It’s beginning to look a lot like recovery.

Today’s reports all show.

Take a look at the confidence, it’s rising once again

And Black Friday made the Redbook glow.

It’s beginning to look a lot like recovery.

Is hiring on the rise?

That’s what we will see the economists seem to agree

A happy Friday surprise.

That’s the essence of a variety of economic reports out today, which nearly all point to economic improvement.

The Consumer Confidence Index jumped 4.2 points to 54.1, its highest level in five months. The main driver of the increase was a 6.7-point improvement in consumer expectations for the future. Economists had expected a more modest rise to 53, on average, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Investor confidence, according to one index, also rose during November. The State Street Investor Confidence Index was up 9.3 points in November. It’s still off its 12-month high of 107.4, but well above the low of 88.1.

As a point of interest, Monster’s stock — at 22.47 a share at the moment — has more than doubled over its 52-week low of $10.00. Investors are not only rewarding the company for its product improvements and its revenue growth, but some of it has to be attributed to the expectation that hiring is picking up.

Retailers, anticipating improvement in sales this holiday season, increased their temp hiring. Early predictions by Challenger, Gray & Christmas were for a stronger hiring season.

Now, initial reports are bearing out retailers’ expectations. The Johnson Redbook Retail Sales Index, which measures same-store retail sales, was up 4.9 percent for the last full week in November. That included both Black Friday and the Saturday after. As a whole, November sales were up 3.2 percent over last year.

The more detailed International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs report supported the Redbook survey, though it said sales rose 3.5 percent over the same period last year.

Yet another report that exceeded economists predictions was this morning’s Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, which came in at 62.5. Economists were expecting a more modest 59.

Housing, however, remained relatively soft. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of home values rose .6  percent in September over the year before. It was the smallest gain since January.

Economists are expecting generally positive news from other reports this week, especially the market-moving employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The prediction is that the report due out Friday morning, will show the U.S. added 145,000 jobs in October, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Tomorrow, we’ll get some indication of how strong a month it was for private employer hiring when ADP’s National Employment Report is released.

The pay’s about the same; the benefits are every bit as good; the job is equally challenging; and, the training and career ladders are equivalent.

So how do you attract the top talent when you don’t have quite the same brand awareness as your closest competitors?

“Flexibility is the number one carrot,” says Paul Peterson, national talent resource manager for the Canadian branch of international accounting firm Grant Thornton.

Grant Thornton is a top 10 accounting firm. In size, it ranks fifth or sixth, depending on who’s counting. Either way, it’s a firm with significant resources, career mobility, a global reach, and, as Peterson observes, a brand not as well known in North America as the Big Four (DeloitteTouche Tohmatsu, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG.) With salaries and benefits comparable among the firms, his recruiters have to be more innovative in selling Grant Thornton to top candidates.

So what do they do?

“We work hard to identify potential high quality employees in advance. When we approach them we have a stated goal of getting inside someone to find out ‘what makes them tick.’ Once you have a sense of someone’s values you can take a step back and determine ways to structure a job to accommodate them,” says Peterson.

Borrowing from the principles outlined by Daniel Pink in his bestseller, Drive, the Grant Thornton team emphasizes flexibility.

Pink, in his now famously viral 18 minute speech at the TEDGlobal conference last year, says, “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” What most motivates 21st century workers is  “autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things.”

These are the differentiators that Peterson and his team sell to their prospects. “I don’t know that we necessarily talk about it that way, but we try to appeal to those same drivers,” says Peterson.

While money always factors in, it is rarely the primary attractor. “It’s so much more than that …  Sometime we highlight the things that are already in place. Sometimes it’s about the flexibility in work arrangements. That flexibility gives them control, autonomy … ”

Tangible carrots of all sorts — the Yin of management — have long been the tools employers have used to motivate workers to higher levels of productivity. Sticks are the Yang.

An article in the Harvard Business Review detailed the results of a multi-year study of worker activities and motivations. As part of the study, the authors surveyed some 600 managers on what they considered to be important drivers.  “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” ranked as most important in motivating workers. While not unimportant to workers, they told the researchers that progress — what Pink calls “mastery” — was their most important motivator.

The managers, in a dramatic show of disconnect, listed progress dead last.

“A close analysis,” the study authors write, “shows that making progress in one’s work — even incremental progress — is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event.”

What should this mean for recruiters?

Writing in the September issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, Joseph Shaheen, managing director of Human Alliance, Inc, said, “The recruiting leader’s responsibility is no longer simply to recruit. It is to manage the livelihood of her entire organization.”

Amplifying his written comments in an interview, Shaheen says recruiters should be talking to hiring managers about their candidate experiences, sharing what they have learned from speaking with them and “get past” the conversation about pay and benefits.

“The way most HR managers are … they are not looking at alternatives,” he says. In fact, “Recruiters are not even expected to discuss these things.”

What kinds of non-monetary incentives might tip the scales for a high potential candidate? Regular access to the CEO or other high-ranking company executive — visibility — might convince a career-focused candidate. Another might value coaching. It’s a bene that is routinely offered to senior executives and almost never to mid-level candidates, Shaheen says.

Still another might be lured by the promise of working on challenging projects. That’s an incentive technology recruiters find works well, says Dice’s Tom Silver. Of the tech recruiters who are finding they have to sweeten offers, seven percent use projects as a primary incentive. More use flexible working arrangements.

At Grant Thornton, Paul Peterson’s recruiters have those conversations with hiring managers and supervisors.

“They have influence (on the corporate culture). Because they are talking to a lot of people, hearing from candidates and digging in to their motivations, trying to get inside them, they have the data,” says Peterson.

Grant Thornton recruiters, he says, have “a lot of input,” encouraging managers to be flexible in how they incent and manage staff. The feeling among recruiters and managers is that it is paying off. The candidates for whom the terms of employment were more flexible — call them the personalized offers — provide more and better referrals than more traditionally hired workers. There’s a sense, too, that they are more productive.

“You have to have a culture internally that accepts it (flexibility and non-traditional arrangements). In the end, it’s a lot more up front work, but it’s much more successful this way.”

NOTE: This article was excerpted from a longer piece originally published in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

That is a lot like hiring salespeople. You might think 80% of the salespeople would produce 80% of the sales, but that is seldom the case. In most organizations 80% of the salespeople generally produce about 20% of the sales. I know. I was a sales manager for a long time. I was also a sales trainer who used the best-known training and coaching programs I could find. Guess what? I never once saw a workshop or sales manager consistently turn poor salespeople into exceptional ones. It was 80/20 from the day of hiring to the day of firing.

Our organizations might have mastered machines and processes, but overall, they fall short in the human resources department. By that I mean we seldom, if ever, measure accurately candidates for the specific skills they need on the job. Instead, we take their word for it.

That’s why sales performance stays at a rock-solid 80/20 ratio.

Aseement: A Part of Evyday Life

People tend to think they are the best judge of other people. Normally, this keeps us out of trouble, but in jobs where specific human performance skills are required, it makes for disaster. Easy to fake pre-hire practices encourages hiring and promoting unskilled people and rejecting skilled ones.

Perhaps you noticed a few misspellings in the title of this section. Based on these errors, you might have jumped to a negative conclusion. Making sweeping assumptions based on insignificant snippets of information is human. If we like candidate X, we tend to assume he or she has positive skills (i.e., halo). If we see small mistakes, or dislike candidate Y, we do the opposite (i.e., horns). Both halo and horns decisions lead to dead-weight employees, abusive managers, and, narcissistic executives, to say the least.

We cannot avoid assessment … halo-horns decisions are pre-wired. Have you ever gone on a date? Both you and your date were in assessment mode. Have you ever taken a written driver’s exam, eye test, or drove around the block to get a driver’s license? You were being assessed. Have you ever taken a certification exam, completed an application, or answered interview questions? You were being assessed.

Forget for a moment the rumor that “assessment” is a virulent disease that hitchhiked to earth on moon rocks (e.g., I have it on the highest government authority that high-altitude weather balloons were involved); people are in assessment mode all the time. Assessment has been around since God made dirt. It happens every time a hiring manager or HR specialist asks an interview question, chooses a recruiting source, decides whether someone is worthy of promotion, reviews a job application, reads an ad, or checks a reference. Assessment done well is a blessing. Assessment done poorly leeds to organizational disaster.

