ERE.net

One of the easiest ways corporate advisors and consultants help their clients improve performance quickly is highlighting and putting an end to dumb things being done that negatively impact results. Over the years I have developed my list (some of it is shared below), but I would love to hear your thoughts on what you are seeing today that makes you scratch your head, or worse, makes your skin crawl with anger.

The Staffing Management Association of Seattle (one of the nation’s most progressive professional associations for recruiters) has selected this topic for the closing keynote session I will deliver at its seventh Annual Symposium on November 9.

I’ll incorporate your views into my presentation and share my final list with the ere.net community following the event. Helping rank my list and identify missing things shouldn’t take more than five minutes and could prove very helpful to the entire recruiting community. Look through my list of 30 dumb things and select the five that you see as the most common and most egregious. keep reading…

How does your organization look through the eyes of a candidate? The candidate experience you offer has a direct impact on the success of your recruiting efforts.

This engaging and interactive program will evaluate your organization from the candidate’s perspective. You’ll learn what factors can influence a candidate’s decision to choose your company over a competitor and discover the tools and techniques to create a unique and memorable experience that engages and captures the best talent.

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

If you weren’t at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect last week in Las Vegas (Oct 17-19, 2011) you missed the recruiting event of the year. Since most of the work I do is with SMBs (small to medium size business), I was asked to lead a program on how to create a big brand without the big name. As part of this I introduced a new concept for how companies should benchmark their social media presence and effectiveness: the Social Media Pyramid. I know many of you will be vying for awards at the Spring 2012 ERE Expo, and social media will play a role in quite a few of the awards, so I thought I’d give you my guidelines for using the Social Media Pyramid as guide.

Most companies are using a hodgepodge of social media ideas, trying a little of this and a little of that, in the hope something works. Rather than proceed in such a haphazard manner, I’ve decided to give some structure to the process by creating five levels of social media effectiveness based on currently available technology. keep reading…

The stock markets rallied today on news of a European bailout deal, but Monster didn’t make the party.

The company’s shares got no lift from the overall market even though earnings are up, because the employment picture in the months ahead is murky. keep reading…

The lively discussion about favoring employed job candidates over unemployed job candidates sometimes includes a dichotomy: the recruiter’s open to people without jobs, but the manager not so much.

Ron Katz, of Penguin HR Consulting, and I talk for 10 minutes, below, about what recruiters can do in situations like that. We also get into what exactly’s behind the bias against the unemployed. And we touch on how the perception of HR/recruiting factors in all this.

keep reading…

“Technology — rather than hiring — is on the minds of most executives of mid-market companies.”

So says Mid-Market Perspectives: America‘s Economic Engine – Competing in Uncertain Times, a Deloitte survey of almost 700 executives at companies with revenue of $50 million to $1 billion.

A majority of the executives expect both revenue (61.2 percent) and profitability (52.6 percent) to increase next year, despite limited faith in any significant improvement in the national economy. What drives their optimism is a continued focus on cost controls and increased productivity.

Of the 70 percent of executives reporting an increase in productivity, the average saw a 6.1 percent improvement since the beginning of the recession. The majority of executives credit the rise to improvements in business processes (62.2 percent) and technology (50.3 percent), especially the automation of business operations and increased use of data analytics for business intelligence. keep reading…

Social media gets a lot of press. There seem to be millions of articles offering advice on how to succeed with social media, in business, in fundraising, starting revolutions, and of course, recruiting. A lot of that advice is as useful as a bicycle for a fish — since it’s often anecdotal or the wisdom of some self-styled guru writing about purple sheep or comparing anyone that doesn’t follow their advice to dinosaurs. So it’s great to read something that’s based on data and research, like a recent report from Gallup that has implications for recruiting.

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online. keep reading…

Someone asked me a question out of nowhere yesterday — in a restroom of all places — that took me aback.

It got me thinking about a very different — and more important — question you need to ask if you’re a manager.

“I Beg Your Pardon?”

As I approached the hotel restroom sink to wash my hands, a man in a suit turned to me and said:

“I know this is a weird question to ask, but … do I smell bad?”

He explained that he had been sweating profusely because of the hot conference room and was worried that he now reeked and would repel others. While this is never a pleasant thought, since this was an event where you wanted to network with others, he was especially concerned about being perceived as a noxious life form.

Since he was being so authentic and genuine, how could I not accommodate his request? I got a bit closer and took a whiff. keep reading…

Inside this modest, even nondescript brick building is the Conspiracy. I capitalize it because I’m playing along with the preposterous notion that it was selected because of grammatical significance to be part of the official name of the organization that inhabits suite 200 here on Fort Worth’s Magnolia Avenue.

“Conspiracy,” explains the man whose name is also part of the title, “is a collective noun. It represents the whole.” At another point he tells me, “The intellectual power of the organization comes from the whole.”

