ERE.net

Home Depot has quietly been expanding its use of Facebook in online games and recruitment advertising on people’s profiles, meanwhile operating with transparency and responsiveness — returning emails in 24 hours — often missing elsewhere in online recruiting.

Miko Covin, who manages the employment marketing group, is one of the key players. She and others in that group — people like Alison Foy — came up from recruitment ad agencies like Bernard Hodes, TMP, and JWT Inside.

Covin arrived in 2008 from JWT, wanting to use the basic marketing and advertising skills she’d learned at agencies and apply them to social media and recruiting. In early 2010 (late in the game, she admits) she opened up a personal Facebook page after a friend invited her to be a Facebook member. She also saw the agency world struggling, social media increasing its role in recruiting, and wanted to move Home Depot in the social media direction.

She spent 2010 on education. There were HR people in Home Depot who didn’t get social media; in fact, some even used the now-awkward word “The” preceding “Facebook.” “I don’t know about The Facebook,” one person said.

Covin kept talking up the importance of social media in recruiting. By the spring of 2010 Home Depot began testing two things on Facebook, targeting people based on the information in their profiles. First, it tried advertising store jobs to females, part of an effort to reverse the perception as a company for male jobs. It casted a “huge net first,” Covin says.

It narrowed after that, targeting people — now both male and female — whose profiles indicated they were in HR, and were based in areas where an HR district manager was needed.

It brought on JWT, the recruitment marketing agency, to help with the Facebook project.

By August, satisfied with the approximately 100 resumes it had received over the summer from these efforts, the recruitment marketing team was feeling that Facebook was a success in recruiting, and it should be expanded. keep reading…

Bewildered about the direction employment is taking? Join the club.

Between the official reports, the private ones, and all manner of surveys, you can pretty much find one that will agree with whatever opinion you hold. Or want to hold.

Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said job growth in May was the smallest in eight months, stunning economists and investors who’s already lowered their expectations after being shocked when payroll processor ADP said the private sector added only 38,000 jobs in May. keep reading…

A California gaming-industry company whose value is “fire” is holding a contest to find coders to work for six weeks in July and August, saying “blow our minds while you’re here and we’ll hire you.”

IGN Entertainment says it doesn’t care if you’re flipping burgers or whether you went to Stanford or MIT. You just have to be legal to work in the U.S., 18 years old, and answer some really simple questions. For example:

1. How many pennies could you put on the Golden Gate Bridge without any of them overlapping?
2. Our images have a ratio of 16:9, and our design layouts have 12 pixel wide increments (there are no limits on height). Give examples of three image sizes that would have the correct ratio and would fit the design layout.
3. What is the minimum number of moves required for a knight to cover the entire chess board? Write a program to prove it. Provide a graph with the move number on the x axis and the number of squares covered on the y axis.
4. Creatively prove to us that you meet our value — Fire — that this would be more than just a job to you, and that you are passionate about us. keep reading…

Five years ago someone asked if the adoption of social networks would lead to the demise of job boards. It was a great question, one that forced a number of people to ask: “Why would they? What value were they not delivering? How should they evolve?”

Today there are more job boards than there were five years ago, some of which are attempting to be more social, just as the social networks themselves are looking at how best to serve the employment space. While the job boards have demonstrated a steady pace of evolution, corporate career sites have not. Yes, the graphics are getting better and widgets here and there are displaying live feeds from social media sites, but in the end they serve up the same loathed experience they did five years ago.

Corporate career sites have never been compelling enough to capture an audience. Despite huge advances in content management, content aggregation/curation, and content sharing, most sites remain little more than a thin veil for the ATS-delivered online application. The always informative Doug Berg of Jobs2Web once shared in conversation that all research indicates someone desperately seeking new employment will ignore all content and go direct to whatever link is labeled with a variant of “apply now.” Knowing this, is it still worth it to build out pricy, glossy career sites no one is paying attention to when other avenues to apply are emerging? keep reading…

As important as the first days of a new job are to an employee, onboarding is the unglamorous stepchild of the hiring process. Paperwork has to be filled out, a workspace assigned, gate passes issued, and introductions made.

Even in shops at the top of their game in recruiting, onboarding itself can make or, as was the case with Morgan Hoogvelt’s friend Herb, break the budding relationship.

“Most corporate onboarding programs are designed from the HR administrator’s perspective,” wrote Dr. John Sullivan in a 2008 article on the subject. That’s one reason why HR vendors have focused on automating the form filling part. That’s transactional onboarding.

The few that offer more — Kenexa is one that stands out here — incorporate social components and cultural acclimation into the onboarding program via externally accessible intranets. The best employers provide the new hire facility maps, profiles of their new colleagues, and welcome messages among other information.

