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

Among the many other folks trying to do something about it is Ken Seville.

photo from the defense dept in Canada

Seville’s startup called “GuaranteedInterview” can be summed up briefly: get American and Canadian companies to agree to interview one qualified veteran each time they have a job open.

Seville — dialing in from Santiago, Chile — and I talk more about it in the podcast at the bottom of this post.

Meanwhile, some more information on the topic:

• Recruitment marketing to attract military veterans (webinar with Lisa Rosser)
• Translating military service to the civilian world
• Getting good at military skills translation

I’m going to be collecting information by interviewing as many company and HR leaders, some who I know other I don’t, focusing on HR leaders from the 2011 Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For list.

Below are some but not all of the questions we will be chatting about in my path of discovery.  I’m also figuring that all this great information will create even more questions from the questions.

Q1: Rate your organization’s external and internal candidate experience: poor, average, good, great, or amazing.

Q2: How important is creating a high-touch “candidate experience” to your company?

Q3: Define what you feel your candidate experience looks like.

I’ve set out with a vision to uncover the reasons why improving the candidate experience has not been a priority for most organizations. I draw this conclusion from the horrific, low satisfaction scores from candidates. Even within the initial four interviews with HR directors I’m been enlightened with the perspective of straight-up HR (versus talent acquisition) people who are all at the top of their game and committed to doing a great job.

I’m digging into what people really think about this topic of the “candidate experience.” There have been lots of opinions and discussion about candidate experience, but still don’t think we’ve figured out why good organizations run by good people have horrible or at least very average candidate experiences. My goal is not to condemn or beat up anyone’s HR, recruiting, or corporate culture practices. It’s to frame these discussions into a way that can be consumed by everyone the candidate experience touches.

What other questions should I be asking in my journey to figure out why good organizations have a lousy candidate experience”?

Just food for thought: check out the video below, created out of a panel from Recruitfest Fall 2010: The Candidate Bill of Rights.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out The Fordyce Letter!

If this was one of those no-future-for-job boards things, then we might expect to see Wall Street discounting all the publicly held recruitment publishers. But Dice Holdings, which reported its strong quarter Tuesday morning, is up. And the Chinese careers company, 51Job, which has annual revenue that’s less than Monster’s quarterly take, is trading at $64.82, down .2 percent.

Not two hours after the company ended its quarterly financial conference call with analysts, Monster’s stock is selling at $12.06 a share. That’s an 8 percent drop from Wednesday’s $13.14 close.

It doesn’t seem to make sense considering Monster earned 9 cents a share, a penny more than what analysts were expecting. It reported 2nd quarter revenue of $269.7 million, well above expectations and even a bit more than the company’s own best prediction.

Its international business grew 31 percent over the 2nd quarter last year and now rivals its North American revenue, which increased by a not-too-shabby 26 percent to $122.6 million.

With those kinds of numbers, and predictions of a strong 3rd quarter, Monster Chairman, President and CEO Sal Iannuzzi was hardly boasting when he opened his presentation this morning, saying, “We are pleased with our financial performance.”

Considering the economic conditions worldwide, and especially the lackluster job growth in the U.S., Iannuzzi’s comment could even be considered understatement. Indeed, answering analyst questions later in the call, Iannuzzi said, “In general, business has been sluggish all year.” “More sluggish,” he added, “than we would have expected.”

In his opening Iannuzzi touted the launch of Monster’s biz-focused social network, BeKnown, and its versatile sourcing search tool, SeeMore. Bookings, the annual contracts for job postings, searching, and other services, increased 26 percent during the quarter. International bookings, Iannuzzi said, accounted for almost 50 percent of the contracts.

If anything could be considered big news (besides, that is, the quarterly numbers themselves) it would be that the company has decided to get out of the lead generation business. Those are the ad banners promoting trade, vocational, and online schools. In years past, credit card solicitations and a few other similar pitches were among them.

Media companies typically get a fee for every person who fills out one of the applications for information. Credit card companies used to pay $25 and up for each and some of the schools have paid multiples of that for every person signing.

Because it wasn’t so profitable, and because of government crackdowns on the for-profit education sector, which is resulting in new regulations, Monster won’t be running those ads anymore. It was worth $50 million annually in revenue, but was, Monster’s CFO said, essentially a break-even proposition.

What’s behind the stock hit? Perhaps it’s uncertainty about the debt ceiling issue in Washington, which affects Monster’s government service contract that represents about 10 percent of its North American revenue. Perhaps it’s worries about the global economy and job growth. The Chinese labor market is strong, so 51Job is less affected, while Dice is strong in tech and energy, two of the absolutely strongest market sectors.

Perhaps its just a fickle market that sees slower growth for recruitment advertising due, not only to the economy, but to the impact of social media, search sourcing, and, of course, companies like LinkedIn, which is now trading at $101.39 a share, up 1 percent. It reports its 2nd quarter numbers next week.

Renee Jackson, a Boston attorney with the law firm Nixon Peabody, mulls over these issues in the podcast below, about 11 1/2 minutes. She talks about the role non-solicitation agreements play in all this, and the push and pull between being extra careful to avoid legal trouble and trying to stay consistent with the open-honest-transparent spirit of social media recruiting.

(If the podcast doesn’t show below, try refreshing your page.)

This isn’t uncommon. Joblessness increases the risk of suicide.

And yesterday, the New York Times ran an article about companies that discriminate against the unemployed.

As recruiters, our routine actions can be a direct blow to the emotional health of hundreds — even thousands — of people we’ll never meet. Our inaction, our silence, our casual attitudes, can add to someone’s set of worries. Our decisions impact families. Lives.

Stop. Think. Before dismissing entire categories of people. Our economy, this job market — they are complex. Simplistic thinking (e.g., “all the good ones are working”) doesn’t hold up. “Unemployed” is an easy filter to apply. Just like “years of experience.” Only junior recruiters and rookie managers rely on such criteria to assess talent.

Real recruiters and real managers ask:

• Has this person done this job successfully in the past?
• Does this person have the attitude and the will to get the job done?
• Will this person help the company save money, achieve goals, serve customers, or improve products?

I’ve said it before. Unemployment is getting worse because of advancements in technology and improvements in worker productivity. Companies experiencing record revenue and profit growth are laying off workers by the thousands. We are going to continue to see perfectly good workers among the ranks of the unemployed. As recruiters, we can’t do much about the shrinking number of available positions. But we can ensure that the process is fair, transparent, and respectful.

We can remember that our work directly impacts the lives — and livelihoods — of real people.

