollar you could imagine.

Can you imagine what it would be like if management considered your department a revenue generator instead of expensive overhead?

Tell Me About Yourself

Asking someone to “Tell me about yourself” does not sound like a test question. But, what would you call asking a question, evaluating the answer, and making a decision? It makes no difference if it’s written on paper or verbal. If you make a decision based on a candidate’s answer, it’s a test. Now, how about this kind of test question:

“Give me an example of when you solved a difficult problem. Tell me what the problem was, what you did, and the result.”

Better, yes? But only if the interviewer knows that problem solving is important to the job; the kind of problem solving required; the difference between good and bad problem solving; can pry details from the candidate; and, uses a standardized scoring sheet. Why get all nitpicky? Structure is the best way an interview question can be a good predictor of job performance.

You may think unstructured interviews are the bread-and-butter sandwich of recruiting, but look between the slices: usually you’ll find mold and rancid butter. Interview questions need validation just as much as formal tests.

You cannot trust any selection tool that is not valid! Consider Merriam-Webster’s definition of valid: having authority, relevant and meaningful, appropriate to the objective, supported by truth, basis for flawless reasoning, evidence, justifiable. Now, isn’t that something you want?

False Sense of Security

Once upon a time I worked for a large consulting company. It was filled with administrative assistants who could not spell and used bad grammar. After listening to client complaints, I went to the internal HR department and asked if they gave AA applicants a spelling and grammar test. “Yes,” they answered, “We use one developed by the owner.” A quick examination showed the test looked OK (i.e., was face valid) so I asked if I could see the scores from the last 100 hires. Guess what? Passing rates averaged about 95%!

High AA scores might have given HR a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it was just another case of organizational incontinence. I considered giving them a box of departmental-sized Depends, but I think they would have missed the point. Their test did not test anything! It was not valid. While worker bees labored to present a professional image to big-buck clients, incompetent AAs were misspelling words and using atrocious grammar. I’m sure the president would have responded if he had known, but HR was not going to rock the boat if their life depended on it.

Self-developed tests may seem like a good idea, but they are usually inaccurate, invalid, or poorly maintained. Bogus tests harm the organization because they give a false sense of security, while actually doing nothing to improve quality of hire. This is especially true when managers get frustrated and decide unilaterally to make up their own test. If it’s important enough to test, it is important enough to validate. Otherwise, forget it. Even high-profile assessment organizations make foolish decisions.

From the Frying Pan Into the Fire

Math and reading are becoming problematic. I’ve heard from dozens of organizations about employees who cannot read, calculate, or write. This is an issue when becoming automated, adopting computer-driven equipment, or encountering frequent or steep learning curves. In response, unknowing people think grabbing a test off the shelf will solve their problems. I’ve even seen some who used reading tests developed for placing students in the right English class.

Testing studies show a three-bears effect. That is, human KSAs come in sizes: too little, too much, and just right for the job. For example, we know intelligent people tend to perform better than unintelligent ones; and, intelligent people tend to score higher on abstract verbal and numerical tests. But now life gets challenging …

It’s a fact of life (at the group level) that intelligence test scores cluster into different curves depending on demographics. There are plenty of theories why, but we’ll conveniently ignore them. Let’s just say we have five demographic groups: Pandas, Penguins, Puppies, Kittens, and Bunnies. Pandas score an average of 85, with 2/3 falling between 70 and 100; Penguins average 93 with 2/3 between 77 and 107; Puppies average 100 with 2/3 between 85 to 115; Kittens average 107 with 2/3 between 100 to 122; and Bunnies average 114 with 2/3 between 107 to 129.

Demographics membership does not force someone to be smart or dull. Individual Pandas can still score substantially higher than individual Bunnies and individual Bunnies can score lower than an individual Penguin. There will just not be as many high-scoring Pandas and Penguins at the group level than Kittens and Bunnies. Now this next part is important!

We don’t need to be rocket scientists to know that low scores lead to mistakes, bad products, and safety violations, while high scores usually lead to boredom and turnover. Balancing demographic differences with our need for “just-right” intelligence, how do we establish and defend cutoff scores?

No organization I know is forced to hire unqualified people. But, the EEOC and OFCCP expect you to show there is a business need and job requirement. Oh yes, and it is incumbent on employers to give new employees “reasonable” time to learn the necessary skills. If you eliminate new employees based on something they could learn in a reasonable time, you better be able to explain why.

A well-done validation study keeps the input funnel filled; employs only fully qualified employees; keeps training times reasonable; minimizes adverse impact at the group level; and maintains both business necessity and job requirements.

