A year later, we’re not done yet. At least one new site is hoping to join the bunch. Called “Better Weekdays,” it is being built behind the scenes, with one major player in the company, who’d rather we not use his name, telling us it’s about five months off from launch.

The site has an abbreviated website up, in addition to a LinkedIn page and Twitter feed. It’s looking to hire recruiters or other recruiting-industry insiders. Better Weekdays hopes to use a combination of tests already built and used in recruiting, along with some of its own “secret sauce,” as one of the site’s founders says. People’s skills and “personal culture” — what’s important to them — will be captured and matched with companies looking to fill jobs with MBA graduates.

Better Weekdays is working on its site and on spreading the word among potential customers. But, unlike the “Mystery Applicant” site we mentioned, it’s not focusing on applicant tracking systems right now. The company doesn’t want to deal with the issues involved in integrating an application with those systems. And, it sees its sweet spot to be mainly hot, growing, small and medium-size companies, not as much Fortune 500 firms.

Those small/medium companies, Better Weekdays figures, are less likely to have much of an HR department, and could use Better Weekdays to hire someone, probably with a pay-per-hire model, rather than a pay-per posting.

“Hasn’t this all been tried before?” I asked my contact there. “Yes,” he says, “but still no one’s cracked the code.”

Guy Krief, VP of innovation, said the company had been failing in its efforts to fill its job through more traditional methods. The game was, Krief said, an “act of desperation.”

That act, he says, was bringing up to 100 candidates a day until Christmas slowed things down for a few days.

The Missions

The seven “missions” are weighted differently in Upstream’s scoring. So, for example, one’s worth twice as much as one of the others when it does its scoring, because that mission is testing an aspect of the job that’s more important. The submissions — for the approximately 90% of candidates who do them all — are being scored. Top scorers are being interviewed. Fifteen people have been interviewed so far — personally by Krief. Twenty-five may be interviewed in total. “The impressive thing,” he says, “is that 10 are actually very, very good matches. On paper we would have never spoke with them. They really seem to be the right candidates for this particular job.”

I asked Krief what role the resume plays in the selection of people to interview; after all, as I mentioned in that first article, it seems to be required. “It plays no role,” he says.

Krief says it does help weed out people who really would not be interested in the job — he mentions a 52-year-old CEO who sent in a resume but was “way too senior.”

Upstream will make hiring decisions in about a month. It has five openings, but likes what it sees and will “keep sourcing the very good candidates,” Krief says. Plus, more Upstream jobs may open up, and, he says, some people who took the challenge say they became much more interested at working for Upstream than they were prior.

Think that’s an odd question? How about this one: What do you think of garden gnomes?

Glassdoor has 23 more questions just like those, compiled from thousands of interview questions posted to the employer review site during the last year by job seekers, some charmed, others perplexed, and some completely flummoxed by these kinds of oddball questions.

Pity the poor job seeker who did just what all the advice books and columnists advise — researched the company, read up on the industry, prepared for the inevitable “Tell me about your weaknesses” — only to be asked, “Please spell diverticulitis.”

The candidate didn’t get the job, but rated the interview “easy.” The relevance of the spelling test to the position as an Engineering Account Manager is hard to fathom.

However, more than a few of the questions that made the Glassdoor list evidence some connection with the underlying job. There’s the engineering candidate asked to solve this puzzle: “Given 20 “destructible” light bulbs (which break at a certain height), and a building with 100 floors, how do you determine the height that the light bulbs break?” And the candidate for a position as a demand planning analyst who was asked, “How many planes are currently flying over Kansas?”

Like Google’s famous (infamous?) interview questions, which are intended to elicit a candidate’s analytical skills, some of the Glassdoor questions fall into that category. What’s more, these kinds of oddball questions are becoming more common.

The Wall Street Journal says, “Weird interview questions have become a meme, like a joke or a viral video. It’s catchiness, rather than proof of their effectiveness, that keeps them in circulation at many companies.”

The notion, though, that the traditional interview doesn’t really yield a whole lot, is gaining mainstream currency. The Journal article describes a Harvard experiment in which observers who viewed 10 seconds of an interview had similar views of the candidate as did the interviewer themselves. Thus the effort to find alternatives.

In the Glassdoor collection, the planes over Kansas question seems intended to see how well a candidate for a job planning for consumer demand can analyze fuzzy situations. The breakable light bulb test tests both math skills and a candidate’s skill at engineering simplicity. (Incidentally, here’s a solution that takes only 14 bulbs.)

While questions like these have a connection to the jobs, and others are intended to test for fit, more than a few give every sign of being conjured by interviewers for no obvious good reason. The candidate with the garden gnome question described it, and others, during two days of interviews for a clerk position with Trader Joe’s as “bizarre.”

Even so, it wasn’t the questions that left the candidate with a sour taste for the experience. Instead, it was the classic case of failing to communicate. According to the review, even though promised a response, and even after repeated contacts, it wasn’t until weeks later that the candidate learned from an employee at the store that the position had been filled.

About that elephant, “open the door and tell it to go in.”

Indeed: the chief brand officer at Women’s Healthcare Associates, LLC is Anita Jackson. The director of human resources is also Anita Jackson.

In the video below, about 7 minutes long, Jackson and I talk about her unusual dual role at this Oregon gynecology and obstetrics organization. She shares whether this model could work in a larger organization, and how this structure affects the candidate experience.

Within each of us, in the collective unconscious, there lies a hero — an archetype that Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed lies dormant until called to action. Studying world mythology, Joseph Campbell built upon Jung’s work, discovering that no matter what the myth, a hero’s journey remains the same. All heroes must leave what is familiar, venture forth, do battle, and then return, forever changed, with new talents and gifts to share. For those of us in talent acquisition, that means we deal with something far more important than recruiting metrics and candidate tracking systems: with each and every recruiting engagement, we bear witness to the hero’s journey.

Each senior executive, each technologist, each professional in some way is forever changed by his or her search for a new opportunity. If that involves unemployment, and even homelessness, the bravery and determination required of our hero is the stuff of which legends (and movies) are made.

The film The Pursuit of Happiness captures that heroism. Will Smith and his son Jaden star in the true story of Chris Gardner, a San Francisco salesman who rises above homelessness and poverty to become a Wall Street legend. The movie reminds me that we need to remember we are not always aware of the random acts of courage required of the candidates with whom we interact every day.

The Hero’s Journey is a story lives in the subconscious — one that speaks to us, that moves us, and inspires us as human beings. As recruiters, we would do well to reexamine the recruiting lifecycle to discover the archetypal phases of the Hero’s Journey contained within. A candidate’s subconscious may influence his actions and decision-making as much as conscious reason. To start, we need to learn to recognize the classic markers of the epic tale. The story always begins in the ordinary world, until something triggers the first phase: departure.

Departure

The Call to Adventure: For executive search and recruiting, the call to adventure comes when a candidate first discovers that the ordinary world at work is going to change. It may be that an executive has learned that his company has been acquired or is going through a massive reorganization. It may be that the boss who hired him has left, or that there are rumors of impending layoffs. It may be increasing unemployment or outsourcing of his work. Whatever the call, the effect is the same; the landscape has changed. The Hero’s Journey has begun.

Refusal of the Quest: The next step is often refusal to heed the call. Candidates may not be ready to leave their current roles out of a sense of duty or obligation. They may fear leaving what has been so familiar. They may worry that they simply won’t measure up in their next place of employment. And so the candidate stays, as other workers depart.

Supernatural Aid. Once the hero has committed to the quest, a magical guide or helper appears — cue the recruiter. The most gifted search consultants naturally assume a Sherpa-like role, reassuring candidates as they make the decision to begin the journey. In recruiting, it may simply mean that we convince a passive candidate to consider the extraordinary opportunity that lies beyond the four walls of their current employer and to agree to exploratory conversations.