Sales: The Life’s Blood of an Organization

Are you doing a good job avoiding sales candidate halo? Rank-order your current salespeople based on personal productivity. Next, subtract the right-time-right-place sales. Did you notice that a few folks produce a majority of the sales? Didn’t you expect everyone you hired to be a high producer … or at least perform equally?

Productivity differences are often the result of halo decisions. The low producers burn through potential clients and drain cash faster than a career politician. As an example, take a 10-person salesforce generating 5 million in sales. Four folks generate about 4 million and the rest generate about 1 million. Sales costs are budgeted at 10% of revenue, or about $500,000. The top four salespeople earn twice the commissions as their low-producing brothers and sisters. Assuming everything else is constant, we want to discover how much the bottom six sales people really cost.

Start by allocating sales costs by producer; that is, $500,000 /((4 people times 2x) + (6 people times 1x)) = 35.7K. Using this figure, we learn the top sales group costs $285,714 (4 x 35.7K x 2) and the bottom costs $214,285 (6 x 35.7K x 1). Next, we’ll calculate sales as a percentage of revenue. Top sales = 7 cents on the dollar ($285,714 expense/4mm revenue). Bottom sales = 21 cents ($214,285 expense/1mm revenue).

Our oversimplified math shows the bottom group costs three times the top group and generates 3 million less revenue. And, we have not even added the cost of recruiting, training, coaching, turnover, lost sales, poor customer service, and so forth.

Seven Steps to Hiring Successful Salespeople

Top salespeople have seven things in common: 1) the ability to quickly build and maintain trustworthy relationships; 2) skillfully asking questions to discover potential problems; 3) making persuasive recommendations and presentations; 4) helping people overcome purchasing risk; 5) having strong motivations to win; 6) willing to put the prospect or customer first; and, 7) doing all these things at the right time. Whew!

Look closely. Can any of these factors be ignored without sacrifice? Even if they could be accurately measured using traditional interview questions, do you expect a candidate to be honest? Suffice it to say unless each factor is thoroughly and accurately assessed pre-hire, we are doomed to be lifetime members of the 80/20 club. Breaking free requires hard-to-fake tests, behavioral interviewing, and simulations.

Decision Paralysis

So are you ready to start hiring top producers? A few readers may say, “Yes!”, but my experience predicts the majority will be paralyzed by indecision. After all, payroll money does not come out of HR’s pocket; low performers are someone else’s problem; horns and halo decisions are comfortable; people are afraid they will lose control; filling slots gets more emphasis than hiring qualified people; and, in spite of the rank-ordered facts to the contrary, many sales managers insist they “know ‘em when they see ‘em!” Meanwhile good candidates are turned away and bad ones are hired.

Is gut important? Of course! The gut is always the final form of assessment … but, right or wrong, guts are always 100% convinced of their infallibility. Hiring professionals cannot afford the luxury of uninformed guts. There are good reasons why every organized sports team only hires players who pass tryouts. No skills, no play. The same goes for many other professions where the costs of unskilled people are too big to ignore.

So, unless your organizational objective is to pay for attendance instead of performance, your job is to thoroughly and accurately assess every sales candidate for each of the seven factors. Yes, you will kiss more frogs to find your prince or princess because only one about 1 in 10 sales candidates can perform all seven satisfactorily; however, the newly hired royalty will produce like champions.

One last note: depending on their involvement in the setup process, expect a few hiring managers to override some of your early rejections (e.g., it’s not easy to control uninformed guts). But, fast learners don’t make the same mistake twice.

Even if you avoid all forms of in-person commerce in between Thanksgiving and New Years, like me, it is likely that the person fulfilling your order at an online retailer is in the same boat.

Temporary staffing has always been a mainstay of the holiday shopping experience. The convergence between the traditional holiday staffing issues, consumer behavior, and corporate balance sheets continues to leave many baffled about what 2011 and beyond holds for employment in this country.

Holiday Hiring Is Up

There is at least a bit of good news coming off some continued flatness in unemployment: holiday hiring is up. Big time. SnagAJob.com, the job board for hourly workers, estimates an increase of 26 percent over last year. Employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimate the increase at about 20 percent. Retailers are expecting sales gains to outpace last year.

On the surface, this is great news. Stronger retailing points (at least superficially) to better economic conditions. As the Wall Street Journal points out, there is good news for those who are hoping a seasonal or temp position will help secure something a bit more stable:

“The hope of landing a permanent position is one reason people are willing to turn their lives upside down for a temp job; 40 percent of employers that are hiring seasonal workers this fall intend to offer some of them permanent jobs, up from 31 percent last year, according to a survey of 2,457 employers by CareerBuilder, Chicago, operator of a job-search web site.”

Meanwhile, temporary payrolls continued their steady growth in September and October while the rest of the employment picture continues its stop-and-go progress.

But now there is a new challenge.

The Changing Consumer

As retailers adapt to shifting consumer behavior, the impact on the workforce is unavoidable. Look at what retailer Toys “R” Us is doing to respond, according to The Courier-News (Elgin, Illinois):

“Toys “R” Us spokeswoman Linda DeNotaris said that with so much of the toy business happening at Christmas time, the company experimented with the temporary, 4,000-square-foot “pop-up” Express stores last holiday season in 90 locations.

Customers responded so well to those added locations that this year, the chain is opening 600 Express stores, more than six times as many as last year and about equal to the number of regular Toys “R” Us stores in operation. And these pop-up stores will require 10,000 new seasonal workers to staff them, DeNotaris said.

Opening up, stocking, operating for a couple months and then closing these stores down is more economical than running the operation year ’round. If the trend takes hold, that means retailers will continue to shed full-time workers for either part-timers or seasonal workers.

Analysis is mixed as to whether this is a permanent consumer change or whether it is a continued reaction to the ongoing recession, but by any estimation, it will continue to at least be a short-term concern. As the economy slowly grows back though, pressure will be on retailers from Wall Street to respond immediately and with strong competition still in place, will be a challenge for retailers to not adapt.

Companies Continue to Hoard Money

The larger concern is what companies choose to do with the massive amounts of cash they have in the bank. While not as publicized as the retail market and not as obvious, it is the 800-pound gorilla in the room when talking about employment. To quote from the Baltimore Sun:

As of June 30, the non-bank members of Standard & Poor’s index of 500 big U.S. companies were sitting on $842 billion in cash, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior analyst at S&P. Count all U.S. companies, and it’s well over $1 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.

That was the seventh quarterly record in a row for S&P cash. The cash pile was also very high on a relative basis, making up nearly 12 percent of the market value of those companies. A decade ago, corporate cash was less than 3 percent of the S&P 500′s stock market value.

As we continue to slog through a rough economy, companies are sitting on a record amount of cash — some $1.1 trillion. And what they choose to do with it is going to have a huge impact on the employment picture in the U.S.

What’s Next?

I’m sure most people are tired of hearing about how we are going to have to wait until the next few quarters play out before we come to any conclusions, but I think in this case, it is perfectly appropriate. What we do know is:

1. Part of the response hinges on how retailers do this holiday season. Anything at or above expectations is going to be seen positively whereas anything below expectations could be a huge blow.
2. Consumer behaviors are certainly changed for the short term. Whether that impacts buying and investing in late 2011 is what is murky right now.
3. Whether temp workers get converted to full-timers is going to depend largely on how companies choose to invest on hand cash. I have a feeling that stockholders and boards are going to start pushing investment once again in 2011.
4. Could we be in store for another round of merger and acquisition activity? That’s certainly another option for that cash on hand besides hiring employees. And in certain depressed sectors, it might make more sense than bringing on new employees.

What’s your take on this? Is the workplace shifting or is our economy just taking longer than usual to recover?

Today, the U.S. Labor Department reported that initial claims for unemployment fell last week to the lowest point since July 2008. In another report, the U.S. Commerce Department said Americans increased their spending for the fourth consecutive month in October. Personal income also rose, as did disposable income, tangible evidence that the improving optimism in recent surveys is real.

In fact, one of those consumer sentiment surveys, the Reuter’s/University of Michigan’s Consumer sentiment index, surprised economists by coming in at 71.6, a full point higher than the most optimistic of the predictions. It was 67.7 last month. The survey tracks with the Conference Board’s venerable Consumer Confidence Index, which rose 1.6 points in October.

