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If you subscribe to the notion that any growth in jobs is good, then today’s report from ADP will be encouraging. The payroll processor said 91,000 new private sector jobs were created in August.

That’s still less than the 100,000 economists were expecting, and it’s about a third of what the U.S. needs each month to bring down the unemployment rate.  The company, and Macroeconomic Advisers, its partner in the monthly report, also adjusted downward its July estimate to 109,000 from the original 114,000.

In ever-so-cautious language, the report says that the slow job growth in August is “at a pace below what would be consistent with a stable unemployment rate.” That means that should the trend continue, unemployment may rise.

Economists expect that when the official employment numbers are released Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor, they’ll show the 9.1 percent unemployment rate unchanged. New jobs are expected to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 75,000 (Bloomberg News) to 80,000 (Dow Jones Newswires). keep reading…

I had my first shot at management last year, and like every newly promoted doe-eyed employee I was on a quest to be the best manager ever! However, I had no management experience and no playbook as to how I was going to go about winning over my team. I went through my mental rolodex of previous bosses to draw inspiration; after all, the one benefit to the amount of job-hopping that I have had is that I have met quite a few characters along the way. I have had some great mentors in the past, and inevitably, some not-so-great ones. One mentor comes to mind who I have now followed to three different roles and honestly would follow her just about anywhere. She believes in me enough to do anything to help me be successful (Best Boss Ever — yes I still feel the need to brown-nose her).

But as I examined some of my other supervisors, I devised a list, or manager playbook of rookie mistakes that I vowed never to repeat. Below I’ll walk through some of the things I have seen personally. The stories you are about to read are true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. keep reading…

Consumers may be pessimistic about jobs, but investors clearly were not today, bidding up the stock of the three publicly held career sites.

So aggressive was the action on Monster in particular that its stock soared 21.45 percent today, leading the gainers on the S&P 500 Index. Monster’s shares closed the day at $9.91.

LinkedIn rose 6 percent today, closing at $87.49. Monday, LinkedIn was up 7.5 percent. Dice Holdings was up 2.16 percent to $10.40.

All three companies had a tough few days last week, with LinkedIn sinking on Thursday to $70.05, its lowest price since going public in May. It closed its first day of trading back then at $94.25, after hitting a high of almost $123 a share.

Monster, which has been drifting in the mid teens for months, started heading south in late July, closing on August 22 at a low of $7.13.  Friday, the stock began inching up, and Monday, despite news the company had replaced its CIO Darko Dejanovic, it continued to rise. Today, after the company reported that three of its senior executives cumulatively bought more than 87,000 shares, the stock took off.  keep reading…

U.S. consumer confidence in August dropped to the lowest point in two years, the result, analysts say, of the protracted debate over the debt issue and the continuing employment situation.

The 14.7 point drop in The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index is the largest since October 2008, at the very beginning of the recession when banks and investment houses were failing. The Index now stands at 44.5, its lowest level since April 2009.

Among the components that make up the Consumer Confidence Index is the jobs picture. There, 49.1 percent of consumers said jobs are “hard to get,” an increase from July’s 44.8 percent. The percent saying jobs are plentiful declined to 4.7 percent from 5.1 percent.

Asked about job growth, consumers were even more pessimistic. Almost a third of consumers (31.5 percent) expect there to be fewer jobs available in the next few months. Just last month, 22.2 percent expected fewer jobs. Employment optimists — those expecting more jobs in the months ahead — declined to 11.4 from 16.9 percent. keep reading…

While running the executive recruiting department for a Fortune 50 company, I once overheard a conversation between two people at a well-known coffee bar. Based on their dialog, they were executives from my company’s main competitor and were discussing a candidate they had just interviewed. Said candidate was a high-potential executive at my Fortune 50, and like many executive candidates, this person was a valued employee and not an active job seeker. The indiscretion of the two leaders from the competing company could have put their candidate’s career at risk, or at the very least, jeopardized his interest in continuing conversations with them.

The experience reminded me how much responsibility hiring entities have to maintain the confidentially of the executives they interview. There are at least five areas where exerting caution is imperative. keep reading…

You always suspected you didn’t get that promotion because the boss played favorites. Now there’s evidence you’re right.

The majority of bosses in a new study admit they knew who they wanted to promote before the formal process got underway.

Published by Georgetown University, the study by Jonathan Gardner, COO and senior managing director of Penn, Schoen, & Berland Associates, found 56 percent of large company (with more than 1,000 employees) executives with more than one candidate for a promotion already had a favorite. After going through the evaluation process, 96 percent of those managers with a favorite gave them the job. Twenty-nine percent of the managers had only one candidate.

No wonder, then, that 78 percent of managers said their promotion decision was easy. And no wonder, too, that 92 percent say favoritism exists in most large organizations. keep reading…

Regulations are strangling job growth

Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash. That’s enough to fund 27 million jobs, or reduce unemployment to near zero. So what’s keeping them from spending? The economy is slowing from what was already a very tepid recovery. But even with greatly reduced expectations, job growth coming out of the recession has been far below what should have occurred based on historical precedents.

