It wasn’t among the questions posed to debaters Jason Averbrook, CEO at Knowledge Infusion, and Gartner’s Managing VP Jim Holincheck, though it lurked behind their generally affable agreement on most of the talent management issues that arose during their time on stage.

For instance, when show co-chair and debate moderator Bill Kutik asked about the meaning of strategic human capital management, and, later, about just what workforce planning is, there wasn’t much debate.

The former is the linkage of employees, their skills, training, performance, management, compensation, and deployment directly to the business goals and needs of the enterprise. As Holincheck said, it is “more than talent management,” and as both agreed, it is well more than the mere automation of HR functions.

Workforce planning was a little more complicated.

Distilling what the two said, workforce planning is the collection and analysis of human capital metrics to produce actionable plans positively impacting the performance of the enterprise.

What happens, though, when you have multiple best-of-breed systems from different vendors? There’s lots of data being collected, but the first obstacle to using it is integrating it.

Holincheck observed that 30 percent of his firms did no core HR integration. One problem, one big problem, is, he said, that “HR is still siloed.”

Averbrook echoed the silo comment, pointing out that talent management and workforce planning is “measured by what value it brings.” The implication being that without stitching together all the data and linking it to business talent management is, if not useless for business planning, certainly of limited value.

It was at this point that the differing views of best of breed began to emerge. While neither of them articulated it quite this way, best of breed can be decided component by component. That’s pretty much what we have been doing for years.

Makes sense, no? If you’re going to buy a talent acquisition system, you want the best of breed. Or at least the best you can afford. Same for onboarding. Ditto for performance management, and so on.

The problem with that approach, as countless employers have discovered, is as Averbrook energetically observed: “Is there a way of pulling all this data together?”

“Do you have the IT support to go with a bifurcated approach? The vendors aren’t going to string it together for you.”

Another way of looking at best of breed is holistically. Even if each piece may not be the Rolls Royce in its field, does a vendor’s complete talent management suite do what you need it to do effectively, smoothly, efficiently, and work in a way that makes it easy for people to use? Then for you, that may be the best of breed.

The HR tech vendors have been sensing the shift to product suites for the last few years. It’s one reason why so many acquisitions and partnerships have been happening.

Not an hour after the Great Debate ended, I was talking with Terrence McCrossan, division VP marketing and strategy for ADP. We were talking about the growing HR software line from ADP and the morning’s debate.

“Convergence there,” he said, referring to the issue of suite vs. best of breed, “is a big one.” Customers are looking more and more, he agreed, to comprehensive solutions for all the reasons Averbrook cited.

None of this means second rate is acceptable. And the larger employers with the IT and financial resources to make things work together, will probably still take the component approach. However, it does mean we’re taking a broader view of what it means to be  “best of breed.”

Once you have the data, however, you compile it. Then what do you do with it? Both debaters agreed that most of us are still in the early stages of making best use of the information the systems now give us.

One more observation from the debate: How do you introduce the social collaboration tools to your enterprise?

Averbrook counseled HR to “take the lead,” and not leave it to other departments or IT. “Start with it,” rather than add it incrementally to the work process.

Holincheck didn’t disagree with HR being involved, but he cautioned an incremental approach. Go slow. Let the use of social tools grow virally.

“I think it has to be part of the (TM) strategy, but I don’t think it has to be first.”

The latest feature is a “Deloitte NZ Fan Showcase,” which you can find on the company’s Facebook wall. One of the company’s “fans” is interviewed with a little camera — an idea one Sodexo observer seems to like.

In addition to the fan showcase, the Facebook pages also include:

• A video q and a, where people can ask questions like “how important are grades?” ”This will be the predominant way we will be responding to fan questions,” says Paul Jacobs. “It showcases to them that we are human, and highlights the variety of people working for Deloitte NZ … trying to humanize the brand.” Talent Acquisition Manager Richard Long has been working with Jacobs for a year on social recruiting strategies. The two are handling most of the Facebook filming, writing posts, and so on from soup to nuts.
• Live webcasts for fans — candidates — to hear more from the company. This was inspired by the way celebrities like Miley Cyrus were using Facebook. “Our inspiration for a lot of our initiatives comes from outside the recruitment and HR industries,” Jacobs says. “We are watching closely how celebrities, artists, DJs, and game developers are using social media to engage and build a loyal following of crazed and addicted fans. Our intention is for Deloitte employees/recent grad recruits to tell the story behind the brand, using the employee-branding philosophy rather than employer-branded.”

The payoff all this? Jacobs says “we’ve had significant ROI in securing top student talent from our competitors, and the offer-to-acceptance ratio was considerably higher compared to previous years.”

I met a guy this morning at breakfast who runs the HR analytics department for a major financial institution. We talked data and he told me about the challenges of getting usable data out of multiple systems — not to mention the various ways systems allow information to be entered. He’s here shopping for tools to help solve the problem and improve analysis.

To my left at the table was an HRIS manager for a specialty retailer with more than 12,000 employees looking at new talent management systems.

At the opening reception Tuesday night I met a team of two HR professionals who came to look at comp management systems. And on the shuttle ride to McCormick Place an HR generalist with tech savvy said he’s at the show to scope out a new recruiting system. He won’t be looking at anything from the current vendor because, he confided, of its poor customer support.

The 13th annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition opened in Chicago this morning with a rousing welcome from show co-chair Bill Kutik. The HR Executive columnist exuberantly declared it the “largest HR Tech show in history.”

Spilling out statistics almost as fast as he can speak, Kutik said there were more exhibitors, multiple attendees from several companies, and attendees from multiple countries. Some 100 financial analysts and investors from Wall Street, VCs, and investment banking firms are in attendance, presumably to know more about industry trends and potential opportunities than to system shop.

Even attending was the CTO of the CIA, Kutik observed.

Two years ago, when I last attended an HR Tech show, the vendors bordered on the extravagant in their efforts to impress. Taleo had multiple booths with aerialists doing a high-wire act. Workscape had a drawing for a car.

Now, as the VP of marketing for one vendor joked, “They’ve all rightsized.”

Another executive said her company decided “We wanted to focus on the value we offer.” The booth had multiple demo areas with presenters using terms like “ROI,” and “efficiencies,” and talking about “the business implications of your human capital management and how it directly contributes to productivity improvements.”

The other trend that is full force here is the move toward comprehensive talent management solutions. StepStone, Lawson, Taleo, Kenexa, Plateau, Oracle, and the other HR tech vendors all are promoting their suites, and the efficiency of the single-vendor approach. And everything is SaaS.

Even Bond, a staffing and search firm focused tech provider, is going suite. It rolled out a vendor management system last year and an ATS a few months back. (It previously had Bond StarSearcher, which is the basis of the new Bond Talent.) Next year, it intends to roll out Bond HR, its HR admin tools. The VMS, ATS, and Bond HR will form the suite.

I talked with one HR director for a regional bank who was listening in on a demo of a performance management solution. She’s been proposing a talent management system for more than a year, building a case for the need to be able to identify promising employees, know what skills the workforce has that can be tapped when the need arises, and provide development plans and regular feedback.

The bank has an ATS and other components, which are stitched together and work, “but not really as well as we know we can do.” She’s looking for a system with all the moving parts, so the bank can start with the basics and won’t have to figure out how to get everything to work together as the needs grow.