From a jobs perspective, the more telling Employment Trends Index (also from The Conference Board) is at 98.1, up .8 from September, but up 10 percent over the last year. This index is considered by many economists to be an especially useful indicator of hiring trends, since it takes into account eight labor market indicators, including unemployment claims, temp hirings, job openings, and data from the consumer confidence survey.

The reports prompted Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC, to tell Bloomberg, “It really looks like a recovery here. Wages and salaries are strengthening, and we have really good momentum going into the holiday season.”

Holiday hiring is the strongest since 2006, says global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The firm’s analysis of labor market data says retailers added 150,900 jobs in October versus 47,600 last year. Retailers continue to hire in November and December, leading the company to predict that seasonal job growth will top 600,000.

Next week will provide economists more grist for their predictions for 2011. The Conference Board will release its report Wednesday on employment ads posted during the month. On Tuesday, its consumer confidence index for November will be out. Then comes ADP’s National Employment Report, foreshadowing the most closely watched jobs data of each month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly Employment Situation. This is the report that announces the unemployment rate and offers significant other data on current employment in the U.S.

Part 2 in a series related to optimizing recruiting team results

Given the demands to do more with less that are prevalent in HR and recruiting departments, in Part 1 I discuss how imperative it is to take a systems approach when implementing changes to improve recruiting team yields or other key performance indicators, and discussed two recommendations related to investing recruiter training initiatives: Evaluating both capacity and also incentives, before pulling the trigger on a training initiative.

A common problem is that many organizations make the decision to train their recruiters (and other staff) without evaluating other components that correlate to optimized outcomes. This is a common training error: “we aren’t getting the results we need … therefore let’s train the staff … (and fast).”

There are three more areas that should be considered before implementing recruiter training initiatives:Understanding Motivational Factors, Optimizing Feedback and Communication Systems, and Evaluating Environmental Factors.

Understanding Motivational Factors

This is strongly related to incentives, but different. The primary difference is that although you can adjust incentives, which certainly have the potential to impact motivation, you can’t motivate your staff … they can only motivate themselves! Think about that for a moment. You can provide a reward or other negative incentives, but it won’t necessarily motivate your staff. The classic example is that some people simply aren’t motivated by money or (insert potential motivator here). Indeed, it has been proven that although money is often a motivator, more money doesn’t often improve performance or work output.

The overarching point is that delivering training to an unmotivated staff is a bad strategy. A better solution is to understand individual motivational factors, make an assessment, and address motivation gaps or opportunities before delivering training. There are some key steps to doing so:

1. Understand that motivations are individualized: Not everyone is motivated by the same things. It’s worth understanding motivations for each member of the team as an individual. This will take some time and investment. Make a list of four or five things that motivate each of your employees. Review the list before each of your 1:1 meetings. On a weekly basis, provide reinforcement related to each employee’s motivating factors.
2. Motivating a team is a process, not an event: Organizational dynamics are constantly changing, and with that, so are employee motivations. Ongoing recognition is important, but so is ongoing acknowledgment of the portfolio of motivating factors for each employee on your team. Make motivating your team part of the way of doing business.
3. Support recruiter motivation by using systems (for example, policies and procedures); don’t count on good intentions. You may be surprised to reveal the gaps between intent and actual performance once you implement systems that create transparency around expectations.

Optimizing Feedback and Communication Systems

Most employees say that they don’t get enough feedback on their performance. This is nearly always the case in recruiting teams I observe …people just don’t “know how they are doing.” The reasons for this typically fall into two distinct buckets: One, there are not clear objectives and expectations set for members of their recruiting staff for each step in the staffing process. Therefore, recruiters perform the role to the best of their understanding of what the role should be, with no way to self-assess whether they are doing the job correctly. This is one of the most common errors I find when evaluating recruiting departments: all the recruiters are performing the role differently than their peers, because there are no clear expectations attached to how each step in the process should be performed. Indeed, I have observed recruiters in the same department doing completely different jobs in terms of tasks, behaviors, and results. By default, performance standards and levels are driven toward the mean when this happens.

The second reason recruiting staff do not get enough feedback is because the staffing leader does not invest enough time in evaluating performance at each step in the staffing process. Often they only measure end results such as time to fill or total number of hires per period. This is an error, as most staffing processes are metaphorically similar to an obstacle course … with different segments requiring different subject-matter expertise, skills, and competencies in order to optimize. Therefore, to optimize the results systemically, one needs to evaluate performance at each step in the staffing process to produce the optimal results.

Both of these underpin the argument for why training often doesn’t produce results — trainees do not understand the expectations for each step in the recruitment process, and staffing leaders often deliver training that doesn’t really address the gaps in performance (because they don’t know the true gaps in performance). A common, real-world example I frequently observe is when staffing leaders train their recruiters on sourcing skills, when in fact the ability to source candidates is not the gating factor at all.

So before delivering training, leaders should answer yes to the following questions:

• Is each step of the recruiting process well documented and communicated to each stakeholder?
• Are the competencies, behaviors, and subject-matter expertise required to be demonstrated in each step of the staffing process well-communicated to everyone on the staffing team?
• Are the business outcomes for each step in the recruiting process understood and measured?
• Has the performance of each member of the staffing team been evaluated against the previously described objectives for each step in the staffing process?

Once these questions are answered, then training may be developed and delivered in an effective manner.

Evaluating Environmental Factors

The final impediments that sometimes gets in the way of recruiter training effectiveness are the host of environmental factors that, if left unchecked, can render training useless.

What are the time constraints impacting recruiter performance? What are the tools constraints? What is the stress level? How distracting is the work environment? Are cubicles better than offices? The list goes on and on.

An effective exercise is to survey the recruiting staff and ask: “What are the obstacles that get in the way of you doing excellent work?” and “What tools do you wish you had in order to be more effective?”

I’ve been amazed at how many recruiting departments don’t provide mobile phones to their recruiting staff. Or laptops. Or business cards (really). Effective staffing leaders evaluate the environment, work to reasonably optimize it, and then train their staff.

Now that we’ve evaluated some of the reasons training recruiters doesn’t work, in the next installment we’ll examine the top strategies and tactics to deliver high-quality training that really makes a difference.

However, most organizations are operating without an overarching strategy that defines how to get a solid and visible return from their social media approaches. Recruiters have become caught up in the technology and are using these tools without much focus on whether they are working or not. Organizations are creating Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn groups, and so on with little understanding of their goals for doing so. While there may be cases where a recruiter can say that they made a hire because of a social media tool, there are few organizations that can show a consistent return or prove that some other approach would not have worked just as well.

Many traditional tools such as email, job board postings, and face-to-face meetings may be as successful (or even more so in some cases), but are abandoned in the excitement generated by the social networking platforms.

Before social media will become a mature process for recruiting, we need to build appropriate strategies and measurements to gauge its success.

Here are five things to consider:

Focus on a Goal
Before anything, establish what you hope to gain from adopting social media platforms. Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive more interested potential candidates to your career site, or convert social media group members to employees?

What are you promising your hiring managers that could not be more easily or cheaply done through some other media?

Start with a written objective that is small enough to achieve and that can be done through some sort of social media application.

Know Who You Are Recruiting
Are you trying to hire mostly experienced mid-career professionals, or are you after recent college graduates? Are you focused on building a talent community for future recruitment or are you looking for immediate hires?

These are key questions to ask when it comes to choosing a strategy and a recruiting platform. Social media is most effective with younger candidates and most likely would be a marginal choice if you were recruiting executives or seasoned professionals. You need to deeply understand where people go to look for jobs, what attracts them to your company, and how to reach passive candidates.

Using referrals or telephone calls may work better than Facebook or LinkedIn, and nothing should be excluded from your initial strategy planning. To assume that everyone is connected, has a Facebook profile, and uses LinkedIn is flawed.

Tie All Your Social Media to a Destination
I believe that proper implementations are hierarchical in nature. All your social media efforts should drive potential candidates to a central place: ideally your talent community. Many organizations have a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn page, and perhaps other social media vehicles as well. While these are valuable ways to approach a variety of people and offer many channels for communication, they can also lead to candidate confusion and to a loss of ROI.

