ERE.net

Even after cutting their way through 2011, pharmaceutical companies expect to make more cuts this year to their salesforces as they struggle to adapt to the changing marketplace for their products.

A survey by consultants Hay Group found that half of Big Pharma, as the major drug companies are collectively called, believe themselves overstaffed, with many planning to eliminate from 6 to 15 percent of their sales staffs. The consulting group’s 2011 Annual Study of Sales Force Effectiveness says only 5 percent of the the other companies in the life sciences industry plan cuts.

“While smaller, more specialized companies appear to be aggressively hiring, Big Pharma is still fixated on continual cuts and retrenchment, as these organizations seek to find their way in an uncertain world,” says an article by Hay Group practice leaders and survey authors.

The article in Pharm Exec, which distills the findings in the proprietary report, says a  “dramatic structural change” is underway in the pharmaceutical marketplace, but bemoans the industry’s response. “While change is championed publicly,” the authors write, “recruiting still focuses almost exclusively on those with industry experience.” keep reading…

A repair technician - Camp Dwyer, Afghanistan

The Marines have launched a new career site, heavy on interactivity, video, and big, striking photos. A career tool asks users 10 questions about themselves — Do you have a fear of swimming? Are you a visual thinker? Are you good with maps and diagrams? — and then shows videos to candidates depending on their answers to the questions.

There’s a big section on “recruit training” overviewing the 12-week training, with video.

The U.S. Marine Corps began in 1775.

People love to talk about themselves, and they love to talk even more online — often to a fault.

Honesty is not the best policy, especially online. Most of us know that an inappropriate picture or comment posted online can derail a person’s job prospects. In my view, recruiters and hiring managers make too much of people’s online posts and using them in a hiring process is fraught with problems, but online conversations can work to a recruiter’s advantage, especially in a talent community. keep reading…

The New York Stock Exchange will be using a new hiring tool from a company that’s launching today and is backed by a million dollars in angel funding. Charles Handler is among the advisors to the firm, called EmployInsight.

In short, here’s how it works.

keep reading…

Hunter College president and IBM's GM of North America Bridget van Kralingen

A new report’s out about recruiting technical women. The document is from a not-for-profit called the Anita Borg Institute (which appears to be putting on a May 10 workshop on recruiting high-tech women … heck, stay in town a week and you’ll see us in Mountain View).

Anyhow, the 50-page PDF called “Solutions to Recruit Technical Women” includes case studies from Cisco, IBM, Intel, and Intuit, and also some good appendices listing how many women receive engineering and other degrees from various colleges.

On Wednesday one of the newest startups to focus on internships will host one of the largest, if not the biggest, online workshops to be held on Google+.

In a sign of maturity for the social network Google launched last summer, as well as for InternMatch, a “names” group of companies have signed on to host one-hour segments for college students hoping to land an internship.

For instance, hiring managers from Nestle Purina will discuss the ins and outs of building connections and using social media in searching and landing internships. Google’s engineering recruiting lead, Jeff Moore, will do a segment on “Hacking the Engineering Internship Application,” which, presumably, won’t involve any actual hacking, but advice on how to get through the process and stand out from the crowd.

After seven hours of sessions, InternMatch will throw open the doors, so to speak, for 17 hours of online, interactive help for students. The 24-hour marathon, which begins Wednesday at 9:50 a.m. Pacific time, will end Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific.

The event makes use of Hangouts, the video chat and conferencing service that is part of Google+. Hangouts is interactive for up to 10 participants, but it has a broadcast feature that’s essentially a video stream for hundreds or thousands of viewers. The seven segments will be recorded for later viewing. keep reading…

Never before has the time been riper for recruiters to make a real difference to the profitability of their firms. The differentiator between profits, innovative products, and long-term success is, very simply, the quality of talent.

As gatekeepers, your function is far from trivial. You are key to finding the best talent and therefore ultimately a core player in corporate success. But we continue to act like our job is about as important as sorting screws or stocking shelves. We are rarely influencers or early adopters of technology.

Influencers are noted for focus, their ability to make a case for what they want that is backed up with data, and for empowering others to act. In many cases, they also use the latest tools to raise awareness and efficiency.

If you want to be an influencer here are some ideas, concepts, and provocative moves you can use to transform your recruiting function.

Narrow the Field

Most recruiters have too large a scope and hence spread themselves very thinly, pleasing no one. keep reading…

I saw an interesting discussion posted in one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to. It asked:

When “cold calling” on a company for the first time, what is the best way to make contact that gets results? Assume you have no “in” at the company.