“We’re big enough that we can’t do this the way we always have,” she told me. We’re not getting the kind of results we need. The recession has been hard, but it has also made everyone up the line realize we just have to do a better job at managing our workforce.”

Pause for a moment to take in the heady aroma of furans, pyrazines, carbonyl, and alicycliin compounds, and the other ingredients that give coffee its distinctive aroma. Then drink up, and just because it’s National Coffee Day, have a cup more than the statistical average of 3.1.

You’ll have plenty of company. The National Coffee Association says 56 percent of Americans drink at least one cup a day.

If you have a donut with that coffee, make it a Dunkin’ Donuts in recognition of the company’s work with CareerBuilder to unearth the coffee drinking practices of America’s workforce. Without its survey, how would you know that 40 percent of American workers aged 18 to 24 say they can’t concentrate as well without coffee. Or that 43 percent of  18 to 34 year-old workers have lower energy without that cup of coffee.

What types of workers most need coffee? Nurses, physicians, hotel workers, designers/architects, and insurance and financial sales people. The survey has 12 occupations listed.

So recruiters, especially those of you in healthcare, don’t neglect the coffee bene when talking company culture. Armed with this survey, and the finding from the National Coffee Association that recession or not, gourmet coffee consumption is on the rise, you might also use that seat at the table to pitch broadening the choices in the breakroom. Look what free coffee did for Starbucks.

A new company called “Social Intelligence” says it’ll “track the worldwide network of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, individual blogs, and thousands of other sources.”

Social Intelligence will, within 24-48 hours, produce a report on a job candidate using both automation as well as humans, the latter there to make sure there aren’t “false positives.” It says it will weed out “protected class” information it finds, such as race and religion. The company is also offering a version to monitor what existing employees are up to.

As far as the hiring version, a screenshot, which you can click on to enlarge, shows that the employee profile screens for such things as: ”Gangs,” “Drugs/drug lingo,” “demonstrating potentially violent behavior,” and “poor judgment” — something we could all agree can be found in ample supply on social media.

I asked the company’s CEO, Max Drucker, whether this judgment thing is kind of subjective. “We err on the side of not flagging something,” he says, adding that “serious red-flag issues” are what they’re really looking for. He also notes that the firm has three people review information before the profile’s done. So, “Todd beat Sean in the 600-meter dash” shouldn’t show up as a Todd-beats-people flag. I hope.

Nick Fishman, the co-founder of EmployeeScreenIQ, doesn’t envision his or other similar companies going down the social-media background-checking road. “Not only are they not now, but I don’t foresee getting into it in the future,” he says. “It’s a hornet’s nest.” Awaiting employers in that nest, he says, are FCRA regulations and EEO rules.

But Drucker, from Social Intelligence, says that “what we do is protect the employee from discrimination, and protect the employer from allegations of discrimination.” He notes that “if the employer is freaked out by the risks” of background checks and skips them, then they may end up liable for being negligent in the hiring process.

Robert Pickell, who’s the senior vice president of customer solutions at HireRight, says that he expects to see a lawsuit like that before long: a workplace violence or similar episode will happen, and someone will argue that the employer should have found information on social media indicating that the employee was dangerous.

HireRight has been talking to customers about the social-media-background-checking convergence for three or four years. The company has yet to plunge into it, though, saying there just isn’t demand, and the pitfalls are too great.

In the comment section, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this.

If you can’t make it in person, you can still catch much of the great content by watching the live stream carried here on the ERE.net homepage or at www.sourcecon.com.

Things will get kicked off at noon Eastern on Tuesday, September 28th and will continue on Wednesday starting at 8:45 a.m. Eastern. You can find the full schedule of sessions here.

You can watch the stream online right here on ERE.net, or you can watch on the SourceCon homepage, participate in the live chat, and follow the event on Twitter using the #SourceCon hashtag. Just click the ‘play’ button on the uStream box and you are all set!

Led by our chairperson Eric Jaquith, this year’s speaker lineup includes sourcing experts such as:

• Glen Cathey
• Gary Conway
• Jeff Eveler
• Chris Gould
• Kristin Kalscheur
• Earl Mann
• Shannon Myers
• Michael Notaro
• Tim O’Connor
• Maureen Sharib
• Shally Steckerl

You can read more about all of the speakers and what they will be talking about on the Agenda page.

Though Ball admits any company would say this, Sodexo, she says, is highly focused on talent. Indeed, that’s what increases curiosity about Sodexo’s ATS selection process and all else the company does with human resources: the outfit has won multiple awards for human resources and recruiting, including the ERE Recruiting Excellence Award for the recruiting department of the year in 2010.

“This is a big deal for us,” Ball says. “We’re in a growth mode. We need to have the right tools. Our ATS is kind of like the plumbing in the house.”

The plumbing wasn’t broken, but it was aging. Sodexo had tinkered so much with its Kenexa system, which as of this year was nearly 10 years old, that it didn’t have easy access to Kenexa’s system upgrades. “Because of the tremendous degree of customization as technology evolved,” Ball says, “we were still working with old technology. We knew we wanted to do something different. We wanted to start from scratch.”

In 2007, Sodexo put in a three year-plan that would ultimately result in a new technology system for its 59-person recruiting team. In 2008, it sent out an approximately 28-page Request for Information to eight vendors.

A very structured scoring process was used to narrow down the vendor list to five. At the end of 2008, those five companies were sent a Request for Proposal. That document began with a template from the Recruiting Roundtable (now called CLC Recruiting) that was modified by Sodexo’s IT experts and others.

Sodexo narrowed that list of five to three companies, with two the clear leaders. Recruiters, procurement employees, the legal department, human resources professionals, and others watched demos of the products. Not everyone – not legal, for example – had voting power. HRchitect, a consultancy, was brought in to help with the final decision.

Icims had very heavy support among the recruiters in particular on the selection team, and was the preliminary winner. Selecting it wasn’t the last step, however. Ball had to convince an IT governance committee that this purchase was necessary. The committee, which included the CFO and CIO of North America, only met certain times. A year ago, they gave approval.

iCIMS seemed to have the customer service record that Sodexo liked. It appeared easier to use than some of the other systems, with what the demo-watchers felt was a good user interface, and search capabilities. The reference checks Sodexo conducted went well. The system also was able to provide candidates a similar look and feel as they got on the Sodexo career site (a challenge I wrote about in more detail in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership recently; often, fancy career websites lose their mojo when you get to the part of the site where you apply for a job or search for one).

Cathy Barton, a critical player in this process, said that the Kenexa customization had “backed us into a corner” (not due to a fault of Kenexa’s, she notes) and that iCIMS would give them flexibility to change as time went on. Barton is a director of talent administration, managing back-of-the-house functions like recruiting systems and metrics tracking.

Other key players, by the way, included Sherie Valderrama, handling communications and change management, and Anthony Scarpino, handling the branding in the various portals (internal, external, alumni).

Long and Winding Road

Sodexo chose the system last fall, and just went live this August. So, it took a bit less than a year to get it all done.

The first three months were centered around figuring out all the requirements of the system, such as how the reporting hierarchy would work. And the company found that as more and more areas were affected by the implementation, it became a challenge to keep other day-to-day work going on as normal. It was not only installing a recruiting system for candidate management, but also moving away from the “bolt-on” products for interview management and scheduling it had been using, and toward third-party systems. So this wasn’t about moving from “Kenexa to iCIMS” but rather “Kenexa to iCIMS and others.”