The Crossing of the First Threshold. As supernatural guides, recruiters help usher candidates across the threshold to enter the world of the unknown. The candidate submits his resume, reviews a job description, and journeys into the field of adventure for rounds of interviews with your team. In doing so, he leaves behind the employer that is familiar, and ventures into a strange and dangerous place — your company — because the rules of your corporate culture are not yet known.

The Belly of the Whale. This is the final separation from the hero’s known world and former self. Often it is a dark, unknown, or frightening experience to triggers a metamorphosis. They may enter the belly of the beast when they are handed a pink slip or are fired. It may be simply painful recognition that there is no future where they currently work and that they are undervalued. There is no going back.

The second phase of the hero’s journey is that of initiation. Our hero has left what was familiar and finds himself a stranger in a strange land. He has things to learn about himself and about his new world.

Initiation

The Road of Trials. Candidates, particularly those who are actively looking, experience a series of tests and ordeals that force them to undergo a transformation. Whether it is failing to obtain interviews or failing to obtain an offer after being interviewed. In The Pursuit of Happiness the test is being unable to show up for an interview properly dressed. Still he shows up.

The Meeting with the Goddess. The meeting with the goddess represents a time when the candidate experiences unconditional love. That would be the moment we introduce the perfect candidate to the perfect opportunity — the moment the hiring manager and applicant each recognize they have found “the one.” The opportunity is not “just a job,” but rather a calling that embraces all that we are meant to be.

Woman as Temptress. Inevitably, a counteroffer is made by the candidate’s employer or another company vies for your perfect candidate, tempting him or her to stray from the quest. But while the compensation package is impressive, it is more a material temptation. It lacks a spiritual connection with the work. Why did it take the current employer so long to realize the candidate was worth keeping?

Atonement with the Father. The candidate seeks the blessing of his boss or someone with incredible power. It doesn’t have to be male. In fact, in recruiting, candidates often seek the atonement of their spouses who must sign off on the decision. These are delicate conversations for families as they consider whether they wish to be uprooted yet again, only to leave friends and their community behind.

Apotheosis. An offer is being readied and the candidate is deified, entering a state of divine knowledge and bliss. This is also a period or rest and fulfillment in preparation for the return home to a new workplace.

The Ultimate Boon. The candidate receives an offer and achieves what he set out to accomplish on his quest. All of the steps up until now have prepared the executive for this transcendent moment. In other words, jackpot!

The third and final phase of the journey is the return. It represents a coming home when there is no coming home. It will never be the same because the hero is not the same. He has been transformed.

The Return

Refusal of the Return. The candidate refuses the offer, at least initially. Either it is a negotiating tactic or it is a reluctance to return to office life and all the stresses that come with it. It is intoxicating to be courted. It is quite another thing to commit to one’s next employer and the challenges the new role brings.

The Magic Flight. Sometimes it is difficult and even dangerous for candidates to escape with offer in hand. Current employers may threaten legal action, reminding candidates of non-compete obligations and other contractual ties that bind. Often, they must struggle to break free.

Rescue from Without. Sometimes the candidate needs guides and assistants to help them return home to their new place of work. In addition to the executive search consultant or recruiter, the dream team may also include an employment lawyer, a CPA, as well as a realtor and relocation expert. For proper onboarding, the worker may be assigned a mentor and executive coach.

The Crossing of the Return Threshold. The day the candidate becomes an employee, the start date — that is moment the Hero crosses the threshold. To complete this step successfully, the Hero must remember all that he or she has learned on the journey. The Hero must harness that wisdom on the job and then to share those insights with the rest of the world – not an easy thing to do.

Freedom to Live. It is now a year or two later, and the candidate has achieved mastery on the job. He no longer fears death by downsizing, so he is free to live. The hero’s journey is complete, at least until the next recruiter calls.

I remain humbled by the power those of us in executive search and recruiting hold to transform the lives of the candidates we touch and of their families for generations. We are the door through which an executive or professional must pass for a working wage or wealth creation. In large part, we determine who gets in and who does not, decisions that shape the futures of those with whom we interact virtually every day. It is so easy to take that for granted, but I try never to take it for granted because our smallest actions have the most profound effects on people who just as easily could be you or me.

So often, in so many ways, our candidates are legendary. A hero is defined is someone who is admired and idealized for courage, outstanding achievements and noble qualities. Each and every day, let us remember the hero … and then, let’s recruit him.

However, if you consider omitting information that could directly help the applicant successfully understand the process or land a job to be a lie, then there are quite a few areas where corporations are omitting the complete truth.

I call them “dirty little secrets” because insiders are well aware of them, while most applicants and business reporters are not. If you are a recruiter, you may find that this list includes over-generalizations, but in my experience, the problems in this list are certainly not unusual. My recommendation is that corporate leaders need to identify the areas where there is a distinct lack of openness, candor, and authenticity in the recruiting process and instead to proactively provide that information to applicants.

Recruiting Dirty Little Secrets

Here are a dozen areas where corporate recruiting could improve.

• The corporate black hole — because of recruiter overload, the volume of applicants, and technology problems, a resume submitted to a corporate career site may actually have a zero probability of being reviewed. In the industry, it can be referred to as “the black hole.”
• Looking for an excuse to drop you — there are books written about the need to focus on the positive aspects of individuals, but the entire screening process is often focused on finding a single error or lack of “fit” to quickly eliminate any applicant. If you are categorized as a job-jumper, you are unemployed, you have bad credit or Klout scores, you live in a distant zip code, or they find weird things on Facebook about you, you will be immediately rejected without knowing why. As a result, those who fail to make a single mistake during the process, rather than those who are the best, are the ones that are most likely to get hired.
• The rejection letter is designed to avoid complaints, not accuracy – if you actually get a rejection letter or e-mail, you should be aware that canned phrases like “we decided to move in another direction” or “there were other more qualified candidates” are pretested or lawyer-approved phrases that are designed to quiet you and keep you from making a follow-up inquiry. In many cases, the person sending the letter won’t even know the actual reason for your rejection.
• The interview process will likely be disjointed – applicants invited in for interviews routinely complain about disorganized interviewing, death by interview (having to go through 10 or more interviews), continually getting the same repeat questions from different interviewers, and having to return multiple times on different days. If the process seems poorly managed and disjointed, it is probably because it usually is. The overall corporate interview process is more often more whimsical than scientific and integrated.
• Some jobs are not really available to outsiders — although legal requirements may require an organization to post all open jobs, in some cases, the hiring manager has already predetermined that they will hire internally. There is no way for an external applicant to know when a job is “wired,” so applying can only lead to frustration and you will never know that you did nothing wrong.
• Some companies are blocked — if you work at a company covered by an informal “non-poaching” arrangement where two firms agree not to hire from each other, your chances of getting hired are near zero. Even though these agreements are illegal, they are secret, so your application will never be considered and you will never know why.
• Recruiters won’t know if you are a customer – you might think that being a loyal customer might help your application, but most corporations have no formal way of identifying an applicant as a customer.
• We will keep your resume on file (but we will never look at it again) – is certainly true that when they tell you that your rejected application will be “kept on file” it will be. However, it will be kept almost exclusively for legal reasons. The odds of a recruiter scanning through a corporate database of thousands of names in order to revisit a resume that has previously been rejected are miniscule. Unless a recruiter remembers you by name, assume that your resume has been dropped into the “black hole.”
• You will never know the real odds – although corporations regularly calculate the percentage of all applicants that are hired, you will never find that number on the corporate website. Although the lotto is required to publish your odds of winning, corporations keep it a secret. For some jobs, the odds are well over 1,000 to 1.
• Technology may eliminate you — and most large organizations, resumes are initially screened electronically. Unfortunately, if the software is not fine-tuned, the recruiter is not well-trained, or if you fail to use the appropriate keywords and phrases, no human will ever see your resume. In one test, only 12% of specially written “perfect resumes” made it through this initial step, although in theory, 100% should have made it.
• Busy people are forced to take shortcuts — during a down economy, the volume of qualified applicants can force recruiters and hiring managers to take shortcuts. For example, recently a coordinator asked the recruiter which one of a handful of resumes should be invited in for an interview. The response was “I don’t have time to look at them; just flip a coin and pick them.” Hiring managers are also known to make choices based on snap judgments or stereotypes that add a degree of randomness to getting a job.
• Don’t call us, we’ll call you — if an applicant is rejected at any stage, there is no formal process to help you understand where you need to improve in order to be successful when applying for a job in the future. Unlike in customer service, there is no 1 -800 number to call, and because of weak corporate documentation, recruiting might not actually know (beyond a broad reason) why you are rejected and how you could improve your chances.

