Analysts expected a loss between 3 cents and 5 cents a share on revenue of $216 million. Monster, which reported its financial this afternoon, came in at break-even on earnings per share and $214.9 million on revenue.

Counting the HotJobs expenses and a few other smaller, one-time costs, Monster reported losing $2.96 million on revenue of $214.9 million. That translates into a 2 cent a share loss. Without those one-time expenses Monster’s loss was just under $200,000, which is break-even on a per share basis.

In the report, and reiterated during a 5 p.m. (EDT) conference call with analysts, Monster officials said the company expected a better year than it had previously forecast. Crediting an increase in bookings (contract sales), and sales of  its power resume search, CEO Sal Iannuzzi and CFO Tim Yates said the company now expected to lose between 6 and 14 cents a share, a significant reduction from a previous high of 20 cents.

Despite the bottom-line performance, Monster’s domestic and overseas revenue shows the continuing softness in recruitment. Though the picture is vastly better than in 2009 when revenue dropped 37 percent in the second quarter over the same period in 2008, lackluster job growth in the U.S. was the biggest drain on the company. North American revenue was $96.9 million, a drop of 5 percent over last year.

Still, Monster’s North American second quarter revenue was virtually unchanged from the first quarter and the international revenue was up. Between the 1st and 2nd quarters, Monster’s revenue was basically flat. That’s evidence that the U.S. economy is not getting any worse.

CareerBuilder, meanwhile, reported its North American revenue was $139 million, up 3 percent over the same period in 2009 and up 5 percent over the first quarter of 2010. The privately held company volunteers only its domestic revenue. It won’t disclose international revenue nor its expenses.

How the acquisition of HotJobs will change Monster’s financial picture isn’t clear, though in the near term it’s expected to contribute $20-$40 million before taxes, interest, depreciation, and amortization. Yates said HotJobs is expected to be a particular help in the staffing and healthcare areas.

The deal is to close sometime in the the current quarter. No HotJobs contributions were factored into the full-year financial estimates.

Dice, the other major publicly held job board operator, reported earlier this week that it earned 6 cents a share.

The agenda of the board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was released a short while ago and includes consideration of the proposal.

Also on the agenda for the three-hour meeting is the even more controversial proposal to approve a .XXX extension for porn sites. For obvious reasons, that request has garnered wider public interest, including 13,325 comments posted to the ICANN forum. The .jobs expansion plan garnered 316 comments.

The board’s telephone conference is not open to the public. An ICANN spokesperson said that the board’s decision on all agenda items will be made available following the end of the meeting. The spokesperson didn’t say exactly when the results would be reported.

The proposal by Employ Media, and endorsed by its partner, the Society for Human Resource Management, seeks approval to permit the use of geographic, occupational, and other names in conjunction with a .jobs Internet extension. (Complete coverage of the issue on ERE is available here.)

Currently, only employer names can be used. However, some non-employer names have been registered. The Chicago Urban League has one. It runs a job board on NextMove.jobs. At least a few others have been registered, including MakeItHappen.jobs, which is registered to Lee Memorial Health System and forwards users to Lee’s career site.

Employ Media wants permission to use the so-called generic names and assign them in one of three ways: first via an RFP process; then an auction; and finally on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The proposal has been widely condemned by the job board industry, which objects to the power it vests in Employ Media to decide who will get the names.

The beneficiary is widely expected to be the recruiting consortium DirectEmployers Association. The organization launched several job boards using the restricted addresses last fall and announced plans to launch tens of thousands — possibly a million.

Led by its trade association, the International Association of Employment Web Sites, hundreds of comments opposing the plan were posted to the ICANN forum. Monster and CareerBuilder posted notes, as did many other operators. Besides objecting to the distribution method, the opponents complained that the job board industry was not consulted, and that as a major player in sourcing and recruiting, it is part of the international HR community.

Proponents of the expansion, though not as numerous in the public comments, pointed out that a job board operator participated in the SHRM committee that considered the plan. Aaron Matos, CEO of Jobing.com, resigned before the vote on the plan was taken. The committee endorsed it 7-1 and the SHRM board later approved it, too.

SHRM was a sponsor of the creation of the .jobs address in 2005 and has since played a role in advising Employ Media on the program. One of its responsibilities is to review and recommend proposed changes.

With this in mind, I’d like to offer a few of my favorite passive candidate recruiting secrets.

Networking Secrets of an Old-time Headhunter

1. Network in 3D. While the names on LinkedIn are great to have, getting the names of their best connections is even better. As you begin your quest for great referrals, don’t just consider peers. Consider those who these people have mentored, who mentored them, who they most likely worked with on cross-functional teams, and who they regularly work with outside the company, including vendors, customers, and consultants.
2. Track your effectiveness. Don’t waste your time. Networking is not about dialing for dollars. Instead, track how many people call you back, how many are interested in talking about your position, how many are qualified for your opening, and how many referrals you get per call. If you’re not tracking this daily, you can’t get any better, since you won’t know what to work on. If you do track these metrics, you’ll soon discover that great referrals from well-respected people can increase your productivity 5-10X. That’s why the first name found on LinkedIn is not nearly as valuable as a referral from one of these people.
3. Get three referrals on each call. The most important metric you can track is how many high-quality referrals you get on each call. You need to become adept at getting these names. Make sure you highlight the fact that you don’t want to know anyone who’s looking. Instead, ask the person for the best person they know who’s absolutely not looking, but would be open to discussing a potential career move. Thinking in 3D helps here. For example, I’ve called buyers at major retailers looking for salespeople, product marketing people looking for engineers, ad agencies looking for product marketing people, and CPA partners looking for CFOs. The key is not to hang up until you have three great referrals if the person you called isn’t appropriate for the job at hand.
4. Don’t call people who won’t call you back. Great people will call you back if you mention the name of another great person. That’s why step three is so important. Track your callback rates. If you make sure that 80% of the people you call are warm, pre-qualified referrals, your call-back rate will be 75% or better. If you just make outbound cold calls, your callback rate will be closer to 25%. This is a huge difference in productivity.
5. Only call people who are worthy. While getting people to call you back is important, if they’re not worth talking to, it’s a waste of time. That’s why it’s important that you pre-qualify the referral. Just ask the person giving you the name why the person is a top-performer. As far as I’m concerned, a worthy person is someone who is either qualified for the job or knows someone who is.
6. Leave professional and career-oriented messages. Whether it’s a voicemail or an email, suggest you’d like to enter into a discussion regarding what could potentially be an important career move for the person. You must include some substantive proof as part of the message, not hyperbole. For example, “You might have heard that we just merged with XYZ Resources, and are looking for a product manager to lead the first integrated development project. I’d like to chat with you to see if this could offer a significant career move for you.” If you can mention the name of the person who provided you the referral you will more than double your callback rate. Hyperbole — “the greatest position in the world” — will cut it in half.
7. Create instant careers. If you’ve asked the person if they’re open to discussing a possible career move and they answered yes, don’t tell them much more about the job; instead, get them to first tell you a little about them. This is essential. As you quickly go through the highlights of the person’s work history, look for gaps in the candidate’s background your job fills. This could include staff size, scope of the project, impact the person can make, exposure to management, and the like. Mention these as reasons to proceed in the discussion. Of course, if the gaps are too big, or non-existent, smoothly switch your focus to getting three referrals.
8. Don’t take “no” for an answer. In addition to doing everything described above, you also need to be adept at overcoming objections. These cover the range from I’m not looking, what’s the comp, I’m happy where I am, to I’d don’t like the industry, your company has a bad reputation, and I don’t want to relocate. It’s impossible to put 20 years of advice into a single paragraph, other than to say that persistence is the key here. If your position represents a true career move, you owe it to your hiring manager, yourself, and the person on the phone not to give up until the person has the information needed to compare your job to what they’re doing today or whatever else they’re considering. Don’t give up until they do. Even if the person decides it’s not a true career move, you’ll still be able to get your three referrals.
9. Recruit first, network second. You’ll increase your networking productivity by directly recruiting the person first, rather than calling the person on some “networking” premise. To me this later approach should only be used when calling someone who clearly is not a candidate for the job. Recruiting the person first allows you to find out about the person’s background before revealing much about the job. This allows you to determine if you should recruit the person or get referrals. You also establish a different relationship once the candidate has shared some confidential information with you.
10. Become SWK (someone worth knowing). Top prospects want to stay connected with top recruiters who handle important jobs. To become SWK you must know the job, the hiring manager, your company, your industry, and your competition. You need to be seen as a reasonably objective career counselor who is only willing to proceed if the job represents a true career move. You know you’re SWK if you get unsolicited referrals from top people in your area of expertise who want to work with you and give you other top referrals.

