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It’s numbers week in the U.S. again. The time of the month when the official government employment data makes its appearance, influencing stock markets worldwide, and corporate hiring decisions nationally.

Predictions of what Friday’s labor report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will show are already beginning to appear. A Dow Jones Newswire survey of economists says that on average they expect the U.S. to have lost 110,000 jobs during August. That’s mostly due to the continuing layoff of temporary Census workers. keep reading…

A group calling itself the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition is asking the Internet addressing authority to reconsider its decision to allow the use of almost any name in conjunction with a .jobs extension.

Composed of several high-profile organizations and companies, the Coalition claims the .jobs expansion and the plan for allocating the new names violates the charter from the Internet Association for Assigned Names and Numbers, which spells out some of the terms for issuing a .jobs address.

The charter gives Employ Media, the domain registrar, the right to issue addresses, and gives the Society for Human Resource Management policy authority. It also sets the conditions for issuing addresses with a .jobs extension.

The Coalition says Employ Media’s plan, detailed in its RFP instructions,  to allow third parties to use .jobs addresses for purposes that might including running a job board is inconsistent with the charter and exceeds the approval it won from SHRM in June. keep reading…

In the September Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I write about branding in a way that, hopefully, you haven’t thought about before.

There has been a lot of talk about employment branding recently and how organizations are dedicating more and more of their resources toward their branding intitiatives. In all the noise and in the race to create the best brand something essential not just to recruiting but for the entire entry-to-exit HR process was lost. Keeping promises! That’s right — keeping promises. It’s not as boring a subject as it might seem, and I make no ethical/soft arguments toward that end in my article. Simply put, I provide evidence and a discussion that supports either promising only what you deliver, or using your employment brand as a driver to deliver more than what you promise. It’s all there in the literature. It’s even very intuitive to see, yet time and time again we see that this advice is ignored in the branding efforts of even some of the most visible organizations.

What I say in the Journal is that branding isn’t a matter of good and bad, but about how much you promise, what you promise, and what you can deliver. If you raise people’s expectations too high, and under-deliver, that’s when you’ll have a problem. keep reading…

Dr John Sullivan and Master Burnett

The smart phone and the applications associated with it are radically changing the game for advanced, technically savvy recruiters (others need not read on unless you like shaking your head in disbelief). For those not afraid of evolution and innovation, an emerging class of “location aware” social networking applications can and are enabling recruiters to facilitate impromptu face-to-face meetings with top talent outside the structured assessment process.

Originally intended to help friends with time to kill coordinate impromptu meetings with other friends physically located nearby, services like foursquare, Facebook Places, loopt, and countless others provide savvy recruiters with an opportunity to engage face-to-face with elusive top talent often difficult to convert to an applicant or the offer-stage candidate sitting on the fence.

The scenario goes like this: while on your way to grab lunch you check out one or more of the location-based social networking apps (a.k.a. prospect locator apps) to see if any of the top talent you have been courting happens to be in the area. Within seconds, you have identified that a candidate you have been talking to for nearly a year recently checked in at a Starbucks just three blocks away. You make a beeline for that Starbucks, scanning the candidate’s recent wall posts and shooting him/her a quick instant message or text message in route. Upon arrival, you make contact, reinforcing the electronic relationship with a physical one even if the meeting lasts only minutes. You have successfully used GPS technology and social networks to provide you with an informal opportunity to recruit. keep reading…

Most candidates — even high-level executives — need to be prepped before the interview. The reason for this is obvious: they all think they’re great interviewees. Most aren’t. Making matters worse, the hiring managers they’ll be meeting think they’re endowed with some special instinct that allows them to accurately assess candidate competency. Most aren’t.

Since I don’t like to present great candidates who get inadvertently excluded for dumb reasons, I need to prep both my hiring manager clients and my candidates to increase the likelihood the candidates are appropriately and accurately evaluated. This way I don’t have to do searches over again and rely on luck to make placements. keep reading…

Kevin Wheeler joined us this week to discuss the global trends that have been reshaping the recruiting industry. In this webinar we covered how to effectively recruit across a variety of cultural barriers as well as how new technology and social media is affecting the global marketplace.

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

The operator of the .jobs domain opened the competition today for the bulk assignment of new Internet addresses.

The RFP process announced by Employ Media solicits plans from third parties for the quantity use of addresses incorporating geographic, occupational, industry, dictionary, or combinations of these in conjunction with the .jobs suffix.

The 10-page RFP application notes that “A key goal of the .JOBS RFP is the enhancement of the .JOBS brand. Please include specific detail on how your proposal would help achieve that goal.”

This first round of the process — second round details will be announced later — costs $250 and closes on Sept. 24.

Besides the formal Request For Proposals application form, Employ Media also details the criteria by which submissions will be judged. Among the 15 listed points are: brand enhancement; quantity of the addresses to be used; “community value, impact and investment”; “quality, innovation, choice and differentiation”; the effect the proposal might have on SHRM, the sponsor of the domain; and typical criteria dealing with the financial stability of the proposer, and its ability to perform. keep reading…

Labor Day parade, Main St., Buffalo, N.Y.

