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.

Because of the massive Census hiring, analysts have been paying closer attention to developments in private sector hiring. In July, the BLS said 71,000 non-government jobs were created, though the Census layoffs resulted in a total loss of 141,000 jobs. (Both those numbers are likely to be adjusted in the Friday release.)

Tomorrow, we get a preview of what may be in store when ADP releases its National Employment Report. The payroll processor uses its data to estimate the monthly change in private sector employment. While the numbers are usually lower than the government’s, they tend to accurately predict whether jobs were added or lost.

There’s not much consensus among the market blogs and advisory services that try to crystal-ball the report. Zacks Investment Research says the ADP report will show 15,000 jobs lost in August. MF Global UK Limited, meanwhile, is looking for a gain of 13,000.

Once the report is released, which is usually just before the business day starts on the East Coast, we’ll see new predictions of what Friday’s BLS report will contain.

Also out in the morning will be  The Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online Data Series. It counts the number of online job postings in total, and the number of new listings.

The Help Wanted series, and Monster’s Employment Index (out Thursday) help show the national hiring trend. The Monster Index has been moving up slowly, but consistently, since the beginning of the year. The Help Wanted numbers are more erratic, though the total number of job ads online has risen by almost 260,00 since January.

As always, surprises are not unusual. For instance, The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, released this morning, improved to 53.5 from a revised 51 in July. That was a little better than what some economists were expecting.

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.

It also argues its members and their businesses — and others globally — will be hurt by the expansion because there are no procedures or rules to protect them against ”abusive and infringing registrations.” And because they had no “voice in the policies that will govern their registrations in .JOBS.”

In a brief comment from Ray Fassett, EVP, Employ Media said it was aware of the reconsideration request, adding, “We believe the ICANN Board made the correct decision, and we trust ICANN’s Accountability and Review processes.”

Among the members of the coalition are the world’s two largest job boards — Monster and CareerBuilder — as well as the job board trade group, International Association of Employment Web Sites. The Newspaper Association of America, representing most daily newspapers in the U.S., the American Hospital Association, the American Staffing Association, and Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications are also among the listed coalition members.

The 25-page filing says these organizations and others like them were disenfranchised by the process followed by Employ Media and SHRM in considering the changes to the .jobs registration program:

“Members of the Coalition and the businesses they represent will be directly and adversely affected by the fact that, as non-members of the .JOBS Sponsored Community (HR professionals), they must bear the costs of, but will have no meaningful voice in the development of, .JOBS policies and procedure.”

While the filing raises a number of fairly technical issues regarding the protection of tradenames and marks, it also challenges the way ICANN and its staff handled the program changes.

It calls the staff summary of the 274 letters and emails received during ICANN’s public comment period “clearly rushed. It failed to adequately account for either the breadth or depth of comments and boils down complex argument to a form that loses most if not all of its meaning.”

An analysis of the comments and the subsequent staff report by British journalist and Internet domain blogger Kieren McCarthy is pointedly critical of the handling of the comments. “Important questions raised during the comment period were overlooked,” he writes, adding, “Board approval of the proposal was at best premature.”

The ICANN board voted 11-1 with two abstentions on Aug. 5th to approve the Employ Media Phased Allocation Plan. The vote came two months after SHRM’s advisory council endorsed the plan and three weeks after the close of the public comment period.

McCarthy also questions whether Employ Media and SHRM allowed for “meaningful input.” “According to a number of respondents (and external voices) the process used by the dot-jobs sponsoring organization to consider the proposal was purposefully skewed in order to achieve the desired result,” McCarthy writes. Whether or not true, it should have been investigated, he says.

SHRM did not respond to an email regarding McCarthy’s report.

There is no indication when ICANN’s Board Governance committee will decide on the reconsideration request.

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.

And if you under-promise and over-deliver (like the famous motto of some of the major organizations goes) you risk not attracting the volume and the high quality talent that you’re seeking.

For example, let us consider Un-diverse Inc, a fictitious company based on a real example. Un-diverse is considered to have one of the most attractive employment brands for young aggressive professionals. However, we questioned its generational diversity efforts from the images displayed on its careers website, as well as when questioning its associates about their internal status. Although it is not explicit in its attraction for young professionals (that would be illegal in the United States, according to Title VII and other federal and state laws), the culture created from their particular employment brand is one which is attractive to young professionals, especially male professionals.

Of course, the company states that it is just a good place for anyone to “start a new career,” but the effect itself is one of attraction of young males.

As a thought experiment, let us consider this particular case:

You are a female in her mid career and you are dissatisfied with current opportunities in your field. You decide to apply and consequentially are accepted as an underwriter at a local Un-diverse location. During your research of the organization, your screening calls, your interviews, and subsequent parts of the recruitment process, your psychological contract is developing toward the idea that this is a diverse place suitable for all ages, sexes, and career points. After all, this is what Un-diverse claims in its branding messages!

Once you begin your new assignment, filled with enthusiasm and excitement, you find that 98% of your peers are under the age of 25 and male, and thus a culture inevitably develops that reflects this.

How would you feel? Most employees in this position would feel that Un-diverse is not a place for all generations and career points, regardless of Un-diverse’s efforts to 1) make it so and 2) say that it is so.

In this case, you, the female professional, came into the organization with expectations that were not met, regardless of the effort (real or not) that was undertaken to meet them. On the other hand, Un-diverse claims that its workplace is a great place for anyone to work, yet its brand attracts young male professionals in large doses, which effectively limits the flexibility of the culture and dooms it to be young and male-dominated. Regardless of effort, the psychological contract of this female professional has not been met, and it had no relationship to HR practices, the recruiting process, or any of the typical drivers of employment branding. What it was based on, however, was a very strong brand that was geared in a particular direction.

Although unproven and potentially controversial, one can make an argument that Un-diverse seeks young male candidates for its branch positions, but due to government laws and regulations they cannot explicitly say so. Instead they create a brand which is attractive to young male candidates, and explicitly declare that it is simply a great place to start a career regardless of your current career progression or diversity category.

More on this in the Journal, but for now let’s just say that if an employer chooses to brand itself as a company that “does xyz,” it should consider the ramifications to its promise in the forming of a psychological contract between it and its new employee. Another conclusion of this is that talent acquisition can never be thought of as an independent process from internal human resource and talent management practices.

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.

The scenario above may seem outrageous to the average recruiter, but it is clear that social networking has become an integral part of the daily lives of millions of professionals and that location-based services which extend the functionality of social networks are a welcomed innovation (as evidenced by their adoption growth rate). When added to the toolkit of a savvy recruiter, these tools can influence the outcome of hard-to-hire recruiting attempts.

