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.

For example, skirts and stock markets tend to move up and down together, beach ice cream sales and shark attacks tend to move together, and watermelon sales and temperature move together. But, skirts do not cause the market to change, sharks do not buy ice cream, and selling watermelon does not cause it to be hot. You can probably think of many others, but the most important statistical concept is, “If it does not cause, you need to pause!”

True professionals know beforehand the factors they want to measure. Then, they use stats to compare scores with performance to try to prove themselves wrong! I know it does not make sense, but remember that since the future is murky and uncertain, it’s better to reduce mistakes than seek perfection. Explaining things after the fact is creative story telling. Professionals make an informed prediction, collect data, and try to disprove it.

Screwy Thinking

Returning now to our example: We already discussed why throwing things against the wall to see what sticks is unprofessional. Now let’s consider the Lake Woebegon effect; that is, the men are all strong, the women are all pretty, and the children are above average.

Let’s suppose in our previous example that shoe size was one of our factors. We know individual shoe sizes in both Group A and Group B ranged from size 6 to 12. However, Group A folks averaged size 8 and Group B averaged size 10. Does that mean an applicant wearing a size 9 will become a member of Group A? A size 12 a member of Group B? Nope. And, Nope. Group-level data tells us about groups, not about individuals! Bad analyst! Bad!

How about this? There are four people in Group A and 10 people in Group B. Aside from the problems we already discussed, can we compare the two groups? ‘Nope again. One person in Group A has a 25% impact on the group’s overall score, while one person in Group B has only a 10% impact. Furthermore, the group sizes are so small it would be silly to think scores would generalize to all candidates. It takes at least 25 (preferably, hundreds) of subjects to draw reasonable conclusions. No soup for you, analyst!

Oh, yes, one more thing. Can we trust someone with a high score in the judgment trait to be smart? Get real! Most studies show less than a 1% relationship between personality scores and cognitive skills and about a 10% relationship with interpersonal behaviors. Why? When people take a self-descriptive test you never know if they are honest, trying to make a good impression, delusional, clueless, and so forth. If you need someone who is smart, give them a problem to solve … not tell you about it!

Importance of Being Wrong Less Often

It may sound counterintuitive, but it is easier to reduce the number of bad hires than it is to find superstars. The future is murky, filled with unpredictable events that elude even Karnak the fortune teller. Folks who expect 100% hiring and promotion accuracy are going to be frustrated. No system known to humankind can perfectly predict the future. There are just too many uncontrollable variables.

The present, however, is more tangible. So, instead of trying to ensure perfect success, it’s actually easier to reduce test error by screening out unskilled people. It goes without saying that manager-employee compatibility is very important; but, in addition to personality factors, organizations expect employees to have cognitive abilities, motivations, and so forth. This is the 20% that delivers 80% of job results.

Summary

Selecting or promoting people based on silly science is more than just bad practice. It’s unethical, irresponsible, and unprofessional. Qualified people are rejected, unqualified ones are hired or promoted, and the inevitable potential of legal action increases. And, it could get worse. What do you think will happen when all those incompetent employees think they should be promoted to management?

Reducing the odds of making a wrong decision requires tests, interview questions, application blanks, and so forth that are grounded in a solid theory of job performance; that is, they measure things that cause high or low performance. If you cannot, for certain, prove you are measuring factors that cause performance, you will never graduate from the half-wrong club.

“If it does not cause, you need to pause!”

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.

The site also lists the 10 most popular micro-resumes, selected, presumably, on the basis of the number of forwards. (Retweet they would be called, if on Twitter, which, incidentally, is banned in China.)

If you take a look at the micro-resumes, you’ll immediately notice that Google’s English translation (pictured above) runs much longer than 140 characters. That’s where language makes a difference and may keep the micro-resume from gaining much popularity in that part of the world that uses the Latin alphabet.

China’s alphabet allows users to convey far more information in 140 characters than does English.

That hasn’t stopped recruiters in the U.S. and Europe from tweeting job postings to their followers. Typically, these are two or three word descriptions with a link to the full post. Occasionally, Twitter using job seekers will do the same, with a link to an online resume or LinkedIn address.

Once tweeted, however, these jobs and resume pointers descend down a follower’s list, disappearing with a rapidity dictated by how many Twitter connections a person has. Sina’s micro-blogging job service works differently, indexing and highlighting jobs and resumes. Instead of sorting things the way Twitter does — by a chaotic system of hashtags — Sina created a separate site for the recruiting service.

Whether the micro-resume has legs even in China remains to be seen. The Xinhua report quotes one HR director who has doubts:

Wang Dong, a human resources director working for an online advertising company, says that he is very cautious when dealing with microresumes. He believes that they aren’t long enough to provide a suitable introduction for employers.

“Microresumes aren’t necessarily suitable for every industry,” Wang says. “Advertisers and media companies are the most suitable targets for this kind of recruitment.”

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.

An article called “How social influence can undermine the wisdom of the crowd effect” discusses how we as social beings are subject to influences that will often make people revise their estimations and affect the accuracy of the outcome. In their research, the authors show how the “social influence effect” — such as learning that an interviewer, or your boss, favors a candidate — diminishes the diversity of the group without improving its accuracy. The experiments conducted by the authors tested objective, verifiable data and controlled for social conformity biases.

The group subject to social influence became actually less reliable in guiding the decision-makers. As the group is influenced to head in one direction, and the range of options are reduced, the supreme perverse effect is the “confidence effect,” or overconfidence, as everyone reaches an agreement although the decision may be wrong.

This can translate into a hiring manager who relies on 10 very keen interviewers being supremely confident in their decision and exhibiting a high level of certainty while the accuracy, in reality, isn’t improved a bit.

Ultimately, this very fascinating research shows that even though we tend to believe that debating a decision will lead to a better choice, this assumption fails to take into consideration the fact that no one is immune to social influence.

In an interview debrief that organizations tend to perform by phone or in person, the most vocal person usually impacts the outcome and the decisions of all the others. All those involved will eventually merge toward a common assessment and the confidence of the group will be raised. The group will then make a decision feeling very certain they have made a good choice, but a single answer is not the stamp of accuracy.

To prevent this, ask for feedback on the rating of the candidates before any discussion starts. This can be done online before the meeting or even at the meeting before it starts. If you are leading the hiring committee and are leaning toward a particular judgment, write it down rather than consciously or unconsciously leading the group in the direction you wish to take.

