With corporate recruiting activity continuing to surge, many corporate recruiters say they are busy keeping up with their organizations’ robust recruiting objectives, let alone working to fill the jobs that were the most difficult to staff over the summer months, and which may remain unfilled.

The challenge of recruiting in a seemingly buoyant economy — driven perhaps by the continued growth of corporate earnings, the retreat of oil prices from record highs, and modest inflation — remains a balancing act as corporate recruiters take their messages to a labor market emboldened by the increasing availability of good-paying jobs.

To gauge what some of corporate America’s best recruiters are doing to compete for top talent, ERE recently revisited a handful of former ERE Recruiting Excellence Award winners to see how they’re handling today’s tough recruiting challenges and what they’re doing to extend the best practices that earned them awards for best employer brand, best corporate careers website, and other key recruitment benchmarks:

• Sherri L. Bliss, account manager, Recruitment Services, UnitedHealthcare Pacific and Southwest, Legacy PacifiCare
• Frank Wittenauer, global eRecruitment leader, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
• Trudy Knoepke-Campbell, director, Workforce Planning, HealthEast Care System

UnitedHealthcare

Since being recognized for establishing the Best Employer Brand in early 2006, the recruitment and workplace branding environment at PacifiCare have completely changed. PacifiCare was acquired by UnitedHealthcare in December 2005, and the PacifiCare team fully transitioned to the UnitedHealthcare recruitment model in March 2006.

In addition, the PacifiCare brand has transitioned over to UnitedHealthcare’s during the past seven months, and at this point, only PacifiCare’s legacy line of products continue to be marketed and branded with the PacifiCare name.

Sherri L. Bliss, account manager for recruitment services with UnitedHealthcare Pacific and Southwest, says she is currently assigned to the account management team in recruitment services, so it’s her group’s responsibility to assure service delivery of recruitment services as well as to manage the overall suite of recruitment products and services to the company’s hiring managers and top leaders.

In general, Bliss says, “We are always working on simplifying our recruitment process, as UnitedHealthcare recruitment services supports almost 19,000 employees and hiring is very high-volume.” She says her team is working on process elements, including better understanding the cycle time around UnitedHealthcare’s recruitment process and how it can improve that cycle time. “Our team is also working on an employment branding campaign which is very exciting considering the recognition PacifiCare received earlier this year for our employment branding efforts,” she adds.

The employment branding campaign at UnitedHealthcare is comprehensive in scope and has targeted branding planned all the way to specific job levels, which Bliss believes has high-impact potential.

The campaign will include resources for recruiters and hiring managers so that the company and its jobs are consistently and clearly marketed relative to what motivated current employees to take jobs as well as stay with the company, Bliss says.

United is also working on a suite of workshops for hiring managers to better enable them to function as an extension of the recruitment services group, Bliss adds. That includes a workshop entitled “Everyone is a Recruiter” and what that means for hiring managers taking advantage of their networks to recruit top talent, as well as workshops on effective job profiling and interviewing.

Within the areas that Bliss supports, the clinical personnel and underwriters/actuaries continue to be the most difficult jobs to fill. “Nothing has changed with regard to availability of any of those categories of personnel,” she says. “Some of our senior-level network positions and sales positions are becoming increasingly difficult, as well as candidates [coming] to the table with multiple offers.”

The company’s top four sources for hires in the first two quarters of 2006 were internal candidates, referrals, the UnitedHealth Group website, and other job sites. The latter, Bliss explains, “have become catch-alls for candidates who may have been exposed to UnitedHealthcare marketing or branding through several channels but indicate their source as job board or company website because that is the vehicle through which they are applying.”

When it comes to getting the top passive candidates into the company, she adds, “We would like to see direct sourcing increase and are spending more time assuring our source tracking is cleaned up to accurately capture the right source for every hire so we know with a high degree of accuracy what is working for us.”

So how does the UnitedHealthcare recruiting team measure success? In many ways, Bliss says, it is based on company performance. “For example,” she explains, “retention of key accounts within specific regions and market segments can be highly attributed to our internal talent and success in product development, network management, sales, customer support, claims processing, and I am sure a plethora of other internal functions.”

Account retention as well as membership growth are important measures for the company’s success and are based on having the right internal talent to create the right products for the right price with the right service backing up the delivery and administration.

“We have a Human Capital team that was created specifically to implement human capital and recruitment initiatives targeted to account retention that is unique to UnitedHealthcare and very exciting,” Bliss says. “It all really comes down to the talent you have on board to deliver on your consumer commitments and continuous improvement to what you are able to offer in your consumer marketplace. In addition, recruiters are evaluated on cycle time, direct sourcing, hiring manager feedback, and soon-to-be-implemented new hire feedback.”

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu

Frank Wittenauer, global eRecruitment leader, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, which was recognized by ERE in 2006 for having the Best Corporate Careers Website, says he has seen some big changes in the recruiting market since then.

“We’re definitely seeing more people out there. Our candidate volume seems to be high, but there’s a lot more focus on quality, whereas in years past, it was about getting on the big job boards and driving candidate volume,” Wittenauer says.

He says Deloitte has changed its careers website so that country managers across its global consulting operations can “localize” the content. “We have a platform and we execute that locally,” he says.

