It came as a surprise to economists who had predicted a more modest increase of about 130,000, according to a survey by Dow Jones Newswires. In addition, ADP revised its October private-sector growth number by 20,000 to 130,000.

The ADP report sparked a stock rally that ignited after it became known that the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks were coordinating efforts to help Europe’s debt crisis. The Dow rose more than 400 points, settling at just under that after lunch in New York.

While the numbers don’t often sync well with the official numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor, ADP’s National Employment Report offers guidance about the monthly government report. That report is due out Friday morning. Before today’s ADP report, estimates of what the Labor Department would show ranged from around 100,000 to 130,000. After the release, Reuters reported Deutsche Bank raised its forecast  to 150,000, while Capital Economics adjusted its 1000,000 estimate to 140,000.

The Reuters report also noted the long-running debate among economists over the validity of the various jobs numbers. ADP and its partner in the national report Macroeconomic Advisers produce its job growth estimates from ADP’s payroll processing data. The company handles the payroll for more than 500,000 business clients in the U.S. The official report, produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is derived from a survey of payroll data from some 140,000 businesses and governments.

The ADP report says most of November’s job growth was in the service sector, which added 178,000 positions. Businesses with fewer than 50 employees accounted for 95,000 of those jobs. Businesses from 50-499 workers added 67,000 service jobs.

The goods-producing sector added 28,000 workers. All the gain came from employers with fewer than 500 workers. The biggest employers, those with 500 and more employees, dropped 4,000 jobs during the month.

Tempering the strong jobs growth news from ADP is a Conference Board report showing a sixth consecutive month of fewer jobs being advertised online. The Conference Board’s Help Wanted OnLine survey said 76,200 fewer jobs were posted online in November than in October.

“The November decline in labor demand, following on the heels of the drops for the previous five months, is not good news for the labor market,” said June Shelp, vice president at The Conference Board.

During the month 3,857,200 jobs were listed online, according to the data compiled by Wanted Technologies.

Also released this morning was the monthly layoff report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The firm said U.S. employers announced job cuts totaling 42,474, down 0.7 percent from 42,759 in October. Announced layoffs so far this year are ahead of the total for all of 2010, the firm said. Including the November number, the total this year is 564,297. The total for 2010 was 529,973.

Most of the layoffs this year have come from government, the Challenger report says. Some 180,000 layoffs were announced there. The financial sector was a distant second with 56,000 announced layoffs.

The Role of Recruiters in Social Media

Recruiters often struggle with social media because the medium does not lend itself well to traditional recruiting practices. Recruiting is typically a highly transactional process — the recruiter collects information from a candidates, decides if there is a fit, and moves on to the next step. It’s essentially a one-way street, running from the candidate to the recruiter with little or nothing going the other way. Social media requires two-way communication (the “social” part): conversations, sharing, and engagement. This is how talent communities are created, and the same makes it difficult for recruiters who are accustomed to being gatekeepers and in-control of the process.

The difference between traditional recruiting and using social media is akin to being the captain of a navy ship compared to that of a cruise ship. In the former case, the captain is king. She decides where the ship goes and who does what. The passengers have no say. On a cruise ship the captain has much more limited power and has to behave very differently.

The Cruise Director

Fans of The Love Boat will remember Gavin MacLeod in the role of Captain Stubing. But the more interesting role was that played by Lauren Tewes – the Cruise Director Julie McCoy. She was the one who had to keep everyone happy and having a good time — i.e., engaged.

This is the role the recruiter needs to play when using social media. You can’t act like the captain on a navy ship. The passengers are not going to stay with you for the voyage if you don’t keep them happy. The members of a talent community are largely there because they’re interested in what the community has to offer in terms of content, not because it’s the shortest path to a job. That may happen but it’s not the primary reason that someone joins a talent community. Talent communities are designed to attract the vast majority of people who are not active candidates. If there’s a high level of engagement they will stay there and may be persuaded to consider the jobs you have to offer.

In this situation a recruiter can’t succeed with a transactional approach. A recruiter has to be social — facilitating conversations and fostering interest in the community. It works best if the members interact with each other, since it’s physically impossible for a recruiter to meaningfully interact with all. The pace can’t be forced — it has to be allowed to develop. You can’t very well order people to have conversations and build engagement.

Again, it’s like being the cruise director, not the Captain.

The Cruise Director vs. The Captain

Watch The Love Boat and you’ll see that the job of a Captain is highly structured — the ship’s destination and path to it are predetermined and well travelled. There’s a lot to do to get the ship there, but there’s not much chance it won’t get there. It’s rare that much goes wrong and aside from the occasional iceberg there are few obstacles in the way. It’s Groundhog day most of the time. One has to be exceedingly incompetent to fail.

Compare that to the job of the Cruise Director where every day is a new day. Julie was dealing with a constantly changing collection of colorful characters. Beyond knowing that the job requires keeping the passengers entertained, there are few rules about what to do. Getting it wrong is easy — book the wrong act and you can bet that the passengers are going to be writing disparaging remarks on their Facebook pages and tweeting about it before their next turn at the buffet.

That’s how it works for recruiters trying to use social media. We know that success requires engaging with candidates but things get fuzzy after that. Despite what some claim, there aren’t any templates for success. Often you have to make it up as you go along.

It Takes Two

The Love Boat was based on a book written by a former Cruise Director — Jeraldine Saunders, who was also the main writer for the series. Her description of what makes for a successful voyage was that it required both the Captain and the Cruise Director. The same is true for recruiting with social media: to be successful means managing both the unstructured components. This is why recruiters find it challenging to use social media while also managing traditional processes. The two require fundamentally different skills. You can’t be the Cruise Director and the Captain.

Built on the Facebook platform, BeKnown is a jobs-oriented network that allows users to build career profiles and connections separate from those on Facebook itself. By adding jobs to corporate sites and including colleges, Monster is encouraging users to conduct their job hunting within BeKnown.

For employers and schools that already have a Facebook career presence — and thousands do — the BeKnown sites are largely duplicative. But for those brand sites where jobs aren’t the main focus, a BeKnown site can become the gathering place for career discussions.

That’s the point Tom Chevalier, Monster’s BeKnown product manager, was making during a demo call today. A BeKnown site is a “secondary or duplicate offering,” he said, if a company or campus career center already has a recruitment presence on Facebook.

For everyone else (and that would include all those companies who simply stream their openings onto their Facebook site) a BeKnown site is where employees, alumni, students, job seekers, and potential candidates can engage in career conversations. Chevalier observed that a company isn’t very social if  it’s not carrying on active discussions with its fans and visitors.

In that regard, colleges will have it easier than employers. Alumni are vocal supporters of their school, and they are the very ones to talk about how their degree and their college years have paid off. And to post jobs.

