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Do the vast majority of people who pass your personality tests turn out to be exceptional performers? If you answered “no,” then your tests aren’t testing. Recruiters and hiring managers are led to believe people who pass their personality tests will be successful. Unfortunately, practical experience shows that about 50% of employees and 70-80% of managers still fail to meet expectations. It’s a hard concept to grasp, but don’t be fooled by statements like: “The XYZ is not a hiring test … but it can be used to help make hiring decisions.” That’s like saying, “Ignore the rattle … the snake’s harmless.”

Cause? What Cause?

Here is an example of traits often found in personality tests: dominance, compliance, extraversion, judgment, sensitivity, curiosity, conscientiousness, humility, and determination. First, we’ll show you a silly-science example: 1) divide producers into groups (e.g., high and low performers); 2) give both groups the same personality test; 3) see which scores differ; and finally, 4) use candidate scores to predict group membership.

After impressive number-crunching, suppose the A-list group had higher average dominance, compliance, and extraversion scores; the B-list group had higher average curiosity, conscientiousness, and determination; and, both had the same average judgment, humility, and sensitivity scores. Is this enough evidence to use the results for selection or promotion? Noooo.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Anyone can compare two sets of numbers and tell you whether they correlate; but, it takes careful study to know whether A actually leads to B. keep reading…

Credit the Chinese for coming up with the latest trend in recruiting: The micro-resume.

Not those qualifications on a business card that made the rounds of networking events a few years ago, but a resume reduced to 140 characters.

Ever since China’s leading micro-blogging site weibo.com launched a jobs service in late March, 140-character resume summaries have mushroomed. One count in May put the number at 17,000.

Graduating students were the earliest adopters of the micro-resume, sending brief messages noting their academic degree, interest, and experience. Other job seekers have also begun to take to the micro-resume. A  Xinhua article quotes a senior manager who posted his own micro-resume praising their  efficiency.

Recruiters are also taking to the service, broadcasting micro-job posts to the site. On the home page of  the Sina recruiting site are company profiles for Manpower, Panasonic, and Alipay, China’s equivalent of PayPal, among others.

keep reading…

If you want a job at Google or McKinsey, you’ll have to go through a rigorous process. This process often includes as many as 10 interviews, and requires one to provide six or more references.

The intention is good, for we all know that the more feedback one can gain on a candidate, the better. And this truth was discovered a long time ago. In 1906, for instance, Englishman Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, stumbled upon an intriguing contest while attending a livestock fair. An ox was hanging on display, and the visitors at the fair were invited to guess the animal’s weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 participated, but not one person hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Galton’s insight was to examine the mean of these guesses from independent people in the crowd. Astonishingly, the mean of those 800 guesses was 1,197 pounds —  accurate by a fraction of one percent.

Today, this phenomenon of having more accuracy collectively than any single individual is called collective intelligence, and the field is booming, as research has shown over and over again that estimations coming from many people, in the right circumstances, lead to results closer to the truth. This is because the extremes are essentially cancelled out. That is why it is often referred to as a statistical phenomenon.

Because of collective intelligence, organizations that try to stay on the cutting edge of information and technology think they should interview more individuals, because more is better.

This isn’t always true. keep reading…

Telecommuting can attract and retain employees. It can even save you money. But not all employees or companies are cut out for virtual work.

Providing the tools and technology are easy. The tough question an employer must answer is: how do we hire and manage the right teleworker?

Like employees who fill every other job, some workers are natural fits, while others seem to be the square peg forced into a round hole. Telecommuting requires different skills than working out of an office, even if the job responsibilities and requirements are exactly the same.

Recent research out of Global Integration Inc. identified the traits of successful virtual workers and telecommuters. The most successful virtual workers are self-reliant and self-motivated. That sounds like the perfect fit for an ambitious introvert, but the “lone wolf” tends not to perform very well on virtual teams. keep reading…

Here’s an offer that’s going to be hard to refuse: For $2,495 TheLadders will guarantee you a job offer in six months. And not just any job, but one paying at least $100k.