One new tool Deloitte expects to roll out soon revolves around the notion of how to “find your fit,” which will include questions that will lead applicants toward the consulting opportunities that best match their skills, experience, and education. That module on the company’s website will help translate its internal terminology to candidate-facing messages. That means whether or not a visitor enters “enterprise risk services group” on the Deloitte site, their answers to questions found there may just point them to that team even if they weren’t specifically looking to find opportunities with that team in the first place.

Wittenauer says Deloitte is also planning the launch of some brief, approximately 90-second videos to help support the mission of its careers website. But the intended outcome of the workplace-oriented videos is different than in previous years when the Deloitte team was most interested in keeping the site “sticky” and keeping visitors on the site for as long as possible.

Now, he says, it’s all about providing job seekers with pertinent information in as few mouse clicks as possible. “We want people to come in, get their information, and go,” Wittenauer explains.

“We’re also just on the cusp of doing hiring manager surveys. We’re going to be measuring four areas of quality in recruiting, and those are hiring manager satisfaction, retention, performance, and utilization,” Wittenauer says. Those hiring manager surveys, he adds, will be conducted 90 days after a new employee is hired to determine “how the person is working out.”

Wittenauer says the Deloitte team is also working to increase the number of employee referrals it gets each year and also to sort through the tax implications of providing employee referral bonuses in numerous countries around the world for both the company and the individual.

Employee referrals already account for between 35% to 40% of all of Deloitte’s experienced hires, and it wants to lift such referrals as a percentage of new hires from about 15% to the 30% range in the United Kingdom, for example, and to as much as 50% of new hires in places like Australia.

“We have no doubt that employee referral is where the quality is,” Wittenauer says.

HealthEast Care System

Trudy Knoepke Campbell says she and her colleagues at HealthEast Care System in Minnesota have spent much of the past few months working through the launch of a new applicant tracking system (VirtualEdge) that will take the institution “from a paper-based system to non-paper” and moving more recruiting resources online.

The healthcare system, which employs 6,900 people in four St. Paul-area hospitals as well as in clinics, home care, and other settings, expects to debut its new career website on November 15.??

But that’s just part of what Knoepke-Campbell’s metrics-oriented workforce planning efforts are focused on these days. “We’re looking at all of our processes and constantly looking to improve what we do,” she says. “We keep pushing the envelope. That’s part of what our function does.”

Knoepke-Campbell says the healthcare system “did some pretty significant branding” of its workplace experience during the first three months of this year. “We’re still seeing some residuals from that, which include an 89% increase in our RN applicants. We’ve hired probably our highest number of RNs this year,” she says.

“We put on a pretty big push for new registered nurse graduates. That’s our pipeline,” Knoepke-Campbell says, noting that it has hired 100 new RNs over the past 12 months to help offset the nursing shortage.

“We’re doing a lot of college recruiting events,” Knoepke-Campbell adds, and HealthEast is also working hard to retain its student interns.

She says 91% of recent hires had searched the healthcare system’s careers website, so her team felt that creating a new website was a wise investment to boost its recruiting effectiveness and also to convey what it’s like to work there.

Knoepke-Campbell says one of the biggest paybacks the healthcare system has seen was from its decision to have both the nurse manager and human resources jointly interview candidates. That way, she says, “both people hear the same thing from the applicant.” The recruiting process is also more efficient because of the use of behavioral interviewing techniques that are “driving more at performance in the interview questions,” she adds.

So what’s on the horizon? Knoepke-Campbell says her group will conduct user surveys to assess the effectiveness of the VirtualEdge applicant tracking system, continue to keep its eye on employee retention, and focus on recruiting in-demand healthcare professionals like pharmacists and physical therapists.

“We’re going to get hit with heavy demand for healthcare services at a time when the bulk of our workforce will be leaving [for retirement],” she says, so HealthEast Care System expects to be competing for the best talent for years to come.

That’s according to the findings of a global recruitment survey released by Accenture, which polled more than 4,100 job seekers in 21 countries in North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region to identify the most-valued career goals of both entry-level and experienced job seekers.

The findings indicate that challenging and interesting work is the most important characteristic that job seekers look for in prospective employers, selected by 60% of all respondents.

The potential for recognition and reward for their accomplishments was a close second, selected by 58% of respondents.

Rounding out the top five characteristics of greatest interest to job seekers were opportunities for fast career growth (44%); indications that the employer is well-established and is likely to have long-term prosperity (42%); and indications that a company has a particular focus on its people (42%). ?

“We found that what is considered important to potential recruits was remarkably consistent across geographies,” says John Campagnino, Accenture’s global director of recruitment.

“Also notable was the fact that while we know from our own employees that corporate social responsibility and diversity are important employer characteristics — things our employees demand and place high value in — the research also validated what many of us intuitively know: namely, that more tangible benefits such as rewards and recognition are most important from an external recruit’s perspective.”

For example, a job that commands a salary of $30,000 nationally can pay as little as $27,840 in Birmingham, Alabama or as much as $37,680 in San Francisco, according to the 2006 Geographic Salary Differentials study (link shows salary definitions for select cities) from Mercer Human Resource Consulting. That one example represents a pay variation of more than 32 percentage points ? from 7.2% below the national median to 25.6% above.?

The Mercer study compares local pay rates for more than 200 cities to national medians at different pay levels. The results show geographic pay variations are less pronounced, but still evident, at higher pay levels. For a job with a median salary of $60,000 nationally, for example, pay varies from a low of $55,080 (?8.2%) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to a high of $72,000 (+20%) in San Jose.