What’s great about LinkedIn and its Recruiter product is it gets you in the major leagues on day one. This is an invaluable gift. Regardless, since everyone will soon have access to the same information, your ability to convert a list of names into hot prospects and great hires is the real difference-maker. In my mind, this is the essence of great recruiting.

The company reported this afternoon that it lost $1.4 million, up from just $113,000 in the same quarter last year. Stock options and costs relating to previous acquisitions totaling $6.9 million were responsible for the loss. Not including these expenses (which analysts don’t include in their estimates) and some minor other one-time expenses, Taleo earned 14 cents a share. That was 2 cents better than the analyst consensus.

Revenue from applications (software)– $47.9 million —  was almost 12 percent than the same quarter a year ago. That boosted the quarterly revenue to $56.3 million, for an overall increase over the year before of 14.6 percent.

Of the 226 new customers signed in the quarter, eight of the deals exceeded $250,000 annually.

Taleo also reported that CFO Katy Murray would leave by Oct. 1. She earns $315,000 and received a 2009 bonus of $126,000, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

Talk about global recruiting. In the last couple days, both Indeed and SiumplyHired have announced country-specific (or, in the case of Antarctica, continent-specific) job search sites.

SimplyHired added South Africa and Argentina to its roster. Indeed added 24 countries.

In five years the two job search engines have gone from start-up to grown-up, indexing millions of jobs a year. They’ve built enough of a presence to land themselves among the top 10-most-trafficked career sites.

Indeed’s new sites now give it a presence in a remarkable 53 countries. It offers its listings in 24 different languages, among them Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, and Russian.

SimplyHired, based in Silicon Valley, across the continent from its Connecticut rival, is now in 21 countries, providing its listings in 10 languages that include Chinese, Korean, German, and Spanish.

The two search engines now have a presence in more countries than CareerBuilder and just behind Monster. And Indeed may have the only job board devoted to Antarctica, which is almost certainly more for fun and marketing than anything else.

What’s particularly surprising about the two search engines is that after five years their business model is almost unchanged. Jobs are free to post and free to search. They don’t collect resumes and don’t require registration. You won’t find a single credit card come-on or vocational school ad. (At least, none I’ve ever seen.)

The two search engines survive on revenue from premium listings and  Google AdSense, which might bring in enough in a year to pay for outings like SimplyHired’s staff winery visit.

The fact that both companies have survived, and even grown through this global jobs drought, is evidence of the strength of the appeal of the pay-per-click model. Borrowing from the success of Google’s keyword ad program, the two sites allow employers to set a budget and pay only when a potential candidate clicks into the ad.

They’ve also been particularly clever in how they built networks. Where CareerBuilder and Monster pay for the traffic partnerships they have (the HotJobs acquisition is a traffic play), Indeed and SimplyHired offer tools that enable bloggers, niche sites, and in fact almost anyone, to offer jobs on their site. The publisher customizes the job feed to target jobs to the audience and they get to share in any revenue that is generated through their site.

In the early years, when both sites were scraping listings off other sites, including most of the major job boards, a concern was what would happen if the pay boards decided, as Craigslist did, to cut them off. Today, every job distribution service and most (if not all) ATS vendors send jobs directly to Indeed and SimplyHired.

With their traffic continuing to grow and their global footprint expanding, both sites are regularly included by employers as job posting destinations. It would almost unthinkable for a job board to turn off the feeds to either site. What would be the point? So many employers are sending their jobs directly to the search engines, that it would be a loss only to those who don’t.

What will be interesting to see is how the services evolve. While they’ve resisted collecting resumes up to now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change in the next five years. That they haven’t yet is partly technical and mostly practical. Resumes would have changed the competitive dynamic. Without resumes they are a distribution network. Collecting and selling resumes makes them a direct job board competitor, which might have choked them off at the starting gate.

If you haven’t checked into either site in a while, you might be surprised at the tools and utilities they offer, including integrations with Facebook and LinkedIn. Even if you don’t need to post a job, use the sites for business intelligence. Running searches is a good way to keep up with the local economy and to track what the competition is doing.

The Dow closed in positive territory, but just barely. Both the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 lost ground for the day.

The Conference Board’s Index fell to 50.4 from a revised 54.3 in June. The Index was last this low in February, when it stood at 46.4. Despite encouraging quarterly financial reports that have been trickling in since the end of June, the percent of consumers who expect business conditions to worsen rose in July to 15.7 from 13.9 percent in June.

Even more consumers are pessimistic about job growth over the next several months.

One in five (21.1 percent) expect fewer jobs to be available in the near future. The percent of optimists about future growth — those expecting more jobs — fell to 14.3 percent from 16.2.

“Concerns about business conditions and the labor market are casting a dark cloud over consumers that is not likely to lift until the job market improves,” says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. She warned that this year’s back-to-school retail season may be “challenging” due to “consumers’ heightened level of anxiety, along with their pessimistic income outlook and lackluster job growth.”

Consistent with the decline in The Conference Board’s Index, the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan confidence index dropped almost 10 points, going from 76 in June to 66.5 in July. That’s the lowest in a year.

Bloomberg News quoted Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia, declaring “Faith in the economic recovery is failing. It’ll be 2013 before we see any semblance of normality in the labor market,” he predicted.

Economists, job seekers, and recruiters will be watching closely next week as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the critical employment situation numbers. July’s numbers are expected to offer a sharper picture of job creation, because the counts should finally be cleared of most of the influence of the hiring and termination of hundreds of thousands of temporary Census workers.

Especially watched, as it has been since the Census ramp-up began, will be the private sector employment. The ADP National Employment Report, to be released Wednesday, will offer some clues about the BLS report, which will be out Friday morning.