By having a central website or talent community as an endpoint where candidates can learn about your organization, find more details about an open position, and where you can screen and communicate with candidates, is a core element in a successful social media strategy.

Use and Educate Your Hiring Managers
Asking hiring managers to communicate with candidates via Twitter or Facebook can be a real asset. They can provide authentic information, answer questions, and even close offers. But to make this a legal and effective process, you need to provide hiring managers with some education on how to effectively use social media. Provide them with guidelines, work with your legal department to build an agreed-upon process for communication. Keeping all social media interaction with the recruiting department limits its value and lowers ROI.

Look for Crossover Benefits
Use a broad array of tools to source candidates but look for areas of synergy. For example, how can your job postings drive potential candidates to your Twitter or Facebook accounts? How can you leverage a quick phone chat to invite someone to join your Facebook fan page? The goal should be to always get interested people to your destination site or talent community. Social media is primarily for sourcing and communication, not for selling or closing a candidate.

I have put a together simple chart (above, click to enlarge) to help organize thinking about the value and use of a variety of social media tools.

In every case, the strategy is to use social media in a casual chain: to move people from casual or no awareness of your employment brand to being actively engaged in learning about possible opportunities and ultimately to become an active candidate and/or employee.

The OMG moment for talent management leaders is coming.

Financial analysts and executives have finally begun to make the connection between excellent talent management practices and profitability. More and more of the financial powers that be are considering making talent-management-effectiveness assessments mandatory. When the interest rate your organization gets on a major line of credit is influenced by your talent management effectiveness, you can bet the degree of scrutiny from both internal and external leaders will change the game.

The Power of Financial Analysts

Ratings by key financial analysts can make or break a company. If an influential stock or bond analyst gives your firm a positive or negative rating, your stock price can change by double-digit percentages almost instantaneously. Moreover, because evaluations by financial analysts can come without warning, you can make a strong argument that the CEOs of large public corporations fear the wrath of external financial analysts even more than they fear irate stockholders and auditors. It should be clear to the leader of any business function or unit that if their unit is negatively cited in an external financial analyst’s report, that the leader and the function are both guaranteed to bear the wrath of the entire executive team.

Moody’s Begins the Change

Moody’s is an internationally known corporate bond rating service. Its bond rating can dramatically impact the cost of corporate credit. In a recent report on the outlook for the healthcare industry and the primary factors that contributed to profitability, Moody’s made a direct connection between financial performance and success in the talent management areas of recruiting and retention. Lisa Goldstein of Moody’s wrote that an effective strategy focusing on quality could:

“result in improved market share, better ability to recruit and retain physicians, lower nursing vacancy/turnover rates, improved financial performance…”

This statement clearly connects recruiting and retention with organizational performance in both market share and financial performance. In this report, Moody’s also cites the importance of additional talent management functions, including leadership development, training, and benchmarking best practices. Moody’s has made it clear that these types of factors will now influence its bond ratings. Given the widespread exposure that this report generated (it was highlighted in a Forbes article) talent management leaders in other industries can now expect their executives and an increasing number of financial analysts to increase their scrutiny and raise their expectations for the talent management function.

Google Also Connects Talent Management and Business Success

In addition to financial analysts, Google has taken the lead in making shareholders aware of the importance of talent management. For example, as early as 2004 and continuing up until the present day, Google has in its SEC legal filings been clearly stating the direct connection between talent management and company success. For example, in its June 2007 filing, it stated that “We believe that our approach to hiring has significantly contributed to our success to date.” It also included this important statement under the “risks” section: “If we do not succeed in attracting excellent personnel or retaining or motivating existing personnel, we may be unable to grow effectively.”

Additional Connections Between Talent Management and Business Success

Although no individual firm has yet to make the direct connection between its talent management success and improvements in its stock price, analysts have shown that there is a connection. For example, researchers at the consulting firm Watson Wyatt using its human capital index found that good people practices can increase a company’s value by as much as 30%. Russell Investments reports that firms on the Fortune “100 Best Companies to Work for” list outperform the S&P 500 and the Russell 3000 by as much as 10%.

Risk Management and Workforce Planning Collide

Workforce planning has been a key practice in best-practice organizations for some time, but despite years of continuous improvement, most organizations have had less than stellar success linking such efforts to the business. Outside the HR function, more and more organizations are realizing that lack of capability or lack of effectiveness in talent management produces risk to the organization. Furthermore, actuaries in risk management know how to model such risk and peg potential dollar-impact assessments to each. ERE Excellence Award winner Dan Hilbert has been working on tools that help organizations better merge workforce planning, financially focused headcount planning, and workforce risk management for several years. The response to the tools he has architected as CEO and Founder of OrcaEyes is stellar when the audience is made up of finance, operations, and risk professionals, but not so much with traditional HR professionals who struggle to comprehend the depth of analysis. What is easy to predict is that risk modeling will become a standard practice, but that HR may not be the driver!

Action Steps

If you are a talent management leader who wants to be proactive, strategic, and demonstrate a commitment to enabling/driving the business, don’t delay action until this external assessment trend hits you in the face. Instead, consider it as an opportunity to show off the results that you have worked so hard to produce. Some action steps that I would recommend include:

• Start by putting together a team of financial and metrics experts in order to prepare for this added visibility and scrutiny.
• Develop a set of workforce productivity metrics, starting with revenue per employee but escalating to the ratio of the dollars of labor costs to dollars of corporate profit.
• Develop a set of correlations between improved results in recruiting, retention, development, etc. and increases in business results, including sales, customer satisfaction, and product quality.
• Learn how to convert your talent management results into their impact on corporate revenues. For example, reporting a 5% decrease in turnover just does not have the same impact as reporting the fact that the 5% decrease resulted in a $3.2 million increase in revenues.
• Develop a methodology and approach that allows you to prepare for and to successfully respond to analysts questions and inquiries.

Final Thoughts

At many firms, the largest single variable expense is employee cost. Because it is such a large expense item, it must provide a positive return on investment. Unfortunately, many HR leaders have been reluctant to even calculate their return on employee costs. If what many predict will happen does happen, very soon you will have no choice but to calculate such metrics and suffer public scrutiny. Depending on how your results rank, that could be a great day, or alternatively, it may be your last day.

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

Now, CareerBuilder says Adams would have been closer to the truth if he had used a fish.

The company’s weekly survey of work-world issues turned its attention to pet ownership, discovering that fish owners were likely to hold jobs in human resources, or in a few other areas, including finance, transportation, and hospitality.

Cat owners, says CareerBuilder, are more likely to work as physicians, real estate agents, science/medical lab technicians, machine operators, and personal caretakers.

Dog owners are more likely to be in the C-suite. And snake owners more likely to earn six-figures. (Does owning both improve your chances of being a very highly paid executive? CareerBuilder doesn’t say.) Snake owners are more likely to be editors and writers, which belies the income finding, although I completely understand the ownership connection. For editors.

But fish owners as human resource professionals? I struggled with that one, until I took a step back and looked at this as a food chain issue. Now stay with me here.

Dogs chase cats, cats eat fish. HR professionals are forever seeking a seat at the table. Alas, the closest they get to the table is to be served as one of the courses. The few who do get to sit there are most certainly not the innocent goldfish who populate home aquariums. (Pet store goldfish can be bought in bulk. When they are, they’re called “feeders.”)

There you have it. Dogs are at the top of this little food chain. Fish at the bottom. And cats? Right there in the middle, drawing your blood, running the tests, delivering the news that your house is underwater, and being the caretaker that sucks your breath when you’re too weak to resist.

There is a dark side to a company’s ability to identify and recruit high-potential fully-employed passive candidates. The problem: the fully employed people they’re identifying, recruiting, and hiring now work for your company.

So as LinkedIn’s “auto-connect your employees with every job posting” feature becomes more pervasive, and Doug Berg at Jobs2Web figures out how to get everyone in the world into your talent community, and Monster makes sure your employees see that your competitor’s opportunities are better than what they’re doing now, expect some ugly consequences.

