If it’s adopted — almost half the state Legislature is listed as sponsors — the bill would impose a number of administrative obligations on staffing firms, and potentially limit some fees while raising costs. It exempts most professional workers, but it would apply to a broad range of workers, including nurses, clerical, blue collar, and similar. Violators could be fined.

Proponents, who were contacted but didn’t respond  are positioning the legislation as a “temp workers right to know bill,” highlighting provisions requiring staffing firms to inform employees for whom they’ll be working, how much they’ll be paid, where they’ll work, and what they’ll be doing.

While on its face benign, other provisions of the bill limit some fees and essentially end temp-to-hire conversion fees. It puts a damper on the practice of shopping good candidates, by prohibiting candidate referrals without job reqs. Out-of-state staffing firms could be closed out of placing workers in Massachusetts unless they had an in-state office.

“There is no such law currently existing in other states,” says Stephen Dwyer, general counsel for the American Staffing Association. “It is more sweeping and more harmful than any, bar none.”

Dwyer and Mark Carlson, president of the Massachusetts Association of Personnel Services, explain that the organizations pushing HB 1393 claim it’s needed to protect day laborers. With many of them immigrants and undocumented, they have sometimes been the victims of unscrupulous employers who pick them at street corners with the promise of a day’s work, but cheat them out of pay.

However, as Dwyer points out, “that’s not the staffing model.” Staffing firms typically vet their candidates in advance, verifying their qualifications before referring them out. While bad apples exist in every barrel, by focusing on staffing firms, Dwyer says the bill “puts the onus on an industry in which the bad operators are outside the industry.”

Indeed, the two examples cited by the proponents involved failure to pay taxes and make workers’ comp payments. Says MassCosh, one of the labor groups pushing the bill, “non-professional temp agencies are creating an underground economy that undercuts hard-working employers, results in the exploitation of workers and steals desperately needed tax revenue from the state’s coffers.”

Though the bill only affects firms doing business in Massachusetts, Dwyer says it has the potential to become law elsewhere. “California could use it as a model,” he says. “It certainly could spread and that’s one of the concerns we have.”

Even without that risk, should the bill become law as written,  it could have repercussions for out-of state firms who place workers in Massachusetts. An Illinois staffing firm, for instance, with a client with operations around the country, might have to forgo Massachusetts placements unless it has or is willing to open an office in that state.

Even if it manages to continue placing workers there, it could see costs rise, since the bill requires staffing firms to pay food and lodging costs should an out-of-state worker arrive and not immediately be put to work.

(Different provisions apply to states that are contiguous to Massachusetts, raising issues about interstate commerce that could end up in federal court.)

Even that seemingly benign disclosure requirement is causing the industry heartburn. It requires as many as 17 different items be disclosed in writing and sent to the employee.

Carlson explained that most of what the bill requires is already part of every firm’s standard operations. Employees obviously have to be told where to report, when, and to whom. What they’ll be doing, how much they’ll be paid, and, the approximate duration of the employment are also passed along, says Carlson.

But with some firms placing dozens of workers  a day — Dwyer said 40,000 temps, on average, are on the job every workday in Massachusetts — “it’s an administrative burden to put everything in writing,” says Carlson, who points out that the industry practice is to handle things by telephone.

“I have a number of people who want to work a day here, a day there,” he says. In some instances, a temp request for a replacement clerical worker or receptionist might last one or two days. The disclosure form would arrive after the job is over.

The cost, too, is an issue. As the number of daily temps placed goes up, so does the work involved in sending each the required disclosure. Passing the cost along to the client isn’t always possible, so, Carlson points out, workers could end up with a lower hourly wage.

With so many of the provisions of the bill having little or nothing to do with curbing abuses of day laborers, Carlson fears that it’s a first step on a slippery slope that could lead to imposing restrictions on the entire employment industry.

“I understand the spirit of the legislation,” he says, “but this is so broad that it pushes us down a slippery slope … The definitions (in the bill) are broadly written, and if they get accepted by everyone, then they can be used in ways to encompass everything we do.”

The Massachusetts Staffing Association, the national organization, and Carlson’s MAPS group are rallying staffing firm owners for a show of force at a hearing June 9th by the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Labor and Work Force Development. Carlson says he hopes to have 100 people there to educate the officials on what staffing firms do and how they work.

As for policing the bad apples and protecting the day laborers, the ASA’s Dwyer says laws already on the books in Massachusetts are adequate. They just have to be enforced.

Conducted by Swedish research firm Potentialpark Communications, the firm surveyed almost 4,800 U.S. students and grads from a variety of business schools and universities. They were asked what they most wanted from career sites and the application process. From the features and component lists developed from the survey, Potentialpark analyzed 755 sites worldwide, including 102 in the U.S.

Bertelsmann came out on top on both the career site ranking and on a second ranking for the application process.

“The biggest strength of Bertelsmann’s career website,” says the report, “is to focus on the information flow within the site itself. The thinking starts from the job seekers’ point of view and what questions they have, rather than what the company gets across.”

On the career site rankings, Bertelsmann is followed by Accenture, Ernst & Young, Deutsche Bank, and Deloitte. On the application rankings, adidas, Ernst & Young, Roche, and Northrup Grumman round out the top five.

The Potentialpark surveys come just a few days after a related survey on the candidate experience by CareerXroads. In that survey, principals Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin and a team of volunteers applied to the 100 companies on the Fortune best companies to work for list. Three months after the last resume was sent, 25 percent of the companies failed to even acknowledge receipt.

Many companies had pre-screening questions. One had 144 multiple-choice questions that had to be completed before an application could be submitted.

Other companies had online forms that had to be filled out, in addition to uploading a resume. “Point, click, upload, and go,” Mehler says, is the ideal candidate experience. Few were set-up to do that.

Ease of applying was an important consideration in the Potentialpark research as well.

Potentialpark has conducted its Top Employer Web Benchmark study since 2003. Last year, Ernst & Young came out on top. However, this was the first year for the application process study, which it calls “Applying Online and Loving It” (APOLLO).

”Students and graduates have accepted that applying online is ‘what is common today’,” says Potentialpark. “The problem is, the more they apply, the more they dislike it.”

In the application rankings, Potentialpark lists the ATS each company uses. Of the 3o highest ranking companies, 17 use a Taleo system. But, says the report, “no service provider is a guarantee to be in the top.” Many of the most popular systems as often were among the bottom-scoring companies as they were among the top.

“In fact,” says Potentialpark, “how candidate-friendly an online application is seems to depend more on how the employer drives the project, embeds the system into the career website, and adjusts the implementation to its needs.”

Besides the rankings, the Potentialpark research found that the majority of the surveyed students and graduates don’t want to connect with prospective employers on Facebook. Instead, they prefer to engage with them on business networks.

Yet, the research found that 39 percent of the surveyed U.S. employers link their corporate career site to their social network presence. Only a quarter of them connect to a business network.

