The Internet makes talent communities inevitable

In recent weeks we’ve seen a lot of outpouring of grief over the now dead SOPA legislation. The law’s critics claim that, if passed, the law would end the Internet as we know it, threaten our way of life, and confirm the Mayans were right. We periodically experience this type of mass hysteria, whenever something seems to threaten the “promise of the Internet” — the last time was over net neutrality. That so-called promise has to do with the perceived “free” flow of information: articles, stories, videos, songs, or content. What’s gotten lost in this noise is that that nothing is free. The current business model of the Internet has simply shifted dollars from content creators to content aggregators. Advertisers sponsor content so users can pretend it is “free.”

A long time ago, about the time the last ice age ended, there was something called AOL. It seems like eons have passed, but those who remember that era may recall that after we returned from foraging for food we would turn on our dial-up modems and connect to AOL, having paid a monthly fee for access to all the content that was available, the forums, the news, etc. Connection speeds were 1,200 bits per minute — you could almost count those bits coming in. Now we do the same with Facebook and Google, which we experience as free. Perceptually, we ignore the ads — targeted ads based on all the information collected by the sites — ads tailored to our habits, our behavior, and interactions. AOL charged a fee and had no ads; Facebook doesn’t charge a fee but has ads. There is no free lunch.

So now we have a business model on the Internet favoring networks that can attract members and keep them there. That requires having content that attracts users, however it may be generated. Initially, sites like YouTube and Facebook, with their user-generated content, left us wondering why they existed. But, they have been enormously successful and it is clear that communities naturally form where content gets developed and shared. The better the content a community brings to its members, the more of them it gets and the more engaged they are.

Big Brother is Watching You — and That’s OK

What we know now is that people prefer content they don’t have to pay for directly. We’re apparently willing to share substantial personal information with advertisers in exchange for “free” content. Just how much intrusiveness we’re willing to enable remains to be seen, but the boundaries are constantly being pushed — Google’s new privacy policy being only the latest example. The company will now offer a new “benefit” for users — it will track you across multiple services including Google+, YouTube, Gmail, and any other property they own, including Android phones. I wrote this on Google Docs, so what I wrote was likely being indexed as it was written. Big Brother was an amateur.

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

While users are opposed to paying for content (whether it is legally or illegally obtained), there’s an opportunity for employers. Any employer can create forums where content is produced targeting interests that are relevant to specific groups of people –- creating talent communities — thereby aggregating candidates they may eventually want to hire. This is the only way to create talent communities, built around a topic that candidates (or people that might become candidates) are passionate about: chemical engineering, pediatrics, Java, nursing, recruiting, etc. A place online where people congregate to share their interests and interact with each other. Anything else is not a community.

But this opportunity comes at a cost. Relying on Facebook or Google+ to create talent communities means accepting their terms of doing business. That is, giving them access to data that can be analyzed and sold to third-parties. That’s the price of “free” content. There’s really no getting away from it — the money to support Facebook has to come from somewhere. Although this model prevails today, there are other forces at work that will change the game. The exchange of personal information is at odds with our natural desire for privacy. So, as we continue to explore how much privacy we’re willing to exchange for “free” content on sites like Facebook, a desire for alternative models will grow. Other forms of sponsorship, where advertising is less apparent, will naturally appeal to those concerned with privacy, and may even serve to encourage community members to share more in a community with restricted membership.

Communities don’t have to be built entirely on Facebook’s terms. It is possible to create somewhat private communities. In fact, it is prudent to create communities on one’s own terms, rather than be at the mercy of a third party whose interests diverge from ours.

Employer-sponsored talent communities should be private domains for members that represent a group desired by the employer as employees. The basic formula for success is simple: develop or support the creation of content and make it available for free and accessible, and drive people to it. However, putting this into practice is a lot of work.

First, it requires having interesting content, which means that it needs to be material that is original, relevant to a particular group, and prompts controversy. Then there needs to be a critical mass of members in the community that gets engaged in robust discussion. That is what creates a community, it’s not just a repository of content. A community is one where people congregate to share their views and learn from each other. That’s the “social” part of social media, a fact that often gets forgotten in the zeal to build a lot of communities which are nothing more than databases.

This is what employers need to be doing today. There is no other way to create talent communities. But do it now, because who knows what’s coming that may make it difficult to create communities.

The Role of Recruiters in Social Media

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

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

The Cruise Director

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

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

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

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

The Cruise Director vs. The Captain

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

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

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

It Takes Two

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

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online.

A key finding of the research is that social networking is done more offline than online; the most common type of social networking is face-to-face or over the phone. This is a tough pill to swallow for those who worship the god of digital media, but the conventional wisdom is based on confusing the medium with the message. Social networking is what people are naturally driven to do; online social media is just the mechanism through which it’s done.

One size does not fit all. The research shows that social networkers have different reasons why they use their networks. These reasons are intrinsic to each individual: if you want to engage with them you need to tailor your message to them. If your social media initiatives are designed to reach the widest possible audience, then there’s a lot who will simply tune it out.

It’s About Engagement

The conventional wisdom about social media is that it’s a vehicle to reach the widest possible audience at the lowest cost — 467 first-level contacts connect you to 88,654 second-level contacts and 12,674,812 third-level contacts; Facebook has 600 million users, and so on. Getting dazzled by the numbers obscures the fact that success with social media requires engagement. And engagement means connecting with people who have shared passions and interests. Research on the effectiveness of tweets as a means to deliver a message shows that that happens most when tweets are re-tweeted — which only happens if the message resonated with the person reading it … an engaged follower. A “like” by a friend is more likely to be noticed than an ad, and even more if the friend commented on whatever it was they liked.

And engagement means that people are more likely to talk with their friends about the topic, whether it’s a product or a job, or interesting place to work. This is why talent communities can only succeed if they build engagement. The conventional wisdom about the talent communities is that they should include the largest number of possible candidates, with the idea that some will become employees. That approach doesn’t build engagement. It builds a database. The people in it are not likely to be retweeting your jobs or sharing them on Facebook.

The Gallup research shows that prospective customers are much more likely to try your product or service or advocate on your behalf if they hear good things about you from an engaged customer in their social network. They are much less likely to trust online advertising or corporate-sponsored Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. Candidates will behave the same way — if they’re engaged with you they will mention it to their friends, and those friends are more likely to be attracted to your jobs, more so than any amount of tweeting and self-promotion you may do through SEO for your jobs.