Signature, as TheLadders calls the program, was announced on CNBC this morning by CEO and founder Marc Cenedella.

“You sign up. We assign you a career adviser. We rewrite your resume. We have a 10-step program that walks you through the job search; takes the mystery, takes the stress, takes a lot of the anxiety out of the job search,” he told CNBC. “And we believe in it so much — we’ve been working on it so long — that at the end we guarantee you’ll get an offer in six months.” keep reading…

Few roles could be more important in an organization with deteriorating performance than the roles responsible for crafting a new strategy and the roles responsible for securing the talent that will make that strategy successful.

Climbing wall at Google - Boulder

Firms that have successfully overcome negative momentum and turned their performance around often select new leadership with a proven ability to operationalize a much narrower strategy. They also accept that the talent that was with the organization going into decline may not be the best talent to help pull the organization back up.

Turning around an organization is a tremendous feat, one that involves numerous cultural battles. It’s illogical to assume that any organization in a state of decline could transform itself into the next Apple, Google, or Facebook without dramatic changes to every aspect of its culture. keep reading…

Monster launched a Facebook app over the weekend that will let the 700 million users of the popular social community build a professional network separate and apart from the one their friends get to see.

BeKnown, as it is called, borrows much from LinkedIn and BranchOut, but goes further than the latter and offers more versatility and flair than the former. It’s not a frontal attack on LinkedIn’s growing recruitment business, but a flanking maneuver, focusing on younger workers just beginning to build their business contacts.

While Monster is aiming at the 600 million-plus users worldwide who aren’t LinkedIn members, those who are can import their contacts from there as they build an independent network on BeKnown. The app also makes it possible to invite contacts from other sources, including Gmail, Yahoo, Twitter and, of course, Facebook.

Installing the app gives users a second Facebook profile, that can be imported from LinkedIn or Monster if they are registered there. Pictures and other, existing Facebook content can be managed to create a distinctly differently persona from the one social friends get to see. Otherwise, the visual appearance mimics the typical Facebook presence. keep reading…

Everyone knows that networking is critical to finding a job, or for schmoozing with senior leaders at your company. But networking is essential for talent acquisition leaders who want to do a great job. Why? Because leading a recruiting function is hard. Really hard. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not rocket science, but it’s a lot of moving pieces. And just one broken part can derail hiring throughout the company in a very visible way.

So what’s the connection to networking for talent acquisition leaders? Tricks, tips, good ideas, and best practices to constantly making improvements to the way we run the talent acquisition machine. Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, as we tend to do, we need to take the time to step out of our frenetic schedules and connect, learn, and brainstorm with our peers. The payoff benefits your team, the talent acquisition function, your organization — and your own personal development.

How can we make this happen? Here’s one great idea: attend ERE in September in Florida. Really. It’s an inexpensive way to pack in a ton of networking, learning, best practices, and discussion into two days. You deserve it — and your company deserves it.

As I ponder the future of where our industry is headed, I’m reminded of Geoffrey Moore’s technology adoption curve, from his fine book, Crossing the Chasm. It describes how users (aka “buyers”) of technology follow a predictable adoption rate, generally based on their comfort with the technology and their ability to implement change.

It’s not surprising that technology, especially the use of advanced business networking tools, in combination with state-of-art Internet marketing techniques, is fundamentally changing the face of recruiting as we once knew it. What is surprising though is that most major U.S. corporations are still moving too slowly to take full advantage of these important changes. In some cases, companies are moving fast enough, but are misapplying the technology, and not getting its full benefits. Worst of all, though, are the large number of companies that are actually fighting the technology, or are oblivious to the potential positive impact of these changes. keep reading…

Several years ago, as I was preparing to head off for a long weekend hiking in the Yosemite backcountry, I got a call from the CEO.

“Why won’t you be reachable?” he wanted to know.  He just read the email about my being out of touch with the office.

Because, I started to explain, there are no cell towers or service in the middle of the wilderness. He cut me off with a curt, “Maybe you should vacation somewhere else.”

An isolated incident? Not anymore. Today, says a Manpower survey, nearly two-thirds of the responding workers at least sometimes get emails in their off-hours from bosses who expect a reply.