The next time you debate the hiring or promotion of an individual, think about Francis Galton and the ox and ask yourself if the decision has been truly driven by diverse feedback or the views of one strong minded, vocal individual.

Sunday, Monster launched BeKnown, an app that lets Facebook users harness their social graph to find a new job. If this sounds familiar, its because it is exactly what BranchOut  has been offering since its public launch in January.

The growth is impressive. (BeKnown just launched Sunday, so there is no comparable chart, but right now Facebook says that there are 6,434 monthly users.)

But there’s another chart that’s also interesting — it’s the percent of those monthly BranchOut app users that have been coming back each day. And it looks like most of those new users are not sticking around for long.

BranchOut and BeKnown are both interesting offerings, but if they are going to effectively compete with LinkedIn, they are going to have to follow in LinkedIn’s footsteps and find a way to build a more lasting connection with Facebook’s users.

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. Having the knack of keeping things to themselves is not a virtue of the virtual team member. Effective virtual work teams require interdependency on others. So while self-reliance and self-motivation are critical success traits, the employee must also appreciate the need to collaborate and willingness to share common goals and responsibilities.

The ability to deal with ambiguity is another critical personality trait. People who like fixed schedules, explicit instructions, and predictability won’t generally perform very well in the virtual work setting. Virtual work requires independent thought and a willing to take initiative. That means sometimes the employee will make a mistake or go off in the wrong direction. Effective virtual workers can’t wait for every instruction or wait to be told what to do.

But both the manager and employee must acknowledge that taking initiative has risks, and that personal accountability and accepting responsibility are must-have characteristics. Employees who take feedback and criticism personally will struggle if not fail when working far from the maddening crowd.

Communication skills are also must-have job skills. Since much of the interaction a virtual worker does is verbal and written, not visual or face-to-face, he must have the ability to draft easy-to-understand and to-the-point communications. While dealing with ambiguity is a working style asset for the telecommuter, it can be a liability when it comes to communicating with others.

While offering flex time and telecommuting as an employee retention strategy has significant benefit, not all candidates or current employees can make the transition. The onus for selecting the right candidates to work from home falls upon the employer, and more specifically, human resources.

Obviously one good indicator might be experience. Has the employee worked remotely before? What were the circumstances? How effective was he or she? Was this a full-time virtual position or was the employee allowed to work from home just a day or two a week? What were his/her responsibilities? Did both the candidate and employer benefit from the arrangement, or just the worker? If the manager had an opportunity to re-hire this person again, would telecommuting even be an option they would offer?

Unfortunately most workers don’t have a solid track record on working virtual. An estimated 2.9 million employees worked primarily from home in 2009, while as many as 33.7 million worked from home at least once a month. The requirements to work remotely every day versus only on the days your child is sick or the weather is bad are vastly different. So how can an employer identify employees and candidates who are cut out for virtual work and telecommuting if past experience is not a factor?

Personality tests offer a reliable indicator of job fit for the virtual worker. Referring back to the Global Integration research I mentioned earlier, self-reliance, self-motivation, flexibility, collaborative tendencies, dealing with ambiguity, criticism tolerance, multitasking, and task closure (follow-through) are all traits and characteristics that can be assessed using a validated pre-employment assessment test. While the results of such a personality assessment are not conclusive (nor should they ever be used as the only hiring indicator), they are very accurate at identifying the high-risk candidates. And should the manager offer telecommuting as a work option, the results of many employee assessment offer insight about how best to manage, develop, and mentor the employee.

Fortune’s 2011 list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” offer telecommuting opportunities to employees. The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey reports an increase of employees who worked from home of 61 percent from 2005. With more and more companies struggling to find and retain qualified workers as well as manage costs, the number of virtual workers is sure to rise. But as with every job, not every worker is qualified to fill the position. Companies must add the ability to work virtually to their list of job competencies and be able to assess accurately the candidate’s ability or potential. Otherwise, the advantages of employing virtual workers will quickly be outweighed by lost productivity and turnover.

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.”

This is no JobSerf program, where someone else applies for jobs on your behalf. Or even a RiseSmart Transition Concierge that sends participants job listings, and includes access to a coaching library, webinars, and some phone consultation.

Signature is a career coaching program; an online equivalent of executive outplacement. It requires the active engagement of participants who must follow certain rules, including attendance at a majority of online meetings, in order to qualify for the money-back guarantee.

If that seems like a catch, it is. But one that only makes sense. The FAQs tell prospects right up front: “Signature is designed for the job seeker who is dedicated, motivated, and willing to put in the time and resources to get the job that’s the right fit.”

The terms and conditions tell prospects that in the first 60 days they must:

• Attend seven sessions;
• Complete the first several steps of the program;
• Apply to six “well-fitted” positions;
• Complete additional assignments, presumably from the personal coach.

There are other requirements for the balance of the program, including attendance at a majority of the online meetings, and continued applications.

Signature, as Cenedella notes on his personal blog, isn’t for everyone. That’s probably why there is no online signup; interested job-seekers have to call TheLadders to discuss the program.

In testing for several months, Signature claims a 90 percent success rate. Says Cenedella, “More than a hundred people have already completed the current edition of the six-month program with a success rate of more than 90%.”

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.

Corporate culture, often the subject of much debate, is quite simply the real operating environment of the organization. It has nothing to do mission, vision, and values, and everything to do with the unwritten rules that are inferred every day by management actions. Many CEOs who led less-than-successful turnarounds did so with the expectation that the answer was in product development, R&D, or sales, overlooking the role of talent management.

Talent Is Key in Any Turnaround

Despite CEOs acknowledging that developing “strategies for managing talent” (Growth Reimagined, PwC, 2011) is the most critical business problem they face in this difficult business environment, there are few leaders in talent management bold enough to accept the challenge of leading a business turnaround. Recruiting leaders often say that they want to have a strategic impact, but focusing on tactical issues and efficiency demonstrates that they don’t know what actions they need to take in order to be strategic.

“Being Strategic” Requires a Performance Culture

Southwest Airlines Bags Fly Free Photo Shoot

Being strategic requires actions that demonstrate a multi-year impact on the primary strategic goals of the organization (i.e. revenue, profit, productivity, market share, time to market, and innovation). In cases where a dramatic business turnaround is required, CEOs often articulate the need to build a performance culture (every employee, every manager, every process expected to increase performance and innovation). Unfortunately, many organizations attempting to transition fail to consider the insane impact a talent management activity like recruiting can have on corporate culture.