Old Habits Die Hard 

Much of recruiting has to do with advertising; the enduring popularity of job boards is testimony to that. Before that, so much of print advertising was devoted to help-wanted ads. It’s hard work to come up with leads on candidates and then reach out and try and to get them interested in your jobs. We’d all like to just post a job and wait for the resumes to roll in. When social media came along the most natural thing to do was to try and get those jobs in front of as many people as possible. That was the message peddled by ad agencies — the former middlemen in the job-posting business. Hence the obsession with click-through rates, impressions, views, etc. That may work for jobs where the requirements are a pulse and the lack of a felony (and sometimes only the first) but it usually doesn’t work for jobs requiring specialized skills. Do it too much and you’re just filling the channel with noise that no one’s paying any attention to.

Advertising doesn’t build engagement but a focused message, tailored to a narrow segment resonates. Talent communities are most effective when they include like-minded people who share a passion for their work. Do it right and you have passive candidates engage with you in ways not possible through advertising. Do it wrong and you’ve got the social media equivalent of spam.

Nerds in Paradise

Well, if that story seems quaint, your next tech hire may be demanding she bring her pet to work too. Think that’s unlikely? Well think again.

Unemployment among many categories of workers tech is at or lower than 1998. The Boston Globe reports that in Massachusetts recruiters are seeing 3-5 jobs for every software worker. Workers with the right skills are being snatched up in as little as 24 hours. Contract developers are turning down offers of $130 per hour.

And the Bay State is no isolated example. The New York Times reports that while the rest of the city anxiously watches unemployment hover just below a demoralizing 9 percent and Wall Street braces for more layoffs, developers are complaining about being called with too many job offers. The shortage is causing salaries to skyrocket across all levels of jobs. Nationwide salaries for software engineers rose 20 to 30 percent in the past year and a half.

Employers are resorting to all sorts of creative strategies to attract and keep talent. Netlix offers employees unlimited time off under a program called “freedom and responsibility.”

This Time Is Different

Back in the 90s the talent shortage seemed to be a smaller problem — something that would not last, and was mainly in tech. This time the problem is more deep-seated and enduring. A recent survey by Manpower of employers found that just 27% believe their business has the talent it needs. Underscoring that gloomy assessment is a report from the World Economic forum that estimates significant shortages of talent in most major categories of professional jobs — tech, healthcare, education, biotech, etc. — through 2020.

A key reason the problem is bigger is because the supply of talent is just not there. Less than 1% of college students in the U.S. pick computer science as a major. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing estimates that the combined output of all nursing programs in America is 30% less than the demand. Shortfalls in talent that were made up by immigrants are no longer possible because the number of H-1B visas available has been stuck at 65,000 since 2007, and in the current political climate no politician on either side has the courage to push for an increase.

Weird and Weirder

Employers are getting increasingly desperate in their attempts to recruit talent. Among the more unusual approaches include having a wine bar at DPR Construction. All 17 of the company’s offices offer employees the option to open a bottle to toast accomplishments and at the Texas branch they have a full saloon. Chesapeake Energy offers employees botox injections and tanning beds. Taking a cue from Roberto Ziche, Kimpton hotels allows employees to bring pets to work and offers veterinary health benefits. But the prize for most unusual recruitment idea goes to Hipster, a San Francisco startup that gives each new employee a year’s supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon. There’s no accounting for taste.

Regulations are strangling job growth

Businesses are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash. That’s enough to fund 27 million jobs, or reduce unemployment to near zero. So what’s keeping them from spending? The economy is slowing from what was already a very tepid recovery. But even with greatly reduced expectations, job growth coming out of the recession has been far below what should have occurred based on historical precedents.

For a clue why this is, look no further than the environmental impact statement report on the proposed pipeline to bring crude oil from Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. The project is estimated to create more than 138,000 jobs and invest over $20 billion in the U.S. economy. However, those benefits have to be weighed against such critical factors as “the impact on beetles” — a subject of considerable study in the report, among other things. The report concludes that there is no significant environmental impact because of the project, but tell that to the beetles. Since they have no legal standing, the government has come to their defense. The EPA is doing everything and then some to block the project.

I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help

When it comes to job creation, the government’s public position is completely at odds with its actions. Take the newly minted ozone regulations proposed by the EPA. The agency itself admits that (I kid you not) the technology required to comply with its standards doesn’t exist and that the benefits are based on highly dubious assumptions. And just what are the benefits that the EPA seeks to achieve? A reduction in the concentration of ozone in the atmosphere by 10 parts per billion. And just to drive home the point about how smart an idea this is, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson concedes that scientific support for the new standards is “limited” and any benefits to people or vegetation (yes, vegetation) may be hard to measure.

Conservative estimates of the impact of these regulations show that it will result in the loss of over a million jobs in the already reeling construction industry over the next 10 years, as businesses are required to invest close to $1 trillion to meet the requirements. The EPA projects that the new standards would force about 20% – 30% of U.S. counties into non-compliance, requiring them to spend on expensive emissions control technologies (yet to be developed) or failing that, take industrial capacity offline … in other words, force several hundred thousand people into unemployment. Well, we already have 25 million people unemployed, so what’s a few hundred thousand more? Who would even notice?

And the list goes on and on. We also have the boondoggle involving the National Labor Relations Board’s opposition to Boeing setting up a huge manufacturing plant in South Carolina, instead of Washington — since the South Carolina facility will be a non-union site. That the plant will create 13,000 jobs is apparently not a consideration for the NLRB.

These are not isolated examples. Regulations of all sorts exist today to limit just about any type of project. The President keeps talking about funding “shovel-ready” projects, but it takes between three and seven years from the time a project is conceived to the time the first shovel can get into the ground, because of regulations. Amazingly, the government is unwilling to even help its own agencies that want to do something about job creation. The pipeline project mentioned above is being championed by the State Department since the oil originates in Canada. It was first proposed in 2008, but three years later the project is still in limbo because the EPA refuses to accept the claim that there’s little impact on beetles, and a much greater one on humans.

But then, no price is too high to pay if it means fewer parts per billion of ozone or happier beetles.

Size Doesn’t Matter

The Shortest Distance Is Still a Straight Line

Weiner on Talent

Texas Adds Over 700,000 Jobs

Winners and Losers

Home of The Unemployed

The Winning Formula

Build Social Capital to Succeed with Social Media

“The Whuffie Factor” is a book about using social networks to build your business. The concept of whuffie (rhymes with whoopee, but don’t confuse the two) refers to social capital built through connections among and between people in communities of shared interest. This creates a sort of “cultural currency” that an organization (or individual) can “spend” for its own benefit.