“It’s now taken for granted that everyone has to check their work email during the weekend,” says Monika Morrow, SVP for Manpower’s Right Management unit.

That’s most true for exempt workers, who likely made up the bulk of the 569 survey respondents. Non-exempt workers, however, have to be paid. Maybe not for every contact, but, as we’ll see in a moment, more often than not. keep reading…

Spam: it’s not just for breakfast any more, but what you may not realize as a recruiter is it could be keeping food off of your table.

Most recruiters are highly dependent on email. A single blocked email can result in the loss of a five-figure fee or the hiring loss of the top candidate. Blocked emails can be disastrous either from the receiving or the sending side. What most recruiters don’t realize is that blocked emails occur mostly as a result of the email recipient trying to stop spam. (And no, we’re not talking about that oh-so-yummy canned ham product!)

What Is Spam?

Here is partial definition from Wikipedia: “Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media … ”

“Spamming remains economically viable for advertisers because they have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet Service Providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.”

The effects of the spam epidemic can be felt far and wide, but are felt most acutely when important emails get blocked because someone, somewhere thinks it might be spam.

Can I Control What Email Gets Blocked as Spam?

There are multiple distinct chokepoints to consider whether you are sending or receiving email. keep reading…

Two medical recruiters are the new owners of recruiter community and discussion site RecruitingBlogs.com.

Noel Cocca, owner of Novo Medical Careers, and his partner Tim Spagnola bought the four-year-old site at auction Tuesday for $95,000. The two also have a small blog they started last year, RecruitingDaily.com.

“We’re both very excited about this,” Cocca told me by phone, not long after RecruitingBlogs founder, Jason Davis, revealed the identity of the buyers. “I don’t know what we’ll do with RecruitingDaily, but we’re going to keep the status quo on RecruitingBlogs.”

Noel Cocca

No changes are planned, said Cocca, adding that it works well as is. What they do hope, he said, is to grow the audience and participation. “We might add something ,” he said. “I really can’t see us making any changes.”

“The philosophy that Tim and I share,” Cocca said, “is we are open people. We believe in simplicity. And to pay it forward.” keep reading…

Newell Rubbermaid is wrapping up a move of its Europe-Middle East-Africa headquarters from France, Belgium, and Germany to Geneva, a consolidation that talent acquisition director Carlos Vazquez says involved a “gargantuan task of staffing over 80 roles during the last six months.”

Vazquez manages recruiting in EMEA and in Latin America, working out of Weston, Florida, not far from both the ocean and the Everglades. Most of Vazquez’s work — about 70% — is on EMEA (and he might live in Europe if he was single and didn’t have three kids in the States) and about 30% of his work is on Latin America. He has been with the company for four years, coming from Lucent.

CEO Mark Ketchum — who is retiring in a few months — made the announcement of the European headquarters move in the second quarter of last year. Newell Rubbermaid wanted a geographically central place with a good business climate and a high quality of life.

Back in 2010, Vazquez had a team made up of only one person, and himself. He says Newell Rubbermaid “bent over backwards” to retain people and offer them enticements to move, many from Paris but others, as mentioned, from elsewhere in Europe.

Even though it’s an hour flight from Paris to Geneva, a three-hour train ride, and the language is the same, it is two different countries, and roughly 75-80 people, or about 50%, did not make the move for one reason or another.

So Vazquez’s team needed to hire everyone from individual contributors to director and VP-level roles, spanning marketing, finance, supply chain, and sales jobs. And, of course, recruiters: he now has four talent acquisition managers reporting to him and working on Europe, and two researchers (“all you see is the back of her neck,” he says of one).

Employees had to start work in Geneva before the new offices were done. “Living like nomads,” Vazquez says, while they found housing, which wasn’t easy.

To find the roughly 80 new hires, the Vazquez team used a little of everything. That included LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Facebook, and The Network. The latter is a way of posting jobs to the top job boards in multiple countries. “Basically we left no stone unturned to let people know we were we’re hiring,” he says. keep reading…

Men are better online networkers than women? True, says LinkedIn.