Thus concludes a just released 27-page argument by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN, as the Internet’s addressing authority is commonly known, filed the document and almost 300 pages of exhibits, in response to Employ Media’s  arbitration request, submitted early in May.

Manager of the .jobs domain, Employ Media’s arbitration request claims its issuance of thousands of Internet addresses to a single organization for use as job boards is consistent with the 2005 agreement that created the .jobs domain in the first place.

To sum it up simply, ICANN says the opposite.

It will be up to a three-judge arbitration panel from the International Chamber of Commerce / International Court of Arbitration.

The current legal dispute dates to February 27, when ICANN sent Employ Media a breach of contract notice over allowing DirectEmployers Association to use tens of thousands of .jobs addresses for job boards. After two months of negotiations, Employ Media invoked its right to go to arbitration over the issue.

In reality, the issue goes back to Oct. 2009 when DirectEmployers introduced the first few dozen job boards. They bore geographic or occupational names and carried a .jobs extension, as in Boston.jobs or Nursing.jobs. While Bill Warren, head of DirectEmployers, was promoting a .JOBS Universe, behind the scenes we now learn ICANN was telling Employ Media it had concerns about this use of the .jobs domain.

Why .Jobs Was Created

When the notion of a special Internet extension — a top-level domain — was first proposed in 2004 by Employ Media and its partner, the Society for Human Resource Management, the idea was to give employers a special location for their own jobs. A .jobs extension would make it  easy for employers to promote and easy for job seekers to find.

Some very specific conditions were imposed. Only company names could be used with the extension. The request had to be made by an HR professional who was a SHRM member or otherwise adhered to the SHRM code of ethics, and the address could only be used to advertise the employer’s own jobs.

Now, most of those conditions are in play, according to ICANN’s response to the arbitration request.

It claims that while the use of non-company names was approved last year, Employ Media exceeded its authority by allowing job boards to be created. ICANN also says Employ Media is all but ignoring the other requirements as well.

Its response lays out the history of the dispute, referencing conversations both private and public, dating back to November 2009. That’s when ICANN  became aware of the use of non-company names in .jobs addresses, “which was contrary to the companyname.jobs naming convention mandated in the .JOBS Registry Agreement.”

On Nov. 24, 2009, ICANN officially informed Employ Media it was conducting a compliance review of those non-company-name addresses.

ICANN Lays Out Background

The history is extensive, and involves SHRM, sponsor of the .jobs domain, and the official policy overseer. After a series of meetings last year, a SHRM committee and eventually the SHRM board approved allowing Employ Media to register non-company names.

ICANN signed off on the change, and on Employ Media’s plan to distribute non-company names via a phased program, allowing for bulk distribution first.

This entire process was highly controversial, eventually leading to the creation of a .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, made up of a number of organizations including the Newspaper Association of America and CareerBuilder and Monster. The group flooded ICANN with letters and comments opposing the expansion of the allowable names. Then, when the ICANN board approved it anyway, the group filed a reconsideration request.

That, too, was rejected, but with an explicit warning to Employ Media that it would be closely watched. The ICANN Board ordered the “President and CEO, and General Counsel and Secretary, to ensure that ICANN’s Contractual Compliance Department closely monitor Employ Media’s compliance with its Charter.”

.JOBS Universe Relaunches and ICANN Acts

Almost immediately the .JOBS Universe was relaunched. It had been on hiatus since being ordered offline by ICANN early in 2010.

“The .JOBS Universe can only be described,” ICANN says in its arbitration filing, “as a massive job board offering links to third-party employment opportunities in various states, cities and industries.”

When ICANN’s contractual compliance department asked about this launch, “Employ Media began taking the position – for the first time – that .JOBS registrants need not be “engaged in human resources management practices” to register and use .JOBS domain names.”

ICANN’s arbitration response goes on to say Employ Media argued that the requirement that the person requesting a .jobs address be “engaged in human resource management practices” could mean “anyone dealing ‘with the human element from outside an organization,’” including a recruitment ad agency.

It was then the notice of breach was sent to Employ Media.

ICANN details three specific bases for upholding its breach notice and allowing it to terminate its contract with Employ Media should it come to that:

Simply put, allowing the operation of job boards within .JOBS exceeds the scope of the Charter and is not permitted under the terms of the Registry Agreement.

Thus, by permitting job board operators to advertise employment opportunities outside their own companies, Employ Media has breached the spirit, intent and express terms of the .JOBS Registry Agreement and Charter.

Second, by espousing a view under which a .JOBS domain name can be issued based on a sole requirement that a human resource professional “request” the domain, Employ Media has failed to enforce meaningful “restrictions on registration within the TLD,” as required by the Registry Agreement…

Third, by allowing DirectEmployers to register scores of the most valuable non-companyname.jobs domains through what appears to be a backroom deal, rather than through an open, fair and transparent allocation process, Employ Media has violated the terms of the Phased Allocation Program approved by the ICANN Board and made part of the Registry Agreement.”

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

Matt Jeffery, who wrote that article on ERE that went quite viral, says his employer, Autodesk, is among the leaders in the mobile race. More on Jeffery and what his company is unveiling in a minute; first a look at how we got to this point.

A page from the Autodesk iPad version

What the amorphous term “mobile recruiting” has meant to many people so far is encouraging candidates to send a text message companies about jobs, like UPS has done, or the tinkering around with a careers website to make it show up better on smart phones, like companies such as Hyatt have done. Randy Goldberg and the Hyatt team are looking into having candidates submit some quick information on themselves using a cell phone, so they wouldn’t have to type in a whole resume or application. But right now, Goldberg believes that having candidates actually apply for a job using their cell phone would be quite a hassle for a candidate.

Most everyone tends to agree — including many folks you may have heard of who have an interest in mobile recruiting, people like Geoff Peterson, Craig Fisher, Gordon Lokenberg, and Chris Russell.

Lokenberg has helped Deloitte-Netherlands with its mobile recruiting. “There are a lot of apps out there that are mostly shortcuts to an Internet career site of the company,” he says. “That makes it hard to navigate.”

“The technology’s not 100% there,” says Peterson. “You’d have to have your resume already loaded up online and have a link to share, or something else like that. In theory (applying straight from a mobile application) can be done for sure, but do I see a lot of being done now? No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve seen promise from a few different companies,” says Fisher. “But I’ve never seen a working product yet.”

Many of the applications out there are for certain groupings of people, like Lokenberg’s application created in 2009, which works only for companies that are a part of his database, and is called “Shake Your Job.” Or, Monster’s mobile application, for candidates to apply with the Monster accounts. LinkedIn says it does not yet have an “apply now with LinkedIn” mobile-phone application; Russell believes that in general, as LinkedIn makes its moves, it “should speed up the innovation around mobile applying.”