It’s no secret that firms notorious for delivering record-shattering performance invest significantly in both recruiting capability and capacity, while those that fail often institute cost-containment efforts without any consideration for functional effectiveness. Companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos accept that the recruiting function can dramatically impact corporate culture by managing the caliber of talent that makes it through the front door. There are few more impactful ways to build a performance culture then to populate your firm exclusively with new hires who know how to build that culture rapidly.

The First Step – Accepting the Role of Gatekeeper

By accepting gatekeeper responsibility, recruiting leaders send a clear message to everyone inside the organization that they will ensure that all new hires will either be a top performer, an innovator, or a game-changer. This is necessary because despite the crisis, individual hiring managers will likely continue hiring in their own short-term interest if allowed to.

20 Additional Steps Recruiting Can Take To Help Turnaround a Business

The following 20 actions are the most impactful actions a recruiting leader interested in driving a turnaround effort should consider. They are broken into four categories.

Change Goals, Targets, and Branding

1. Shift the goal to “hiring for the good of the firm” – traditionally the recruiting function has allowed most managers to hire for their short-term, self-serving needs. In a performance culture, that tendency must be changed so that all hiring decisions are made based on meeting the goals of what is best for the overall performance of the organization. Follow the example of Google and consider instituting a broad hiring team that will ensure that every hire fits the new culture.
2. Change the targeted competencies – recruiting leaders need to change the definition of “corporate fit.” Organizations must target individuals with new competencies who would not “fit” the old culture. This is necessary because in a performance culture, every job description and selection criteria must emphasize performance, the ability to lead, and the ability to successfully innovate. You can’t produce significantly different results if you hire the same competencies that got you into your current situation.
3. Change employer branding and recruiting communications – in order to attract the very best, recruiting and corporate communications must shift messaging radically. The new approach must clearly communicate that “things are changing” and articulate why the organization would be not only relevant, but also an exciting place for top performers, game-changers, and innovators to work. Those involved in hiring must be provided with a sell sheet that helps them to effectively communicate the changes that are occurring and how the new culture would be exciting to top candidates. Emphasize fast decision-making and a chance to try new things.

Change Who You Hire

1. Begin with a few magnet hires — start by identifying and hiring a handful of “magnet” individuals. This will quickly send a message throughout the industry that the very best have recently decided to join your firm. By bringing in a few well-known people, you automatically attract others who admire them.
2. Prioritize the hiring of managers and leaders – managers and leaders have the most influence over changing the culture and improving performance and innovation. As a result, recruiting must prioritize the hiring of great managers and leaders, so that they are filled with change agents and innovators.
3. Prioritize high-impact jobs – in a performance culture, everyone acknowledges that all jobs do not have an equal impact on business results. Because at least initially there will be a limited number of hiring opportunities, with its remaining hires, recruiting must identify and prioritize the business units and the jobs that will have the most impact on performance, innovation, and the turnaround. Recruiting leaders must influence the CFO and COO to prioritize the authorization of requisitions in those high-impact areas.
4. Hire change agents – whenever you hire regular employees, emphasize the identification and hiring of “change agents” with a track record for implementing change. Also target individuals who have a history of intolerance for the status quo and those who overly defend it. Look for “fist raisers” and individuals who will instantly speak up when they see a performance weaknesses or a lack of innovation.
5. Shift the focus to external hires – a successful turnaround will require employees with a completely different skill-set and a mentality. Although organizations normally have a preference for promoting and transferring current employees, changing long-held employee values and behaviors may require more time than the turnaround allows. You need to shift the ratio of internal versus external hires to emphasize external hires not overly tied to the current culture.
6. Target your competitors — if you’re going to beat your competitors in the marketplace, you also have to beat them in the talent market. Winning the battle for top talent must start with a competitive analysis that includes the strengths and weaknesses of each of your major talent competitors. Because a large percentage of the top performers in your industry are likely working at one of your competitors, target your competition’s best talent. Hiring from competitors not only helps your firm but it also simultaneously degrades the capability of your competitors.
7. Speed requires team lift-outs — in order to minimize the time it takes for your turnaround, you may have to target and successfully recruit entire intact teams from other firms. This is because intact teams are already used to working together, and as a result, they often can produce results much faster than a newly organized team of “strangers.”

Change Your Processes

1. Change the assessment process to identify performers and innovators – at least for the first year of the turnaround, recruiting must change its resume screening, interviewing, and candidate assessment processes, so that they effectively screen out anyone who is not a top performer or an innovator. Instead of simply relying on candidate statements, require each candidate to demonstrate their ability to perform and innovate on real problems that the company is currently facing.
2. Emphasize proactive referrals — in order to ensure success with limited recruiting resources, every employee must become a talent scout. Start by approaching current employees who are known for performance and innovation and specifically ask them to use their social networks to identify and make employee referrals of those who fit the new culture.
3. Focus on direct sourcing — you cannot assume that broad advertising will successfully reach and convince the people that you really need to apply (especially if you are targeting individuals who are not actively looking). Instead, your sourcing effort must proactively identify and sell the specific individuals who you need to build your culture of performance and innovation.
4. Improve coordination and sharing – effective recruiting relies heavily on other HR and talent management functions. In order to maximize speed and results, interrelated functions need to be more closely coordinated and integrated. A process must also be put in place that ensures rapid and widespread best practice sharing. You may also need to develop a SWAT team to rapidly address the most difficult recruiting problems that come up.
5. Develop metrics to identify problems – in a performance culture, metrics improve accountability and spur continuous improvement. As a leader of the turnaround, recruiting must lead by example by developing quarterly performance metrics that quickly allow everyone to identify hiring successes and failures.