The Index is a composite of the results of responses to an economic survey conducted monthly by TNS for The Conference Board, a private business economics research group.

Analysts estimated revenue would be right around $28.7 million with an average earnings estimate of 5 cents a share.

Investors bid up the price of Dice Holdings share by better than 5 percent. In afternoon trading in New York, DHX shares were selling at $8.29.

Growth was driven by ClearanceJobs.com, a job board for workers with security clearances, by international operations — especially in Asia — of its financial sector job site, eFinancialCareers.com, and by contributions from the company’s smaller units, including AllHealthCareJobs and Targeted Job Fairs.

Dice.com, the company’s flagship IT specialty job board, wasn’t detailed specifically, though it is the largest contributor to revenue. Dice reported that the DCS Online unit — Dice.com and Clearancejobs.com — contributed 71.3 percent of the total company revenue in the first six months of the year. That’s down from 74.4 percent for the same period in 2009, likely reflecting the continued softness in the tech sector.

Looking ahead, Dice said it expected revenue to continue growing. It estimated 3rd quarter revenue of $31.5 million and $121.5 million for the year. That compares to $26.7 million for the 3rd quarter of 2009 and $110 million for the year.

In addition to an improving global job market, Dice is also moving strongly into social recruiting. Today it launched the Dice Talent Network on the Dice.com site.

Monster will report its 2nd quarter financial results after the market closes on Thursday. CareerBuilder, as a privately owned company, isn’t required to report its numbers, but it typically does provide its North American revenue.

1. You shred the resume and delete it from your ATS
2. You make up a reason why she’s unqualified
3. You look up the classifieds in Soldier of Fortune magazine
4. You decide to interview her anyway

If you picked #4, you’d be in the minority.

In a recent survey by Microsoft 84 percent of U.S. recruiters think it is proper to consider personal data posted online when evaluating a candidate and do online research using search engines, social networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter, online-gaming sites, and even classifieds, and auction sites like Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc. What they expect to find in that last category is a mystery, but I guess you never know. Now whether all this “research” does anything to improve the quality of hires, or it’s just an excuse for voyeurism, is something we’ll likely never know. The survey doesn’t address results or even ask about the respondent’s perception of results.

Sauce for the Goose

If the survey numbers are true, then thousands of hiring decisions are being made based on information that may or may not be valid, from sources that may or may not be reliable, and using criteria that may or may not be relevant to hiring. What could go wrong? The Shirely Sherrod case that has been in the news is a perfect illustration of what can happen when an employment decision is made without understanding the context or the credibility of the source. And that involved dozens of people up to the level of the White House.

The survey mentions that concerns about lifestyle, inappropriate comments, and unsuitable photos and videos top the list of reasons that those surveyed give for rejecting a candidate. Well, since these criteria are so well defined with no possibility for ambiguity, it must be all right to use them. But recruiters also rejected applicants because of inappropriate comments by friends, family, and colleagues. So it’s acceptable to reject candidates based on gossip?

Relying on online information in a hiring decision can cut both ways. Already, services like Reputation Defender are offering to clean up people’s online reputations by bombarding the web with positive information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. What’s to stop candidates from creating largely fake online personas when they know that recruiters put so much weight on information they find online? Almost half of the recruiters in the Microsoft survey said that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to a great extent.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The danger for employers is that continuing to make hiring decisions based on data collected online will generate a legislative backlash. Several states –New York, California, and Colorado — already prohibit employers from taking any employment related actions based on legal off-duty conduct. It’s not a reach to see those provisions being extended to hiring decisions. And Congress may get in on the act. In times like these when jobs are scarce, an issue like this can garner plenty of bipartisan support. And that could be a disaster, since laws made in response to populist anger will likely make life difficult. For starters, they would impose very onerous reporting burdens on employers.

Some would argue that any such laws would be difficult to enforce, since a lot of this kind of research on candidates can be done anonymously. But that’s not quite true. Digital forensics is the fastest growing field in the legal profession, and the tools to discover where someone’s been online are getting very sophisticated.

The bigger issue: what’s the value being gained from all this online research? Few, if any, employers have specific policies and rules about how to interpret online information. Unlike information obtained from background checks, which is highly structured and obtained from very credible sources, virtually everything seen online is unstructured and from sources of unknown credibility. Ninety percent of respondents in the Microsoft survey claimed that they take steps to corroborate the authenticity of information they collect online. How exactly does one do that? If they see a picture of a candidate holding a glass of what appears to be beer do they track down the others in the picture and ask if the candidate is routinely drunk?

It appears that much of this activity is done because it’s possible, not because it results in better quality hires. It gives the appearance of having done a good job in evaluating a candidate when there’s no evidence that it makes any difference at all. There are examples of some employer that avoided making a genuinely bad hire because of something discovered online, but those stories don’t establish that aimless trolling for information improves the hiring process.

Interestingly among the survey respondents almost 90% of male recruiters check out candidates online, compared to only about 60% of female recruiters. So maybe it is about voyeurism and not hires. But recruiters are hard-working people, who often get little respect and appreciation. Who’s to deny them some fun?

Analysts, reported by Yahoo Finance, expect the job board company to report earnings per share in the range of 5 to 7 cents a share, with the consensus at a nickle. Besides its flagship IT site, Dice also owns a few other boards, among them eFinancialCareers and ClearanceJobs and a company that produces job fairs.

The numbers will be the lead item on the financial conference call with analysts, but you can be certain that CEO Scot Melland is going to showcase the Talent Network release.

The network is a major step to integrating social recruiting into a job board environment. Like Facebook or LinkedIn, the Dice Talent Network program  builds off a company profile that can be richly populated with external content, photos, even video. Recruiters can create their own profile page and invite potential candidates to connect with them.

It made sense for Dice to do this, Melland told me a few weeks ago, because of the nature of the visitors to the sites. (A similar service was rolled-out on ClearanceJobs.com in June.)

Most are employed, he explained. They come to the sites for the editorial content, the discussion groups, and to keep up with the kinds of jobs and companies that are hiring. Unlike a generic job board, Melland insists that a substantial number of visitors to Dice and ClearanceJobs are not actively seeking a new job, but are receptive to opportunities.

The new talent network has tools and features for them, and for employers and recruiters. Candidates or potential candidates can control access to their resume, choosing to focus only on certain companies, getting job and content updates delivered directly.

Employers and recruiters can build connections with these candidates, inviting them to join their network. They can chat with them, send email, and send them jobs.

Dice has been promoting its talent networks since launching the Cleared Jobs Network on the ClearanceJobs site. The video here is one of several for recruiters and job seekers on Dice’s YouTube channel explaining what the network is and how it works.

The launch of the talent network, says Melland, marks a “shift from a transactional (experience) to being much more of a relationship building.” Even so, he says neither the Talent Network nor the Cleared Network will replace job posting and resume sourcing. Consistent with the company’s understanding of just what social media is — “We define social media as any web-based tool or service that facilitates conversations and networks,” Melland says — “it’s another tool recruiters can use.”

Jobmagic

The company, the successor to job-match provider Vitruva, released a tool set for recruiters and employers that simplifies the distribution of jobs to social networking sites and spiffs up their appearance with logos, pictures, and even embeds You Tube videos.

