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An insurgent group of former SHRM leaders and current members has declared that attempting to resolve differences with the current SHRM board in face-to-face meetings is futile, and is asking for help in deciding next steps.

In an email sent Sunday, the SHRM Members For Transparency said “it has become apparent — as many of you suggested it would — that continuing to meet is unlikely to be a successful means to achieving our goals.”

At this point, says the unsigned email, “We are reaching out to you now because we need your feedback to help determine SMFT’s future direction.” Encouraging the members and the SHRM regional, state, and local leaders who also were sent the email to complete a questionnaire, SMFT says, “your responses are critical and will guide us in identifying our next steps.  In many ways, your feedback may determine the future of SHRM.” keep reading…

As the investment world watches Facebook’s historic IPO today, marketers are beginning to wonder if advertising on the 900-million-member social network is going to yield anything close to the bonanza of its initial stock offering.

Just this week, General Motors confirmed it was cancelling $10 million worth of ads on the site because, said the Wall Street Journal, it found they “had little impact on consumers.”

The article arrived like a bombshell, coming just days before the IPO. It set off all sorts of debate in the marketing community — and beyond, of course — as experts weighed in on both sides. Rival carmaker Ford even jumped in, firing a shot on Twitter saying, “It’s all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Remember that part about “engaging content & innovation.”

For recruiters, this is more than just an interesting sidebar to the stock sale story; which, is opening (but won’t stay) at $38 a share, giving Facebook a market value of $108 billion. Rather, the General Motors withdrawal raises anew the whole issue of the effectiveness of social media recruiting, and Facebook specifically.  keep reading…

A new “matching” site, a new social media/employee-referral site, and the negatives of stripping.

Yes, it’s our regular roundup of recruiting and HR happenings, below.

Social Referrals keep reading…

Mystery Applicant is the winner of ERE’s first-ever competition between startups, one that began with almost 50 applicants and ended up with the candidate-experience technology firm pocketing $10,000.

You may have read about the company as it launched quietly and later said it had signed on an 80,000-candidate-a-year customer. It was picked among six finalists, including Goood Job; Lab of Apps; Ongig; Traitperception, and Venturocket. They came from as far as the UK and Israel, and as close as San Francisco to take the stage in Mountain View today at the Recruiting Innovation Summit to show off their products and fight for the grand prize.

Nick Price, director of Mystery Applicant, said after the award was announced that he’ll use the money to invest in product development. “The money is brilliant,” he said, “but the recognition of what we’re doing is really good too.”

Tweets flew fairly frequently during the competition, and the startups were grilled from judges Jason Warner, Steve Boese, and Ethel Chen, including being asked:

• How will you make money?
• How will it work with an iPad?
• What’s your go-to-market strategy?
• Does your product do so many different things that the message gets muddled up?
• How do you solve the problem that some people in our networks are people we don’t really know?

Judges were asked to choose a winner based on such things as whether the companies actually solved a business problem; how well they focused on a target market; and how well they positioned their product in the marketplace.

Videos from the demos are below, broken up into two parts and followed by the announcement of the winner, which included comments by the judges. keep reading…

Among the locales fighting for talent — everywhere from Detroit to even the Yukon — is Austin, Texas, where a new portal allows job-seekers to search for jobs, use LinkedIn to connect with local employers, and find local training classes. Of course, there are links to information about why you might want to move to Austin.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, the Chamber of Commerce paid $40,000 to Experience to work on the site. Employers will pay membership fees to Experience use the site, and Experience will share some of that revenue with the Chamber.

This past week I was interviewed by a reporter from a major news magazine. He contacted me about a controversial article I had written on ERE addressing the lack of forward-thinking when it comes to companies developing talent acquisition strategies. In the article I suggested that follow-the-leader seemed to be the dominant strategy of choice used by most companies.

We then got around to talking about the skills gap in the U.S. workforce, whether it was real or imaginary, and if anything could be done about it. “Plenty” was my instant comment. Here’s what came next: keep reading…

The fastest-growing human resources technology company many have never heard of is having its own challenges attracting technology talent, and has begun a recruitment advertising campaign.

Cornerstone's billboard tonight on Santa Monica Blvd

It’s very early in the branding-advertising effort by Cornerstone OnDemand, one its CEO Adam Miller says will involve social media, and has already involved 18 employees running the LA marathon with company shirts on, partly to raise the firm’s profile.

Los Angeles is a massive, sprawling (the 37-mile drive home tonight from the Cornerstone conference took me a mind-numbing 3 1/2 hours) metropolitan area of about 13 million, but it’s not a magnet for tech talent like Silicon Valley is. (This despite a growing number of tech firms — including some in the HR field – that are setting up shop and calling the tech community by the monicker “Silicon Beach.”)