Final Thoughts

Almost without exception, corporate recruiters are hard-working and ethical people. But most are too overworked to be able to take a step back and to formally assess where the recruiting process could be more open, honest, and transparent. Unfortunately, most of the current “candidate experience” efforts that I have seen are focused more on increasing courtesy and politeness rather than being significantly more open, honest, and transparent. If you would like to add to this list of “secrets,” add them to the comments section immediately following this article on www.ere.net.

So this morning we discover that Talent Technology did the swooping and scooped up the site for job seeker portfolios. Financial details weren’t in the announcement, but Talent Technology made clear the site would continue. “The service will continue to operate as a standalone offering,” said Talent Technology.

Just in case you don’t recognize the corporate name, Talent Technology is the Canadian firm that sells the HireDesk ATS, and a sourcing system it calls Talementry. A new version of the latter was just released.

Even if you’re not a job seeker, and don’t plan on being one, VisualCV is worth a look. It’s a great place to showcase work for anyone building or managing their personal brand. It supplements your LinkedIn profile.

As Amybeth Hale wrote on our sister site, SourceCon, the site enables professionals “to easily build and manage an online career portfolio that comes alive with informational keyword pop-ups, video, pictures, and professional networking.”

All good for VisualCV, but what’s in it for Talent Technology? The announcement doesn’t really say. There’s only this: “As part of Talent Technology, users can also look forward to new innovations to help them create even more engaging online resumes faster and easier in the future.”

For users of the site, VisualCV says everything will stay as is, except that it will now be free. The premium service is being discontinued. Subscribers should already have gotten a refund.

The German company has about 336,000 employees, 1,640 locations, and about 60,000 people, and growing, in the U.S.

Rachel Romaszewski, who recruits for Siemens’ energy business, and I talk about the skills shortage and what’s being done about it. She tells me (out of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) which social media site is working well, which one works less well, and which one’s hit or miss.

“We are just growing like crazy,” she says, in the seven-minute video, below.

We start with a job seeker good deed from the Challenger people:

Free Job Hunting Advice By Phone

For two days next week, job seekers will be able to get career advice directly from professional counselors at no charge. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST on December 27 and 28, counselors will accept calls from job seekers nationwide, answering questions and offering advice about the job hunting process.

The number is 312-422-5010. Job hunters can get more information about the call-in at firm’s website and blog.

This is the 26th year that the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray  & Christmas will offer this free call-in service .

Salesforce Acquires Rypple

Rypple, the company that brought a social, collaborative networking approach to performance management, is being acquired by Salesforce.com. The CRM company announced last week that it was buying Toronto-based Rypple for an undisclosed amount.

When the deal closes next year, Rypple will be renamed Successforce and become the foundation of a new Salesforce HCM business unit.

Both companies are entirely cloud-based operations, addressing different parts of the HR landscape. Primarily a CRM service, though it has a significant presence in candidate and applicant tracking, Salesforce has been broadening its product lineup. In the last year it ha acquired a number of companies including Assistly for $50 million, Mobile Metrics (price undisclosed), and social media monitoring company Radian6 for $326 million.

However, the Rypple deal is the first pure-play HR buy. It signals an aggressive push by Salesforce into human capital management.

Said the press release announcing the Rypple acquisition, “The company plans to expand into other areas with a new social model that will revolutionize the way companies recruit talent, build teams, empower employees, and achieve results.”

Salesforce Losing Force?

That’s one way to put it, says an analysis this week from writer Drea Knufken. In her list of the 10 Most Controversial Stocks of 2012 she calls Salesforce “one of the most overvalued stocks on the market.”

Pointing to a P/E ratio of 400 and receivables growing 300 times faster than revenue, the one time Business Pundit blogger declares, “The question seems to be not if Salesforce.com’s stock will drop, but when it will happen — and how the company will handle it.”

Solving the Mystery Applicant

Much like the weather, the “candidate experience” has been talked about for years but fewer folks do anything about it. Companies often not only don’t tell folks why they didn’t get a job — but decline to tell final candidates that they didn’t get the job.

The topic is getting new attention. A recent webinar on the topic drew a large crowd. And, a new award was recently launched just for providing a good candidate experience, with two winners of that award set to talk about their hiring-process improvements in March in San Diego.

Now, a startup out of the UK is also making the candidate experience its niche. Mystery Applicant is launching quietly while it builds up some clients and gathers data.

Director Nick Price says the product is a lot like the consumer surveys you take after calling in with a question about your credit card, satellite TV, or cell phone plan. When a candidate applies for a job, they get an email asking them to answer some short questions about how the process went for them. They’ll get another after being hired or rejected.

Price says that he hasn’t done any big splash, and is quietly working with applicant tracking systems to tell them about the product. But, he says, he has gotten the interest of some large companies, and one of the world’s largest employers is already using the service. They can filter the responses to see if it’s working better in certain geographies, or among young people vs. old.

A Recruitment Campaign or Is That a Wanted Poster?

The Hamburg, Germany police department is more than a little embarrassed after it discovered that one of the four models it used in its 50,000 Euro recruitment marketing campaign is a suspected thief.

Seems that after the we-want-you posters went up all over the city, one of the four models posing in full police uniform was identified as a suspect in a petty robbery. The victim saw the poster and called the (real) police. The suspect denies the charges, but the posters he has in have been taken down.

What’s That Internship Pay?

Students looking for work on Internships.com will now be able to see what the job pays and what the range is should it turn into a full-time opportunity. Glassdoor’s salary data will now be a part of the listings on the site.

New Sourcing Suite Version Released

Talent Technology Corporation released a new version of its  Talemetry talent generation suite. In particular, the company says the release includes a “significant update to Talemetry Match which delivers a redesigned user interface designed to help novice and experienced recruiters search, rank, and contact candidates from virtually any internal job database, job board or social network.”

The report this morning from the U.S. Department of Labor says 364,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits were filed last week, a decrease of 4,000 from the week before and 59,000 fewer than the same week last year. It’s the third consecutive weekly drop. (Numbers are seasonally adjusted.)

A Reuters poll of economists in advance of this morning’s release predicted the number of new claims would rise to 375,000. The lower-than-expected number helped get stocks off to a strong start this morning despite a Commerce Department report that the third quarter GDP grew at a revised 1.8 percent rate. Previously, the rate had been estimated at 2 percent. Economists were expecting the 2 percent growth rate to stand.

However, there were other positive economic reports. The Thomson Reuters University of Michigan consumer sentiment rose to 69.9 points in December from November’s 64.1, besting expectations it would only reach 68. The index is derived from monthly surveys of consumers nationwide.

