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HR stocks are getting hammered far harder than the broader financial markets, as the global selloff that began a week ago resumed today.

HR stocks are bleeding more than the market as a whole, as investors worldwide continued their rush to sell. The publicly traded job boards were all off by double digits, with LinkedIn down more than four times the Dow as a whole.

At mid-afternoon in New York, the Dow was down 4.4 percent, which translates into a nearly 500 point drop. The NASDAQ, where some of the HR stocks trade, was off 137 points, a 5.5 percent from its opening.

Investors spared none of the HR stocks we track. Wall Street darling LinkedIn was off $16.68, a drop of 18.26 percent. It was the biggest decline of any of the job boards and, for that matter, of all the HR firms on our list. keep reading…

Most executives assume that low employee turnover is an indication of great management. While that could be the case, there are many other reasons for low employee turnover, not all of which are good. For instance, it could indicate that talent competitors find little value in the people that comprise the organization: they simply are not desirable.

Turnover Rates Are Impacted By Employee Desirability

High turnover rates do not always mean that you have bad managers or that you are not a great place to work. Firms with great brands and industry visibility are often the target of recruiters. In fact, it is not unusual for hiring managers to direct recruiters to only target employees from the top five firms in their industry. That being the case, you need to consider the reverse: employees may stay only because they have few options to leave.

Reasons Low Voluntary Turnover Might Be Bad News

Every organization needs to understand “why” recruiters opt for and against targeting the employees of an organization, and why employees stay. Some possible drivers of low turnover include: keep reading…

With Wall Street braced for the worst, the U.S. Labor Department had good news this morning. The U.S. economy added 117,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.1 percent.

Coming the day after the Dow plunged more than 500 points, the better-than-expected jobs numbers offered some relief from the last two weeks of pessimistic reports about the economy. Stocks opened higher.

Estimates ahead of the report pegged job growth at around 90,000 during July, though some economists said the number could be as low as 55,000. The unemployment rate, which ticked up in June to 9.2 percent, was expected to be unchanged. ADP’s National Employment Report Wednesday, which is not often in sync with the government report, said 114,000 private sector jobs were added in July. The BLS put that number at a 154,000. Government job losses offset the private sector gains.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles and maintains labor data for the U.S., also revised upwards jobs numbers for May by 53,000 and June by 46,000. keep reading…

As Malcolm Gladwell points out is his bestseller The Tipping Point, little things can make a big difference. The same is true when it comes to finding, recruiting, and hiring passive candidates. One big thing recruiters can do is tame their hiring manager clients. Taming your hiring managers is an essential first step if you want to recruit passive candidates.

As was pointed out in a major study we did last year with LinkedIn, 82% of LinkedIn’s fully employed members characterize themselves as passive candidates. While they’d be open to talk with a recruiter, they are not interested in a lateral transfer, applying through your ATS, or working for a company that doesn’t know how to hire and develop talent. To find and hire these people, especially the best of the group, recruiters need to not only tame their hiring managers, but also employ the 6 Cs for recruiting passive candidates. These represents the key tipping points involved in any passive candidate search effort.

Over many (many) years, I’ve worked on search assignments with more than 500 different hiring managers on positions ranging from staff accountants and senior engineers to functional VPs, COOs, and CEOs of all stripes and sizes. From these experiences I’ve discovered a bunch of challenges that need to be addressed before you start looking for candidates. keep reading…

Wall Street may have tanked. The global markets may be in a shambles. But LinkedIn is proving you can roll uphill.

Fresh off its May IPO, the company surprised almost everyone, reporting it more than doubled revenue in the second quarter and turned a 7 cent a diluted share profit. After hours, investors rewarded the company’s performance, bidding up its stock price by almost 10 percent in the minutes after the numbers were released.

Analysts had predicted the company would lose 3 cents a share on revenue of $104.73 million. Looking ahead to the third quarter, the consensus was for a 4 cent a share loss on revenue of $111.82 million.

Now LinkedIn estimates it will bring in between $121 million and $125 million.

Since the initial euphoria, LinkedIn’s after-hours trading is lower, but still up over its New York close of $95.52. The stock lost $10.13 during Wednesday’s bloodbath. At early evening in New York, the stock is trading at $99.00 a share.