In the next part, I’ll discuss a few differences between validation and litigation.

The profiles start at around $495 for companies with 5,000 employees or less, with discounts for companies that commit to 12 months. Bigger companies usually pay $795/month, but a few with super high traffic will pay more. Fourteen companies, including the Cleveland Clinic, Orbitz, Microsoft, AT&T, Geico, Adobe, and Ernst & Young, are signed on, at a discount to start. They’ll have pages on Glassdoor with a “why-work-for-us” section, a listing of best-places-to-work awards, a feed of open jobs, and a feed of the company’s Facebook and Twitter updates.

Also, companies that pay get an analytics page showing such things as what other companies the candidates who visited their page also visited, as well as what cities they’re located in. So Adobe’s analytics page hypothetically might show that its applicants are also visiting Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel’s pages, and that they’re most often located in San Francisco, San Jose, and Austin.

Glassdoor says it has two to three million visitors per month, and is growing 15-20% monthly. Half the users have zero to five years’ experience.

Yet when the offer package came, there was a significant typo, which could have translated into several thousand dollars of unintentional income to my friend.

Of course my friend pointed out the error, and new docs were drawn up, but something sad happened in the interim.

A bit of tarnish on the brass ring.

(What do you do when the cover letter has a typo? Recruiters are always looking for reasons to dump resumes in the garbage, and when candidates send cover letters with typos, they throw them out — no matter how good the credentials might be.)

There are many phases in the recruiting process, including:

• Advertising
• Sourcing
• Pre-screening
• Interviewing
• Preparing for the new hire
• Offers and regrets

How your recruiters (internal or external) handle each part shapes impressions, positive or negative, of your brand.

If your brand is about Delivering the Wow (Zappos), then I want to be just as wowed with the recruiting process as I am when my shoes arrive (I am.)

Your brand beats through everyone.

But for every active seeker, there are many more who, if they learned of the right opportunity, might just be convinced to kick the tires. Reaching those millions of others in order to find just that one, perfect candidate, is a recruiting goal best described as a quest.

For years, now, the job boards have been in hot pursuit. They’ve partnered with newspapers — CareerBuilder is mostly owned by newspaper publishers and Yahoo’s network is hundreds of newspapers deep — they power niche sites, buy keywords on search engines and traffic from social media, and have built networks of hundreds, even thousands of blogs, content providers, hobby sites, professional associations, and others.

In most cases, the networks and traffic deals simply broaden the distribution of job postings. Some, like the programs run by SimplyHired and Indeed, offer publishers the ability to choose what types of job ads to display. It’s a rudimentary type of targeting based on the content and nature of the site.

Monster’s Career Advertising Network is more sophisticated in that it targets ads to the user based on their browsing and job search behavior. Come across an ad that catches your attention and you click into the posting on Monster.com.

But recruiters are looking for more; instead of simply collecting apps, recruiters, influenced by social media, want to build relationships with candidates and bring them to the corporate career site.

Now Monster is leveraging its ad network to drive candidates to where recruiters want them and to deliver an advanced set of analytical tools to  help them more accurately tally up the results of a CAN ad.

I got an overview of the changes Monster has tested with some of its bigger customers. The change in the business model will undoubtedly appeal to recruiters and employers who might have balked at the old program’s double-dipping. Previously, you bought a job posting on Monster, then bought a CAN ad that linked to that job posting.

However, Monster is clearly putting the emphasis on building traffic to corporate career sites. Customers want to go from their ATS to the ad network and drive traffic back to the corporate career site via the ATS, Monster’s PR chief Matt Henson said, explaining the rationale behind the first of the enhancements to CAN.

Previously, employers who bought into CAN converted a job posting to a text ad (with logo) to get broader exposure: active job seekers via the Monster posting, and passive seekers (or at least less active seekers) via the CAN ad. CAN, being a period buy, meaning the ad would be served up over 14 or 30 days, didn’t guarantee a certain number of impressions, but company officials said an ad would typically get at least 40,000 and as many as 200,000.

Now, employers who have a Monster account can skip the job board posting and go right to CAN, bringing potential candidates directly to the corporate career site where the company can tell its story and begin a relationship.

The second development that Monster introduced is every bit as valuable and, if you are data-driven (as Dr. John Sullivan has been evangelizing for years), it may even be more useful. This is a set of enhanced analytics that can tell you where a candidate saw your CAN ad, how they came to your career site, and what they did when they got there.

So even if a candidate came across the ad last week, didn’t click on it, but today remembered it and Googled the company to find the job, the new analytics will tell you that. Did the candidate check out the job, leave, and then come back a few days later to apply? The metrics will tell you that.