The report noted that, “Good times economically were expected in 2012 by 29 percent (of consumers) in December, up from 19 percent in November and the recent low of 14 percent in August. While more consumers heard news of employment gains in December, they didn’t expect that those gains would have much impact on the national unemployment rate in the months ahead.”

However, the survey measures were below last year’s levels and consumers reported being worried about their personal finances. That prompted surveys chief economist Richard Curtin to warn, “If the payroll tax holiday is not extended, it would be a significant drag on economic growth, and would increase the likelihood that weakness in consumer spending would again put the economy at risk of a renewed downturn.”

With Congress stalemated over extending the payroll tax cut, business associations are warning that hiring plans are beginning to be put on hold. The International Franchise Association said this week that failing to extend the cut will “jeopardize the creation of 168,000 new jobs” next year.

If there’s no action by the end of the year, workers will see fewer dollars in their first paychecks of 2012, at just the time bills for their holiday shopping begin to roll in. For workers earning $50,000 annually, it would mean about $19 a week less take home pay.

Much of the attention has been focused on the impact of ending the 2 percent savings on Social Security taxes that has been in effect for a year; without a break in the impasse, some 2.6 million Americans could lose their unemployment benefits. CNN/Money says that by mid-January, nearly 700,000 would lose benefits, which average $300 weekly. By March 3, the number rises to 2.6 million, according to White House estimates.

Astronaut Candidate Selection Manager Duane Ross says “we have many, many more people than we could ever take. It’s a “good-news, bad-news scenario,” he says, meaning NASA will have great people to choose from but wishes it could hire more. “It’s a very competitive job.”

About 3,565 applicants came in last time around — the 2009 class. Of those, about 2,900 met basic qualifications, 113 were brought to Houston, 48 selected as finalists, and nine brought on.

This process happens ever few years: “when we need astronauts,” Ross says. But this time around, given the advent of social media, the NASA ad blitz was bigger and the candidates are coming in more quickly. 

NASA advertised the jobs — well, in brief, everywhere. This included diversity magazines, news releases, public service announcements on radio and TV, Twitter, NASA TV, blogs, Facebook, contacts with universities, and all military branches.

NASA made astronaut Rex Walheim, who was on the final Space Shuttle flight, available to answer questions about NASA and the application process (in one response, for example, Walheim noted that he’s surprised how many people look healthy but fail medical tests).

Planning Ahead

The application process for an astronaut job is more typical of a a government job than you might think: put your resume in a recruiting technology system, along with references; submit your transcript; eventually take a drug test, and so on.

star forming in the constellation of Monoceros

NASA’s looking for someone who’s ambitious, team-oriented, creative, and daring. You have to be willing to travel for three to six months at a time — and by “travel” NASA doesn’t mean your basic trade show in Vegas, but rather “distant destinations in deep space.”

You’ll need a degree in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics. An aviation degree doesn’t count. You have to pass a swimming test your first month of training, and eventually will need to learn Russian.

After the January 27 deadline, interviews, reference-checks, and medical exams will begin. The folks hired now are really hired based on future needs. Basic training’s about two years long, and mission-specific training about 2 1/2 years long. So NASA’s hiring people based on projections about 4 1/2 years in the future.

Granted, my organization is still far off from where we want and need to be from a talent acquisition standpoint; however, we are taking the proper steps to get there as an enterprise. One particular topic that has always been the focus of my recruiting career is the candidate experience. Some will argue that it includes an employment brand, a cutting-edge career site, high-performing HR technology, etc. I have always believed and will continue to believe that while those items are important, nothing can replace the importance of proper human interaction. This will truly set your company’s candidate experience apart from other companies out there in the marketplace.

Two case in points occurred this week: two individuals, two different positions. The first individual, who did not receive an offer, sent us an email thanking us for how we handled and treated him through the search process. Here is a snippet of the note that we received:

…I’ve been doing this for a while and I’ve never worked with anyone in an HR capacity who took the time to inform, support, and strategize with a candidate the way that you guys did with me. It’s obvious that you all care about the candidate as much as the company you work for, and that’s very rare. I really appreciate all the time you took with me to help me try and succeed.

The second note came from a candidate who received an offer on a different position. Here is a snippet from that note:

…I can’t begin to tell you how great the experience I have just completed was. The entire candidate process from start to finish was great and in speaking with everyone involved, they all treated me with dignity and respect when I felt I was at the lowest point of my professional career. I tell you this not to sound self-indulging, but the truth is that I had other offers on the table, but I chose the opportunity with your company simply based on how well you all treated me. There was simply no question in my mind where I needed to be.

Although one candidate received an offer and the other did not, both completed the process with a positive view of the organization, our people culture, and how we treat prospective candidates. The point is that there is a good candidate experience and then there is an awesome candidate experience.

If you want an awesome candidate experience, here are some tips for you to incorporate into your current process. These points come from feedback I have received over the years from numerous candidates and individuals that I have had the pleasure to meet and work with:

• Hire for skill set and fit — in these uncertain economic times, good people have lost their jobs. We recently hired two A+ candidates who were both unemployed for several months due to layoffs at their former companies. And while there is a lot of attention and focus on finding “passive candidates,” there is way too much focus on it. Bottom line: hire the most qualified individual for the position. What difference should it make if an individual is employed or not? Through a proper interview and selection process, you should be able to make a thorough and informed decision on whether the individual is right for your organization.
• Do what you say — the classic line of the recruiter who has no guts or respect for others is “We’ll be in touch.” The fact is, no you won’t. Disposition each candidate who is rejected and/or properly communicate with them; return emails/phone calls, follow up, etc. Occasional individuals will slip through the cracks. But in the end, a no is better than nothing.
• Know your candidate — if you have selected an individual for an interview, there is more to know about them than what is on paper. Ask about them, what makes them tick, their hobbies. Have an open, friendly and genuine conversation and get to know the person. You will be amazed at what giving an individual one minute of your time can do, especially to those who are down on their career luck.
• Build a relationship — no one says you have to be best friends. Be friendly, approachable, and inviting. None of us know what the future holds and we have all heard the timeless story of good fortune coming around to those who help and give to others. Whether you believe in that or not, that is up to you. But I can tell you from personal experience, good things come to those who give back.
• Provide return value — recruiters in general cannot help everyone directly — meaning we cannot help every single person we meet get a job for various reasons. But if you have the opportunity, and cannot help a candidate with direct value, provide the candidate with some type of indirect value. For example, you can provide resume advice, interview tips, career planning, referrals to other organizations who may be hiring, or you can simply provide an ear.
• Treat others how you want to be treated — my wonderful mother taught me this tactic at an early age and it has never done me wrong. Place yourself in the shoes of those going through the applicant/hiring process and keep in mind that a career transition is one of the most stressful events one can go through in life. A little personal touch to your candidate experience can go a long way.

2012 is nearly upon us. What will be your professional resolution? I challenge all of us in this industry to take what we are currently doing from a candidate experience perspective and square it. You will see the long-term results in not only your recruiting operations but over the long run in goodwill, friendships, and networking.

Where social media sources register a barely discernible 1 percent of all hires, job boards produced 19 percent. That was matched only by internal transfers; even referrals came in lower — 16 percent.

These are among the surprising, and not so surprising, bits of data developed from a survey of 414 employers conducted by HR consultants Bersin & Associates. Compiled into the Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011, and authored by principal analyst Karen O’Leonard, the 100 page volume offers details on the recruiting metrics from employers as small as 100  workers to those with more than 10,000.

Josh Bersin, founder of the eponymous firm, said the genesis of the factbook came from the company’s clients and conversations with many others since Bersin launched his talent acquisition practice a few years ago.