Employers, whether direct or agency, need to invest time to make social media work. This isn’t unique to BeKnown or any other social site. Simply streaming jobs onto your site is not a social media strategy.

Engaging with candidates requires real interaction. Chevalier says BeKnown facilitates that because of its orientation. The way the site is designed, a BeKnown user can quickly see who they may know. If the employer adds the job feature — free and easily added — current listings appear on the main page. Right now, only jobs posted to Monster automatically show up. Soon, Chevalier said, XML and RSS feeds will be added to automate the process.

Colleges have it even easier. Monster has created pages for some 3,500 colleges in the U.S., populating them with content that includes a bit of history, costs, financial aid, and alums registered with BeKnown. A school need but claim its page.

While Monster was announcing its latest enhancements, Facebook was already the center of attention over its rumored plans for a $10 billion IPO next year. In a story repeated in hundreds of posts, the Wall Street Journal said the company was expected to file papers for its initial public offering possibly even before the end of the year. Based on the shares already outstanding, a $10 billion offering would value Facebook at $100 billion, ranking it among the most valuable companies in the world.

Officially it’s launching at 2:30 Eastern time in the afternoon November 30, but you may find much of the site live now. It’s essentially a big database of who’s doing what when it comes to STEM education and careers. There’ll be profiles of corporations, foundations, non-profits, women’s/diversity groups, and other profiles. Later, in 2012, expect information on the supply of technical labor, broken down by state.

We mentioned Ingersoll Rand — it’s among the site sponsors. A few of the others are Lockheed Martin; CSC; KPMG Foundation; Peabody Energy; National Grid; Raytheon; Kraft Foods; Aerojet; Southern Company; the EPA, and NASA.

First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”

Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”

Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.

Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job.

Intel’s still refining it, and still piloting it, but basically recruiters, instead of getting paper resumes and writing notes on them, are equipped with iPads. The iPad application (see graphic at left) is used at a career fair or other conference to collect information from a candidate, such as their name, email address, grades, and interests. The recruiter can mark it up with notes, such as whether the person wants a job or an internship.

The information makes it way into the Taleo applicant tracking system, and candidates can hopefully get an email back from Intel as soon as that day, the day they interacted with Intel at a career fair, and not weeks later.

Stephens says “the app allows Intel to reduce our candidate response time by 25 times, and save over 500 hours per year in manual processing.”

Development started in August, and as I mentioned, is ongoing. The biggest challenge right now, with the application having been tested at three different events, is getting a soft copy of a resume entered into the system; in other words, finding the best way way to get additional information from the job candidate added to their profile.

New Mobile App for Candidates

The college recruiting application mentioned above is generally an internal technology — to make life easier for recruiters and in the end, better for candidates. Intel’s also rolling out an application for job candidates who look for jobs with a smart phone, along the lines of ones Autodesk, Pepsi, and others have had built. It’s first being rolled out for Androids, and then to iPhones and iPads.

It took about six months from the first meeting about it to completion, and is still being tweaked as we speak, particularly with respect to the branding, images, and the security features. “We take our brand very seriously,” says Intel staffing channels manager Keith Molesworth. “Especially in the recruiting space.”

Facebook and Other Social Media

When we last off, a year ago, Intel was trying to make its social media recruiting more social, more consistent, and make sure it didn’t fall behind Silicon Valley competitors. Sejal Patel and others are continuing that work, with new wrinkles.

One of those is Google+. Patel partnered with the Social Media Center of Excellence (within the Sales and Marketing Group) to create the Intel brand page, which has multiple circles such as “technology enthusiasts,” “Newsroom,” “Trends,” and a recruiting-focused one, “Life at Intel.”

Meanwhile, as far as search engine optimization of jobs is concerned, earlier this year, Intel started using a tool from an association called DirectEmployers. The tool costs nothing additional for members of the association. Intel is now trying out Jobs2Web on some of Intel’s critical software jobs.

Intel continues to use Twitter, LinkedIn (where it has enjoyed success with a student lounge), and Facebook. When it comes to Facebook — well, that all had gotten a bit unwieldy for Intel, with multiple pages around the world, some even inactive. What it’s doing now is putting jobs tabs on different pages for different countries – UK, Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Vietnam, Israel, Germany, Russia. Those pages will have feeds from Intel’s careers blog, as well as local career-related events. A company called Vitrue helped create the tabs, modules, and feeds.

The Facebook site is pulling from the Taleo system, so people can search for jobs on Facebook, read the job description, and in the end go to the Intel careers site to apply. Work4Labs helps power the job search. “It’s a cleaner, prettier, branded way to search for jobs on Facebook,” says Patel.

It’s not yet using BeKnown or BranchOut, but was recently approached by the latter and is considering testing it, and others in that field.

Intel is also stepping up its use of virtual events in recruiting. Using a company called ON24, some of Intel’s events are mainly chats, where candidates submit resumes and talk to hiring managers and recruiters about working at Intel. Others are more of the webinar variety, on topics like CV writing — with a question-and-answer period.

Allen Stephens provided stats on a recent event: “Over 650 resumes received during two-hour event; 385 students attended; 10 hiring managers plus multiple recruiters in the chat event.”

Still Cracking the Code

Even with all this going on, even with this being Intel and all, if you talk to the Intel team, you find that it’s sourcing and social media challenges aren’t so different from everyone else’s.

You have your Tiffany Peerys (among the Intel team on video here talking about their recruiting in the spring of 2011) who are adept at the social-media recruiting thing, and you have others who aren’t as enthused. To that end, Intel recruiting leaders in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere are brainstorming some ways to better train people on social media, with that training likely to increase toward the beginning of 2012. It’d also eventually like to have a community manager for each region of the world, rather than so much of it being either run out of the U.S, or ad hoc.

Several weeks ago ere.net published an article that asked the question “what are the dumbest things that recruiters do.” After surveying recruiters on ere.net, Twitter, and at the recent SMA symposium in Seattle, it is clear that most feel the dumbest thing recruiters do is…

Not managing the candidate experience — the candidate experience is the perception of the sum of interactions with an organization throughout the hiring process. It includes every communication, the design of the process, the fairness of process elements, the quality of information exchanged, and the honesty with which questions and concerns are addressed. Providing a poor candidate experience can have many negative consequences, including an increased candidate dropout rate, negative word-of-mouth, and decreased loyalty to the overall brand.

The rest of the “Top 10” are…

Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — potential applicants assume that the company puts its best foot forward when it describes a job. So when they compare your dull, legalistic description with your competitor’s more compelling description, they will simply apply elsewhere. The net result is that you lose candidates unnecessarily, harm your employer brand, and you will eventually frustrate your hiring managers.

Not taking advantage of employee referrals — the best-practice firms approach 50% referral hires (the percentage of all external hires who come from referrals). Failing to fully use referrals means that you will miss out on a large number of high-quality, prescreened, and presold candidates. Because employees are no longer doing some of the recruiting work, your recruiting workload will increase.