Additional Actions to Consider

1. Show the business impacts of recruiting – recruiting leaders cannot assume that executives and hiring managers will automatically see the tremendous economic impact that recruiting can have on the business turnaround. In order to get executives and managers to own recruiting, both groups must be shown the direct dollar impact on revenue that results from hiring top performers, game-changers, and innovators. In fact, all recruiting results must be converted into their dollar impact on corporate revenue and sales.
2. Negotiate control over other types of labor — because as much as 50% of an organization’s “labor” may come through contingency or outsourcing channels, the head of recruiting must ensure that they have some degree of influence or visibility into contingent hiring as well. This is necessary so that everyone (regular or contingent) is on the same page when it comes to performance and innovation.
3. Re-train your recruiters – in order to hire the best, you will need to retrain your recruiters so that they have the mindset and the capability of bringing in top performers, game-changers, and innovators. The tools and technologies that you provide to recruiters and managers must also improve if you are to successfully recruit top talent into a firm with a lagging reputation. Focus on referral and social media tools because they are effective and inexpensive.
4. Reward great hiring – in order to get managers to focus on great hiring, work with those in compensation and performance appraisal to add the hiring of top performers, game-changers, and innovators to the bonus criteria of every manager and executive.
5. Improve internal movement – because resource limitations will restrict the amount of external hiring, it is a good idea to use your corporate recruiters internally to identify and move innovators and top-performing employees quickly into areas within the firm where they can have a larger impact. Influence the promotion criteria so that they promote based on a recent record of performance and innovation, rather than on experience and loyalty.

Final Thoughts

In my former role as a chief talent officer, I can tell you that I learned quickly that the prime differentiator between great and average recruiting leaders was their ability to see the tremendous business impact of great recruiting. Once a recruiting leader realizes that recruiting alone can have a tremendous impact on building a performance culture and on turning around a struggling business, they are simply unstoppable.

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.

Borrowing liberally from other Internet social sites, Monster has added enough bells and whistles to appeal to younger users accustomed to interacting more intimately and frequently.

For instance, like LinkedIn, you can have your contacts endorse you. As they do, and as you achieve certain milestones — number of connections, length of time with an employer, for example — you get badges, like on Foursquare. And, similar to Jobvite and Jobmagic, friends can recommend jobs, which will show up on your site. (Jobs from Monster.com are also tucked onto the jobs tab.)

Besides those general LinkedIn-style endorsements, BeKnown enables skills-specific acknowledgments.

Recruiters, who, obviously, can create their own BeKnown profiles, can also claim company pages where, once they’ve built a network, can post jobs for free.

What’s not evident in this initial, beta release, is a method of conducting the kinds of professional conversations that active LinkedIn members use to enhance their brand, gain notice, or for help with business issues.

Josh Bersin, who got an advance look at BeKnown, says it “has the potential to become one of the major social recruiting networks in the marketplace.”

In a very extensive blog post, Bersin details the specific features of this initial release, and notes some of the features expected in the  future, in particular a bounty program to pay users who offer up qualified candidates.

He says the new service is likely to appeal mostly to young career-oriented users, with more limited experience than those found on LinkedIn.

That’s an observation Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li shares. “If I’m looking for an entry-level researcher or intern I won’t find them on LinkedIn,” the Financial Times quotes her as saying. “When you’re coming out of college, you don’t have a professional network, you have Facebook.”

Can Monster make a success of BeKnown?

Bersin says the company is planning an extensive promotional campaign, presumably a global one, since the app is available in 19 languages and some 35 countries.

The company is so sure it has developed a weapon in the recruiting war with LinkedIn and other social networks — including, curiously, Facebook itself — that the company demanded a signed non-disclosure agreement before journalists, bloggers, and others could preview the site last week. (ERE was invited to preview BeKnown, but declined to sign the NDA.)

Li, who previewed BeKnown, said Monster has “a long row to hoe,” adding “I also find it very, very interesting.”

“If I’m looking for an entry-level researcher or intern I won’t find them on LinkedIn,” she said. “When you’re coming out of college, you don’t have a professional network, you have Facebook.”

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.

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.

Much of this resistance or misapplication can be attributed to both the vendor and the customer. On the vendor side it’s a lack of understanding of their clients’ real recruiting challenges, pressured by the need to sell product in order to reach Moore’s Early Majority group. On the customer side, much of the misapplication is due to being peer pressured into buying something that has some value, but not being able to fully use it properly.

With this adoption rate concept as a backdrop, below are my current predictions for recruiting circa 2020. As a party elder who has been through 3-5 of these technological transformations, I’d urge everyone to be an early-adopter, despite the skepticism you have. The first 25% always have the most success, and then diminishing returns set in. But being first is not enough. Proper implementation is the key. Without the proper implementation, the technology won’t get you there, regardless of how fast you adopt.

While some of the following points are broad projections, most are reasonable extrapolations of current trends. (Sign-up now for a webcast we’re holding on this important topic on July 14th.)

The Future of Recruiting 2015-2020 — Seven Major Trends to Consider

1. Category-based hiring will replace individual job requisitions. Rather than drive candidates to individual requisitions, jobs will be posted by groups or projects (i.e., sales, engineering, operations, product launch, etc.) regardless of level. From these “hubs” candidates will be automatically matched with potential opportunities that best meet their capabilities and interests. Specific requisitions will be written after a candidate is selected. The legal issues associated with this shift are now being identified and addressed.
2. Intelligent profile matching will augment SEO. Currently the big winners are those that can get their postings to the top of a job search using search engine optimization techniques. Creative postings emphasizing career messaging do even better, if they’re easily found. While jobs are now pushed to candidates that match normalized titles, there’s more that can be done here. In the next few years candidates will be able to use Google to map their resume and automatically match this with the best career opportunities across multiple variables, including track record, depth of skills, and personal requirements, among others.
3. Candidates will be hired based on their ability to perform rather than on their absolute level of skills and experience. Current requisition-based hiring is fundamentally flawed. For one thing, having or not having the skills and experiences described, predicts neither success or failure. Worse, top people, even those with the skills and experience described, won’t apply since they’re looking for career moves, not lateral transfers. Job profiles that define successful performance rather than list skills and experiences can eliminate this problem. Here’s a video you can watch to quickly gain a sense of how to convert jobs into careers right now.
4. Integrated workforce planning will drive the recruiting and hiring process. Workforce plans will be automatically generated during the business planning process and updated constantly based on actual operating performance. These plans will generate job requirements by category and automatically match the best prospects in a company’s internal and extended talent network 3-6 months ahead of time to begin a customized CRM campaign.
5. 360° talent networking will become the primary external candidate sourcing process. As everyone in the workforce becomes connected by one degree of separation with everyone else, it will be easy to instantly match potential prospects with open opportunities. Dynamic talent communities will allow companies to focus their sourcing and recruiting efforts on pre-qualified prospects. The result: maximize quality of hire, minimize cost, and move to a just-in-time hiring environment that best balances candidate supply with demand. Implementing PERP (proactive ERP) programs is the first step in this movement.
6. The hiring manager self-serve recruiting model will change the role of corporate recruiting. As search and automated matching tools become more prevalent, hiring managers will be able to personally handle the bulk of their own recruiting efforts. This will change the role of the corporate recruiter and the corporate recruiting department. As part of this, tools and training will be pushed to hiring managers to enable them to define the work, conduct the assessment, recruit the candidate, and negotiate an offer.
7. Work will be customized to meet individual and demographic needs. As matching technology improves, it will be easier to accommodate the job and career needs of a demographically changing workforce. Emphasis on project-based work will allow for more contingent workers, with career-based opportunities provided to those with the potential and desire to grow with, and lead, the company.
8. The underlying architecture of the ATS will need to be altered to address these changes. Unless these changes are supported by the ATS vendors, progress will be painful. In this case, some new type of ATS vendor could emerge to claim the lead role, possibly Jobs2Web, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Avature, Infusionsoft, or maybe even Facebook. Prospect management is rapidly changing the face of recruiting, and whoever does this best could also become No. 1 on the ATS side.

