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ADP, best known by the adjective “payroll processor,” will need to launch a rebranding campaign. Something like, “ADP, the full-service human capital company.”

The $10 billion company announced today it is acquiring The RightThing, a leading recruitment process outsourcer, which three years ago acquired AIRS. Terms of the deal weren’t announced.

It’s the second acquisition for ADP in as many months. In September it bought Asparity Decision Solutions, a supplier of  employee health benefits decision support tools.

Besides giving ADP a strong and immediate presence in the burgeoning RPO business, The RightThing’s AIRS unit brings a sophisticated recruitment technology and a well-regarded recruiter Internet training component.

However, the announcement strongly suggests that it was the RPO side of the house that ADP was after in the acquisition. keep reading…

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

It’s 5:30 a.m., and Joe McHenry, a 36-year-old international tax manager who works in New York City, wakes up, checks his e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter activity from his smartphone all before getting out of bed. By 6:45 a.m. he’s dressed and walking to the train station for his 40-minute commute into the city. From the moment he grabs a seat to the moment he steps off the train, his eyes are glued to the four-inch screen of his personal onramp to his digital life and the information superhighway. Throughout the day, he’ll spend another 4.25 hours engaging with the world through it.

Now consider this: you’re trying to recruit Joe McHenry. He has blown off your e-mails, your voicemails, and even your InMails. This morning, however, his friend who used to work for your firm retweeted a link to the job you’re recruiting for, and it appeared on Joe’s Facebook wall. While on the train, Joe’s curiosity got the best of him and he clicked the link. The browser on his smartphone opened and started to load a page from your career site. He waited and waited, but the page just wasn’t loading. He figured, “I’ll try the parent domain instead.” He typed in yourcompany.com and up came your company’s WAP site, nicely formatted and clean. He looked for the link to jobs, but couldn’t find it. Frustrated, he abandoned his curiosity and went back to catching up with his friends on Facebook.

Sound like a poor experience? Only eight of the Fortune 100 have a career site that detects mobile browsers, and sadly, few of them optimize content for mobile visitors. Among those companies that have invested in building a mobile website, jobs content is more often than not missing. An infant-sized handful have done something for the mobile audience. They have built a careers app users can install on their phone or built out a mobile careers site. You can check out the progressive few: Raytheon, Starbucks, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Hyatt, and AT&T.

The New Normal

Joe McHenry’s lifestyle is the new normal. keep reading…

The U.S. Department of Labor issued one of its better jobs reports this morning, showing job growth in September was better than what  economists expected, and revising upward its zero growth August numbers. The monthly employment report also showed improvement in hourly earnings large enough to offset the loss in August.

American non-farm payrolls grew by 103,000 jobs last month and by 57,000 jobs in August. The Labor Department also revised up its July jobs numbers from 85,000 to 127,000. Economists predicted September’s number would come in closer to 60,000.

Certainly a positive, the numbers weren’t enough to make a dent in the ranks of the unemployed, leaving the unemployment rate at 9.1 percent. It has hovered there since April.

A big part of the September increase in the jobs count was due to the return to work of some 45,000 Verizon employees who were on strike in August. Even so, the jobs report showed the private sector added 92,000 after accounting for the returning strikers.

Job growth was strongest in healthcare, which added 44,000 positions; construction grew by 26,000; and, retailers added 13,600. The professional and technical category increased by 48,000 jobs, fueled largely by increases in IT, management, accounting, and technical services. Staffing and related services added almost 24,000 jobs.

Government was the biggest loser as it has been for months, shedding 34,000 jobs in September, while manufacturing cut 13,000 positions.

The report showed little appetite in the private sector for aggressive hiring. keep reading…

Tomorrow the U.S. Department of Labor is expected to report that fewer than 100,000 — as few, says one estimate, as 60,000 —  new jobs were created in September. While that’s an improvement over August’s no-growth report, it’s not going to change the unemployment rate, which has hovered around 9.1 percent since May.

Wednesday, payroll processor ADP and its partner Macroeconomic Advisers reported that 91,000 private sector jobs were created in September. That was the same number initially reported by ADP for August. (The September report adjusted downward that number to 89,000.)