Not learning the business — obviously if you can’t speak “their language” and you don’t understand their problems, hiring managers will be less responsive to your requests. Your lack of knowledge will also make it more difficult to communicate with, to sell, and to build relationships with candidates.

Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — higher-level jobs require a different level of service, knowledge, and relationship-building. So using the same process that you use for lower-level jobs on more sophisticated, technical, or management jobs will result in fewer returned calls, a higher candidate dropout rate, and lower-quality hires.

Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are gone quickly, so a drawn-out process or slow decision-making will likely mean that candidates with multiple offers will be gone. Managers will also become frustrated if a slow recruiting process means losing the best.

Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews are traditionally weak predictors but poorly executed interviews dramatically increase the chances of making a major hiring error. Poorly designed interviews may also screen out innovators and turnoff top candidates, because they have not felt challenged.

Using active sourcing approaches for passive candidates — posting your jobs using active sourcing approaches like job boards, newspaper ads, and job fairs means that the 75% of the workforce that is not actively looking for a job will never see them.

Not prioritizing jobs — focusing on low-value jobs with little business or revenue impact will anger your managers and reduce their business results. It may eventually lead to lower recruiting budgets, after executives see that your hiring is not prioritized and in line with their business priorities.

Not identifying job acceptance criteria — if you don’t proactively ask for their job acceptance criteria, you can only guess about what it will take to get a top candidate to say “yes.” Although it is ranked as #10, not tailoring your recruiting marketing and candidate-selling approaches to the decision criteria of top candidates almost guarantees that you will lose these candidates. Because these individuals have choices, they will simply wait until an opportunity comes along that precisely fits their requirements and expectations.

Final Thoughts

Nearly 80% of CEOs select talent management as the business area that requires the most change. As a recruiter, if you are going to dramatically change, you have only two basic choices, 1) stop doing the dumb things that negatively impact your results or 2) start doing smarter and more effective things. The “stop doing dumb things” choice is probably the easier of the two because it doesn’t require you to learn anything new.

So if you are recruiter or recruiting manager with limited time and resources, we recommend that you use this “dumb things” list to begin the process of changing and improving your recruiting.

In other words, Dodd-Frank is mandating that more women and minorities must occupy lucrative Wall Street jobs that heretofore have been dominated by white men who, in gender and ethnicity, resemble Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of the movie Wall Street and of its sequel.The Dodd-Frank provision is buried within some 850 pages of legislative text designed to strengthen the financial sector, promote economic recovery and job growth, protect consumers, and permanently end taxpayer bailouts of private institutions. Section 342 of Dodd-Frank embeds 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion at virtually every major financial regulatory agency of the federal government: Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the 12 Federal Reserve banks, and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The offices are designed to serve as watchdogs, monitoring the diversity of the agencies and the government contractors and subcontractors with which they do business. The list includes “financial institutions, investment banking firms, mortgage banking firms, asset management firms, brokers, dealers, financial services entities, underwriters, accountants, investment consultants and providers of legal services.”Wall Street’s issues with gender diversity date back to the now infamous “Boom-Boom Room,” Smith Barney’s basement party room where lap dances took place in the 1990s. Since then, females across the industry have shared similar tales about how they were sexually harassed with vulgar talk; excluded from business lunches, meetings and golf outings; and how their careers were hindered or damaged.

While consciousness has been raised and while the numbers of female and minority executives have improved, the vast majority of Wall Street firms lack diversity in the upper ranks. And that disparity could be a big problem in the eyes of Dodd-Frank regulators. Wall Street does billions of dollars in business with the federal government for services that include debt issuances, sales of government assets, as well as more general advisory services.

That business now may hinge on a Wall Street firm’s ability to correct racial and gender imbalances. According to Dodd-Frank language, if a federal agency’s compliance director concludes that a contractor has not made “a good faith effort to include minorities and women in its work force,” the agency head is authorized to cancel the contract. In other words, contracts worth billions are at stake — a dollar amount designed to be so significant even the wealthiest 1% would take notice.How can you determine whether Dodd-Frank diversity mandate applies to your firm? Chances are Dodd-Frank does apply if the following describes your current firm:

• Your company is an investment banking firm, mortgage banking firm, asset management firm, broker, dealer, financial services entity, underwriting, accounting, investment consulting, or law firm.
• Your company does business with the federal government’s financial agencies: Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the 12 Federal Reserve banks, and the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

What should you do if you determine that Dodd-Frank diversity mandate applies to your firm? Your company must demonstrate that it has made a “good faith” effort to employ women and minorities. Clearly, “good faith” is subject to regulatory interpretation. However, Wall Street firms that demonstrate incremental improvement year over year in the diversity of their workforce may be better positioned for compliance than those that do not.

Employers also need to make sure that rounds of recent layoffs have not had a disparate impact on protected classes: workforce reductions and reorganizations have a way of eroding diversity ratios. Still, steady improvement may not be enough if regulators determine an organization could and should be doing more. To prepare for impending diversity regulations, potential next steps include the following:

• Define the baseline. Quantify the percentage of qualified women and minorities in the labor markets from which you recruit.
• Quantify the percentage of women and minorities in your current workforce, broken out by level, function, and geography.
• Compare your company’s diversity to the diversity of the labor market and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Focus the diversity talent pool and pipeline initiatives on the levels, functions, and geographies where they’re needed the most.
• Identify, map, and cultivate relationships of diverse talent at all of your favorite target companies.

Because Dodd-Frank diversity regulations are still being written, few Wall Street employers are fully conscious of its impending diversity mandate. One head of diversity for a global investment bank told me he fears that by the time those regulations are announced next year, there simply will not be enough time for Wall Street firms to come into compliance. Consequently, my colleague maintains that the time to act is now.

Dodd-Frank is the law. Wall Street companies can either ignore its diversity mandate at their peril or they can invite a growing occupation of corner offices and trading desks by female and minority employees. Interestingly, the latter choice also stands to make the workforce more economically diverse, which, in turn, may put Wall Street back in touch with Main Street. In fact, what may be most intriguing about the Dodd-Frank is the transformative potential of its diversity mandate. It holds the promise of reforming Wall Street from within.

The site is being unveiled by a job-board group called The Network, along with a Dutch labor-market research agency called the Intelligence Group. It’s first available to Network customers and its partners such as Beyond.com, with access possibly opening up in 2012.

For an example of what’s up on the site, let’s take India. If you click on India, you can find out, among other things:

• the percentage of people willing to move within India
• the percent willing to work abroad
• how long, on average, they’ll stay abroad
• the sources (e.g. job boards) they’ll use when looking for a job abroad
• what they most want to know about a company they’d go work for
• people in India’s most important factors in deciding whether to take a new job

Like any survey results, these are only as good as the survey methodology. In this case, because many respondents to this online survey were job-board users, that’ll skew the source of hire a tad, and will include more candidates with bachelor and master degrees than the general population.