While these predictions are somewhat speculative, current technologies and trends suggest that something comparable is more likely to occur than not. The key is for company leaders to assess the validity of the ongoing trends, quickly identify potential problems and roadblocks within their own organizations, take immediate action to address critical issues, and begin pilot programs to assess the value of different approaches. The future of hiring is just around the next corner. You’ll have a chance to see it more closely in a webcast we’re holding on July 14th.

“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.

For exempt workers, it’s pretty much black and white. Employment lawyers agree that for those salaried people, after-hours contacts just go with the job.

Anthony Oncidi

“It’s not a wage and hour issue” if the employee is exempt, says Anthony Oncidi, head of the California Labor & Employment Law Group at Proskauer Rose in Los Angeles. “They do the work or they can choose to leave.”

For non-exempt workers though, “it’s very much an issue we are beginning to see percolate through the courts.”

The U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act and state labor rules require employers to pay non-exempt workers for after-hours work that goes beyond minor, almost negligible amounts. Responding to a supervisor’s call about where a certain file might be, or if a bill was paid might be considered de minimus and not compensable if the time involved was trivial. Historically, such time slices weren’t easily measured and were too small to be worth the effort. The rule of thumb was less than 10 minutes.

Now, though, digital devices easily record and track messages and online time. As Oncidi notes, “it is no longer a swearing contest.” And companies that previously issued BlackBerries to only certain employees now are distributing them widely.

In Chicago, a police sergeant brought a class action suit for overtime pay because he and others were required to check and respond to messages on their department issued devices while off duty. The case is awaiting trial. A similar sort of case was brought by an ATT worker in California. The case was dismissed last year.

It will only be a matter of time before one of the cases reaches an appeals court, which will have to wrestle with the de minimus issue.

Todd Fredrickson

Attorney Todd Fredrickson, managing partner in the Denver office of labor firm Fisher & Phillips, says his rule of thumb for duration is five minutes. But things get fuzzy in situations where, say, there are multiple emails each of which may entail only a few moments.

What he’s telling his employer clients is “if you don’t want to pay for it, don’t let it happen.”

“This is a hot one for collective action,” he cautions.

Under the FLSA a successful plaintiff collects the back overtime, plus “liquidated damages” equal to the amount of back pay, and the employer pays attorney fees. And the FSLA provides for class actions, but the employees must opt-in. However, that’s not a major hurdle, so employers shouldn’t take much comfort in that.

What they should do, says Oncidi, is to reexamine who gets electronic devices, and make clear what the overtime policy is — to the rank and file as well as to managers.

“Don’t just let these things go on,” he says. Companies need to be “having a specific consciousness about these things.” Even unauthorized overtime has to be paid if the company “permits or suffers the employee to work. That’s what the language says,” explains Oncidi. Even if the policy says no overtime unless authorized, if the circumstances implicitly mean work is to be done but no express authorization is included, it has to be paid.

His example: An executive on an overseas trip who emails his non-exempt assistant who is off the clock to rebook a flight and rearrange the itinerary has implicitly authorized the overtime.

While exempt workers have no legal rights to a 40-hour work week, it doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences for an employer.

In California, even exempt employees are entitled to a real vacation. Text, call, or email an exempt vacationing employee and if they do work, the law forbids you from counting it as a vacation day.

Even so, Right Management’s Morrow points out that employers shouldn’t expect everyone to be “on” 24/7. “If this is everyday, you can’t sustain it,” she says. Tired workers lose focus and productivity is hurt. Turnover goes up and the company employment brand is hurt.

“The 24/7 workplace is here to stay. But workers need a break. They need downtime to decompress.”

Workers regularly swamped by after-hours emails, texts, or calls should raise the issue with the boss. Rather than complain, she suggests inquiring, counseling employees to, “Talk to them about their expectations about the emails. What do they expect in the way of a response.”

Some bosses will just fire off an idea, a project, a reminder as they think of it and not expect an immediate response.

Morrow has one other suggestion: take an electronics-free weekend. Let everyone know that you’ll be unavailable all weekend.

And hope that unlike my boss, yours will understand.

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. Any of these can be the point at which an email fails to get to the recipient as intended. Some of these are in your control and some are not. It is often difficult to determine where the guilt or innocence lies when it comes to email spam blocking. Typically when you send an email, the route that email takes is as follows:

1. Your email application (Outlook, Exchange, Eudora, etc.) — this is the place you create your email.
2. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) — you use this to connect to the mail server that is going to send your email out.
3. Your email provider’s SMTP server — this is the mail server used for sending emails.
4. Your recipient’s POP server — this is the mail server that receives emails for your recipient of the email.
5. Your recipient’s email application (Outlook, Exchange, etc.) — this is where your email is received and viewed by the recipient.

When you receive email, the process is reversed. At each step of the way, spam blocking is usually enacted in some way. It’s a wonder that any email ever gets to the end user! While some of this is totally out of your hands, there are two distinct ways you can potentially control the receipt or blocking of email messages.