Potentialpark suspects that students may unreasonably fear that “liking” a company on Facebook will expose their personal lives to recruiters. It also theorizes that few students have business network profiles, and that companies simply prefer Facebook because it offers much more functionality and dynamic interaction.

Notes the report: “All in all, the opinion that many of the most forward-thinking employers in U.S. have come to is that it can pay off to be on both types of networks, but in different ways: Facebook for branding, LinkedIn for recruiting.”

As I received feedback on the topic and read through various comments, I thought that surely there had to be a solution to the science of onboarding. Or, perhaps not so much a solution, but a tool to help solve the missteps of the process and have individuals be accountable for their part of the onboarding process. Another thought with regard to on/off-boarding was brought to my attention by my overstuffed wallet (not with money, mind you). As I dug through my wallet to lighten the load, I was surprised at what I found: not one but three security keys from previous places of employment. Two were from organizations where personal financial information was stored, including social security numbers, names, birthdates, bank account numbers, tax returns, etc. How come no one asked for these items back when I left? Is there anyone accountable for asset management in the onboarding/offboarding process?

Shortly after the article went live, I was introduced to a small technology firm called Dovetail Software, located in what is affectionately known as “Silicon Hills” or Austin, Texas. Dovetail Software is an independent technology firm that prides itself in building products that are easy to manage and upgrade while being flexible enough to handle virtually any HR workflow, no matter how custom. This was music to my ears, as corporate America has turned the onboarding process into a complex science. So I figured “what the heck?” and requested the introduction to Manager Kent Valentine.

After speaking at length with Kent, it was clear that this software could be a great tool in helping companies and organizations not only manage their onboarding process but to also promote ownership and responsibility for specific assignments and duties, and go a step further and ensure asset management.

While I am sure there are many tools out there that may be able to help, regardless of which one you may choose, an onboarding platform such as this will enable HR departments to maintain consistent service delivery, stay on top of HR issues, sustain case management through auditing & tracking, review analytics, and manage assets. These topics will continue to be important and scrutinized as CEOs are looking into the HR department more today than in the past.

Perhaps a tool like this would have made Herb’s current employer a bit more organized for his arrival on his first day. Perhaps a tool like this, if used correctly, would have had internal departments held accountable for first day needs such as IT, payroll, and security which in turn would have made Herb’s initial experience the positive welcoming he deserved.

As recruiters, we can learn from the music industry. Ultimately, digging your heels in isn’t a winning proposition. Defending the status quo is a dead end. Finding the best talent is always a challenge. And the way to do it is always changing. The things that worked for us even two years ago are not the best strategies today.

And for those leading a recruiting team? Balancing the tools, technology, systems, process, metrics, and a team of recruiters can be overwhelming. Sometimes the best thing you can do is get out of the office and immerse yourself in an environment where you can meet new people, hear innovative ideas, and think strategically about where you want to lead the function.

If you’re ready to hear new ideas, learn from your peers and engage in the largest gathering of recruitment professionals, I encourage you to attend ERE’s Fall Expo in Hollywood, Florida, September 7-9.

This event (that I’m chairing) will feature a unique blend of talent acquisition practitioners and thought leaders speaking about the most timely and important issues addressing talent acquisition. In a few days, you can hear best practices and tips about candidate management, talent acquisition process improvement, mobile apps for recruiting, building a talent pipeline, and becoming an employer of choice.

So do what it takes to adapt, grow, and embrace what’s coming. See you in Florida!

(Hat tip to Seth Godin.)

Somewhere in the bowels of the company’s mission statement is some form of the platitude “hiring top talent is a major company objective.” But in the field where the battle is played out, a different picture emerges. Hiring top talent, especially those who aren’t looking for a job, is not about posting a boring job description on some site, getting people to apply, and then conducting a series of behavioral interviews. It’s about finding and convincing these top people that your position offers the best career move among competing opportunities. While many recruiters and individual hiring managers can pull this off one assignment at a time, only those companies with a compelling employer brand have mastered the art at scale.

Another positive U.S. Department of Labor hiring report with 244,000 new jobs created in April 2011 brings seven months of significant job gains. A few more months like this and there will be a real need for companies to accelerate their passive-candidate recruiting. LinkedIn’s historic IPO roller coaster of a run provides credence to the interest in tools available to help make this shift. LinkedIn can be an invaluable tool in the right hands. In the wrong ones, however, it’s just an expensive company directory. Worse, once everyone has the same directory it will be even less valuable without a companywide ability to recruit and hire passive candidates.

Except in isolated instances, I’m going to contend that based on how companies now recruit passive candidates, most of their efforts will be wasted. In large part, this is attributed to the lack of alignment with strategy and tactics. Simply put, you can’t hire top passive candidates who aren’t looking, using processes designed to hire active candidates who are looking.

Rather than get into all of the nitty-gritty details of this, the following are some of the bigger issues you need to consider to make sure your company is ready and able to hire passive candidates in any sizeable quantity. If you can’t answer unequivocally yes to the following questions, don’t waste your time recruiting passive candidates. Instead, spend it figuring how to get ready.