Pay variations by geography are even noted at $90,000. Among the cities included in Mercer’s study, cities like Little Rock, Arkansas and Omaha, Nebraska represent the lower end of the pay range at $84,510 and $86,580, respectively, while cities like New York and San Jose, California hold the top spots at $102,060 and $104,040, respectively.

Mercer’s geographic analysis highlights the challenges faced by many large employers with employees in multiple locations throughout the United States.

Sensitive compensation issues can arise, the survey found, when an employee transfers from a relatively high-salary area to a relatively low-salary area, or vice versa. Good quality information on salary variances helps employers handle these situations in an equitable and consistent manner.

Howard Levine, a senior compensation consultant with Mercer, says it’s important for recruiters and corporate employers to understand the difference between cost of living and cost of labor. Cost of living differentials reflect the difference between localities in terms of cost of goods, such as housing, groceries and transportation. Cost of labor takes into account the difference between localities in terms of cash compensation for the same work.

“Organizations must also be concerned about pay levels for employees in the same location,” Levine cautions. “Individuals moving from one location to another should be paid a locally competitive salary and expenses such as higher rents and home prices should be offset in the relocation package.”

That’s why his New York-based company, Corzen, Inc., a provider of recruitment market data and analysis, has developed a recruiting activity model that tracks the hiring habits of each of more than 13 million businesses in the United States.

Murray, the company’s CEO, says Corzen is now using a combination of data-scraping from online job boards, Dun and Bradstreet data, statistics from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources to determine which companies are doing the most hiring and for what positions, and feeding that to recruitment services providers.

Corzen incorporates these data into a model that can take any single business in the United States and predict how much hiring that business will do over the course of the year. The company assigns each employer in the United States a score that estimates the number of people they will hire and the amount that each is likely to spending on outside recruiting services.

“We developed the Corzen Score to assist companies across all segments of the recruiting services marketplace,” Murray says. “The Internet has created a much more competitive environment for recruiters; the Corzen Score enables online job boards, staffing companies, recruiters, and newspapers to focus their efforts on the companies that do the most hiring. The reason the Corzen Score is more accurate than other methods of identifying hiring potential is that we bring all these sources together into one hiring model. No one has done this before.”

Murray says his company is also developing a resume-scoring component to its services portfolio. “Never before have there been so many resumes online as there are today,” he says, adding that the mission of the new resume-scoring service (details of which will be released in the coming weeks) will be to “help employers understand the potential market for employees.”

Murray acknowledges that other recruiting services providers have worked to qualify resumes and match them with corporate employment opportunities. But, he adds, “The approach we have, we think, is new and will do a better job because of our access to millions of resumes and deriving information from that.”

That’s according to the results of the first comprehensive national study of recruitment advertising effectiveness, which reveals that most corporate recruiters find online job sites effective in filling job openings, despite complaints that they generate too many unqualified applicants.

The joint study by ERE Media, Inc., and Classified Intelligence, LLC, found that only employee referral programs got higher recruitment effectiveness marks that online recruiting. Print advertising trailed the pack.

It asked corporate recruiters to rank the value of job sites, print advertisements, social networks, employee referrals, and career fairs. Most important in making that judgment, the survey showed, was recruiters’ assessments of number of hires compared to cost.

“The big news is that recruitment sites are identified as an effective way to find and hire employees,” says Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence. “Especially among large companies, recruiters are increasing their spending. This should mean real growth for the online job segment — most likely at the expense of newspapers.”

Nearly half of the 353 recruiters who participated (45 percent) expect to increase spending with job sites this year over 2005; more hires for more companies come from job sites than anyplace else.

More than half the recruiters expect to spend more on employee referral programs, although fewer than one-third of hires come from these. Social networking sites are used by 43 percent of the responding recruiters and HR managers, but a common sentiment revealed by the study is that the jury is out on their overall effectiveness as a recruiting channel.

All forms of advertising have a place in the spending mix, recruiters emphasized.

“This is extremely valuable information for recruiters who want to know what approaches their colleagues are finding successful, and consider how best to allocate their budgets” says David Manaster, CEO of ERE Media. “The report reflects HR professionals from a great cross-section of industries and company sizes talking about how to get the most for their money.”

While the average pay in nearly two-thirds (63%) of the 60 countries — including the United States — surveyed by Mercer Human Resource Consulting is forecast to rise between 1 and 3.5 percent above inflation, the consulting firm’s global pay report reveals interesting differences in pay and inflation trends around the world.

“Pay increases tend to vary significantly around the world, depending on country-specific factors such as inflation, economic growth, and unemployment,” says Steve Gross, a world partner for Mercer and global leader of its broad-based rewards consulting practice.

“Global companies need to be especially aware of these key economic and labor market differences when setting compensation budgets and deciding how to allocate resources to generate the greatest return on their rewards investment,” he adds.

Despite continued economic growth in the United States and Canada, wage inflation remains stable, with salaries in both countries likely to increase by 3.7% next year.

However, with inflation at 2.4% and 2% in the United States and Canada, respectively, Canadian employees will fare better overall. In Mexico, salaries are predicted to rise by 4.5%, with inflation at 3.7%.

“Since the dot-com bubble burst around four years ago, base pay in the United States has remained fairly stable,” says Gross. “Employers continue to be reluctant to increase their fixed-pay costs, preferring instead to use variable pay to reward their employees.”

