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Recruiting, talent management, and HR professionals in general have been using metrics for many years now. More often than not, the story HR metrics tell is irrelevant or disappointing. Over the past three decades, I’ve compiled a long list of common metrics mistakes that you can use to assess your measurement efforts and improve your efforts to get the attention of your management and senior leadership.

25 Most Damaging Metric Errors

Following are 25 of the most damaging mistakes you can make when using metrics to assess or defend your performance presented in five categories. keep reading…

The other shoe is dropping in last year’s anti-poaching case the U.S. Department of Justice brought against six big-name tech firms, and it is falling most heavily on Apple.

The six firms — and a seventh,  Lucasfilm — are facing a class action suit claiming their agreement not to pursue each other’s employees depressed wages and was a violation of California antitrust law.

According to the suit filed Wednesday, Google, Adobe, Intel, Apple, Pixar, and Intuit (the six firms, which were sued and settled with the DoJ), and Lucasfilm agreed not to cold-call each other’s skilled workers. Doing so, the lawsuit alleges, denied workers information about job opportunities, pay scales, and reduced their ability to negotiate.

That much the Justice Department claimed when it settled with the six companies it sued. But it alleged then that the conspiracy was a series of interconnected agreements negotiated between companies. Now, the suit suggests Apple and its CEO Steve Jobs was behind the scheme. Claims the suit:

Defendants’ conspiracy consisted of an interconnected web of express agreements, each with the active involvement and participation of a company under the control of Steve Jobs (currently CEO of Apple) and/or a company that shared at least one member of Apple’s board of directors.

keep reading…

The unemployment rate climbed in April, but the 244,000 new jobs created during the month was the largest increase in a year, swamping economists’ predictions. They were expecting the unemployment rate to remain at 8.8 percent and about a 185,000 increase in jobs.

The numbers released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning showed 268,000 private sector jobs added in April, the fastest hiring rate in five years.

Every industry sector showed growth except for government, which was off 24,000 jobs; 14,000 of those lost jobs were in local government. The service sector added 244,000 jobs, while the goods-producing sector, which includes construction (up 5,000) and manufacturing (up 29,000) increased by 44,000. keep reading…

In this informative webinar, Linda Brenner shows you how to recruit the best with limited resources.

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

Anna Jarvis was from my home state of West Virginia. She introduced the traditional Mother’s Day celebration in 1907. It became a national holiday only seven years later. You may think Anna was delighted with how quickly her idea spread throughout the world. Actually, she spent the rest of her life and all of her savings protesting how the true meaning of Mother’s Day had been lost. She believed printed cards and candy were insufficient to honor one’s mother. On one occasion, her protests landed her in jail for disturbing the peace. Imagine what her reaction might be to people who simply Tweet their moms on this special day. keep reading…

The general climate among HR and staffing professionals is that pre-employment assessment is a complex and confusing matter that is not really worth the hassle. Why is this so? My own research and experience has led me to the following plausible explanations:

Assessment can be complex: There is no one magic bullet and the choices to be navigated make constructing good testing programs a blend of both art and science.

Assessment is often oversold or mis-sold: Vendors often fit round pegs into square holes because they only sell the round pegs and their motive is to hammer as many pegs in as possible.

Testing is not fun: Let’s be honest. Most applicants don’t really enjoy doing complicated math problems or answering questions about how outgoing they are at parties. It is not hard to see why many firms would want to spare applicants from these forms of mild torture!

Where’s the beef?: Many companies totally ignore the value proposition for assessment because they don’t make a game plan for testing that directly allows them to see the ROI it can deliver. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!

Consumers do not follow best practices: When the consumer is not aware of the steps required to ensure success with assessment, they make it harder to achieve success. Failures often represent the end of the line when it comes to testing programs.

The reasons go on, but all of the above issues can be overcome more easily than you think. I don’t want to downplay the complexities of assessment — they are real and they are many. However, I do feel that if you use the following four steps as your mantra, you will come out on the good side when it comes to assessment.

Above all, the key ingredients to making these steps work for you are: keep reading…

Social Media Trends

The first four months of 2011 have shown that social media is far from a fad. More and more ordinary people are joining networks, sharing pictures, uploading video, and opening their personal lives to friends and colleagues.