Pointers for Receiving Emails From Clients or Applicants

First of all, think about your attitude toward spam. Recruiters are a different breed when it comes to receiving email. Many recruiters have the attitude of “I never saw an email I didn’t like.” On the receiving side for a recruiter there may not be such a thing as spam. As a recruiter, would you rather have to delete 50-100 emails each day that are spam or potentially miss out on that placement email that puts money in your pocket? Tightening down on your spam control may cause you to miss an email from a client requesting to interview an applicant or you may be missing a rich source for leads.

The more you or your email provider put software in place to stop you from receiving spam, the higher the risk of  important emails either being totally blocked or getting delivered to your Junk Email folder.

If you are using an email program like Outlook to open your email, you can control some of the spam settings in addition to training Outlook on what are good and what bad emails. In Outlook you have the option of controlling the level of spam filtering you have. In addition, when you right-click on any email, you have the option to add the sender to your blocked sender list, which moves the email to your junk folder and puts their name on your blocked list. It also allows you to add safe senders to a list, so all the mail from that individual will always be delivered to your Inbox, regardless of the content. So if you are missing emails, the first thing to do is check how your Outlook is set!

What if the Email Is Getting Blocked Somewhere in the Middle?

ISP and email provider spam blocking is the hardest thing to track down. Spam is much more than a nuisance of having to wade through junk email to find good ones. Many spam emails contain viruses, malware, or links to websites that harbor malicious software, so ISP and email providers usually have robust programs in place to stop this kind of email. You will want to be cautions of these malicious emails, too, especially if you are “letting everything through.” You can always confirm an email is valid if you take the time to look at Internet headers. Most email programs have a way to look at the Internet header, which always shows you the real sender, regardless of what is in the From address. In Outlook you can just right click the email and go to the Message Options. Here is an example of an Internet header:

Return-Path: <support@go4.bz>
Delivered-To: support@846815.867606
Received: (qmail 19740 invoked by uid 78); 13 Jun 2011 14:08:57 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO cloudmark1) (10.49.16.98)
by 0 with SMTP; 13 Jun 2011 14:08:57 -0000
Return-Path: <support@go4.bz>
X-NETSOL-Whitelist: Yes
Received: from [205.178.146.51] ([205.178.146.51:57007] helo=omr1.networksolutionsemail.com)
by cm-mr23 (envelope-from <support@go4.bz>)
(ecelerity 2.2.3.46 r(37554)) with ESMTP
id D5/49-27784-8F916FD4; Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:08:57 -0400
Received: from cm-omr14 (mail.networksolutionsemail.com [205.178.146.50])
by omr1.networksolutionsemail.com (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id p5DE8uQo008126
for <support@go4.bz>; Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:08:56 -0400
Authentication-Results:  cm-omr14 smtp.user=support@go4.bz; auth=pass (LOGIN)
X-Authenticated-UID: support@go4.bz
Received: from [64.208.166.62] ([64.208.166.62:2649] helo=appsrv3)
by cm-omr14 (envelope-from <support@go4.bz>)
(ecelerity 2.2.2.41 r(31179/31189)) with ESMTPA
id 3D/CE-22125-8F916FD4; Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:08:56 -0400
From: “Gopher Support” <support@go4.bz>
To: <support@go4.bz>
Subject: Test message
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:08:56 -0600
Message-ID: <002801cc29d3$6f109de0$4d31d9a0$@bz>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_0029_01CC29A1.24762DE0″
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0
Thread-Index: Acwp0223TgIxcz0OSg+9iMfIudDMcQ==
Content-Language: en-us

Look for the “Received From” information which will have the real mail server name and IP address that sent the email. If the domains don’t match with the “From” address on the email, you can be 99% sure it is SPAM and should be deleted — and deleted from your deleted items.

If your ISP is blocking good emails, it will help you get your point across to them if you can have the sender get you the Internet header like above and the email that shows the reason it was blocked  You may find that you get into the realm of reverse DNS lookups or SMTP protocols to determine if an email is valid. Don’t let the technology deter you. These are just other ways that an Internet provider tries to protect you from spam. If you find they are blocking your emails from getting to you, and they are using spam-blocking software, see if you can remove your email address from using the filter so you get your good emails. If also helps to have a backup email address at one of the free email providers like Yahoo that you can have a sender send to if you are not getting their email at your regular address. Each major mail provider uses different ways to determine spam, so you will find that you may not get an email sent to you at your main email but it does come to your Gmail or hotmail account.

Pointers for Sending Emails to Clients or Candidates

The first red flag for most spam filters and for readers of email is something coming from goodguy27@gmail.com. There are two things to be aware of here. First, if you are in business, you loose legitimacy by not having an email address of yourname@yourcompany.com. Ditch the Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts as your main business accounts! These email sources were never meant to be used for business purposes. Setup a domain name and email address for yourself that defines you and your business. Second, emails from these sources are the main source of spam worldwide and the first emails to get blocked. You are doing yourself a disservice by using one of these for your main business account.

Next, if you send out a lot of unsolicited mailings you will always want to include the information required by the CAN-SPAM act. At a minimum, this must include the physical address of your company and a way to opt out if they no longer want to receive unsolicited emails from you. A lot of providers are looking for this information and will add you to their blacklist if you are not in compliance. AOL will put you on its blacklist if one person at AOL reports you as a spammer. You then have to go to AOL’s website and try and get yourself removed. Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail also have list that will block your emails from being delivered if for some reason you get yourself on a Blacklist.

Lastly, drop the fancy signatures with pictures, logos, etc. and opt for a clean, easy-to-read signature for your email messages. Even if your email doesn’t get tagged as spam, sometimes images are blocked and not visible to the recipient. If this is the only way for you to convey your contact information, you may not be giving your recipients a way to get in touch with you.

Below are some links if you want more information about spam.

• AOL’s postmaster page describing the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance Proposal
• Anti-Spam Research Group. ASRG is part of the IRTF, and affiliated with the IETF
• Anti spam info & resource page of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission
• CAUBE.AU – Fight Spam in Australia, The Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia
• Composing abuse reports — what to send, how to send it, where to send it, and what not to send or do.
• “Computer Incident Advisory Committee’s suggestions: E-Mail Spamming countermeasures: Detection and prevention of E-Mail spamming” (Shawn Hernan, with James R. Cutler and David Harris)
• “Historical Development of Spam Fighting in Relation to Threat of Computer-Aware Criminals, and Public Safety” by Neil Schwartzman
• Mail DDoS Attacks through Mail Non Delivery Messages and Backscatter
• Spam Laws United States, European Union, and other countries’ laws and pending legislation regarding unsolicited commercial email
• Stopping Spam An article about spam in Scientific American
• Yahoo’s Anti-Spam Resource Center
• Spam Filter Comparison
• SpamWise — Tools to check your website for address-harvesting risks

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.”