But in the end, as Kevin Wheeler wrote, “a manager who takes time to discuss issues with a new employee, who shows concern over that person’s assimilation, and who knows what the employee can do and wants to do, will make wiser decisions and build loyalty over time.”

Now PeopleAnswers, the assessment firm, is introducing a behavioral onboarding component to its assessment software suite. It’s one of those tools that make sense the minute you see it. In a crisp, direct handful of paragraphs it gives a manager guidance into how best to work with the new employee and make their first few months productive. keep reading…

The U.S. added a mere 54,000 non-farm jobs last month, the lowest number in eight months. The unemployment rate ticked up to 9.1 percent.

This morning’s report from the U.S. Department of Labor also adjusted downward by 39,000 the previously reported employment numbers for March and April.

Economists had been expecting much more robust growth and a decline in the unemployment rate. A Dow Jones Newswires survey predicted the government’s report would show a jobs increase of 160,000 and a decline in unemployment to 8.9 percent. However, after being shocked Wednesday when ADP’s monthly private sector jobs report put the increase at 38,000, many economists lowered their predictions, some to 75,000. keep reading…

In the installment of our webinar series, we examined the culture and core values that Zappos is committed to which have allowed them to develop one of the most powerful consumer and employer brands on the market.

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

Private industry job growth may have stalled last month, but HR jobs continued to grow.

New job trend numbers from Indeed.com show that human resource job listings grew 4 percent from April to May. For the month, Indeed counted 66,482 new listings for HR jobs of all types. Since May of last year, that’s a 36 percent increase.

At the same time, the number of searches for these jobs increased 53 percent in the year. And the number of clicks into HR jobs also jumped. Most frequently clicked on in May were HR jobs with the title of generalist, assistant, or manager. Recruiter titled jobs got almost 83,ooo clicks.

“Human resources” was the category’s most frequently searched keyword, with 726,000 searches during the month. Add in the keyword variants such as “HR” and the search total bumps up to almost 900,000. “Recruiter” was second, with 111,000 searches.

Indeed.com has similar data for a dozen other industry categories. Only job listings in the real estate sector showed a consistent decline for the year, the quarter, and the month. The biggest percentage growth in listings for the year was in transportation, at 65 percent. Manufacturing was second, with a 52 percent increase in listings. By far, healthcare has the most number of jobs advertised.

Texas Adds Over 700,000 Jobs

Winners and Losers

This is a very special week for me. June 1st marks a full decade that I have spent dedicated to the work my company, Rocket-Hire, has been doing to promote the benefits of best-practices-based screening and assessment programs.

For those of us who are working to move our field forward. it is often easy to lose the forest for the trees, as our daily efforts to implement assessment often keep us focused on the issues that still hold us back. So in reflecting on the past decade as a thought leader for the assessment world, I have worked hard to refocus on the big picture. When I took time to change my perspective a bit, I realized that zooming out to the treetops has presented a view that is extremely positive and encouraging. This vantage point has reminded me that, while we still face all kinds of crazy challenges in the moment, we have seen some quantum leaps in the testing game that have made the use of pre-employment screening and assessment an even bigger value add then ever.

Here is a quick review of my thoughts on the big picture when it comes to innovation and progress in our industry over the past decade. keep reading…

The resumes a recruiter or HR professional screens in and gives to a hiring manager don’t fit the bill. The hiring manager scratches her head, wondering whether the recruiter understands the job, the job description, and what the manager’s really looking for in a candidate.

Sound familiar?

Obi Ogbanufe and I talk about this common scenario in the video below. She’s the founder of the Dallas, Texas, technology consulting firm Indigomark, and is the author of “Technology Made Simple for the Technical Recruiter — A Technical Skills Primer.”

We also talk about the many requirements found in job requirements that shouldn’t be in there and don’t translate into job success — such as requiring on MBA degree, a bachelor’s degree, or for legal jobs a degree from a top law school. It’s about 13 1/2 minutes, below. keep reading…

So what’s the big deal about strengthening your presentation skills? A lot, if increasing your influence with the hiring managers and creating a reputation as the “go to” person for recruiting is important to you. This is a description of presentation that goes far beyond the old interpretations of platform skills such as poise and dressing for success. While personal presentation and effective speaking are important elements of your presentation, there are several other elements that are equally potent though less conventionally addressed.

When faced with hiring managers who are busy (and some less interested then they should be) and with the best candidates shopping options, like it or not, how you present becomes as important (we would say more important) than what you present.