But Gross also cautions that applying one standard approach to compensation can hurt the motivation of exceptionally high-performing employees, while at the same time reward those who really need to step up their contribution to the workforce.

“To make the most of their base pay budgets, employers should consider segmenting their workforce — not just into high, middle, and low performers, but also by geography, career level, or function,” Gross advises.

“Defining each employee segment based on its contribution to business success enables organizations to reward staff appropriately, as they can apply premium, standard, or discounted pay levels to the various groups,” he adds.

“As the economy grows and demand for high-quality workers increases, many companies turn to the recruiting and staffing industry for assistance, therefore driving demand for recruiting and staffing services and higher compensation,” says Art Papas, CEO and co-founder of Bullhorn, a Boston-based provider of recruiting and staffing software.

The findings of a recent Bullhorn survey suggest that staffing and recruiting professionals’ overall pay and benefits are likely to remain competitive and above that reported in other sectors of the employment market as talent becomes harder to find and organizations continue to place a premium on attracting high performers.

While salaries varied greatly among survey participants, the average expected salary of staffing and recruiting professionals for 2006 was $82,000, excluding bonuses, according to the nearly 500 staffing and recruiting professionals from various industries in the United States and Canada who participated in the survey.

The survey found that staffing and recruiting professionals who work outside the United States tend to be more experienced and better compensated, since a higher concentration of Canadian recruiters had average salaries of at least $100,000 and fewer had salaries below $50,000 than their U.S. counterparts.

It also found that there is a strong correlation between compensation and industry experience. Recruiting and staffing professionals with more than 10 years of experience reported earning an average salary of over $150,000.

?”The continued strong salary increases over the last few years are an indication of the value placed on [staffing] professionals’ contributions to the organization,” says Steve Williams, research director for the Society for Human Resource Management.

Both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are recruiting aggressively these days as each tries to increase its overall ranks to more than 10,000 to meet the public need.

“Recruiting, for us, is the foremost priority for the department, along with public safety,” says Lt. Joe Fennell, who heads up the recruiting unit for County Sheriff Lee Baca. “Our goal is to hire 1,000 deputy sheriff generalists per year, and that will be our annual goal at least into 2007 and 2008.”

Fennell says the growing population of the Los Angeles-Orange-Ventura-San Bernardino-Riverside county area is placing unprecedented demands on law enforcement agencies across southern California and forcing them to staff up faster and longer than ever before.

The sheriff’s department says it is still feeling the impact of a board of supervisors’ decision about four years ago to reduce its budget by $166 million dollars. That cutback put the brakes on much of the agency’s hiring plans.

“That basically took us out of recruiting because we had to shut down the recruiting office. In 2003, we only recruited 75 deputy sheriffs, and in 2004, only 190. That’s basically shutting down our recruiting office,” Fennell says, especially considering that it’s now charged with hiring 1,000 of them this year, and at least into the foreseeable future.

Salaries Rise

The most effective channel for identifying new recruits, Fennell says, has been the sheriff department’s own website, which is replete with calls to public service messages such as ‘Be A Hero,’ ‘Be A Deputy,’ and ‘Real People — Real Leaders.’ The site also advertises ‘Excellent Pay’ and ‘Exceptional Benefits.’

The website has information about Community Job Fairs, information about the testing required of deputy sheriff applicants, and community-service alerts with tips for protecting against identity theft and a call to learn how murders are investigated.

Also prominently displayed is a flash media advisory explaining that the starting salaries for qualified deputy sheriffs increased 13 percent effective April 1 of this year, to $4,749 per month. That comes out to a sign-on salary of $56,988 on an annualized basis, and about what the department needs to compete for talent in the competitive southern California employment market.

Fennell says another of the department’s more effective recruitment channels has been its billboard advertising campaign. The department current has over 20 large billboards in the greater Los Angeles area and one in Nevada, all of which help extend the messages that residents across the region see regularly in newspaper and television ads.

The agency has entered into recruitment-related sponsorships with a variety of organizations, but perhaps none as high profile as those agreed with home-state sports teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Oakland Raiders, UCLA Bruins, USC Trojans, and the Los Angeles Kings.

Those sports agreements help create a lot of recruiting buzz for the department, but Fennell says its employee referral program is probably the most effective recruiting source he’d like more people to be talking about.

“About 26 percent of our new deputy hires come from our referral program,” Fennell says.

Despite their proximity and the common public service calling of their law enforcement mission, Fennell says that Sheriff Baca’s Los Angeles County agency doesn’t see itself competing for talent specifically against the Los Angeles Police Department.

However, he says, “We’re competing with everyone in law enforcement, and we’re all drawing from the same applicant pool,” along with other government agencies and the private sector, says Fennell.

Fennell acknowledges that it has employed some creative recruiting tactics that he’d prefer to keep private.

“We do have some things out there that are creative and innovative,” says Fennell, “and we’re doing those things with the support of Sheriff Baca. We’ve been recruiting successfully under his leadership and vision. He’s in total support of what we’re doing and he has a ‘hands on’ approach to recruitment.”

Part of the recruiting challenge law enforcement agencies face is the availability of other well-paying jobs in southern California, as well as the high cost of housing and the demands of the ongoing war against terrorism, which has extended the service enlistments of many who might otherwise return home and seek out a new career behind the badge.