The value proposition for Cornerstone OnDemand candidates is multi-fold. keep reading…

The company that powers campus recruiting services, including NACElink, is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly attempting to hack into the computer systems of two competitors.

The investigation doesn’t involve NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Nor is there any evidence that NACElink was ever hacked or that any attempt was made to illegally access the system. However, Marilyn Mackes, executive director of the nonprofit association, says the organization is monitoring the situation and has been sending periodic updates to its member schools and employers.

“Is NACE going to be looking out for the interests of its members,” Mackes said rhetorically. “Of course it is.”

At this point, she says, it is “kind of premature” for the organization to make any decisions about the hosting of its career services network.  keep reading…

When U.S. college students and recent grads go looking for a job, they want quick answers, trustworthy insights, and evidence the employers know how to use the various social media channels to add value to their search.

So says PotentialPark, a Swedish recruitment market research firm. Its annual survey (U.S. results were not posted as of this writing) of 3,552 U.S. college students and recent grads found young job seekers are comfortable with social media and expect that you will be too. While 86 percent of them make use of company career sites, more than half (56 percent) expect to find a company on Facebook, and 69 percent expect you to be on LinkedIn.

What PotentialPark found when it audited the corporate career sites of almost 500 U.S. firms was that only 57 percent link to their Facebook page; 79 percent connect to LinkedIn or some other professional network. The career site itself, says PotentialPark, “rarely offers any interaction.” keep reading…

What do you expect from a website feature whose URL is mynitro.com/nobullshit?

What’s after the slash is what Nitro tries to give you in its new careers site feature, a little game built by Nitro’s developers. The San Francisco company, in the paperless office/document management business, wants to show that it is creative, fun, Australian-influenced, and un-corporate. So it asks candidates if they want to take the “wombat pack” career track or the “corporate drone” career track, as well as a few other quick questions to that effect.

On the site, it says it’s looking for engineers and product managers (and even a recruiter) who are “rock stars” and who “get *%$@ done.” Except it doesn’t use those characters.

Like most every other careers pages, it unfortunately loses a bit of the cool factor once you click on the job descriptions. Anyhow, check it out here.

Fire Department of New York officials announced this month that a record number of minorities took its firefighter exam this spring. The Fire Department says nearly 46 percent of the potential recruits were members of minority groups. The number of women test-takers also saw an increase this year. Nearly 2,000 women took the test. That’s more than the past three test years combined. That’s a good thing, but it’d be even better if these applicants were even more prepared. More on that in a minute.

Big Improvement keep reading…

The use of the Internet with a smartphone is fast becoming the next mass media channel. That’s particular true with social media such as Facebook. Recents statistics from a company called comScore show the mobile Internet audience is using Facebook nearly an hour more a month than they’re using it on a desktop.

Facebook mobile users have a choice of downloading an application, or using the mobile Facebook. Eighty percent of mobile Facebook users use the application. With Twitter, users prefer the application, too. This data has confused many industry commentators, with many bloggers writing that applications are “winning the battle.” This interpretation is wrong. keep reading…

TalentBin officially launched from private beta to public yesterday. The service, which bills itself as a talent search engine, announced via press release that it “just turned the entire professional web into the largest talent sourcing database known to mankind with its public launch.”

If you’ll excuse the bravado, what TalentBin is trying to do is actually quite impressive and has leaped forward since I saw the beginnings of its private beta at the HR Technology Conference last October.

What it is trying to do is fairly simple: create a searchable database that merges information about a person from all over the web into a single profile so that recruiters can get all of the information about them in one, digestible place.

keep reading…

This week, recruiting leaders will be gathering at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley for the Recruiting Innovation Summit. If you aren’t going to be one of them, then clear your schedule for the end of this week and participate virtually.

To catch the live stream for free, go to this page Thursday and Friday. The event kicks off at 9 a.m. PDT both Thursday and Friday.

keep reading…

Business-to-business blue-chip ADP is trying to spread the word on social media to potential employees that it’s about more than just payroll. As part of that, it’s making sure recruiters are up to speed on how to use social-media sites, how not to use them, and why.

Lisa Sherr, senior director, global staffing marketing & analytics, talks with me about this training of “brand ambassadors,” “coaches,” and “certified social media experts” in the audio below. She covers:

• Why this was started in the first place
• Basic vs. advanced use of social media
• The use of recruiters to train ADP employees in other departments in social media
• Whether the training is tactical (e.g. how to use Twitter) or strategic (making and carrying out a plan)

It’s about nine minutes, below. keep reading…

How familiar do the three scenarios below sound to you? They’re a few examples of how the siloes in talent management impact HR, employees, managers, candidates, and corporate executives. The impact: companies waste time and money; they compromise on the quality of their talent; their employee engagement deteriorates; and, ultimately, their business performance suffers. Breaking down these siloes is the topic of a workshop I’m running at the fall ERE Expo.