While brevity and fact-based presentation are key today, if what you present is a recitation of the facts about a candidate, ranking them using some algorithm, this can be, quite frankly, boring. How do you get the hiring manager to not only want to meet with you, but also to listen to you, seek your advice, and respond? It’s in your presentation. For example, when you start working with a hiring manager and as the process continues:

• Are you fearful about bothering them in approaching them with your concerns or questions?
• How responsive are you? Are you slow because you are seeking the “perfect candidate”?
• How good are you at building relationships?
• How focused are you on the hiring managers’ issues and needs? Have you inquired as to their key priorities for the role?
• Are you interesting to talk to and meet with? Do you bring energy, knowledge, and value-add ideas to the discussions?
• Do you conduct yourself like a peer or subordinate?

These questions reflect the “intangible” elements of presentation. Many recruiters we meet believe that their value is predominantly in identifying and bringing good candidates to the table. Yes, this is certainly their role, though only a part of their potential value. And strong presentation will help you expand your value.

Start acting like a peer, bring distinctive and useful knowledge to the discussion, demonstrate beyond what is expected, look and be impressive, and you will be seen differently. Presentation is a package, and the ol’ a la carte approach will only take you so far.

The Techniques for Highly Effective Recruiters pre-conference workshop we’re giving at the Fall Expo will address these issues and more to help you increase your effectiveness and impact as a recruiter in your organization. And yes — it’s in your presentation.

If you haven’t already heard about today’s jobs numbers from ADP, well, to paraphrase Bette Davis, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

The employment report from the nation’s largest payroll processor says 38,000 private sector jobs were added in May. That’s a huge drop from the slightly revised figure of 177,000 new jobs ADP reported for April.

Released before the U.S. stock markets opened this morning, the report sent tremors through the finance community, which promptly began a selloff that had the Dow Jones down 220 points with only an hour left before the 4 p.m. Eastern time close.

Economists were expecting ADP to report the May jobs increase to be in the range of 190,000 jobs, so the smaller number was a big disappointment. It prompted a flurry of “uh-oh” reports from business writers, while analysts reexamined their predictions of what Friday’s official employment report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show.

Goldman Sachs revised its initial estimate of 150,000 total new jobs to 100,000, while other firms were more pessimistic, cutting their estimates to as few as 75,000.  A Bloomberg survey before today’s ADP numbers were released, pegged the official jobs numbers at 180,000, which already was a reduction from the Labor Department’s April count of 244,000. Chances are that a new survey will now see that estimate drop. keep reading…

Have you thought about how much it costs to fix a problem after the fact vs. preventing it from happening in the first place? In a February 2011 McKinsey report one of the companies interviewed for the article had a struggling executive team. McKinsey reported about the executive team and their company: “Fewer than one in five of its members thought it was highly respected or shared a common vision for the future, and only one in three thought it made a valuable contribution to corporate performance. The company’s customers were very dissatisfied — they rated its cost, quality, and service delivery at only 2.3 on a 7-point scale — and the team couldn’t even agree on the root causes.” Ouch! That smarts.

Here’s a team and company way out of alignment, and it realizes it. It was unable to agree on the causes of their problems, which is very unfortunate. I wonder how many of them may be thinking about running for the door? Do you think they’ve considered what it has cost them thus far in time, dollars, and productivity to have issues so detrimental to the health of their organization? Why aren’t they discussing how to fix the problem? Given my experience, I’d assert they are just so overwhelmed with the idea of fixing their problems that they’re paralyzed.

Companies can take a proactive approach making the time and spending money to build their organizations the right way the first time. keep reading…

Whether the economy is strong or weak, no matter the time of year, and no matter how much they are paid, many of our best employees decide to leave. The question we all grapple with is why.

Why do people stay at a company or leave? What motivates such behavior, and how can employers motivate people to stay longer? What is a “good” rate of turnover and how do we know who to entice to stay and who to let go? While this article cannot hope to answer these questions in any detail, let’s take a quick look at the subject and see what we find.

First of all, when employees are asked why they leave, they usually give reasons like these: They want a better work/life balance, more money, a better opportunity for career growth, more independence and control over their own work, and of course job security.

For most of the past decade, employers have worked hard to give employees more time off and more benefits aimed at the family. They have increased salaries and offered stock options, enriched and enlarged jobs until some employees are now complaining that their jobs are too enriched, and they have offered employees more autonomy over the kinds of work they do, where they do it and how they do it. More pay is “at risk,” meaning the employee has to perform to get it, and this is at least loosely coupled to job security.

What is surprising is that turnover, which should be at an all-time low given this slow economy, is about the same as always. Sure, the rate has slowed a bit and few firms are experiencing the 25%-20% turnover rates of the past two or three years, but people are still leaving — good, valuable people who we want to keep. And as the recession eases, more will decide to leave: the grass is always greener.

So the question becomes: what are the real reasons people leave and what can employers do about it? keep reading…