Most of the features automate the job distribution to social and business networking sites and via Twitter channels. The graphic elements and the interactive components are differentiators in this growing area of social media servicing.

A Jobmagic posting can include a mini-profile to give candidates some confidence that there’s a real person somewhere out there who just might look at their application. Even better is a contact button that connects recruiter and candidate. I couldn’t find out how that’s done. IM would be really cool, but it’s probably a post to the recruiter’s or the company’s Facebook wall.

Somewhere out there, the Vitruva matching engine comes into play, alerting candidates in the Jobmagic system when they’re a good match to a job.

The other features of what Jobmagic is calling Social Media Optimization post the enhanced job listings to the various social networks, focusing, as you might expect, on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Jobvite launched a similar service not long ago. It does many of the same posting duties as Jobmagic, without the heavy branding emphasis. However, Jobvite leverages the network connections of recruiters and employees to seek out referrals in its own version of job matching. The bigger difference is Jobvite’s metrics, which can track where every candidate comes from and the referral chain that snared them. There’s even a free version called Jobvite Share.

If you don’t need all that horsepower, but want to do more than simply upload jobs to the social nets, Jobmagic looks like it has the chops to make the task easier while adding some creativity to your typical job posting.

A few years back I was advising a Fortune 100 firm that had a painfully slow and somewhat arrogant hiring process. To demonstrate the negative impact of their process I had to prove to a skeptical senior manager that they were letting top candidates get away. I asked a manager hiring for an important job to rank, in order of quality, 100 applicants who had been sourced for the role. The chosen rank was discretely written on the back of paper copies of the candidate’s resumes. Months after the role had been filled, the manager was asked if they were satisfied with the hire. He was, and felt quite certain that he had successfully hired a “top 5” candidate. After hearing of his satisfaction I had him look at the initial rank he had provided the candidate who was later hired: 75.

You can imagine his shock when he realized that the hiring process had somehow let every single one of the top-ranked applicants that the firm had prided itself in hiring “every single time” slip away. Clearly the quality of the people who they didn’t hire was significantly higher than the quality of the one that they did.

Selecting HR Metrics Is Unfortunately Not a Scientific Process

Most organizations adopt metrics based on those covered by benchmark reports or that can be easily enabled via their technology providers, instead of determining what they need to discover or prove. As a result, many organizations are burdened with data and reports that offer little in the way of guidance helping them improve their effectiveness. One metric often not fully taken advantage of is quality of hire, which I estimate less than 40% of organizations even attempt to use. Even fewer use the quality of hire derivative, quality of those not hired, because it can very quickly demonstrate how poorly a process performs.

Determine Where Your Recruiting Problems Are Occurring

During an advisory conversation with a recruiting leader at a well-known social networking firm experiencing difficulty achieving hire diversity, I asked “at what step or stage is your recruiting process failing?” I wasn’t surprised when he responded “we don’t actually know, we just know that the overall recruiting process is not producing the results we need.” Like many organizations, this organization lacked well-thought-out metrics that enable both performance reporting and process diagnostics.

Recruiting processes fail because either they do not attract enough top-quality candidates up front, or they fail to accurately identify, assess, and sell those attracted on the job at later stages in the process. Most organizations focus heavily on measuring sourcing effectiveness, but ignore the later stages of the process altogether. One benefit of using a “quality of those not hired” metric is that it focuses exclusively on the back end, where I estimate at least 50% of those organizations not meeting their goals have problems. If you doubt that the problem is post-attraction, ask your favorite agency or executive recruiter what percentage of qualified candidates are lost due to slow or ineffective actions on the part of hiring managers and corporate recruiting processes.

One of the purposes of the quality-of-those-not-hired metric is to force organizations with a high percentage of quality hires slipping away to identify where in their process the talent opts out or gets dropped. There are six post application stages where firms lose top candidates, including:

1. Resume screening process — the ATS, a recruiter, or a hiring manager mistakenly screens out top applicants.
2. Telephone screen — top applicants rank poorly on their phone screens or their screen cannot be completed, so they are dropped from consideration.
3. Interview scheduling — they get frustrated over the number of interviews and dropout or they cannot complete them in time because of scheduling conflicts.
4. Interview assessment — they voluntarily drop out before the interviews can be completed, or the interview process mistakenly rates them poorly.
5. The offer process — either the process fails to include most of the top applicants on the list of finalists, or they reject the offer.
6. Reference checking — even though they are high-quality candidates, they somehow fail the reference/background check.

Since the goal of a good metric is to help you identify what is not working, carefully select and implement at least one metric that can point out failures occurring during the latter stages of your recruiting process.

Focus Only On the Top Candidates

A quality-of-those-not-hired metric can become cumbersome if it attempts to categorize the quality of every applicant who doesn’t get hired. In order to save time and money, narrow your focus to the strategic issue of “what happened to the cream of the crop?” Out of 50 applicants for a single job, there might only be three who were so qualified that a hiring manager would actually regret failing to hire them. I call these individuals “regrettable misses,” and it is these folks that the quality-of-those-not-hired metric aims to highlight.

Action Steps for Developing a “Quality-of-Those-Not-Hired” Metric

If you decide to implement a quality-of-those-not-hired metric, there are several action steps to consider, including:

• Setting goals — I recommend that you set goals for the use of this metric that include: accurately identifying the top three to five “regrettable” candidates; determining what percentage of top candidates become finalists for the position, and determining what percentage of new hires came from the top candidate list.
• Select an evaluation range — this metric should focus solely on reporting the progress of “the very top applicants” who senior managers would regret not hiring. To limit the scope of evaluation, preselect what size of candidate slate will be evaluated. For most jobs, three to five top applicants would be a sufficient number to track. You can also use a set percentage of all applicants (i.e. top 10%) to define what you mean by top.
• Determine when to identify top applicants — identify the top applicants early on in the hiring process so that you will have time to address any issues that emerge before a final hiring decision is made. If you are conducting an audit post hire, you need to make sure that the person doing the initial selection isn’t aware of which individuals were finalists and who was hired.
• Select methods for identifying top applicants — the best method for identifying the top applicants is to have multiple evaluators select a finalist slate that is then merged to create the sample that will be monitored. An alternative approach involves using the profile matching capabilities of your ATS to produce a listing of top applicants. A third possible list segments applicants who come from high-value benchmark firms.
• Report the metric in percentages — the best way to report the quality of “those not hired” metric is in percentages. For example: 66% of all finalists came from the top-ranked list, and 47% of the time a top-five-ranked candidate was hired.
• Identify the stage where top talent slips through — for high priority and mission-critical jobs, after the hiring process is complete, identify at what specific stage in the recruiting process did a top applicant opt out or get dropped from consideration. You can then use that information to improve that stage.
• Identify cause for top candidate removal from consideration — if a significant number of top candidates opt out or are dropped from consideration without becoming finalists, follow up and find out why. If your process screened them out prematurely, recruiters and hiring managers must be questioned to identify what knockout criteria is being applied. If the candidate dropped out on their own, they need to be questioned to see if their early withdrawal could’ve been prevented.
• Keep in touch — separate from the process of calculating the metric, the organization should keep in touch with and build a relationship with the high-quality applicants who you regret missing. Building this relationship will help to ensure that they will favorably consider another opportunity with your firm in the future. Develop an alert system so that the star applicants can automatically receive e-mail alerts whenever a relevant job opens up.