Anyhow, multiple recruiting departments I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on this, with help from various technology vendors. Among those many vendors is a small husband-wife Ohio consultancy working on an “apply now” mobile application, whose work is so private that it doesn’t want its name to be mentioned.

Pepsi, one of the innovators in the mobile arena, was aggressively working on an apply-with-a-cell-phone project, the company told me in the spring, though a spokeswoman tells me it’s not there yet. A little-known UK firm called AllTheTopBananas is its vendor of choice, a company that raves about the success of Pepsi’s mobile efforts to date. AllTheTopBananas has only about 13 employees, mostly developers. It started off in April 2007 as a job aggregator, sort of like a British version of Indeed or SimplyHired in the U.S.

AllTheTopBananas notes that “from the first 60 days from the apps going live, a soft launch only in the U.S., with the apps only being featured in only two places, on their careers website and in the app stores, PepsiCo had received over 3,500 downloads. Out of the 3,500 downloads, 85% of the candidates had job alerts set up on their device for targeted jobs they are interested in. When tracking the candidates who came from their apps, they have hired two new employees and have 10 in the recruitment process. Again, this was within the first 60 days of launch.”

Sodexo, not yet naming the vendor it’s working with, expects to launch its mobile application in about a month, allowing candidates to search and apply for jobs on their phones.

For Sodexo, among the challenges has been the three types of candidates in its current system (internal candidates, external candidates, and Sodexo Alumni) with three different experiences. “This has been a complicated process,” says Sodexo’s Arie Ball, “but in the end we expect candidates, including our internals with simple sign-on requirements, to be able to apply from their mobile device and answer screening questions. I believe we will have the only app with access from three unique portals to offer different candidate experiences.”

And that brings us to Jeffery, who started talking to the same company that’s working with Pepsi, AllTheTopBananas, when Jeffery was working at EA. Jeffery took a job at Autodesk in March and AllTheTopBananas began work on a mobile application for Autodesk, a project that took about three months. Jefferies says Autodesk’s application will be a “game-changer” and may be available as soon as this week on Android-system phones.

Jeffery believes the Autodesk application will be the first where people can apply directly from the phone without a resume. But, he says, that’s the least of it. Far more importantly, Jeffery says, is that the application is a “one-stop shop” to Autodesk tweets, Autodesk YouTube videos streamed through the application, Facebook wall comments, a gallery of work by Autodesk employees on the company’s software, and more. He wants to engage people, excite people, make them inspired about Autodesk, and believes the application does just that, more than just being practical or functional.

But back to the practical: candidates visiting Autodesk’s careers pages on a mobile phone will be asked if they want to download the cell phone application. They can search (see scrollable file at the bottom of this post) for Autodesk jobs with their mobile phones, and can view them on a map. Then, after downloading, the “push notifications” feature saves the previous search created by the jobseeker to the phone, so when Autodesk has a job that matches the saved search, the jobseeker is sent a text message letting them know.

So if they search for, say, San Francisco engineer jobs, even if they don’t type any information in about themselves, Autodesk will push future job openings to them through the application on their phone. If they’re interested in applying, Autodesk will ask for candidates to enter only basic information, such as name, current position, and contact details from their phones. On its end, Autodesk will need to then go in and put that information into its applicant tracking system. And, it’ll contact that candidate later to ask the candidate, perhaps now from their desktop or laptop, to enter some more complete information in the Taleo system, beyond what had been captured during the brief mobile phone visit.

This is all phase I, Jeffery says. Phase II will include more content, more “stickiness” and “gamification.” Autodesk’s application doesn’t include the segmentation I mentioned earlier that Sodexo is working on (internal employees, external employees, and alumni).

AllTheTopBananas, meanwhile, is working or has worked on mobile applications for other major big names including Nestle, RIM (Blackberry Careers), Match.com, and Oracle. Three major multinationals, one based in the UK and two in the U.S., are considering signing on with the mobile-app maker. Each company wants something different built; not surprisingly, AllTheTopBananas’ Commercial Director Cristian Bradshaw tells me the firm is “non-stop busy.”

Autodesk Careers on iPhone

Reporting this morning before the U.S. markets opened, Dice reported it earned 11 cents a share on revenue of $44.9 million. Dice beat the Street’s high-end revenue prediction by almost $1 million. Revenue was 50 percent higher than in the 2nd quarter last year, due in part to acquisitions last year, as well as a 48 percent increase from eFinancialCareers, especially in the U.K.

For the current quarter, the company said it expected to earn 13 cents a share, which is what analysts were expecting to hear.

The largest company segment was tech and clearance, where revenue from the company’s flagship tech site, Dice.com, and from ClearanceJobs.com, was 32 percent ahead of the same quarter last year.

Scot Melland, Dice chairman, CEO and president, said business on the tech site in particular “continued to grow nicely.” Speaking during a conference-call presentation this morning, he predicted “the healthy tech recruiting market to continue for the forseeable future.” Financial recruiting, he said, will “moderate” some in the second half of the year.

He also offered an opinion that the job market, while hardly robust and weaker now than it was a few months back, is “not as bad as people think it is.” The recovery, he said, “really is a sector story,” pointing out that tech, healthcare, even manufacturing have been improving more rapidly than finance, construction, or government, which are either cutting jobs or struggling to stay even.

In response to a question about the impact of LinkedIn, Melland observed that while investors have only started paying close attention since LinkedIn announced its IPO a few months ago, Dice and other recruitment publishers have been competing with the company for several years.

“They (LinkedIn) get a piece of the business,” he said, ” We get a piece.”

“Customers,” he added, ” generally buy both services because they use us in different ways.”

Dice stock climbed sharply after the market’s opening, rising to $14.61 from its close, Monday, at $13.44 a share. It has since fallen back to $14.09, up 4.84 percent on the day. The Dow, meanwhile, is off .44 percent.

At a high level I disagree. I believe that a company, regardless of size or maturity, needs quality, effective recruiting practices and has the ability to implement them. In determining what these best practices are for your company, a number of questions need to be asked and evaluated. That said, there are some issues early stage companies deal with that large companies don’t, and vice versa.

I suspect that if I asked 100 recruiters what they consider to be best practices in recruiting I’d get similar responses at a high level and different responses at a granular level. For example, if I asked recruiters whether or not candidates should receive a response to job inquiries, I believe they’d all say “yes” (high level). Where many people would differ is in answering the (granular level) question, “How should I respond and in what timeframe?” Elaine Orler wrote a post recently telling a story of an individual at a large company who asked each of his recruiting departments around the world a question with a negative consequence to get ideas on how to make the candidate experience better. It was a very interesting approach to get his recruiters to look at issues in a new way. The bottom line is that overall there are practices that we can probably agree are positive for our organizations. How they’re implemented is where we may differ in our approaches.