Sodexo also has three different portals (something that affects the pricing of its iCIMS system). These are for internal candidates, external candidates, and alumni. Sometimes jobs are posted just for internal candidates; other times just for internal candidates and external candidates; and so on, for other combinations. The messaging a candidate receives changes depending on whether they are internal, external, or alumni.

Anyhow, recruiters who were working on the implementation had some of their requisition workload reduced. Cathy Barton also got relief from some of her responsibilities handling competency interview management.

There were a ton of moving parts to manage during that time, and a steering committee of Ball, Barton, HRMS and finance representatives, as well as Dawn Atwood, met monthly to handle any major decisions that needed to be made. Atwood is a project manager who’d worked on other projects, like payroll, and was brought on to do this for about a year and a half.

The timeline of the system’s rollout went roughly like this: On July 3, Sodexo implemented a blackout period for a couple of weeks, with no new jobs posted. (“Since not a lot happens” the week of July 4, Ball says.) Ball says that it took “an incredible amount of communication” to handle that period. Heavy training on the new system happened around July 12, for all recruiters. On July 19, the iCIMS system was launched at the same time as the Kenexa system was still in use.

On August 6, the old system went dark. Data was migrated to the new system, which was no small potatoes. Sodexo moved over many employee profiles, as well as information related to the interview process. Barton notes that they didn’t want people to have to sit through a 45-minute interview again, just because the information was lost in transition.

The new system launched on its own August 24.

“Recruiters are very pumped about it,” Ball says. “But it’s a lot to learn all at once. And you can’t postpone this and learn it next week.” What she means is the system is part of everyday work, not an extra tool.

Sodexo has been doing some major training on the new system. As the launch approached, recruiters were given tips and “pre-training”; they were provided with things like “top 10 reasons you will like the new system” and were taught the new lingo that goes with it. Hiring managers have been watching 60-minute webinars, and for HR partners 90-minute webinars, on the new system. Ball says having recruiters teach recruiters was critical. Webinars, particular surrounding the most frequently asked questions, continue.

With the old Kenexa system, Sodexo couldn’t tell when a candidate dropped out of the process — only that they dropped off. Now it can tell at what point the candidate bailed, something Ball feels should allow it to tweak the system improve drop-off rates.

Ball didn’t add in any headcount savings with the new system. In other words, Sodexo doesn’t plan on cutting recruiters because of it. But, she feels recruiters will be more effective, with fewer administrative tasks and more time to focus on candidates and hiring managers.

Sodexo will be working with iCIMS to see if the system can accommodate the various ways social media is changing the management of candidates. As an example, Sodexo would like to have only the jobs individual recruiters are working on to be fed to their Facebook pages.

Also, it’d like its Softscape system for succession planning, and its background checking system, to interface with this new talent acquisition system. It might add the iCIMS onboarding system eventually, too.

This raises the question of why Sodexo didn’t go with one company to handle all HR processes. It thought about this, but in the end wanted to find the best recruiting system for its hiring needs, and not the company that could do everything from recruiting to payroll. “A lot of companies do all of it,” Ball says, but outside of their area of expertise, “”they’re not as good at the other stuff.”

For now, Ball, Barton, and team are happy to have most of this out of the way. “It was absolutely huge,” Ball says. “So many details, and the devil was in the details.”

Just Say No

Sodexo does a better job than most at keeping in touch with job candidates, and letting those who don’t make the cut know they didn’t. It sends out, for instance, a newsletter to candidates in its pipeline, featuring jobs and career articles about the food and nutrition field.

I applied for a senior vice president of operations job September 17. It asked me to upload a resume. I didn’t have one, and there wasn’t have an easy way around it, so I loaded up a Word document with some random verbiage just to progress through the system and become part of Sodexo’s “talent community.” Regarding this resume requirement, Barton and Ball say, without a lot of specifics, that they’re working on it. They’re looking at some sort of system changes that would make it more flexible and allow people to upload some other format of resume.

I received an email back that read: “Sodexo USA Careers – Welcome to the Talent Community! 
You have been added to the Sodexo talent community, which will help keep you notified of when great opportunities are available that match your interest.”

Barton says that this is one of 100 different emails that Barton says Sodexo now sends candidates.

I also got this email:

Dear Todd,

Thank you for your interest in career opportunities with Sodexo. The success of our organization begins with our employees looking for career growth and development opportunities.

We have received your application for position 2847, Senior Vice President – Operations and will be reviewing your qualifications. We will contact you as soon as possible by phone or e-mail to provide an update regarding your status. In the meantime, please click on the link to learn more about our Hiring Process.

We encourage you to continue to visit our Career Center at http://external-careers-sodexo.icims.com/ where we post new and exciting positions every day. You may search for open positions, create a Job Agent, review and update your profile or check your status for jobs to which you’ve applied at any time.

Diversity and inclusion, sustainability, wellness and fighting hunger are fundamental to Sodexo’s commitment to making every day a better day for us all. We are known throughout our industry as a top employer of talented individuals, and are proud of our track record in providing a highly rewarding work environment, with opportunities for professional and personal development, and career growth.

Again, thank you for your interest in Sodexo.

Sincerely,

Sodexo Talent Acquisition

This was on September 17. That email came with a job search widget, courtesy of Jobs2web and pictured at the top of this article, for me to put on my computer and keep up with future job openings.

On September 21, I got a rejection that went like this:

Thank you for posting your resume to the Senior Vice President – Operations position – (2847). It has been determined that you will not be forwarded for further consideration of this position.

We encourage you to continue to visit our Career Center where we post new and exciting positions every day. You may also create a Job Agent so that we can e-mail to you newly posted positions that match your pre-set search criteria or review and update your profile to ensure that you do not miss new opportunities in your area of interest.

Again, thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,

Sodexo Talent Acquisition

The fact that Sodexo said “no” to me was nice, as it provides the closure that candidates wish they got from many companies. So I’m now in its talent community, which on the back end means I’m in its new talent acquisition system, one that Ball says will make life easier for the 300,000 annual Sodexo job candidates, as well as the recruiters who sell them on jobs and the managers who hire them.

Establishing a science-based college recruiting program requires using market research to more thoroughly understand your recruiting target and to test time-honored assumptions that have guided efforts in years past.

This was the topic tackled in part one of this series. Here, I’d like to explore using market research to empower direct sourcing (researching labor pools to identify target talent and reaching out to said talent prior to them submitting an application).

Steps of the Market Research Model Applied to Direct Sourcing

Use referrals to identify the very best — Referrals routinely produce the highest quality candidates and hires. For college recruiting, special programs can be established to reach out to faculty, staff, students, teaching assistants, alumni, and the references of previous top hires. When hires are made, be sure to personally thank those who made the referral. Over time, narrow down the list of possible program participants to focus on those who have a successful track record of identifying the top students.

Identify where you can view their qualifications — Direct sourcing requires that you not only be able to identify potential members of a labor pool, but also establish some knowledge of their qualifications. Great universities (and even mediocre ones) often require students to collaborate on projects and in some disciplines publish their work. Use your market research efforts to identify where students share, collaborate, and publish their work so that you can mine such sites to evaluate talent prior to making contact. Typical channels include social networking profiles, status updates, student websites, and university library archives. To find work published on publicly accessible servers, use Boolean searches that include target universities and knowledge domain-specific language. Google Scholar indexes a number of information sources including student theses, online project repositories, and professional society publications.