Facebook now has well over 700 million members. LinkedIn is about to go public, making it the first of the social media firms to do so. Empire Avenue is streaking forward, educating us on how to make social networking valuable, while Twitter continues to grow as a tool for sharing and crowdsourcing information.

The benefits of joining any network are quickly apparent: connecting easily to friends, staying in touch with distant family and friends, finding employment or a mate, sharing information, learning, and being entertained are all positive outcomes.

These outweigh the potential risks about lack of privacy. People are increasingly sophisticated about what they share and why they share it. keep reading…

Stocks dropped today following reports suggesting the U.S. economy is still wobbly. The market was off more than 100 points at noon in New York.

Payroll-processor ADP’s monthly employment report came in with a lower-than-expected 179,000 new private sector jobs created in April. It was the lowest increase reported by the company since November, when it said 122,000 jobs were added.

Economists were expecting ADP to report 198,000 new private sector jobs, while estimates of the official count, to be released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday morning, are for 183,000 total new jobs in April. (ADP, which processes payrolls for about a quarter of all U.S. businesses, counts only jobs in the private sector. The BLS includes government employment, which has been falling for months.) keep reading…

…after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.

Mr. Disraeli’s supper companion’s remark demonstrates to us how the prime minister made the young woman feel after their engagement over supper.

I say the word “engagement” knowing that nowadays we all hear a lot about how we can become more bonded in our communications with others.

One of the synonyms for engagement is commitment.

When you say the word commitment, you cannot ignore the meaning of assurance and obligation that lies behind it.

If we are to “engage” another we must naturally offer our pledge, our vow, if you will, that we will stand behind what we’re offering.

We must be trustworthy.

In order to be trustworthy we must also be able to trust.

Conversation is almost always about feelings.

Seldom is it about facts.

Facts might be the starting point to a conversation, but it’s most always the feelings of the conversationalists that color the outcome.

What we think and feel is not always what we say.

Many times it’s in what’s not said that carries the truest meaning. keep reading…

Doing less with more. We measure it. Monitor it. Optimize it. Benchmark it. Roll it. So many schools of thought channeling through webinars, blogs, SMS feeds, etc. assail the minds of talent acquisition leaders daily. It can be hard to take the time to process it all, let alone roll out a custom implementation when what is really needed today is a purple squirrel with an engineering degree willing to relocate for less money. Late nights at the office resuscitated the question, “Can we get back some of the time we spent executing necessary, yet time-consuming transactional activities and reallocate the team’s time to more strategic client-facing initiatives and management’s time to taking care of the team?”

I approached this conundrum earlier in my career with the help of my talent acquisition team at that time. As we began an examination our own processes, we tried to keep a “lean-esque” perspective on what we see is the incremental value recognized through individual process steps. The central challenge became whether we could change the way in which something is executed, while still retaining (or increasing) its incremental value. Ultimately, can we do it quicker, cheaper, and not cannibalize our effectiveness and efficiency?

keep reading…

In an admission that negotiations have failed, the manager of the .jobs addresses has filed to arbitrate its dispute with the Internet’s addressing authority over its awarding of .jobs domains.

Making the announcement in a press release issued a short while ago, Employ Media‘s CEO Tom Embrescia adopted a strong position, saying, “This filing was necessary to ward off ICANN’s unwarranted and unprecedented threat of contract termination. That action created immediate uncertainty about the .JOBS TLD (top level domain) on the Internet and caused significant duress on our business.”

The arbitration request to the International Court of Arbitration takes an even stronger tone, saying ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is the Internet’s addressing authority, made “improper allegations” and “unwarranted threats.”

The filing comes just days before the May 6th deadline for Employ Media to resolve its differences. ICANN issued a notice of breach on Feb. 27th, saying Employ Media was exceeding its authority by allowing the creation of thousands of job boards by the DirectEmployers Association.

The 4-page notice included a sharp rebuke to Employ Media and its partner, the Society for Human Resource Management, which were accused of establishing restrictions on the use of .Jobs address so “loose” they “appear to exclusively serve the financial interests of Employ Media and SHRM.”

Since then, ICANN, SHRM, and Employ Media have been negotiating the issues in a contractually required “cooperative engagement” process. Twice, the initial 30-day negotiation period was extended, with the latest one expiring Friday.