Looking ahead to the immense recruiting challenge over the next few years, Fennell says one of the biggest challenges is getting the support of the public education system to produce more graduates who can pass the department’s written and oral examinations.

“We believe our education system is kind of letting us down,” Fennell says, explaining that the agency’s recruiting figures would improve significantly if more diploma-holding applicants were capable of passing its 90-minute written exam.

To help improve those scores, the county sheriff’s department has been offering test-taking seminars to help those whose job application might otherwise be snuffed out by a failing grade.

But Fennell also points out that law enforcement agencies aren’t the only ones faced with the challenge of raising the educational capacity of job applicants. “That’s what everyone is facing, including Corporate America,” he says.

These are good days for Wichita, Kansas-based Cessna, which plans to deliver 300 business jets this year, and up to 23 percent more next year with the availability of several new aircraft for discriminating aviation buyers.

To fuel that growth, the company is recruiting aggressively and, by the end of December, will have recruited 1,000 new employees this year. It also recently announced that it plans to hire nearly another 1,000 people across its operations next year, including about 600 in Wichita. Most of the anticipated new hires are for aircraft assembly jobs. Cessna?s Scott Reid, manager of workforce planning and staffing, says that, depending on employee attrition, the company will hire 900 to 1,000 new employees in 2007, with some of the new recruits joining Cessna?s operations in Independence, Kansas and Columbus, Georgia.

Reid says Cessna will recruit from a variety of channels, including advertising locally on radio and in newspapers, advertising in aviation-related magazines and publications, career fairs, online media, and through employee referrals. Among those, Reid says, career fairs, employee referrals, and local advertising have been the most effective forms of employee recruitment for the company. In fact, a recent one-day Cessna job fair in Wichita attracted about 3,000 applicants. But the challenge for Cessna, as with all growth-oriented companies, is finding the right people for the right jobs, and Reid says the competitive dynamics and challenge of filling some new positions are a constant impact on its recruitment activities.

?The challenges we face are just competition from other aviation companies,? says Reid, who points out that ?engineering positions are generally tough to fill.?

Last year, the media-focused private equity and mezzanine capital investment firm made its initial venture into the recruiting sector of the human resources market by securing a financial stake in PreVisor, a provider of online pre-employment testing and assessment solutions.

The question now is whether Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s acquisition of TMP’s recruitment advertising business will satiate its hunger to ride increasing corporate demand and investment in the employee selection and recruiting sides of business.

“Hiring and retaining a high quality workforce is a top priority for companies, and becoming increasingly difficult due to an aging population, competition, and regulatory and compliance issues,” says Michael Kessler, a managing director of Veronis Suhler Stevenson. “We expect to benefit from the projected growth in spending on employee recruitment and selection.”

Trent Hickman, also a Veronis managing director, says the TMP deal offered an especially compelling opportunity for the investment firm to serve its media, communications, and information portfolio.

“We believe that TMP Worldwide is an attractive platform company in the recruitment advertising agency sector because of the company’s demonstrated commitment to its customers, many of whom have partnered with TMP for over 10 years,” Hickman says.

Not surprisingly, Andrew J. McKelvey, chairman and CEO of Monster Worldwide and founder of TMP Worldwide, reinforced that view of the Veronis opportunity with the TMP media property.

“Although Monster.com was originally a service offering of our advertising business, it has since become the core of a global media company,” he says. “We now believe that TMP Worldwide’s customers can best benefit from advertising counsel, planning, and services that are not directly affiliated with any other media or advertising ownerships.”

As part of the deal, TMP Worldwide will maintain its present organizational structure and staffing throughout its regional operations in the United States, Canada, and India. The company will also remain part of the TMP Global Alliance of Companies, serving international relationships in the Americas, Europe, and Asia/Pacific.

While most companies have seen some signs of a talent shortage, 39% report no such indications. At the same time, one-third of organizations have already taken steps to update selection and recruitment criteria. Nevertheless, 10% of employers expect no shortage of talent in the next decade.

“The talent shortage continues to capture the imagination of employers worldwide,” says Tim Vigue, vice president of Boston-based Novations Group, the organizational consulting firm that conducted the survey of 3,100 senior human resource executives. “But our survey shows there’s also widespread uncertainty about what’s going to happen and when. Some organizations are in a passive mode, while the smart ones are taking a hard look at their recruitment and selection procedures.”

The survey asked a number of questions relating to a long-anticipated shortage of talent and how responding corporate HR executives would characterize their current approaches to recruiting and hiring. The participating companies’ responses included:

• We have already seen some signs of a talent shortage and have taken steps to update selection criteria: 32.1%
• We have seen signs of a talent shortage, but we will continue to hire at a normal pace in the year ahead: 29.1%
• While we have seen no signs of a talent shortage, our organization will remain cautious on new hiring in the year ahead: 19.4%
• While we have seen no signs of a talent shortage, we are convinced one will emerge before the end of the decade, and we will take appropriate steps: 9.7%
• We do not anticipate a talent shortage in the next decade: 9.5%

Uncertainty about an approaching talent shortage may also be reflected in a Novations finding about retiring baby boomers. “Again, organizations are divided,” Vigue says, “with as many taking steps to mitigate the loss of talent as there are others that expect no great talent drain as boomers retire.”