Search “lists” that are likely to include the only the names of likely top prospects — Not all students will have work published in such a way that it can be discovered, so you will also have to rely on information that is indicative of someone being a top student. Lists that identify honor society members, grant project members, faculty sponsored association leaders, case competition winners, etc., are a great place to start. While some lists will be available for all schools, consider using your market research process to identify local lists that may not be available online. Garnering access to some lists may require that you court friendly staff members, grad assistants, faculty, or former interns.

Tap the networks of identified students — No matter how exhaustive your research efforts, it is still highly probable that a number of exceptional students would go undiscovered. For instance, relying solely on research that looks at academic results may overlook the student who is a workhorse on team projects but struggles with individual assignments. When initial contact of directly sourced students proceeds, ask prospects:

• Who else is very good in your class that often gets overlooked?
• Which students look good on paper, but don’t fare well on projects?
• If you were assembling a dream team comprised of your fellow students to accomplish _______, who would you want on the project and what role(s) would each person play.

Learn alternative approaches to name identification — Every day the world of social media introduces a new way to find and assess exceptional talent. Many social networking tools establish a regional following long before they go national/international. When conducting market research, be sure to identify the latest tools and online communities that target students are using. Each recruiting season, revisit your list of sources, dropping those that are declining in value and adding others to evaluate.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your Effort

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so every year you need to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and look at the landscape of known talent competitors to see how you align. While MGM Mirage and Colgate may not compete directly as businesses, when it comes to courting top students, they are certainly competitors, so toss your narrowly defined scope of competitors out the window. Things to look at include:

• The competitive landscape — Recruiting, like marketing, is not executed in isolation. You need to look at what other organizations are courting students from the same pools you are, and how their approach aligns with yours. Whose process is more responsive not just to students’ needs, but also their wants?
• Identify dropout factors — When students you court opt out of your process, find out why. Is it something specific about the organization, the job, the individuals involved, etc? If the issue is something that can’t be resolved without significant organizational change, don’t lie and say that it can, but keep in mind that to prevent future failure the issue may need to be addressed.
• Identify what worked — No organization can do everything possible well. Ask students that advance the furthest (including those hired) what elements of your approach were the most influential, and invest more in those elements next term. Also ask what didn’t influence them or did so negatively and drop those elements.

Final Thoughts

You cannot be a great angler without fully understanding the interests and the feeding habits of fish. Intuition or luck can result in occasional success, but predictable performance requires scientific approaches.

Rapid change is everywhere, and universities are not exempt. As business processes become more refined and effective, recruiting practitioners and leaders must be willing to adopt their successful tools and methods to what they do, CRM being just one of many business processes relevant in recruiting. The alternatives to changing are well understood and include declinging performance, declining budgets, declining perception of value/relevance, and ultimately becoming obsolete.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the settlement in Washington a few hours ago and simultaneously filed a civil antitrust action. Brought against Adobe Systems, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar, the lawsuit details the alleged hiring arrangements. Accompanying the civil complaint was a proposed settlement in which the firms agree not to engage in anti-competitive no solicitation agreements.

The DOJ says the settlement “prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.   The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.”

The investigation was launched last year into recruiting collusion among a number of firms, including Google and Apple. The arrangement between the two firms, the Justice Department now says, began “no later” than 2006 when the two companies instructed recruiters not to cold call the other’s employees.

Similar arrangements existed, the Justice Department charged in the suit, among the other four companies. In a press statement the department issued, it said that in addition to the Google-Apple agreement, similar no-poaching agreements existed between Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar, Google and Intel and with Intuit.

Google didn’t issue a formal statement. But in a blog post, Amy Lambert, Associate General Counsel, Employment, said the company decided in 2005 not to “cold call employees at a few of our partner companies. Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly. In fact, we hired hundreds of employees from the companies involved during this time period.

“While there’s no evidence that our policy hindered hiring or affected wages, we abandoned our “no cold calling” policy in late 2009 once the Justice Department raised concerns, and are happy to continue with this approach as part of this settlement.”

However, the Justice Department, in its public statement on the settlement, said the recruiting arrangements among the companies “eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees, and overall diminished competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities.”

The Associated Press reported that Adobe, Intel, and Intuit  issued statements denying they did anything wrong. Each said they were settling to put an end to the matter. Neither Apple nor Pixar, a company once run by Apple founder and current CEO, Steve Jobs, issued statements.

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

But as we’ve come to expect from the economic news, this morning’s good news was tempered by an unexpected rise in unemployment claims. The Labor Department said this morning that claims rose by 12,000 last week to 465,000. It was the first rise in five weeks.

The market, more spooked by the unemployment rise — and worries about the European economy — than encouraged by The Conference Board’s rising index, reacted by closing down for the day.

In another economic announcement from the government, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were 1,546 mass layoffs in August, which resulted in 150,192 workers losing their jobs. That was an increase in almost 6,500 more laid-off workers over July.

The layoff numbers themselves don’t say a whole lot. Since January, the numbers have hovered between 140,000 and 150,000, though they have been as high as 200,870 (April) and as low as 135,789 (May). Compare them to early 2007 when 120,000 to 130,000 was more the norm, and you can see the grip the recession still holds.

While September’s numbers won’t be out for a month, Layoff Watch is full of job-cut announcements, including 1,700 announced by FedEx earlier this week and 3,000 announced Wednesday by Abbott Laboratories. They don’t come anywhere near the BLS numbers because the Bureau considers it a layoff whenever 50 or more workers file an unemployment claim against a company in any five-week period. Many companies don’t announce layoffs that small; some don’t announce layoffs at all.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, meanwhile,  sent out a note this morning pointing out some half-full economic news. The global outplacement firm noted that Macy’s says it will hire 65,000 seasonal holiday workers, expecting sales to grow 3-3.5 percent over last year.  Toys R Us earlier said it expected to hire 10,000 temporary workers for the holiday season.

Predicts Challenger: “Hiring will increase this holiday season over last year, due to two consecutive months of sales gains in addition to a 65 percent decline in retail-sector job cut announcements since 2009.”

I had the chance to catch up with Mahoney (who’s speaking this Fall in Florida) after her presentation to talk to her about recruiting in Silicon Valley, getting out of the rat race, and finding perspective to recruit better.

How the Recession has Impacted the Valley

Mahoney, who was the VP of talent acquisition at Yahoo, said that the first part of the recession locked up talent in their current companies, but after that, an infusion of venture capital started getting people moving from their companies. “After that, the dominoes started following and people started moving,” she said.

Even being a big brand has its challenges. While smaller companies sometimes disregard the results of large, recognizable brands, the recruiting atmosphere in Silicon Valley is so competitive, there are no guarantees. “These people might be getting picked up by Google, Yahoo, and Facebook,” says Mahoney. “And there might be smaller companies that can offer more as far as equity or experience. It’s still a horse race.” The best part about being a larger brand, she says, is that you will get a call back; you still have to make the hire.

Losing Perspective

We also talked about how small to mid-sized firms (the size of firms she works with at her company, Talent Acquisition On Demand) have a hard time looking past the challenges of today. “Emerging technology firms are looking for talent that can fulfill their need to ship,” Mahoney says. ”They aren’t looking past that.”