Regardless of the practices you implement and the way you choose to implement them, they need to align with your answers to the questions I pose below. There are some questions that will be more appropriate given the size and maturity of your company, but in general there are certain questions you need to be asking to begin the process. This list is not comprehensive, but will give you a good jumping-off point.

1. What is your business strategy?
2. Is what you do in your work aligned with that business strategy, and is everyone in the company aligned with it?
3. Is your executive team operating according to the company mission, vision, and strategy?
4. What is your turnover rate? What is turnover costing? Why are you having turnover?
5. What is the experience we want our candidates left with?
6. What are the common denominators that appear in our successful and unsuccessful employees?
7. Are we clear on our culture and are we hiring to people who fit that culture, as opposed to just having the right skills and abilities?
8. Are our recruiters partners with our hiring managers? Do our hiring managers see the value in the recruiters?

The questions I’ve posed are imperative to begin to determine not only your recruitment strategy but also the best practices that follow and align with this strategy. Remember that your talent strategy (which includes recruiting best practices) needs to align with your business strategy. Without this alignment you won’t truly have “recruiting best practices.”

Tuesday morning, Dice Holdings releases its financials. Two days later, on Thursday, Monster reports. LinkedIn, which may or may not be a job board depending on your point of view, reports on August 4.

Privately held CareerBuilder released some limited numbers last week. One of the two largest career sites in the world, it reported $160 million in revenue from its North American operations. That represents a 15.1 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010, and a 6.67 percent increase over the first quarter of this year.

The Chicago-headquartered company doesn’t make public its other numbers, so only the owners know how well CareerBuilder is doing on the other fronts. There were some hints last week when its largest shareholder, Gannett Company, conducted its 2nd-quarter financial conference call. Gracia Martore, president and COO, credited CareerBuilder with “another strong quarter,” adding that among the reasons “was a significant revenue increase in their international operations.”

CareerBuilder’s CEO, Matt Ferguson, in a separate comment, attributed the job board’s growth to three factors:

One, the employment situation is improving in the U.S., Europe, Asia and other markets.  Companies are in a better financial position today and are feeling more confident about adding headcount. Job listings on our site were up 20 percent year over year in the second quarter.

Two, it reflects a greater demand for our human capital solutions that go beyond our job board …  We’re seeing rapid adoption of our Talent Network offering, Supply & Demand portal, and Work@ application, among others.

Three, our international business is growing rapidly. CareerBuilder operates sites in 21 countries worldwide and has a presence in over 55 markets. Global economies are in recovery and in need of talent.

Tuesday morning, Dice Holdings will report its 2nd quarter results. With tech one of the hottest job sectors, the company’s flagship, Dice.com, the web’s best known tech  job board, grew revenue by some 35 percent in the first quarter. (ClearanceJobs.com, another of the company’s sites, contributed to the total, but the bulk came from Dice.com.)

Analysts are expecting $43.55 million in revenue when Dice reports at 8:30 a.m. ET. Profits of 11 cents a share are predicted, a penny a share consensus increase in the last 90 days.

Monster, which reports Thursday, is a bit of an enigma. The company is expected to report earnings per share of 8 cents on revenue of $266.12 million, which is the mid-point of what the company predicted back in April.

Although analysts lowered their quarterly earnings consensus a few months’ back, there is a certain bullishness about the stock. UBS upgraded Monster to a buy recommendation in June. After Monster launched BeKnown a few weeks ago, Zacks Equity Research praised “management’s recent efforts to revamp business by constantly introducing innovative products along with cost-reductions.”

So what’s the enigma? The impact all the state and federal layoffs and budget problems are having on Monster’s government unit. During the 1st quarter financial report in April, Monster’s CEO Sal Iannuzzi warned analysts that government spending could be “a little bit lumpy at times.” With government employment spending accounting for about 10 percent of the North American revenue ($121 million in Q1 2011), the company was conservative in predicting its revenue and earnings.

One more thing: Is it meaningful that Monster will release its financial report before the markets open Thursday morning? Probably not. It wouldn’t be the first time it held a morning briefing, though usually the numbers and conference call are held after the market closes. On the other hand, if I had really good news, I’d want it to get as much mileage as possible, in which case two days of trading before the weekend would be better than one.

This “Apply With LinkedIn” feature wraps up the candidate profile in a tidy package that feeds directly into any one of the several tracking systems it has or will partner with. No ATS? No problem. LinkedIn will email the profile to you.

This portable feature can be used on any job, anywhere, on any site, including any job board.

Five ATS providers — Peoplefluent, Jobvite, SmartRecruiters, Bullhorn, and Jobscience — turned on the automatic feature this morning. Taleo, Lumesse, and Kenexa will have it enabled in a matter of months.

However, as LinkedIn’s VP of product management, Adam Nash, explained, the company designed the “apply” feature to be used by small, as well as large employers. It’s “really trivial” for a hiring manager at even the smallest of firms to add the button to a job posting, and specify how and where the resume is to be received.

Even candidates with resumes already on file with a job board may find the LinkedIn apply feature of more use, since it allows them to update their LinkedIn profile before submitting it, and also tells them who in their network works or knows someone at the company.

Those who click the link without having a profile — a not-too-common occurrence given the 100 million members LinkedIn has — will be given an opportunity to join.

Candidates can always opt to use some other source for their resume submission, Nash said. “This won’t be the only option there,” he said. If, though, recruiters begin to use the “apply” button in numbers, job seekers will find it easier to keep one profile updated, than the 12.6 LinkedIn says the average seeker has.

“Users,” he added, “will vote with their clicks.”

Its one major drawback is that it doesn’t yet work with smartphones. It will with some portable devices such as an iPad. Full mobile compatibility is coming, Nash promised.

“Apply With LinkedIn” has very definite consequences for job boards, which derive a third or more of their revenue from resume searching. Almost two months ago Dan Schawbel wrote about the feature, still then under wraps. Touting the advantages of the plug-in, he said, “Job boards and traditional resumes are going to fade faster than I even predicted!”

This morning, I emailed three of the largest job boards for their reaction. I haven’t yet heard from any of them,  but I can’t imagine this is a development they’re welcoming. Corporate career sites, search engines, and social media all have impacted the pay-to-post business of job boards. Now LinkedIn is making a frontal assault on resume search.