There were 64 votes. The voting results follow:

• Email (4%)
• Telephone (until you reach them live) (18%)
• Inmail once (1%)
• Email, then follow up by telephone (28%)
• Telephone, then follow up by email (46%)

I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to change “company” to “person” and change “assume you have no in at the company” to, “You don’t know this person.”

Which would you choose?

I’m a phone sourcer who’s asked many times to take my research one step further and contact each of the names I’ve sourced to “profile” them for their interest in the opportunity my customer represents. So, I would choose Door #2.

Telephone (Until You Reach Them Live)

I know that makes me a minority, but I have my reasons for doing this. keep reading…

This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

360° employee feedback surveys are one of the most common HR practices, but unfortunately that popularity may have led to a degree of complacency. Whether you design, execute, or are merely asked to fill them out periodically, you should be interested in maximizing their effectiveness. After years of extensive research on the 360° process, I have found that there is far too little focus on the potential problems and the many weaknesses associated with the process. My research and experience with HR leaders has helped me compile a list of the potential issues, problems, and concerns that should be considered by anyone designing the process or interpreting its results. Your survey results will improve dramatically only when program managers and users are fully aware of all of its potential problems.

The following article highlights each of these potential issues within seven categories.

The Top 40 Problems With 360° Employee Feedback Programs

The top potential issues/problems are split into seven categories:  keep reading…

So Mark Murphy’s not a fan of many of the interview questions commonly used, saying they don’t differentiate between better and worse performers, and ultimately don’t result in better hires.

The questions the Leadership IQ CEO does like can loosely be split up into categories: attitudinal questions, and coachability questions.

The first type of questions help you actually tell who’s a better than a candidate than the next one, rather than having each person just tell you all their success stories. The second category — coachability — gets into what someone’s boss would say about them.

He explains more, and offers specific sample questions, in the 6-minute video below. keep reading…

Recruiters need to be able to quickly and accurately assess candidate competency. The obvious reason for this, though, is not the most important reason.

Of course, it’s important to ensure that the candidate is competent and motivated to do the work, and can fit within the culture and style of the organization, but this is a less important reason for being good at assessing talent than you might think. The more important reasons recruiters need to do this well are to defend their candidates from managers who make superficial or emotional decisions, and to demonstrate to their candidates that the job at hand represents a clear career move. keep reading…

In this session, we will talk about all your recruitment & sourcing process and how you can cut costs without sacrificing the quality of the hire. Not everyone is able to afford the cost of every job board, along with Broadlook Diver, and a Linkedin Premium account. Sometimes being a staffing manager means creating magic out of very little or nothing at all.

We will discuss improvements to your recruitment process that include savings on the phone, savings in your search, savings with your recruitment message, savings in your branding, and savings in the sourcing tools that you use.

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

This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

Employee engagement is at or near the top of most surveys that cover the concerns of HR leaders. Almost everyone is enthusiastic about the concept and their program. However, there is far too little focus on the problems or issues related to engagement.

My research and experience with HR leaders has helped me compile a list of the potential issues, problems, and concerns that should be considered by anyone involved in employee engagement. The process of gathering engagement data and the interpretation of it both improve dramatically when program managers and users are fully aware of all of its potential problems. The following article highlights each of these potential issues in bullet point format.

The Top Problems With Employee Engagement Programs keep reading…

Sodexo is launching two things: a new mobile-friendly careers site, as well as a job-hunting application for U.S. job seekers to use on iPhones, iPads, Androids, and soon Blackberries. Candidates can use the app, available from a landing page, to search for jobs, apply for jobs, join a talent community, get job alerts, and learn more about working for the company.

What makes it not just-another-mobile-recruiting-launch is, for one, that it’s Sodexo. The company earned the 2010 recruiting department of the year award; is a finalist this year in the best-brand category; and is a leader in recruiting with social media. Also, candidates who create a profile in the Sodexo career center can apply for a job straight from the mobile device; this differs from many other setups, where companies need candidates to eventually get to their laptop or desktop to apply. keep reading…

 You can be proud to work here.

That is one of THE most important messages your new employee orientation program should communicate.

This is so crucial because people of the caliber you want to attract and retain place a high value in working for an employer of whom they can feel proud.

So, make sure you communicate to your new employees — both explicitly and implicitly – that they can be proud to work at your organization.

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” implicitly by conducting a well-designed, well-organized, effective onboarding program. They see by the way you deliver the onboarding experience that your organization does things right. Conducting a high quality onboarding program engenders both pride — “I’m part of a great organization” –and respect for management — “They know what they’re doing here.”