Is this stalking? Yes! The idea of cyberstalking may repulse conservative recruiters, but not everyone views taking advantage of technology to facilitate conversion of online relationships to real-world relationships a bad thing. Most social networks provide tools to help users establish privacy boundaries, so using the information when visible to you to facilitate a meeting is within the expectations of the prospect.

We’re not dismissing the idea of privacy. We’re simply arguing that how people define and approach the concept of privacy has changed. Avid social network users and college students in particular often share highly personal information online including addresses, phone numbers, risqué photos, and their present location. While these users may adopt privacy settings that restrict access, they do have an expectation of total privacy. Obviously, recruiters using location-based social networking need to employ good judgment when approaching potential prospects, but that is true of making contact via any channel.

Real-time Meet-up Scenarios

Real-time meet-ups can occur under a wide variety of situations, including:

• Coordinated — an impromptu plan to meet is confirmed by phone or text/IM upon learning of a prospect’s proximity.
• Directed — no advance plan is communicated, but your actions are directed to ensure a face-to-face encounter.
• Coincidence — no advance plan is communicated and no directed actions are taken; you simply take advantage of proximity as it happens.

Each of these scenarios can play out in a 1:1 or 1:many environment.

Michael McNeal, while at Cisco in the late 1990s, pioneered using social gatherings such as wine, art, and beer festivals as recruiting events. He targeted such events because attendee demographic data demonstrated that engineers were frequently in attendance. Real-time location recruiting is really an evolution of that practice, allowing recruiters to target events and location based on real-time intelligence of a prospect;s whereabouts.

The Location Recruiting Toolkit

Hundreds of online services and smartphone apps can be used by tech savvy recruiters to facilitate real-time recruiting. While no means an exhaustive list, the following are a few to consider. (Got your own favorites? Share with others, post them in the comments sections!)

Social Networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, etc.) — Today’s leading social networks offer up a plethora of ways to garner intelligence around a prospect’s whereabouts. The leading sources include:

1. Status updates — One of the most common things people post about is what they are up to and where they are doing it. Scanning a prospect’s wall or profile can lead to location trends; for example, every morning the prospect grabs coffee at Starbucks on Third. If the prospect uses geolocation apps, status updates can also be used to identify when the prospect “checks in” at a local restaurant, pub, airport, etc.
2. Groups (location, local association, special interest) — LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks are home to numerous online groups that share discussions, and often meet in the real-world based on either a regular schedule or planned meeting. Such online groups are a phenomenal way to identify people who live in a specific area and that share an interest in a topic. For example, a pediatric nurse might join a group for PedNurses of Silicon Valley.
3. Public Events Calendar (Persons Attending) — Public calendars on the major social networks are a great way to find local talent and to coordinate a face-to-face with talent you already know will be in attendance. You might be surprised how many corporate events are listed. Scanning the attendance and invite lists shows you who is local.

Public Event Calendars (meetup, zEvents, upcoming, eventful) — If you haven’t explored services such as Meetup, you really should. Some provide more user profile data than others, but almost all provide some information about the people who will be gathering. Search for domain-relevant events or people in the area with domain knowledge. Master recently joined a meetup for adult kickballers because a majority of those playing on one team were from digital media start-ups in San Francisco. Once the season started, he realized that most of the teams had numerous players from individual companies.

Online Rating Services (Yelp.com, etc.) — You might have missed it if you have been a long-time user, but many of the online rating sites have improved their social networking functionality. Yelp, for instance, now let’s reviewers “check in” and build profiles that include information on what they do for a living. While not a deep source of information, profiles can be used to identify where known prospects frequent, be alerted when they check-in, and to find possible talent.

Location Aware Mobile Applications — the newest tools to cyberstalk someone! There are literally hundreds of location-aware applications for people to find other people like them in a local area.

1. Location broadcasters (foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Lattitude, etc.) —  This category of tools broadcasts a user’s location to those who follow them usually via one of the larger social networks or through the service itself. The most popular is foursquare, but Facebook also recently entered the game with its Places functionality. You can’t search for strangers using either one, but if you had pre-identified people, friended them (or they had a public profile), you could then monitor their location routines and conveniently bump into them!
2. FriendFinders (loopt, whrrl, face2face, etc.) — This category picks up where the previous one left off. While many of these applications aim at helping singles find more “adult” encounters, a few are intended to truly promote social networking. Most require that users opt-in to share location data with others, but loopt recently launched looptmix (4+ million users) which lets you search for other people (strangers) near you based on interest tags and chat message based bios.

Final Thoughts

It’s unfortunately true that many recruiters are risk-averse and slow to adapt to new approaches, tools, and technologies. If you look beyond recruiting, you will find that many of the approaches outlined above are already use by marketers to reach consumers. You can dismiss it as too intrusive or an invasion of privacy but be careful that you’re not using an outdated definition of privacy or an exaggerated fear of legal issues to cause you to miss out on a powerful recruiting tool.

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.

To be taken seriously on this point I had to write a book: Hire With Your Head. Basically it describes a process on how to get hiring managers and candidates on the same page. From the hiring manager’s perspective, it’s describing the work as a series of performance objectives required for on-the-job success. (I refer to these as performance profiles.) From the candidate’s perspective, it’s having them describe a comparable accomplishment for each performance objective. For example, let’s assume the job required the new product marketing manager to develop and launch 25 new iPad apps over the course of the next year. During the interview you’d ask the candidate to describe in detail some comparable product-marketing-related accomplishment. I suggest spending 10-15 minutes getting lots of details for each accomplishment. (Here’s my one-question interview article I wrote for ERE in 2001 on how to do this.) These performance objectives can be split among the hiring team; then, during the collective debrief, the team can rank the candidate on how well the accomplishments compare.

At least that’s the theory. In the field other things happen to mess up this plan.

Those on the interviewing team actually do a very good job as long as a performance profile has been developed, everyone on the hiring team agrees to it, and there is a formal debriefing to evaluate the candidate. The part that’s a bit out of control is the candidate, and the more senior the candidate the more difficult the control. The problem is that candidates have their own way of presenting things, and there are 4,262 books on Amazon on how to interview, most of them on “How to Ace the Behavioral Interview.” To get around this cornucopia of advice, I suggest another way: learn how to effectively answer the accomplishment-based question with insight and confidence. And if the interviewer doesn’t ask this question, make sure he or she does.

The reason the prep is needed is that candidates are not used to talking about a single accomplishment for 15-20 minutes. Instead, if you’re lucky, they’ve been trained to give a STAR answer to a behavioral question like, “give me an example of when you have to demonstrate drive or self-motivation.” Candidates then give a two-minute description of the situation (S), the task (T), the action (A) taken, and the result (R) achieved. Which isn’t bad, but it’s not deep enough to make an accurate assessment. Worse, most candidates have canned answers for all common behaviors and competencies.