But even larger technology firms can push your perspective. Mahoney said during her presentation that she had a hard time getting her head above water when she worked as a corporate recruiter. For 11 years, she never took more than a week off from work (and even then, she was always connected).

When she realized she needed a break from the rat race, she realized how the constant push-push nature of the tech scene had pushed her out of balance and made her a worse recruiter for it.

Finding Balance

Mahoney doesn’t believe you need to take a sabbatical or a long break to find this perspective. She presented the way she daily keeps things in check through planning her schedule to start the day, reading the news, and getting social media updates before she starts working. “It takes discipline to do it,” she said. “But it’s possible.”

She feels as if recruiters get stuck in this rut easily as well because they can be so focused on what is in front of them. And especially in the hyper-competitive tech industry, recruiters have to find ways to get the broader perspective.

Not being Valentine’s Day, nor the 24/7 romantic, some of you might be confused. Of course, in this case I’m referring to quality of hire. It’s a worthy topic, but like a cloud, it’s hard to get your arms around. When should it be measured is as difficult to answer as how. “Why” adds another set of variables to the mix. I’ve just volunteered to help HR.com develop a curriculum for a new Quality of Hire educational program it’s launching, so I figured it might make sense to get some discussion going on this important topic, starting with what, when, why, and how. My viewpoint follows, but don’t hesitate to add your own to the conversation.

Why you should measure is probably the best starting point. Some of my reasons for measuring quality of hire revolve around the following:

1. Determine how well your hiring process is working. If you’re not hiring people in the top half, or the top half of the top half, you’re not raising your talent. Measuring quality of hire by position will tell you how well you’re doing from an end-to-end standpoint.
2. Track every aspect of the sourcing and recruiting process. Breaking down quality of hire by process step — e.g., sourcing channel, recruiter, hiring manager, etc. — allows you to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Sourcing channel quality of hire tracking should be high on the list here. Tracking candidate quality at this step allows you to allocate your budget precisely by calculating ROI by sourcing channel.
3. Measure your assessment accuracy. By comparing pre- and post-hire quality of hire by candidate, you can determine the predictive value of your assessment process. You might discover that traditional behavioral event interviewing doesn’t differentiate too well between the top half or bottom half, or maybe it does.
4. Determine if you’re hiring good people for the wrong job. Many top people underperform because they’re doing work they don’t like, don’t fit the culture, or don’t get along with their supervisor or their team members. Quality of hire needs to take these differences into account.

What — defining quality of hire. All of the whys listed above indicate the need for a common definition of quality of hire. Maybe this should be the starting point. To begin this part of the discourse, I’ll suggest the following definition for quality of hire, but don’t feel bound by this. Modify it or propose your own.

Adler’s Proposed Definition of Quality of Hire: the measure of how well a new person meets the performance needs of the job.

The reason I like this definition is it takes into account the actual requirements of the job and environment in order to measure candidate quality. It’s also simple, and should tie directly to the performance management process. Most important, it’s not based on an absolute level of quality, e.g., skills, experience, academics, behaviors, competencies, and the like. For example, without this fit and actual performance consideration, a talented person based on ability, training, academics, experience and potential might turn into an abject failure. Likewise, a person who might seem marginal on a skills and experience level could be a star if he or she thrives in the environment and doing the work actually involved in the actual job.

When should you measure quality of hire?

My take on this one is: always, and before, during, and after. If you wait until the person is hired to measure quality of hire, it’s too late. How could you possibly figure out the cause of a problem if you waited until the person was on the job and working? And if you’re going to wait until after the person is hired, how long will it take to learn if the person is in the top half or bottom half? Thirty to 60 days is too short, and six months to a year is too long. This is comparable to measuring product quality after the product has been sold and used in the field.

Since you need to measure quality of hire at each critical pre-hire process step — e.g., sourcing, interviewing, closing, etc. — in order to keep track of what’s going on, unique metrics need to be developed that best predict on-the-job quality of hire. For example, from a sourcing perspective you’d want to know which channels produce the most high-quality hires, and their cost. The definition of quality at this step, however, might not be the same one used to measure post-hire quality. Something like “number of candidates passing the quality screen and making it to the first round of interviews” might work. Regardless, whatever is developed has to correlate with post-hire quality of hire.

Always, or consistenly, is also part of the when-to-measure-quality-of-hire discussion. This way you can determine if a process step is getting better or worse and if some intervention is necessary. So daily or weekly needs to be added to the “when” consideration.

How to measure quality of hire.

For purposes of this article, the best we can say is that it will be different before and after, but whatever measures used need to correlate with the ultimate measure of quality of hire: how the person performs on the job.

Here’s one solution. For the past 20 or so years as part of our search practice, I’ve been using a talent scorecard (download sample form) that compares a candidate’s past accomplishments to what needs to be done on the job across 10 basic factors. Some of the factors include technical competency, motivation to do the required work, team skills working with comparable groups, and planning and organizing comparable work. The evaluation is based on asking candidates to provide detailed examples of accomplishments that best relate to the actual performance objectives of the position.

Since all of the factors on our scorecard relate to real job needs, the same form can be used to measure both pre- and post-hire quality. This is a huge benefit. Subsequent differences between pre- and post-hire quality can then by attributed to changes in the job or environment, weak assessment skills, or hiring manager issues, and the like. This method requires that the performance expectations of the job be defined before hiring the person and discussed in detail during the onboarding period.

The idea of measuring quality of hire before the actual yes/no decision is made has a lot of intuitive appeal, especially if the post-hire measurement technique is essentially the same, and there’s a high correlation between the two. In this case, pre-pre-hire quality metrics can then be developed to measure both pre- and post-hire quality. One of these would be the number of formal manager interviews per hire, which could then be tracked back to the recruiter and sourcing channel. Tracking quality by active vs. passive and inside vs. outside recruiter would also help isolate the best techniques to maximize quality.

This performance-based approach to measure and control quality of hire is only one of many possible, but it meets a lot of key needs. For one, it’s not that difficult to implement. For another, it can be easily tracked from a process control and feedback standpoint. But don’t stop here. Add your thoughts and possible approaches to the mix, but try to meet these overriding requirements: simple to use, it works, and it’s part of an end-to-end process control system. To me these three conditions are essential. HR.com is planning on a major educational program around this topic, and if the hiring market improves it will be a critical component of any company’s hiring strategy. On this basis alone it’s worth developing a workable solution.

All of this means that the skills that once defined a successful corporate recruiter are not sufficient. Indeed, those skills may even be detrimental to success.

A corporate recruiter has always had a different skill set than a recruiter working in an agency or as an independent. While agency recruiters have focused on building relationships (often in deep, vertical job families), on tapping into new sources of candidates, and on assessing candidates against a variety of criteria, the corporate recruiter has evolved three very different set of competencies over the years.

The first is the ability to facilitate hiring. These recruiters are adept at dealing with the corporate bureaucracy and legal issues. They are formidable navigators of the corporate landscape. They know every hill and valley, every bomb and sinkhole. These skills are unique to a particular company and do not transfer well. Recruiters with these competencies are most likely to have worked for the same firm for many years. Every bureaucracy has created people with these types of skills and could not function without them. The internal knowledge they have, and their ability to get things done in systems resistant to getting things done, makes them valuable, but only in that system. While this may seem as if it is practical and useful, the skills usually fail completely to help the recruiter navigate a talent-constrained marketplace, find the rare candidates, or convince them to work for the organization.