Sample “Quality of Those Not Hired” Report

Here is a sample report illustrating what a recruiting leader or hiring manager might see.

Job Family: ASIC Engineer

Report Period: Q3 2010

Hire Volume: 53

Recommended Actions

Candidates reported that more often than not interviews would need to be rescheduled because times initially proposed were no longer available upon confirmation. Many candidates reported that it took recruiting coordinators longer than a week to confirm meeting dates and times. Solution:

1. Allocate dedicated time slots to recruiting activities that cannot be booked by other activities more than 24 hours in advance.
2. Establish service level agreements that call for manager response to scheduling inquiries within four business hours.

Final Thoughts

If you were a competitive fisherman participating in a pro fishing tournament and you repeatedly landed prize-winning fish, you would be justifiably proud. However, if you repeatedly caught prize contenders but lost them prior to tournament completion, wouldn’t you want to know exactly where and why you kept losing them? That is exactly what the “quality-of-those-not-hired” metric tells you. It reports how often you successfully land a great applicant, but fail to convert them to employee. Your organization can’t attain the highest level of new hire on-the-job performance (quality of hire) if your process allows the highest-quality applicants to be missed.

Rick Marini, an entrepreneur with an impressive pedigree, was concerned enough about the transparency issues I raised in the post, that he pinged me to clarify a few things.

What he said was encouraging. “We are very aware of the privacy issues,” he said at the outset of our conversation this morning. “We would never compromise privacy.”

In the team’s haste to push out the app, a few things were overlooked, he said. One of them, a rather important oversight, was any sort of explanation about the access to personal Facebook information that BranchOut needs to do its work.

“We didn’t do a good job explaining,” Marini agreed. It’s being fixed, he said. Explanations and clarifications are being added to both the www site and the BranchOut Facebook presence. The first piece, an explanation page that comes up when you refuse to grant the requested permissions, is now in place.

The additions and fixes are all welcome, even if it does suggest that privacy and transparency weren’t priorities until they were raised by others. Nevertheless, recruiters should be heartened by the responsiveness of Marini and his team to the feedback if, for no other reason, than self-interest: BranchOut could become a remarkably useful tool to source candidates and to further employee referral programs.

You can read more detail about what BranchOut does in yesterday’s post. Briefly what it does is tell you where the friends in your network work or have worked and it lets you know if any of your friends have friends in specific companies.

You can post jobs to your own friends network for free. Soon, Marini told me, employers will be able to post jobs and have them targeted to Facebook users that have been identified by BranchOut on the basis of their job or employer.

You can do all this on LinkedIn, and many recruiters do. LinkedIn makes it easy to source candidates.

Facebook is more of an attractant approach. People generally come to you. BranchOut adds the missing dimension. Its sheer numbers — 500 million users as of just this week — make it a very attractive pond in which to go fishing.

What we don’t know is how many Facebook users have bothered to post detailed profiles about themselves. Or, if they have, to make them available. On LinkedIn, the majority — by quite a bit — have complete and public profiles. So far, from what we’re seeing, Facebook is just the opposite.

Thus anything Marini and the BranchOut team can do to instill confidence that data won’t be misused, can only help encourage Facebook fans to complete those profiles. Which will improve sourcing for recruiters.

Ron Katz joined us to discuss what you can do to improve your performance and data management systems and make sure your succession planning efforts adequately prepare you for the jobs and challenges of tomorrow.

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

The UK company Reckitt Benckiser has launched, in beta, a Facebook game called poweRBrands, for students who might be interested in its marketing jobs.

Reckitt who?

I thought the same thing, but you know at least some of this company’s products, which include Woolite, Lysol, Clearisil, French’s, and Calgon.

Anyhow, with the poweRBrands game, so far available in English, German, Italian, and Portuguese, players make decisions on such things as what to do if a sickness breaks out, increasing demand for Clearisil while you’re short-staffed. Or, you’re presented with a scenario where the VP of sales is impressed with your work and is looking for ideas for the next annual sales plan; should you approach him on your own, or with the brand manager? (I chose to include the brand manager, but the game told me “this was your chance to go for it on your own, and you blew it.”)

A bit harsh, but this is an impressive game.

Reckitt Benckiser doesn’t do a hard sell for its jobs while you’re playing the game. The game does include, though not terribly prominently, links to the company’s pages: its blog, its careers page, Twitter account, YouTube, and more. Players are often asked to invite a friend to play, an invite which easily allows you to shoot a note to people you’re connected with on Facebook. On a Facebook fan page, developed with the recruitment ad agency Euro RSCG Riley, players can discuss the game, provide feedback, and learn more about the company.

This effort started last Fall, when the Reckitt Benckiser PR and HR departments, as well as the CEO, realized just how little-known the company was, despite the familiarity of the company’s products. Work began on the game in March, and cost in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It got help from a fellow named Drew Spencer, then at Euro RSCG Riley (and who’s now at Blackbridge), as well as the social media agency Nudge to build the game, with UbaGLU helping as a sort of interactive integrator. Among the metrics Reckitt Benckiser will use to measure success of the game will be whether job candidates become more aware of the company.

Reckitt Benckiser is advertising the game through banner ads, videos, and MPUs using Facebook, Adknowledge, LinkedIn, and Techlightenment. Interestingly, the Reckitt Benckiser home page (not its careers page) plays up its jobs far more than most company home pages, which often include a mere link to a careers site.

For example, Apple might be described as perfectionist, controlling, modern, and demanding, while Microsoft might be described as Yuppie, Gen X, brash, or arrogant. IBM as stuffy, old school, traditional.

Customers form opinions about an organization from its brand image, its presentation and packaging of products and services, but most of all from their contact with employees.

We often call the collective personality of an organization its organizational culture.

Many recruiters recognize the value of understanding the organizational culture and finding people who are good fits for it. However, until the specific traits that make up this culture are articulated clearly, it is very hard to know who the right people are.

Taking the time to define and understand the talent philosophy of your organization will enhance your success and improve the productivity and retention of the people you hire.

While you and hiring managers may instinctively tend to hire people who act or think in ways that are compatible with your organization’s culture, we often make mistakes and even misjudge what the culture really demands. And hiring managers often hire people who reflect their own style rather than that of the organization. We all know how disruptive it can be to hire someone whose personal style is at odds with that of the rest of the team.

Employee Treatment Reflects Your Philosophy

One of the surest ways to begin defining your talent philosophy is to ask how employees are treated. Many organizations have evolved philosophies that are easy to understand. IBM had a philosophy of hiring young people, usually right after college, and promoting them internally after a rigorous internal development process. They hired for certain traits: people who wanted to have a career, who were eager to learn and continue studying, who were open to new opportunities, who were willing to wait for promotion, and who were going to play by the “rules” of IBM. Whether or not IBM hired deliberately for these traits I do not know, but they were certainly reflected in the kinds of people who stayed and who thrived there.