While the question format I suggest interviewers use is similar, it requires a more substantive answer. Using the above product marketing example, the question form would be “tell me about your most significant comparable accomplishment related to launching 24 iPad apps over the next 12 months.” This is not easy to answer unless the candidate has thought about it ahead of time. This is even more challenging, since as part of the fact-finding I suggest interviewers ask STAR-like questions for all of the standard behaviors and competencies. This way the interviewer can obtain a more complete understanding of how the person’s behaviors, competencies, and skills relate to specific performance objectives.

To get candidates ready for this type of performance-based interview, I tell them to write down their biggest accomplishments for each job they’ve held. They can then mention these when going through their work history. I then have them prepare a two-paragraph write-up of their most significant team and individual accomplishment. As part of this I make sure they include dates, the people involved, results achieved, the role played, the challenges faced, and the impact made. If I want to really prep them I’ll have them prepare this type of write-up for each accomplishment listed on the performance profile. This is also a great way for me to determine if they’re worth presenting to my client, since I often have difficulty ferreting out all this info in my initial interview. This way I can determine if they’re qualified during the process of getting them to think about what they’ve accomplished at a much deeper level.

If the hiring manager has prepared a performance profile, this type of prep is very effective. However, many hiring managers don’t prepare performance profiles, and even those who have often get caught up in the moment and go off-script. This is where part two of the prep is so important — getting the candidate to have the hiring manager ask performance-based questions. In this case, I instruct candidates to be ready to ask this type of question early in the interview. It goes something like this:

The recruiter didn’t give me a great deal of insight into the performance requirements of the job, and this wasn’t clear from the posted job description, either. Would you mind giving me a quick overview of the open position and some of the performance expectations? This way I can give you examples of related accomplishments and projects I’ve handled.

This will get the manager’s attention, and a few critical performance objectives will be described. Candidates can then ask for some clarification, and smoothly provide overviews of their most comparable accomplishments.

The key to all of this is get the hiring manager to clarify the performance expectations upfront and in parallel have the candidate smoothly provide real examples and details about related accomplishments. Unfortunately most hiring managers “don’t have the time” to understand what the job really entails, and most candidates tend to talk in generalities, hoping their personality and enthusiasm carries the day. While taming hiring managers and prepping candidates takes some effort, the process suggested ensures the best person is hired for exactly the right job. (We’ve prepared a video for recruiters to send to candidates to get them ready for this type of interview. This preview has some good tips. Email me if you want to see the whole thing.

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

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.

Click for larger image

One criterion weighs the proposer’s “historical activities and actions” relating to the .jobs domain, Employ Media, SHRM, the HR community, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The number of potential proposers with the experience suggested here is likely to be small. One organization with a clear track record of involvement with all the groups is Employ Media’s beta partner DirectEmployers Association.

Last fall, the two organizations joined forces to launch several dozen job boards using geographic and occupation-specific names, such as Atlanta.jobs and Nursing.jobs. At the time, DirectEmployers boasted it would eventually launch hundreds of thousands of such sites.

But after the Internet addressing authority, ICANN, questioned the use of such names, which were restricted in the original contract with Employ Media, the sites were taken down.

Subsequently, Employ Media petitioned for a change to the agreement, which then went through a process including a review by a SHRM council. The first iteration of that council was headed by Bill Warren, the executive director of DirectEmployers, and included members of the organization.

SHRM eventually dissolved that group and appointed its own Policy Development Process council. One member of the nine-person council was Rhonda Stickley, president of DirectEmployers.

DirectEmployers said it will participate in the RFP process, and published a whitepaper outlining its plan. Authored by Warren, the plan is essentially the same program that was launched last fall: multiple addresses serving up targeted jobs from a common platform.

“All employers worldwide, regardless of size or industry, should be allowed to list their jobs free of charge,” according to the whitepaper. Low‐cost recruitment advertising opportunities” are an objective.

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: Work is something we do for money, is generally not very enjoyable and interferes with more important things like family.

We should be required to spend as little time as possible “at work” as it interferes with things we would rather be doing. It also subtly assumes that we all must be physically at some other place than home when we work.

The end result is a belief that work should be regulated and time with our families should be made mandatory. The work/life balance cause assumes a more or less digital world: work is on or off, family/life is on or off. For them it seems strange or impossible to have work you get paid for that is your life.

History of Work

Yet, for centuries work and life were co-joined. It is only in the past century that we have physically separated most paid work from the home.

Throughout all of history people have toiled in fields, worked in small shops, bazaars and at home without paychecks, labor laws, or a day off. Women and men shared skills and children were almost always part of the working and life equation as soon as they were old enough. Work might not have been fun in our modern sense, but it was a family activity and it was the fabric of life. Hobbies, travel, and other pleasurable activities were limited by the call of nature and the needs of the community.

Many people ended up doing things that were not of their choosing, but were inherited from fathers or were available at the time they were looking. The classic global example is that of the farmer. On every farm the entire family participated from an early age in the work. Even learning was a family activity, and fathers and sons often co-invented things or passed their knowledge to each succeeding generation.

The modern separation of work from family, learning, and pleasure was the result of the economic expediency found in isolating work in factories and offices. By overseeing the work, owners could ensure efficiency and focus and over the past century has led to increasing levels of work specialization. Often no one in a family understands what other members actually do.

A New Chapter

This is rapidly changing and the work/life movement will wither away over the next few years as people begin to find ways to develop their passion and dreams into paid work that they can do at home or near home when and as much as they want.

Young folks, the Gen Y or Millenniums, are rejecting the work/life notions, much to the chagrin of their elder Gen X colleagues. Gen Y tends to look for work they are passionate about and then they tend to work in ways foreign to Gen X. They take any sense of balance away and may work for days without a stop or not work much at all for some time. They try to choose meaningful and interesting work and embrace it with a passion only seen once in a while with Gen X or Baby Boomers.

Baby Boomer are finding ways to have second careers doing what they thought was a hobby for money. Consultants are more common than ever and offer a variety of services virtually as well as physically. The Internet and the slow withering of corporate life as we have known it for a half-century will radically alter how we think about recruitment and learning.

As work returns slowly to individuals, entrepreneurs, small shops, and small organizations, we will see more and more integration between work and life. More spouses will work together and more children will be part of that work. The days of specialization, physical separation, and mental isolation are ending, I think and hope. We have traversed across a century of change to return to where we started.