“It let’s us go beyond the click,” says Chris Snow, analytics product manager at Monster. His comment that these analytics are “a powerful tool for recruiters” is understatement. Besides offering insight to the targeting and effectiveness of a specific ad, the data can help assess the ad’s branding value.

The first release of the analytics are already in place. They provide data on landing page visits (for the ads), candidate source information, application starts and completes, and basic ad click and impression information. More data points are coming in the future.

The analytics use a cookie with a 14-day duration, so anyone refusing cookies or who cleans them out at the end of a browsing session or acts after two weeks doesn’t get counted. That’s an issue everyone faces with cookies.

Still, that’s likely only a small number of job seekers. For everyone else, recruiters can get a much clearer picture of candidate interest and ad yield.

It’s also a plus for Monster, since source of hire statistics have always been problematic. Most sourcing data is gathered by candidate self-reporting or automatic capture by the ATS. So that candidate who Googled the company in the example above would be counted as coming from a search engine, when, in reality, they were acting on an ad.

Making all this work requires a tight integration with a corporate ATS, which means the CAN ad tracking isn’t going to work for every employer. You need to  have a way to create and submit a requisition through Monster’s Business Gateway.

Monster says there’s also a certain amount of customization a vendor is going to need to do for the system to work. It’s working with a few of the major ATS vendors now, though the customers will be driving the integration.

A New York startup called Referrio is quietly entering this niche. On that site, Cisco, for example, lists 11 jobs and is offering about $2,500 per job for people who fill the openings by spreading the word through social media sites or email.

Meanwhile, Virginia Mason Medical Center has set up a “grab this widget” tool for employees to share the organization’s jobs. The Seattle-area nonprofit needs to fill a director of nursing informatics job, IT jobs for people with Cerner experience, and more.

Bernard Hodes helped it develop the widget, which recruiters and some Virginia Mason employees are putting on their Facebook pages and elsewhere. But a big push to get employees to add it to their sites is yet to come. First, the center needs to set up a social media policy. ”We’re a little bit new to all of this,” says strategic recruitment specialist Carol Altschul. “I think it’s kind of happening a little backwards. The social media (widget) set up, then the policy created. Right now it’s just kind of growing organically. We’re getting our feet wet.”

At Enterprise Rent-A-Car, employees are adding widgets about company jobs to their personal Facebook pages, and getting paid if the widgets result in a hire, which, I hear, a couple have. Hyatt is testing a widget developed by NAS; Hyatt employees will be listing Hyatt jobs on their Facebook pages and sending them out to friends via Facebook.

At Banner Health, the Phoenix and Western U.S. nonprofit, experienced nurses and occupational/speech/physical therapists are among the highest in demand. Michael Seaver, sourcing program manager, said there was “unreal” interest when the 36,000-employee organization moved to an electronic employee referral system two months ago. About 1,500 people referred candidates in about a month. This was not a social media campaign per se, but that’s likely coming soon. Banner, with help from CKR Interactive, is working on how it’ll incorporate its 16 Facebook pages, 16 Twitter accounts, and YouTube account into employee referrals. Banner was until recently in a transition phase, acquiring other organizations. Now, it is “focusing on the people we have,” says Seaver, and will make it easier for those people to refer others.

One sign of the employee-referral times is that SelectMinds, a company mainly known for its work on alumni networks for corporations, is moving deeper into the referral world.

Michael Mallin, the SelectMinds VP of product management, believes that “innovation stalled” a bit during the recession, which “created an opportunity to do something quickly.” That something is a tool that melds employee referrals with social media. Jobster, Mallin believes, had the right idea, but was simply ahead of its time, just before the real explosion in social media. He says that Jobvite (whose success with TiVo I wrote about in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) has a good handle on small and mid-size companies, particularly those that want to use Jobvite as their talent acquisition system, but that SelectMinds’ relationship with large firms, like the biggest accounting companies, will help its referral program succeed.

SelectMinds is planning on having a couple of its clients do a free beta of the referral product for two or three months, starting probably in July. For companies that pay, Mallin says it’ll cost about $2,500 per month for companies with up to a few thousand employees, and higher for the largest firms. Pricing varies based on the number of people you make “referrers.”

What happens with SelectMinds is that an automated (or manual, if a recruiter wishes to select some employees to send it to) email goes out to people who might be able to help fill a job. Let’s say hypothetically we’re talking about a software job at Nationwide, and that the job is in Dayton, Ohio. An automated email about the job opening might go out to 1) Nationwide employees in any region who are in IT jobs, and 2) all Nationwide employees in Dayton. The SelectMinds email allows employees to either email selected contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to tell them about the job, or update their LinkedIn and Facebook statuses (and soon Twitter, just not on the demo I saw) with info on the job. The chain of link-forwarding gets tracked as it moves around online, and the employee either gets the whole referral kitty, or can share part of it with a second person, depending on how the company sets it all up.