Other organizations have philosophies that are much more difficult to decipher either because they have not really defined a common philosophy or because they have many sub-cultures within the organization. This is particularly true of newer firms who have not yet had the time to evolve a distinct personality. But, even in these firms it is possible to see some basic traits that are emerging.

What Is Real and What is Wish?

Frequently I work with organizations that have developed a talent philosophy that is attractive to candidates but not reflective or what they really do. It is often more a statement of what they want the philosophy to be rather than what it really is.

It may state how the organization is committed to employee development and internal promotion, yet they almost always hire new people from the outside. Or it may contain statements about work/life balance when in reality everyone works 60 hours a week.

A talent philosophy is very hard to create. It is generally an outcome of who has been hired over time and what those folks, collectively, believe, and how they act. It is very hard to change without the highest level of internal support.

Talent philosophies are complicated things. They are a mix of individual traits and a set of overarching beliefs and practices that usually have evolved over time. They are based on assumptions about how people behave or about what they want from the workplace. For example, it is typical to assume that everyone wants a long-term career when, increasingly, today’s young people want opportunities for advancement and learning and don’t care too much about a career in a single firm. Knowing what your assumptions are is essential for successfully defining your talent philosophy, yet it is very hard for those in an organization to determine those assumptions.

Very often it is necessary to bring in an outside consultant to help, but here are a few questions that you can use to help in the unraveling process. By setting up groups of people, maybe incorporating customers or others from outside the organization to help, and by trying to answer these questions in an unbiased way, you can make a good start at clearly defining what assumptions you are making and what critical traits new employees should have.

Ten Tough Questions to Answer

1. What single characteristic is considered most important by hiring managers in a potential candidate?
2. If there are two equally well-qualified candidates for a job, what determines the final choice?
3. What are the personality styles, traits, and habits of those who get promoted or seem to be the most highly regarded in your organization?
4. If an employee were asked what adjective most accurately described the best employees’ personalities, what word would they choose?
5. If a customer were asked to describe the culture of your organization, what would they say?
6. How do you deal with poor-performing employees?
7. Who is considered the most valuable employee in your organization? What distinctive traits or characteristics does s/he have?
8. How do major decisions get made? Are they made by consensus, a majority viewpoint, or a single person?
9. What do you expect a good employee to have as general career aspirations?
10. What does an employee have to do/demonstrate in order to be considered for a promotion?

A truly honest understanding of your assumptions about people and their careers and a solid analysis of what common traits employees should have will go miles in improving the quality of the candidates you bring to the table.

BranchOut, which launched yesterday and is profiled today on TechCrunch, is an app that details the past and current employers of your Facebook friends. And, if you can convince your friends to install the app, you get the same info for the friends of your friends.

It gives a new twist to Sun-tzu’s counsel about keeping your enemies closer. With BranchOut installed, you’ll want friends closer, lots and lots of close friends who will unlock their profiles so you can see who works or worked where and who has friends there.

If you’re a recruiter or otherwise have reasons to know your Facebook friends’ work history,  it’s a great tool, even if it’s a little buggy right now. Michael Arrington, who wrote the TechCrunch piece, warns as much. The most glaring bug I found was that BranchOut has trouble distinguishing between current and past employers. It also listed the clients of some of my friends as employers.

Neither of those is a deal-killer, nor even much of a hindrance. The bigger issue is that few of my Facebook friends have either bothered to complete their profile or make it available.  That may be for the same reason I haven’t: Facebook is for fun; LinkedIn is for business.

More than a few TechCrunch readers agree with that. Ventrino posted this note to the BranchOut review: “Have to agree with above comments, facebook is not for business.”

Ddeckster made a similar point, though more, uh, pointedly:

“What a terrible yet inevitable idea! Facebook is not and never will be good for hiring people. Linkedin will not be competed with in this space. Facebook = looking at photos and playing Mafiawars. Linkedin = professional networking, great groups and how to find professionals

I’ll be damned if I give a site with such awful privacy as facebook all of my career information.”

I can’t agree with the “Facebook will never be for hiring people” claim. As we know, that’s already happening. Is there a major job board today that doesn’t have a Facebook integration? BranchOut itself intends to offer job postings.

However, I think ddeckster is on the money with the concern about privacy and the Facebook user culture. Facebook’s privacy record is so spotty that it ranked lower in user satisfaction  than IRS e-filers. The American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report scored it a 64 on the 100-point scale. That ranks it in the bottom 5 percent of the survey by the University of Michigan and ForeSee Results.

If you’ve missed the whole controversy over Facebook and privacy, Google it.

That would be a purely Facebook problem except that BranchOut and its principals, including CEO Rick Marini, appear not to have paid attention to the privacy debacle. Go to BranchOut and before you can learn anything about it, you have to surrender your Facebook access. Click that Get Started! button and you’re presented with a list of everything that BranchOut wants from you, including permission to access information whenever it wants.

There is a BranchOut Facebook site. But it doesn’t offer any help with the privacy issue. Who are the people behind BranchOut? Not a lot of help from the website or the Facebook page. CrunchBase has that info.

Despite those unfortunate omissions, BranchOut has some real potential as a sourcing and job networking tool. Even if the majority of Facebook users keep their profiles private, the sheer number of users should provide enough content to make BranchOut a useful addition to the toolbox.

Not all the comments opposed the expansion; however, most did. The majority appear to stem from an email campaign launched by the International Association of Employment Web Sites, the trade group for the world’s job boards.

While many of the comments followed the sample letter circulated among IAEWS members and to others including staffing agencies (here’s a sample that includes the pitch), several argued their own case against the expansion.

One of those, from Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi, urges the Internet addressing authority — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — to reject the plan to open up .jobs addresses to almost any name combination.

His letter says “Monster has significant procedural and substantive concerns” with the proposal, not the least of which is that it “proposes to grant unlimited decision-making authority to a single entity — Employ Media — that stands to reap significant financial benefits… ”

In 2005 Employ Media was granted the right to sell .jobs addresses to employers who use their corporate name in the address. Thus, CompanyName.jobs is allowed, whereas Atlanta.jobs is not. In addition, the company could only use the address for its own jobs and had to subscribe to a code of ethics.

However, last fall Employ Media and its partner DirectEmployers Association launched the first of what was to be thousands of job boards using generic names, including Atlanta.jobs. The project was only halted after ICANN sent letters to Employ Media and to the Society for Human Resource Management, which sponsored the .jobs domain plan in 2005 and still oversees it.

At that point, SHRM convened a council to review the plan and conducted a survey of its members. The group OK’d the plan early in June.  At the point, Employ Media petitioned ICANN for its approval. Besides broadening the use of the .jobs domain, Employ Media says it will distribute the names via an RFP process, followed by an auction, and then if anything is left, by a first-come, first-served sale.

Iannuzzi pointed to those job boards and the geographic and occupational names they used when he said, “It does not appear Employ Media has any intention of allocating any non-”company name” domain names to third parties, other than perhaps to DirectEmployers Association as part of the ‘building out’ of “The Dot Jobs Universe” that has been occurring in 2009 in contravention” of the agreements with ICANN.

Noted recruiting leader Gerry Crispin sent a separate letter urging rejection of the expansion, as did David Manaster, CEO of ERE. There are also comments and letters from associations and some college career centers.