1. Money talks. Are the funds and resources available to match the level of importance assigned to hiring top talent? If you don’t have enough money in the budget to spend on higher salaries, more recruiters, and better resources, you’ll come up short more times than not.
2. Hold hiring managers accountable for quality of hire and timeliness. Are the hiring managers at your company held fully accountable for the timeliness and quality of their hiring decisions? This means the topic is part of every staff meeting and part of their performance reviews. If hiring managers are not held responsible for their hiring efforts, and do not consider it a priority, don’t waste your time recruiting passive candidates. You’ll just be disappointed at all of the good passive talent you didn’t hire.
3. Make sure hiring managers are able to recruit and hire top talent. Are your hiring managers able to both accurately interview and recruit top talent? Not only must hiring managers be held responsible for hiring top talent, they also must be able to do it properly. Recruiting passive candidates — especially the goods ones who are in high demand –requires managers who understand how to position their jobs as career moves and then demonstrate that they have mentored their best people into better jobs. Without this ability and validation, hiring top passive candidates will depend on the company’s reputation and/or the hiring manager’s manager.
4. Make sure everyone on the hiring team knows what they’re looking for before you start looking. Before the sourcing process begins, do you get everyone to agree to the real job needs and performance objectives? (Here’s an article on how to do this.) If not, how can you possibly accurately assess competency? Worse, top passive candidates always ask recruiters to tell them about the job before they decide to even seriously engage with a company. If the people they then interview with don’t describe something similar, they’ll disengage very quickly.
5. Offer career moves, not lateral transfers. Are you still posting traditional job descriptions highlighting skills and experiences where passive candidates can see them? If so, stop, at least if you want to hire passive candidates. (Here’s how and why.) The best passive candidates are not looking for lateral transfers. LinkedIn is filled with great people who are looking for career moves, so if you want to attract them you must advertise career moves. As part of these career-oriented messages, describe the employee value proposition, what the person will learn, do, and could become if successful, and how their skills will be used on the job.
6. Conduct a professional, two-way interview and assessment process. Do you still conduct 30-minute interviews; are any managers unprepared; do you ask silly or inappropriate questions; and do managers still expect candidates to be overly eager? These all run counter to the requirements for hiring passive candidates. The best passive candidates expect the interview process to be professional, well-organized, and those involved, knowledgeable and fully-prepared. They prefer tough questions that dig into performance, team skills, and job-related critical thinking ability. They’ll quickly disengage if managers ask meaningless questions, don’t understand the job, get mixed signals about real job needs, are left waiting, or a rushed through a series of wasted interviews where they’re judged on presentation skills and cleverness rather than their accomplishments. They expect, in turn, to be able to ask tough questions about available resources and upside opportunities, if successful.
7. Don’t sell, recruit. Do your hiring managers really understand how to attract, assess, and recruit star candidates who have multiple opportunities? Hyperbole and platitudes work when selling snake oil to the naïve, but not to top performers who aren’t looking. In this case hiring managers have to describe real job needs, conduct an in-depth performance-based assessment, and clearly demonstrate that their opening offers stretch, growth, and upside opportunity. Recruiting passive candidates requires them to see your opening as the best among competing career moves. In the process, money will take a back seat and they’ll begin to sell you.
8. Provide recruiters the time and training to recruit. Can your recruiters recruit and, if so, do they have the time to do it right? Both are prerequisites to hiring more passive candidates. LinkedIn is a great resource, but without skilled recruiters who can attract, screen, recruit, and close top talent based on career opportunities, not compensation increases, it’s nothing more than a job board for the professional market. Don’t bother hiring top-notch recruiters or send them through passive candidate recruiter training either, if they’re not given the time needed to spend contacting and networking with passive candidates.

Finding 100 million passive candidates on LinkedIn is not the same as hiring them. To hire them in any quantity you need committed and capable hiring managers and recruiters who are trusted partners with their hiring manager clients and have the skills and time to recruit. All of this must be on top of a hiring process that’s designed to meet the needs of top people who aren’t looking. If you don’t have these core pillars driving your hiring efforts, don’t waste your time recruiting passive candidates.

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

One of the ideas behind technology is that it empowers us to work creatively. By blending different technologies we can democratize communication in new and surprising ways.

If you buy into the theory (and I do) that future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations, then you’re far on your way to understanding that what works for one person might never work for another.

Once again, I’m going to approach this subject from a phone sourcer’s perspective and demonstrate how I blend the use of high technology with low technology.

Remember early on in this series when I delineated old (low) technology from new (high) technology in how we communicate?

BRAVE NEW WORLD (High technology)

Text

Instant messaging

Electronic mail

Social media exchange

Cellphone (mobile)

Real-time video (telepresence)

OLD WORLD (Low technology)

Snail mail

Fax

Land line telephone

Face-to-face communication

Keith Halperin pointed out in the comments section of that first part in this series that I forgot real-time video (broadband/telepresence, Skype, etc.) so I added it above.

There are many in our community who insist that the use of technology (Internet search, e-mail, mobile applications, messaging, etc.) is all one (really) needs to perform the work that must be done in our industry.

In fact, Dr. John Sullivan recently wrote an article here on ERE that detailed how to recognize if you yourself have become a technology dinosaur and recommended doing what Jack Welch (past CEO, GE) did: acquire a technology mentor to upgrade your technology status in the event you are found guilty of more than five transgressions on Dr. Sullivan’s list.

I don’t agree with some of his postulations but then, none of us have to agree. As the many comments brought forth, different things work differently for different people.

And that’s my point.

Use what works for you.

Here’s what works for me on a typical sourcing job and here’s how it happens:

Work comes in through either a phone call (low tech) or an e-mail (high tech). The e-mails that come in are usually from established customers, all of whom were preceded originally by a telephone conversation (low tech).

Occasionally a job order gets faxed in (very low tech).

It warrants mentioning at this point that what once was high tech is now low tech; at one point faxes were very high tech, remember?

I look at the job in e-mail. Many times there are attachments to the order (job description, Excel lists of targets and/or names the customer already has, special instructions, etc.) and I format all that into a working document (using my handy dandy electronic Word skills — still very high tech).

Next I do the lowest tech thing of them all. I think!

I plan, I plot, and I posture the job into how I am going to approach it.

When I first started sourcing — and you’ve heard me confess this before — I would spend inordinate time on the Internet searching for information … scratch that … searching for names — that I could use on a job.

Remember, this was the mid to late 1990s, so Internet search was new and cutting edge (very high tech) and very few people knew how to do it. The results that came in could pretty much be used as long as they had been “checked.”

We all know what that means.

As long as the person was “still there” (meaning still at a company) they were pretty much good to go on the list that got submitted to a customer.

It was so much fun to be a whiz-bang Internet sourcer.

Today, not so much.

That same once-high-tech formula has now become a low-tech approach that is being misused in some sourcing circles and is the main determinant why sourcing fails in many organizations.

In sourcing far more sophistication is required today than way back then.

Remember when we started this final piece in this series, I said, “future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations“?

Those in the know in sourcing today have done just that.

Until interactive applications become practical (and this will take years), matching robust common-sense knowledge with computers enables a new class of sourcers to make sense of today’s world with a breadth of knowledge that can be integrated with (some) computer applications.

They’ve recognized that technology morphs over time and what’s new today was old back then and what’s old now was new before.

When Lou Adler said that we must kick the sourcing habit in a recent article here on ERE, he said sourcing is getting easier by the day.

He’s right.

I personally don’t agree with him when he says, “at the current rate, by March 11, 2012, everyone will be connected by one degree of separation with everyone else either via LinkedIn or Facebook.”

I think that ignores the trepidation that is beginning to develop in the population around over-exposure, but that tale remains to be told.

Sourcing (as most people think of it) is on the endangered list because its high tech approach is yielding inadequate and many times stale results.

So how can we make the old new again and the new old again?

We can learn how to communicate with each other, and yes, you can just about guess in what direction we’re going here.

What works for me in the next step in my sourcing process is another low-tech tool.

I get on the phone.

I said before that when I started sourcing (in the mid 1990s) I’d spend lots and lots of time on the Internet forestalling that fateful moment when I had to pick up the phone.

This has become a common low-tech problem that self-medicates itself with the overuse (and misuse) of the Internet.

Nowadays, on most jobs, it’s just way faster (for me) to pick up the phone and start talking to people to obtain the information I need.

It doesn’t much matter anymore how scary the job looks.

I just start calling my target lists, knowing that the more I call, the easier the job is going to become.

The more I talk to people, the more I learn.