The employee who’s doing the referring can tell their company, via a short form, how well they know their friend, and what they think of them. The referring employee also gets emails notifying them if their contact has expressed interest in the job.

Meanwhile, recruiters view a dashboard listing how many times a job was referred, and how many applications came in for it. A recruiter can drill down and see who’s referring who.

Mallin hopes the future versions — and he says SelectMinds hopes to release new ones monthly — are “more intelligent.” For example of what he means, let’s take that software job in Dayton. Mallin hopes that a later version will notice that a Nationwide employee may not be in the software field now, and may not even be in Dayton now, but the system knows through combing that employee’s LinkedIn profile (if privacy rules allow it) that she used to work in the software field. Because she may have friends who still work in the field, she’d get the automated job notice asking for referrals. This smart marriage of referrals and social sites is where we’re headed.

Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

The performance gap between the very best employee referral programs and the typical program is growing dramatically wider each day. Benchmark organizations dedicating resources and formally managing their programs are very close to producing 50% or more of all external hires from their programs — nearly double that of the average firm. They are also using their employee referral programs to accomplish objectives not directly related to closing requisitions, including increasing workforce diversity, and influencing their organization’s employment brands.

The increasing disparity in performance is largely attributed to the lack of management. Many recruiting leaders view ERPs as simple programs, requiring little in the way of resources and day-to-day management. They throw together a simple policy and call it a program. Unfortunately, such efforts lack formal design, formal goals, and often ignore a multitude of variables that lead to improved performance and prevent barriers to performance from emerging.

The end result is easy to see in organizations large and small: newly launched ERPs become stale and outdated within months of launching, their performance rising, leveling, and dropping off until someone steps up and once again opts to retool the program.

Based on the registration response and volume of questions submitted during a recent ERE webinar on Making Your Employee Referral Program Work Smarter, clearly many organizations have retooling their programs on their agenda. With nearly a question a minute coming in from the hundreds in attendance, responding to all simply wasn’t possible. What follows are the public questions that were submitted (grouped, combined, and summarized) and our brief response to each. Looking for more detail? Use the comments functionality following this article to let us know and we’ll do our best to develop future content along those lines.

Benchmark Research

Many of our perspectives on employee referral program design and performance are based on benchmark research conducted in 2006, 2007, and 2008. With a data set that includes more than 600 organizations dispersed across more than 26 countries, there is little we have not seen. This fall (September), we’ll repeat our core benchmark study, making summary results available for free to all organizations that participate. If you’re interested in participating, register here, and you’ll be notified when the process kicks off.

Social Media Integration-related Questions

Can you offer some suggestions on making smoother handoffs between the referral program or social networking program and recruiting?

As more and more psycho-social research about the impacts of social networks on relationships emerge, one thing is clear: social media tools dramatically increase the number of close relationships an individual can maintain. Some studies demonstrate that proficient social media users can maintain close relationships (relationships in which they know a number of recent personal details about the other person) with three times as many individuals as nonusers. These expanded networks are a rich resource that many organizations would like to tap, but early efforts to drive conversion from contact to applicant were rarely successful. One of the key drivers of failure in early adopter organizations was an assumption that the same old approach to communicating employment opportunities could be applied to social media communication channels. That assumption ignored the fact that social media tools were developed primary as a means for a close network of people to communicate with one another via a channel free from spam and noise. To better take advantage of social media within the enterprise and to smooth the handoff during conversion, organizations need to invest in three practices.

• First, you need to develop a primer to help employees cultivate professional relationships online. This often entails educating them on how to identify valuable contacts, how to make a good introduction, how to establish a mutually beneficial dialogue, and how to determine if and when referring someone to the organization should be considered. We all know how employees feel about training, but to our surprise, 51% of 15,000+ employees surveyed in 2008 indicated that training on cultivating a stronger professional network was the No. 1 thing their organization could do to improve their ERP.
• Second, you need to develop a way of communicating critical position vacancies to the segments of the workforce that are most apt to be able to refer a qualified person in a manner that isn’t spam. We all know what spam is; the vast majority of HR communications qualify! A good approach uses hyper-defined segments and crafts messages that go far beyond just detailing the openings. Great ERP communications explain why finding great talent for the open positions is important to the organization and to the recipient of the communication. They also include priming questions, or questions that can help the recipients more quickly identify who they may know, and provide interesting information about the role, the team, or the organization that someone may actually want to share in casual conversation.
• The third practice you need to develop is allowing referrers to make a referral in a manner consistent with dealing with a friend, but that delivers value to you the employer. This involves making the submittal process easy but qualitative. You need information, and both the referrer and the referral need a way to provide it to you that isn’t cumbersome. The e-commerce model of sending a link to a referral that takes them back to the online application doesn’t fit this audience and should be dropped like a hot potato. Consider allowing employees to make a referral using a social network ID, and ask them to prequalify the referral using one to three questions.