Employers, he said, “are anxious for a lot of information.” But there wasn’t much detailed bench-marking generally available. It wasn’t easy for employers to get answers to questions like: Are my recruiting costs in line with other companies? Am I spending my money effectively Am I getting the kind of results others are?

Now they can.

Some of the data — such as cost per hire, source of hire, time to fill — is widely available and in more detail.  The Society for Human Resource Management has data on a number of important recruiting metrics, including cost per hire and time to fill, the traditional recruiting effectiveness measures. The Prinzo Group offers a series of reports on talent acquisition metrics. Annually, CareerXroads publishes a source of hire survey, based on responses from the firm’s roster of mostly Fortune 500 companies.

Bersin’s factbook includes those types of metrics, but breaks down the responses by company size, and industry. In other areas, such as the report’s section on quality of hire metrics being used by employers, offers insights not readily available.

The report also draws conclusions and makes recommendations based on the data. Regarding job boards, for instance, authoir O’Leonard writes:

While the landscape is changing, job boards certainly are not dead. To the contrary, 81 percent of organizations say they will spend on job boards this year. However, we expect that organizations will use job boards more selectively, for certain types of positions and in certain geographies…

(Incidentally, CareerXroads found job boards accounted for 24.95 percent of new hires in 2010. Referrals represented 27.5 percent in the CareerXroads report. The data, however, is not directly comparable since the report separated new hires from internal transfers, while Bersin’s survey asked about how all open positions were filled.)

Some of the more telling points in the factbook deal with the use of social media. Despite all the chatter about social recruiting, most companies spend next to nothing on that strategy and, not surprisingly, make few hires from all their friends and fans and followers. “General social media,” as the factbook describes sites not principally intended for professional networking, produced 1 percent of hires. Only the largest employers hired more — 2 percent.

O’Leonard notes that the reason for the low spend — 1 percent of the recruiting budget — is that social media’s costs “are negligible”, and that when money is spent there it typically comes out of a centralized marketing budget. “Converting candidates reached on social media to hires,” O’Leonard writes, “can be a time consuming-process.”

On the other hand professional networking sites like LinkedIn account for 10 percent of the hires, but companies only spend 3 percent of their external recruiting budgets there.

With all the energy being put into social media, the results reported by the surveyed companies seems meager at best. “A lot more hype than reality,” is   Bersin’s assessment. However, when companies use sites like Facebook and Twitter as a marketing and brand building tool, they get results, he said. Social media, he says, “is being used effectively to build pipelines.” But when candidates decide to apply, they go to the company career site, he said.

One important, and oft-ignored area that the Bersin factbook to its credit takes a stab at addressing is quality of hire. More than a few companies attempt to close the loop and track the performance of new hires back to the source of their application, as well as the recruiter who presented them.

“Recruiting teams can look at a number of measurements to determine new-hire quality, including new-hire performance assessments, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction and new-hire retention,” O’Leonard writes. However, more than 25 percent of companies do nothing, she adds.

This section of the report details the kind of measurements companies do use, though the data here is limited to just a few charts specifically regarding use of performance reviews and turnover data.  Still, it offers guidance to companies who want to become more data-driven, but aren’t sure what to measure or where they stand.

That’s exactly how Bersin hopes employers make use of the factbook. “First,” he says, “Are they in the right ballpark?” The data can be used to analyze their own spending, source of hire, and basic productivity measures.

Second, he says, the factbook can help recruiting leaders determine how to allocate their sourcing dollars.

“Really, Bersin, says, “what this is about is where do they fit. It gives them something to compare (to).”

Taking a broader look at the survey results, Bersin said, “It tells me that (recruiting) is expensive. It is not cheap to do it well.

“It tells me that companies are spending more right now… It may be even harder because there are so many candidates.

“It shows that there is a pretty substantial change in using social networks.

“It tells me that the recruiting industry is very complicated.”

Q: Recruiter … My system works best. I know, because most of my placements survive the guarantee period.

A: Good for you (or, for your business, at least). From my experience, only a really bad candidate will fail to survive a guarantee period, and most organizations will go to great lengths to avoid the pain of starting another search. Besides, it generally takes about 18-24 months before an employer can separate job-learning from job-performance. Measuring success by guarantees is not the same as measuring success based on whether someone can do a job.

Q: Vendor … My system works great. It matches each candidate to a job profile.

A: Oh really? Do all jobs in the target profile perform the same work? Is every profiled-person a fully skilled, high-performing employee? Does each factor in the profile carry equal weight or are some factors more critical than others? Do individuals making up the profile actually match their own group average? Suppose there are two job groups of 100 people with the same average score. However, in one group, individual scores range from 10 to 90 … in the other group, scores range from 45 to 60 …  are the two groups really the same?

Q: Employer … Our attorneys recommend against tests. We interview candidates.

A: Interesting. What do you call it when: 1) you have something you want to measure; 2) you ask a candidate questions; and 3) you score the answers? Tests/application blanks/sourcing venues/interview questions/resume reviews and so forth = tests. And, their accuracy varies widely. By the way, corporate attorneys tend to be trained as contract experts, and labor attorneys tend to be litigation experts; so, it is really up to HR to do the front-end prevention work (scary, yes?).

Q: Recruiter … Job-fit is more important than anything else.

A: Maybe. Let’s break apart the job into pieces, starting with the critical competencies used to get the job done; then we add manager-fit (may change), department-fit (may change), organizational-fit (usually stable until the next merger/sale/acquisition), and job-fit (probably constant) … now, which “fit” category are we speaking about, and why does fit trump everything else?

Q: Vendor … Our personality tests accurately predict on-the-job behavior.

A: Hmmm. While some of the better-developed tests include scales that identify inconsistent answers, does every personality factor make the difference between job-success and job-failure? Even if you can identify specific performance factor(s), can you actually be sure candidates don’t try to fake good, attempt to match a specific job profile, present an idealized image, or report their true self? In a controlled experiment, I once compared ratings from experienced professionals (e.g., experienced people trained to observe and classify behavior) with 266 candidate personality test reports. Guess what? There was almost no correlation between test scores and behavior.

Self-descriptive personality tests are poor measures of performance. If behavior is critically important in your job (i.e., managers, salespeople, customer service, and so forth) the best way to get a trustworthy reading is to put the candidate in a position where he or she must show you what they can do.

Q: Employer: We don’t have to worry about being sued by the EEOC.

A: Not right away. Consider this. Two companies each hire 100 people. The Great-Hire Company uses a combination of validated behavioral interviews, tests, and simulations. They screen-out everyone who cannot demonstrate (i.e., show) required skills. The Know-Em-When-We-See-Em Company uses traditional interviews. They screen-out people who cannot pass an interview. Which company has the better-skilled workforce? Which has a better career path and deeper promotion pool? Which is more productive per employee? Which company is less likely to get sued for wrongful termination or not promoting protected groups? Forget about the EEOC. Start worrying about organizational bench strength.

Q: Vendors and Recruiters: You are just trying to get people to use tests/assessments.

A: They already are…I’m just trying to get them to use better ones; that is, identify more and better skilled employees.

Q: Employer … We use tests, but don’t use the scores to make hiring decisions.

A: Then don’t give your test until after the candidate is hired.

Q: Employer … we’re satisfied with our present interview and test system.

A: That either means one of two things: 1) you know precisely the cost of low performance, have done formal job studies, validated all your tests, ignore personal anecdotes, and track adverse impact at every decision point; or 2) you never calculated the cost of a bad hire. Which group do you belong to? In case you belong to the second, you might like to know that traditional interviews and unvalidated tests produce enough poor employees and managers to cost your organization anywhere from 10% to 50% of base annual salary. This number comes from recruiting, lost opportunities, turnover, training, coaching, employee mistakes, over-staffing, litigation expenses, lost salary, and so forth.