The Whuffie Factor is about marketing and sales but it does have some lessons for recruiting. The main one is that in order to succeed in making hires, recruiters must actively participate in social networks in — well — a social way. What most recruiters are accustomed to is using any media or channel to push ads.

The social media recruiting strategy of many employers can be described as one of getting as broad a network as possible (followers, connections, friends), getting to know major influencers, and getting write ups or posting jobs through those. That may well have worked in a Web 1.0 world, but it won’t do much in a Web 2.0 world, where people expect to have interactions with others — which is what social media is all about.

‘Tis Better to Give Than to Receive

Whuffie is about getting involved with a close-knit community, actively participating, and paying it forward. As an example, don’t just promote your company. Ask others about their companies. Participate in other’s online events and help them promote theirs. Don’t just ask them to attend yours. And help others get make connections that help them; don’t just ask for connections to people who might be interested in your jobs. Turn the bullhorn around: listen, don’t always be the one talking.

That builds up social capital and creates a currency that you can spend in pursuit of candidates. But you have to earn the currency before you can spend it. These principles are the same offline and online. Just how likely are you to help someone make connections who shows little interest in you and is only interested in using your network for their own benefit? But most people will help others they are close with and with whom they have regular interactions.

Talent Community or Marketing Database

Whuffie can be built up in talent communities, so long as they are real “communities.” Members interact with each other, share experiences and knowledge, and have a sense of belonging. But that takes time and deliberate design to ensure that there are meaningful common elements, good reasons for participating, and facilitators to make the interactions happen. This all takes time and effort and employers that can’t do so end up feeling frustrated with social media. A lot of so called talent communities are nothing more than a database of prospective candidates. They can be described as communities only if you believe that the phone book represents a community.

I signed up for one such community and the next thing that happened was I started getting emails telling me about every job that company had open, from the an entry-level administrative role all the way to a director-level position. Really makes you feel like you’re part of something special.

Some companies have decided that the returns do not justify the effort required for a talent community to be successful. The strategy of a major cruise line is only to post stories and articles on social media sites and direct candidates to their own website. That can be automated by a content management system. Given the volume of hires the company makes and the wide diversity (in jobs, locations, and languages), a true social media strategy is not practical. What they’re doing is using social media as a channel for broadcasting ads. There’s nothing social about that. It doesn’t build Whuffie.

Recruiters need to interact with a talent community to earn whuffie, which takes time and effort. There’s no way to automate that, though it can be outsourced. Some employers have established or hired offshore teams to interact with talent communities and create whuffie, much like gamers in multi-player games buy advanced levels from “factories” in China and other countries. That has to be less satisfying than doing it yourself (much like makin’ whoopee) but either way, you have to get it before you can spend it. It’s not a one-way street which is what makes it difficult for recruiters to build a reliable, repeatable process for getting hires through social media.

The central message of The Whuffie Factor is that your social reputation is your capital. It takes time to build a reputation but do it well and you can achieve a lot.

This is similar to what many employers do when recruiting: rejecting candidates for reasons completely unrelated to any ability to do the job.

With social media it’s very easy to do so now. Over 80% of recruiters consider personal data posted online when evaluating a candidate and look up social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal web sites and blogs, and even sites like Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist. This seems hypocritical since we’re supposed to make hiring decisions using job-related information assessed as objectively as possible. But most personal information collected online doesn’t meet those criteria. Much of it is unverifiable, and there’s no reliable way to know how it will impact the candidate’s performance on the job.

Keeping it Professional

There are some aspects of any candidate’s personal life that should get them rejected from the hiring process — convictions for violent crime or clear demonstration of illegal behavior — but most personal behavior doesn’t fall into those categories. I recently read an account of a hospital that rejected a well-qualified physician candidate because of some apparently embarrassing pictures found on her Facebook page. The explanation was that they didn’t want patients finding those. I wonder if a lot of patients go looking up their doctor’s Facebook page, and if they do are they going to refuse treatment based on what they find? Did the hospital administration think they were going to get calls from patients saying, “Hey, I can’t accept this diagnosis. Have you seen what’s on her Facebook page?”

How much of a person’s personal life is truly relevant to the job? Obviously even a single instance of some behaviors is completely unacceptable, but until it’s established that candidates actually demonstrate those, it’s foolish to reject them based on some arbitrary moral standard. CBS justified Charlie’s firing citing the publicity around his “dangerously self-destructive behavior.” That behavior didn’t have any negative effect on his show’s ratings. Before rejecting a candidate, think if customers or others the candidate will come in contact with really care — like the example of the hospital above. If they don’t, then does it really make sense to reject a candidate based on personal information?

The simple fact is that it’s near impossible to link most personal behavior to job performance in an objective way. Any attempt to do so requires uncertain judgement applied inconsistently. A candidate that changed the privacy settings on their Facebook page could hide any examples of inappropriate behavior and get hired while one who didn’t do so may get excluded. If a candidate’s Facebook page suggests he likes drinking, then it doesn’t prove that he’s in the habit of showing up for work drunk. Until someone completes a study showing job performance scores have a strong correlation with Facebook pictures of drinking it’s foolish to assume they prove anything.

Some suggest poor writing and bad grammar in Facebook profiles and in blog entries can raise a red flag about communication skills. That may be true, but blog-writing tools and Facebook lack spelling and grammar checkers, and the posts are examples of casual writing. How many people would show the same limitations if Word lacked those features?

The Charlie Sheen Standard

Using personal information to evaluate candidates is getting to be the norm. In Maryland the state recently suspended a policy that asked job applicants to provide their Facebook login and password. What they expected to find was never clear, but lacking a coherent policy any employer should consider the following when evaluating personal information.

• Is it well established (by industrial psychology, behavioral science, or medical research) that people displaying a certain behavior in their personal life also repeat it in their professional lives?
• Can the behavior that’s objectionable be defined? That’s not as easy as it may seem; take drinking, as an example. Drinking what — beer, hard liquor, wine? How much? Over what amount of time? How many examples of the behavior have to be displayed before the candidate is rejected? One? Three? Ten?
• Can the behavior be measured through the medium being used? What would have to be mentioned in a post or picture to show that a person has been drinking? Is holding up a glass of colored liquid proof enough? This is why assessment tests are validated before being used.

Will customers or others who work with the candidate suffer any harm because of the personal behavior?