Let’s hope we won’t need legislated labor days anymore, as every day will be both one of family and work intertwined as it has been through most of history.

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.

Produced by CJP Digital Media, the phenomenon tag is anything but hyperbole. The videos have been watched some 18 million times. The show was nominated this year for a Streamy Award – the online Emmys. It has a Facebook page and a loyal Twitter following.

It’s also been picked up by cable TV syndicators and is being shown to 1.9 million Marriott, Hyatt, and other hotel guests every year on in-room entertainment.

“A phenomenal success,” declares Lisa McCarthy, Director of Marketing and PR for SFN Group, Spherion’s parent, who says the success surprised everyone.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” she told me. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with.”

That was back in 2006. YouTube was a year old and hadn’t yet been bought by Google. In the recruiting world, we were all worrying about the impending “War for Talent” and the necessity for employers to brand themselves.

Spherion was worrying about that, too. One of the largest staffing agencies in North America, Spherion Staffing Services was discovering it was almost unknown among college students, few of whom even thought about temping.

Like so many other employers, Spherion knew it needed to raise awareness of itself, especially among 18-25 year-olds, the entry-level demographic.

“We were sitting around a room brainstorming ideas,” McCarthy recalls. There were thoughts of using Second Life, the virtual world that was a hot trend for a while. Videos were an obvious choice for branding. But Spherion’s push-the-envelope culture, plus the demographic it wanted to reach, meant a talking head video wouldn’t do.

What emerged was the Internet TV show you see today. “My gut instinctively said it would work,” says McCarthy. To be sure, especially considering the investment she would be asking the company to make, focus groups were conducted to see whether the idea would resonate with the target audience.

It did. The C-suite bought into the idea and, though McCarthy won’t say what the program’s budget is, it clearly has grown along with the show’s success. Still, she says it’s less costly than a full-blown ad campaign.

Branded entertainment is not new. It was pioneered in the early days of radio, later making the transition to television. Although cost and audience taste have curtailed branded broadcast TV productions — Hallmark is one of the few remaining — it’s flourishing online. IKEA, for instance, sponsors Easy to Assemble. Topps, the trading card company, and Dick’s Sporting Goods, sponsor Back on Topps, the winner in the Branded Entertainment category.

What’s different about The Temp Life is the almost complete absence of a Spherion pitch. Only at the beginning of each episode is the company mentioned. The show’s website discreetly offers a jobs tab. But that’s it. And that’s intentional.

The demographic Spherion is pursuing is savvy to obvious pitches, explains McCarthy, and easily turned off by it. That’s also why there’s no attempt to capture viewer information, either by requiring a registration or even offering a newsletter or other come-on.

“Maybe at some point we’ll do something. Maybe not,” she says. “We didn’t want to make it a commercial.”

So what’s been the results?

McCarthy says that as a branding effort, The Temp Life has accomplished more than the brainstorming group could have hoped. The viewership numbers are her primary metric. A second is the buzz. The Temp Life pops up regularly in entertainment and marketing blogs, and was named one of Brandweek’s Bright Ideas.

She wouldn’t give me any details, but she did mention that a second series, aimed at a different demographic, may be in the works. She soon heads to New York, where The Temp Life is filmed, for a meeting to discuss the new show.

Though few employers have the kind of resources to sponsor an Internet series, let alone two, McCarthy believes The Temp Life offers ideas recruiters can adapt for their own companies.

“It’s really all about content,” says McCarthy, who eschews those common and all-too-formulaic job hunting tips and ideas. “Talk about the local things in your community,” she says. “The key is to build a rapport with the people out there.”

Videos are great, but there is no silver bullet. Take advantage of all the social media available. Be useful, she counsels. And “have a little fun.”

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.

True SEO geeks, though, check those files. Sometimes the instructions to the crawlers contain interesting tidbits, such as the location where dummy editions might be found. A blogger in 2007 posted about what he found in some UK newspaper files.

Someone else tweeted about this little bit of robots.txt humor. (Do I need to explain the joke?)

In the case of the Daily Mail, its robots.txt file contained these lines:

“# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!

# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline dot co dot uk”

It’s certainly an odd place to run an ad. But talk about targeting! Who but a die-hard SEO fanatic would spend the time poking about such files? At least until blogger Malcolm Coles came across the ad, it was a genius way to filter out the hoi polloi.

But then it got picked up by Paid Content, and then by TechCrunch. And now by us.

I wish I could tell you a brilliant UK recruiter came up with the idea. Instead, it was James Bromley, who runs MailOnline.com. He claims the credit in a tweet today.

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.

I am being asked to show that my team is at capacity, and what it would take to complete the recruiting team to address the business needs (requisitions). When I joined the company two years ago, we had 15 recruiters. In the last two years we have had three reductions in force, hiring freezes, etc. It made sense for the company to decide that we could downsize the recruiting organization. Since December 2009, our requisition load has been a consistent 100+.

Last year with seven recruiters, we filled 774 requisitions. This included moving internal resources to fill the requirements and then backfilling them and also converting temporary employees to full-time. If I remove the latter two, then we are down to 700 external hires. This indicates an average of 100 hires per year per recruiter. Two-thirds of our hires are technical, billable, client-facing, and implementers. Some require Microsoft certifications or Cisco certifications. The last third of our hires are a combination of telesales, finance, and marketing roles.

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

I appreciate your assistance.

—-

Richard Newsom

Hi Linda. Great question, and one that is getting more and more attention now. It sounds as if your recruiting team has been very busy. Nearly 800 hires for a team of seven recruiters appears to be a productive group. As you mentioned, the workload your recruiters are dealing with greatly depends upon the types of roles being filled (e.g. senior technical role vs. telesales agent). It also depends upon the recruiting process at your organization, the legal and compliance aspects your company follows, the current marketplace, and dozens of other factors. As you’ve recognized, simply having a “feeling” that your team is overloaded is no longer good enough. We must be able to accurately justify their capacity and current workload.

There are many different ways to approach this, and not every solution works for every company. I’d like to discuss one particular approach. It is not a new concept, as it has been used in manufacturing industries for years. However, it hasn’t been used as much in the services industry or in recruiting. David Szary has been pushing this concept hard for while now and it has a lot of merit. The concept of Materials Release Planning is an approach that could help you in this situation.