I call because I know the majority of the people I need for my job I cannot find on the Internet.

No way.

No how.

This calling — what may seem to you a low-tech technique — may not work so well for you. I’m going to ask you why that is.

You can send e-mails (most of which won’t get read and those that do stand a very high chance of being misunderstood) and you can send text SOS messages out to your network of contacts or you could post your need in some social networking group you’re a member of.

You could even make a video of yourself detailing your urgent need for a medical device sales application engineer and tell them where to send their resume.

You can use all those high-tech channels and then you can sit and wait for results.

Unless you’re some mega-bucked organization that was way ahead of the curve and has been investing in today’s high tech so-called communication channels for the last 10 years, using all the high-tech gadgets of today isn’t going to mean squat if you can’t talk with somebody and make a connection.

I think communication that uses real-time analogy and association is the highest technology we as humans possess.

It’s a brave new world and, oddly enough, it very much resembles the old.

Part IV. Part III. Part II. Part I. Intro.

1. Operational Excellence: best price with lowest inconvenience
2. Product Leadership: innovation that delivers the best product
3. Customer Intimacy: deep customer relationships for customized results

The book is full of great (albeit a bit dated) examples of companies that “choose their customers and narrow their focus.” A few modern examples of my own: Apple comes to mind as a Product Leader. Customers expect the folks in Cupertino to turn out innovative products. They will pay more for the privilege of being the first with an i-anything. Wal-Mart is the long-standing example of operational excellence; Amazon is the Internet equivalent. Customers expect the best price, convenience and speed. Starbucks is great example of customer intimacy. Half-pump skinny extra hot vanilla latte? Not a problem for the Starbucks baristas.

The Disciplines Applied to Recruiting Leadership

Each time I approach a new recruiting challenge, or am asked to lead a new team, I interview the “customer” – the hiring managers (or their leaders). (And by the way I’ll be talking sourcing leadership in Florida.) It’s become habit to understand what they’re after – a fast, low cost process, the best talent in the marketplace or something else altogether. Of course, many managers will reflexively declare that they want a fast, low cost process and the best talent. As a recruiting leader, you would be foolish to promise both. Yes. Foolish.

If your customer is indeed looking for the very best talent in the marketplace you simply cannot promise to deliver the goods quickly and cheaply and remain credible. I’ll let you in on a secret: life is much easier if you declare a discipline and deliver predictable value.

Operational Excellence and Recruiting

Many recruiting organizations strive to achieve operational excellence; delivering the right talent just in time. In the right environment operational excellence — where time is substituted for cost — is achievable. Efficiently run retail, customer service or college recruiting organizations come to mind.

• Keys to success: Efficiency, standardization, predictability and metrics
• Structure: Command and control management, centralized, highly trained process-driven recruiters
• Sourcing: Active and semi-active candidate sourcing
• Technology: ATS aligned with recruiting workflow, online assessments, mobile and remote technology

Product Leadership Recruiting

Recruiters in Silicon Valley likely recognize this model. Startups and hot tech companies are competing for the best engineers. A superstar software developer can make or break a company or product. It is important to distinguish between hiring the best talent possible and hiring the best candidate. Hiring the best talent possible involves understanding the entire talent landscape, identifying by name and accomplishment the top talent, and using a variety of persuasive techniques to get the talent to move. Product leadership recruiting is required when only the best in a particular field – the award winners, the Ivy League graduates, the high achievers – will produce necessary results for the company’s success.

• Keys to success: Creativity, aggressiveness, decisiveness
• Structure: Organic, ad-hoc teams, senior recruiting talent in all jobs
• Sourcing: Passive candidate sourcing, research, and competitive intelligence
• Technology: Social media, CRM, knowledge sharing and information/data harnessing

The Trap of Customer Intimacy

Many recruiting organizations, patchworked together over time, take on the characteristics of a customer intimate organization, by default. Customer intimate recruiting teams are viewed as client-driven, prone to create a new solution for every recruiting challenge, collaborative, and relationship-driven. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless one of the other two models is what your hiring managers really crave.

• Keys to success: Collaboration, problem-solving, relationship-building
• Structure: Flexible teams, functionally-aligned or decentralized, strong A-Z recruiter
• Sourcing: Passive or active candidate sourcing as needed; ever-evolving
• Technology: ATS with strong talent management integration, surveys and feedback, strong internal communication tools

If you run a recruiting organization for a mid- or large company, it’s likely that you have recruiting teams (or recruiters) that fall into all three categories. The authors of the book make compelling arguments for having each team declare the value it provides, focus its efforts and communicate and deliver that value consistently. The biggest mistake, as I see it, is trying to be all things to all clients. It is much better to declare your value than struggle to deliver something you’re ill equipped to deliver.

Imagine articulating these scenarios with your leadership:

• “Our process is fast, efficient and we’re great at hiring field technicians, but we don’t have the in-house talent to recruit a CTO, so we’re going to engage an executive search firm.”
• “We focus on building a pipeline of top software engineers; we outsource our customer service hiring to a reputable RPO firm.”
• Each function is assigned a senior-level recruiter who works closely with managers and HR to fill each position as it opens. It’s not the fastest process, but hiring managers feel supported.”

Is this a more realistic approach to leading an internal recruiting function? Do recruiting leaders have the luxury of determining their focus and strategy? Would companies find a value discipline approach to prioritizing recruiting resources acceptable? What do you think? Could the Value Disciplines be applied in your organization?

In some respects, what the recruitment tech vendor offers is just another — if more clever — screening variant intended to weed out resume spammers. Interesting, but no game-changer as I told Jobaline founder and CEO Miki Mullor.

What did catch my attention, though, is that Jobaline also attempts to rank applicants on their “seriousness.” An elusive concept to be sure, Mullor says “People who are more serious about a job will take more time on the website.”

Mullor wouldn’t detail everything that goes into the Jobaline mixer, but the amount of time a candidate spends responding to questions is one of the measures, as is the number of jobs a candidate has applied for. Out of the crunching comes a score Mullor says suggests the candidate’s level of interest in the job.

Before we go any further, some background.

Jobaline launched a few months ago on the premise that it could cut the time recruiters spend reviewing resumes, yet still find quality candidates. It does this by having recruiters and hiring managers mark up their job postings so candidates have to provide specifics for the most important of the requirements. Jobaline codes these posts, which can be placed anywhere: corporate site, job boards, etc.

Both sides can come up winners here. The employer flags the most important requirements, while the candidate can amplify what’s in the resume, or offer details that might not be in the resume at all. These micro-resumes, as Jobaline calls them, can prompt some candidates to opt-out and resume spammers aren’t very likely to start filling in response boxes.

However, it’s hard to see how that would compensate for the work involved in reviewing all the extra information. Heck, if you read my post yesterday about recruiters not even reviewing the resumes of those they want to phone screen, it’s evident that the last thing recruiters want is more to read.