Most notable among the supports are letters from Employ Media and DirectEmployers Association. Employ Media’s 10-page rebuttal to the opposition letters appears immediately before Monster’s letter. Submitted by Ray Fassett, Employ Media’s VP, the rebuttal argues that changes in the naming convention was always anticipated in the agreement that created .jobs as an Internet extension in the first place.

“Many detractors, who seek to force Employ Media to forever maintain the same business model and naming conventions, even to the detriment of the Community, fail to see that change is contemplated throughout the document,” the rebuttal says.

The “Community” is the HR community. Employ Media declares false claims by opponents that by expanding the types of names that can be used with a .jobs extension the nature of the community is changed. “Any comments with regard to the RSEP (expansion) request in any way changing the Community are completely false,” writes Employ Media.

The letter also defends the process by which a SHRM-created committee reviewed the expansion plan and approved it. In a section headed “SHRM has Served Impeccably as the Sponsoring Organization for the .JOBS Community,” the rebuttal letter charges the job board group with impugning SHRM’s reputation and allowing it to become “acceptable collateral damage.”

The arguments of the opponents are called “convoluted” and the letter notes, “Employ Media submits that for IAEWS it is all about keeping out the competition.”

DirectEmployers also submitted its own rebuttal letter. Over the signature of Bill Warren, executive director of the organization, the letter calls the opposition efforts a “smear campaign using modern day technology.”

The comment period is now closed. What happens next is not entirely clear, though an ICANN spokesperson said the organization’s board may take up the expansion plan for .jobs at an Aug. 5th telephone meeting. Those meetings are closed. We won’t know until the week before if the matter is on the agenda.

Making the case for job boards

Vanessa Bostwick writes: “As someone who is deeply embedded within the recruiting industry, I hear these words every day: job boards are done. Finished. Finito. Social media, which some say is quicker, cheaper, and easier to track and implement, is edging out job boards to become the top job channel for both job seekers and employers. But statements like these don’t reflect the true state of job boards and their continued adoption by users. Here are some strong arguments for why job boards aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.”

Strong employment brands will rule social recruiting

Omowale Casselle writes: “Social media is redefining the way prospective candidates and employers interact. Not only do candidates now have the ability to directly communicate with employers, but they are also able to communicate with each other regarding the pros/cons of an employer. Employers have gained lots of expertise in one way communication with prospective candidates, and there is no doubt they will quickly master two-way communication as well. However, the key to success will be how well they can influence the conversations they are not directly involved with.”

Trust and privacy on LinkedIn

Irina Shamaeva writes: “There are questions about LinkedIn many members have. How many friends should you have on LinkedIn? Should you set your profile as public or private? Should you sign up for a business account — and for which option — or stay with a basic one? If you keep the number of connections small, what are your chances to reach others for business? Here are some facts and guesses that may help you make decisions on those options.

It may be slow, it may be bumpy, but it’s gonna hurt. Unless…

Paul Klip writes: “Stretched to the hilt, companies who were forced to decimate their talent acquisition teams have started feeling the effects of a recovery with a barrage of new requests from hiring managers as their businesses continue recovering from the worst economic downturn since the great depression. Still unsure as to the long-term viability of their hiring needs, companies are reluctant to add full-time talent acquisition professionals and are saddling their office managers, HR generalists and existing TA teams with more and more hiring requests which are beyond their scope of recruiting expertise.”

10 steps to making your relationship with Twitter work

Kendra Pearson writes: “Twitter and I have been involved for almost a year now. In honor of our upcoming one-year anniversary, I think it is appropriate to reflect upon my relationship with what I consider to be the most misunderstood social media technology. I will start by saying that it was not love at first sight. As stories of recruiters and job seekers connecting through Twitter flourished, I knew I needed to try this technology in order to understand it. But still I resisted. I felt like I needed a handbook just to join the conversation. Followers? Tweets? Hashtags?”

What no job board wants to talk about…

Jeff Dickey-Chasins writes: “As you might guess, I’m a great believer in the fundamentals of job boards. I’ve seen the emails from happy job seekers and employers extolling the many ways job boards can save users time and money. In essence, for many people, job boards work. But …there are things that job boards often shy away from — topics they don’t want to touch. Why? Because sometimes job boards don’t work. Perhaps there were unrealistic expectations. Perhaps there was just a mess.”

“Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.”

Maureen Sharib writes: “There’s an old saying you don’t hear much anymore: “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.” What it means is that someone starts out in work sleeves and succeeds enough to allow their children to wear silk sleeves.  Those wearing the silk sleeves usually abandon the opportunity to do anything with the means that provided those silk sleeves and, ultimately waste it, leaving nothing but shirt sleeves for the third generation to wear.”

#SHRM10: Final Thoughts

Gerry Crispin writes: “Mark Stelzner’s blog summarizing his observations was so good as a conversation starter that most of what I could say about the conference I said in my comments there. My only additions are these:”

Unlike the previously posted list of program design features that can “kill” an ERP, these factors plague even well-designed programs, rendering them weak and ineffective. While much more likely to occur during economic downturns and periods of reduced or halted hiring, these program degraders can emerge whenever an employee referral program is neglected.

If your program doesn’t seem to wield the power it once did, do a quick mental audit to see if any of these factors may be to blame.