Materials Release Planning (or just-in-time hiring) considers the required process inputs to determine the size of the workforce needed. Using your example of 774 hires (and making some broad assumptions that you’ll need to validate)…

Assumptions:

• We need to hire 774 people in 2011
• 90% of the offers extended result in a hire
• 25% of the interviews conducted result in an offer
• 80% of the candidates submitted to a hiring manager get interviewed
• It takes 1.5 hours to source a candidate worthy of submitting to a hiring manager
• Each recruiter has 2.5 hours per day dedicated to sourcing candidates for submission
• There are seven recruiters dedicated to recruiting throughout 2011 — thus seven recruiters X 2.5 hours per day for sourcing = 17.5 sourcing hours per day total

Calculations:

• 774 hires needed/90% acceptance rate = 860 offers need to be extended
• 860 offers/25% offer rate = 3,440 candidates need to be interviewed
• 3,440 interviews/80% interview rate = 4,300 candidates who need to be submitted to hiring managers
• 4,300 submissions X 1.5 hours per candidate = 6,450 sourcing hours needed
• 6,450 sourcing hours needed/17.5 hours per day = 369 business days to source all candidates (516 calendar days)

Using these assumptions, it would take your team of seven recruiters nearly a year and a half to fill all 774 positions. Keep in mind that this model assumes that all hires are spread evenly throughout the year. Any cyclicality of the hiring would increase the resources you need.

Obviously you’ll have to verify the data in these assumptions to create your own bottom-line results; however, using these assumptions, you would be understaffed by nearly 50%. While your team of seven was able to handle this volume in the past, if understaffed, they did it at the expense of other things (employee engagement, quality or work, risk and compliance, etc.)

One final thought to consider: the simplistic example above treats all positions equally. Thus, it takes the same amount of time to source a Cisco-certified person as it does to source a telesales agent. To account for this you can simply segment your hires into whatever logical buckets you have (sales vs. non-sales, technical vs. non technical, etc.) and run the model separately on each of those segments, using different assumptions for each segment.

I wish you the best of luck in your journey.

Sincerely,

Richard Newsom

Vice President of Recruiting Operations

Fifth Third Bank

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.

Globally, however, Monster will have to negotiate traffic deals for Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The traffic arrangement gives it an exclusive right to negotiate with Yahoo for a portal presence outside North America “subject to certain (undisclosed) limitations.”

In the U.S., Monster gets a network of about 600 daily and weekly newspapers, which focus mostly on local and regional recruitment advertising. Put together several years ago, the newspaper network joins the 400 papers already aligned with Monster.

The company also says it “gains additional job posting strength in three important sectors: healthcare, finance/insurance, and retail…” Employers in these sectors tend to recruit locally, which is where newspapers are strongest.

Monster’s announcement says that it expects that with the addition of HotJobs customers it now will be doing business with 97 percent of the Fortune 1000.

Many of the largest employers were doing business with both Monster and HotJobs, so they’ll see some savings. Monster says that it will continue to operate HotJobs separately until at least the first quarter of 2011, when it expects to launch an integrated site.

It’s not clear what that means. A FAQ accompanying the announcement says, “We’re selecting the best products from both organizations to deliver effective solutions…”  That suggests something more than just migrating customers to Monster may be in the works, though it’s hard to imagine what that might be. Yahoo hasn’t invested much in HotJobs in the last few years, so chances are the “best products” are probably job delivery and distribution tools.

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.

A quick disclaimer: Influence done right and practiced well is not manipulation. It is not about attaining power, control, looking good, or driving your personal agenda. It is about mutuality. It’s about what is known as the law of reciprocity: knowing what is important to the other person and helping them get it. In turn, you will achieve what is important to you: using your skills and knowledge to improve the talent management process within your organization.

For example, when recruiting for a new employee, whether it’s a replacement position or a new position, what are high priorities for the hiring manager? High priorities can be:

• Finding an individual who will best meet the manager’s business objectives for his or her operating unit
• Finding an individual who will fit into the culture of the operating unit
• Finding an individual who the manager feels he or she will be compatible with and who will work in a way that is consistent with their working expectations
• Finding an individual who will make them and their operating unit look good
• Finding an individual who can quickly grow and adapt in their position with the organization (important for fast-growth companies)

How well do you know what’s most important to the hiring manager? Often well-intended assumptions are made that are not in alignment. The five points raised above are examples, and there may be other drivers key to your hiring manager. The very process of asking allows you to better understand the hiring manager, build a relationship and align your efforts.

While it’s easy to talk about the importance of influence, and it’s intuitively logical, actually doing it can be a challenge. Examples of common challenges are:

• Trepidation in dealing with the manager
• Not knowing exactly what to do to build the relationship
• Poor responsiveness (in timeliness or quality) to the manager’s requests
• Tendency to oversell your candidates or your hiring strategies
• Quitting at no — avoiding conflict versus working through it
• A need to find the “perfect candidate” — in your opinion

Learning how to overcome these challenges is important and critical to the organization.

As a corporate recruiter, how do you gain an edge? How do you use your skills to improve the recruitment process and ensure the right candidates are hired? One thing is certain: you cannot do it well alone, nor can the hiring manager.

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?

I argue NOT!

Characterizing the Last 20 Years

While the adoption of technology has certainly been a major driver of change, there are ultimately four characteristics that define the business environment of the last two decades. Those characteristics are:

1. Continuous churn — frequent cycles of both rapid economic growth and contraction that forced organizations to acquire and shed both talent and entire businesses. Many global organizations were forced to deal with both rapid growth and contraction simultaneously, i.e. churn.
2. Intense global competition — as barriers to entry and competition fell, every firm, even those servicing once tightly defined regional markets, was thrust into a state of unrelenting and intense global competition. In a race for differentiation, technology was leveraged to accelerate product development and innovative delivery, kicking off a never-ending battle that has shortened product development lifecycles and forced innovation throughout all business functions.
3. Rapid obsolescence — with product lifecycles getting shorter and new ways to deliver goods and services arriving daily, information, tools, practices, products, and skills are becoming obsolete at an insane pace. In some industries the knowledge required to produce a product is obsolete by the time the product hits the market. This characteristic impacts not only individuals and organizations, but also entire industries (print publication, photographic technology, communications infrastructure, etc.)
4. Unpredictability foils planning — all of the above characteristics combine to create the fourth: the complexity that volatility in the business environment brings to planning. For industries that make long-term investments (airlines, heavy manufacturing, materials mining, etc.) long-term planning has become largely ineffectual.

The two words that best describe our current state: continuous obsolescence. Years ago, management guru Tom Peters predicted our current state. He called it “managing under chaos.”

Established Competencies No Longer Apply

Evolution and change are not new, but the rate at which the business environment is changing is unprecedented. During most of the last century, economic cycles, product lifecycles, and the knowledge, skills, tools, and approaches used to produce products lasted longer. Not only did change occur slower, it occurred in predictable patterns. This stability and consistency enabled organizations to create organizational models that governed how work was broken up into tasks, who would accomplish those tasks, what tools would be used, and to predict how long work would take. A few years into the industrial era, the concept of competencies emerged and organizations started hiring to a target competency profile that has hasn’t changed much in 60 years; that is, until now!