The second common skill is that of resume scanner. I recently ran into a situation where the recruiter had searched LinkedIn and other sources and had compiled a large set of resumes generally related to the open positions that a hiring manager was hoping to fill. The recruiter then forwarded them to the hiring manager with a note saying that in an effort to be proactive she was asking him to narrow the pile down to a short list of candidates the hiring manager might be interested in. The hiring manager responded negatively to this, to her surprise.

He felt that she should have enough knowledge of the position and his requirements to do that screening herself. He felt that she was passing her job off to him — an overworked engineer making critical products for the company. She lost credibility and any ability to influence this manager who now looks at her as a clerk. A very dangerous place to be in this competitive and challenging economy.

The third skill is that of receptionist, light screener, and tour guide. They may even take a resume and call a candidate to ask a few questions. Their focus is to be “nice” and make a good impression while determining, based on some predetermined ideas of fit or suitability, who should be invited in for interviews with the hiring manager. Those so chosen are met by the recruiter, given a tour of the building or facility, and perhaps even taken for a coffee or lunch. They become of the liaison or interface between the company, the hiring manager, and the candidate.

None of these three roles are value-adding. They do not actively look for good candidates or even know where to look for the best candidates. They do not aggressively ferret out what competencies and skills the best performers have – indeed they don’t even know who the best performers are. They do not offer alternative screening or assessment for a hiring manager nor are they very helpful in closing. They put together standard offers based on what they have offered other people with similar backgrounds and experience.

So what does a modern recruiter need to have for skills?

Today’s successful recruiter is a different breed. She needs to be good at four things:

Skill #1: They can find rare talent.

These recruiters are experts at using the Internet, Facebook, LinkedIn, job boards, and whatever else it takes to find the best people in a particular job family. They spend inordinate amounts of time talking, reading, networking, and learning about the areas they are responsible for and the people who are considered the best in the field. They develop referral networks and attraction strategies to draw in the good people and then connect those people to hiring managers as directly as they can.

By having access to talented people and by building knowledge they gain credibility and add value well above their cost.

Skill #2: They build relationships.

Important and close to the top of the pyramid of skills is the ability to build relationships with these talented people and with hiring managers. This is what all great recruiters do. Every executive search guru is really a guru at building and maintaining relationships. Recruiters within organizations need to get out of the organization and get to know people at all levels and professions who might be useful to their firm. They need to use technology to help create the initial relationship, and then they need to leverage that by talking on the phone, sending frequent emails, having breakfast or lunch with possible candidates, and by always asking one candidate to recommend a few more.

Those who possess this skill set are good at knowing who the best performers are, because they also have good relationships with the hiring managers and other workers who can tell them. They assess why those people are the best and then try to find more with the same skills.

Skill #3: They understand technology.

Technology already dominates recruiting. Applicant tracking systems, HRMS systems, email, job boards, blogs, social networks, and recruiting web sites are all part of the technology equation. If the recruiter is not technically agile and informed, she cannot be successful in the long run. Great recruiters dominate the technology and learn how to make it do what they want.

Skills #4: They can sell and close candidates.

In the end, a recruiter is as good as the number of candidates that she can close. To do this, she needs to be good at selling candidates and hiring managers. She needs to know how to overcome objections and turn negatives into positives. They need to offer solutions, work out compromises, negotiate, and in the end, make the hire happen.

All of these skills are about relationship, networking, collaborating, and selling. The administrative and back-end skills of the 20th century are not very valuable given the ATS’s and other tools that take care (or should take care) of the tactical and administrative side of things. The differentiators for today’s recruiting are these skills alone.

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

The nearly opaque two-sentence announcement is the only one of its kind among the 39 reconsideration requests posted to the ICANN website. What the committee typically does is to simply issue a recommendation, which is usually that there be no reconsideration.

Here’s the announcement as posted by ICANN:

“At its 20 September 2010, (sic. presumably, the missing word is ‘meeting’) the Board Governance Committee (BGC) agreed to proceed to consider Reconsideration Request 10-2. The BGC will proceed with the Reconsideration Request in conformity with the ICANN Bylaws, Article IV, Section 2.”

Confused? You’ve got company.

John Bell, who heads a coalition of groups opposed to the way the expansion was handled, first said when I reached him, “We are enthusiastic. ” Then, he added, “We asked our attorney to get an interpretation of this … I don’t know where we are.”

I asked Employ Media, the .jobs registrar which sought the .jobs expansion, for its interpretation of the announcement, but haven’t yet heard back.

I also asked ICANN for a clarification. What’s unclear is why the committee would issue an announcement like this, instead of simply making a decision; whether it means the program now underway to use the newly authorized names has to stop; and, how and how long this process will take.

Employ Media, and its partner, the Society for Human Resource Management, proposed the creation of a .jobs address a few years ago. It was approved, but unlike the traditional .com domain, a .jobs address had certain rules attached to its use. One of them was that it could only be used in conjunction with an employer’s business name.

When .jobs failed to gain much traction (only about 15,000 addresses were ever issued and that number has since dropped), Employ Media and its CEO Tom Embrescia began casting about for ways to pump up interest. One was to open up the use to almost any name combination. That lead to the launch last fall of dozens of job boards by the DirectEmployers Association. Working with Employ Media, DirectEmployers announced plans for a “universe” of similar sites. But then ICANN stepped in asking about the authorization to expand the .jobs use. That triggered a SHRM committee review and approval and finally, in August, to a vote by the ICANN board allowing it.

Along the way, several organizations, led by the job board industry, voiced objections to the request and to SHRM’s process, saying they were effectively shut out. After ICANN acted on August 5th, a .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition formed and requested reconsideration.

(An archive of .jobs posts can be found here.)

In the last week, Monster and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce both sent letters to ICANN asking the board to reconsider its decision. Monster’s letter from its lawyer Paul McGrady of  Greenberg Traurig, not only asks for reconsideration, but a halt to Employ Media’s .jobs distribution program until the matter is decided.

The Monster letter echoes the position and issues detailed by the coalition, declaring:

• ICANN staff did a shoddy job of analyzing and summarizing the more than 250 comments and letters of opposition sent to ICANN. And when the ICANN Board of Directors relied on the staff summary without doing more, the directors “failed to satisfy their duty of inquiry;”
• The board’s vote “unwittingly authorized Employ Media to flagrantly violate the terms of the Charter under which it operates”;
• The board’s decision “has broad anti-competitive implications that were not properly examined by the staff”;
• The decision undermines ICANN’s credibility in regard to how it polices the use of other domains.

In its letter, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce articulated the same reasons for wanting a rethinking of the decision. It also complained, “While the expansion eliminates the protections built-in to a system where registrations are limited to a company’s trade or commonly known name, the Board has not called on Employ Media to provide any tools to facilitate rights protection and prevent abusive registrations.”

A company can hire slow for two major reasons: because they know exactly who they’re looking for and are willing to wait for the right people to apply, or because they don’t know who they’re looking for and believe they’ll know when the right person applies.

The first is more useful. If you’ve done your homework and figured out the characteristics of the employees you’re looking for, and if you’ve trained your interviewers to recognize those people, then by all means hire slow. Take your time and wait for the right people or, better yet, go out and attract them to the company.