Q: Recruiter/Employer … we ask our hiring managers to define job requirements.

A: That’s a big problem. Who knows more about what it takes to do your job: you or your manager? Managers might define overall performance, but job holders know the most about what the job takes moment to moment. And, senior managers know how your job will change in the future. You think you can get all that from a hiring manager?

Q: Recruiter/Employer … if we did all that, we would never hire anyone.

A: Are you saying that if you identified critical competencies by interviewing incumbents, managers, and visionary managers, and then used validated tools to screen-out everyone who did not meet the job requirements, no one would pass? Hmmm. Please tell me how you explain all those people already doing the job?

Q: Trainer … just hire the people. We’ll train them to competency.

A: You read a book on this, right? Have you forgotten the number of times you were asked to train an incompetent person into a competent one? Or cringed when asked to link training dollars to either behavioral change or personal effectiveness? Training might enhance skills, but it seldom, if ever, changes a job-incompetent person into a job-competent one. Training is a skills enhancer, not a magic wand.

Q: Vendor/Employer/Recruiter … we use a popular intelligence test to make hires.

A: You know, of course, intelligence tests are both good and bad? The good part is smarter employees (i.e., higher scoring candidates) tend to do better than their less-smart team members. The bad part is you run the risk of: 1) filling an organization with people who are too smart for the job; 2) adversely rejecting too many members of a protected demographic group; 3) hiring people who practiced the test multiple times on multiple job interviews; 4) or restricting the size of your candidate pool. Intelligence tests are great performance predictors, but only if they pass the Three-Bears-Test: too much, too little, or just right for the job.

Q: Vendor/Employer/Recruiter … why is the intelligence test so important?

A: It is not critically important in all jobs … only jobs where the person is required to learn, solve problems, analyze information, make sound decisions, and so forth. It’s common sense really. Put a team of one dozen dull employees alongside a team of one dozen smart employees, and who do you think will do better?

Q: Vendor/Employer/Recruiter … the DOL ‘Guidelines and ‘Standards don’t apply to me.

A: Actually, they apply to everybody with a role in recruiting, evaluating, placing, training, or promoting employees/managers. If you don’t follow the ‘Guidelines and ‘Standards, then hiring and promoting fully-skilled employees will never be more than a game of chance. Test liability? That is always responsibility of the test user. EEOC? That’s the least of your worries.

Q: Vendor … my tests are approved by the EEOC and validated for all jobs.

A: And pigs can fly. The EEOC does not approve vendors. Tests have to be validated job by job, unless, after doing a job analysis, one a test user can transport (e.g., borrow) another user’s validation work.

Conclusion

This is by no means a complete list. But the logic is clear: if you don’t follow best practices, your employees and managers will range from good to bad; and, bad employees means higher turnover, more training expense, excessive recruiting costs, increased legal exposure, more people to do the same work, and wasted payroll.

If you don’t do it right, you will do it wrong. There is no alternative.

As usual, there was much sturm und drang about social media, the lingering recession, and the Iowa caucuses — no, wait, that’s another post.

At any rate, here are the things I thought were most notable:

Job boards did not die: Yes, the combined power of thousands of bloggers and SM evangelists simply could not bring down the 100K+ or so job boards around the world. In fact, the publicly held boards seemed to recover nicely as the year progressed (er, maybe not Monster’s stock). Well, hope springs eternal, right? Maybe in 2012?

LinkedIn got serious about making money: Nothing like an IPO to focus a company’s attention. LI settled down to creating more recruitment products for its audience of employers and recruiters to buy, and it continued working on the 1-5% of its users who actually visit the site monthly to pay for that privilege. LI is not going away, folks — and that means you, job boards.

Monster fought back: The job-board monolith made several key moves in 2011 that kept it in the game and growing. First, it launched a Facebook offensive via its BeKnown app (tens of thousands of users and climbing). Next, it introduced SeeMore, a database-bridging search tool aimed directly at the LinkedIn threat. I expect to see more initiatives in 2012 (once it gets past that stock thing, that is).

Matching sites proliferated: Taking their place alongside well-established job-matching sites such as RealMatch and JobFox were new entrants: VentuRocket, Grex, Direct Approach Solutions, JobHat, Geekfinder — the list goes on and on. Have any of them solved the precision issues that have historically plagued matching sites? Stay tuned.

Mobile kept growing: It was no surprise that mobile continued to make significant inroads into the online recruiting space. According to Beyond, 77% of job seekers were using mobile in 2011. Is your site “mobilized”?

The .jobs universe fizzled: 2011 should have been the year that the .jobs universe grew. Perhaps it did, but the adoption rate among companies I surveyed was still below 15%. Legal issues may make this a shrinking universe.

Money started moving: As John Sumser pointed out in a recent post, acquisitions increased in the online recruiting space  – and that shouldn’t change in 2012. As we inch our way out of the recession, a combustible combination of pent-up demand, smart use of technology, and pre-emptive strikes against competitors will keep the pipes full.

Temps became the new perms: The recession left considerably fewer jobs in its wake — and more of those left were filled by temps. This drove up business for staffing firms and freelance sites such as oDesk and eLance, and changed hiring cycle patterns throughout the industry.

TheLadders said “adios” to $100K only: In a move that probably surprised no one, TheLadders moved away from its long-held position and embraced jobs under the $100K mark. But it’s still not a job board, right? At least, that’s what its ads say …

Indeed targeted employers: After years of saying it worked with job boards rather than against them, Indeed began directly competing for employer dollars. Monster was not amused.

Adler’s Holiday Missives 2011 on How to Recruit Passive Candidates

Bridge the Gap on First Contact. Recognize that for passive candidates “Criteria to Engage” is different that the “Criteria to Accept” an offer. On first contact passive candidates decide to engage based on “Day 1” criteria. This includes the job title, the company, the location, and the compensation. However, when deciding to accept an offer, top passive candidates use “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria. This includes the career opportunity, the importance of the work, the hiring manager and team, the compensation and total rewards package, work/life balance, and the company mission and culture. Being able to bridge this gap on first contact is the difference between hiring great people and wasting your time.

Recruiting Workflow Active vs. Passive: the recruiting process to source and hire active candidates is fundamentally different than what’s required to hire passive candidates. Passive candidates go slower, take more time to decide to become a candidate, and won’t follow traditional approaches. Most companies use a “surplus of candidates” model to design their workflow. If you want to hire top-notch passive candidates in any volume, you must use a “talent scarcity” model –otherwise your efforts are wasted. (Here’s a link to some upcoming webcasts that gets into this in more depth.)

Job Descriptions vs. Performance Profiles. Unless you have a big employer brand, passive candidates will only consider career moves even to engage in a short exploratory conversation. So if you tell the person about the job before you know anything about the candidate, you’ve lost the opportunity to recruit the person, make the job bigger, or get referrals. Since traditional job descriptions describe lateral transfers, they must be banished as part of a talent scarcity talent acquisition approach, and never, ever discussed in the first 30 minutes of the conversation. Here’s how to do this.

Consider the Pace — It’s Much Slower! For top people, especially passive candidates, the decision to change jobs is a strategic decision based on more “Year 1 and Beyond” criteria rather than “Day 1.” As shown in the graphic, this takes extra time. To pull this off recruiters must use consultative selling every step of way, fashioning a career move for the candidate as part of the process. Unfortunately, too many recruiters use a transactional sales approach trying to fill reqs by offering lateral transfers with a salary bump — all Day 1 stuff. Note: when dealing with passive candidates, for a recruiter being “results-oriented” needs to be more about advancing the process along the path and hiring top talent vs. getting positions filled quickly. (Also note: this is where a common competency like being “results-oriented” can have a totally different meaning on-the-job and typically results in the wrong type of recruiter being hired.)