The era of long-lasting competencies is gone, and I am predicting that it will never return. Chaos and rapid change are the new norm and will be for decades to come. In the chaotic environment that is today, one thing is clear: the approaches developed for organizing labor and accomplishing work in the industrial era have become barriers to productivity today. No longer do organizations need indefinite access to narrowly skilled talent; instead, they need medium-term access to versatile talent and short-term access to specialized talent.

The Only Competency that Will Matter: Continuous Learning

It should be clear to everyone in HR that in a world of constant obsolescence, knowledge, skills, tools, and practices have an extremely limited shelf life. Instead of relying on past experience, training, or education, employees will be required to continually “unlearn” yesterday’s obsolete practices and solutions and to seek out completely new ones using the social trends and technology of the day. In that environment, the only key competency that can effectively counter continuous obsolescence is the ability to continuously learn and apply knowledge.

The continuous learning competency is the foundation behind building a “learning organization,” a concept firms like Google, Nike, Netflix, and Apple have championed since inception.

The key characteristics of the continuous learning competency include:

1. Endless learning — unlike traditional training and development, there is no endpoint for individuals or organizations that exhibit this competency.
2. Relative speed — while continuous learners never stop, the speed at which they seek out, absorb, and leverage new knowledge is relative to the rate of innovation or speed of change called for by the market.
3. Bleeding-edge — continuous learners are never playing catch up, but rather are learning from the leading or bleeding edge of knowledge. As such, their trusted sources don’t include more mainstream channels of information dissemination.
4. Self-directed — remaining on the bleeding edge of knowledge requires direction that cannot come from systems designed to coordinate the masses. As a result, continuous learners are self-motivated and self-directed learners.
5. Immediate application — it is possible to continuously acquire knowledge and never apply it, but continuous learners are never satisfied with theoretical or abstract knowledge. They instead seek out learning that can be directly applied to current and “near future” problems and opportunities.
6. Broad scope — to further enable application of knowledge, continuous learners seek out information on a broad range of skills and capabilities that better enable immediate application of core knowledge. The expanded scope of learning often includes potential problems, leading experts, the best information sources, next practices, metrics, and trends.
7. Agile — continuous learners can quickly recognize and accept that previously attained knowledge is no longer relevant, and stop defending past practices and long-held beliefs.
8. Sharing — both individuals and organizations that master the continuous learning competency develop systems that actually get used to maximize the speed and quality of information that gets shared throughout the organization, eliminating excessive duplication in discovery. These systems also help pinpoint how and where continuous learners are uncovering information of value.
9. Performance criteria — individuals who are continuous learners assess their own performance based on their ability to remain on the “bleeding edge,” even when others do not. Organizations seeking to develop a learning organization also establish continuous learning behaviors as primary assessment factors in hiring, promotion decisions, and performance appraisals.
10. Data-based decision-making — non-continuous learners are comfortable using historical data and examples out of context, while continuous learners and learning organizations demand time-sensitive information to justify decisions.

Final Thoughts

Stop reading for a second and ask yourself: “has my organization experienced unpredictable change in recent years, are we growing in some areas but contracting in others, and does the way we have always done things seem to be a barrier moving forward?” If you answered yes to any of those phrases, is it really likely that you can lead or dominate your industry without addressing those issues?

Accepting obsolescence of knowledge and experience is hard, but if you are going to be successful in a world of chaos, innovation, and constant obsolescence, you need to realize that “yesterday’s answers” are not only rapidly losing their value, but reliance upon them may be a liability. If as an individual you desire to be successful and enjoy job security, you need to become a “learning machine.” If you want to make your organization successful in a chaotic world, declare “continuous learning” to be your organization’s No. 1 core competency.

No Excuses

A while back I was attending a formal meeting at Google. Demonstrating my total attention (in stark contrast to the Googlers in attendance) I left all of my technology packed away. Immediately following the meeting I was asked to discuss the ramifications of a major industry event that had occurred during the meeting. I excused my lack of knowledge and awareness of the event using my dedicated attention to the meeting with executives. Much to my dismay, the employee responded with a scowl, dismissing my excuse, and proceeded to walk away mumbling to himself and shaking his head in disbelief. I learned that day that the cost of not knowing “everything immediately” at Google is extremely high. Don’t let my excuse be yours. Learning cannot stop because you are otherwise engaged!

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.

Without a doubt, there are plenty of skeptics to both of those claims. In the first instance, Eric Shannon, a job board founder himself, offered evidence to show that the hiring of candidates from job boards has been growing over the years, as has the number of job boards themselves. His reference to CareerXroads 2010 Sources of Hire study points out that after employee referrals and a company’s own career site, job boards provide the most number of external hires.

The second reason job boards have survived is their evolutionary behavior. Each time a new killer app or trend has come along, the job boards have morphed, co-opting it or integrating it.

Since last year we have seen pretty clearly how the job boards are responding to the surge of interest in social media recruiting. In fact, just since the summer began Dice.com and its sister site, ClearanceJobs.com, have aggressively imitated some of the best of the social media elements, creating a Dice Talent Network on its flagship IT site and Cleared Network on its security clearance jobs board.

Dice, incidentally, is one of the job boards using multiple social channels to promote itself. It has its own You Tube channel and its own DiceNews video service.

CareerBuilder a few months back added several new features, including a Talent Network service that helps recruiters build their pipeline by identifying where the best candidates can be found. Its hireINSIDER is aimed at job seekers and lets them see how they compare in experience, skills, and education to others pursuing the same job.

Smaller job boards — in traffic and resources — have been no less aggressive in adding function and interest. Among other improvements, AfterCollege.com has overhauled its company profiles, converting what industry-wide has been a dreary corporate factsheet into a much more interesting presence that borrows liberally from Facebook. Beyond.com, by no means small cumulatively with 15,000 or so sites, has introduced applications for smart phones and has jumped into video with a YouTube presence.

And, like the major national job boards, many, perhaps most, now distribute their job postings via Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn.

These changes — and plenty of others — are how the job boards have maintained their position as one of the most effective means of sourcing candidates. The September issue of The Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership details the integration of social media by the job board industry and offers snapshots of what some of them have done.

The article also looks ahead at the next-biggest job board move, one that has been underway for a few years, but which is about to accelerate even faster than it did following the introduction of the first iPhone.

As noted recruiting authority and executive director of the job board industry’s trade group, Peter Weddle  says, mobile ”is the next big thing.”