I do not question his explanation. It has the ring of HR about it.

Maintaining his own name as part of the title of what once was called Starr Tincup signals continuity; a heritage name, he adds. I do not question this either. It has the ring of marketing wisdom about it.

Thus was Starr Tincup rechristened The Starr Conspiracy, says the man. His name is Starr, Bret Starr. A year ago he bought out his partner Bill Tincup, then promptly made partners of four of his long-time associates.

Documents that have come into my possession (and which I share with the world here) more fully detail the name change. The word “conspiracy,” says a document bearing the cryptic seal of the organization — a be-tentacled octopus with an all seeing eye – ”denotes a group of persons working in secret to influence perceptions and outcomes.” keep reading…

There is a common belief that the primary cause of a sales team missing its revenue goal is a dry sales pipeline. If a sales team doesn’t have a healthy prospect pipeline, trouble lies ahead. Yet, there is a pipeline that is more impactful to the financial health of the business than even the sales one. That pipeline is the sales candidate pipeline. keep reading…

In Part 1 of this series I called out the need for the recruiting profession to embrace and make the business case for using market research to inform and guide recruiting efforts. In this episode, my attention turns to acting on that need.

Every recruiting leader wants top candidates, but the standard approach used by most recruiters simply doesn’t work. A more precise data-driven approach that leverages complete understanding of the attraction factors can give you a competitive edge. Market research can reveal: keep reading…

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times, for recruiters. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are out of work, actively seeking employment. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are employed and won’t budge for fear of LIFO.

Hiring managers can afford to thoroughly assess candidates, but they still need to proactively recruit.

Successful recruiters can manage this unique employment market by melding the initial assessment and sourcing through a dual-purpose recruitment tool: ideal profiles.

The ideal profile is not about elevating nice-to-haves to must-haves in your list of job requirements. It’s about using your knowledge of a top-performer KSAs and competencies to target your recruiting and do a more thorough, objective assessment of candidates.

What Is an Ideal Profile?

keep reading…

In this educational webinar, we’ll be opening up the phone lines for you to discuss the unique challenges and strategies specific to recruiting for the healthcare field.

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

I recently predicted that Facebook will eventually destroy LinkedIn. Today, that prediction came closer to reality as the world’s largest social network announced a partnership with national employment services and the U.S. Department of Labor. According to Facebook’s official statement, the Social Jobs Partnership goal will be “to facilitate employment for America’s jobless through the use of social networks.”

Facebook has launched a page, facebook.com/socialjobs, which features resources and information for job seekers from the coalition’s other partners: The National Association of Colleges and Employers, the DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, along with the Labor Department. Facebook plans to create public service announcements to promote its services in the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, which, according to CNN Money, are Michigan, Rhode Island, California, South Carolina, Oregon, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Alaska, and Florida. Included in Facebook’s list of initiatives is this intriguing item: keep reading…

Politicians claim they never let a good crisis go to waste. Reacting to crises is how people take advantage of opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked. But, have you ever thought about how that applies to HR? Or, maybe you have not kept up with the trend to eliminate internal recruiters.

Professional recruiters are citing an increasing number of independent studies claiming there is no difference in employee quality between internal and external recruiters; so, they argue, why should organizations hire full-time internal recruiters when external ones deliver the same results … cheaper? If I were an executive looking for ways to reduce costs, that argument would resonate with me. keep reading…

LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference wound down in Las Vegas today after a three-day run that was equal parts training, trends, product, and showbiz. It was the perfect mix for a city that thrives on spectacle.

After a Tuesday night party worthy of a last century Silicon Valley event, a bleary-eyed audience was brought to its feet by former basketball great and now-successful businessman Magic Johnson. Roaming the cavernous convention hall, he mixed photo ops with motivational lessons from his life, which took him from high school standout to Laker star and now to business success as the CEO of multi-million dollar development companies that work largely in inner city neighborhoods.

He offered up such chestnuts as  ”It’s not enough to deliver … you have to overdeliver”; “losers lose and winners win”; and others as he told his life story. It was an entertaining almost 90 minutes that went into overtime as Johnson took questions, hustling over to each person to make sure they could get a picture of themselves with the NBA legend. keep reading…

Learn how to improve recruiting efficiency and quality-of-hire with new online reference-checking

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

Most corporate recruiting departments struggle to fully support the recruiting needs of their organizations. This is not to say that there aren’t strong recruiting functions or recruiters on the corporate side, but corporate recruiting does struggle with an image issue that is at least somewhat deserved. A couple weeks ago I published an article that stirred up conversation between corporate and third party recruiters, so I thought I’d follow up with a more detailed understanding of the corporate recruiter’s role. This perspective should be beneficial for some agency recruiters to understand why their corporate recruiting counterparts sometimes struggle to fill openings, and also suggests what corporate recruiting leaders should be fixing.  keep reading…