Applicant Control. This is one of our core recruiter competencies described in our Corporate Recruiter Competency Model. The keys: stay the buyer, get the candidate to sell you, and you determine if you’re interested in the candidate before the candidate has a chance to say no. You must maintain applicant control to ensure the candidate makes a “Year 1 and Beyond” career decision. Here’s how to establish and maintain applicant control.

Don’t call anyone who won’t call you back, or isn’t qualified. For the newbie recruiter, LinkedIn is a database of 140mm+ names. For a seasoned headhunter it’s a one-degree connection to every top person on the planet. If you know how to network, you’ll be able to find out about every one of your connections’ connections and pre-qualify each one before calling. Then only call the best. They’ll call you back, too, if you mention how they got their name. Done properly, you should be able to generate a short list of qualified candidates in a few days. Here’s more on how to do this.

If you’re interested in improving your passive candidate recruiting game, start by reengineering your processes from a scarcity of talent perspective. Part of this is hiring recruiters who use a consultative approach to recruiting vs. a transactional sales approach. We’re hosting a number of webcasts in 2012 describing this difference. After you attend them, try out the ideas. You’ll discover they work. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it, otherwise it’s déjà vu all over again.”

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider.

1. Increase the productivity of your workforce – workforce productivity is merely comparing the output of your entire workforce (the total value of the products and services they produce) with the cost of your workforce (total labor and talent management costs). Many talent management departments measure engagement (a precursor to productivity) but they don’t measure workforce productivity. Even fewer take proactive actions to directly increase it. Increasing productivity requires talent management to identify the barriers that restrict productivity and then to proactively provide the consulting advice, best practices, and tools that have been proven to increase a team’s productivity.
2. Increase employee innovation – fierce marketplace competition requires firms to accelerate innovation in product and service areas, despite having fewer resources. Rather than targeting a few departments, talent management must increase innovation in all areas of the business. Typically, innovation can be increased tough the targeted hiring of innovators, retaining innovators, and minimizing the barriers that innovators face within the corporation. Talent management must help shape the culture so that the expectation of continuous innovation permeates every business area.
3. Reward great people management – Most managers simply don’t spend enough time on talent management activities. The primary reason is that managers are not directly measured or rewarded based on how well they manage their talent. This is true even though talent management “owns” all of the key components related to measuring and rewarding (performance management, performance appraisal, competencies, and reward systems). The key action step is to develop a “people management scorecard” for each individual manager and reward them based on their performance against those standards.
4. Identify and fix bad managers – research by Google has shown that in most cases, an employee’s or a team’s manager is the single-highest impact factor on the hiring, retention, innovation, productivity, and the development of employees. Yet most organizations have no formal program for identifying weak managers. Strategic actions would include implementing surveys and metrics to identify with managers and to provide general lists with proven tools and approaches to improve a manager’s people management performance.
5. Convert talent management metrics into their dollar impact – unfortunately, most traditional talent management metrics fail to impress executives because they are not expressed in “the language of business,” which is dollars. Saying we have a 12% turnover rate, a 54% engagement rate, or an 87-day time to fill generally won’t impress senior managers because the metrics are not expressed in their dollar impact on corporate revenue. In contrast, stating that every percentage point increase in regrettable employee turnover costs us $7.2 million gets an immediate reaction. Work with the CFO’s office to credibly calculate the impacts.
6. Calculate the risks of weak talent management — shifting from the positive business impact to the possible negative impacts requires a risk management manager. Risk management is an increasingly important function throughout the business, but unfortunately, few talent management functions have put anyone charge of risk management. Risk managers identify and quantify the risks associated with potential talent problems (its probability and likely costs). Underfunding important talent programs can create tremendous economic risks such as losing key innovators to competitors, failing to have enough developed leaders, and a weak employer brand that drives top candidates away.
7. You need to prepare for a leadership gap — the combination of increased growth and higher turnover rates will mean that most corporations will begin to suffer because of a lack of leadership bench strength. In addition, because the type of leaders who will be needed will also change, the entire leadership and succession program will have to be re-examined and new social media and project rotation tools will need to be developed and implemented.
8. Speed up internal movement through proactive internal placement – very few things increased productivity, retention, and employee development faster than periodic internal movement. Unfortunately, most corporate programs require the employee to initiate the movement and to find the “correct” placement area. A more strategic approach is a proactive one where recruiters periodically identify employees and then help to correctly place these individuals who should be moved both for their own and for the corporate good.
9. Improve internal best-practice sharing – most talent management leaders spend most of their time and resources on developing new programs and approaches. Surprisingly, the data indicates that you can have a higher impact faster and at lower cost by simply identifying and sharing “hidden” existing best practices. Rather than relying on this best-practice sharing occurring organically, a superior approach is a proactive one that seeks out these affected practices wherever they might be in the organization. And once identified, they are shared in such a manner that managers easily understand their value and implement them.
10. Update your retention approach – just like employer branding, retention programs have been allowed to atrophy because the economy has reduced most turnover to a trickle. Unfortunately, turnover is about to dramatically increase, so processes to prioritize key individuals, processes for identifying who is at risk, and retention toolkits need to be reinvigorated before it is too late.
11. Employee referral programs need to be reinvigorated — as the rate of hiring and competition for talent increases throughout the year, stagnant employee referral programs need to be re-examined. Because they produce the highest quality and volume of hires, referrals as the percentage of all hires should begin to reach over 40%. Employee referral programs must be closely integrated with the developing social media approaches.
12. Assess your external employer brand – during the economic downturn, the area of employer branding has been frequently ignored because very little hiring was going on. Unfortunately, during the same time, the reputation of many corporations has been tarnished as a result of layoffs, salary/promotion freezes and a reduction and development resources. In addition, corporate images in general and in some specific industries like banking, oil etc., have been damaged by recent events and “occupy” type movements. The growth of glassdoor.com, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook now make it much easier for negative messages to be spread. At the very least, the positive/negative aspects of your employer brand should be measured and monitored before an upturn in hiring begins.
13. Re-examine your social media approach – although many talent managers have “done something” in the area of social media recruiting, realize that the potential for social media in talent management is much greater than almost everyone anticipated. Plans should be developed to determine how social media can positively impact training, employee development, learning, retention, collaboration, problem identification, crowdsourcing of answers, and best-practice sharing. The mobile platform should be examined in a similar manner because it is rapidly becoming the dominant communications platform for employees.
14. College recruiting needs to be reengineered — communications and job seeking approaches have changed dramatically on college campuses but college recruiting programs have unfortunately been stagnant for years. Program features that need to be examined include remote college recruiting, social media approaches aimed at college students, mobile platform approaches and marketing research to better understand the needs and the actions of top grads.
15. Improve non-monetary motivation – when compensation and reward resources are limited, nonmonetary motivators need to be emphasized. Unfortunately, the compensation function focuses almost exclusively on “expensive” salary, benefits, and bonuses … even though a significant percentage of employee motivation comes from … recognition, praise, and feedback. Talent management should develop non-monetary motivation tools for managers that are easy to use and that produce measurable results. They should also target key employees and server them in order to identify “how to best manage and motivate me” plans.

Benchmark Firms to Learn From

A key competency for any talent management leader is rapid self-directed learning, so it only makes sense to benchmark the firms that are aggressively making tremendous strides in talent management. My extensive research has identified some of the best firms to learn from. Many are from the Silicon Valley, which has already returned to a “war for talent” (Google, Facebook, Zynga all approach talent management using a more scientific approach).

Firms outside of technology have also taken some amazing steps so they should not be ignored (Zappos, Sodexo, CACI, DaVita, Deloitte, KPMG, PepsiCo, and the U.S. Army have all taken bold steps).