Having developed these three practices, the organization needs to highlight successes visibly and frequently. Establish goals for both the ERP and the social networking initiatives, because goals give you an excuse to communicate and a target to track against. Reward successes, and provide a means for employees to easily share what is and is not working.

What are some alternatives to social networking sites if these sites are prohibited by the company legal department?

Obviously the most desirable approach is to make the business case to change internal perspectives/policies, but until that is accomplished, there are still some actions you can take. A number of tools make it possible for employees to publish content to their social networks via e-mail; tweetymail is a good example. While this approach will not enable the same rich networking experience as interfacing with the services directly, it can provide organizations with an effective way to use the services within the network policy of the organization. Many proficient social media users also connect to social media services via mobile devices, which your organization may have a policy against using on company time, but which is most likely ignored. Recognizing that adept networkers will always find a way, and developing tools or approaches that lend themselves to the alternative access methods, is a way to be supportive.

What technology have you found most successful in tracking the social media network referrals?

As mentioned earlier, converting social network contacts into referrals can be a daunting activity. Early research has shown that the last thing you want to do is take a newly developed or cherished online contact and force them into the torture process that is the online application. Conversion rates of social media contacts to applicants can be as much as 10 times higher when alternative application methods are used, mini-registration forms on micro-sites and landing pages being the most common. Five years ago there were not many software systems available specifically developed to help administer ERPs, so many best practice firms built their own solutions internally to support their programs. Today, firms like SelectMinds (webinar sponsor) and Jobvite provide tools that can not only help you drive awareness of opportunities, but also track the response. An alternate method involves using a CRM system such as Salesforce.com or Avature and evoking the web-to-lead functionality. Web-to-lead lets organizations rapidly create a number of online forms that funnel data on respondents back into the CRM as leads, which can then be tracked through a defined workflow. The later approach would let you create different referral forms for departments, social media campaigns, locations, etc.

Program Administration-related Questions

My company requires a waiting period after hire of the referral, before paying any referral bonus. I am not sure it serves any legitimate purpose. Thoughts?

Never ever delay payment. It’s a program killer. I do not know where this silly practice originated from, but it is a useless policy that will severely dampen enthusiasm. Unless your organization does an incredibly poor job selecting who to make offers to, 99.9% of the time the referral will outlast the waiting period, saving the organization nothing and penalizing the employee in the process! Delaying the reward just adds another administrative issue, expanding the process time significantly and forcing developing of a tracking element. Most reasons for early turnover are related to the manager or are related to issues beyond the new hire’s control and have nothing to do with the referring employee. If you do have an employee consistently providing bad referrals, coach them. If an individual manager has high early turnover rates from any source of hire, coach the manager.

If you can’t develop a business case to stop delaying payment, consider repositioning the reward. Instead of communicating that the reward is withheld until completion of a probationary period, give the referring employee a small reward at time of hire and alter your reward structure to provide a larger reward for all referrals that result in a hire that obtains above-average performance ratings after six months. This approach will encourage the referring employee to support the referral during the early stages of employment and possibly even reduce overall program costs. Our 2008 research revealed that 58% of employees are comfortable with ERP rewards that vary with hire performance and that another 13% are neutral on the issue.

It seems difficult or ambiguous to tie referral credit to someone blogging. How do you identify who deserves credit, especially if the referral wasn’t a warm referral at the first point of contact?

There is a quite simple solution to identifying who gets credit for a referral. Ask the referral who played the biggest role in getting them to apply! If they list a specific blog, video, social network contact, etc. you can use that information both to allocate the reward and to educate your employees about “what works” and what does not.

I understand that it is very important to respond to every referral within an acceptable period of time, but is an automated response enough?

It is certainly acceptable to send automated acknowledgments that a referral has been received, but that should never be the only communication sent to all parties involved. When automated responses are used, they should help establish expectations by outlining the referral process and estimated timeline. All referrals need to be closed; i.e., result in a hire or a decline. A personalized communication needs to be sent to every party involved at each stage of the referral process until the referral is closed, with the first personalized communication occurring within 24 to 72 hours of the referral submission. Think of it like an employee suggestion system; if a suggestion that an employee has worked hard on gets only a generic response, it is unlikely that you will get future well-thought-out suggestions either from them or their colleagues.