“The respondents are from job boards,” says Geert-Jan Waasdorp of the Intelligence Group, “so there is some bias. But we focus mainly on motives … we know in detail what drives people from country to country B and know how to reach them.”

It’s the largest number of  “job-leavers,” as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, in more than a decade. Included in the count are workers who took buyouts, some who quit ahead of a dismissal, and others who may be taking time off before starting a new job. The bulk, however, are those who decided to leave a job without having another lined up.

There’s no way of telling what kind of workers these job-leavers are. However, any number of surveys over the last few years show there’s a gathering wave of intentions about leaving, if not actual departures.

“Top performers have had it with stagnant opportunities and rewards, and are starting to jump ship now that the job market is a bit looser,” says Dr. Pat Sikor, TNS Employee Insights Senior Researcher. Pointing to declining scores on employee engagement surveys, she says it “reflects the pent-up demand of employees to want more than what they have.”

TNS Employee Insights conducts surveys and research into the effect of employee engagement on business performance. Its recent research shows a dramatic drop in some key measures of engagement. Between 2006 and 2011, TNS found a 17.6 percent reduction in employees who feel their company rewards them according to the value of their performance. There has been a nearly 13 percent decline in their feelings about the company when it comes to personal development and growth.

Other surveys have found similar results. What this suggests is that employees are disengaging, with most choosing not to become job-leavers, but ready to bolt should an opportunity come along.

BlessingWhite, which conducts a periodic broad, global study of engagement, found last year that 13 percent of North American workers planned to leave their current job in a year. That was almost twice the 7 percent who planned to quit in the 2008 survey. While workers were about as engaged last year as in 2008 (57 percent v. 56 percent), the less engaged the worker, the more likely they said they were to leave. Older workers were more likely to be engaged; millennials, the least engaged.

Disengaged and disengaging workers aren’t necessarily minimum performers. There is a correlation between engagement and performance, as the BlessingWhite report details. However, for any number of reasons (many of them referenced in these reports), top performers can grow disenchanted.

Why did workers want to leave? The BlessingWhite survey found 28 percent of North Americans cited lack of career opportunities. That was also an area where the TNS Employee Insights survey saw a decline from 2006. In the 2010 survey, worker satisfaction with career opportunities within their current company had declined 14.3 percent; 48 percent said they were satisfied in the most recent survey.

With the economic malaise continuing and job creation barely keeping up with population growth, most workers aren’t too likely to simply walk out the door with no place to go, although obviously tens of thousands do. Fewer will go out in Joey style, producing a video of his musical resignation seen now by 3 million. But top talent that grows disenchanted has opportunities. Whether they call that headhunter who left them a message or put out the word to their network, they will find another job.

However, as TNS’ Sikor says, “The key to retaining top talent therefore is simple: move the needle and increase employee engagement.” She’ll be one of the speakers at a free TNS webinar on Dec. 6 — “How to Retain Top Talent – Moving the Needle in Employee Engagement,” which is HRCI approved.

Anderson is a family-owned outfit, started in 1913 and handling tens of thousands of homes and businesses. It has just under 200 employees but wants to grow about 25% over the next few months, adding 25 “co-workers,” as it sometimes calls them, by the end of the year, and about 25 more early in 2012.

And not only is it hiring, but human resources is part of its marketing to prospective customers. They’re told that “Anderson retains technicians longer so customers get more consistent service.” And they are asked, “How many different technicians have handled your account during the past 24 months?”

Anderson is hiring in Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Indiana. The business is cyclical, with fewer pests in the winter, ants arriving in the spring, a slightly slower summer, and ants and yellowjackets in the fall.

It’s playing up its careers as being interesting, pretty stable (see graphic at left) and always in demand, as well as environmentally friendly. That last part of the value proposition, O’Hara says, is a biggie both for customers and recruits. Rather than offering just a few “green” products, the whole company is based around trapping, not using rodenticides. Rodenticides suck up a lot of resources when they’re produced, he says, and they also can end up in dumpsters.

This approach means more labor, more expertise. It’s so different from what O’Hara says competitors do, that the company doesn’t recruit from competitors. “Trying to weed technicians off of a tank is hard,” he says. “Communicators, service, heart, attitude — that’s what we’re about. It’s not the traditional ‘see and spray.’”

Anderson is also touting its community involvement. Carrie Missele, a regional sales manager I talked to, is particularly fired up about a program where if the firm adds 25 people before this year’s out, it’ll donate $5,000 to the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

This isn’t a sexy industry — “A stigma we need to overcome,” O’Hara says. So the company is doing a number of things. For one, not finding enough success with career offices and career fairs at schools, it’s talking to professors about the company, about their students, who might want to be an intern, and so on.

It’s bringing in people for internships where they rotate through different parts of the company, and then do an open-ended project at the end where they present ideas for improving Anderson. Some interns can then come back a second summer, and help put on the intern program for first-year interns. O’Hara says he’s also going to be working with a (very successful) public charter school called “Urban Prep,” in Chicago. Students will spend a couple weeks shadowing Anderson employees, and then will receive a paid trip to a university. O’Hara believes that once the student actually sets foot on a university and knows it’s within their reach to receive an education and have a good career, they’ll be more likely to want to go to college.

O’Hara said he initially thought people might want to read things like facts about animals on Facebook, but that he wisened up. “Nobody wants to hear that,” he says. They want to know, “where does this fit in with my life?” So the Facebook page has videos about life at the company.

There’s more. They’re trying to hire more women (and three female technicians have started in the last five months, after not having one in many years; O’Hara attributes this partly to having female recruiters). They’re trying mentoring programs. They’re trying to get more employee referrals. Past interns are appearing at career fairs and sales parties, like a party held at a race track. “When you get one of your students there,” O’Hara says, “the response is much different.” It used to be tough to compete at fairs against a company like Anheuser-Busch, he says, but after all of the above the company has been trying, “we actually have a line now.”

Don Ramer, CEO and founder of Arbita, said three employees were laid off Friday. One or two independent sourcers will close out the remaining projects, but by the end of the year Arbita will be out of the sourcing business.

The future of the OnePost job distribution service, is also “in flux,” Ramer said. The service distributes employer job postings to multiple job boards, tracking responses to provide source analytics. What exactly is to become of OnePost isn’t clear, though Ramer said he might “spin off” the posting business. However, he was adamant that its future will not include him in any kind of leadership role.

Ramer says the company has been “financially stressed and challenged since Q1 2010.” Responding to reports of delayed paychecks, missed reimbursements, and deferred payments to vendors, Ramer said, “Like many small businesses we have had to be open about cash flow with our employees and flexible in timing disbursements. During the last three years we have paid or earned out the bulk of the company’s debt to our job board partners.”