Seeking Top Performers

This is a worthy goal, no question about it. The problem lies not just in identifying who will be a top performer, but who will be a top performer at your company. This is where your corporate culture plays a major role: if your culture is one of aggressive individualism, then team players are less likely to thrive; conversely, if you’re working to build high-performance teams, then someone who has never cooperated with their team in the past isn’t likely to change just for you.

Identifying the intersection between top performers and your cultural values takes more than listing buzzwords on a job ad and then hoping for the best. It requires taking an honest look at your company and how you’re doing business; it requires paying attention to the things that you normally take for granted: those are the elements that a new person is most likely to notice.

Fun to Work With

I am frequently told that the goal of the interviewing process is to find people who are fun to work with.

The problem with looking for people who are fun to work with is something that I’ve dubbed the “hydrangea effect,” after the Russian spies recently arrested by the FBI. The neighbor of one of the spies was quoted as saying something to the effect that, “She couldn’t be a spy. Look what she did with the hydrangeas!”

Planting hydrangeas is so far outside the image of a Russian spy that this simple act created a very powerful illusion. After all, who would imagine James Bond planting hydrangeas? This, of course, is exactly why he would plant them! (And, being Bond, probably knows detailed information about seven different cultivars.)

By the same token, many interviewees learn early on how to conduct themselves in an interview. In fact, most candidates probably have more experience being interviewed and more knowledge about how to evoke the hydrangea effect than the interviewers have about how to interview. The worst prima donnas are generally extremely charming and friendly. It’s only when you’ve worked with them for a while that the problems emerge. Perhaps even more disturbing is that psychopaths, in the clinical sense of people who do not feel remorse for actions that hurt others or the company, are particularly charismatic, are generally skilled communicators, and are extremely good at masquerading as effective leaders. No, that’s not a joke or an exaggeration.

Fun to work with is a not a particularly good metric. Not only does it get you the wrong people, it can easily get you the wrong people who are the best at masquerading as the right people. More broadly, gut instinct, positive or negative, is easily fooled. It takes a lot of training to develop a smart gut, and, even then, it’ll be wrong more often than we like to admit.

Not Threatening

This is an odd statement. What does it mean to be looking for someone who is “not threatening?” After all, as long as the candidate didn’t show up for the interview armed to the teeth, one might assume that they are “not threatening.”

When I’ve asked people what they meant, the answers were as varied as the people asked: “won’t disrupt the way we work,” “good team player,” “respects others,” “isn’t a know-it-all,” “will be loyal,” and so forth. A common element, though, was a key element of the corporate culture: employees at organizations with highly competitive “fire fast” cultures were more likely to view strong candidates as “threatening” than employees at organizations where people were not pitted against one another. Quite simply, if the company takes the attitude that the poorest performers will be fired, then many people will instinctively respond by making sure not to hire anyone more qualified than they are! While I’ve had managers tell me that such an attitude is highly unprofessional, it’s also highly intelligent self-preservation. I’ve observed that most people would rather feel smart and unprofessional than stupid and professional, especially if the former lets them keep their job and the latter does not!

Not threatening also comes into play in organizations that have a culture that does not tolerate mistakes. The less tolerance there is for mistakes, the less willing people are to make decisions.

Wouldn’t Damage the Culture

Another popular explanation for hiring slowly is to “not damage the corporate culture.” This might be a real concern … if the company is extremely small, as in tiny, or if you’re hiring someone into a very senior leadership position. Organizational culture is one of the most powerful, most immovable forces in any business. Culture is extremely resilient and does not change easily. Now, if you’re hiring a new CEO, then a cultural fit is very important. If you have a cultural mismatch between a CEO and the organization, then one or both are going to be extremely unhappy: a culture mismatch produces a culture immune response.

If you are hiring for less lofty positions, though, there are couple of things to recognize: first, if someone really doesn’t mesh with the culture, they probably won’t stay; and second, if you haven’t done a great deal of homework, you probably can’t tell in advance anyway. Because most people focus only on the surface trappings of organizational culture, it’s easy to be misled by cultural artifacts. To be fair, it does take a fair bit of effort and training to identify the “why’s” of culture that underlie the “what we do around here.”

A hiring process that lets you correctly identify the right people most of the time may not always be quick, but the slowest part should be getting the right people to apply. If you really know how to recognize them, the process should be clear and transparent to the applicant. Of course, if you don’t know how to identify the right people, then it’s really just a question of how quickly you’re getting lost.

Announced today, the real-time recruiting intelligence can tell you how many people saw an an ad or visited your career site, what they did and, if you have Jobvite Hire, which includes an ATS, what you did.

For instance, if you distributed a job through social sites, sent a Jobvite to your employees, and posted it to traditional job boards, the recruiter intelligence part of the Jobvite dashboard can give you the number of visitors to each page where the ad appeared; how many then opened it; how many of them applied, and how many were interviewed, and, finally, if a hire was made, from where.

With Jobvite Hire, all the data flows in automatically. If you use Jobvite Source, some of that data requires a connection to your ATS.

Lots of companies provide metrics on ad placements. And most ATS platforms can give you data on the inbound applicants and traffic reports on career sites hosted by your recruitment management vendor.

Managing the various data bits and bytes gets challenging the more sourcing methods you use. So Jobvite’s graphical dashboard intelligence makes life a little simpler, which means a recruiter is more likely to actually consult the data to see what’s working.

“The goal is to have it become a daily habit,” says Jobvite CEO and President Dan Finnigan.

What I particularly liked about it during the quick demo Monday was the ease with which you can see the results for different types of jobs and different candidate sources. With Jobvite Hire — or a connection to your recruiting system — you’ll know which source produced the most interviews,  an indication of applicant quality and a useful guide to sourcing for similar jobs in the future.

If you’re going to HR Tech in Chicago next week, Jobvite is one of six companies invited to demo during the “Awesome New Technologies for HR” general session Thursday afternoon.

The announcement was made this morning by the two companies. No price was announced.

SumTotal’s acquisition now gives it a major presence in the growing market for integrated talent management systems. Softscape was one of the earliest technology companies to promote a comprehensive approach to what was — and still is for many employers — a siloed system.

Formed by the merger of Docent and Click2learn in 2004, SumTotal began broadening its product line almost immediately. It bought Pathlore, an e-learning firm with a focus on healthcare training and learning for midmarket businesses, in 2005. Adding Mindsolve Technologies the following year added employee performance management tools.

Last year, SumTotal, then trading on the NASDAQ, was itself acquired by Vista Equity Partners, which paid $160 million and took it private.

Today’s acquisition of Wayland, Massachusetts-based Softscape continues the consolidation in the HR technology space that has seen Peopleclick and Authoria merge, ADP acquire Workscape, and two of the dominant players, Kenexa and Taleo, both make big buys in the last few months. (Taleo bought Learn.com and Kenexa got Salary.com.)

But the acquisition also adds more evidence — as if more were needed — that the integrated approach to HR management tools is every day becoming the way to go for employers. Josh Bersin, in his analysis of the Softscape deal says, “Remember also that the days of a ‘standalone’ talent management platform are slowly coming to an end.” Bersin, who got advance notice of the deal, declares SumTotal will now be a a major new force in talent management software” and “a large, credible player and can meet the needs of any RFP.”