While the ADP National Employment Report rarely tracks closely with the government’s official numbers, it’s seen by economists as an indicator of what the report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics may show. Taken with other reports out this week, there’s a sense that tomorrow’s numbers won’t move the needle.

“You have to characterize labor-market conditions as tepid and disappointing,” Bloomberg quoted Joel Prakken, senior managing director of Macroeconomic Advisers, as saying. “There is an element of structural unemployment that persists.”

This morning, the Institute for Supply Management reported that economic activity in the service sector grew in September for the 22nd consecutive month. It was off slightly from August, but still above the level indicating contraction.

However, the Institute’s Employment Index decreased 2.9 percentage points to 48.7 percent in September. It was the first decline in 12 months and signals a reduction in hiring.

Earlier this week, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said employers in September announced plans to layoff 115,730 workers, more than double the  51,114 announced in August. It was the largest number of layoffs, the firm said, in two years.

The Conference Board, which monthly counts the number of current and new jobs advertised online, said September’s count was 43,500 below August’s. Since March, the number of advertised vacancies has dropped by half-a-million.

There are 10 million more unemployed workers than there are jobs advertised online, the Conference Board said.

As one of America’s largest credit unions moved from the city to the suburbs this year, it underwent intense efforts to make sure not only that current employees didn’t quit rather than move, not only that future employees would find the new location as cool as San Francisco, but that employees would feel engaged, appreciated, and not cogs in a company machine with little concern about their personal lives. keep reading…

This session will include ideas Frank borrowed and applied from other professions such as the medical profession, and the real estate industry. He will demonstrate how he converted a “real estate appraisal” was borrowed as the model for his “Search Reports” which cause clients to say “WOW” while demanding the CFO rush out an immediate payment.

Combined with new recruiting agreement language and proposals, the strategy presents a fresh approach will help participants differentiate themselves from run-of-the-mill contingency recruiters, while generating immediate ‘up-front’ cash flow in the form of non-refundable deposits.

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

Knowing that some readers of ERE.net are not in recruiting, I wanted to address a question that Todd was sent about how to get into recruiting. This is an appropriate topic for recruiters still green in their careers as well as recruiters with years of experience.

The questions were as follows:

1. How do I make the switch into the recruiting industry?
2. How do I leverage my industry knowledge while I’m there to gain enough experience?
3. And eventually start my own recruiting business?

Let me begin by answering the first question and telling you how I made the switch into recruiting. keep reading…

TMP Worldwide has launched a mobile phone application called TalentBrew Mobile, which its clients could use to make their job listings a lot more friendly to people job-searching on a smartphone.

Matt Lamphear, senior vice president of interactive products at the recruiting ad agency, said that TMP looked at what job boards and others — including TMP itself — were doing with job listings, and realized they weren’t quite there yet. Job listings were being optimized, but they weren’t really being — I’ll sort of coin a word here — mobilized. Says Lamphear: “There’s nothing mobile-friendly about six paragraphs of text.” keep reading…

A Washington, D.C. nonprofit has a new turnover calculator out, allowing you to calculate the cost of turnover online.

It’s a quick and dirty worksheet, admittedly not including all the costs and after-effects of someone leaving, like frustrated customers or clients, the costs of staffing the job temporarily, and so on.

It does include things like some recruiting costs, as well as the time it takes the newbie to get up to speed. You can find it at The Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The March 16, 1998 issue of Fortune showed a picture of one Roberto Ziche, a software engineer, and his bird, Reika, a little lime-green and red parrot. Demand for tech talent so outpaced the supply then that his employer had agreed to his demand to let Reika hop about Ziche’s office all day, jumping from his keyboard, across the top of his monitor, and stopping for a rest sometimes on Ziche’s head. “She’s a pleasant diversion,” says Ziche. But there are drawbacks. “When I am on the phone she gets jealous and starts screaming and biting and messing up everything on my desk.” And of course, unlike a dog, the bird was not house trained, so messing up on the desk meant more than mixing up the papers.

Nerds in Paradise

Well, if that story seems quaint, your next tech hire may be demanding she bring her pet to work too. Think that’s unlikely? Well think again. keep reading…

There are some clever and innovative products on display at the HR Tech show here in Las Vegas this week, and 11 of them were recognized today as among the best.