With the sourcing business closed and the future of the  job posting service uncertain, Ramer said he will be sorting through the options for the company and its seven remaining employees.

He said he is looking toward some form of “high-level consultancy” in which Arbita would work with senior-level corporate executives in a strategic talent acquisition and management role.

“We see opportunities at a more senior level,” Ramer said during a phone conversation Monday. The next several weeks will be spent “researching what to do next,” he said, “for the company and the brand in a calmer time.”

The last two weeks have been anything but calm. The sourcing community in particular has been buzzing about Steckerl’s decision to leave Arbita. Several messages about the company’s financial issues have been making the rounds by email and on Twitter.

Ramer referred to the “angry mob mentality I’ve been seeing on social media,” denying the company is folding and refuting suggestions he would “cynically go on vacation and decide to terminate a bunch of people.” Ramer spent part of this month in New Zealand. During the conversation he characterized himself as being “on the defense.” He also had some cryptic tweets over the weekend.

Steckerl himself has said little publicly about his decision to leave Arbita, where he had been executive vice president and head of the sourcing and training group. Steckerl merged his Job Machine training and sourcing consultancy with Arbita in May 2008.

A year later, Ramer credited the merger with helping Arbita grow by more than 600 percent. Many of the new customers were users of OnePost. However, Ramer said the new training unit — Arbita Consulting and Education Services — headed by Glenn Gutmacher was a strong contributor to the company’s growth.

“The JobMachine acquisition connected us with tens of thousands of recruiting professionals who have purchased workshops, consulting, professional development, or other products developed by Shally Steckerl and Glenn Gutmacher,” Ramer told HRrchitect. Gutmacher left Arbita at the beginning of this year.

However, during our phone conversation Ramer said the sourcing unit hasn’t been profitable for some time and that he has been considering its closure for months.

Steckerl refuted that claim, asserting sourcing and training were a significant source of the company’s revenue. Beyond that, however, Steckerl declined to comment publicly.

Since leaving Arbita two weeks ago, Steckerl has removed mention of the company from his LinkedIn profile. His Twitter account has been made private; you need permission to view his tweets. Steckerl said financial issues fueled his decision to resume his career as an independent cyber-sleuth and sourcing trainer. “I have to pay my bills and provide food for my children,” he said.

During my first corporate recruiting position I felt that my role was as a “service provider” to my managers, so when they said jump, I did. Looking back on that now I realize how many opportunities I missed to set myself up as an expert in my profession of recruiting because I lacked the confidence to command a meeting and initiate a true partnership during the beginning of that relationship.

During my time as a recruiter I have run across several different types of managers and most can be intimidating. Below are some of the most common personality types that I’ve run across and ways that you can forge strong relationships with them despite some of their traits.

The “unemployment rate is so high you must have candidates banging our door down” manager: This particular breed of manager needs to be better educated on what is really out there in the market. The unemployment rate rising doesn’t always result in a rise in the actual candidates who you need for a given opening. Websites like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Wanted Analytics are great starting points to use, and they’ll be able to arm you with some statistics on how many candidates for that job are actually out there. Be prepared for your first meeting with this manager by painting a realistic picture of the market from the very beginning of your search so that you set expectations correctly in the beginning.

The “I am an executive and feel I am better than you and want to hire an agency” manager: Oh my, this is my least-favorite manager, and there is always at least one in every company! Some managers no matter what your success rate is want to use an outside source just for the purpose of using an outside source. Try and compile a list of agencies that your company has worked with in the past and rate their success rate against your own, and how many hires have they made for your company vs. how many you’ve made. What has the success of those employees been in terms of tenure?

When I worked at Mike’s Hard Lemonade, I had an executive who just so happened to be best friends with a particular agency that he gave the exclusive to on everything. I wasn’t able to get him to stop using that firm on my first search, but I was able to see the candidates that agency was submitting and how easily they were finding them by pulling up the same candidates on Monster or LinkedIn. When you can illustrate that the 25-30% agency fee is only getting you a 10-minute Monster search, executives tend to listen a little more closely. With time I was able to convince that manager to allow me two weeks for a search before it went out to an agency. Over time my track record spoke for itself and I was able to gain trust and create a good partnership with this manager.

The “I don’t have time for hiring” manager: About half of my managers fall into the category of not having any time for recruitment, yet hiring and staffing their team is their No. 1 priority. These managers can be difficult to get any information out of, yet they assume you’re able to leave a five-minute meeting and produce a perfect candidate in a matter of days. The reality is managers need to be educated that the more information they provide to you and more information you get upfront, the less painful and slow the process of staffing for their team will be. I worked with a manager at Cobalt several years back, who was notorious for missing my meetings. So when I received a position from him I would do as much pre-work as possible, knowing from experience that I was only going to get yes and no answers from him, and that our first meeting about this position would most likely be our last.

Be prepared in that first meeting with candidate profiles. You most likely won’t get more than a job description from this manager, so use that to find some profiles and review them on the spot. Even hearing a yes or no on a profile can provide you with a sense of the type of candidate that they are looking for. Come prepared to the meeting with companies in your area that are hiring similar profiles so that you can provide the manager with a list of companies to pull from instead of expecting him to have that available for you. Ask if there is a lead or manager on their team who can assist with the candidate screening in an effort to save them time.

The “in an effort to look engaged I am going to ask for status updates on everything you do” manager: Some managers just like to micromanage the process and want to know everything you’re doing, including how many resumes you’ve seen, how many candidates you’ve rejected, etc. I try to be as proactive as possible with these ones and ask in the first meeting what kind of metrics they are looking for, and will create a weekly report for them. Most ATS’s have reporting functionality that you can use to build out custom reports without a lot of effort needed on your end. I use Jobvite, which has a custom report functionality that works great for this, and also allows for managers to go into the system and run their own reports at any given time.

The “even though I am a VP of _____ I am also an expert in your field and will tell you how to do your job” manager: You gotta love managers who know everyone in the industry, exactly where to find people, and how you should go about starting your search. While having a manager be networked and engaged is usually a blessing, sometimes it can go to the extreme and become a curse. Managers who know everyone in the industry and therefore start rejecting candidates based on rumors, hearsay, or reputation alone will really narrow down your pipeline. Use their knowledge to your benefit. If there are associations and groups that they’d like you to network in, ask if a member of their team can assist you as well so that you’ll have time to not only run your own search but also incorporate the ideas of your hiring manager without running yourself ragged.

QR codes are a second-generation barcode that allows potential candidates to quickly and directly access supporting materials and websites using only a camera equipped smartphone. QR codes have many uses, but are most often used to direct target audiences to online content that cannot be easily conveyed in print.