A periodic contributor to the site, Cocca said he and Spagnola have long been fans of RecruitingBlogs. When Davis decided to sell it and return to hands-on recruiting, Cocca said he and Spagnola immediately considered buying it. “We had already started our own blog, and we both just wanted to make a contribution, to put something out there,” he explained. RecruitingBlogs “trumps it (RecruitingDaily) in every way.”

Tim Spagnola

Acknowledging that $95,000 “is a lot of money,” Cocca said they don’t have any specific plans on monetizing the site beyond the occasional ads and sponsorships already there. “We’re very new” at trying to monetize a private website, Cocca said, adding, “I don’t see banner ads all over the site.”

Nor, he added, will the 28,000 members begin receiving email blasts. While Cocca said, “I do see a value in being able to communicate with the community,” his mailing business — Accurate Mailing Services — wouldn’t be involved. “It’s a direct mail service.”

Cocca, who was on vacation in St. Kitts in the waning days of the auction, joked about making bids via his phone from the airport and elsewhere. “It was exciting,” he said with some understatement.

The deal is expected to close next week. Davis will work with Cocca and Spagnola during a transition.

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.

He was looking for people who like fast-paced work, and — beware of one of recruiting’s most-common buzzwords approaching — people who are passionate about their work. He also wanted people who could “get their fingernails dirty,” perhaps literally, given the new headquarters being a work in progress, people adaptable to change, and who thrive under tight deadlines.

One challenge is that the company’s brand, like Reckitt, is less known than its products. Sure, people know Rubbermaid, but it wasn’t until 1999, about a hundred years after the company started, that Newell even acquired that part of the brand. Much of what the company does — take Goody, for instance — involves products people know but don’t know who makes them. Another is Graco, known by most parents and benefitting from new car-seat laws in Brazil.

In addition to all the branding challenges, there was red tape to deal with when it comes to all this hiring in Europe. “We like to move at certain speed,” he says, “and sometimes you have to sit back and wait for things to happen.”

One of Vazquez’s recruiting hires is well-versed in social media. She’s working on improving the company’s relationships with colleges in EMEA. She’s also working with the corporate staff, which likes a certain amount of consistency, as she improves the company’s Facebook and other pages. “Are we where we want to be with regards to social media right now?” Vazquez asks, rhetorically, answering: “Probably not.”

Anyhow, this successful move is now mainly in what Vazquez calls the “rearview mirror.” The hires are pretty much complete, and the new headquarters has opened, though Vazquez tells me the Swiss government still has to fully approve/establish the company. It went better than expected, he says, but was “a learning experience. It’s not as easy as doing business in the U.S. where everything is more cookie cutter, if you will. Every country is a totally different world.”

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.

See what I did there? I compared ComScore’s time online in Europe to LinkedIn’s global counts of men, women, and their total connections. Different measures.

Getting closer to an oranges-to-oranges comparison, Rapleaf, a data analysis firm, found that women had more friends and deeper relationships than did men on social sites. The study came out in 2008, so its findings are dated, but more recent reports tend to confirm them.

Pew just released a report on who uses social media, which found that 56 percent are female, a gain of three points since 2008. On Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace women are more plentiful by far than men.

But, when it comes to networking on LinkedIn, men are way ahead of women; 63 percent participation by men vs. 37 percent for women, says Pew, which did the counting last fall.

With that kind of discrepancy, it’s no wonder that LinkedIn’s own data showed men to be the savvier business networkers. That holds true even in areas where women might be expected to dominate.

Take the cosmetics industry. LinkedIn found even though women outnumber men, it’s the men who are the savvier networkers.  Mary Kay — yes indeed, the cosmetics company with the pink everything branding — is a “very male savvy company,” LinkedIn reports.

HR, a female-dominated occupation, is another male networking surprise. In the U.S. and in Australia, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, Spain, and the U.K., men were found to be the savvier networkers.

On the other hand, in the tobacco industry, it’s just the other way around. Women are the better networkers.

LinkedIn speculates the minority sex has to network harder than the dominant sex to break into those industries.

Overall, concludes LinkedIn, “Globally and in the U.S. men are savvier online professional networkers than women.”

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.

“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.

Based in the U.K., Jobpartners has 68 clients, including 16 of the Global 500, who deploy its suite of talent management products across 50 countries and 28 languages. Its product lineup mirrors what Taleo offers — recruitment, succession planning, performance management, and social networking tools — and, like Taleo, it is SaaS based.

Besides acquiring the clients, Taleo also gains feet on the street, doubling the size of its sales and support team in Europe.

“This acquisition creates an opportunity for us to accelerate our expansion outside of North America by increasing our customer base, increasing our local sales and support capacity, as well as taking advantage of the Jobpartners Eastern European development center,” said Gregoire in announcing the deal.

Nothing was said of the transition in the announcement; however, it’s a good bet that Taleo and Jobpartners representatives will be meeting with the European customers to discuss transitioning them to an all-Taleo lineup when it stops offering Jobpartners products.

The deal is expected to close in the third quarter and add between $2 and $3 million to Taleo’s revenues. The company had revenue of $71.5 million for the first quarter of this year, losing $2.17 million or 5 cents a share. However, Taleo has grown revenue each quarter for more than a year, despite the rocky global economy, which has translated into a stock price (up over $1 today at $35.50) that has more grown 75 percent since January of last year.

During that time, Taleo bought up three other companies — Cytiva, Learn.com, and Worldwide Compensation. Learn and Worldwide complemented Taleo’s suite, adding compensation and learning technology to the product lineup. Cytiva brought a number of SMB clients.

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:

Applicant Tracking Systems: Companies need these systems to help manage their candidate pool. There are so many out there to choose from. Where do you start? Do you need it to integrate with payroll and HR? Why? Why not? Do you know the right questions to ask so you don’t end up with a product that doesn’t suit your needs or is so complex that your employee compliance is low? There is one very well-known company out there today whose product I’ve yet to hear one positive thing about from any recruiter using it. Remember, just because you recognize the company’s name does not mean it’s a product you should buy or that it will suit your requirements. More bells and whistles are not necessarily a good thing.