If the answers to the above questions aren’t “yes,” then candidates are being rejected based on personal prejudices and intangibles that have no link to job performance. Even if there were an objective way to measure inappropriate personal behavior, any “test” of the same may not be much use. Drug tests, considered highly objective, miss most drug users. About 8% of Americans are estimated to use illegal drugs, but a Federal Government drug testing program found only 153 employees testing positive out of 29,000 tested — about 0.005%. The Feds have a workforce most representative of the population, so it’s the test that’s failing. When something as precise as a drug test produces so many false negatives, just how likely is it that an evaluation of candidates based on personal information will be accurate?

I know several recruiters who rationalize their decisions by saying “I know it when I see it” or “I can always tell.” That’s right up there with the hiring manager that claims “I can judge a candidate by their handshake.” That kind of thinking has no place in a good recruiting process. Using the logic demonstrated by some in assessing people based on their personal lives this guy would be unqualified for the job he’s got.

Perhaps the most interesting are in energy, manufacturing, and robotics.

What it takes to get your jobs retweeted

Tweeting jobs is an increasingly popular approach to broadcasting jobs. Ideally the jobs are retweeted, increasing exponentially the exposure one would get from the initial tweet. Tweeting is a social networking tool, so this can be a great way to tap the power of social media. Get enough people to retweet your jobs and you can reach a huge audience of prospective candidates. Well, maybe. Buy enough lottery tickets and you’ll win the lottery too.

First, some statistics to put Twitter use in perspective. While its popularity continues to increase, only about 8% of adult Americans use Twitter, That’s still a large number, about 16 million people, but Twitter users tend to be clustered into a few major categories: 18-29 in age, African-American and Latinos, and Urbanites. So it’s not the most representative group when it comes to filling jobs. Research by Sysomos — a maker of social media analysis tools — shows that 71% of all tweets produce no reaction. Twenty-three percent produce a reply and only 6% are retweeted. The implication being that the majority fall on deaf years (or blind eyes?). So a lot of those jobs being tweeted are likely not being noticed.

Retweets: Getting Attention

In social media circles retweets are the holy grail. A retweet means that the retweeter has read the original tweet and considers it worth passing on, so the likelihood of it being read is higher. And if even a small proportion of those who follow a company or a recruiter will retweet the jobs they received, a much larger number of people would see the jobs. So what does it take? Having a large number of followers is no guarantee of retweets, but using certain words can make it more likely that a job will be retweeted. Social media researcher Dan Zarella has a list of 20 words that when included in a tweet increase the likelihood of it being retweeted. The list includes “you,” “please,” “retweet” (please rt), “great,” and “check out.” I was underwhelmed too by this revelation, but apparently it works.

Hashtags are another way to get tweets retweeted. Hashtags organize tweets into groups, so people can follow them based on category. As an example, if you sent out a tweet for a job in sales and add #salesjobs to the tweet, it will show up in the feed for #salesjobs and everyone reading that particular feed will see it. Visit hashtags.org to see what categories are popular.

The timing of tweets is also a factor in their being retweeted. Dan Zarella has also found that tweets made during the morning hours are more likely to be retweeted than tweets made during later times.

The Illusion of Followers

The term “followers” is an interesting choice. It conveys a whole lot more power than “friends” or the more clinical (but the most accurate) “connections.” From the first time I heard about Twitter I thought this was the answer to the prayers of narcissists and stalkers everywhere, and the illusion has been perpetuated. The idea that one has “followers” can do wonders for a person’s self-esteem, especially for those with low self esteem to start with. Most of us know someone who’s very proud of the number of people they have following them. But a person has to be completely delusional or really full of themselves to believe they have enough interesting things to say on a regular, or even occasional, basis that any of their “followers” actually want to read. Having a large number of followers does not equate to influence over them, i.e., they don’t necessarily read or pay attention to tweets. This much was confirmed in a research study called “The Million Follower Fallacy” that analyzed data from some all active Twitter accounts.

There’s a very low correlation between the number of followers and the number of retweets. Many of those so-called followers do so out of politeness than any great desire to hear from the person they follow. One easy way to increase the number of your followers is to start following others in large numbers, many of whom will return the favor. But they aren’t just sitting around waiting for tweets, and most updates will be missed.

Tweets are very likely to get retweeted among followers’ networks when they meet certain criteria. Josh Gordon at Social Media Today has found that the most retweeted items are short (13 words, and 69 characters), use humor, and are personally connected. That suggests that tweets are best sent by recruiters and employees. Sending a tweet under an employer’s name is not likely to have much impact. And they should include something more than just a link to the job. And ask (beg) to have it retweeted.

from Starpulse.com

Are you a good-looking man or woman? Depending on how many X chromosomes you have, this could be a good thing if you’re looking for a job. A new study shows that good-looking people are more employable. Well, men at any rate. Women are out of luck.

The study done in Europe and Israel shows that employers contact good-looking men in significantly higher numbers than they do women. More importantly, good-looking women appear to be at a disadvantage even compared to less-attractive women. Employers in the study contacted almost 20 percent of male candidates considered attractive (based on a picture attached to their resumes) compared to about 13 percent of the men with “plain” looks. For attractive women applying to a company, the call-back rate was about half that of their less attractive compatriots.

Of course in America nobody includes a picture with their resume, but that’s increasingly irrelevant since most recruiters’ inclination is to immediately surf over to a candidate’s Facebook page or Linkedin profile, which does include a picture.

Revenge of the Nerds

So why are attractive women being punished for their looks? Digging deeper, the researchers found that the vast majority of screeners were single women under 34. The researchers conclude that much of the discrimination is the result of jealousy. That suggests that if more screeners were male, the level of discrimination may be less. More than likely, the results would be skewed the other way.

This is a challenge for both candidates and employers. Attractive men and less-than-attractive women need to apply for half as many jobs as their opposites to get an interview. Just wait until someone at the EEOC gets hold of this and we’ll have a whole new set of laws and legislation to deal with. Of course, the definition of “attractive” is subjective and difficult to define, but that kind of thing has never stopped lawmakers from attempting to craft a solution if they think they can.

A more relevant problem for employers is that if a trait like physical appearance, unrelated to talent or capabilities, has such a big impact on who gets through the initial screen, then they are losing a lot of qualified candidates. It could be claimed that those who are eliminated early on based on their looks may be eliminated later anyway, but there’s no reason to believe that would be the case. Interviewers at later stages of the hiring process are usually not the same ones who are the initial screeners. Even if they are, then their biases may be counteracted by the information collected in the interview.