Here’s what I consider the domino effect of what on the surface appears to be a good thing — identifying great people and offering them what appears to be better career opportunities:

Short-term and Narrow Domino Effect

1. Increased employee turnover at the professional level.
2. Increasing use of counteroffers to retain key employees.
3. Across the board salary increases to minimize the “grass is greener” mentality.
4. Hire more recruiters to assist filling the open positions.
5. Increase salaries and signing bonuses to attract key people.
6. Develop aggressive retention programs.
7. Turnover rates at all companies increase as employees proactively seek greener pastures.
8. Aggressively negotiate offers to compete for people who have multiple offers.
9. The use of outside recruiters increases and fees escalate dramatically.
10. Ask for increases in your recruiting budget for 2011, now.

Long-term and Broader Impact

1. Wage inflation at the company and national level accelerates sharply.
2. Succession planning is thrown for a loop as key employees depart.
3. Turnover trends worsen as companies hire people for 2-3 year stints. This becomes the new normal for tenure.
4. Lack of experienced and capable leaders causes shortages at the mid-management level within 4-6 years, with comparable shortages within 5-10 years at the executive level.
5. The U.S. world competitive position deteriorates further.

Some might call this the good old days. But whatever it’s called, external recruiters are having a field day.

Some of these deleterious effects can be mitigated by implementing the Larry Clifton (CACI’s VP of Talent) counter-measure, aka his unspoken seventh law of motion: react first and faster before the other side knows what you’re doing, or be proactively proactive.  I call this the “Clifton Rule.”

Geoffrey Moore offers some critical strategic advice on how you should implement the Clifton Rule in his classic marketing book Crossing the Chasm. While the book is geared toward developing marketing strategies for high-technology products, his definition of customer behavior is useful as you increase your level of proactivity. Moore categorizes buyers of technology into these five groups:

1. Innovators who try stuff out the moment it’s available. Have you seen the iPad with camera and GPS yet?
2. Early-adopters who wait until the beta proves out. They create the buzz. These are the people who bought their iPads earlier this year.
3. The Early Majority who recognize a good thing when they hear the buzz. These are the people buying iPads now.
4. The Late Majority who wait until the buzz is so loud they’re embarrassed into proceeding. They’ll be buying their iPads for Christmas 2011.
5. The Laggards who never hear the buzz, or they’re convinced it’s a passing fad. They’re thinking about getting a cell phone with SMS and maybe email.

With this in mind, and for all of those talent managers and leaders out there, here’s how I’d go about becoming proactively proactive.

Become an innovator and early adopter for every new idea that comes up. Be part of the beta program. If you haven’t yet bought into LinkedIn’s talent suite of products or Jobs2Web’s talent community programs, you’re already too late. These products are changing the face of recruiting today and you need to be using them. At best you’re still in the Early Majority, if you act today. (For the sake of disclosure, I work closely with both of these companies, primarily because they’re leading edge.)

Implement PERP. Employee referral programs (ERP) need to be expanded to take advantage of LinkedIn’s auto-matching capability. Get your employees to proactively connect with the best people they’ve worked with in the past, so they’re identified with your open jobs as soon as they’re posted. This is PERP. But remember, other companies are now starting to connect with your best employees, so act yesterday. I’m sure LinkedIn has a heat map that demonstrates your vulnerability, or if not, will soon have one.

Implement robust retention programs. This must be a multi-pronged strategy to prevent your best employees from leaving. As a minimum it needs to consist of these measures:

• Determine if your compensation if competitive. If not, pull a Google and give everyone an immediate increase. This will buy you 3-6 months.
• Increase your internal mobility efforts. Your workforce is tired so you need to do something about this. A recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn indicated that 78% of your fully employed professional workforce was either looking for another job or open to talking with a recruiter about new opportunities. Giving people different lateral positions will buy you an additional 3-6 months. If they’re stretch jobs you’ll gain a year or two. You’ll gain even more than this, if you implement some type of continuous stretching. You’re already doing this for your high-potential group, so it makes sense to broaden this to the top-third of your workforce you can’t afford to lose.
• Sample your workforce satisfaction levels on a monthly basis. On the LinkedIn survey mentioned earlier, we measured employee satisfaction levels in comparison to job-seeking behavior. Surprisingly, those who were most active were not overtly dissatisfied, just more neutral about their future prospects. By tracking satisfaction, you’ll be able to implement corrective active programs once you observer a change from satisfied to neutral. (We’re holding a webcast with LinkedIn on Dec 7, 2010, to review these survey findings.)
• Energize and upgrade your employee satisfaction programs. Your employees are at the starting blocks just waiting for something different to do. Don’t wait for them to leave before you implement all of the great ideas your OD people are now considering.
• Establish a quick-response task force to address those now pursuing other jobs. Figure out who’s ripe for leaving, figure out why, and put in some aggressive programs to stem the upcoming rush to the exit doors. Have a well-thought counter-insurgency plan in place before people start turning in their resignations. Reacting with a competitive counteroffer is the worst thing you can do. By then it’s too late. It still might be appropriate, but if you don’t do all of the above in parallel, you’re just postponing the inevitable.

Stop using skills-based job descriptions to attract, screen, and hire people. I wrote a rather contentious article on ERE recently — “A Zillion Reasons to Eliminate Traditional Job Descriptions“ — that made a convincing case that job descriptions emphasizing skills and experiences are the root cause of turnover. The big point: people who accept lateral transfers, generally active candidates, based on some economic need, do so until something better comes along.

Hire people using the same criteria you’d use to retain them. Top performers tend to like the work they’re doing; there is some intrinsic long-term motivator that keeps them highly motivated; they are respected; their managers support and develop them; and they are provided with continuous growth opportunities. It makes sense to offer new hires these same opportunities. This is the primary reason why I suggest using performance profiles with strong EVPs, rather than skills-based job descriptions for sourcing, screening, and recruiting purposes. A performance profile defines the work the person will be doing defined as a series of projects and performance objectives. Candidates should be screened on this from both a competency and motivation standpoint. The EVP, or employee value proposition, describes why a top person who is fully employed and not looking would want the job. This should represent the core of all recruitment advertising efforts. This approach attracts the best and ensures they’re hired for long-term career rather than short-term economic reasons.

Emerging social media tools like LinkedIn and Jobs2Web are providing early adopters an opportunity to find and recruit everyone else’s best talent. This represents a fundamental shift in the balance of power, and more hiring turmoil can be expected over the next few years. The post-and-pray model of yesteryear is rapidly being replaced by a new version of “poach and prey.” Since everyone will soon have access to the same tools and the same people, the difference maker will be the implementers — recruiters and front-line hiring managers — and companies who have established themselves as early adopters of systems integrating their hiring, retention, and performance management system. However, until internal talent development becomes more important than hiring, our economy is in for a rocky ride.

In a memo responding to a series of questions from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, SHRM said there is no requirement that only company jobs be posted on a site with a .jobs address.

While that may be technically correct, it is counter to the purposes SHRM and Employ Media detailed in their 2004 application for requesting ICANN create the domain. Then, the two entities argued that a .jobs address would benefit employers by offering an easy way for job seekers to find corporate career sites and would make it easy for companies to market those sites.

Employ Media itself, the wholesaler and manager of .jobs addresses, tells potential applicants that the Internet domain is to be used “for your recruitment ads.” Its registration agreement specifically says:

“…you may not:

1. Use your .jobs domain to post third-party information, such as job listings for other companies. This means that you can not have a job board at your .jobs domain which contains listings for jobs outside of your Company.”

Noted recruitment consultant Gerry Crispin, a principal in CareerXroads, was a strong supporter of the creation of the .jobs address when it was first proposed. He saw it as a way to reduce job scams and help job seekers find their way to the legitimate jobs of the companies in which they had an interest.

This morning, after learning about SHRM’s response to ICANN’s questions, Crispin said, “That’s not what they sold and what I bought.” Dot jobs, he said, was intended to provide “a safe haven for job seekers where they wouldn’t get scammed. The spirit of that intent is not being maintained by SHRM.”

Even though there is no contractual content requirement evident in the .Jobs Charter, SHRM was given the opportunity by ICANN to address the spirit and purpose behind the creation of .jobs.

“What are SHRM’s expectations for content on domain names registered in the .JOBS sTLD?” ICANN asked.

“It is SHRM’s expectation that any content at domains registered in the .JOBs TLD serves the needs of the international human resource management community,” was the response.