With respect to retiring baby boomers, the responding HR executives described the following situations within their organizations:

• We anticipate a serious loss of talent and institutional know-how, but currently do not have any steps in place to mitigate this loss: 17.9%
• We’re taking steps to mitigate our loss of talent, for example, by creating ways for baby boomers to gradually reduce their hours: 29.6%
• We don’t expect an unusually large loss of talent with baby-boomer retirements: 39.3%
• Not sure: 14.1%

That’s the notion that moved Monster Worldwide to recruit former Nike executive Tony Balfour as president of its Asia Pacific operations, a newly created position the online recruiting giant hopes will help propel the growth of its existing operations in India, South Korea, China, and elsewhere in the region.

Balfour was most recently employed by SEEK, the Australian online recruiting company, where he served as a marketing director. Prior to that, he was general manager of Nike’s operations in Australia and New Zealand, and held a number of other positions with Nike over a nearly 10-year period, including general manager of Asia Pacific.

Monster already holds an important strategic investment in ChinaHR, adding to the company’s growing presence in the region. Under Balfour, it expects to continue to build awareness of its global brand, expand its worldwide job seeker audience, and deliver online recruiting services to large and small companies throughout the fast-growing Asia Pacific market.

“The Asia Pacific region, particularly China, is a large, emerging market with strong GDP growth, rapid job formation, and increasing broadband and Internet penetration,” says Andrew McKelvey, chairman and CEO of Monster Worldwide.

Balfour will report to Steve Pogorzelski, group president of international operations for Monster Worldwide, and will work closely with Monster’s Asia Pacific country leaders. Balfour will be based in China and will assume his new duties at Monster on October 1.

“In the late 90’s, it was commonplace to hear about companies with recruiting campaigns that included extreme employee perks such as company cars, game rooms with foosball tables, huge sign-on bonuses, and chef-prepared lunches,” says Heather Galler, CEO of JobKite.com. “That ship has sailed.”

The JobKite survey revealed that 56 percent of the 263 responding companies have made some significant enhancements to the employee benefits they are offering for retention or recruiting purposes, with most geared toward improving the quality of employees’ work and home lives. Most notably, these benefits include telecommuting, increased vacation, and health benefits. The 147 responding companies that actually increased benefits over the past six months reported increased employee compensation in the following categories:

• Medical: 88 percent added health-related benefits, including life, vision, and better or increased health plans.
• Money: 69 percent have increased stock vesting, 401(k) funds, salary relative to market averages, sign-on bonuses, quarterly bonus plans, and/or relocation packages.
• Vacation: 41 percent are increasing the number of paid days off per year.
• Alternative working arrangements. Thirty-six percent are adding or enhancing flextime and/or telecommuting. One Fortune 1000 company says it launched a new telecommuting program on August 16, for example. Another has an informal telecommuting option to be used for unexpected events, and a formal program for modified or reduced work schedules. One-third of the employees using that program are men.
• Other: 8 percent plan to offer other miscellaneous benefits, including massages, monthly cookouts and gym memberships.

“As they shift their benefits to reinforce the work-life balance, companies are really making a smart move,” Galler says. “By focusing on making their employees happier and more balanced, companies only stand to gain through increased loyalty, productivity, and retention.”

If the scarcity of healthcare talent wasn’t enough of a challenge, consider how a spate of recent deals that has resulted in the sale or closure of hospitals and California laws that regulate minimum nurse staffing levels have stressed the region’s healthcare recruiting market and increased the competition for the best talent.

Kristin W. Alexander, senior healthcare recruiter with Glendale Memorial Hospital and Health Center, a Catholic Healthcare West institution in Glendale, California, says her hospital’s top priorities are filling hard-to-recruit positions, much the same as with many of the Catholic system’s 43 other hospitals in California, Nevada, and Arizona.

“The focus right now is on the tough-to-fill positions, and what’s always tough to fill is the registered nurse positions, along with pharmacy, occupational, and physical therapy, and radiology positions,” Anderson says. “So it’s not just nursing. We’re trying to look at the bigger picture of the hospital.”

Alexander says the hospital’s own Careers website has been its most effective recruiting channel, responsible for as much as 60 percent of its candidate traffic. “All of our applicants are forced through the website,” she says.?

Keeping the site’s content fresh and appealing to allied healthcare professionals who have a lot of employment choices because they’re in such high demand. “A lot of it is updating the site and changing the message and the photos,” Alexander adds. “We crunch a lot of numbers about [online] visitors, who returns more than once, how long they stay on our site. That’s all a part of engaging with potential employees.”

Alexander says the hospital’s non-profit status and its now 80-year history of serving the Glendale community have helped attract trained healthcare talent. But it takes more than that to compete against some of the region’s other outstanding hospitals.

Also key to Glendale’s recruiting success is its recipe of offering competitive salaries, what Alexander calls a “good retirement package,” and the promise of free healthcare for all employees and their immediate families. “Things like that provide a quality of life and makes it a nice, stable place to work,” she says.

Glendale has found that professional association channels have provided the biggest return on its recruiting budget, because given all the training, education, and certification that healthcare professionals must attain, sourcing talent through healthcare associations delivers the right job candidates.

Besides the professional association channels, Alexander says her employer also tends to employ direct mail and e-mail campaigns to bring targeted messages to various groups of healthcare professionals.