Softscape’s client base includes some of the best known brands — Seagate, Nike, and Sodexo among them — and a global diversity. Bersin details many of the company’s innovations and firsts, singling out its introduction of an HRMS, employee self-service tools, and a talent mobility module last year.

From a cultural standpoint, Softscape has a checkered reputation. The 200-employee company has a long and bitter legal history with Success Factors that provided the industry with comic opera gossip. Filed by SuccessFactors, the lawsuit alleged that Softscape anonymously created a 43-slide PowerPoint, attacking SuccessFactors. The presentation was made to appear as if it came from a SuccessFactors customer.

There were also countercharges of business espionage by Softscape (eventually dismissed by the court) and a replay of accusations dating back to mid-decade of employee raiding.

The suit was settled with Softscape admitting guilt and paying SuccessFactors an undisclosed sum.

Owned by the Watkins family, whose members filled most of the key positions in the company, Softscape has faced complaints on rating sites of nepotism and poor employee relations. According to information on the SumTotal site, Softscape’s management and employees will be integrated, giving SumTotal about 700 employees worldwide. The firm is headquartered in Silicon Valley.

From the vantage point of someone who has been involved in college recruiting for more than 40 years, either representing a corporation or a university, it is clear that we are approaching a strategic inflection point with regard to the amount of strategy supporting college recruiting.

As that inflection point approaches, there are several dramatic changes that you should anticipate, including:

• The growth of social media (already demonstrating significant impact), opens up hundreds of new communication channels, allowing organizations to present highly targeted messages to highly targeted prospect segments and to cultivate relationships with top talent throughout their academic careers.
• The growth in acceptance of and access to video communication equipment will make it possible for organizations to decrease the use of campus visits and embrace “remote college recruiting.” This societal change comes just as more universities embrace virtual classrooms that allow students to participate in courses without being physically present. Costs will drop, organizations will be able to expand the number of colleges mined for talent, and everyone involved will save time.
• The globalization of work will force organizations to embrace unified global sourcing. While most organizations today continue to recruit geographically, as work becomes more distributed and global universities refine their emphasis and establish stronger industrial ties (Petronas University of Technology for example), organizations will have no choice but to tap the global market to recruit the high volume of graduates with specialized skills needed.
• The “businessization” of university recruiting will require more strategic, longer-term programs to manage complex situations. Due to the dramatic growth of for-profit universities and ongoing economic pressures on public institutions, many educational programs today have direct ties to established corporations that enable benefactors closer access to top students. Cultivating a relationship with said students in such environments will require college recruiting functions to become more business-like, i.e. guided by strategy, empowered with real-time information and relationship-management tools, and world-class opportunities (think of jobs as products) to take to students.

All of the changes highlighted above point to a demand for the college recruiting function to migrate away from being a game of chance to a more serious function that embraces cutting-edge marketing and sales tactics to deliver specific students to the organization. The modern arsenal of tools needed will include CRM (customer relationship management) systems and highly segmented branding informed by robust market research.

Marketing Demands That You Fully “Understand” Your Customer

Recruiters, both those who focus on experienced and college recruiting, often assume that they know and understand the type of people the organization needs to recruit. In direct contrast, marketing professionals, even those with strong track records of success, rely on routinely executed market research to provide real-time understanding and identify the changing needs of target customers when taking new products or updated products to market.

Having been students before and having dealt with students/faculty day in and day out as part of the job, many college recruiters approach college recruiting from a state of familiarity that no may no longer have any basis in reality. University campuses today are awash with diversity. There are students from all generational segments, races, national origins, and experience levels. U.S. veterans returning from foreign assignments as troop retrenchment proceeds are flocking to colleges and universities flush with GI Bill benefits. In many public institutions, the stereotype of the typical student being an 18-22 year old is no longer representative of the majority.

To fully understand the complex landscape of students participating in college programs today and the relevance/attraction of your opportunities to them, full-blown market research is needed.

“Understanding” Top Students

In order to successfully recruit not only the right number, but also the right caliber of students needed, you should fully understand your target both when designing new jobs and when taking those job opportunities to them. You’ll need to know how best to identify them, communicate with them, and what factors about your organization and the jobs you have available they would find both relevant and compelling.

Benchmark research can tell you what students in general are thinking, but they do not provide nearly enough information to build out a recruiting strategy that targets highly refined student segments. Using a homegrown process or services provided by Universum or LinkedIn’s Insights Group, execute surveys or focus groups to find out about:

Their job search process — if you have no clue how top students go about finding and vetting career opportunities, you have no chance of landing the best talent. Identify the specific steps they take and the timeline they use when searching for jobs.

• For non-active candidates, identify what it takes to get them to enter the job search process. Not all college students are actively looking for a job;they may be considering graduate school, traveling, or already have a full-time job. If you are targeting those not actively seeking jobs, you must identify the “triggers” that would excite them enough to get them to enter into job-search mode.
• For active candidates, identify where they see job or information session postings. Identify locations where your top prospects would likely see and read an announcement of either a position or a recruiting-related event. Put an identifying code or unique web address on announcements in each location in order to identify which ones actually draw the most interest.

Their job excitement criteria — identify the specific factors about your industry, organization, and jobs available that would excite your target students enough for them to both consider you relevant and an organization they would like to work for. Also identify the factors that are turnoffs.

How to “successfully” counter perceived negatives — no organization is perfect, no matter what picture your recruiting collateral paints, so at some point you will need to respond to those factors that are turnoffs identified earlier. Like a child standing in a puddle of juice exclaiming “I didn’t spill it,” not all counters are effective. Learn what sources students would trust countering messages from, what types of evidence may sway them, and what justifications they accept as valid for turnoffs with a strong basis in reality.

Identify where they “hang out” or “lurk” — with a good understanding of how your target audience searches for opportunities and evaluates them, the next step is to identify where you could place messages that would influence their perception of your organization and compel them to act on current opportunities available. You need to know what they read, watch, listen to, and attend. Fourteen questions to consider include:

• What websites do they frequent?
• What type of electronic messages do they read or reject (i.e. e-mail, IM, social media messages, SMS, video, voice, or snail mail)?
• What social network sites do they frequent (i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)?
• What electronic forums/chat rooms do they frequent?
• What blogs do they read?
• Where they view public videos (i.e. YouTube)?
• What magazines, publications, journals, or newspapers do they read?
• What organizations do they join or attend (professional or student)?
• What events or meetings do they attend (at school, for learning, at work or play)? (Also, identify the factors that would cause them to attend a company information event.)
• Under what conditions would they return a direct message from an unknown recruiter?
• What radio or TV programs do they tune into?
• Where would posters they would likely read be located?
• What classes and professors did/will they take during the recruiting year?
• Who influences them to consider a firm or job (faculty, student leaders, grad assistants, parents, friends, the career center, etc.)?

You should also find out if top prospects frequent different “locations” than average students. Once you have identified the most-effective channels for reaching them with a recruiting or employer branding message, you can then shift your attention to the content of that message.

Identify the message required to get their attention — design and pre-test both branding and recruitment-related messages to make sure that if a target student sees them, even briefly, that the content would drive them to read the entire message and take the desired action, i.e. visit your website, attend a college information session, apply for a position, sign up for an interview or make a call to a recruiter, etc.

Coming Up Next …

In the next installment of this two-part series, I’ll tackle applying your market research to direct sourcing initiatives to identify and tap top students on/off campuses around the globe.