However, late last month signs appeared that the process was not going well. Employ Media’s lawyer Arif Ali, of Crowell & Moring, wrote ICANN objecting to its posting of correspondence sent by the participants. At one point, Ali says:

Some measure of confidentiality is essential to the negotiation process so that the parties can be open and frank without grandstanding or pandering to a larger audience—especially as that audience includes a number of third parties who have wrongfully attempted to insert themselves into ICANN’s contractual relationship with Employ Media.

The third party mention is a barely veiled reference to The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, a group formed last year to oppose Employ Media’s plans to open up use of the .jobs extension. The group has ever since bird-dogged Employ Media, objecting to its release of tens of thousands of .jobs addresses for use in creating niche job boards by DirectEmployers.

ICANN’s response to Ali refutes the claims its posting was improper, and that it acted in bad faith by making public the breach notice and some of the subsequent correspondence between the parties. The letter also warns that the “cooperative engagement process is undercut by correspondence, such as your April 22 letter, seemingly geared solely towards use in future litigation.”

The arbitration, now, is that future litigation. The process can be a lengthy one, especially since at stake is the future of the management of the .jobs addresses and the hundreds of thousands — and potentially, millions — of dollars Employ Media might generate.

The core of the issue is whether allowing multiple addresses to be issued with non-company names for use as job boards is permissible under the charter granted by ICANN. In its filing to the International Arbitration Court, Employ Media essentially says it is.

During the process it went through with ICANN last year to obtain permission to issue .jobs addresses using other than a company name, Employ Media said it fully disclosed its intention to expand usage as it had first done in 2009, when DirectEmployers began launching hundreds of job boards on location- and occupation-specific .jobs addresses.

The “universe of .JOBS,” as it was being called, was taken off-line while Employ Media and SHRM went through a review process that last August was confirmed by ICANN’s board of directors. (The job sites went back up after the board vote and has been expanding since.) In the arbitration request, Employ media pointed to that experience, observing: “… anyone who wanted to delve into Employ Media’s plans needed only to look at that beta test.”

Consequently, the company claims that the breach notice “resulted from anti-competitive pressure from the Coalition and other, well-financed, well-connected entities, intent on eliminating free market competition posed by the .JOBS Universe.”

Employ Media specifically asks the International Arbitration Court to declare that not only did it not breach its contract with ICANN, but that it is ICANN that did so and for that, ICANN should have to be damages yet to be determined.

Note: Complete background on the .jobs dispute and the creation of the .Jobs Universe is available here.

Human resource jobs continue to grow, according to a report out today from Indeed.

From March to April, the number of postings for HR jobs increased 3 percent, making the sector fifth in job growth among the 13 categories tracked by Indeed. For the quarter, postings for HR jobs grew by 11 percent.

Although Indeed doesn’t track the specific HR jobs being advertised, keyword searches are counted, and the most popular keyword used by job seekers is “human resources.” During April, there were 695,000 searches using that term.

“Recruiter” was the distant second most popular search, with 108,000 searches.

Competition for jobs in New York was greatest. There were 209,000 clicks into HR job listings in New York, followed by jobs in Atlanta, which had 122,000 clicks. Because Indeed sends job seekers to the site where the job posting originated, there’s no way of telling from the data how many of those clicks resulted in applications.

This is the week employment numbers for the U.S. will be released by the Labor Department, and economists expect them to continue the robust trend of the past few months.

In advance of Friday’s release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average of economists’ predictions are that it will show the U.S. added 183,000 non-farm jobs during April. ADP’s National Employment Report, due out tomorrow, is expected to show 198,000 private sector jobs were added. The unemployment rate is predicted to remain at 8.8 percent.

Optimism in continued jobs growth is reflected in several indicators measured by the Conference Board. Both the CEO and Consumer Confidence indices showed improvement. The CEO Confidence index climbed in the first quarter of the year by five full points, and now is at 67. keep reading…

Does your recruiting department have a vision statement? Do you have a clear strategy to accomplish this vision? If you are like most in recruiting functions, you probably do not (and likely should). How else will your recruiters know how their daily activities tie to departmental and organizational success?

At DaVita, our recruiting team has crafted a strategic intent that states, “We create competitive advantage through recruiting excellence, ultimately reflected in leading patient & financial outcomes.”