Perhaps needless to say, Mullor makes the point that by reviewing just the responses to the tagged requirements recruiters can quickly build a short list. It’s the second piece of this, though, that’s particularly intriguing. Jobaline ranks the candidates on their seriousness.

The obvious question is whether this score has any significance. Neither the content of the responses nor the candidate resume are considered. Pure and simply, Jobaline looks only at the mechanics of the process to create a behavioral score.

It doesn’t take an I/O psychologist to wonder about the validity of the score. Mullor acknowledges that Jobaline is too new to have enough data to be able to say what or even if there is any correlation between the seriousness score and candidate quality or interest. Anecdotally, he says, some of the clients who are testing the service are reporting good results. (Recruiters themselves can affect the score, as they review the micro-resumes.)

What I find interesting is that Jobaline is part of what seems to be the cusp of an emerging trend to adapt behavioral marketing — and search — concepts to recruitment. It’s probably not just coincidence that Jobaline and Bullhorn partnered a couple months ago.

Bullhorn, a dominant force in the staffing and sourcing world, not long ago introduced Reach. Among its many features is a predictive formula that looks at a recruiter’s LinkedIn network and lists those who may be preparing for a job search. It, too, takes its cues from search and marketing, looking at such behaviors as profile updates and new recommendations.

Intuitively, what Bullhorn Reach does makes sense. The more time I spend getting my profile in shape and posting content, particularly if this is a change from what I’ve been doing in the past, then it seems reasonable to say something is up. Whether I’m preparing for a job search or simply making good on my New Year’s resolution is still up in the air. It will require validation to establish the degree of correlation. But for not now, Bullhorn Reach simply raises a flag that a recruiter might want to pursue.

With Jobaline now available to Bullhorn users, Mullor points out that it adds a second data point for recruiters. Bullhorn scores resumes on keyword matching and other elements to create a ranked list of applicants. Jobaline, Mullor notes, is “an additional layer of scoring.”

Does it make a difference? It will be sometime before Jobaline is able to collect enough data to know. Even so, it’s an indicator that vendors are beginning to adopt behavioral measures for talent acquisition.

Some years ago, Yahoo! HotJobs talked about doing this very thing. By analyzing both the profile activity of its members and their Yahoo! search behavior, HotJobs was thinking it could predict who was about to become an active job seeker. I don’t know if it ever went beyond a thought exercise, although something similar was tested for predicting car-buying behavior and it turned out well.

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

I talk about these oddities in the 9 1/2-minute podcast below, with Coleen Byrne. She’s a sales director, most recently with Yahoo, and is the co-author of a new book for job-seekers called The Web 2.0 Job Finder. We also talk about the interesting advice people are getting with respect to creating a LinkedIn profile, as well as some mistakes job-seekers make when using LinkedIn.

Young employees are less “engaged” than older employees, and Macedonian, French, Turkish, Mexican, and American workers are far more engaged than Hungarian, Czech, Serbian, and Portuguese employees.

That’s the upshot from a new survey of 30,000 employees in 29 countries, done by GfK Custom Research. An international team of employee engagement experts designed the survey, defining that often-abstract word “engagement” as employees’ identification with their company’s success, dedication, and willingness to stay with their employer.

Also from the survey:

• Internationally, 58 percent of young workers are actively looking for a job, or will be in the next six months. Forty-one percent are willing to emigrate to find new employment.
• In the U.S., 72 percent of young employees are actively looking for a job, or will be in the next six months. Fifty-nine percent would consider changing their career.
• Internationally, 36% of young employees have been forced to accept a job they were unhappy with. The same goes for 42 percent of U.S. employees.

Here’s a look (click to enlarge) at what’s most troubling to employees, internationally as well as just in the U.S.

Three months after applying to the last of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, Santa has no idea if the job has been filled at 78 of them. He doesn’t even  know if 25 of them got his resume.

Applying under his given name, Chris Kringle (Anglicized from the original German), the jolly old guy was looking for a job as a systems engineer in logistics or product security.

With his uncanny ability to know who has been naughty or nice, and to manage overnight global delivery of billions of packages, Kringle should be a shoo-in for every recruiter’s short list. And even though he got turned down by 22 of the 100 companies, a few recruiters did call him up for a phone screen.

So you can imagine their embarrassment when Mark Mehler, principal in the recruiting consultancy CareerXroads, pointed out that Chris Kringle is another name for Santa.

“I would say, ‘Would you please read the bottom of the resume’.” And there it was, the disclaimer: “This is a CareerXroads Mystery Job Seeker.”

“Obviously,” says Mehler, “They hadn’t read the resume.” There were other tip-offs. Chris’s resume says he once worked for the CIA at the North Pole where he “analyzed coded messages from around the world from children asking for holiday gifts.”

Over the 10 years that Mehler and his partner, Gerry Crispin, have done this survey, they’ve created resumes for Ted E. Baer, Gold E. Locks, and, last year, for environmental technician Jack Coostow.

While the names are all in fun, the exercise has a serious purpose: To survey the responsiveness of companies to their job applicants.

“Our objective is to see how the job seeker is treated,” explains Mehler. “If these are the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S., they should understand how to treat the job seeker.”

“You would think,” he adds. And in so many ways, you would be wrong.

Not only did companies fail to acknowledge receiving an application, but the process itself was so arduous that one of the volunteers helping submit applications said it was almost impossible to do more than a handful a day.

“It’s just amazing what we find when we do this,” Mehler says. “And these are the best companies.”

Many companies had pre-screening questions. One had 144 multiple-choice questions that had to be completed before an application could be submitted.

Other companies had online forms that had to be filled out, in addition to uploading a resume. “Point, click, upload, and go,” Mehler says, is the ideal candidate experience. Few were set-up to do that.

Like the fictitious Chris Kringle, real candidates want acknowledgement of their application and to know when the job has been filled. A survey of candidates by Shaker Consulting Group showed they valued both of those communications more highly than anything other than knowing when they can expect to hear.

To recognize companies that do the best job of meeting candidate expectations, and to spur others to improve their application process, a group of recruiting professionals have created The Candidate Experience Awards.

Sparked by a suggestion from Chris Forman, CEO of Startwire and former head of Airs, now a part of The RightThing, a group of recruiting professionals formed The Talent Board, a non-profit specifically to produce the awards. Its mission “is to facilitate the evolution of the employment candidate experience principally through the annual production of The Candidate Experience Awards.”

Employers of every size and from any industry can participate. The first step is a 40-question application that not only provides the basis for the initial screening, but will allow applicants to see how they compare to other companies.

The competition FAQs say, “Each applicant will, at a minimum, receive specific survey feedback on how they compare to the applicant group. In other words, each applicant will get specific feedback on how they can improve their candidate experience.”