You can of course provide a printed URL, but if you have ever tried to enter a long URL into a mobile browser, chances are you wouldn’t do it again.

What Is a QR Code?

The QR in QR code stands for quick response, and although you might not know them by name, you have undoubtedly already seen these one-inch square shaped symbols that look a little like a maze in advertisements, on billboards, and in posters. Don’t let their size fool you: QR codes can be powerful communication mechanisms because they can take candidates directly to customized supplemental recruiting information that might include a website, pictures, videos, narrative information, or point directly to Twitter or Facebook. Organizations that have taken lead in using QR codes for recruiting include Google, the U.S. Army, E&Y, AT&T, Siemens, and Pepsi.

The Many Benefits of Using QR Codes in Recruiting

QR codes were designed to support mobile users, something the recruiting-tools community hasn’t invested a great deal of time in despite the widespread adoption of smartphones. Because many smartphone users are never more than a few feet from their almost-always-on device, mobile will become the platform of choice for recruiting activity. The application to decode a QR Code comes pre-installed on most devices and there are many free Apps for users with a device not pre-installed with one. Potential candidates could be on the subway, reading the paper, or walking down the street and with the push of a button be immediately taken to follow-up information or a job application.

If your recruiting effort is attempting to show off your firm’s innovation or its use of technology, the use of these codes might help to reinforce that message. QR codes can dramatically increase the value and usefulness of print ads, billboards, posters, business cards, and brochures. Because college students are particularly mobile phone dependent, QR codes should be embedded into all aspects of college recruiting.

These codes are also powerful because they easily allow for effective tracking analytics that can identify sources and usage rates. In addition, QR codes can be produced for free and because they are so small, will save space and advertising costs. These codes can also be used for non-recruiting purposes including check-ins and to provide employee, vendor, and customer information.

“Like a picture, a QR Code can replace a thousand words.”

Potential Uses of QR Codes in Recruiting

There are literally dozens of ways in which these codes have been or can be used to provide recruiting information to prospects and candidates. Some of them include:

• Newspaper/magazine ads — to provide follow-up information that can’t fit in the ad.
• In job postings, social media and blogs — they can provide detailed reference or follow-up information without taking up space.
• Referral cards — they can instantly take a referral to an application site.
• Wall posters/stickers — that can be placed on bulletin boards and even on poles.
• Billboards/signage/on vehicles — QR can work even when the picture is taken from a distance.
• Career fairs and college events — they allow an interested prospect to instantly access additional information without having to wait in line or ask a question.
• In text messages — they can be attached to text messages as a picture or they can be used to send text messages.
• Job alerts/calendar events — individuals can sign up for specific job alert notifications and calendar items can be easily saved on a phone’s calendar.
• Direct mail — they can move an individual directly from a paper letter to the Internet.
• In slides — they can direct you to more detailed information from presentation slides.
• Invitations — they can be used to invite people to join talent communities, and to participate in contests or events.
• In retail outlets/at trade shows/on product packaging — they can convert customers into applicants.
• Bus cards/name tags — they can provide instant detailed information about you.
• On T-shirts — they help send a message that your firm is “cool” (Google used them)
• On resumes — applicants can place them in resumes to show work samples.

Possible Issues

There are of course a few downsides related to the use of QR codes. The first is that many recruiters will resist them for no other reason than most recruiters resist any kind of change that involves a new technology. Second, you will most likely get a spotty response from potential candidates because while QR codes have existed for a while, not everyone is familiar with them and others don’t yet have a smart phone with QR reading capability.

Final Thoughts

Although QR codes won’t solve every recruiting problem, they certainly are a quick, cheap, and flexible way to re-energize and make your non-Internet recruiting information approaches more effective. These codes are particularly effective because they support mobile audiences and that allows individuals to act when they are most excited. Soon QR Codes will be as common as embedded hyperlinks that are only effective within electronic messages.

You can test the effectiveness of QR codes for providing contact information by using your smartphone camera to take a picture of the example at the top of this article, or you can create your own QR codes for free by going to a site like http://goqr.me/.

This diverse and highly experienced virtual panel will debate the causes and solutions, the trends and gaps while opening the phone lines to the audience members. Register and join in the conversation.

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

Job Failure and Job Success

My profession is studying jobs and designing tests/exercises/interviews that measure both skills and attitudes. Extensive job experience and exhaustive graduate studies have brought me into contact with hundreds of managers in large corporations. One of my first activities has always been to interview people, either in the job or supervising the job, and ask: “What are all the reasons employees succeed or fail in this job?” The following responses are typical:

Can’t manage time, Makes bad decisions, Can’t get along with people, Doesn’t seem to care, Can’t sell, Can’t lead others, Poor communicator, Not honest in dealing with people, Poor communication with customers, Poor planner, Doesn’t follow up, Can’t learn new information, Poor attitude, Doesn’t show initiative, Can’t see the forest for the trees, Doesn’t consider enough information, Never anticipates consequences, Has poor judgment, No tact, Not a “people person,” Ignores deadlines, Inflexible, Doesn’t like the work, Not a team player, Doesn’t support organizational goals, Can’t see the big picture, Can’t make a decision, Bad fit

Now that we know what people who supervise (and do) the job say, let’s look at how HR usually answers the same question:

No one helped them, Not given direction, Bad management, Never trained, Bad fit, De-motivated, Not really sure, Personality conflict …

(Yes, it’s usually a very short list.)

Notice the difference? Managers and job-holders cite about 80% skills-related items and 20% attitude-related ones. HR, on the other hand, almost always attributes performance to victimization. I think this is a pretty significant finding, don’t you? Now consider the following claims from the email vendor:

The vendor says:

• Our research shows 89% of bad hires are due to attitude such as coachability, emotional intelligence, and temperament.
• Source credibility for this data is attributed to articles in Fortune, IndustryWeek, and other newsstand magazines.
• Almost everything about job attitudes can be discovered from an interview.
• You can learn all your need to know by attending a 60-minute webinar.

On what planet?

Obviously the vendor’s body of research has been kept completely secret from the hiring-science community. Sure, if an employee arrives on the job with a full complement of skills, attitude can have a big effect. But, by completely ignoring ability, do you think this vendor is appealing to people who supervise the position, or the HR community? More to the point, if this product ignores 80% of job experts’ data, do you think their product can possibly be as good as they claim?

I’ve been on the end of many of interviews and can say with certainty most magazine authors are less-than-expert in the subject matter. In fact, they work hard to find simple sound-bite answers to complex questions, seldom caring about hard research because it makes for dry and uninteresting reading. In short, articles published in mainstream media are a better indicator of clever PR than expert peer-reviewed research. If you want opinions, visit the newsstand or bookstore. If you want facts, read unbiased hiring research studies.