Earlier this month, it shut down access to its network for sites like Monster’s BeKnown and BranchOut. Those services leveraged information on social networks, including LinkedIn’s, to build profiles for their members. Now, in a bit of a turnabout, LinkedIn hopes to leverage job postings to increase its own recruitment value. Whether it succeeds will depend on convincing recruiters and employers to adopt the plug-in and use it on every job posting. Netflix, LivingSocial, and Photobucket are among the initial users.

“Like everything transformative, you can argue both sides of the equation,” Nash said, when I asked him what reception LinkedIn expected from the job boards.

In the last three years especially, LinkedIn has been encroaching ever more aggressively into job board territory, offering premium search tools for recruiters,  job postings, experimenting with career tools, adding a resume-maker for candidates, and now the apply button.

There’s no mystery why LinkedIn is transforming its business network into what Gerry Crispin called a “job board for the 21st century.” In 2010, recruitment products accounted for 42 percent of LinkedIn’s total revenue. In 2008, it was 22 percent, third behind marketing solutions and premium subscriptions.

Based on my observations in the field over the past 40 years, I’ve compiled the following list of what I have seen that leads to greatness.

Some of the factors relate to strategy and goals, some basic perspective, and others operations and administration. Truly great recruiting leaders understand not just a few but rather all of these laws and govern accordingly.

Irrefutable Laws Related to Functional Strategy and Goals

• The primary goal must be business impact — strive to directly impact business results and the organization’s strategic business goals (including revenue, business expansion, productivity, and innovation). This impact will result from designing a branding, recruiting, and hiring process that hires employees who rank in the top percentile of performers based on on-the-job performance, retention, innovation, and diversity.
• The recruiting strategy must lead to domination of the talent marketplace — recruiting leaders must select and implement the most effective recruiting strategy that contributes to an overall “performance culture” and that allows the organization to dominate the talent marketplace in its industry. The strategy must be agile so that it shifts to fit the current business environment and competitive marketplace. Recruiting processes and goals most closely mirror the business strategies of marketing (including branding, prospect identification, market research, and sales) and supply chain. Those business approaches should be the foundation for developing recruiting strategies, processes, and tools.
• Executives are the primary customer — executives are defined as the primary customer because they best understand the “big picture” needs of the organization and they approve funding. Individual hiring managers are important, but they are not primary because when hiring, they routinely put their own selfish short-term interests ahead of the long-term corporate interests.
• The primary target is top talent – in order to be effective, you must clearly delineate and define your primary recruiting target. The primary recruiting target in most cases should be top talent, which includes top performers, those with critical skills, game-changers, and innovators. Top talent can come from anywhere, but most are employed and well-treated at competing organizations, so the strategy and process must be designed to convince those not looking for a job (some call them passives) to consider working at your organization. While “active” candidates should be considered, recruiting leaders must realize that approaches that attract active candidates will not work for individuals who are not looking.
• A competitive advantage is needed in a zero-sum game — because recruiting faces a limited pool of top talent, it is a “zero sum game.” As a result, the recruiting strategy and process must not only be effective, it must be clearly superior to those of your talent competitors. In order to build a competitive advantage, recruiting leaders must create a differential and continue to differentiate between your organization and its talent competitors. That should include conducting a competitive analysis, gathering competitive intelligence, countering each competitor’s moves, and being able to react whenever a competitor improves their recruiting approach.

Irrefutable Laws Related to the Basic Recruiting Paradigm

• Recruiting has five key components — employer branding, talent prospecting, talent courting, candidate assessment, and offer closing. While all are important, the first three have the most impact because great assessment and selling can’t produce quality hires unless top talent is in the candidate pool.
• Employer branding has the greatest long-term impact — managing the employer brand(s) is the most strategic component of world-class recruiting in the long-term. Functional leaders must measure and proactively influence a firm’s brand image in order to ensure that the very top prospects become interested in working at your organization.
• Prioritization allows you to focus – because not all jobs have the same business impact, recruiting leaders must work with management to identify and give priority treatment to high-impact jobs.
• A talent pipeline approach is superior — in order to maximize effectiveness, recruiting must start well in advance of an opening. That means that the strategy must include a “pre-need” component to build a talent pipeline for key jobs. In the same light, truly outstanding talent needs to be proactively recruited and hired even when there is no current open requisition.
• Speed is required for quality — because top talent is in high demand, the hiring process must be fast if you expect to land top candidates with multiple offers, but also thorough.
• Timing is required for quality – because an organization’s chances of recruiting top talent are diminished when the competition for talent is high, it is essential that recruiting efforts be timed appropriately. Many organizations recruit whenever a position opens up, but a superior approach is to consider labor market trends and recruit top talent at the most opportune time: i.e., low competition, great supply.
• A global capability is needed — because top talent exists around the globe, organizations must develop processes that are effective at attracting and hiring talent anywhere. This should include offering remote work options and adapting recruiting processes to local needs.
• Aggressiveness is the norm — unlike most areas of HR, recruiting is a highly competitive act. When labor market conditions are tight, it is literally called a “war for talent.” If you want to dominate the talent marketplace in your region or industry, you need to be proactive, bold, and aggressive. Aggressiveness is required because the recruiting process mirrors the sales function, where they are literally trying to “steal” away another organizations’ customers. You also you need to be able to successfully “counter” the offerings of your talent competitors.
• Recruit diversity for improved business results — one of the primary goals of recruiting is to hire individuals with diverse backgrounds and ways of thinking. In addition to meeting legal requirements, diverse perspectives increase innovation, help identify major errors, and ensure that the employee base understands the needs and expectations of the organization’s diverse customer base.