What should you do if the referral is clearly not qualified for the position?

This happens much more frequently in programs that lack a design element requiring referring employees to pre-assess or qualify their referrals. You must respond to all referrals, but in the case of outright rejections, it helps to provide the employee with feedback so that they know what they did wrong or the general reason for the rejection. This might include a checkbox list including insufficient education, insufficient experience, or lacking specific skills. If you do not have the resources for customized responses to all, you should at least provide specific feedback to first-time referrers, to well-connected individuals, to senior managers, and to individuals in the hard-to-fill positions.

Is there any research that demonstrates that companies make employee referrals a priority? If yes, how do they maintain two different recruiting processes?

In our benchmark research, we isolate the top 40 performing programs evaluated as our best-practice sample. In 2008, all but one of the firms in the best-practice sample maintained a separate recruiting process for referrals that fast-tracked evaluation and scheduling. Prioritization is becoming more common as more organizations acknowledge that treating all roles and organizational units equitably doesn’t mean equally. Business leaders expect prioritization even though they may not be happy when it negatively affects them. From an economic perspective, ERPs produce the best hire yield for external hires: 1:3 in best practice firms. So prioritizing flow from ERPs is a logical resource optimization tactic that drives not only efficiency, but effectiveness.

Other factors driving prioritization include the fact that all high-quality applicants (and referrals are top-quality candidates), once identified, should be given expedited treatment because they remain in the job market for such a short period of time. Prioritization also encourages your employees to continue referring, by providing a positive experience that validates that their input is valued. Incidentally, prioritizing referral applicants does not imply that they will undergo different screening or assessment, only that the process will trigger faster.

What should happen if a referral that was made for a position that involves a bonus … ends up being a better fit for another position that does not have a bonus attached to it?

Generally referral bonuses are tied to a specific job or requisition number because they are hard-to-fill jobs or are mission-critical. As a result, filling another position with a referred candidate would not automatically result in a reward.

What do you do when two employees refer the same candidate? Do you reward the earliest referrer or split it between them?

Generally, referral bonuses are paid to the earliest referrer but referrals can be set to “expire” after six months or one year. However, even the best-designed referral programs run into conflicts, so the best practice in those rare cases is to have the referral identify who played the biggest role in them joining the organization.

All referrals are important but how do you balance the fairness of someone who really worked hard to get a referral to someone who did not?

The foundation principle behind employee referrals is that employees will only refer those folks whom they desire to work alongside and who can do the work. Rewards primarily focus on results, not effort. I am not aware of a single firm that measures or rewards the amount of effort that the employee puts in to get a referral. Obviously, well-connected individuals can more easily make referrals, but they have over time invested in developing those connections. However, if all employees are given a wealth of information, templates, and best practices, you can certainly narrow the gap between the effort required by the well-connected and less well-connected.

Whether employed or one of the 8.6 million men out of work, fathers are feeling stressed, fatigued, and for the 2.7 million who have been out of work more than six months, discouraged.

The “mancession,” a catchy, sound-bite of a description for the recession has hit men, especially those at mid-career, disproportionately hard. The 2009 summary from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells the story. At the end of the year, men accounted for 59.3 percent of the nation’s unemployed. But they made up only 52.7 percent of those working.

Both sexes are about equal when it comes to the average length of time it takes the unemployed to find a job: 24.6 weeks for men v. 24.1 weeks for women. Drill down a  bit and what you find is that way more men (59.7 percent) than women (40.4 percent) make up the long term unemployed — those out of work more than 26 weeks.

No surprise that outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas says  “the best father’s day gift would be continued assistance and support from family members as these out-of-work men continue their job searches.”

Working dads are also feeling the stress. They may not be worrying so much about the house or car payment, but a CareerBuilder survey says they are struggling to balance home and work. It’s not a new challenge, but it has been worsened for 10 percent of the surveyed dads who reported their spouse or partner became unemployed in the last year.

The majority — 63 percent — say they work more than 40 hours a week, leading 37 percent to report spending less than two hours a day with the kids. More than a third — 35 percent — report missing two or more significant events in their child’s life because they had to work.

Now we all know that some of that is dad’s own doing. Even in good times, fathers choose work over a soccer game or school play. Even when employers make efforts to afford employees some balance, says Jason Ferrara, CareerBuilder’s VP corporate marketing at CareerBuilder and a father of two.  “Year over year, we find that nearly half of working dads do not take advantage of the flexible work arrangements offered to them.”