Company CEO Jeff Weiner, speaking at the company’s first financial results conference call, reported that on every metric LinkedIn’s second quarter performance showed growth. Besides the dollars and cents, Weiner said LinkedIn is growing at the rate of 2 members every second and now has 121 million members. Engagement with the site also continues to grow; pageviews are up 80 percent over the same quarter last year and unique visitors now average 81.8 million monthly.

“Talent is the driving force,” Weiner said, both on the site and in the company itself. keep reading…

Paul Basile, CEO of Matchpoint Careers, Inc and a veteran business leader and H.R. specialist, will share insights, examples and the validated science that offers practical solutions to today’s recruitment dilemmas.

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

Matt Epstein really wants a job at Google. Really.

He wants to work for the company so much he’s launched a silly, almost ridiculous “Hire M.E.” campaign in which a phony mustache plays a supporting role. keep reading…

There couldn’t have been a more perfect scenario for Derek Jeter on Saturday, July 9, against the Tampa Bay Rays. In the third inning on a full count, Jeter got his 3,000th hit on a 78 mile per hour slider, knocking the ball out of the park. But he wasn’t done yet. Jeter finished the game for the Yankees 5 for 5 with a game-winning hit.

I was on the edge of my seat on hit 2,999. I’ve witnessed lots of broken records and new milestones in sports throughout my life, but this one was special. Jeter has something more than just sheer athletic ability.

True star athletes have more than just physical talent. They possess the confidence and inner fire that pushes them to overachieve on the playing field or on the court. These leaders also have the ability to motivate and collaborate to drive their teams forward and win.

In fact, over the past five decades I’ve found that sports and business align in many ways. With Jeter’s recent accomplishment, it’s easy to see how a top-performing athlete and his team can be role models for others aspiring to that same level of greatness. Throughout Jeter’s career — his massive wins and some shortcomings — there are countless lessons that directly apply to the boardroom. keep reading…

Payroll processor ADP says 114,000 private sector jobs were created in July, a number inline, if on the high side, with what economists expected.

All but 9,000 of the jobs were created by small and mid-size businesses employing up to 499 workers. The gain came in the service sector, which added 121,000 jobs during the month, according to ADP and its forecasting partner, Macroeconomic Advisers. The goods-producing sector lost 7,000 jobs, with manufacturing alone shedding 1,00o. Construction was down by 11,000, the third consecutive monthly decline.

Widely watched for clues as to what the U.S. Labor Department’s monthly employment report (out on the Friday after the ADP release) is likely to show, the ADP National Employment Report is often far off the official numbers.

In June, ADP estimated private sector job creation at 157,000, revised down to 145,000 in today’s release. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the private sector number at 57,000. For May, ADP said 73,000 jobs were created; the BLS said 36,000. In April, ADP said 179,000 jobs were added; the BLS said 241,00. keep reading…

Should you pay people who refer to your company a job candidate who ends up getting hired? Or, should you pay people merely for sending in a name of someone?

Cathy Henesey, manager, career services, Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, talks about the latter — paying for names not just hires — in the 9 1/2-minute video below. She discusses whether some jobs or all jobs are eligible; how to handle situations where multiple people give the same name; and the results of the program. keep reading…

Have you seen these people? The ones in the picture to the right? If you have, immediately call the marketing police and report their location. They are on the “Most Overused Stock Image Photo” list at MarketingProfs.com.

I’ve personally tracked the photo to eight HR-related sites where it shows up illustrating employee engagement, consulting services, headhunting, and a company’s commitment to diversity recruiting. I know there are more. Google has 19 pages of results.

Is your company among them?

A moment’s digression: Google has a new, handy image search that lets you drag an image into the search box to find where else it appears. You can also upload a picture, search by URL or, with the right extension, right click an image. Google explains it all here. keep reading…

OK, so we all know a few serial Facebook-posters who can’t seem to pick up the phone and have a conversation. But assuming for the moment that being active on social media means you’re more social than not, the “most social” job is actually one of a recruiter.

That’s according to a study by a company called NetProspex. In short, its criteria was 1) The number of people with social media profiles on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook using a company email address; and 2) The number of connections people had on those three networks.

The end result is what the company calls a NetProspex Social Index.

Here’s what it came up with for the “most social” jobs (click graphic to enlarge).