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.

Founder John Sudds (I’m not kidding about his last name, but you can understand why I thought I was being punked) insisted recruiters will spend the money and wear his stuff because of the pride in their accomplishments. “It gives recruiters something to shoot for,” he tells me during our conversation. “It gives the industry a sense of inspiration.”

After that, it was TalentHole, and that line about removal services, that inspired me to think of those  few people from my past life I wished I could have had removed. Permanently. If you catch my meaning.

So I was a little disappointed, though not unexpectedly so, to discover that TalentHole.com’s idea of removal really means outplacement. Its founder, an independent recruiter who wants me to call him Carlos, sees this project of his as something of a holy mission.

“There are so many bad employers now and they are asking employees to work their — I’ll use “behinds.” Carlos had a different noun — off, that I wanted to do something to help,” he says.

And then there are employees with attitudes that would scare away Atilla the Hun, but whose work quality is good enough to keep them from getting fired. “A person is a Talent Hole, when he or she makes everyone else miserable by the very nature of their actions and in-actions.” It says that right on the website.

Tell TalentHole about them and maybe Carlos can help them find another job.

He works splits, fills reqs, sources candidates, and might just be able to facilitate the divorce in a way that is speedy and amicable.

If he earns a placement fee, great. He doesn’t charge otherwise.

But Carlos, I asked him, what recruiter wants your loser candidate with the bad attitude?

Reasonably enough, he explained that not every worker who wants out has an attitude problem. Many just don’t fit the company or the boss. “75 percent of the time,” he says, “that Talent Hole, somewhere else, is a super star.”

Maybe. Me, I’d ask questions if a Carlos from Santa Monica were to pitch me a candidate. On the other hand, if my boss is a Talent Hole, I’d at least be comforted to know I have a champion in Carlos at TalentHole.

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.

We created a diversity and inclusion framework that was based on measures of accountability from the CEO down, tied to incentives and performance goals. We established a consistent and transparent recruiting and selection process and provided training in compliance in such areas as EEO/Affirmative Action to ensure that all our managers understood the legal environment.

And, we built a comprehensive diversity sourcing strategy, focused on best practices, and using technology and new communications media to identify and connect with top diverse talent. We required all of our recruiters to become AIRS-certified diversity recruiters. We also focused on the importance of building relationships with top talent. From recruiting at colleges and universities that have highly diverse populations, to diversity-focused professional associations, to positioning our company as a top employer of diverse talent, we worked hard on the front end to attract and hire. But, we realized that all of these efforts would be meaningless without a work environment that let our employees thrive.

Embedding Diversity and Inclusion Into our Corporate Culture

Encouraging all employees — from senior staff to front-line workers — to embrace diversity and inclusion values can be can be daunting for an organization our size, with more than 6,000 individual operations across the U.S. alone. Our company created this cultural shift by literally embracing the words of Mahatma Ghandi: “We must be the change we want to see in the world.” Through diversity-focused training, to the establishment of vibrant employee network groups and mentoring initiatives, over time, diversity and inclusion have become a part of our company’s DNA. This value is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is viewed as a distinct competitive advantage. In fact, we’ve even been recognized this year by DiversityInc as the #1 overall on their top 50 list of diverse and inclusive companies and #1 for Recruitment and Retention. In 2008, ERE recognized Sodexo as #1 in diversity recruiting.

Why Internal Mobility?

The short answer is that our employees are our greatest asset!

We know from our candidate surveys and our company engagement survey that our employees want to stay in a company that provides a range of professional opportunities and career paths where they can grow their career. So, if we can leverage the opportunity to promote and hire from within the company, we may be able to retain existing diverse employee populations.

The Challenge

Like any large organization, our challenge lies in the existence of multiple market segments all within our one company. It can be difficult for individuals to plan, identify, and compete for promotional opportunities — especially when those opportunities might be in a different market segment.

Meanwhile, we see an opportunity to stimulate employee creativity and innovation by introducing employees who may have different business perspectives. They bring a fresh perspective to existing work plans and can stimulate process development and productivity.

Blazing the Path for Internal Mobility

Thus we launched our internal mobility initiative with the goal of helping our employees achieve their career aspirations, and, ultimately attempting to influence the engagement and retention of our top and diverse employees..We began with “soft” internal sourcing: sharing jobs with our employee network groups and sending e-cards internally to individuals on our succession plan. As we progressed, we learned that just sharing information with our employees was not enough. We needed to help them to overcome organizational barriers that make it difficult for our employees to post and compete for positions outside of their markets.

So, we took a more consultative approach to our challenges. For example, we engaged our executives in panel discussions and held focus groups on internal job opportunities and barriers. We looked for ways to focus on competencies vs. organizational experience when looking at talent, and considered developing partnership programs to team with other company initiatives to more explicitly focus on helping our top and diverse employees achieve their career aspirations.

Team Effort: Engaging Multiple Leadership Levels to Drive Results

Buy-in from the executive level is critical for cross divisional movement to be successful. To assist in driving success, our talent acquisition group launched three vodcasts with messages from senior leaders in support of internal mobility to be used at team meetings throughout the organization and with recruiter training.

Additionally, our talent acquisition group formed and now leads a cross-divisional and cross-function team that is systematically looking at program enhancement opportunities and ensuring that proposed solutions will fit within our company framework. Early results from these efforts show that on average, 10% of our internal management hires have been cross-divisional transfers. And the information from our 2010 Employee Engagement Survey is especially encouraging in an environment where most companies have seen the engagement of their employees drop (as reported by the 2010 Hewitt Study). We have succeeded in increasing ours by a strong 7%, with 85% of our employees reporting that Sodexo is a better employer than the competition.

More Than Just Another Hire

While Sodexo has been recognized for implementing best practices in diversity and inclusion, we know that our journey is not complete. We are continually looking for new ways to take our programs to the next level.

To be a competitive employer for top diverse talent, we need to be able to do more than simply source and hire. We need a corporate culture where employees thrive and are able to achieve their career aspirations. As such, we believe that our current focus on internal mobility is an important initiative to increase retention of top diverse talent. It completes the circle: sourcing, hiring, and retaining top diverse talent.

Let’s Continue the Conversation at the ERE Expo

Will you be at the ERE Expo this fall? If so, I invite you to join my keynote session. I would love to continue the conversation, share with you some of what we at Sodexo are doing to take our diversity journey to the next level, and also learn from you the best practices at your organizations.

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:

• Better hiring decisions
• An improved candidate experience
• A more cost-effective approach to talent acquisition

Working Outside the ATS

Applicant tracking systems offer a robust way to manage applicant flow, communicate effectively with candidates, ensure compliance, and report analytics. But only if you use the system.