The Summit, New Jersey-based Programmers Guild is filing employment discrimination claims with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related discrimination. The complaints allege that the companies have discriminated against U.S. citizens and permanent residents in job postings that express preference towards hiring foreign workers on H-1B, L-1, or student visas.

John Miano, who founded the Programmers Guild in 1998, is filing the cases because he says there has been a major lack of oversight by the federal government regarding some employers’ openly favoring foreign workers over American workers.

“Abuse of the H-1B program has become so widespread that companies apparently feel free to engage openly in the practice. And we are only reviewing ads for computer programmers,” Miano says.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, U.S. workers — those legally entitled to work in the United States — are a protected class, and it is illegal to discriminate against U.S. workers on the basis of immigration status.

The Law Offices of Rajiv S. Khanna posted a warning to employers on its website to stop running such ads, bolstering the legitimacy of the Guild’s charges: “We are representing some employers who have recently been served with a notice by the U.S. Department of Justice for investigation regarding discrimination against U.S. citizens. The charges allege that these employers placed ads inviting only non-immigrants to apply. Please stop all such advertising,” the online warning stated.

Miano cites examples from actual postings on Dice.com and Monster.com:

“We offer H1B services for L1 Visa Holders and new H1B for the right candidates in?India.”

“H1B -From India-Multiple positions”

“We require candidates for H1B from India.”

“ONLY OPT STUDENTS NEED APPLY”

“We sponsor GC [green card] and we do prefer H1B holders”

In addition to this “Americans need not apply” discrimination, Miano says, many H-1B job postings are for employment arrangements that amount to the sale of visas and green cards.

“We have postings for arrangements where the ‘employee’ finds his own work and the ‘employer’ takes a cut of the earnings,” Miano says. Many “high-tech companies” obtaining H-1B visas, he adds, “operate out of apartments and Mailboxes Etc.”?

BP has since announced plans to keep the Western half of the oil field online, which will allow it to produce 200,000 barrels per day, or about half its pre-shutdown capacity, by the end of the month.

“Alaska has had a wake-up call,” Murkowski said in a statement about the ongoing crisis. “With 86 percent of our revenues coming from oil taxes, we are vulnerable to any decline in production.”

The Alaska governor added: “The attorney general will review the state’s legal rights and determine an appropriate course of action to protect the state’s interests, including the state’s right to hold BP fully accountable for losses to the state.”

In addition to instituting the immediate hiring freeze on state workers, Murkowski has asked the federal Office of Management and Budget to ready a management plan to protect vital state services during the oil field shutdown.

The hiring freeze covers the principal departments of the executive branch of state government, and is patterned after a hiring freeze put in place immediately after Governor Murkowski took office in December 2002, when the state faced an $800 million budget deficit. At that time, the hiring freeze covered only exempt and partially exempt employees; however, the current freeze also covers employees in the classified service.

The current hiring freeze does not apply to positions critical to protect the public’s health and safety, such as state troopers and correctional officers, or to positions that provide patient and residential care in 24-hour facilities.

The state estimates the loss of Prudhoe Bay’s daily production of 400,000 barrels of oil means a drop in $6.4 million per day in state revenue. If BP can produce half of the pipeline’s capacity by the end of August, the state will realize a less severe loss of tax and royalty income.

The bank will recruit new personnel for its Boston-based Global Wealth and Investment Management division, a client relationship center in nearby Waltham, Massachusetts, as well as for its branches and a Rhode Island call center.

The recruiting push is part of the bank’s plan to follow up on promises it made to keep the same number of New England employees — 17,900 — as FleetBoston Financial Corp. had at the time of its acquisition by Bank of America. Bank of America acquired Fleet for $48 billion.?

Bank of America spokesman Ernie Anguilla confirmed that the recruiting planned now through year’s end is indeed “a follow-up to the employment commitment Bank of America made after the Fleet merger.” He added, in a statement: “We pledged to return to pre-merger employment levels in New England by the end of 2006.”

Anguilla also confirmed statements by Anne Finucane, Bank of America’s global marketing and corporate affairs executive, who had said previously that the CEOs of both banks had agreed about New England staffing levels before the acquisition.

Bank of America currently employs 16,600 people in New England. It has 1,100 open positions and recently held a job fair outside Boston to help recruit new staff. Later this fall, the bank will announce plans to add another 200 jobs to reach its employment-pledge goal.

The bank’s open positions range from $210,000-a-year wealth management positions to $30,000-a-year back-office jobs.

The bank’s recruiting efforts in New England will put eventually put 1,300 people to work there, but will also earn Bank of America important public relations points.

Soon after it acquired Fleet, Bank of America laid off 3,000 people in New England, prompting an outcry from politicians and others who questioned its long-term intentions in the region. But Bank of America has been recruiting steadily since 2004, and now appears poised to win a lot of friends for keeping its promises.

The company’s ‘Labs Are Vital’ recruitment, education, and awareness initiative is built around a million-dollar equipment donation program for lab training institutions, a consumer advertising campaign and the launch of a new website focusing attention on the life-saving work that medical laboratory scientists provide in diagnosing disease and improving health outcomes.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that by 2012, there will be a need for 138,000 laboratory scientists, but that only 42,000 will be trained and available by then.

But Abbott says the pinch is already being felt in some locations where patients are required to travel considerable distances or make appointments months in advance to have routine medical tests conducted. That’s because some hospitals have consolidated laboratory operations or chosen to compress the schedules for laboratory services. These changes are in response to a labor shortage and growing cost pressures in healthcare.?