Additionally, we focus on five core areas to implement this strategy: Alignment with Operations, Top Players, Clear Brand Differentiation, Relentless Sourcing, and Service Excellence. These five core principals drive our team’s daily recruiting practices and project assignments. As a recruiting leadership team, we check back regularly to ensure that we don’t lose sight of our strategic intent and make sure these are still the right areas of focus. Below is an explanation of our five core principals. keep reading…

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One of the things that frustrated me when I was a recruiter was a poorly written job description. This was just one of many puzzle pieces that provided the impetus for me to leave recruiting and work on aligning talent strategy with corporate strategy.

For those of you who are responsible for writing job descriptions and/or approving them for your company (hiring managers, corporate recruiters, RPOs), what guidelines do you follow to produce exceptional and accurate job descriptions? Do you even follow any guidelines? Has anyone ever taught you how to write an effective and accurate job description? Have you thought about what’s necessary to attract the “right” candidate for you and used these things to recruit those top performers so they want to come to work for you? Do you just throw the job description onto your “careers” page, a job board, or social networking site, and hope (I always say “hope” is never an effective strategy) great candidates find you? But most importantly, is your job description a reflection of an aligned executive team, benchmarked employees, and well-thought-out recruiting practices that are directly in line with executive alignment and culture?

One of my LinkedIn connections passed on a job description through his network for one of his connections who’s looking for inside sales folks. The individual who wrote it is a VP of Sales & Marketing. I’m not sure if he’s responsible for all their recruiting or if this company also employs corporate recruiters and/or 3rd party agencies. Either way, this is a wonderful teaching example of what won’t work, unless you’re looking for low-quality employees. I’ve included the entire job description (click to enlarge) with the company’s name removed, for obvious reasons.

As you read this, can you see some of the main the issues I’m seeing? It occurs to me that they are just casting a very wide net to see what they may catch. Let’s look at the most important items. keep reading…

Finding someone to just fill a seat at your company isn’t hard. But finding great people—the ones who fit with your culture, who share your vision, who can make immediate and lasting contributions—can be very difficult. This is true for small and large companies, as the right people can transform any organization.

Here are three ways you can better source and hire truly great people for your company.

Make Time to Hire

One thing all companies have in common is a lack of time. As painful as it may be, the most important factor in hiring great people is devoting time to the process. Schedule it in your day just like you would a client meeting or a business transaction. For example: the first week after posting a job ad, take 30 minutes each morning to download and compile resumes and cover letters; at the end of each day, review them and put aside potential interviewees for follow-up. Then, at the end of the week, review your selections and short-list a group of candidates to phone screen. keep reading…

A new– and for now, free — toolset from Bullhorn is getting good marks from users who have been testing it for a few months, but what’s most impressive is that it can give recruiters an early heads-up about their connections who may be preparing to “go active.”

KC Carpenter, a healthcare recruiter and co-founder of K.A. Recruiting in Boston, says the still-in-beta Bullhorn Reach is “great. It’s a huge, huge time saver for us … What would take 10 times as long, we can do with one click.”

If automating postings to social networks and optimizing them for search engines was all the service did, “it would definitely be a site I would pay for,” he says. But Radar, the tool that tips you to the likelihood one of your connections may be starting an active job hunt, is something Carpenter sees a “great for business development.” keep reading…

You’ve hired your rainmaker! The hard work is over and now it’s time for the dollars to roll in. After all, you’ve just hired a great salesperson. Take her to the office, hand her a prospecting list, and success is imminent!

Oh, if only this formula worked.

keep reading…

Technology is evolving at the fastest rate in recorded history, and tools relevant to recruiters are not exempt. Every day a new piece of hardware, software, or service is announced that could be used to better support world-class recruiting. Staying abreast of evolving technology is difficult but essential for any savvy recruiter hoping to stay on top of efficiency and effectiveness expectations.

Technology by itself is never a solution, but it often enables leading-edge solutions and approaches. When someone becomes aware of a new tool or service that makes an activity easier or cheaper or faster, they naturally see how that tool could work in other parts of their life even if that tool wasn’t created with those other purposes in mind. Hiring managers, candidates, and savvy recruiters forge such expectations, so failing to be aware of and address how emerging technologies could impact your recruiting operations is akin to saying “I am happy being a laggard.”

While there are numerous indicators that that you may be on your way to becoming a “technology dinosaur,” some of the more obvious are highlighted below. keep reading…