Only the winners will be publicly identified, and recognized during a ceremony at the HR Tech show this fall in Las Vegas. Others remain anonymous. There’s no cost to enter. The deadline is June 30.

There’s nothing 100% foolproof and guaranteed, but good methods of pre-qualifying candidates regarding counteroffers will make your life less stressful and more financially rewarding. In addition, if you are straight in your qualifying methods you may even weed out the candidate who would accept the counteroffer and possibly leave you hanging.

First, I know the word “never” is a strong one. I don’t use it lightly or without substantial consideration as my world, both personal and professional, is gray. In this case I believe accepting a counteroffer is positive in a fraction of the cases and it’s just not worth the risk.

It can be career suicide. A counteroffer may be both tempting and flattering to the candidate in question. It may be very appealing to a candidate who isn’t truly committed to leaving his job. I have known people who accepted counteroffers and, most often, they regret their actions.

As a recruiter you must resist the temptation to persuade your candidates into accepting your offer if you have even the slightest hint that the position in question isn’t the right fit. It’s hard, especially if/when you’re depending on acceptance to make a living. We know people buy on emotion, and enticing someone to take your offer (or the current company getting their employee to accept a counteroffer) by getting him excited and hopeful is just plain out of integrity. Temptation can be very seductive and hard to resist. As George Bernard Shaw said, “I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.” That said, let’s look a some of the reasons not to accept a counteroffer. Make sure you’re using these reasons for them to decline a counteroffer wisely throughout the recruiting cycle.

1. The current employer is attempting to cover their tush. When you quit they lose money. When you quit the manager looks bad. Better to keep you on board until they can find a replacement. If that happens your pink slip will follow in short order.
2. You become a fidelity risk to your current employer. You’ve threatened to quit once. It’s only a matter of time before you do it again, and smart companies won’t allow themselves to be put into this situation. You will never be perceived the same to them once you’ve threatened to quit and decided to stay.
3. Any situation which causes an employee to seek outside offers is suspect. For example, if money is your issue why does it take a full court press for your employer to realize they need to pay you more? If you’re worth more money now, why weren’t you worth it 15 minutes earlier?
4. The reasons for you wanting to quit will still remain, even if they are temporarily shaded.
5. Quality, well-run companies won’t give counteroffers…ever! How would you feel if one of your employees forced you into something? ”If you don’t X, then I’m quitting.” I know I’d be angry. I’d be more than angry. If they don’t like working for you then they should go.

If you do get the urge to accept a counteroffer, just be prepared for the consequences whenever they do show up.

While the Dow is off 151 points in early afternoon trading in New York — 1.3 percent — LinkedIn is selling at just under $86, a drop of 7.2 percent from Friday’s $93.09 close.

Since hitting a high of $122.70 on its first trading day last Thursday, LinkedIn has become the poster child for Internet bubble talk. A Sunday New York Times story about the company began, “What are shares of LinkedIn really worth?”

The conclusion? Probably not the $9 billion valuation investors gave the company last week. The stock benefited from investor fascination with all things social.

This morning, Indie Research, an independent research service, picked up on the Times story and riffed on the high valuation theme. It got wider circulation than it might when Yahoo Finance picked it up.

Meanwhile, a security consultant in India Sunday posted a blog note about LinkedIn’s cookies posing a potential risk. It’s not as potentially serious as when hackers broke into the Sony PlayStation network and stole millions of bytes of personal information, including credit card information.

However, Rishi Narang reported, wrote on his blog that LinkedIn cookies remain active for a year, giving hackers a big window to capture the information and use it to access accounts. The cookies themselves are not sent securely, so hackers might be able to capture them using so-called sniffing tools.

While credit card information is probably not at risk, Narang said he captured the access information for some LinkedIn users and could have altered their profile information or manipulated other parts of their online presence.

Reuters reported LinkedIn officials said the company was preparing to offer additional security on an opt-in basis that would include encrypting the cookies.

The business world is transforming at breakneck speed. Entire industries like print publishing, digital imaging, and entertainment are undergoing radical evolutions, displacing established leaders, and launching new ones. Even once-successful companies like MySpace are burning out just three years into their mature life, demonstrating that if you can’t keep up, you will be marginalized.

All around you new products are emerging that demonstrate the profound impact innovation can have in just a year. Mobile video has gone from a pipe dream to a reality, and smartphones just a year old lack the hardware to take full advantage; chips from Intel that are introduced in January are commodities by December. Telephones that used to be viable for years in the 1950s today are obsolete with two years. A phone capturing a premium upgrade price in January could not be sold a year later.

The increasing speed of change should not be a surprise; society has for centuries focused on accelerating nearly everything. That fact has long driven the efforts of business functions that directly touch the design, manufacture, sales, and distribution of products, but functions like HR haven’t always responded in kind.

HR can play a role in increasing speed throughout the organization and it’s time talent managers step up and acknowledge that.

Why You Need a Culture of Speed

If you take the “need for speed” seriously, you need to move beyond having isolated “pockets” of speed throughout the organization.  Due to the interdependency of all functions and processes, diverse organizational units need to work in unison. If IT or HR or Finance is out of phase, it can dramatically delay innovations coming from other mission-critical units. Supporting all mission-critical roles in an organization are key roles that can cause just as much damage if staffed inappropriately.  You can’t have the fastest organizational speed in your industry if a single process, silo, or function moves at a lower rate of speed, creating roadblocks and “speed bumps” for the faster moving elements of the organization.

What Is a “Speed Culture?”

The most effective solution for increasing speed across the organization is the development of “a culture of speed.” Just like any other type of corporate culture, a speed culture permeates every department and business process, including hiring, performance evaluation, finance, decision-making, communications, and rewards. In order to maintain speed in a speed culture, every new program, idea, product, process, etc. must be evaluated for its impact on speed, not just when first considered, but continuously post-adoption as well. Most organizations are full of policies and procedures that once made sense but today are nothing more than barriers to speed and productivity.

A “speed culture” is a variant of the more common “performance culture” or “innovation culture.” In a speed culture, you need to add processes, measures, incentives, and even people that have the capability of accelerating existing processes while maintaining the same or higher levels of performance and innovation. Ideally, a culture of speed is owned by the managers and employees but it is supported and developed through HR.

The Key Components of Speed

Once you accept the premise that speed is an essential characteristic in business, it is only logical to begin assessing which elements of an organization need to move significantly faster and precisely how each needs to improve. The following is a list of the key components that must be present in order to optimize speed.