Measure attitude using only an interview? Sure. For one thing, everyone knows a smart candidate can dance rings around a typical interviewer. For another, interviewers neither have the training nor the experience to be personality psychologists. Anyway, abundant literature (I know… booooring!) shows clinical evaluations (e.g. trained psychological experts) are inaccurate predictors of job success. You won’t find this information in the WSJ or HBR because it is not “catchy.”

Hard Facts

In my experience, there are thousands of training-program vendors, thousands of junk-science test vendors, and a few hundred professional selection tool vendors. Seldom will you find both training and professional selection technology coexisting — the technology and philosophy is totally different.

If a vendor’s website talks all about training, it’s a good idea to pass. You see, developing a professional hiring test takes more than drafting a few questions. It takes months of editing and statistical analysis to demonstrate it actually predicts some aspect of job performance. BTW: This would be a good time to revisit the manager’s succeed-or-fail list.

If you are responsible for making hiring decisions, be careful of self-promoting vendors entering the hiring and selection marketplace. Professionally, I never found one sufficiently qualified in the science of test development to develop a product that will eliminate dead-wood candidates. And believe me, if you use junk-science tests, you will learn the hard way they don’t work as advertised. Furthermore, all that dead-wood will be on your payroll.

This warning is true for all products that suggest they can teach you to analyze a candidate’s motivations, use self-reported personality surveys to match performance with a data base of job titles, predict job performance without actually measuring skills, or use any other method that is less than comprehensive or validated. From a legal perspective, the user, not the vendor, is always responsible for test use.

I have been accused by some of promoting “assessments?” Get real. It’s semantics: Interviews, resume reviews, application blanks, surveys, tests, sourcing, and so forth, all all assessments. Assessment is just another word for test, and, valid tests are useful tools for evaluating qualifications. If you don’t have proof your test/interview/assessment predicts job performance for your job in your organization, then you will assuredly turn away good people and hire useless ones.

Why should you worry? Experts estimate poor employment decisions cost about six month’s salary, not to mention perpetuating HR’s professional reputation for quick, ineffective solutions to complex problems. Forget vendor hype. Simple, one-step hiring solutions are nonsense. They don’t deliver.

No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth?

If we knew the answer to this question, we wouldn’t be asking you, our readers. It’s a question that comes up often and almost never receives the same answer. Some people think that sourcing is only worth about $6/hr. Others command a hefty $100+/hr billing rate for sourcing projects. Regardless of how you approach this question, the answer will almost never be accurate and I believe that is because there is no cookie-cutter framework in which “sourcing” fits. For instance:

• Some sourcers do lead generation
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach + pre-screening
• Some sourcers do all of the above as well as strategic initiatives, including pipeline development and employment branding projects

…yet they are all “sourcers.” To say that each of these types of individuals should be paid the same since they are all classified as “sourcer” would be as incorrect as saying a person working in sales at a retail storefront should be making the same as a person working in sales at a multi-national ERP software manufacturer, because they both carry the same title.

In my personal opinion, sourcers’ compensation should be determined based on two main items and one sub-item:

• Level of expertise (usually determined by years of experience, but not always)
• Scope of function

If you want experience, you must pay for it. If you want more work to be done, you have to pay for that, too. And if you are not willing to pay for either (translated — you are looking for a “top-notch sourcer” at at $13/hr) then you will engage in a never-ending search — either because you’ll never find a sourcer willing to take your job, or you’ll end up hiring all the wrong ones.

Geography also plays a role in determining a sourcer’s compensation. Where you are in the world makes a big difference — for example, sourcers in the United States and Australia typically get paid more than sourcers in Asia. Cost of living in a given location makes a big difference in what a sourcer could/should earn.

With this in mind, I invite all of you who are sourcers to participate in our Salary Survey so we can get a snapshot of what the actual compensation of sourcers is today. Please follow this link and take a few moments to anonymously fill out the survey. Once we get a good sampling we will share this information on SourceCon.com to give everyone a better idea of how sourcing is compensated.

First up, is the story of Staffingbook and one man’s quest to alter the course of recruiting:

Steve Harari has ambitious hopes for the recruiting industry. Not content to simply help recruiters place candidates and employers find talent, Harari wants to convince recruiters to mentor their talent over the long term.

“I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that a recruiter might be mentoring a candidate,” says Harari, who has launched his culture-changing effort at Staffingbook.

Were he talking about boutique search firms working at the highest levels, it wouldn’t be far-fetched at all.  Even less-lofty placements involve some amount of coaching and mentoring to at least prepare a candidate for an interview.

But Harari’s quarry is the independent recruiter who lives for their next placement. His plan is to convince these recruiters to nurture their candidates for 5, 10, even 20 years.

It’s “a significant behavioral departure for recruiters,” Harari admits. His trump card is that a long-term relationship can lead to multiple fees. “Over 10 to 20 years I might place the candidate four or five times.”

Staffingbook, branded as “The Marketplace for Passive Talent,” is the platform to make it happen. Recruiters post their candidates here. Employers peruse the inventory to find those they want, then, facilitated by the Staffingbook platform,  notify the recruiter who decide whether to present the candidate.

If it sounds a little like some mashup of BountyJobs, TopEchelon, and LinkedIn, you would be sort of right. Except at Staffingbook, everybody pays a fee and splits aren’t in the picture.

Setting it all apart is that mentoring issue. Staffingbook will encourage its recruiters to stay in touch with their candidates and have a conversation at least quarterly.

Kenexa Buys Restaurant Talent Consultancy

Kenexa acquired Batrus Hollweg, a hospitality industry talent management consultancy and tech vendor. The announcement was made this week. Kenexa said the addition of Batrus Hollweg will enhance its existing research and content portfolio.

Headquartered in Plano, Texas, BHI is especially strong in the restaurant industry, where it focuses on helping companies select and develop hourly and management workers. It also offers an ATS branded as Click and Hire.

“BHI’s wealth of research and content regarding talent best practice, as well as their assessment solutions, are recognized as some of the top-notch content and solutions in our industry today,” said Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan. “The combination of Kenexa and BHI will provide the most researched and proven talent solutions content, particularly in the hospitality industry.”

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Earlier this month, Kenexa reported an especially strong 3rd quarter. Its 23 cents per share earnings on $77.2 million in revenue, handily beat Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 20 cents a share. The company predicted its 4th quarter would be equally strong, with revenue in the range of $76 million to $78 million and per share earnings of 25 to 26 cents per share.

CareerFruits Job Site

Proving that every variation of the word “career” has not yet been used in the job-site field, in January 2012 we will have CareerFruits. While the site is being built, a blog and LinkedIn post briefly describe what the company is up to: candidates will “search a job or shortlist many jobs and apply to all of them using LinkedIn/Visualize.me/Video Profiles. You can even add comments to a job and vote if you like a job. You can even ask questions and refer friends in single click to earn reputation and rewards.” Recruiters “can post jobs for free and track responses online, rate/comment on a candidate profile so that others can get benefitted with your feedback, and set up your own team and share profiles that you feel your teammates can utilize.”