There’s no reason to believe that the results would be meaningfully different if the study was replicated in the U.S. So any recruiting team that employs largely women as screeners would be well advised to increase gender diversity. Otherwise don’t be surprised if the workplace seems to be getting stuffed with handsome men and plain-looking women.

There were a few products of note in an otherwise dull field.

The first is Jobvite.

I’ve known Jesper Schultz, the founder of Jobvite, for several years. He was way ahead of his time when he started the company. His original idea was to offer a simple way to tap social and professional connections to distribute and promote jobs. That has evolved into a full-fledged ATS with powerful sourcing capabilities tied to social media. The company has an excellent product and has a single-minded focus on improving sourcing capabilities. It’s easy to get off track here, adding bells and whistles that have little practical use or add any value, but Jobvite has resisted that temptation and the product in its current inception does an excellent job of keeping the focus where it matters for recruiters.

As an example, recruiters can specify which groups of employees to distribute particular job openings — say, the sales staff for sales-related openings. Targeting avoids sending job openings to employees too frequently and increases the probability of getting relevant referrals. The product also allows recruiters to search through their own connections on social networks to send jobs to narrowly defined groups. It even allows employees to control the frequency and number of referral requests they receive.

Overall, Jobvite is a great application that makes using social media very practical for recruiters. The value of this approach needs to be emphasized because there still exists a widespread fallacy among many employers and recruiters that social media is “free” and simple. neither of which is true, as I’ve recently written.

The other product of note is Leverage, which can be best described as a Facebook for businesses. Leverage essentially allows an organization to create a private, internal social network for employees, where they can share personal and professional interests, knowledge, and collaborate on projects and tasks. This isn’t exactly a recruiting tool but it has the potential to be one. Leverage has a unique way to visually see internal networks based on various criteria: location, function, department, etc. A recruiter can use this to gauge their own level of influence and where to focus their efforts in any particular search. The more forward-thinking recruiters can use it to learn where they need to build-out their networks.

Leverage is intended to improve collaboration between employees, help employers know more about the talent they have in their employees, and understand the informal networks and power centers that exist. The challenge for most employers is that, just like Facebook, adoption of such a platform is going to be uneven. A small group will be wildly passionate about it — the same kind of people who share everything from their children’s accomplishments in kindergarten to the cause of the rash on their (pick the body part you’ve read about). The majority will use it some, and a small group will not participate at all. For organizations that are overly political, not much may get shared at all. This is why Leverage may have more value as a recruiting tool than as a source for innovation and generating great new ideas.

Ten years ago such conferences were exciting places. There were new products, things was moving online, and there was a great deal of automation. I’m reminded of a scene from Apollo 13, where NASA can’t get the TV networks to give the mission much coverage. Going to the moon was not very interesting after the first time. The same is true here. Enthusiasm for the event seems contrived, and it shows. The conference does have awards for products. but unlike ERE where one has to demonstrate success or excellence to get an award, these are based on someone’s assessment of a product’s potential. So not too many people take these seriously. Sort of like the Nobel Peace Prize.

Publisher’s Note: The HR Technology Conference is one of the most influential events in our profession, so ERE.net has devoted significant coverage to it. John Zappe wrote several articles from the floor of the show, and you can read them here, here and here. John Hollon at our sister publication for HR professionals, TLNT.com, wrote a wrap-up of the event.

1. You shred the resume and delete it from your ATS
2. You make up a reason why she’s unqualified
3. You look up the classifieds in Soldier of Fortune magazine
4. You decide to interview her anyway

If you picked #4, you’d be in the minority.

In a recent survey by Microsoft 84 percent of U.S. recruiters think it is proper to consider personal data posted online when evaluating a candidate and do online research using search engines, social networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter, online-gaming sites, and even classifieds, and auction sites like Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc. What they expect to find in that last category is a mystery, but I guess you never know. Now whether all this “research” does anything to improve the quality of hires, or it’s just an excuse for voyeurism, is something we’ll likely never know. The survey doesn’t address results or even ask about the respondent’s perception of results.

Sauce for the Goose

If the survey numbers are true, then thousands of hiring decisions are being made based on information that may or may not be valid, from sources that may or may not be reliable, and using criteria that may or may not be relevant to hiring. What could go wrong? The Shirely Sherrod case that has been in the news is a perfect illustration of what can happen when an employment decision is made without understanding the context or the credibility of the source. And that involved dozens of people up to the level of the White House.

The survey mentions that concerns about lifestyle, inappropriate comments, and unsuitable photos and videos top the list of reasons that those surveyed give for rejecting a candidate. Well, since these criteria are so well defined with no possibility for ambiguity, it must be all right to use them. But recruiters also rejected applicants because of inappropriate comments by friends, family, and colleagues. So it’s acceptable to reject candidates based on gossip?

Relying on online information in a hiring decision can cut both ways. Already, services like Reputation Defender are offering to clean up people’s online reputations by bombarding the web with positive information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. What’s to stop candidates from creating largely fake online personas when they know that recruiters put so much weight on information they find online? Almost half of the recruiters in the Microsoft survey said that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to a great extent.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The danger for employers is that continuing to make hiring decisions based on data collected online will generate a legislative backlash. Several states –New York, California, and Colorado — already prohibit employers from taking any employment related actions based on legal off-duty conduct. It’s not a reach to see those provisions being extended to hiring decisions. And Congress may get in on the act. In times like these when jobs are scarce, an issue like this can garner plenty of bipartisan support. And that could be a disaster, since laws made in response to populist anger will likely make life difficult. For starters, they would impose very onerous reporting burdens on employers.

Some would argue that any such laws would be difficult to enforce, since a lot of this kind of research on candidates can be done anonymously. But that’s not quite true. Digital forensics is the fastest growing field in the legal profession, and the tools to discover where someone’s been online are getting very sophisticated.

The bigger issue: what’s the value being gained from all this online research? Few, if any, employers have specific policies and rules about how to interpret online information. Unlike information obtained from background checks, which is highly structured and obtained from very credible sources, virtually everything seen online is unstructured and from sources of unknown credibility. Ninety percent of respondents in the Microsoft survey claimed that they take steps to corroborate the authenticity of information they collect online. How exactly does one do that? If they see a picture of a candidate holding a glass of what appears to be beer do they track down the others in the picture and ask if the candidate is routinely drunk?

It appears that much of this activity is done because it’s possible, not because it results in better quality hires. It gives the appearance of having done a good job in evaluating a candidate when there’s no evidence that it makes any difference at all. There are examples of some employer that avoided making a genuinely bad hire because of something discovered online, but those stories don’t establish that aimless trolling for information improves the hiring process.