So this Father’s Day, treat dad with some understanding. And dads, don’t blame that missed grade school graduation on work. As a friend of mine once told me, “I never heard of anyone on their deathbed saying they wished they spent more time at work.”

The minutes, released Wednesday, also show the council wrestled with the reasons why Employ Media, the registrar of the .jobs domain, was looking to expand its use and what value that expansion might offer the HR community.

However, if the council at any time actually enumerated the specific benefits of allowing non-company names to be used with a .jobs extension, it is not shown in the minutes.

When the council voted 7-1 on June 3 it approved a measure declaring simply that the proposed amendment “would serve the needs of the international human resource management community.”

The dissenter was not identified. Nor do the minutes indicate the reason for the ‘No’ vote, except to note that the dissenter declared it had nothing to do with the resignation of Jobing CEO Aaron Matos minutes before the meeting.

Matos, who declined to provide me a copy of his letter, would only say that it “detailed my unhappiness with the process.”

It must have been fairly pointed, since it was the first item of business on the day of the vote. (A previous departure from the council by Marilyn Mackes, executive director of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, wasn’t even mentioned in the minutes.)

The Matos resignation was read by council manager Gary Rubin, SHRM’s chief of publications and e-media. Say the minutes: “Gary then read to the Council the entire letter of resignation from Aaron Matos. Mr. Rubin then rebutted various allegations made in the Matos letter.”

It is likely Matos made reference to some technical and contractual issues, since the minutes indicate council members dismissed the objections. “Council Member #3 believed that he/she was not called upon to serve on the Council as a technical or legal expert, but rather, to vote upon whether or not this amendment is a benefit to the HR profession,” the minutes note.

Early on, the council (officially known as the Policy Development Process Council, or PDP council) heard from Employ Media, which administers the .jobs issuance and is the driver behind expanding the allowable names. Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, outlined the firm’s proposal then, later in the teleconference, was joined by other executives to respond to questions.

The minutes reflect little of the give and take, though they note the issues revolved around the grant to Employ Media of the right to issue .jobs domains by the Internet addressing authority ICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). A question about the financial implications for Employ Media was planned, the minutes note, but not asked.

Council members are referred to by number in the minutes so it’s not known who asked some of the more direct questions about Employ Media registering names to itself.

Such cloaking of speaker identities occurs throughout the meeting minutes. Indeed, at the group’s first meeting, Rubin listed a number of “housekeeping items,” one of which was, “The Council members should respect that Council meetings are closed, private sessions to enable all members to speak openly, freely, and candidly.”

The minutes of the council’s five meetings show the group periodically discussed the need to keep their deliberations private, going so far as to deny absent members access to recordings of the meeting.

At the April 30th meeting, which three of the nine members missed, the group discussed a request by one of the absentees to hear the taped proceedings. According to the meeting minutes:

“Council Member #9 noted that he/she has a problem with releasing the recording and how this could possibly be used if the public gets it Council Member #3 was also not comfortable about releasing the dialogue of the recording while we are still in the midst of the deliberation phase.”

At that meeting, the council discussed how it would solicit and receive input from the HR community. On the table was a focus group, a discussion board, and a scientific survey conducted by SHRM’s own research division. How, exactly, the focus group fit in isn’t clear, though there’s mention of one having been convened in Orlando.

In any case, the discussion board caused the council members the most trouble.

“Mr. Rubin suggested that perhaps we can open and publish the questions to anyone who wishes to answer but the responses should come back privately. Further, the public part is important so that the community feels that they have an opportunity to be heard. Ideally, it would be good for the comments to be seen publicly, but private comments would serve the Council better as far for receiving the information that the Council seeks and needs. The Council members agreed to make the questions public but the answers would only be visible to the Council.”

One other point about the process is worth noting. Council members were asked to subhmit a conflict of interest statement. Only two members indicated they had a conflictd — Matos and Nancy McKeague, senior VP, Michigan Health and Hospital Association. McKeague reported she had bought michiganhospitals.jobs, but let it lapse. Matos is founder, CEO, and an owner of a job board.

Rhonda Stickley’s role as president of DirectEmployers Association was raised as a possible conflict. The minutes show she dismissed it, describing herself as “a figurehead or voice of the members of Direct Employers” and not an employee.

DirectEmployers has been a major player in the expansion of the .jobs naming convention. Months ago, the organization began launching job boards with occupational and geographic names on the .jobs domain. It had planned to launch tens of thousands of these until ICANN stepped in.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. --Andy Warhol

It is time to change the recruiting game. Someone has to reinvent a process that is aged, inefficient, and marginally successful in procuring high-performing employees.