Irrefutable Laws Related to Operations and Administration

• You must be talent centric — the recruiting process, at least for top talent, must be “candidate centric” so that “the candidate experience” meets the needs and expectations of top talent. Recruiting must have a process to identify top talent job interests and acceptance criteria, and tailor communications/actions accordingly. The process itself must demonstrate innovation because candidates will assess the innovativeness of your firm based on their experience throughout the process. All candidates could be a current or future customer, so the overall process must be candidate-friendly.
• A strong business case is essential – recruiting must continually compete for resources with other talent management and business functions. In order to get sufficient resources for the function and convince managers to spend enough time on hiring, recruiting leaders must work with the CFO’s office to build a compelling business case. A key business case component is to convert the output of the recruiting function into operational impact, including the dollar impact of hiring top talent, the cost of prolonged position vacancies, and the cost of weak hires.
• Influence managers to act correctly – hiring managers are the final decision makers on hiring, but they dislike being ordered or threatened. As a result, recruiting must accept their role as “influencers” and internal consultants. That means that they must develop effective arguments that convince hiring managers to precisely follow the hiring guidelines and to devote sufficient time toward hiring. Measuring and rewarding managers for great hiring can also contribute to managing hiring manager behavior.
• Technology drives capability, speed, and globalization — technology use must permeate all aspects of recruiting to enable greater capability and capacity. You cannot have an effective global recruiting effort without technology.
• Great recruiters are required to land top talent — services and technology can help any organization source great talent, but subpar recruiters can rarely sell top talent. Recruiters who continuously learn, are aggressive, who understand the business, who have strong sales skills, and who make data-based decisions are the ones who are the most effective.
• The most effective tools are required to land top talent – recruiting depends heavily on tools, so great recruiters and hiring managers cannot be effective unless they are provided with the most effective recruiting tools. The function must continually identify and assess which recruiting tools, processes, and approaches work best for each major need.
• You must use your employees as talent scouts — since there are never enough recruiters due to budget constraints, another strategic goal must be to build a recruiting culture where all stakeholders support continuous recruiting. Employees are well-connected to top talent through their professional networks, so an essential component of the strategy must be to harness those employee connections and relationships. Recruiting must encourage, recognize, and reward employees for acting as talent scouts to identify, assess, and refer top talent.
• Data-based decision-making is best — modern recruiting is more of a science than an art, so in order to produce industry-leading results, most decisions must be based on data. Data must be used to identify the best sources, the most accurate assessment processes, the most effective sales approaches, and other critical success factors in recruiting. Metrics must permeate the entire process in order to ensure that problems are identified and that best practices quickly spread.
• Integration is critical – because recruiting does not work in isolation, the recruiting process must collaborate with other talent management functions. In order to gain their cooperation, recruiting must demonstrate to the leaders of other functions both the positive and negative impacts that compensation, benefits, relocation, onboarding, development, internal movement, retention, etc. can have on recruiting results. In addition, contingent hiring must be fully integrated with the process for hiring permanent employees.
• Legal compliance – recruiting leaders and recruiters must work with the legal department to minimize legal risks. However, great recruiting is never “driven” by the fear of being sued. Effective recruiting departments calculate the risk levels and continually improve processes to ensure a better quality of hire.
• Continuous learning is required — because there is intense global competition for top talent, recruiting is continually evolving. Due to the rapid speed of change, knowledge, information, and “solutions” that are suitable one year may be completely wrong the next. As a result, recruiters and recruiting leaders need to be on the “leading edge of knowledge” concerning best practices, tools, and upcoming challenges.

Final Thoughts

There are several hundred thousand recruiters in the U.S. alone, most of whom operate without the support of a professional organization or uniform code of conduct. Most corporate functions are “ad hoc” functions operating without a complete, organizationally accepted mandate and written strategy or plan. Too many recruiting professionals seem happy to operate without understanding and following the irrefutable laws of world-class recruiting. If you are not among them, use this list as a simple “audit checklist” to identify where your recruiting function stands against world-class standards.

1. 

   It’s somewhat controversial, but by the end you’ll agree (if you get that far).

2. If you’re a corporate recruiter or HR leader, put your confirmation bias in the parking lot before reading this article.
3. You might want to listen to this YouTube video of a webcast (Future of Recruiting Circa 2020) we recently held. It will give you a sense what’s happening now and what will happen soon.

No surprise here, but the answer to the headline’s question is an unequivocal yes. Here’s why the current version of the corporate recruiting department is heading toward extinction:

1. History repeats itself. The current version of the corporate recruiting department and recruiter came into existence in the 1995-2000 time frame due to technology changes. These same technological forces will fundamentally change the nature of the job in the next few years. In the mid- to late 90s with the growth of job boards, companies realized they didn’t have to pay contingency fees to third-party recruiters for candidates they could find on their own. As a result they began to hire contract recruiters at a pretty stiff hourly rate to reduce costs and increase control. This model proved successful and soon contract recruiters become full-time employees at more reasonable rates. Since cost and efficiency were the drivers behind many of these initiatives, there were never enough recruiters on the staff to handle all of the requisitions properly. In many cases this model is more transactional and administrative, focusing on filling jobs with the best person applying, rather than reaching out and finding the best available person. This strategic error, in my mind, will be the root cause of the corporate recruiting department’s ultimate demise.
2. The active-to-passive shift is accelerating. According to a massive joint study we conducted with LinkedIn, only 18% of the fully-employed pool of prospects were looking for new jobs using traditional techniques. The 82% who describe themselves as passive need to be engaged with in a totally different manner from the 18%. They are looking for better jobs and career opportunities, they take longer to decide, they won’t apply, they don’t have resumes, they are in higher demand, and they are far more choosey. Most corporate recruiting processes are ill-equipped to handle these differences. Without a major overhaul in processes, tactics, resources, and how job descriptions are written, the biggest pool of the best prospects will go untouched.
3. Interconnected networks will replace sourcing. Soon, if not sooner, everyone will be connected with everyone else by only one degree of separation. As a result, proprietary talent communities will become unimportant since everyone will have access to the same people. These will soon be overshadowed and ultimately be replaced by 360° talent networks. As a result, those with the deepest and broadest talent networks will win. While developing these networks will be a critical job of the recruiting department of the future, it’s unclear that managing and working the network will require the current set of recruiter skills and competencies. Since the auto-matching of jobs with prospects in these extended networks will soon become the norm, the end-game (reeling in and closing) will become the critical differentiator of success.
4. The rise of the hiring manager self-serve model is accelerating. Just as corporate recruiters replaced TPRs, hiring managers will soon be taking over much of the work now performed by corporate recruiters. Consider this likely scenario: a hiring manager creates a quick video describing the job. Moments later it’s distributed throughout the talent network to just the right people. Available prospects will be notified moments later on their smartphones, and since everything will be known about everyone, the most qualified people will be automatically matched with the best opportunities. The best matches will be to sorted to the top with instant video exploratory meetings set up at the push of a button. I don’t know what happens next, but it will be a heck of lot different than what happens now, with hiring managers driving the process.
5. Quality of hire has not improved under the current model. Let’s be honest on this point: there is no evidence that quality of hire improved as a result of moving the recruiting function in-house. While cost per hire and time to fill have improved, there has been no corresponding improvement in the overall talent level of a company. Improvements on this score, if any, can largely be attributed to employer branding, supply vs. demand issues, hiring manager insistence, or some executive-level strategy change. If some other corporate recruiting model can demonstrate better quality of hire at the same cost and efficiency, there’s no reason to maintain the corporate recruiting function in its current form. The one envisioned certainly meets this benchmark.
6. The decline and fall of the FTE and the requisition. The full-time equivalent worker is becoming less relevant, replaced by contingent, contract, consultants, outsourced and project workers. This parallels demographic changes, with an aging workforce considering more part-time work, and a large portion of those just entering the market not sold on the corporate career lifestyle. Much of the mixing and matching associated with this project-based work environment can be automated, further lessening the role of the corporate recruiting function. On top of this is the idea now gaining traction of crafting the job around a great person who is a rough match on skills, rather than finding a person who closely meets the skill set on the job description. Talent networks like LinkedIn and Facebook coupled with emerging career management apps are both forcing and enabling this type of paradigm shift in approach and thinking.