Additional Strategic Talent Management Actions to Consider

In addition to the top 15 major actions recommended above, some other strategic actions to consider include:

• Prepare for VUCA, the new normal — talent management plans, approaches, and processes need to be improved so that they can handle the new business environment that we face (VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• Increasing revenues — examining how talent management actions can directly increase individual employee revenue generation
• Integration of talent management functions – an almost-universal weakness is a lack of integration. Talent management functions must more closely cooperate, coordinate, and integrate so that they work seamlessly.
• Hire right before they do — if your firm doesn’t have the strongest employer brand, location or glamorous product, you must develop a plan to quickly initiate hiring immediately before your talent competitors. A rapid “explode out-of-the-box” plan is also required.
• Corporate headcount “fat” – setting up a process that ensures that the return to hiring doesn’t result in a surplus of employees (i.e. headcount fat).
• Competitive analysis — identifying the competitive advantage that your talent management practices provide compared to your talent competitors.
• Prioritizing — prioritizing jobs, managers, and talent management programs so that your limited resources provide the highest possible impact.
• SWAT team — creating a rapid response team that can respond to sudden talent management opportunities and problems.
• Alerts — providing a process that alerts managers about upcoming problems before they get out of hand.
• Lean or agile talent management – adapting lean, CRM, and agile business approaches and tools to the area of talent management.
• Remote work opportunities — as technology, communications, and social media tools improve, talent management must develop ways that allows top talent to work from anywhere.
• Forward-looking metrics — unfortunately, almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Instead, forward-looking and predictive-metrics that allow for improved decision-making need to replace them.
• Reengineer performance appraisals – this is an almost universally disliked process that requires tremendous amount of time but produces no measurable results. A completely new approach is required.
• Transparency – throughout the business world there is an increasing emphasis on transparency and openness. The time has come for talent management leaders to reassess their entire approach to secrecy, privacy, and the degree of openness with employees and applicants.
• Cloud talent management – HR and talent management cannot be exempt from the powerful trend to move everything to the cloud.

Final Thoughts

The period immediately before the beginning of the New Year is a great time to sit back and think of your accomplishments and your legacy. Unfortunately, rather than being strategic, too many talent leaders have been simply happy to survive the last few years with their sanity intact.

Now is the time to shake loose any lethargy, to take some risks, and do something bold before you retire or move on. You may have “earned a seat at the table” but you can’t be truly respected and admired unless you produce a measurable strategic business impact.

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Your Staff Is Job Hunting

If you think the headline is wrong, you may be in for a surprise. Right Management (a Manpower division) says 84 percent workers are looking or will be looking for a new job next year. That’s the same percentage as last year, according to the firm, which surveyed almost 1,100 workers for this year’s survey via an online poll.

So now you’re thinking, “Some poll. More than 84 percent of the staff is still here.” But the survey doesn’t mean everyone is headed out the door. The findings are a barometer of worker distrust in management as well as job commitment.

Says Right Management Executive Vice President Bram Lowsky, “It’s a workplace equivalent to whether or not ‘the country is moving in the right direction.’ Sometimes called ‘flight cognition’ by behavioral psychologists, intent to leave is far from an unusual phenomenon, but when it applies to four-out-of-five employees for two years running it has to be of top concern to senior management.”

Creative Forecasting

The first-quarter 2012 outlook for marketing and advertising professionals is pretty decent, according to a new survey.

Here — at right — is what marketing and advertising executives said when asked, “In which of the following areas do you expect to hire in the first quarter of 2012?” (with multiple responses allowed).

Military Recruiting, Swedish Style

The Pentagon recruits American youth with a high-tech appeal that makes military life look like more fun than the best video game. If you’ve seen that space command commercial from the Air Force, then you know what that means. The Swedish military takes, ahem, a somewhat more down-to-earth approach.

Get Paid to Tear Things Down

Who wouldn’t want a job in demolition? Some of us would even do the work for free, especially if it involved stuff blowing up. (Yes, this might just be a guy thing.)

If this interests you, click on over to the National Demolition Association’s new job board, which it calls Demolition Career Connection. It’s a JobTarget site that backfills with construction jobs from construction job boards. Alas, it turns out even laborers have to have certain skills and training to work in demolition.

Applicant Tracking and Referral Systems Partnering

Taleo, a system for managing job candidates, has a little partnership going with SelectMinds. SelectMinds (written up here) has a tool to manage employee referrals, allowing employees or alumni to match open jobs with their contacts, and recruiters to keep track of referral activities, applications received, and so on. This referral product will now be integrated (though not free) for users of Taleo’s applicant tracking system.

Speaking of Taleo partners: TALX also is integrating with Taleo, offering larger employers WOTC help.

Home Health Report

A new report’s out on the home health and personal care industry. The 121-page PDF includes sections on training, wages, hours worked, and labor shortages in the field.

Deloitte Tops Vault’s Tech Consulting List

1,500 consultants ranked Deloitte’s IT consulting group as a best place to work, moving it from third last year to first for 2012. Vault compiled the rankings based on weighting a number of qualities including prestige, firm culture, pay, and work/life balance. Deloitte Consulting LLP earned a weighted average of 7.964. Just behind it was last year’s first place winner, Booz Allen Hamilton with a 7.866 score.

Besides the rankings and scores, Vault also compiles an abstract of what the survey respondents had to say — good and otherwise — about each of the top 25 companies on the list. See it all here.

Manufacturing Optimism

Many manufacturing execs envision certain operations coming back to the U.S. Why? Higher wages in China and elsewhere; a smaller supply of skilled people overseas; and patriotism.

Rumors have periodically made the rounds of a potential or even pending sale — 20 of them since 2006, according to Bloomberg. All have proven false. But now, says the financial news service, financial analysts and some of Monster’s largest shareholders say the time and price may be right for a takeover.

“The valuation is absurdly cheap,” Eric Green, a Philadelphia-based fund manager at Penn Capital, told Bloomberg. With 3.2 million shares of Monster stock, Penn Capital is one of the company’s largest shareholders.

“The stock has been a clear disappointment,” Green is quoted as saying. He suggested a takeover price of $15 a share. That’s a 92 percent premium over Thursday’s closing price of $7.83. “I would love to see someone buy it,” he said.

Monster’s stock price has declined steadily since hitting a 10-year high of $59.28 in May, 2006. In the last 12 months, the stock has been as high as $25.90, reaching there in January, when the economy seemed ready for a hiring surge. Since August, it has been under $10 a share.

The market value of the company is now about $1 billion, $5 billion less than it was worth in 2006. Its 66 percent decline since the start of this year is the largest of any company included in the S&P 500. As a result, Monster is being moved by Standard & Poors to its MidCap 400 after the market closes today.

Part of the reason for the lackluster stock performance is the weak hiring outlook and the global economic climate of the last few years. Another part is the rise of alternative recruiting channels, especially social media, and especially the launch of LinkedIn as a public company. It bears noting that as hot a launch as LinkedIn had, rising almost immediately upon the start of trading to a high of $122.70, it has been under $75 a share since November. Dice Holdings, the other pure play job board, is also off its 12-month high of $18.75, closing Thursday at $8.75. LinkedIn closed at $66.38. CareerBuilder is privately held by a group of newspaper companies with Gannett owning the majority.

“When the employment market recovers, we’re going to see Monster’s revenue recover,” Avondale analyst Jim Janesky told Bloomberg. “If Monster doesn’t earn the value it deserves in the stock market, then there are various other avenues of recognizing value, and one is certainly a merger or an M&A opportunity.”

Monster declined to comment to Bloomberg and didn’t respond to our email asking for comment.