• Processes built for speed – all business processes must be continually assessed for speed. Those that fall behind must be redesigned and new processes must include the essential design components for speed.
• Processes must be integrated – interrelated processes that are dependent on each other must be either coordinated or completely integrated. This integration is necessary to ensure smooth and fast handoffs between functions and to ensure that roadblocks and barriers to speed are quickly identified and eliminated.
• Technology is essential – it is almost impossible to be global, low-cost, highly innovative, and fast without the extensive use of technology. Process and program leaders must constantly search for software and hardware that can enable fast speed and high quality.
• Fast employees are needed – some individuals act, react, think, and learn faster than others. Leaders need to staff and train for speed because unfortunately, a single slow employee like “Homer Simpson” in a team can reduce speed faster than a Formula One disc brake.
• Fast managers are needed – not all managers and leaders are adept at making fast and accurate decisions. In addition “fast managers” understand the process of increasing speed and as a result they are familiar with the most effective tools and approaches for increasing speed in their processes and their employees.
• You must identify barriers to speed — because even the best-designed processes (just like PCs) can slow down over time, there must be processes and tools available to managers to identify current “barriers to speed” and to find the best tools and technologies for increasing speed beyond current levels.
• You must cut approvals – requiring excessive approvals not only hampers speed but it also frustrates innovators. Where approvals cannot be eliminated, dramatically reduce the time required for them.
• You must measure speed — you can improve something that you don’t measure. As a result, there must be metrics for measuring the speed of each step in a process. Incidentally quality must also be measured because customers have learned to expect both speed and quality.
• Provide benchmark numbers — there must be comparison numbers both from within and outside your firm, so that you can accurately assess and maintain your speed lead in your industry.
• Distribute reports – ranked reports demonstrating the differentials in speed between different departments, managers, and processes must be widely distributed to spur competition and best practice sharing.

HR’s Role in Building a Culture of Speed

In most organizations there is no department or individual responsible for managing speed. However in many organizations, HR is directly or indirectly given responsibility for managing the corporate culture. So if a “culture of speed” is needed, it’s logical that HR take a leadership role. HR’s involvement is also important because the most impactful enabler of speed is people, which falls under HR’s expertise. While increasing organizational speed may be an unusual topic within the HR profession, it is a role that HR can grow into because we design many of the processes (hiring, promotion, training etc.) that directly affect the capability/capacity of the workforce. If you’re interested in accepting the role as the “manager of speed” you will not only need to encourage the implementation of the key “components of speed” listed above, but also:

• Hire fast employees — change hiring standards to recruit only candidates with the proven capability of moving fast. The hiring and assessment process must be improved to better assess whether candidates can make fast but accurate decisions and if they learn fast and embrace change.
• Increase hiring speed – vacancies in key positions can dramatically slow down fast-moving processes and projects. As a result, HR needs to develop faster hiring processes in order to fill high-impact vacancies fast with high-quality people.
• Train employees to be fast – some employees are slow simply because they’ve never been trained on how to act fast. The training and development function must develop courses and materials to help employees and managers think and act faster. For example, most employees do their tasks in a linear way (i.e. one step is completed before the next step is executed). By teaching them how to take simultaneous or parallel actions, employees can do more high quality work in less time.
• Develop fast leaders – clearly managers and leaders need to be selected based on their capability of moving fast. Once selected, there must be programs to further develop these leaders so that they can gather information more quickly, make fast decisions, and help their employees learn how to move faster.
• Expand performance management — rather than merely focusing on weak performers, this function needs to also accurately assess speed and identify employees, managers, and people processes that reduce organizational speed.
• Offer compensation and incentives – pay for performance and innovation must be supplemented with incentives for doing things “first.” In addition, there should be rewards for sharing “fast” approaches and tools that can be used by others to increase their speed.
• Improve the speed of best-practice sharing – by coordinating and speeding up the sharing of current best practices within the organization, HR can improve productivity and speed with only a small investment.

Who Has a Speed Culture?

It doesn’t take sophisticated measures or software to identify firms with a speed culture. Firms like Google are well known for their ability to move incredibly fast both within their industry (search) and into growth markets. Apple likes to be the first mover into new product categories and to dominates them from the start. In the game industry, firms like Zynga (Farmville) and Rovio Mobile (Angry Birds) have harnessed the capability to move fast into social media and mobile platforms to the detriment of long-time industry leaders like Electronic Arts.

Other notable “speed culture” firms include Facebook, Southwest Airlines, Amazon, Frito-Lay (PepsiCo), Samsung, Novartis, and Zappos. In addition to technology firms, entire industries including mobile devices, medicine, and green energy industries are learning to move at breakneck speed. Even firms like McDonald’s and Starbucks are learning to change rapidly.

Final Thoughts

You can’t be a hero in a “fast culture” unless you are recognized as being among the leaders in moving fast. Unfortunately, few (even within HR) would argue that HR processes are currently among “the fastest tools in the shed.” Part of our reluctance to move fast and to avoid risks is based on our traditional focus on compliance and legal issues.

The time has come for HR to shift focus away from compliance and towards directly impacting productivity, innovation, and speed. If you want to move beyond being a mere business partner and instead make a real strategic contribution to the firm, why not accept the role as the manager of your firm’s speed culture? Accepting that role means an improved status, increases resources, and a measurable business impact on the function. Don’t wait for someone to assign you to that role. Instead, seize the opportunity and of course, move fast.

Like so many companies, CashAmerica, a nationwide chain of loan and pawnshops, had a retention problem. By the middle part of the last decade the problem had become acute enough that the company regularly operated at 80-90 percent staffing.

That might have been good for the bottom line, but the cycle of hiring and training, not to mention lost productivity, had a cost.

Clint Jaynes, when he took over as SVP of human resources in 2006, figured the cost to be about $2,000 in training costs for every new hire.

As Jaynes studied the matter, he found many newly minted clerks left within the first 90 days; more within six months. By the end of two years, somewhat more than half of all new hires were gone.

Store managers, who cost five times as much to train, had a lower, but still significant turnover rate.

Jaynes suspected that a big part of the problem was in the selection process. Because of the hoary nature of pawnbrokering, hiring was largely done locally. Walk-ins were the norm.

“What drew me was the opportunity to bring some sophisticated tools to the managers,” Jaynes says. “They didn’t have many. They all hired people, but that wasn’t (much of) their training.”

Experienced in using assessments to help select candidates, Jaynes turned to PeopleAnswers. The company uses standardized personality and behavioral assessments, normalizing them against the results obtained by testing existing employees and analyzing their results against their performance.

The results of the high performers are then used by PeopleAnswers to give a thumbs up or down to each candidate.

Other assessment companies use different methods, with the most sophisticated — and pricey — method being the development of custom tests designed for specific jobs at specific companies.

Jaynes chose PeopleAnswers because he was both familiar with the company and knew that its results presentation would be easy for managers to use with minimal training.

At the end of two years, a period when 200 of the company’s 800 stores used the assessments, Jaynes found that where the assessments were in place, clerk turnover was 39.7 percent. In the 600 stores where no assessments were used, turnover was 53.3 percent.

If the entire company had been using assessments, the training savings alone would have been in the neighborhood of $850,000 for the clerk position alone. Manager turnover also declined where the assessments were used in selecting candidates. Add in those costs and the total savings for training alone would have exceeded $1 million.