Interestingly among the survey respondents almost 90% of male recruiters check out candidates online, compared to only about 60% of female recruiters. So maybe it is about voyeurism and not hires. But recruiters are hard-working people, who often get little respect and appreciation. Who’s to deny them some fun?

“During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, ‘social’ media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.”

When disillusionment sets in on a large scale, this bubble will burst because “The promise of the Internet wasn’t merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships.”

I don’t know where he got that idea — given how things have turned out it’s obvious that the promise of the Internet since the beginning was to make adult entertainment accessible in the workplace.

But reasonable people can differ.

The Promised Land

It’s not that the value of social media is overstated, it’s that the investment required for getting value out of social media that is understated. This is what’s relevant to recruiting: social media can be a powerful tool for finding candidates, but a) it is just a tool, one of many, not some silver bullet solution, and b) it takes substantial effort to get results.

As recruiters, we need to connect with people, and networks are a great way to do it. It makes little difference for recruiting programs that the quality of relationships spawned by social networks is low. Most people already know that, and they aren’t about to delete their LinkedIn and Facebook accounts because all those connections haven’t fundamentally changed their lives and they’ve become disillusioned. People like to connect with others — the average Facebook user has 130 friends — but they don’t do much with those friends (the average user on Facebook spends just over 12 minutes per day on the site). That may change in the future, but we’re talking about the here and now. The fact remains that it’s physically impossible to have meaningful relationships with more than a few people: 7 to 10 at best. You still only have 24 hours in a day, and no technology can change that. The vast majority of so-called friends on any social network are just a collection of casual acquaintances.

This is where the bubble has developed: there is a lot of space between the hype and the reality of social networks. Despite all the activity on social networks, people are not as involved with social media as some would like to believe. Despite all the resources we have available to connect with others, where people spend most of their time is in front of a conventional TV. The amount of time spent watching TV exceeds that spent on the Internet by a factor of eight, and very little of that time goes to watching TV online.

The goal is to have a reliable, repeatable recruiting program that produces consistent results. Getting a hire or two on occasion doesn’t make something a reliable source for hires, since it’s impossible to know if an effort of X will produce Y hires. I read plenty of accounts of someone who got a few hires because they posted some jobs on a social network or someone read it on Twitter. That’s great, but for most recruiting managers, that’s not a solution they can rely on. This is the bubble; they’re being told things like “sourcing will become irrelevant once social networks start to engage,” but the reality isn’t quite that simple. It’s still a long ways to the Promised Land.

It Takes a Village

So what’s a recruiter to do? For starters, try getting employees to promote your jobs rather than using a company page to do it. Research shows that Facebook users are twice as likely to read items on profile pages than on company home pages. Users pay more attention to page updates in their News Feed Wall rather than ads. Building talent communities is another approach, but attracting the right candidates to a community is best done by soliciting the help others. Research also shows that people are much more likely to join a community if they have friends who are in the community who know each other. So again success requires involving multiple people to help source candidates. It’s all very doable, but it’s going to take effort.

Companies that have successful social media programs like Deluxe and Sodexho have made big investments in these efforts, and it has taken years for the programs to start paying off. Have no illusions that this is easy. Social media is about engagement, which takes time and effort. Another employer I know of started using social media because it originally thought it was free — but getting hires has required having five full-time recruiters dedicated to working with social networks. It doesn’t run ads, but no one calls it free anymore. If you haven’t got the time to do all that, then it’s best to just pay an SEO provider to raise the visibility of your jobs and run ads on Facebook. That’s an ad strategy, not a social media strategy, but you can claim that you’re using social media. Burst that bubble and you can get back to appreciating the promise of the Internet.

Some of the claims seem to suggest that Arizona is about to turn into a police state.

Better to Keep Your Mouth Shut and …

I would encourage anyone criticizing the law to read the text before launching into a critique. First, nothing in the text of the law gives law enforcement officials the right or power to stop, question, arrest, and detain any individual they suspect may be in the U.S. illegally. That can only happen if a person has been detained because they are suspected of a crime or a violation of the law, such as a traffic violation when identification is asked for. Even then it’s debatable that they will do so. Phoenix has among the lowest ratios of public-safety officers to residents (3.3 per 1,000. New York has 6.5) among major cities in America. The police likely have enough to do as it is. It’s doubtful that they’ll suddenly stop everything else they’re doing and start detaining anyone who looks Hispanic.

Many cities and groups are planning boycotts of Arizona. That tends to be more talk than action. Speeches about boycotts play well to the cameras, but the record shows that not much happens when the lenses are turned away. Despite all the populist anger at certain Middle Eastern countries and Venezuela, we continue to do business with them. And of course, we aren’t exactly going to stop trading with China despite the People’s Republic having such a stellar record on human rights. Business contracts are generally written for the long-term, and with supply chains extending around the world, attempting to disrupt them over some ill-conceived outrage is unlikely to be supported by most executives. Tourism boycotts may occur, but they are not likely to be widespread either. Centuries of systematic discrimination against native populations in Mexico and Canada have not prevented legions of Americans from vacationing in Cancun and Vancouver. If anything, the opposite may happen: if SB 1070 results in lower crime in Arizonan cities, they’re more likely to attract both tourists and business.

Hypocrites of the World Unite

Press coverage of this law has been rather disingenuous, especially given that this type of legislation is the norm in other countries. It would be utterly hypocritical of citizens of most other countries to claim any outrage over SB 1070. In France, Germany, and much of Western Europe, laws applying to immigrants carry even more stringent provisions. Japanese law requires that all foreigners must carry an alien registration card at all times and present it to the police without any reason when requested. Failure to do so results in a $2,000 fine. The French police have the right to stop and question anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, at any time, and not just in the context of another violation of the law. Discrimination against foreigners from certain countries is the norm in Europe. In Switzerland and Austria, being from an Eastern European or Middle Eastern country means an automatic premium for most types of insurance. Those practice have not resulted in boycotts of French wines, Japanese cars, or Swiss Army knives.

In short then, not much is likely to happen, beyond some people getting dyspepsia.

The Problem with Immigration (policy, that is)

Our immigration policy is a mess. Much of what we have today has its roots in conditions after the end of the second world war. The most visible problem has to do with who’s eligible to immigrate. It’s either a lottery, or primarily based on unifying families. Most other countries give preference to people with needed skills or specific talents. Ours barely touches on that. Eligibility for H1-B visas is equally applicable to hairstylists and software engineers. The number of visas is arbitrarily decided, with no basis in demand for skills. This makes no sense at all.