While the trends themselves are quite apparent, one could effectively argue the specific outcomes and conclusions drawn. The lack of technology advances — especially on the ATS front — would be the big reason a new, more efficient corporate recruiting model does not emerge as quickly as possible. The fact that these systems are built on a work process that is requisition-based also prevents much of the changes proposed from being implemented as efficiently as possible.

While change might be slowed by the lack of an effective ATS, recruiting leaders must create the future, rather than react to it. On one level 100% visibility to everyone and every job is not necessarily a good thing. Some negatives include increased workforce turnover, waged-based inflation as companies compete for the best or to retain them, wider swings in company performance as weaker performance accelerates people leaving for greener pastures, and productivity declines caused by the need to increase training.

Whether you agree or not with the specifics here, change of some significant type is inevitable. On the tech front things are changing more rapidly than ever, and as a result, the corporate recruiter of the future will look little like his or her counterpart of today. Those who take advantage of these changes will have a field day. Those who don’t won’t be around to worry about it.

SeeMore is Monster’s newest 6Sense product. Introduced today during a group demo for bloggers, consultants, and HR tech writers, SeeMore applies the 6Sense search power to candidate databases stored in the cloud, producing a ranked list of qualified prospects.

That brief description, however, hardly does it justice. More broadly, SeeMore makes sense of the thousands of resumes that lurk in every ATS. Instead of writing impossibly long Boolean strings, or entering a bunch of keywords and getting back hundreds of results, 6Sense knows, for instance, that an audit manager must have certain skills and experience.

Power Resume users already know that with that job title and a few other parameters — years of experience for instance — 6Sense will scour Monster’s database for qualifying candidates. You won’t get CFO resumes just because there’s a keyword match. (If you haven’t tried Power Search, you can read about it here.)

Speaking to Fast Company, Monster’s CIO and head of product Darko Dejanovic said “traditional search technologies couldn’t determine if, for example, a candidate had Oracle software experience, previously worked at Oracle, or played an oracle in a university theater troupe. SeeMore brings the power of our 6Sense search to the cloud environment and applies it to talent pools beyond Monster.”

SeeMore clients can upload their entire database into the cloud, search it, search Monster, or other uploaded database to source candidates.

It’s slick and easy to use. Candidates from the various DBs can be merged into a single database or sorted into folders. SeeMore’s analytics are nimble enough to track candidates in just about as many different ways as you can think of.

Monster’s senior director of product management, Javid Muhammedali did the demo. Muhammedali showed a few useful analytics, pulling up the candidates for a sales engineer job to show where they came from, then another view showing how many candidates of all types are coming from competitor companies and what skills they have.

I said at the start of this post that SeeMore is more than a useful recruiting tool, and it is. Muhammedali pointed out how SeeMore can sort through an employer’s workforce (assuming it had been uploaded to the cloud) to find in-house candidates. That same 6Sense technology can also be used to identify staff with specific skills, or find those with a certain background, or even help spot shortcomings in the talent inventory.

SeeMore allows you to, well, see more than you would with a typical ATS and even with rudimentary workforce management tools. It’s certainly not going to replace an HCM, but it certainly can enhance one. Monster may not have started out building SeeMore as a planning tool, but by foraying into cloud-computing, it’s venturing outside its proprietary walls.

That’s why I said SeeMore is evidence that Monster is at least thinking of a future beyond the traditional job board revenue model. SeeMore can be used to search Monster’s resume database, but you don’t have to. Pull resumes from anywhere and once in the cloud, 6Sense will search them.

The starting price is $20,000 for an annual, one-seat contract. Not inexpensive, but still within the reach of mid-sized employers, and a bargain if it turns up just one or two of those diamonds buried amongst those resumes every candidate is promised will be kept on file.

Muhammedali, at the beginning of the demo, called SeeMore  “a transformation of the 6Sense technology.” He was speaking of the move to the cloud, but he could just as easily have been meaning a transformation, a small one to be sure, but a step away from the walled garden.

No more.

Beginning in September, says TheLadders, any salaried worker on their way up is welcome.

“It fulfills our mission and our vision,” Alex Douzet said this morning announcing the change. Right from the beginning, explained Douzet, president and co-founder, he and CEO Marc Cenedella had their eye on the up-and-coming professionals.

They focused first on the $100,000 segment, seeing it as an underserved market. Now, he said, the time is right to broaden the scope.

For sure it’s a much bigger market, even with the new salary floor of $40,000. The U.S. Census Bureau says just 9.7 percent of the workforce makes more than $100,000. Even allowing for those a step down to the $75,000 floor, that’s still only 18.1 percent.

By resetting the floor, TheLadders broadens the potential market to something like half the workforce.

However, that resetting impacts the cachet TheLadders has cultivated as the source of “Hand-screened $100k+ jobs,” a point reinforced most recenlty in a series of provocative TV ads.

So the natural question for Douzet is: Doesn’t this make TheLadders just like any other job board?

“The $100,000 cachet is not something we are ever going to lose,” Douzet insists. “That won’t go away.”

Instead, he said, expanding TheLadders to all but entry-level professionals will be a benefit to both job seekers needing help with their next career move, and to recruiters who want to source candidates who have already been qualified.

Says Douzet, “We are a curated network” made up of “the right jobs, the right recruiters” and vetted candidates.

The screening TheLadders does for the $100,000 candidates in its fee and free network will be extended to the candidates in the lower salary ranges. So a job seeker now making $60,000 will get access only to matching jobs within an equivalent and next-step salary band.

That’s done to “avoid spamming” of recruiters and hiring managers by job seekers not qualified by experience or rank for a too-lofty position. Douzet said candidates and jobs would be grouped by experience and salary and each would be matched on that basis. Recruiters can search the entire database if they choose.