Labor Day in the U.S. is almost here. Many other countries also celebrate a labor day, which has always seemed an unusual event to me. We didn’t celebrate such a day at all until Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. Interestingly, this is a date that coincides well with the world’s entry into the impersonal and mechanistic 20th century.

I have been noodling for quite some time over the work/life balance movement. I call it a movement because it really came about unexpectedly around 15 years or so ago and has swept corporate America from coast to coast.

I can’t think of any organization that has not had to change policies or at least address its employees about the issue. The work/life balance movement is an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think there has been a previous era when there was such an emphasis on specifically setting aside time for non-work activities.

It is a logical outcome of decades of isolating work from other aspects of life. The idea of creating a balance is based on a set of assumptions that aren’t questioned, yet are very strange from the perspective of a Baby Boomer such as myself or from that of anyone who has studied the history of work.

Assumptions About Work

If I were to state the assumptions, they would go something like this: keep reading…

Have you ever gotten a video resume where the candidate brags about her gorgonzola mashed potatoes? Or another where the candidate declares his faults, one of which happens to be that he lies?

Trouble has. His given name is Nick Chiapetta. (Think about it. You’ll get it.) His job is to screen all the video resumes that the director of human acquisitions, Alina Deloris, gets, and recommend candidates to her for temp jobs with Celltons, a company that makes cellphone buttons.

Nick, or Trouble, as he prefers to be called, used to own the temp agency where Celltons is now, until an unfortunate incident involving a bus and a 33-week absence lead to the agency’s demise. Now he’s temping for Celltons.

Those of you still reading, but wondering what I’m talking about, you are excused. You may return after completing the pre-requisites for this post about what may be the most incredible branding adventure in recruiting history.

Everyone else here knows about The Temp Life, Spherion’s Internet TV show. What began as a branding effort aimed at the entry-level demographic has succeeded so well it has been declared a “bona fide phenomenon” by Fast Company. It begins its fifth season in November. keep reading…

If you were looking for an SEO manager, where would you advertise?

Even if you follow all the rules Lou Adler laid out, it would be hard to top what the Daily Mail in the UK did.

The newspaper embedded an ad in its robots.txt file, a place there is no reason for any human to look. This is a file strictly to be read by the crawlers from search engines. It tells them what pages to index and what not to. For normal humans, there’s nothing of interest there, as you have may already have discovered if you clicked the link. keep reading…

Is there anyone who could help me build a business case that we are working at capacity?

That question came in August 17. I sent it along to Richard Newsom for an answer. Richard is leading a discussion about “Managing Req Loads” at the Fall conference in Florida. He also wrote a killer article for the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership a year ago (short version here).

Here’s the question about working at capacity (cut down a little), and Richard’s answer.

—-

I have subscribed to ERE for years now and have enjoyed your articles immensely. This is the first time I am reaching out to anyone and am looking for some guidance.

I manage our company’s recruiting organization. We are a 4 billion dollar company, publicly traded, and employ 4,000+ employees. I have a team of seven full-time recruiters and just recently brought on two contract recruiters. Here is my challenge.

keep reading…

HotJobs officially became part of Monster today, completing the $225 million purchase announced last February.

The acquisition — and arguably its most important part — makes Monster the exclusive provider of jobs and career services on Yahoo North America for the next three years, with a prime position in the portal’s navigation bar.

According to Monster, the traffic deal combined with its existing worldwide traffic gives it access to some 43 million unique visitors, “88 percent more than the next largest competitor.” That would be CareerBuilder.

Monster will pay Yahoo separately for traffic the portal sends it. The cost of that traffic arrangement wasn’t disclosed, though it may be part of a future filing with the Securities and Exchange. In a filing with the SEC today, Monster said it would be submitting financial statements in the near future. keep reading…

The relationship between the corporate recruiter and the hiring manager is not always a good one. True, in some organizations the working relationship between the two is strong. In others, however, there is a schism between them. And in still others, the schism became a chasm. In the latter two situations neither the candidate, the hiring manager, nor the organization is best served. And in situations like this, the chance of an unsuitable hire, in our experience, is heightened.

The responsibility to establish a positive and productive working relationship with the hiring manager rests with the corporate recruiter. Whether this is the way it should be or not is not the point. What is important is that the corporate recruiter has skills and abilities that will provide significant benefit to the hiring manager, and the key is to develop the relationship and demonstrate it.

So the two questions that need to be addressed first are:

1. How does the corporate recruiter enhance the organization’s ability to select, hire, and advance the right talent for the organization?
2. How do they accomplish this when they have no direct authority over the hiring manager making the final decision?

The answer to these two questions is: You do this by understanding and practicing influence. Influence (something we’re doing a workshop on at the Fall Expo) is the ability to achieve your objective — to get work done — when you do not have complete control or the authority to accomplish your objective alone. keep reading…

“In a chaotic world, the only competency that matters is continuous learning.”