It may fly in the face of other surveys, but LinkedIn insists that men are savvier networkers when it comes to their participation on the global business networking site and when their number of connections are taken into account.

“Women,” explains Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s Connection Director, “can sometimes shy away from networking because they associate it with schmoozing or doling out business cards, when in reality, it’s about building relationships before you actually need them.”

Well now, just a couple weeks ago ComScore said women in five of the biggest European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom — spent more time on social networks than men. And it didn’t matter if they were 15 or 50. In every age grouping the women were ahead. keep reading…

RecruitingBlogs.com has been sold for $95,000.

The auction for the four-year-old site closed a short while ago. RecruitingBlogs is a recruiter community network with a collection of user-created content.

Jason Davis, who launched the site in 2007 after selling Recruiting.com, said in an email he wouldn’t disclose details about the successful bidder until after the deal closes.

Whoever did win the auction gets an active site with some 28,000 members with profiles, and more than 15,000 different visitors a month. Davis, who goes by the name “Slouch” on the site, said he decided to sell RecruitingBlogs in order to devote his full time to returning to the world of active recruiting.

The auction opened on June 7th. Davis said he expects it will take a few days to close the deal.

Two weeks ago, Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire was telling The Street he saw growth ahead for his HR technology company.

“We are slowly growing our European operations,” Gregoire told The Street’s market analyst Debra Borchardt.

He must have had his tongue firmly in cheek as he said that, since today Taleo doubled its European operations with the acquisition of HR technology vendor Jobpartners for $38 million. keep reading…

There’s probably not a week (or maybe even a day) that goes by in which we don’t read about how technology will help you in your business, whether it be a smartphone, tablet, computer, social media, applications, etc. I think many of us have the need to use every type of technology out there without really knowing why or even having a real need for it. I believe it has gotten to the point that if you don’t adopt every new technology and use it in business, people think there’s something wrong with you.

Yes, technology is wonderful — when used effectively. That’s the caveat. Too many people have just jumped on this bandwagon without evaluating how, when, and why they should be using various technologies in business. It has become so pervasive that some of the tried and true methods of doing business have fallen by the wayside. Let’s look at a partial list of some of the technologies used in recruiting: keep reading…

Monster got a boost Friday when investment bank UBS upgraded the company’s stock to a buy.

In its recommendation, UBS said the job board’s North American division will continue to be challenged, but it is more optimistic about its growing international business and the potential revenue boost from the introduction of its 6 Sense search technology overseas.

The 44 percent drop in Monster’s stock price UBS considers overdone;  its 52-week high hit $25.90; today’s price is right around $13.50. However, while recruitment budgets are generally stable, UBS says the North American business, which comes largely from the U.S., has plenty of competition from niche sites.

As if to prove the point, Monster recently launched a recruiting site for expatriate Indians featuring jobs in the homeland. The flashy ReturntoHome channel, part of Monster’s India job board, has a prominent Flash presentation promoting India as “the land of opportunities.” Besides noting the country is now the 4th-largest economy in the world, it enthuses “your family will surely enjoy the same lifestyle in India.” keep reading…

Are you one of those recruiters who asks off-the-wall questions to see how the candidate reacts?

Famously lampooned for it, Barbara Walters once asked Katherine Hepburn what kind of tree she wanted to be. (To be fair, Hepburn prompted it by declaring she wanted to be a tree.) Recruiters, however, have asked far more peculiar questions.

One job seeker reported being asked, “If you won the lottery tomorrow, how would you spend your free time?” (How would you answer? Personally, I’d first ask, “How much?” A mere million isn’t what it used to be.)

At the end of last year, Glassdoor offered a list of 25 of the weirdest interview questions of 2010 (and answers suggested by readers). Glassdoor is the website where job seekers, employees, and former employees rate companies and their management.

On the list was this one from Amazon: “If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?”

Another one, from Boston Consulting, asked the candidate to “Explain [to] me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years.”

Now, Glassdoor offers another view of the interview process, culling its thousands of company reviews for those rated by job seekers — successful or not — as the most difficult. keep reading…