Much of the anger toward illegal immigrants is directed at migrant workers, primarily working in construction and agriculture. Admittedly there are employers seeking to exploit labor from across the border, but the evidence shows that such employers are a tiny minority. Studies going back decades show that much of the labor from Mexico and South America works in areas where there just are not enough domestic workers available. The argument that’s usually made is that if only employers would pay a high-enough wage, then Americans would be willing to take those jobs. That is not an accurate assessment of the situation. For one, margins in agriculture are extremely low, and most producers have no capacity to raise their prices to counter the effect of paying more wages. Forcing them to pay higher wages will only result in more agriculture being done overseas as is already happening. Second, even with 9.7% unemployment, those who are out of work are not looking for jobs working in fields. Third, even if there were higher wages available, is that what most people aspire to, mind-numbing manual labor?

The solutions to the problem have been available for a long time: a guest worker visa for agricultural workers, and a change in immigration policy to favor the more talented workers. But it doesn’t seem likely this will happen anytime soon.

SB 1070 reflects Arizonans’ frustration with the federal government’s lack of action on immigration. Regardless of who’s to blame, nothing has been done to address the problem. A state cannot pass laws on immigration reform on its own, but it can enforce what’s already there. This is all the more reason that the reaction to the law is odd, considering that some 70% of Arizonans support it. Since we live in a democracy, Arizona’s lawmakers are only responding to the will of the people — which is presumably what they were elected to do. I’m all for immigration reform, as I’ve written on many an occasion on ERE, but I would not attempt to substitute my judgment for that of about 5 million Arizonans.

This reminds me of an interview I heard some months ago, with someone in Fargo, preparing for flooding of the Red River.

The man was building a barrier with sandbags, though he admitted that in five out of six previous floods this solution had not prevented his house from being flooded. It may appear that our friend is missing a few fries from his happy meal, but the point isn’t to be insulting. Regardless of whether he’s a few pickles short of a Whopper, he was doing what he knew, having seen it work at least once.

The Ad Mentality

This is how many employers approach social media. A lot of social media programs are based on what has been done before. Recruiting is a largely transactional process, so the tendency is to keep doing things that are transactional. Which would be running an ad, or posting jobs on Facebook, and waiting for someone to apply. And why not, after all it’s worked in the past. But this does not tap the potential of social media. Advertising, whatever the medium, is a one-way street. It’s us shouting at them. Social media is a two-way street; it’s about having a conversation and creating relationships. And that is not natural for a recruiter. It’s time consuming and takes a lot of effort. Plus, you have to have something to say that the other party finds interesting enough to engage in the conversation.

Talent communities are supposed to be a good way to use social media. But the way many employers have implemented these shows is an Illustration of the ad mentality. I’ve joined a few talent communities and I regularly get solicitations for jobs that are not even remotely related to anything in my profile. I frequently get a list of jobs of all types the company has open. How this qualifies as being social is hard to understand.

It’s unrealistic for any employer to expect that their recruiters can engage in conversations with candidates they are trying to hire. What could they possibly have to say to the vast majority of candidates? To get the most from social media, a recruiter should be encouraging other employees to blog, network, and connect with other to promote their employer. Success can come from relying on the “net,” not so much by doing the “work.”

It’s the Network

Success in recruiting with social media means having something to contribute that invites others to enter into a relationship. Think of any engaging conversation you’ve had. How long would it have lasted if the other party kept talking about themselves? (A long time if you’re in a bar and trying to pick up the other party, but that’s the exception).

This is where it gets difficult. There are not a lot of interesting conversations a recruiter can have with people with a different skill set. What’s needed is to use their organization’s network — get the right employees to start and keep up those conversations. Organizations that think that this encourages time-wasting have their heads in the sand because it isn’t like these conversations aren’t already happening. Might as well use them to your own benefit. They can’t be controlled — only channeled. The genie is already out of the bottle and it’s not going back in.

Prospective candidates cannot become friends with a company, but they can benefit from relationships with employees. That is, they can be engaged, and possibly hired at some point. That can be a long-term process. The best practice in this regard is setting up talent communities that consist of networks of employees and prospects, sharing (preferably professional) interests. Over time, relationships between employees and prospects can allow a company to develop relationships and determine if there’s a match between prospective candidates and open jobs. It also allows candidates to know more about the employer than they would expect to learn in the typical interview process.

There’s a line of thinking that suggests that this approach will lead to better hires with less likelihood of turnover because candidates have a better appreciation of what they are getting into. That sounds logical, but at this time it’s completely speculative: there’s no proof of that, and there won’t be for years. A very long engagement doesn’t necessarily make for a successful marriage.

The key to success is to use the network. It isn’t so much about social media as it’s about social networks. The media is just a means to an end, but using it like a platform for ads is not how to benefit from it. Like our friend in Fargo, it may work on a few occasions, but much of the effort may be just a waste of time.

After two years of decline, any good news will do, but let’s not get carried away. 162,000 new jobs given that 15 million Americans remain unemployed is barely a drop in the bucket. About a third — 48,000 — of those jobs are result of the census. They’ll go away in a few months. 150,000 new jobs are needed per month just to keep up with growth in the population. Since December 2007, the economy has shed 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million, for a total of more than 11 million jobs that are missing. So even with a recovery that was producing 300,000 jobs per month it will be five years before we’re back to where we were before the start of the recession.

How is that supposed to happen?

The engine of growth is consumer spending, and that’s sputtering for a lack of fuel. Consumers are focused on reducing debt, not spending. Spending has increased a little, but given how far it fell it could only get better, if for no other reason than that it could hardly get any worse. The consensus view among economists is that as much as a third of the jobs lost are never coming back, and not because they have been outsourced. Some have been, but that trend started long before the recession. A big reason is increases in productivity — up a record 7% in the last year alone.

Corporate profits and cash on hand are up by huge amounts, but that’s not making its way to spending. Wages have stagnated and even dropped for those employed, and new hires are often at lower pay and benefits than before. There’s not much point being judgmental about this. It’s simple supply and demand. But the fact remains that this dampens any recovery. The only group that has bucked the trend is federal employees, whose pay is up almost 30% over the last 10 years, compared to about 19% for those in private industry.

This is a F***ing Big Deal

Our esteemed vice-president phrased it perfectly, but he was talking about the wrong thing. America’s national debt now equals the entire GDP: about $13 trillion. The cost of the healthcare bill and expected deficits will add another $6 trillion to that over the next 10 years. At some point lenders will demand higher interest rates. One of the biggest lenders is China. As that economy becomes consumer-oriented, they are more likely to spend their money domestically than invest it abroad. Regardless, the current level of borrowing cannot continue. Higher taxes are inevitable. A lot of money will be diverted away from productive activities.