At the annual awards luncheon, HR Executive magazine, sponsor of the show now in its 14th year, honored products as diverse as an online management simulation tool from DDI to a mobile time-and-attendance and scheduling app from Kronos. Perhaps the most unusual among them products is the Keas Health Challenge, a game-based health improvement tool that encourages employees to live healthier through contests, team challenges, and the promise of rewards.

In the social media area, the HR Executive judges picked BranchOut and its competitor, Monster’s BeKnown, as top products, saying they “represent innovative ways to leverage the popularity of Facebook for recruiting.” Coincidentally, BranchOut and CareerBuilder announced a partnership today, which TLNT’s Lance Haun wrote about in detail.

Another announcement came from ADP, which released Vantage, an HCM system that integrates its famed payroll processing, and benefits handling, with compensation (which it got when it bought Workscape), recruitment (from VirtualEdge), succession, and performance. ADP’s SVP of Product Management Don Weinstein said the company’s acquisitions over the last couple years gave it “a pretty strong foundation to build on.”

It’s SaaS-based, as are most HR technology services these days. But one thing ADP rightfully pointed out in the announcement is that it can rightfully claim to be a leader in cloud-based delivery. Tens of thousands of companies have been delivering their payroll data to ADP to handle for years.

Not every announcement or exhibitor, of course, is of the size of an ADP. keep reading…

Recruiting technology vendors have been sprouting in Silicon Valley at rapid pace over the last few months; some catch on, many don’t, and some are just worth checking in on. In the latter category is CodeEval, which I wrote about earlier.

In short, employers are using the site to offer “challenges” to job candidates. CodeEval’s community — the “ecosystem” I mentioned earlier this year — now has more than 5,000 developers in it. If an employer wants to hire an engineer, they can use CodeEval to have them solve a puzzle, and interview them if they like their answer. The company’s still trying to fully settle on a pricing model, but right now it only charges if you make a hire. Six people have been hired thus far using the site, including at Milo (part of eBay) and Lolapps.

About 20% of companies choose to make their own challenges on CodeEval, rather than use one the company has off the shelf for them. About 19,000 challenges have been done by techies on the site — some just for fun or learning, more as passive candidates than active.

The above is essentially sourcing: the challenges are a way of engaging some of these 5,000 folks, and hopefully, for employers, getting candidates to solve a challenge to take a look at candidates’ thought processes. CodeEval also has a screening tool, and that’s what’s now free. So if you’ve got your own folks ready for a challenge — say, five people you’re looking at for a job — you can run them through a challenge on CodeEval at no charge.

Two big vendor announcements kicked off the 14th annual HR Tech show in Las Vegas this morning. And if these are a sample of what we’re going to be seeing when the show floor opens later, then it’s going to be an exciting three days.

Silkroad technology unveiled something it’s calling Point, a different kind of talent (or is it performance?) management product that’s innovative and even a little unnerving at first. It’s certainly nothing like what we have come to expect from human capital systems.

Meanwhile Jobvite, working at the recruiting end of the talent spectrum, released a Facebook app that neatly complements its Jobvite Source social referral tools. Jobvite’s new social app works entirely within Facebook, connecting users with jobs and telling them who among their friends might be a good match. Apply for a job and the candidate gets to monitor the status of their application, all while still on Facebook.

Jobvite has been leveraging employee social connections for the past few years. The system required a company’s employees to work through Jobvite Source to enable the system to access their connections, search out and suggest matches, and then send referrals to those friends or connections. Now, the new Facebook app allows all the action to occur on the social network, making it simpler and easier for an employee to refer friends for jobs. It wouldn’t be right to call it passive job referral, but it’s undoubtedly going to increase the number of referrals because it’s just quicker and more top of mind.

keep reading…

The purpose of this case study was not to say that you should copy everything Apple does, but rather to point out that with relentless execution and focus on key factors even a firm near bankruptcy can fight its way back to the top. In 13 years Apple has transformed itself from an organization of the verge of collapse to the world’s most valuable firm, amassing a phenomenal innovation record in the process. While Apple’s approach wouldn’t work for every firm, there are lessons to be learned that can influence program design regardless of industry, firm size, or location.

In part 4 of this case study (here’s parts 1, 2, and 3) on talent management lessons, the attention is on development practices, role of management, and inspirational leadership. keep reading…