Likewise, educational institutions that train laboratory scientists are also being challenged in a number of ways, including dealing with the escalating cost of buying equipment for the lab. The cost burden of acquiring new laboratory equipment for training purposes?– which ranges from several thousand dollars to more than $200,000?– continues to increase as newer technology becomes available, forcing some educational institutions to close down their laboratory science programs.

“The Labs are Vital initiative is aimed at drawing attention to the efforts of a segment of the healthcare profession who collectively make vast contributions every day to the lives of millions of patients,” says Don Patton, vice president, global diagnostic commercial operations for Abbott. “We hope this campaign will encourage young people to consider a career in laboratory medicine, and help ensure the viability of med tech schools so they’re able to educate the next generation of these dedicated and talented professionals.”

Along with the equipment donation program, Abbott also will kick off an ad campaign to celebrate the work of laboratory professionals and attract young people to the field. “The role of the laboratory scientist isn’t well known outside of healthcare, and this communications campaign will help close the knowledge gap about the many contributions of these dedicated professionals,” Patton says. The campaign, he adds, also is expected to be a source of pride within the lab community and is hoped to help motivate and inspire those already in the field.

The Labs Are Vital effort website will provide resources to lab professionals, information on the status of legislation important to laboratorians, and a forum for exchanging practices that lead to improvements in laboratory efficiency or management and other related topics.

Abbott says that a range of additional programs is in development, including initiatives to help colleges and universities improve graduation rates for students with laboratory science degrees.

Mercer’s 2006-2007 U.S. Compensation Planning Survey finds that American employers plan to grant average pay increases of 3.7 percent this year, just slightly more than they granted in 2005 (3.6 percent), and the same amount in 2007. The recent Conference Board findings pegged worker pay increases (for both exempt and non-exempt employees) at 3.5 percent.

The Mercer report found that employers, overall, remain cautious in their approach to increasing payroll budgets, but that most will concentrate on rewarding high performers and those with skills that are in high demand. The annual study included responses from more than 950 employers and reflects pay practices for nearly 12 million workers.

The budgeted pay increases in the Mercer study included: 3.9 percent for executives, 3.7 percent for management and professional staff, 3.6 percent for office/clerical/technician employees, and 3.5 percent for trades/production/service personnel.

Steven E. Gross, global leader of Mercer’s broad-based rewards consulting practice, says that the spread between salary increases and inflation continues to remain low in 2006 — less than one percent — reflecting uneven growth in the job market and reversing a trend from the late nineties, when pay increases tended to be two percent or more above inflation.

Companies are beginning to segment their workforce to identify the most valuable contributors, in a methodology similar to how they use market segmentation to identify their most valuable customers. The aim is to achieve the greatest return by attracting, retaining, and engaging those employees whose consistent, outstanding performance drive the company’s business success.

“Workforces are being segmented into performance drivers, enablers, and legacy drivers (those employees who created value in the past),” Gross says. “Variations in pay increases and other rewards reflect the company’s desire to drive productivity and engage the right talent in the right places.”

Apart from salary increases, the most popular methods of rewarding top performers are spot cash awards, project milestone awards and signing bonuses. Gross predicts that these alternatives to regular salary increases will become more important as labor markets become more competitive.

Fresh off the news that Monster has entered into a strategic alliance with the new owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and philly.com to better compete with CareerBuilder, newspaper recruitment advertising executives explain why that move may (or may not) fuel similar deals.

“It’s unclear whether this spells the beginning of a?wider competition for newspaper alliances between CareerBuilder and Monster,” says Pete Casillas, classified advertising manager for The Miami Herald/el Nuevo Herald. “Both have had different approaches to building?online audience up to this point.?Monster has a relatively strong audience in the Northeast, so the Philly partnership makes more sense than it?might in?other parts of the country. I think?the pros and cons of online partnerships?will?continue to be weighed on?a market by market, situation-specific basis.”

Casillas adds: “This deal just illustrates the fact that the recruitment advertising business continues to evolve. One-time?competitors?may end up being good partners,?given?new market realities.”

In announcing its recent deal with Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, Monster indicated “the new alliance exemplifies Monster Worldwide’s corporate strategy to grow Monster via multiple distribution channels and reflects Philadelphia Media Holdings’ commitment to leverage and expand the revenue base of its media properties.”

The deal gives Monster a market leader alliance in the nation’s fourth-largest metro area and gives recruitment advertising managers at daily newspapers across the country another potential business partner as they look for ways to buffer and bolster revenue and attract more subscribers.

“Newspapers are still the medium of choice for recruiters and job seekers, so this move makes perfect sense for Monster,” says Ray Farris, vice president of classified advertising for The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. “Newspapers still have the resources, client contacts, and reader loyalty needed to drive this business.”

Miami executive Casillas says that online recruiting company claims that they had taken over newspapers’ traditional recruitment advertising turf have only been partially validated, especially because of newspapers’ real staying power.

“Newspapers own the local sales relationship. This is one factor that has not changed in the last five years,” Casillas says. “Similar to telecom, as long as newspapers own the ‘last mile’ to the customer’s door,?newspapers will remain a big part of the mix. To build a local sales staff?large enough to compete effectively with newspapers is cost prohibitive: just ask Yahoo, AOL, or IAC/Citysearch.”