The Top 20 Employee Referral Program Performance Degraders

1. Loss of a program manager — losing or failing to replace a program manager charged with championing the program and keeping it active can lead to disastrous consequences even for a short period of time. Solution: a resource, hold them accountable, empower them with program metrics, and educate them on key ERP success and failure factors.
2. Reliance on job announcement spam — unfortunately it has become common practice to spam employees with irrelevant job announcements and generic program communications, both of which overworked employees quickly learn to recognize and set aside. Solution: use a more targeted approach to sending out announcements, decreasing the overall volume, and making sure each contains information relevant and of interest to the recipient.
3. Repetitive message formats — years of experience have demonstrated that using the same message format over and over will eventually result in employees tuning out the noise, just as you tune out the billboard that rarely changes on your commute to work! Solution: toss out form-messaging templates and craft a real communication that educates, empowers, excites, and calls for action.
4. Repetitive rewards — program rewards and prizes are intended to excite, but once they become commonplace or stale, they cease to be effective. Solution: periodically change or rotate program incentives using a survey sent to a sample of your employees to determine what would or would not work.
5. Program suspension — some organizations completely suspend their program when hiring is slow, resulting in an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality among employees with regards to being 24/7 talent scouts. Solution: regardless of requisition volume, never suspend a program. It’s OK to narrow the scope of the jobs covered or temporarily reduce incentives, but the process and mantra to keep employees scouting talent for future hiring needs must never cease.
6. Not countering “inappropriate now” arguments — when reductions in force occur, it’s not uncommon for arguments against external hiring to emerge on the premise that giving a job to anyone other than those displaced already would damage morale. Solution: it’s unfortunate that reductions in force must occur, but when they do, those shed by the organization are often those in non-core roles or that possess skills no longer as valuable to the organization as their rate of compensation. To assume that a mission-critical or key vacancy could always be filled by the ranks of those laid off is silly. It’s also silly to assume that other organizations would be laying off volumes of talent in previously hard-to-fill areas, reducing the difficulty of recruiting scare talent moving forward. It’s the role of the ERP program manager to counter or prevent such arguments before they get started. In modern agile organizations, hiring can occur in critical business units just as layoffs occur in others. Make managers and employees aware that the development of new products and services (and their future job security) often depend upon access to new skills and technologies. While retraining those displaced is nice, sometimes it is both time and cost prohibitive.
7. Not maintaining operational responsiveness — without dedicated attention, it is easy for programs with exceptional service standards to slip, resulting in delayed responses to inquiries, slower referral response times, and even complete non-responsiveness. Because response time is the No. 1 success factor for ERPs, service standards should be restored. Solution: re-examine the service standard expectations you have set for your program, and if unable to resource the program adequately to maintain them, reduce the scope of the program temporarily or seek volunteer assistance so that every interaction meets expectations.
8. Relying on the original business case — business priorities change, unfortunately few HR organizations update their business case for key programs such as the ERP to reflect the changing environment. Without ongoing program positioning, it’s easy for programs to lose their executive champions and for participants to forget all the ways the program benefits them and makes the organization stronger. Solution: the business case for the employee referral program should be reexamined every quarter and changes should made to the program strategy and operating model in accordance with changing needs. Executives, managers, and employees in particular need to be reminded of the important role the program plays in building better teams and improving organizational performance. The communicated business case should include evidence of improved quality of hire, retention rates, diversity rates and promotion rates. It is especially important to update the “performance differential” calculation, which demonstrates that referral hires produce more on-the-job than other sources of hire.
9. Ignoring new tools and technologies — programs designed even recently might not have taken advantage of newly developed referral tools, approaches, and technologies. In recent years a lot of development in process and technology has occurred to support vacancy prioritization, electronic referral marketing/communications, social network extension, external stakeholder participation and automated program administration. Solution: every quarter reevaluate how technology can empower the world-class process you desire to execute and try out many of the new service/tool offerings among pilot study audiences. With many tool developers adopting agile development methodologies, product offerings are likely to change/evolve frequently.
10. A lack of employee education — even in great times many organizations failed to provide enough tools, training, and support to help employees uncover great talent within their network, so during tough times it’s no wonder that education efforts all but go away. Without referral events, manager executed referral activities, PDA parties, referral open houses, “Give Me Five” visits, and priming exercises, ERPs become purely reactive and fail to produce the volume of flow needed in the most critical areas. Solution: the referral team must develop quick but compelling presentations/exercise kits for employees and hiring managers (available both online and in person). These tools should explain and clarify new and revised policies, procedures, and expectations, as well as walk employees through simple exercises designed to help them identify possible referrals for current and near term key talent needs. Participant research reveals that a majority of employees are underwhelmed with the amount of how-to guidance their organization provides on identifying possible referrals, networking, dealing with “would you refer me” requests, and how to convert contacts into referrals.
11. Not interfacing with related HR programs — in recent years many organizations have invested in social media programs, alumni group development, and contingent labor programs, all of which have logical ties to the ERP, but that might not have been used well during the downturn. Solution: put together a team with leaders from each related program to determine where partnerships make sense, where duplicate efforts are underway, and most importantly where resources/tools are underused.
12. Outdated prioritization — well-designed referral programs prioritize vacancies based on their business impact, and referrals based on the past referral success rate of the referrer. However, the organization’s priorities may have changed. Solution: if you don’t have a prioritization schema, develop one now. If you do have one, work with senior management to adjust the schema based on emerging needs quarterly or as critical incidents emerge. (Note: prioritization does not require that individual referrals be treated any differently during the hiring process.)
13. Lack of recruiter training — failing to periodically update training of existing recruiters and skipping the training of new recruiters regarding the critical success factors of referral programs can degrade a program from within. Solution: program managers need to be continually educated on the latest benchmark best practices and performance targets leading organizations are adopting and develop periodic training/information sessions for recruiters outlining their evolving role.
14. Failing to do periodic upgrades — the performance of even the best-designed referral programs degrade quickly when program evolution ceases. Solution: if you are not now or have not been rolling out program enhancements and promotions at least once a quarter, start now. Tie enhancements and promotions to forecasted critical needs and short-term business issues to create natural excuses to communicate about the program and improve visibility.
15. Not using metrics — great referral programs rely heavily on metrics to continually improve, but when times get tough, metrics often all but disappear. Solution: identify how employee referrals impact business operations and layer program performance metrics into existing finance and operations reports, making the program visible as a performance driver. Do not forget to quantify the dollar impact on revenue of the key quality of hire metrics.
16. Mergers with other recruiting programs — during tough economic times, it is not uncommon for autonomous referral programs to be combined or merged with other recruiting programs. This lack of identity and control will rapidly degrade program performance. Solution: if you have merged your ERP with other initiatives, make the business case to restore its independence immediately.
17. Unfounded legal fears — even well-designed referral programs get “nitpicked” on by “overly nervous” lawyers and HR professionals who often present their personal opinion as unbiased professional guidance. Solution: don’t argue with attorneys; instead, partner with them on the premise that it is the corporate counsel’s duty to find a way to do what the organization “needs” to do in a manner that reduces the organizations exposure to risk. You wouldn’t propose writing their legal documents, so they shouldn’t design your programs! Make the business case for key program features and outline the negative impact of foregoing a practice. Risk mitigation is about balancing the possible cost of litigation with the financial benefit of a practice. If you are not armed with ROI projections, real-world data, and best-practice benchmark examples, don’t expect to fend off unfounded legal arguments.
18. New/alternate ATS — many applicant tracking systems provide an ERP module that becomes more attractive versus operating a separate ERP program with isolated infrastructure during tough times. These modules which allow employees to send an invitation to apply to referrals turn all referrals into online applicants long before they need to be. They also result in a dramatic decrease in the conversion rate of employee-initiated employee referrals. Solution: figure out when it makes sense in your organization for a referral to become an applicant, and structure your technology solutions to empower your process the way you want it versus altering your process to fit the design of an available tool. Hundreds of mashable tools and services exist today that can empower your program as you envision it.
19. Failing to scale — in tough times organizations merge and get acquired. If your organization has done either, it’s not uncommon for a program designed for a small organization to be ineffective in a larger organization. Solution: evaluate what elements of your program can scale to meet the needs of the newly combined organization and which elements need redesign. Until all program elements can function effectively, consider limiting the scope of the program to that which the existing infrastructure can support at the service level desired.
20. No globalization — if your organization has become a truly global one, as many have, your ERP must be globalized. Solution: look at all processes, communications, and policies to ensure that cross-border referral of talent is being facilitated, and that all possible scenarios have been planned for. Identify what elements of your global program my require localization (communications, rewards, etc.) and develop a matrix specifying each.

Final Thoughts

Very few things that are easy to do have more of an immediate impact than using a failure analysis “checklist” to conduct a quick assessment of an important HR program. With hiring targets growing, there is no more important recruiting program to assess than your ERP, don’t you agree?

We’re looking forward to seeing you all at the next ERE Meetup on Wednesday August 17th, 2010. As was the case in the last one, we need your help organizing them in your local area. Here is how you can help us:

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

We hope you can join us again!