For a clue why this is, look no further than the environmental impact statement report on the proposed pipeline to bring crude oil from Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. The project is estimated to create more than 138,000 jobs and invest over $20 billion in the U.S. economy. However, those benefits have to be weighed against such critical factors as “the impact on beetles” — a subject of considerable study in the report, among other things. The report concludes that there is no significant environmental impact because of the project, but tell that to the beetles. keep reading…

From the giant IPO-bound staffing firm Staffmark Holdings, to Indianapolis’ 14-person HR services firm FlashPoint, 156 self-described human resource companies made the annual Inc. list of the 5,000 fastest growing businesses in the U.S.

Inc. ranks the companies, all privately held, by growth rate; the faster revenue increased over three years, the higher the company ranks. By that measure, HR staffing and services firm Nextaff was first among the HR companies that volunteered to participate. (Participation requires companies to divulge annual revenue, employee counts and growth, etc. Only some companies are willing to publicize that kind of proprietary information.)

keep reading…

Some folks talk about letting applicants know they didn’t get the job, and even letting them know why they didn’t get the job.

But is that communication actually happening? Often it’s not, despite the fact that job applicants are a source of employee referrals, and despite the fact that job candidates don’t forget their bad experiences when they look to buy consumer products.

I talk about this topic for about 11 minutes with Lisa Chartier of Alexander Mann Solutions, below. keep reading…

I was talking to a dear friend this morning who told me all the rain we had recently washed out the rear of her house and caused substantial damage to her foundation and the low-lying rooms on that level of her home.

“Insurance doesn’t cover this. I need a second job,” she said, matter-of factly and in the common-sense tone I have always known her to adopt.

We went on to talk about several other things — how the “guys” in her male-dominated industry don’t appreciate or are willing to pay her fairly for the tremendous extra volume of business she has drummed up for the sales team in the past three years she has been with the company she works for now.

Granted, that’s her side of things and there may be another.

However, at the end of our conversation she happened to mention that she had developed a business relationship with someone who hates the telephone.

“How does that work for him?’ I asked, laughing. keep reading…

Over the course of this webinar, Michael Long, Head of Culture Branding at Rackspace Hosting, will explain the theory, practice and results that have been achieved since the launch of rackertalent.com in March of 2010. Through the deployment of employee blogs, a flexible platform and modern web technologies, the Rackspace career site has increased visitors by over 430% in just one year.

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

With 25 million Americans out of work or underemployed, you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to find a teacher, an admin assistant, or an accountant. But you would be wrong, according to Manpower.

Those jobs are among the 10 toughest jobs to fill in the U.S., says Manpower’s annual Talent Shortage Survey, which also reports that 52 percent of the employers in the survey are having trouble filling jobs.  Only in Japan and India do more companies report talent hard to find.

Globally, a third of all employers say they have difficulty filling jobs.  Lack of experienced workers is the most frequently cited reason,  globally, as well as in every region in the survey. In the Americas, lack of experience was followed by a lack of skills.

Particularly surprising was the the rise in U.S. companies reporting hiring difficulty. In the 2010 survey, only 14 percent of companies reported problems filling jobs. Now the percentage has nearly quadrupled.

If it seems unlikely the hiring situation could have worsened so much so fast, part of the disconnect may have to do with when the survey was conducted – months ago, long before the current round of gloomy economic reports started coming out. keep reading…

In this article, an abridged version of one coming up in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’ll describe how and why hiring and promoting the best people is usually undermined by seven common organizational obstacles.

Briefly, it helps to think of organizations this way: you can hire and promote 100 people whom 20% are high-quality, 20% low-quality, and the rest so-so; or, you can hire and promote 100 people, of whom 90% are top-notch. The first situation is the norm. It’s what you get when obstacles get in your way. The second option is the exception. keep reading…

University recruiting, like any relationship-management sourcing strategy, often requires a balanced mix of long-term investments coupled with numerous annual campus visits in order to develop a successful brand and become an employer of choice. Many organizations structure those “long-term investments” in annual or capital campaign monetary contributions, often to career centers or related offices, which have welcomed the donations as their own funding challenges have worsened. But while such contributions may have led to a significant ROI in the past, that may not be the same case in the future.

The reason is simple: students now turn more often to faculty members for early-career guidance and advice on which employers to start out with. In a way, this might make university recruiting relationship management easier: just shift the primary focus to the faculty. For the time being, until the economy really rebounds, this would be an effective sourcing model. But when the economy rebounds, nearly a majority of tenured faculty at many top-tier universities will at least be eligible for early retirement, and the new relationships forged in those few years will take time to rebuild with new replacements. keep reading…

According to Moody’s Analytics, nearly 148,000 tech jobs will be created in the U.S. by the end of 2011. Surprisingly, the biggest hiring challenge many technology companies face is that many of the industry’s most talented professionals aren’t actively looking for new jobs. Gone are the days of shuffling through hundreds of resumes of potentially qualified candidates. Today’s savvy companies are proactively pursuing the industry’s top talent on sites like LinkedIn, BranchOut, and ZoomInfo. Now more than ever, hiring managers need to be highly networked and engaged in their area of specialty in order to get to know the best of the best.