Who, exactly, submitted the responses on behalf of SHRM isn’t clear. The memo posted by ICANN was sent to Gary Rubin, SHRM’s Chief Publishing, E-Media, and Business Development Officer, and to SHRM’s General Counsel, Henry Hart. It appears the original memo was returned to ICANN with the answers, but without any indication of authorship.

(Lately, SHRM has seen some of its members challenging its openness and transparency. A group calling itself SHRM Members for Transparency appears poised to take on the organization’s leadership. See the details here on TLNT.com.)

The question and answers are part of the material ICANN’s Board Governance Committee is gathering before making a recommendation on reconsidering an Aug. 5 decision to expand what words can be used in conjunction with a .jobs address.

After a lengthy process dating back more than a year, the ICANN board voted to allow Employ Media to sell addresses containing occupational names, geographic names, and others. Under the original approval, only company names could be used with a .jobs extension. SHRM, as the policy overseer contracted by Employ Media, approved the expansion early in June. (Background on the saga can be found here.)

Two weeks after the ICANN vote, a group of job boards, recruitment firms, technology providers, and others petitioned for reconsideration, claiming the board had been inadequately backgrounded by ICANN staff, and that staff failed to fairly and thoroughly investigate the expansion request.

The last few weeks has seen a series of questions sent to SHRM and Employ Media. Those to Employ Media included many that were of the  “what did you know and when did you know it” variety. A few simply asked the .jobs registrar if it intended to violate the .jobs Charter or the agreement it has with ICANN.

As might be expected, the response to the latter questions is no.

The five-page Employ Media answers — and the posting on Oct. 28 of the formal minutes of the board’s Aug. 5th meeting — prompted a 20-page response by the coalition. Besides challenging several of the ICANN staff’s comments as recorded in the minutes, the coalition also offered a question-by-question refutation and analysis of the Employ Media answers. At one point, the coalition says: “The statements made by Employ Media in its answer strain credulity and are internally inconsistent.”

“We knew we had to be there, but there was a real concern about the issue of reputation,” admits Jerry Wimer, VP of operations at the contingent workforce provider. “Our whole industry is apprehensive about opening up that two-way communication.”

That the staffing industry has been hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon is not surprising, considering the odd sort of business it is. It’s a B-to-B service that hires the public to work for someone else.

The work environment, management practices, the day-to-day tasks — almost everything about the workplace is out of the control of the staffing firm, even though, in most cases, its the boss who pays the the employee.

No wonder that when the staffing industry discusses social media the first issue to come up is the fear of negative feedback from the workers it hires, places, and, often enough, lays off.

In an article in the June issue of Staffing Industry Review, Manpower’s VP of U.S. Marketing and Franchise Relations Mark Metzendorf wrote: “The tremendous popularity of social media raises serious challenges around reputation management for organizations.”

But he also notes: “There is a clear role for social networks to help build and maintain engagement and brand reputations in our industry.”

It was the value of this role that so outweighed the potential risk of negative comments that for Staff Management it was never a question of whether to get on board with social media. The question was how best to do it.

“We’ve always been very feet-on-the-street oriented,” says Wimer. “We have been very heavily involved in community outreach, getting involved in a lot of personal contact and candidate networking.”

“But at some point it dawned on us that the whole country was getting on this platform (social media) and we needed to as well.”

So early this year Staff Management, a division of SeatonCorp, set out to develop a social media presence. It started by pulling together groups from within the company, and by looking at what others had done, as it started to develop a strategic plan.

As befits a company that was named #1 this year on HRO Today’s Baker’s Dozen list of top MSP suppliers, Staff Management did its homework. It hired CareerBuilder’s consulting arm, Personified, to analyze its existing online presence, and in particular, its online reputation.

“We needed to know where we stood and what was already out there about us,” recalls Wimer. Not unexpectedly, Personified reported that the company’s brand, as far as the online world was concerned, was limited. Staff Management was told its social media presence was, in Wimer’s words, “not so strong.”

So correcting that became one of the goals of its social media strategy. Other pieces of the plan came from seeing what wasn’t working or others.

“There are so many places out there where there’s nothing new for days or weeks,” says Wimer. “We knew we wanted to be more responsive. We wanted to have someone who would comment or respond back quickly; the same day was our goal.”

Instead of deciding all the details, Staff Management concluded it needed to hire a social media professional to help with the strategy and manage the project. That turned out to be Sarah Katz, a young PR major with social media experience.

“She had a little bit of a blank slate,” Wimer adds. “We had some general guidelines, but we left a lot of it up to her.”

Since coming on board in August, Staff Management has developed a LinkedIn presence and launched a Twitter site. It launched on Facebook in September, promoting its clients and job fairs, but also adding news about hiring, openings, and bits about the company itself. It has almost 200 friends and lists of its openings.

The Facebook wall is mostly one-way, though the few two-way posts are just like eavesdropping on personal conversations. In one, a job fair attendee who didn’t leave a resume asked for and quickly got a fax number. And the name of the recruiting manager.

What the company has yet to do is to establish specific metrics to measure the impact of its social media program.

“A satisfactory result,” says Wimer, “might be a 10 percent lift (in candidate applications). That would be phenomenal.” But, “We definitely don’t have that (specific metrics) built into our plan.”

Eventually, it will. In fact, the company has already seen an increase in online responses to job postings. Wimer suspects that a good portion of that is due to the social media efforts, including the jobs the company now tweets to its followers, many of whom are company employees.

There’s still work to do. One obvious shortcoming is incorporating social elements into the company’s website. There’s no link to any of the social networks. The pleasantly inviting “Talk to Us” page is an impersonal form.

“We’re moving a little more slowly than maybe other companies would,” Wimer says. “We took a long time to decide (to go social), but once we did, we want to do it right.”

He offers three suggestions to other companies — staffing or not — who are considering a social media strategy:

1. Make sure you are fully committed. “Don’t do it all if you are not committed to provide fast and timely followup to comments and posts.”
2. Don’t sweat the negative. “You’ve got to be completely open and honest. Leave the negative comments. You will get some. Removing it will only hurt you.”
3. Involve your workforce and expect enthusiasm. Being on social networks is “exciting. The workforce is there and they’ll be enthusiastic that the company is.” Involving employees will help in spreading the message.

1. It has more than 21,000 followers on Twitter.
2. Its Facebook page is “liked” by almost 2,700 people.
3. Visitors to RackerTalent, the company’s 8-month old career site,  spend almost three times as many minutes learning about its culture than the average for the entire site, including actually searching for a job.

“Not only can we say it’s good, but damn, this is really great.” That’s Michael Long. He’s head of global talent branding for the web hosting and cloud computing company in San Antonio.

You may recall Long from my post in March. He’s the guy who got the company’s logo tattooed on his arm. Also known as The Red Recruiter, Long shepherded Rackspace’s new career site, first as a consultant, then inside as branding leader. The site launched shortly before the tat got inked.

Long and I spoke at length after the tattoo post, mostly about the new talent site and the plans Rackspace had for it. He had a handful of employees blogging, a few contributing photos, and more enthusiasm for the site and his new job than I could have expressed in words.

Now, here it is, almost nine months later, and RackerTalent has 25 regular — and irregular — contributors blogging about everything from 100 days of Racker-T-shirt-wearing to a straight-from-the-heart declaration of the company’s core values. The Culture channel is so engaging it’s no wonder that visitors spent more than eight minutes reading through it.

“These are genuine people here,” says Long, who shared some of the new site’s analytics with me. “They are talking in personal terms about what it’s like to work here; what it means to be a Racker.”

“I think that a big part of it,” he says, explaining why visitors find the content so worth their time.

When Rackspace was planning its recruitment branding and social media strategy, it was less interested in big numbers than in attracting the kind of person who would fit the culture and blossom there. This is, after all, a company that has trademarked the term “Fanatical Support.”

Paul Norman, who was then director of recruiting, said the goal was to give potential candidates a feel for what it meant to be a Racker, and a taste of what working for the company is like. Not everyone is a fit. Nor does everyone feel comfortable with the Rackspace approach that encourages individuals to develop their talents, even when they lead in a different direction.

From the metrics Long has been gathering, RackerTalent is meeting that goal. Besides just the amount of time visitors are spending in the culture channel, those who go there, stay there. The “bounce rate” in October was an astonishing 9.2 percent. For the entire site it was 20.8 percent.