We all get accustomed to doing things a certain way, and for some recruiters, it’s just too cumbersome to use the ATS instead of their own spreadsheets, email templates, or reporting methods. If this is happening in your organization, make some changes right away. The time it takes to get recruiters ramped up in how to use an ATS pales in comparison to the hours wasted by working outside the system.

Recruiters bypassing the ATS also diminishes the value of the reports the tool can generate automatically. These reports provide real-time information about how efficient and effective the hiring process is at any given time. But without timely (or accurate) inputs from recruiters, the data is bad, the team’s credibility can be damaged, and the quality of the hiring process usually suffers.

Practice using your ATS on a real-time basis. This will help you do three things:

1. Learn the system better
2. Prevent the duplication of work, such as re-entering information into the system
3. Keep details like candidate correspondence from falling through the cracks.

Beginning a Search Without the Right Information

“Pay now or pay later” has never been more true than when dealing with the hiring process. When recruiters don’t get the right information upfront, it costs them time, energy, and even money, later. But it’s not usually the recruiters’ fault when the hiring manager doesn’t have time to answer questions or discuss the job in detail.

But it is the recruiter’s job to make the hiring manager understand the consequences of kicking off a search with nothing more than an old job description or the previous posting. What are the consequences?

• Days or weeks of back and forth questions, answers, and follow-up questions
• Sourcing candidates who aren’t a good match
• Frustrating candidates who are interviewed, but later considered “not right” for the job
• Costing the company by extending the time that positions (sometimes critical, revenue-generating positions) remain open

What should a recruiter do? When a job opens, the recruiter and hiring manager should meet live — either by phone, Webex, or in person — to discuss the position in depth. Key questions might include:

• What are the key responsibilities of this job?
• What kinds of decisions will this person make?
• What key accomplishments must be achieved in the first year?
• What’s the best thing about this job?
• What’s the most difficult part of this job?
• What experience and education is a must-have for candidates?
• What qualifications are nice-to-have?
• What companies do you feel hire well for this role?
• Who are direct reports to this role? Dotted-line reports? Supervisors? Key stakeholders?
• Who will interview the candidates?

If your company doesn’t already have a template for guiding the discussion during intake meetings, create one — and adapt it over time — so recruiters can drive consistent conversations with hiring managers.

Not Using Questionnaire Functionality in the Applicant Tracking System

Recruiters often spend hours doing something the applicant tracking system is equipped to do in a matter of seconds.

Recruiters can be much more efficient — and improve their results — by taking the time up front to create job-specific questionnaires in the ATS prior to beginning a search. With good questionnaires in place, the ATS is able to automatically screen and sort candidates as they complete the online application process.

When job-specific questionnaires aren’t used, recruiters have no choice but to review each candidate’s background, one by one. And if there are more than a few candidates on a req, it simply might not be possible to review each one — so recruiters might review only those who most recently applied.

Again, you can invoke the “pay now or pay later” mantra. Taking the time to create a job-specific questionnaire based on the outcome of the intake meeting will result in the most qualified candidates showing at the top of the list — in real time.

Taking a Passive Approach to Scheduling Interviews

Identifying who will be on the interviewing team — and when interviews will likely take place — should be agreed upon during the intake meeting between the recruiter and hiring manager.

When recruiters know the days and time slots the interviewing team has available, candidates can be scheduled on the spot. This type of proactive planning improves the candidate experience, speeds the hiring decision, and helps ensure that the best candidates stay in the process.

Producing Manual or Customized Reports

We all know people who are energized by running reports and reviewing data. And by its nature, talent acquisition is a target-rich environment for data-hungry people. But if we objectively assess the standard reports that most applicant tracking systems offer, we’ll find that — more often than not — 80% of what we need to assess the effectiveness of talent acquisition is there.

Would more reports — or different reports —  be interesting to see? Undoubtedly. Would they help us drive better results? Arguably no.

Talent acquisition leaders should strive to build a set of standardized reports that meet the most critical reporting needs of the function. This will also allow everyone, but particularly recruiters, to focus more time and energy on sourcing and selecting candidates, instead of tracking numbers.

When managing requests for additional data from senior leaders or other stakeholders, talent acquisition leaders should ask: “What will be done with the information once we get it?” and “How will this new data help us achieve our goals of faster, better, and more cost-effective talent acquisition?”

Taking steps to address these five areas can drive significant improvements, quickly, for your talent acquisition team.

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.

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:

• Enabling the local international site to open a local website, in the local language, even in a different “look and feel,” adapted to local expectations and habits.
• Enter the social media independently, not only under the “umbrella” of the U.S. corporation.
• Give publications, articles, and blogs a independent online presence, focused on the potential local candidates.
• Have U.S. corporate people train local international professional recruiters on using the different tools.

What’s the Impact?

I’ll share with you the latest in Israel, following our HRD March 2010 sourcing survey of corporate recruiting departments, and some of the results that I see following the fact that companies representing U.S. corporations are not receiving support:

• Higher cost of hire. Placement agencies and job boards are one of the three top sources of hire.
• Lack of use of online tools. Only 5% of the organizations use their corporate website as a main source of hire; only 45% use online social media tools for recruiting.

How can you improve your work with international sites?

My top five recommendations for U.S. corporations on how to support their International sites are:

• Teach new technology as soon as you learn it
• Allow them to act local
• Trust the local sites; delegate
• Learn from them (maybe they’ll bring new ideas that you can use)
• Benchmark for a worldwide set of best-known-methods, and share them

The value that these changes will bring your company:

• Save money and shorten time to hire in the company
• Build a stronger worldwide brand
• Align corporate recruiting processes
• Enable diversity and new ideas generated by worldwide sites
• Let worldwide sites feel more connected to the corporate

What needs to change? You can help!

The reason why I thought about my brother and me in relation to this conversation is the way we saw it at the time as the “hard fact.” Something that we just couldn’t imagine that would change in our lifetime.

For a few years now I’ve been telling recruiters in Israel that all they need to do is start the dialogue with their corporate partners, and maybe things will change in the future. This year I decided to try and make a bigger difference, and I’ll be presenting my thoughts on this delicate partnership between U.S. corporations and local international sites at the coming ERE Expo.

As part of my preparations for it I need your help:

I’ve prepared a very short survey that will take not more than five minutes of your time to answer. It is intended for HR and recruiting teams of both U.S. corporates and their local international sites. Please help me with filling it out and forwarding the link to your partners around the world in the different local sites.

I’ll be more than happy to share with anyone who fills the survey its results.

To answer the survey please click here.