To improve and extend your career, you need to ponder what the near future holds. While predicting the distant future is tough, looking out a few short years using recent history as your foundation isn’t nearly as difficult. The last two decades have been marked by the radical adoption of technology in nearly every aspect of conducting business. The adoption of technology has eliminated once formidable barriers to entry, brought unrivaled transparency to reality, and accelerated productivity (particularly in the areas of product development and distribution). Given all of the change you have witnessed in the last 20 years, does it really make sense that the same competencies organizations sought out three decades ago will be those most of value moving forward?

keep reading…

Job boards have been declared dead or dying so often that keeping track of the pronouncements is about as easy as counting the number of job boards in the world.

Google comes up with 222,000 references for a search on the keywords: “job board”, dead OR dying.

Yet, for all that, the number of job boards is proliferating and there are still plenty of believers in the model ready to launch more. A good part of the recent debate over the .jobs domain expansion was about DirectEmployers Association’s plan to launch tens of thousands of more job boards.

What’s keeping job boards in the game is their ability to deliver candidates and their ability to incorporate recruiter trends without mindlessly following the pack. keep reading…

What does it mean when a recruiter in Texas announces a line of recruiter fashion and another one in Santa Monica launches a website offering “management and employee removal services?”

That we are in the dog days of August? That we’ve been in the summer sun too long? That I’m being Punk’d?

Turns out the press releases about these ventures are for real.

The LeafBuilder clothing line is an assortment of T-shirts that you use to flaunt your recruiting prowess. The number of maple leafs on the shirts corresponds to your placements — and the price. The entry-level T with a single leaf (corresponding to between 1 and 1,999 candidate placements) is $21.95.

Make it into the agency ownership ranks and a seven leaf, long-sleeved version will set you back $293.95. Somewhere on the site there’s a product that will run you over $1,500. keep reading…

When you think about building a diverse workforce, an internal mobility program may not be the first thought that comes to mind. In fact, when we at Sodexo first looked at internal mobility programs, we were focused on helping our employees achieve their career aspirations through internal promotions and hires.

However, over time, we’ve come to learn that these programs also represent a vital component of our company’s journey to build a diverse and inclusive workforce.

The Beginning of an Evolution at Sodexo

Like many companies, Sodexo’s diversity initiatives have evolved over time. keep reading…

First the good news: many companies are hiring again. Now the bad news: if your company is among them, you’re probably looking at too many requisitions and too few hands on deck to fill them. And, even if you’re not in that boat, you’re probably feeling the pressure to do more with less.

In either case, your team can benefit from persuading recruiters to eliminate the five time-wasters below. By streamlining their work, recruiters will have more time to focus on the most valuable aspects of the hiring process. The results will be: keep reading…

A preliminary report on the ICANN board meeting earlier this month shows that the decision to expand the use of .jobs Internet addresses had at least one opponent.

Of the 15 voting members of the board of the Internet addressing authority (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), 14 participated in the Aug. 5 closed, teleconference. When it came time to vote, one board member opposed the expansion, two abstained, leaving 11 in favor.

The report, which appears to have been posted Monday, doesn’t detail who abstained and who cast the “No” vote. That will have to await the official minutes, which won’t be publicly available until after the next board meeting on Oct. 28th.

The report also says little about the nature of the discussion about the request by Employ Media to issue .jobs addresses using geographic, occupational, professional, or other words (i.e. Boston.jobs, javaengineers.jobs, etc.). All it says is, ”The Board discussed with staff the process taken for the proposed amendment in the .JOBS sTLD, and raised questions regarding the scope of change this amendment would have on the charter of the sTLD.”

It’s not unusual for the ICANN board to split votes or for some board members to abstain. At the same meeting it approved the .jobs expansion and the plan for making available the new names, the board split a vote over creating native language-based Internet domain extensions for Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and Tunisia. That vote was nine in favor, two opposed, and three abstentions. Another split vote occurred over paying the board chairman $75,000 a year.

My younger brother Barak got married August 12, 2010. When we were growing up, the thing I knew for sure was that I hated him. It was the “hard fact.” There was no way around it. I hated him. Every time he said something I wanted to kill him (and obviously the other way around is true), and this picture is one of the few that I found when we were smiling and hugging. Later I seem to have managed to always have someone stand between us (quite like I see with my own kids these days).

But that’s brothers/sisters for you.

Today he’s my best friend; we consult with each other on every new direction or thought, from big to small. We support each other on a daily basis.

I thought of him this morning, about our relationship, and the fact that in the distant past I was so confident that I’ll never want to help him, thinking that I hated him — for me was at the time, a “hard fact.” Something no one could argue with.

This morning, thinking of him and how things have changed during the past approximately 20 years, connected me to my conversations with many recruiters in Israel about their relationship with their corporate partners — usually from the U.S.

“They Would Never Agree to this”

I’ve been training thousands of HR recruiters and managers during the past four years regarding online recruiting. When I ask local recruiters about their progress in implementing social media tools and online recruiting in their company, I usually hear the same sentence: “We’re in a unique position, representing a U.S. corporation in Israel, and they would never agree to that…”

“They” is the U.S. based corporation. ”That” is usually one of a few things that “they” usually don’t agree to: keep reading…