If the story ended there, it would be a happy ending for CashAmerica. It doesn’t. Besides the training savings, CashAmerica found that revenue increased where the assessments were being used; in some places by $50,000.

“We were able to get a higher-quality person,” says Jaynes. Ironically, that pushed up overall turnover because store managers no longer had to accept mediocre performance and terminated subpar workers. It also cut down on internal theft.

CashAmerica’s success is not an isolated case. Dr. Charles Handler, an industrial psychologist and president and founder of Rocket-Hire, a consultancy in pre-employment testing, screening, and assessment tools, says companies that use assessments see all sorts of benefits.

“Retention for a lot of companies might be a starting point,” he says, “But there are other reasons to use assessments.” Among them: cultural fit, leadership potential, decision-making, career planning, and advancement.

Handler cautions that though there are many assessment companies and tests available, price should never be the deciding factor. Instead, “The more you tailor the assessment to the individual, to the company, to the job, the more accurate and the more value it will show,” he says.

Today, CashAmerica regularly uses assessments everywhere. Turnover is down and performance is up. Not all of it can be attributed to the use of assessments, but that’s where it started.

The complete story and a look at the results other companies are getting with assessments will be in the June issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

This latest contest ends Friday, May 20, and involves a coughing, 7-year-old, miniature poodle.
You’re given some info on the poodle’s condition, and are asked to give a diagnosis. Five of the people who enter will be chosen to win a book called “Cherished: 21 Writers on Animals They Have Loved and Lost.” The preface to that book was by Dr. Robert Goldman, who works for a VCA hospital.

VCA has run a contest like this before, a couple of months ago. In case you’re curious, that one involved “vomiting and small bowel diarrhea on and off for the last three months … the pet developed acute lethargy and collapse associated with a recrudescence of vomiting.”

It got 116 submissions from vet students. So far this time, there are 41 entrants, but the contest question is tougher. Perhaps “a little too hard,” says Janine Schaedler, the director of recruiting and professional relations. So far, the contests, she says, are being used to drive interest in VCA’s Facebook careers pages. VCA is capturing people’s contact information, of course, but hasn’t yet marketed careers to them.

Partly, that’s because thus far this has been a test. Come this fall, with the new school year, Schaedler says she’d like to run the contests either monthly or every other month. And, she’s hoping to run contests between schools, for them to compete against each other and when prizes. Eventually, she says, she’ll ask contest-entrants who’ve entered their contact information in VCA’s database if they’d like to receive information about jobs and careers in the veterinary field.

Not bad for a job board business network that saw its first profit last year.

The stock, which was priced in its first filings with the Security and Exchange Commission at $32-$35, soared to $122.70, before settling back to close the day at $94.25 a share.

Trading as LNKD, the stock was the darling of Wall Street. More than 27 million shares will have changed hands by the time the market closes, several times the 7.84 million share that were part of the initial public offering. More than 200 stories have appeared in the financial trades and online since the stock opened this morning.

The Wall Street Journal wrote an entertaining post pointing out that at LinkedIn’s price at one point, Apple would be worth $3 trillion. It shows, says the Journal, “how bananas the LinkedIn IPO is.”

In a more appropriate comparison, at its current price LinkedIn is worth about five times what Monster is. Monster’s stock closed today at $15.01.

The difference, of course, is that Monster Worldwide has been around for 16 years or so (depending on whether you consider just the job board or its predecessor, TMP). The other difference is that Monster’s quarterly sales are equal to LinkedIn’s annual sales.

The big difference is that LinkedIn is new school. It was designed as a business networking site and since has seen recruitment become the biggest part of its revenue stream. Now, recruiters pay annual fees to access tools to search for candidates and to contact them directly. Job postings, a relatively new product, is growing.

It’s the social aspect of the site that makes it different from job boards, despite its reliance on recruitment for revenue and profits. Users come to the site to make business connections, participate with peers in professional conversations, and stay atop developments. Job search, if they come for that at all, is down the list.

That’s why recruiters are so taken with LinkedIn; the users are almost all passives.

Job boards, try as hard as they may to layer on social and career elements, are still for job hunting. By definition, then, nearly everyone on the site is an active job seeker.

Still, while the IPO has made new Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires, the Journal offers three issues to consider. First on the list is “Yes, this is crazy.” At the bottom of the article is a little poll: “Does LinkedIn’s successful IPO signal a new tech bubble? So far, the Yes votes have 70 percent of the total.

In the article, six different process stages are outlined: Needs Analysis, Sourcing, Screening, Assessment, Closing the Deal, and Acceptance/Onboarding. Each step of the recruiting process is detailed, and a checklist of nuances captured at each step, gleaning from the best practices of the interviewed group, as well as the experiences I see each day setting up client workforce strategies.

Below are five tips (or landmines) from the nine-page article which has almost 40 such tips, which together serves as a roadmap for talent acquisition leaders as they plan for the economic recovery and aggressive staffing.

#1: Don’t try and move around management and interview individual contributors simultaneously. Hire all the management first for the incoming individual contributors, and make sure they are trained on the project, interviewing, and have all the bandwidth they need to allow for incoming applicants, interviews, and assessment. If your timetable is truncated, you can start sourcing for individual contributors when you are closing the deal on all the new managers.

#2: Post with sensitivity. Make sure that you have made an effort to broadcast this position to media outlets or local government agencies as much as possible. Not only does the PR do you good and get you applicants, but it also indicates that you are not snubbing the local government agencies or trying to avoid their out-of-work populations.

#3: Visual screening can be executed by non-recruiters. Visual screening needs to be done by people who have clear instructions about what to look for in order to match the qualifications of the job. Managers can do this activity, but likely for every 10 applicants, less than five make it to interview, so do you really want hiring managers spending time on anything with 50% productivity? Consider having a task force or special team assigned to this.

#4: Be prepared for no-shows. It is going to happen. Some hotshot candidate won’t show up, or a plane will be delayed or there will be traffic. Just roll with it. But also realize that you may want to invite more people than usual to interviews. Try adding 10% to what you think, just as a buffer.

#5: The offer approval process will likely need to be truncated. It is not unusual to have two steps for checking the offer. Plan on having no approval on the offers. As long as it is within the approved target range, it should be able to be extended.

Anyhow, find out more in the Journal if you’re a subscriber (or if you’re nice to Todd and signed up for the next big conference I bet he’ll hook you up with this issue for free, and maybe some other high-volume hiring Journal articles about the Border Patrol, Census, and Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare). Also, if you want to check it out, there’s still a video online from my 2010 ERE Expo panel, about recruiting transformation, that included representatives from PepsiCo, PNC Bank, and ESPN. (And you’re not done with me yet — I’m talking with Todd about doing something again for the March 28-30 event in San Diego.)