Developing strong relationships with passive candidates is particularly challenging because you must engage them in a dialogue they aren’t necessarily interested in having. Creativity is king when it comes to designing your strategy for attracting passive talent.

Here are some techniques I have used to differentiate CDW’s recruitment efforts, and engage the most talented passive candidates: keep reading…

The number of  “free agent” workers has nearly exploded in the last three years, and now 44 percent of working Americans describe themselves that way.

A Kelly Services survey says  economic necessity, the desire for more freedom and flexibility, and age have driven up the number of workers not tied to a single company for their livelihood. It’s a dramatic change from 2008, when Kelly’s survey found 26 percent of workers describing themselves as free agents.

Also fueling the rise is the increasing reliance of American business on contingent and contract labor, say the authors of a whitepaper detailing the results. Companies, note Jocelyn Lincoln and Megan M. Raftery, “can scale up and down faster and easier by adopting more flexible workforce strategies.”

A significant driver is the economy. Respondents to the 2011 survey were twice as likely as their counterparts in 2008 to say they became free agents because they were laid off or couldn’t find another job.

That suggests, the authors say, that as recovery occurs, some of the newly minted free agents will return to a traditional employee role. However, “the trend toward more free agents is still very strong and is increasing worldwide. Accounting for differences in legislative frameworks and social and cultural norms, we estimate that the global free agent population is at
least 20 – 30% of the entire workforce, and growing.”

Recently, USA Today wrote about the phenomenon of well-established professionals abandoning comfortable jobs to pursue their own interests.  “Employees bid goodbye to corporate America” chronicled several workers, including two recruiters, who quit to follow their own path.

As the Kelly Services report makes clear, the move by knowledge workers to keep reading…

You’ll find in the interview questions below some you are asking already, some you haven’t been but would like to, and others that just don’t fit for your company and your jobs.

These interview questions are used by permission from Job Interview Skills 101, the Course You Forgot to Take For New Grads and College Students.

Comment on any, or add your own interview questions to share in the comments section. keep reading…

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the first 35 of 70 exceptional employee referral program features. This episode continues with 36-70 and covers features related to program responsiveness, communications, special needs/populations, technology, and process management.

V. Program Responsiveness Features

Being responsive to those who refer and the referrals they submit are critical features that drive program loyalty, participation, and engagement.

1. Rapid response to a referral is critical – a lack of responsiveness to employee referrals is the #1 program killer. The best programs set a target of getting feedback to the referrer and the referred individual within 48 – 72 hours of submission (Aricent & AmTrust Bank).
2. Expedited interviewing – some firms make a commitment to decide whether to interview/not interview all referrals within a week. Others make a more narrow commitment, which is to actually schedule an interview with all “A” quality employee referral candidates within a week of receiving their referral (Owens Corning).
3. Referrals must be tagged and the processing expedited – in the best programs, all referral applications are tagged in order to measure program effectiveness. In addition, the tagged referrals are given a priority for processing (i.e. fast tracked). This is necessary in order to ensure that both the employee and the referred individual feel like they are “special” (Accenture).
4. “On the spot” screening – consider developing a process where resumes collected at the referral desk undergo instant screening followed by instant feedback to the employee and the candidate (Tata consultancy).

VI. Communicating with employees and applicants

High-performing referral programs require frequent and effective communications. keep reading…

This webinar will feature three members of the Compensation Café blogging team – Ann Bares, Jim Brennan and Laura Schroeder – joining forces to examine where compensation practice is headed in the next year and beyond.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on HR be sure to check out TLNT!

I’m concerned that most corporate recruiters don’t understand what it really takes to recruit passive candidates. In three minutes, I think you’ll agree. If you’re looking for candidates where the demand for talent outstrips supply, the ability to recruit top passive candidates will now be more difficult than ever. Those people with good jobs will hang on even tighter, and recruiters will need to use every technique in the book to pry them loose.

In the first article in this series I defined six skills that a recruiter must possess in order to effectively recruit passive candidates. Collectively, they’re called the 6Cs. While all are important, some are more critical than others. Here are the results of a recent poll we took of corporate and third-party recruiters asking them to define the most important of the six skills. Here’s the link to the poll so you can participate yourself. You might want to do this before you read the rest of this article. This way your responses won’t be biased.

The top three vote getters in this poll were the need to articulate a Compelling message, the ability to quickly convert your job opening into a Career move, and the Conviction that you won’t give up despite candidate reluctance to move ahead. The least important — at least according to the poll participants — were the need to Control the conversation, the ability to develop deep Connections, and Closing the deal, without money being the primary driver. If you’re a third-party recruiter you know this is upside down. Controlling, Connecting, and Closing are the most important. Without these, Compelling messages, Career opportunities, and Conviction won’t get you any more hires.

I’ll give the corporate recruiters who took the poll a break here since I didn’t define the 6Cs other than using the description shown on the chart. So let me better define and demonstrate why Controlling, Connecting, and Closing are the most important.

Why Control is #1 on the 6Cs Hit Parade

When first approached by a recruiter, passive candidates make a quick decision to engage in a conversation based on a few core pieces of information. keep reading…