Meanwhile, the survey also came up with a number of other fun lists, including: keep reading…

Apply for a job that’s open at Zoosk, a dating site, start work by the end of September, and you also get a date with one of the stars of its TV commercials, Samantha or Steve. Zoosk will pay for the date — including a round-trip flight to Los Angeles, limo, and dinner.

It’s also offering a $10,000 referral fee for new engineering hires through September 30. Bad news, though: I read the fine print and you can’t collect the cash if you’re a recruiter.

In addition to its engineering and marketing jobs open in San Francisco, Zoosk is hiring an HR manager, and like many companies, an employment branding director.

The San Francisco headcount has doubled in the last 15 months, to 95.

A Massachusetts company with about 1,400 employees ended its contract with a large, national job board, and is allocating — as the graphic shows — its time and money to advertising on Indeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, SimplyHired, and more.

Athenahealth is a healthcare IT company, recently mentioned by Barron’s, that provides online services for doctors, such as billing services. It has received a number of honors like the 2011 “Best Place to Work in Massachusetts” by Boston Business Journal and was named to Fast Company’s list of the world’s most innovative companies in 2010.

While turnover is low, and Recruiting Operations Manager Susan Treadway says engagement is very, very high, athenahealth does have its recruiting challenges. Hiring for its critical sales and software jobs is challenging, competing without a big name against two that are quite big and have New England operations: Google and Microsoft.

Treadway’s department reports to an SVP and lies outside of the human resources department. Interestingly, it includes only six people, though it’s adding 400-450 people a year.

In 2009 in particular, it started to believe that its job board spending just wasn’t working well enough: too many applicants, not all qualified, a lot of sifting, too much recruiter time. keep reading…

Now that the drama queens in Washington seem (see “It ain’t over till it’s over”) to have reached a debt-ceiling compromise we can get back to the other big issue: job growth.

This is the week when the U.S. Department of Labor reports its monthly employment numbers. Against a backdrop of slowing manufacturing, declining consumer job hopes, and other signs of a financial stall, economists are not holding out much hope that Friday’s report will be anything to celebrate.

A Bloomberg News survey of 62 economists found they expected, on average, that unemployment will remain at 9.2 percent and that 100,000 jobs will have been added to the economy. That would certainly be an improvement over June’s 18,000 jobs, but no where near the 250,000 to 300,000 needed to put a dent in the unemployment rate.

Meanwhile, a report from The Conference Board this morning offers no hope that August will be better. New job openings advertised online in July fell by an astounding 217,000 listings. It’s the biggest decline since January 2009, when 346,000 fewer listings were online.

To get your arms around what the number means, consider that through June, there were a total of 689,000 new job postings this year. July’s drop wiped out a third of the gains. The other consideration is that help-wanted ads suggest a slow August, since ads are run in advance of the actual hiring. keep reading…

This public trust is our Company’s most valuable asset: one earned every day through our scrupulous adherence to the principles of integrity and fair dealing… Each of us has the power to influence the way our Company is viewed, simply through the judgments and decisions we each make in the course of an ordinary day. — from News Corp’s code of conduct manual

The News Corp scandal has been an expensive one, tanking the stock valuation by $7 billion in a single four-day period. While it might not be obvious, the scandal will have many serious human resource implications not just for News Corp, but for all large organizations in general.

News Corp will need to replace many key leaders following permanent damage to its employer brand that influences its ability to recruit and retain top professionals (incidentally, Scotland Yard faces the same issues). In both organizations the primary causes of damage appear to be large numbers of employees and managers acting badly.

Undetected employee misbehavior is a common problem at almost all large organizations, so this example should serve as a wake-up call to all in HR that it needs to re-examine its capability for identifying damaging employee behaviors.

What Is HR Accountable for?

One of the fundamental tenants of modern business is accountability, but you would be hard pressed to find any part of the HR function at News Corp accepting responsibility for the recent events. When employees behave badly, you can blame the CEO, but in a massively large organization he/she often pushes oversight off to others (Murdoch has stated publicly that he can’t closely monitor the actions of 53,000 individual employees worldwide). You can also blame corporate culture, but if you do, you must identify who is accountable for maintaining the culture and what systemic actions sustain it.  A third possibility involves blaming whoever is responsible for monitoring and guiding employee behavior.

These last two possibilities bring to mind an important strategic question: keep reading…