This may not be as much of a problem if the economy takes off, but the best we can expect is a sluggish recovery. The ideas that create lots of new jobs occur when entrepreneurs have lots of freedom to do what they want, take risks, and come up with innovations. Most fail, but some succeed spectacularly. It is very much a numbers game: fail quickly, fail often. But current government policies are hardly supportive of this. The goal seems to be to favor certain industries (green being the favorite color) and promoting those at the expense of others. There are only so many jobs for organic farmers, fuel-cell engineers, and wind-turbine mechanics.

Legislation like the proposed financial overhaul, however well intentioned, will only add to the burden on businesses, without doing anything productive, or in any way guaranteeing that the recent debacle won’t be repeated. Where we’re heading is a combination of the European and Japanese models. In Europe the government keeps you safe from all the nasty things in the big bad world, and in return you only have to put with 10% unemployment, stagnant growth, and high taxes. In Japan the Ministry of Trade sets industrial policy, basically picking winners and losers. That doesn’t always work but they’ll eventually figure it out; so what if it results in 20 years of stagnation?

The continuing extensions of jobless benefits is another symptom of this. Currently it’s at 99 weeks, or almost two years. People need help. No question about that. But instead of shoveling money at them it would be better to give employers incentives to create jobs.

There’s a reason why most patents in the world are filed in America. But we can’t have it both ways: a roaring economy and perfect control over all that could go wrong.

Where the Jobs Are

Recruiters looking for work should look to the government. The Feds are going to need lots of recruiters. The Partnership for Public Service estimates that the Feds will add about 600,000 new jobs in the next four years. You can get the details here. The IRS alone will add 16,000 new agents to enforce the requirements of the healthcare bill.

It would be better if those jobs were in the private sector, for the simple reason that government jobs don’t create wealth (in the wider economy, that is). In the private sector, the most reliable source of jobs will be energy. Recent moves to expand drilling for oil and encourage the development of nuclear power will create tens of thousands of jobs. And that makes some people mad, but that’s an added bonus.The level of hiring anywhere else is hard to predict unless we all start eating more organic food.

If that’s what hospitals are like in Canada I’ll be certain not to get ill if I’m north of the border, but apparently as a recruiting tool, it worked pretty well. The video has been viewed more than 60,000 times since its online release in mid-September. And the hospital received some 2,600 resumes within the first few weeks after its release, which equalled the number it received in the previous six months. It also managed to make 200 hires.

Dancing seems to be a popular theme when it comes to recruiting. Here’s a recruiting video from the Japanese Navy that features a group of dancing sailors. I don’t know how successful that one has been in recruiting sailors, but it makes me wonder if the Japanese Navy could win a skirmish with, say, the Canadian Navy.

Unusual recruiting practices aren’t limited to other countries. The University of Tennessee has some interesting ideas when it comes to recruiting for its football program. The University has been using recruiting hostesses, who often travel far to attend high-school football games and to “influence” players the University is interested in. The approach seems to have worked well since Tennessee has managed to recruit several top players. One recruit summed it up: “You don’t want to go to a college where they ain’t pretty.” However, the NCAA is investigating the practice.

I’m surprised the University’s diversity officer hasn’t insisted that they have recruiting hosts as well; after all, why make potentially discriminatory assumptions about the candidates. That may well have happened had the Volunteers’ head coach, Lane Kiffin, stayed with the program since he liked to motivate his new recruits by having his coaching staff rip off their shirts and do a chant, in what he described as his version of “topless recruitment.”

It’s too bad that Lane Kiffin won’t be recognized for his recruiting prowess. Since he quit Tennessee for USC after just one year, the city of Knoxville is planning to name a sewage treatment plant for him.

The parallels between that movie and the current jobs crisis are getting to be uncomfortably close. We may be heading for own version of the big W — a double-dip recession. That is, a brief recovery followed by another downturn.

The reasons are simple. Much of the current growth is fueled by government spending — which will dry up at some point. Unless the power behind the expansion switches to the private sector the economy cannot continue to grow. And that is far from certain.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 8.6 million jobs have been lost since the recession began, and while layoffs are slowing, there’s no sign that hiring is growing at anything close to the levels needed to make up for the loss. About 1.3 million people enter the workforce each year, so that many more jobs need to be created annually — in addition to the ones lost.

History in the Making

We have not seen anything like this before. In past recessions the speed of the recovery equaled or exceeded the speed of the downturn. Based on past experience the economy should have been in overdrive by now, with unemployment in full retreat. Following the dot-com bust in 2001, the number of jobs lost had been made up in about two years. This time we’re seeing a sluggish recovery and no jobs growth.

The last time unemployment hit 10.2% was in 1981. Back then the government’s response was aggressive tax cutting and deregulation. This resulted in employment reaching its previous peak within two years. This time the size of employment decline has been nearly twice as large as in 1981 (5.3% vs. 3%) and the policy response so far has been the opposite — increased taxes and regulation.

We’re in a spiral that’s getting hard to break out from. The simple fact is that much of the growth in jobs has to be driven by consumption, most of which is done by consumers. That cannot happen unless people have money to spend, and when people are not employed they don’t spend much money. Whatever benefits the stimulus packages have had, they cannot be the solution. And all the programs that have been the focus of the administration and Congress for the last year (cap and trade, healthcare) require spending money that must be borrowed and will eventually have to be paid back, i.e., taxes will have to rise, further reducing the money available to consumers for spending.

The Secret of Happiness

The secret of happiness is to lower your expectations to the point where they’re already met. That’s going to have to be the mantra for a long time. With so many unemployed workers employers have every incentive to underpay qualified workers. And with credit scarce and people increasingly focused on reducing their debt, there’s little chance that spending will recover. We may be in for European-style unemployment where 10% is the norm.

Recruiters looking for opportunities should look to service industries – retail, healthcare, government, and education. About half the jobs lost were in manufacturing, construction, and finance, and most are not coming back ever. But healthcare and education are growing. Geographically, opportunities will be the most in the states with the lowest tax burdens and most business-friendly, i.e., least regulated, environments: Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world starts out with the person who had the money driving off a cliff, after which everyone else comes up with wacky ideas to get it. They find the big W but end up without the money and badly hurt. I just hope we don’t see a documentary with the same title.