Now the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a site after visiting just one page. So it’s a good way to measure how engaging that page is. Google’s analytics evangelist, and author of two books on analytics, Avinash Kaushik had this to say about bounce rates: “My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%.”

At 9.2 percent, it means that 90 percent of the visitors to a RackerTalent culture page go on to read another.

“This is a project that just won’t stop,” says Long. “These are great numbers. They show that people are looking at the kind of people who are Rackers.”

From reading through the reports (RackerTalent uses Google Analytics), Long says it’s clear what job seekers and potential candidates care about and what they find useful. That’s a good yardstick to measure the site’s progress. Don’t just look at the visitor counts, he cautions. By that measure, the culture channel ranks only third, behind the job listings.

That’s probably to be expected; after all, the economy is dismal and people are looking for work. Still, Long says he’s thinking how to improve the engagement there to attract more of those visitors to the culture area.

Long is also looking at Rackspace’s Facebook presence, already robust, with a surprising number of comments for a company that is not consumer-facing.

Some of the content on RackerTalent is turning up on Facebook, some of it posted by Rackspace employees, who also tweet about the blog postings and, of course, jobs.

“It’s an inside-out approach,” Long jokes, with employees pushing out content to the world. “The only way to have them help you is to give them awesome content to spread … When I think about social, it’s about rich content.”

Now with the career site established and some of the heaviest lifting completed, Long is looking at other metrics, to see what’s to be learned there. One he shared is the number of applies. From social media sources, Rackspace gets about 35 candidates for every job. From the job aggregators, the number rises to 100.

“It costs a lot to review all those applicants. If we could get fewer, but higher quality applicants,” he says, not finishing the sentence. “I think social media offers that.”

Let me start by saying I am biased with regard to recruiter training. Beyond that bias, though, it is clear that providing development opportunities for people to improve their skills is certainly worthwhile, but in most cases it only holds true provided the training is implemented correctly. But there are countless occasions when I observe recruiter training initiatives deployed incorrectly, so the topic warrants discussion, particularly given that one of the common themes prevalent in today’s workplace environment is cost-containment, and the goal of doing more with less. Indeed, “doing more with less” has probably never been more pressing than in today’s economic climate and is particularly true of human resources and talent acquisition departments across most companies.

I talk with a large number of recruitment leaders who, like many others, are asking, “But how can I do more with less?” As a result many of them are seeking to improve business results by developing their staffing teams. Just last week I was talking with the staffing leader of a large, multinational corporation and the primary mandate for 2011 was to develop her recruiting team capabilities.

I have delivered a large quantity of recruiter training, have also led very large teams of recruiting professionals, and have been required to improve their capabilities through coaching and professional development, including training. I am a huge fan of developing proficiency and capabilities in order to improve business outcomes … but there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to create real results. In truth, I would go so far as to argue that in general terms, one of the primary gaps in the recruiting industry is that the skills of the average cross-section of recruiters would really benefit from significant improvement. Unfortunately, I often observe recruiting leaders investing in training, and then lamenting the fact that recruitment yields, productivity metrics, or other outputs do not show improvement.

One of the reasons for this is that doing more with less requires a systems approach when implementing changes. Recruiting team output is the dependent variable that is related to a number of independent variables that combine with different magnitudes to produce results in the system. These variables include recruiter or team capacity, incentives, motivational factors, feedback and communication systems, skills and competencies, and also environmental factors. We will look at the first couple variables in this article, and the next in the next article.

The presumption underpinning this article is that recruiter training is being implemented in order to improve business outcomes … which seems self-evident, but you might be surprised how many times I’ve observed training being delivered to recruiting (or other) teams without sufficient thought put into answering the question, “What outcome are we trying to improve with this training?” Before training is considered, thinking through the question in detail, and being very specific with regard to what goals training is intended to influence, will pay dividends.

Recommendation #1 — Do not implement training before evaluating recruiter and recruiting team capacity

The capacity variable is strongly correlated to nearly all recruitment metrics, including doing more with less. Indeed, the often-cited measure of “time to fill” is often a measure of recruiting team capacity. Many organizations fall into the Trap of False Economies … what at first seems like a cost-savings measure actually in fact increases operating expenses. For example I commonly observe organizations loading up their recruiters with far too many requisitions, but the net result is that cost per hire increases dramatically. Another example would be a lack of investment in administrative resources … some recruiting organizations “save headcount” by reducing (or eliminating … or outsourcing) much-needed administrative support such as scheduling or other logistics management in order to reduce costs.

Delivering training to a recruiting organization that is at capacity or being stretched beyond its capacity will have negative ROI — the team will just grow frustrated because it doesn’t have time to get to everything on its plate already. Instead, revisit the expectations for the role of each member on the team, revisit the capacity model, and make sure the team has the capacity to implement the behaviors that training is designed to help them improve.

Recommendation #2 — Do not underestimate the impact of incentives

If your recruiting team isn’t incented to improve results or change behaviors, training them how to do something differently or improve their behaviors or skills is unlikely to produce material results. Incentive influences human behavior. It always has and it always will. If you’ve thought through the outcomes you are trying to improve through the delivery of training, then mapping the incentives to these outcomes is relatively easy. However, many staffing organizations have not done an effective job of aligning incentives with the outcomes that drive the most business results. Don’t waste training dollars without thoroughly understanding what the incentive structure, both tangible and intangible, is for your team and whether it’s aligned with the training objectives.

But incentives can be tricky. Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Stanford professor and author of What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management suggests that incentives can and should include things other than money. A useful exercise is to have your recruiting teams define what incents them. To do so, ask them to form a small focus group of three or more people and send them off to come up with a broad list of incentives, beyond just compensation. Once you have the master list of potential incentives, share them with the broader team and have each team member force-rank them in terms of their personal preferences (what incents each individual most). You may be surprised at the results. Once completed, align the incentives (some will cost zero dollars) against your business objectives, and then evaluate training initiatives against these objectives.

In the next installment, we will examine how motivational factors, feedback and communication systems as well as environmental factors relate to recruiting team training and doing more with less.

• Only one of them used LinkedIn
• They were not swayed by free swag at job fairs
• They were hesitant to be contacted by Facebook and SMS, which is often regarded as impersonal, unprofessional, or even spam.
• It they’re receiving text messages from a recruiter or employer at 9:00 p.m., it’s a bad sign that they’d be working until 9:00 on a regular basis at that company

Click below to watch the video and read more.

A major theme was that young job seekers long for face-to-face contact during the recruiting process. One of the No. 1 takeaways was that some good ‘ol fashioned face time is necessary to make sure the position and company culture are a good fit for the candidate.

Another recurring point was that this new generation of workers needs to like what they do. Despite the economic state, young workers have the benefit of mobility and won’t stay in a position for long if they aren’t happy. This seems obvious, but it can often be overlooked when trying to fill a position on a deadline.

Mobility within the company was also discussed. If young workers feel stuck in their position with no room to move upward, they will consider other options. It’s important to make candidates feel like they will have a future with your company with options down the road.

Overall, honesty about the company and taking the time to reach out and make sure the position was a good fit does not go unappreciated. Some highlights are above; the full unedited video can be watched here.

The truthful answer to this is that if the Gatekeeper asks you this question, the high probability is that you didn’t approach her properly*. But, like everything there are exceptions. I’m going to go through a few of them with you.

The first thing that runs a red flag up a Gatekeeper’s pole is saying too much. Many sourcers, because they’re nervous, talk too much.

“Hi, Lorraine, this is Mike Schmidt. I’m working on a list for my boss and I need to know who all your Java engineers are.”

Do you see what you just did here? You offered information that you didn’t need to. It’s called too much information (TMI) and it applies heavily in phone sourcing. You just invited her to ask you more about your “list.”

“Hi, Lorraine, this is Mike Schmidt. I’m working on a list for TheServerSide Java Symposium 2011 coming up next March in Las Vegas, and I need to know who all your Java engineers are so I can invite them.”

What’s wrong here?

You’re not working on a list for TheServerSide Java Symposium 2011 coming up next March, and she can probably hear it in your voice that you’re lying. Chances are you’re sweating bullets through the phone and expert gatekeepers can feel your heat through the phone.