For job seekers who sign-up for TheLadders’ premium service (which is $15 for a month at the current promotional rate), they get access to a career counselor, a resume critique, and can search for specific recruiters. Free clients can see, but can’t apply, to jobs, though their resume is available to recruiters.

None of that will change, Douzet said, acknowledging that focusing on $100,000 jobs helped distinguish TheLadders from other job sites. But, he said, what really set TheLadders — and its eight verticals — apart was the services it provided its paying customers.

“Just showing me the job listing isn’t enough,” Douzet says. Job seekers want help with everything from their resume to elevator pitches, and that, he said, isn’t something just $100,000+ wage earners want.

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

Venture for America is recruiting 50 or more college seniors, and is looking for companies to match them with the students. Beginning in the fall of 2012, the students will take jobs at startups in Detroit, Providence, New Orleans, and other cities that have a hard time competing for talent with sexier locales.

Startups will hire the “fellows,” as they’re being called, for at least $32- $38,000 per year, for two years. Employers agree to pay the candidates’ healthcare benefits; contribute $2,500 into a training institute; host one event for Fellows; and more.

In return, employers are getting their recruiting partially done for them, and a job candidate willing to venture outside of the Bostons and San Franciscos of the world.

Venture for America is also going to keep a database of resumes, transcripts, and essays of candidates who apply to the program, and will make that database available to companies, even those not participating in this program otherwise, to search. I’m told it’ll be free to use the database, with a “tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 – $2,000 upon successful hire by the company.”

I received the e-mail below from a frustrated job applicant who must have found my website when searching for some straight talk about her pre-employment assessment experience.

Hello, My name is #####, and I am an insurance and financial services professional in (city, state). I work for a good company, but just this week I was contacted by large national competitor who was interested in hiring me. After speaking with a recruiter with that company, I was asked to complete a few questionnaires, sign and fax agreements to let this company research my credit and other very private information, and then was sent an email last night to complete an online assessment. I followed the directions, took the 139-question assessment (which took me about an hour) and was emailed this morning saying that I am not able to interview for the position.

I was blown away with surprise, as my credentials are outstanding and I have a clean, strong professional history. I asked for the results of the assessment, and I was denied any information as to why I was dismissed. The questionnaire asked me a few different times about my age, sex, and ethnicity, which I answered completely and honestly. My industry is typically dominated by white male professionals, but I haven’t had any problems with discrimination in the past. I am not assuming that this is discrimination, however, don’t I have a right to know what the results of my professional assessment is? How am I to know what the company views as weak or inadequate professional characteristics without answers or explanation? I want to be as professional and kind as possible with this matter, but I am not sure what to do. Any advice?

Thank you,

######

Here is my response:

Dear ######,

I am sorry you had this experience.

It is the norm that companies don’t share test results with applicants.

They get concerned about this because they think applicants may sue them.

I don’t know enough about this situation to say if the profile for the job is a good match or not to your skills.

I can say this: if you don’t fit the profile they have developed and you answered honestly, you may not be a good fit for that company and their culture even if you can do the job. This may be a good thing in the long run as no one likes to work for a company culture where they don’t fit in.

What can you do to learn more about why you were rejected in this situation? Unfortunately not much.

I would suggest you call the recruiter directly and ask them to share result with you. If they say they can’t, you do have a right to ask HOW the test results are used and what kind of test it is. You have a right to know about the process they use and then you can see maybe what happened due to your testing scores. However, I seriously doubt if any information at all will be shared with you.

In terms of the questions about sex and race, these should never be required. The EEOC has an optional form that they may have provided but if they required this info from you and if you had no chance opt out then they are not playing by the rules. If you feel discrimination is at hand here contact your local EEOC office or an employment lawyer and they can tell you if you have a case.

I hate to say that the kind of thing you experienced is common, but it is. It is the result of several things, including the fact that companies don’t have enough time to discuss information with rejected applicants, companies are worried about being sued, and companies often do stupid things because they don’t know any better.

In today’s economy you are very lucky to have a good job that you like. When it does come time to apply for another job, do your best to ask about the process that will be used to evaluate your suitability for the job.

Regards,

Charles Handler

I am willing to bet that the scenario experienced by #### is a common one. This is highly unfortunate. With high-volume automated processes, for entry-level positions the norm is that no candidate feedback be given. In this situation the recruiter was going after a passive candidate for a professional level position and a relatively deep dialogue unfolded.

We I/O psychologists talk a lot about ROI from assessment via predictive accuracy of assessments. This is definitely important but it is also important not to lose sight of the big picture when it comes to assessments and hiring. Value from the hiring process is much more than just a chance to crawl around an applicant with a microscope. It is also a chance to provide someone with a positive experience and build your company’s brand image.

The company that tried to poach #### certainly does not share this perspective. It left the applicant asking:

Do you value my time? An hour is a pretty long time to ask of a candidate. Assessments taking this long are more common for professional level jobs in which the dialogue with the recruiter has progressed down the funnel. Still it was enough that the candidate noted the exact length of the assessment.

Are you being fair to me? The candidate did not say if the race and sex info request was optional or not. I think that candidates often miss the fact that the EEOC form added to all assessments is actually optional, as this is sometimes not very clear. There is definitely a chance that it was not made optional. Users of assessment tools should review this kind of thing from the candidate perspective and make sure that everything is crystal-clear. You can see what happens when this is not the case. When there is a job applicant who has even the faintest thought of legal action swimming around in her head, bad things are afoot. This is a scenario to be avoided at all costs!

What kind of jerks are you all anyway? Most of all this experience smacks of a company that does not understand the impact of its employment brand on applicants. The web and social media are making brand erosion due to poor experiences a serious reality. Treating candidates poorly is something that is going to be tolerated less and less. Each candidate interaction gives a company a chance to show how much it values applicants and how well it treats its employees. Creating a positive, engaging candidate experience should be a prime directive for all hiring processes. Why not create an interactive online application that serves as a two-way street, engaging applicants while informing them about the job and company and collecting relevant predictive data? This is the future for best-practices-based hiring. Get with it!

What’s wrong with me? While we can’t know for sure if the assessment was the stake through this candidate’s heart, it seems likely. While this may or may not have been appropriate, no one deserves to be treated as poorly as ### was, especially after sharing so much about herself. While it is often the case that assessment results are not shared, companies can still provide rejected applicants with some information that allows them to understand why they were rejected. It is amazing how easily we forget the golden rule. In this case silence is not an effective solution. Sweeping problems under the rug may work in the short run, but in the long run it can lead to some really smelly situations!

If enough applicants ask the questions above based on their experience in the hiring process, eventually this kind of thing is going to cost the company customers, good employees, and revenue!