Corporate Careers Page: How many of you have considered the pros and cons of requiring applicants to register on your careers page? Are you thinking, “We want them to register so we can have their information.” or “We’d like candidates to feel comfortable coming to our careers page”? The first is about you. The second is about the candidate. I’m going to assert you want them to register so you’ll have them in your database for the times you need to search out candidates who have already applied. Probably the most significant concern for applicants is confidentiality. I know if I was confidentially looking around to see what types of jobs were available I wouldn’t want to register for some company’s website. There’s just no guarantee of confidentiality without knowing who may be looking at my personal information. Call me paranoid, but it’s not something that gives me the warm and fuzzies.

I popped onto a few sites today and one F50 company allows you to search everything they have open globally without registering for their site. Bravo for them. I looked at several postings and there wasn’t one that didn’t have at least one typo. Do you think the CEO would be happy about this? This is a reflection not only on the head of their recruiting organization but on the company as a whole. Are they this sloppy when it comes to building and selling software? This also tells me a lot about their recruitment department.

Twitter: Are you spamming out tweets about open reqs or really thinking about the best way to use 140 characters? How can you capture someone’s attention and have them take notice? How many followers do you have? Are your followers really reading your tweets and potentially forwarding them to their friends? Have you really thought out your Twitter strategy and how you should be using it for it to be most effective?

LinkedIn: Are you using LinkedIn in the same way as Twitter? Are you sending the same messages to LinkedIn and Twitter? Do you connect with people in order to have quality connections, or just for quantity? If you’re one of those people who connects to any Tom, Dick and Harry, I’d assert you don’t have a strategy. More is not neccessarily better. I know some of you will think I’m an idiot for saying it, but LinkedIn is NOT about seeing who has the most connections.

How is your profile? Is it professional? Is it complete? Is there a professional picture? If you have a picture of you with your kids, at a bar, at a sports event, etc., put it on Facebook. Does is look like a resume or is it conversational in nature while showing your strengths, accomplishments, responsibilities, etc? Does it have real content for someone to see what you’ve done and what you’re currently doing? If you were a candidate and read your profile, are you someone you’d want to work with or connect to?

How are you using LinkedIn to source candidates? Are you sending emails to people or picking up the phone? Why? Why not? People are busy. Have you really thought about what to put in an email or voicemail so that there’s a higher probability of a response?

Video Interviewing Applications: There are a growing number of these and it feels like I’ve evaluated all of them. What I can tell you is that there’s only one I like, and this is becasuse it can be customized to suit each client’s needs. Most of the apps out there now have limited abilities or a set of questions they give you to ask in an interview. I know that wouldn’t work for any of my clients. Can a third party be on the call and be invisible? Sometimes it benefits my hiring interviewers to have me on the call and invisible and sometimes they want me to be part of the interview.

Make sure you are clear about your requirements before you spend money on this “now” technology.

Facebook: Are you posting to your company page? Your personal page? Is it the same strategy as Twitter and LinkedIn? Do you have “friends” of the page who are going to see what you’ve posted?

Telephone: You may be thinking that the phone isn’t high tech. You’re right in one respect but sorely lacking in another. I could, and probably should, write a post about the art of the telephone. How are your phone skills? Do you say “um, uh, you know” a lot to fill space? Shame on you if you do. Some people may think I’m a dinosaur, but I firmly believe there is no other technology more important than the phone (your oral skills). The phone is where you get to know people, build relationships, and gain trust. No other technology can do this for you. Not even lots of LinkedIn recommendations.

I’d like you to look at the examples I’ve given and put a percentage of use to each. Are you using some more than others? Why? Is the percentage you spend using one or two far outweighing the others? Is that large percent of time you use a particular technology returning that amount in candidates? In other words, if you’re spending half your time in your ATS, is that generating half your candidates and are they qualified? If not, you need to reevaluate your processes and procedures to align with your company’s strategies.

The big takeaway here is that no technology will fix a process that doesn’t work, is ineffective, and/or lacking quality recruiters to implement it. Technology must be looked at as an adjunct to enhance a quality, well-thought-out process. It is really nothing more than a tool to help you do your job.

I really want to hear your thoughts on this. My request is that you answer any or all of these questions in the comments sections (or you can send me an email directly) and ask any other questions you’d like to see addressed. This way I’ll be able to write a follow up to this post. Thanks in advance for your participation.

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.”

According to an account in The Wall Street Journal, a Monster India survey discovered that traffic to the site from those outside India increased last year by 65 percent. By late last year, Monster India had 250,000 resumes from those outside the country. The largest number came from residents of Gulf countries in the Middle East and from the U.S.

Meanwhile, in an analysis by Trefis, a community based, stock analytics and predictive pricing site, Monster was given a current price estimate of $14, which was then slightly below its market price. A big part of the price-setting was the decline in Monster’s North American job postings since the start of the recession. Trefis says postings went from 1.9 million in 2007 to 1.1 million last year.

With the upturn in hiring, the postings are rising, but Trefis says Monster will need to close on its federal government contracts. Says Trefis, “If the government delays further and if employment fails to pick up, we could see downside to our estimates.”

Company officials noted the uncertainty in government hiring during its Q1 financial conference call.

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.

Both Amazon and Boston Consulting made the list of the top 25. Candidates who went through an interview with either company thought it tough, but few considered it negatively. And for those who landed a job, working there is at least an OK experience. (Glassdoor has reviewers rate a company numerically, from 1/very dissatisfied, to 5/very satisfied.)

McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm, was considered to have the toughest interview process of all of Glassdoor’s thousands of company ratings. Interviewers there typically throw candidates such curve balls as: “Tell me why the number of car accidents reported to insurance companies is declining.”

Yet, 64 percent of the candidates consider the experience positive. One candidate described it this way: “They are very thorough and put a variety of interesting and challenging scenarios forward for immediate response. If you’re not confident or comfortable with your skill sets and problem solving abilities, this is not the place for you.”

The most negative interviews, according to the reviewers, are at Cree, an LED development and manufacturing firm. It ranked third on the list for difficulty, but with 42 percent of the candidates calling it a negative experience, it topped the list for that category. Only 19 percent, the lowest of all 25 companies ranked, considered the interview experience positively.

Besides asking technical questions and others like “How many barbers do you need in a city of 1 million,” several reviewers — including some who got job offers — thought the interviewers rude, arrogant, or both.