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” explicitly by sharing stories that demonstrate why your organization is worthy of pride.

“Pride Story” Themes You Can Draw From

These include stories with the following themes: keep reading…

Facebook, and potentially other social media as well, can be used to assess a person’s potential for job success.

That not-so-surprising conclusion is reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and comes out of two studies — one dealing with academic performance, the other with job performance — conducted on college campuses in Indiana, Illinois, and at Auburn University.

What is surprising about the study is that a group of modestly trained evaluators could better predict success after spending a few minutes on a Facebook profile than could a self-assessment of personality traits often used by industry.

“SNW (social networking websites) ratings correlated with job performance, hirability, and academic performance criteria,” the researchers concluded, “and the magnitude of these correlations was generally larger than for self-ratings.” keep reading…

Ask the next hire you onboard to describe everything, every step they took on their way to becoming a candidate, and you may be in for a surprise.

If you track your source of hire, chances are excellent that what your numbers tell you is only a part of the story — the most recent part. What all that data is telling you may be not more than from where your new hire submitted their application.

With two-thirds of the companies participating in CareerXroads’ source of hire survey relying on the hires to say how they learned of the job, “What that’s telling us is what the candidate remembers, which is going to be from where they applied. You might get them to tell you where they first heard about the job,” says Gerry Crispin, one of the survey authors. “But we’ve suspected that more goes into this than is being captured (by source of hire reporting).”

So for the first time in the 11 years CareerXroads has surveyed America’s largest employers on how and from where they make hires, this year’s report includes the best thinking of recruiting leaders about what influenced their new hires to apply.

The just released report, 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire: Channels that Influence, not only offers a look at what recruiting leaders believe about the pathways in talent acquisition, but it also provides a data-rich look at where the 36 responding companies attribute the hires they make. The sources of hire were detailed on ERE yesterday. Today’s post looks at the social media influencers of that hiring. keep reading…

What I learned recently is that colonoscopies and pre-employment testing have a lot in common. First of all, managers and employees dislike, maybe even detest, the seemingly invasive nature of both evaluations. Second, you can’t fake out the results — what physicians see and personality tests reveal is simply “what it is.” Both assessments, when properly administered, are objective and neutral. Finally, both the colonoscopy and personality tests are critical for detecting or preventing “cancers” from spreading in your body and organization respectively.

How did I come up with this crazy comparison? I’m not sure. Let’s just say the analogy just appeared — one of those “aha” moments — during a conversation with a client. She had just completed an evaluation of several employee assessments for her company.

Here’s a little background that prompted her search. keep reading…

After two years of looking internally to fill vacancies, companies in 2011 again began to hire new workers, relying on referrals and job boards for nearly 50 percent of their external hires.

Social media, though it accounted for only 3.5 percent of those external hires, evidences a much greater impact on hiring than the numbers would suggest, influencing candidates whose hiring ends up being attributed to other sources.

These are but a few of the findings in the just released 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire survey. Conducted now for a decade by the talent consultancy of Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the annual survey queries the recruiting leaders of America’s largest companies about where they source the hires they make. Additional questions touch on emerging trends.

While Crispin and Mehler caution that the results reflect only the hiring practices of the participating companies, the survey has come to be an industry standard, occupying the top Google results for “source of hire,” and is one of the tools recruiters use in developing their own recruiting strategy.

This year’s survey found that in 2011 the 36 participating companies, which collectively have 1.2 million employees, filled 59 percent of their 213,375 openings externally. It’s a dramatic change from the last two years when half the openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions. keep reading…

An IT staffing company you probably haven’t heard of is quickly hiring employees and recruiters after it won some new business that it probably hadn’t dreamed it would.

XpertTech has already grown about 400% in six months money-wise, and in terms of employee size, from 12 employees to 61 employees in six months. Now it’s hiring 30 people in 30 days in the San Francisco Bay area for a mobile phone application project. It’s looking for designers, coders, and others. Joe Budzienski, the company’s executive vice president, is telling candidates, “Whether you have just graduated college and have been developing in your dorm room between classes, or have worked as a senior engineer who realized app development was your true calling, we want to speak with you. The only thing we ask is you live, breathe, and eat APPS!”

“To be trusted with this project is an honor,” says Budzienski. “It’s a very very prominent company, global.” One job listing on LinkedIn suggests the client is a banking company, as do some other posts.

The 30-day hiring blitz started Monday, and XpertTech has hired 12 of the 30 already. keep reading…