• Company X has a rigorous succession planning process, but the results of this process sit in binders in several HR business partners’ desks. Mary, a senior manager, has a critical vacancy, so she calls her recruiter, John, to fill it. John hires a retained search firm at great cost and expends a great deal of effort, but finally fills this critical but difficult-to-fill position. After the hire, John gets a call from his HR business partner, who asks, “Why were the three ready-now internal successors identified during talent reviews not even considered for this position?”
• Brad, a manufacturing site manager at Company Y, reviews his staffing needs on March 15 and determines that his plant is fully staffed. However, on March 22, he calls his recruiter, Jane, and tells her a change in business strategy has occurred, and he needs 100 new people at his plant by the end of April. Jane thinks, “Senior leadership must have known about this change three months ago. If only I had known ahead of time, I could have proactively pipelined external talent, and worked with Learning and Development and Succession Planning to pipeline internal talent. At this point, I’ll never be able to meet Brad’s timeline!”
• Peter, a new employee at Company Z, meets with his manager, Lisa, two weeks after his start date. In that meeting, Lisa tells Peter that HR requires every employee to have a development plan. She hands him a copy of the development plan template, and tells him to put anything he wants on it. Peter thinks, “I wish Lisa would give me more direction and support for my career development. I interviewed with so many people to get this job; you think they’d have some sense of my development areas and some suggestions for how to grow. I guess this company’s stated commitment to employee development is just lip service.”

Integrated Talent Management: the Solution keep reading…

Yahoo’s beleaguered CEO Scott Thompson is out, in a shakeup that replaced the company’s chairman of the board and added new directors chosen by a dissident shareholder.

Unable to ride out the storm over a false academic degree listed on his resume, Thompson left the company over the weekend. Yahoo issued a statement Sunday mentioning Thompson’s name briefly, and only in connection with announcing his replacement, Ross Levinsohn, as interim CEO. Levinsohn was Yahoo’s executive vice president and head of global media.

The decision to replace Thompson over his false claim of holding a degree in computer science jelled late Friday, after search firm Heidrick & Struggles denied it had anything to do with the falsification. In meetings he held to attempt to calm the waters last week, Thompson blamed a staffer at an unnamed headhunting firm for making the resume mistake, which he failed to notice for eight years.

That firm would have been Heidrick & Struggles, which was handling his placement at eBay. keep reading…

When most recruiters learn about a potential new media channel like Pinterest or Instagram, their initial reaction is often to discount them as a low-volume source. Many recruiters shortsightedly fail to see their value, no matter how many desirable prospects “hang out” on them, simply because the new source is not designed primarily to be a recruiting site. But don’t let those recruiters with a shortsighted “fill the requisitions mentality” steer you away from a strategic opportunity to build your firm’s image as an innovator by being the first to use new approaches.

Including innovative practices and sources in your recruiting is essential because innovators look for signs of innovation in the recruiting process as an indicator that innovation permeates the firm. And if your firm is one of the first users of these hot sites, you further reinforce your employer brand image as a first mover and innovative firm. If you are going to be a strategic recruiting function, you need to look beyond the short-term goal of filling reqs. 

Build Your Image as an Innovative Firm keep reading…

Recruitment process outsourcing by definition is a form of business process outsourcing where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider. Each letter in the term RPO represents a valuable and equal piece of the RPO process model, yet more and more RPO providers today are using the letters in the phrase but not performing up to standard expectations around each functional letter R-P-O.

Whether outsourcing any particular business function is good or bad can be debated, but for those companies who choose to outsource their recruitment departments and select an RPO provider, there are several key elements that will either make or break the initiative. Most important, understand what a particular RPO provider is willing to deliver and what they are good at delivering. Through personal experience it seems that most RPO providers have forgotten or ignored the “R” or “Recruitment” in RPO and spend the majority of their time and resources focusing on “Process” and/or “Outsourcing/Optimization.”

For me, the “R” is the most important aspect in the term RPO and is what I focus on. If a provider can’t deliver on the “R,” then “P” and “O” are useless to me.  Other organizations may place a higher value on the “P” and “O,” and again it is all what is best for organizational needs. To me, most RPO providers have lost the concept of recruiting and now focus on the outsourced part.

Although it may be more efficient and although it may be more cost effective — I still demand a certain bang for my buck and while I don’t expect executive-search-quality candidates for every position, RPO providers should still be focused on providing candidates of a certain level of quality and not just numbers.

Lucky for me after trial and error, I was able to locate a provider who has not lost focus on “recruitment” and that can and does deliver at a high level, and that is what it is all about for me. Do your homework, talk to some other professionals in the industry, and conduct a proper assessment prior to partnering with an RPO provider. And if all else fails – meet me at the 2012 ERE Expo in South Florida where I can tell you an RPO story that will make the hair on the back of any HR executive’s neck stand straight up. See you there.