Most people can not tell lies effectively. You’re not likely to be one who can.

Think I’m kidding? Ask any professional Gatekeeper. Hell, ask just about anyone. Many people can tell when they’re being lied to.

“Hi, Lorraine, this is Mike Schmidt. I’m working on a list for my boss and we’re on deadline. In fact, if you don’t tell me who all your Java engineers are, my ass is grass and I’m going to lose my job and my five kids won’t eat next week!”

Guess what? A professional Gatekeeper doesn’t care about your kids, and using this cheap trick Drama Queen approach is full of just what it is — Phoney-Baloney.

These are just a few of the common mistakes phone sourcers make when approaching Gatekeepers. Can you think of and offer others?

*Approaching properly: Repeat her name (if she told you her name) and tell her yours.

RealMatch

It also announced that Marcel LeGrand, a former top executive with Monster, joined the company as its CEO. LeGrand, who took on the RealMatch job last month, was a long-time Monster employee, joining the company in 1991 when it was still TMP, a Yellow Pages marketing firm.

Over the ensuing years, LeGrand attracted the attention of then owner and CEO Andrew McKelvey, who described him in an interview as “a bright, analytical guy.” LeGrand rose to senior vice president, heading product development and, later, strategy and corporate development.

LeGrand left Monster late in 2006 to head Blackfin Capital, an investment firm started by him and McKelvey. He also co-founded Vertical Knowledge about the same time. The firm does customized aggregation and structuring of data for financial, media and marketing companies.

RealMatch was founded in 2007 by Gal Almog, CEO and founder of Redmatch. The one-time job board and recruitment-matching service today is a provider of recruitment solutions for industry, government, staffing firms, and for the newspapers who were once its primary focus. Redmatch’s technology was lauded last year by Gartner for its “strong search and matching capabilities.”

LeGrand takes the helm of a rapidly growing job distribution network. Employers can post a job across the 1,200-partner network for no charge. RealMatch uses the Redmatch technology to match and rank candidates in its database and those who apply to the job posting. Employers get a summary look at the candidates, paying only for those they want.

The RealMatch Real-Time Job Matching relies on employers and job seekers defining themselves, their needs, and their preferences from a taxonomy of titles and skills.

In the announcement of the funding and his appointment, LeGrand said, “RealMatch has a breakthrough offering that can really change the e-recruitment industry. Our disruptive solution offers a much better user experience, wider reach and better results that save a lot of time and money to both job seekers and employers.”

Over the past six weeks, we have attended eight large conferences that focus on or relate to talent acquisition. On the agenda in all but one were sessions dealing with employee referral best practices (and Master Burnett and Gerry Crispin will be leading a discussion of referrals at ERE’s March 23-25 conference in San Diego).

Since we have invested a great deal of time investigating both the design and performance of programs in hundreds of organizations, we always make it a point to check out such sessions.

After struggling to sit through nine presentations and listening to countless uninformed opinions, we have to lash out at the masses of professionals who manage employee referrals in their organizations yet remain woefully unaware of what constitutes outstanding, good, average, and woefully ugly program performance.

Below Average Isn’t Great By Any Measure

The first observation that left us absolutely dumbfounded was the fact that nine out of the eleven companies presenting (some sessions were panels) hired significantly fewer employees via their employee referral program than the average company, and that one presenter didn’t even know what percentage of external hires their program produced.

You may think that hiring 1:5 external hires through your firm’s ERP is a good thing, but our research (nearly 700 programs strong) shows that the natural rate of referral (that achieved with no formal program at all) is 16%. Generic programs, those with ad hoc management, often produce 24-27% of external hires. Formally managed programs produce on average greater than 34% of their organizations’ external hires and strategic programs now often produce 48% or more.

Volume of external hires alone doesn’t distinguish a great program, and on that note we congratulate most of the speakers we encountered. All of the programs being highlighted had design elements that were put in place to specifically address organizational weaknesses. Some program elements focused on making the program more visible among remote employees who work in field roles; some focused on drawing more attention to urgent needs; and others on addressing past issues with poor administration of the program. While the design elements could certainly constitute “better practice” when the scope of consideration is local, none were addressing elements that characterize “best practice.”

Your Opinion Isn’t Always Right

Another common misconception that popped up frequently in session Q&As and post-session discussions was the notion that employee referral programs negatively impact diversity slates. Two presenters even went so far as to acknowledge this notion as fact. Few things disturb us more than when people in program-management roles make decisions without verifying assumptions and testing hypothesis. The research is very clear on this issue: 89% of the time employee referral programs produce diversity slates as diverse or more diverse than the organizations overall sourcing efforts. In the 11% of cases where referral programs produce less diverse slates, the organizations are almost always hiring a mass quantity of blue collar workers in geographic regions with low diversity.

The Rush to Social Media

It’s no secret that we love social media and see it as a phenomenally powerful way to dramatically improve nearly every key talent management activity in the enterprise, but simply adding social media broadcasting capability to employee referral programs is not by itself a best practice. If only 17% percent of your employees are active on social media, investing a great deal of time and effort in socializing your program ignores the masses that could be tapped with far simpler solutions. Doing something just because everyone else is doing it is never a good reason, yet it’s really the only reason the vast majority of speakers could articulate for investing in social media enabled ERP tools.

Step Up

If you manage your organization’s employee referral program or influence it in some way, you need to step up and accept responsibility for managing the design and performance of the program. Numerous studies demonstrate that a well-managed employee referral program can accomplish many things; unfortunately, too few organizations establish goals for their program and then design them to be able to accomplish them.

Want to know where your program stands? Participate in the 2010-11 Dr. John Sullivan Employee Referral Program Design and Performance Benchmark Study. Participation is free, as are summary results. Data collection kicks off Novmember 15, 2010. Pre-register to participate at http://bit.ly/ERPStudy.

Before answering that you might want to take a look at the collection of posts talking about counteroffers. For sure, read Dr. John Sullivan’s advice on recruiting a game-changer. He wrote that shortly this summer’s remarkably chronicled — and dissected — campaign to recruit NBA star LeBron James. He announced his decision (in a one-hour TV special no less!)  to leave his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and join the Miami Heat and fellow NBA standouts Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. Money was not the driving force. Winning a title was.

Back now to the original question. What would you do to keep your star from bolting?

The Google answer is to throw money. Lots of money. One mid-level developer already earning a handsome $150k was offered a 15 percent raise PLUS a cool half-million cash bonus PLUS a four-fold increase in stock not to leave for Facebook. TechCrunch reported he left anyway.

In another case, TechCrunch says a Google engineer accepted a $3.5 million stock offer to stay.

With Facebook the latest darling of Silicon Valley, Google has been battling to keep its engineers, often winning, but, like the Cleveland Cavaliers, not liking to lose at all. (LinkedIn says 137 former Googlers are now at Facebook.) Then there’s also the issue of morale. TechCrunch said back in September that even contented Googlers are becoming active seekers, interviewing at hot, pre-IPO companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in order to get a counteroffer.

A post by Mark Spoor mentions the psychic message sent by counteroffers:

“To the employee a counter offer is an acknowledgment (and sometimes a public acknowledgment) that you have been under paying and more importantly under appreciating the importance of this person to your organization.”

So here you are. Battling to keep staff from running off to other tech firms, who, if not exactly in your specific sector, are competing for ad dollars, just like you. And these companies are growing, exciting, and when they IPO, may make their ground-floor employees rich. Very rich.

Google’s answer came late Wednesday. The company announced it will give every one of its 23,000 employees worldwide a 10 percent raise. They’re also getting a minimum $1,000 holiday bonus.

CEO Erik Schmidt circulated a memo saying in part:

“We’ve decided…to give all of you a 10% raise, effective January 1st. This salary increase is global and across the board–everyone gets a raise, no matter their level, to recognize the contribution that each and every one of you makes to Google.”

Then the company committed another of its famous PR faux pas and fired the person who leaked the news of the raises. The firing is now taking top billing with the raises.

Meanwhile, over at Yahoo headquarters, which is bicycling distance from Google’s, layoffs, not raises, are being discussed. The Wall Street Journal says the 7,000 worker consumer products group is looking at cutting up to 1,400 staff in the next several weeks.