Over the past 20 years recruiters have been given magical tools starting with applicant tracking systems, then the Internet, job boards, recruiting websites, and now an array of social media tools. Yet, it is a sad fact that a single recruiter can deal with no more open positions than he could two decades ago, still feels overworked, and is deluged with unqualified candidates.

It is time to challenge our assumptions and reinvent the entire recruiting process. Let’s start by asking dumb questions: why does recruiting exist as a function? Is it to hire people? Surely given our technology, hiring managers could be trained to screen and select the people they need. Is it to screen candidates, schedule interviews? All can be automated. Is it to sell the organization to the candidate? That often happens prior to any recruiter contact through the products and services you offer, through fellow employees, through brand and reputation, and through your location. What the recruiter adds to this is useful, but probably minimal.

So, then, how can recruiters add value?Automation and Process Simplification

The recruiting process is made up of somewhere around 10 sub-processes which include employment branding, communicating with a hiring manager and developing a position description, sourcing, screening, assessment, candidate communication, and marketing (CRM), offer negotiation and presentation, closing, and in some cases onboarding.

Each of these sub-processes need to be examined and assessed for their efficiency and value. You should ask yourself whether that process needs to be done at all, and if so should it be done by a recruiter, and if not, by who? You should also ask whether that step could be automated, even partially, and even if it would be less than ideal. You need to apply the 80/20 rule to recruiting automation: if a tool, system, program, or application can do at least 80% of what a recruiter does, than you should switch to the automated process.

I believe that much of what the average recruiter does can either be simplified, eliminated altogether, or be done by automated systems. For example, is it really necessary to interview all candidates? Why can’t you develop and use a screening test of some sort and rely on that alone? Why does every potential candidate need to complete the usual intensive application process when all you need to know are one or two things in order to move the candidate forward? Why can’t you develop and use good CRM techniques and processes to ease the communication problem. There is a lot of room for improvement in the basic processes we follow rather blindly. By adopting a simplified and more automated approach, you free up recruiters so that they can really add value and improve the reputation and significance of the recruiting function.

Redefine the Need

Recruiting should not be a reactive function, only responding to the mandates of hiring managers. Recruiting needs to be the talent partner within the organization. It needs to have the labor market and available skills knowledge to help managers make the best decisions of the type of people to hire.

The model recruiting functions should work very closely with hiring managers, human resources, and other internal professionals to redefine the positions most commonly open. One method is to interview good employees, as defined by hiring managers and performance reviews, and then construct profiles of these employees that can, in turn, be used to construct screening questions. Building a profile of success saves hundreds of hours of recruiting trial and error. This process also affirms which roles are really important and which ones may be less so. Less-critical positions can be outsourced or put on a lower priority. Many times this process identifies changes that need to be made in the skills, competencies, or experience required for a particular role. Looking at the positions that you are being asked to fill in a constructive but positive way, adds to your credibility and aligns the needs more closely to the market.

Workforce Planning

The next step has little to do with traditional recruiting and is usually called workforce planning. It the skill of building forecasting capability and ensuring that the organization has, or can quickly get, the talent it needs to achieve its business objectives.

It requires some knowledge of demographic, economic, and business trends. It also requires a deep knowledge of the talent marketplace and familiarity with the level of education and experience available in the appropriate geography. It means collaborating with the internal training function, senior management, compensation, and human resources in general to agree on which talent is best sought externally, which is best sourced and promoted internally, and which needs to be developed by the company, because recruiting them is difficult and expensive. These tradeoffs and discussions have almost never happened in the past, yet they are becoming what differentiate a great recruiting function from an ordinary one.

Predicting who you will need, what skills will be important, or what experience will be best aligned with needs is not possible. What you can do by combing workforce planning with a talent community is build the potential — a capability to meet future needs — that did not exist before.

Building Talent Communities

Following all of this, only then is it productive to start sourcing and attracting potential candidates to a talent community. My article last week pointed out how a community differs from a talent pool or a database, and the distinction is significant. Talent pools are inefficient and in the end leave you where you started — with a large pool of unknown people who need to be further screened and qualified. A true community screens by the way people interact, by how they communicate, and by who they are connected to.

When an organization has a talent community, it has a dynamic and ever-changing pool of talent, skill, and experience to meet almost any need that might arise.

Recruiting is in dire need of change. Disruptive recruiting will showcase technology and apply it in a practical way toward improving and simplifying the processes that make up recruiting. Disruptive recruiting will also mean that recruiters need different skills, including those of networking and community-building.