The managing partner, from Singapore, tells us that “the seamless tracking of candidate responses and automated workflow to schedule and track overall interview loops are one of the most sought-after features we are working on.” The site is mainly funded through family and friends; a few investment proposals last month were rejected.

Tech/marketing Jobs Site 

Out of the UK comes JobPage, in beta, for technology jobs and marketing jobs. The JobPage team also was behind Page/Do, an award-winning site for making landing pages. JobPage is a sort of a one-stop-shop for posting a job. You use the site to post a job; broadcast it to various job boards like Indeed and share it through your social media sites; get analytics on who’s viewed the job; and manage the whole process, such as make a note that you need to do reference checks. This pricing chart (in British money) gives you a sense of what you can do with JobPage.

Jobs Sent by Text 

And out of Idaho we have InstantJobFair.com launching this week. You pay $100 to send jobs to a category of people who’ve signed up to receive text messages; for example, southern California salon-health/fitness-beauty job candidates. Job seekers who get your text message are directed to a basic web page with info on where to email their resume.

PepsiCo has for years been an early-adopter when it comes to recruiting with social media, as well as making its recruiting efforts more friendly to candidates using mobile phones.

You can check out the Google+ page here.

And for more on PepsiCo, Here’s Hoyt and colleagues Paul Marchand and Sheila Stygar talking about their talent acquisition department in a video from the last ERE Expo.

Only 7 percent of corporate career sites are optimized for mobile devices, according to a Potentialpark survey. However, 19 percent of job seekers reported using their mobile device for career activities; 50 percent “could imagine” themselves doing so.

The usage data comes from Potentialpark’s massive annual global survey of students, graduates, and early career professionals. It’s Online Talent Communication Study was completed in June and now, with the 2012 survey underway, the recruitment marketing and research firm says the number of mobile job seekers is already showing “a significant rise.”

“Job seekers are using their mobile devices for job search whether employers like it or not,” explained Julian Ziesing, a spokeman for Potentialpark. “Much like the employer brand, refusing to create a mobile recruiting strategy doesn’t stop employers from having one. It simply becomes one they don’t control.”

Internet-accessible mobile devices can connect to most career sites, whether or not they are mobile-optimized. However, if you’ve ever tried to search for a job on a typical corporate career site, you quickly discovered that it is clunky at best, and at worst, some or all of the search features don’t work. Even where you can search, applying for a job from a mobile device may be impossible.

That becomes a major hurdle for mobile using job seekers, 30 percent of whom say they want to be able to apply for a job while on the go. More important to the mobile job seekers is the ability to search for jobs (57 percent) and get notified of openings (51 percent).

The latter is one of the few things companies can do almost painlessly. All but the most basic career sites allow users to opt-in for email notifications of jobs matching their interests. Far fewer send text messages. But here’s where a mobile strategy would suggest text over email. Text messages have a read rate approaching 100 percent. The open rate for emails on mobile devices may be no better than 30 percent, though the data is fuzzy.

Says the Potentialpark report:

Having a well implemented mobile recruiting strategy can greatly improve the overall candidate experience — giving the job seeker a convenient and location-independent approach to job search, and (2) not having any mobile recruiting strategy can erode the employer brand and limit the number of quality applicants received overall.

That said, recruiting consultant and blogger John Sumser has a wholly different and contrarian opinion about mobile recruiting:

Mobile Recruiting is a great way to engineer a flood of ill considered applications that are of lower quality that people are already complaining about? Why? The tool (a phone) is ill suited for the rigors of job hunting. Research is impractical. Cover letters would have to include apologies for the implicit typos.

Director of Fun.

That was the title I was looking at on a resume for a marketing director position. As I read through the applicant’s accomplishments and responsibilities, I could see that it was clearly a marketing-type position. It stuck out, just not in a good way.

What may have seemed like a great little thing to have on a business card as an attention-getter had now turned into a liability. Nobody knows what a “Director of Fun” does. And sure, maybe “Marketing Director” isn’t all that specific on its own, but give me some context (industry, company size, and market) and I can pretty quickly figure out what you’re doing.

Using these fun titles externally is a mistake.

What’s in a Title?

Now listen, I’m not a super stickler for titles. I know it’s what you actually do that’s the real important point.

If you’re an HR manager but you’re doing HR assistant work, I’m going to treat you as such (and vice verse as well). And we know title inflation is a big part of the hiring process and it can help make business transactions flow easier. Go into large banks and insurance brokerages, some with hundreds of branches and I’ll bet you find a VP or SVP in the building.

Wacky job titles simply confuse most real people.

So yes, titles can be B.S., but I think most people know that. If you walk into a brokerage and find most people are managers and directors and the top guy is a SVP, you still contextually know people’s roles and who is in charge. It might be a shift in thinking, but you aren’t reinventing the wheel.

Now “Director of Fun”? Or “Corporate Magician”?

Fun titles Not So Fun in the Real World

Some organizations think funky job titles are a great way of expressing a company’s culture or to stand out from the crowd. Moo.com sent over some of the most interesting examples of this. Here are my top 10 head-scratching titles Moo listed, in no particular order: 

1. Sales Ninja
2. New Media Guru
3. Social Media Trailblazer
4. Corporate Magician
5. Master Handshaker
6. Communications Ambassador
7. Happiness Advocate
8. Marketing Rockstar
9. Problem Wrangler
10. Digital Dynamo

Master handshaker? Problem wrangler? Whose hands do these people shake, and what problems do they wrangle?

In a quote from the press release, Moo.com’s Paul Lewis says,

“Traditional one-word job titles no longer act as an accurate description of what a person does or what they are like. So why not stand out a bit by giving yourself a job title that sums you up as a person rather than limits you to just one aspect of what you do.”

The funny part to me is that Lewis is credited as Head of Marketing (and here, too, on his Twitter profile). And while it may not stick out, I know that he is in charge of marketing. This is helpful if I ever need to get in touch with someone in marketing at Moo.com, or if I ever need to hire someone with some marketing chops.

Taking a Step Back

Fun titles can be great for internal teams. It can help put a fun spin on being at work, especially at some of the less pleasant, white-collar jobs that are out there.

But when it comes to dealing with people outside of the company, it is time to make a decision: do you communicate what you do clearly, or, do you avoid that and try to educate every single person you meet about that fun job title — only to have them forget what you actually do five minutes after they meet you? Or worse, you are mocked for not having a real title and people question your business skills and savvy?

Even the Gen Y guy inside me knows the right answer: you always pick clarity first.

Once a client or business partner gets to know you and your company, they’ll know you’re fun and cool, even in spite of an ordinary job title. And you should be just fine with that.