Let’s start with retention. Take the percentage of surveyed employers (26%) who now say they are “significantly more concerned” about retention of key employees than they were before the economic crisis hit and the percentage (39%) who are “slightly more concerned” — add them together, and you find that almost two-thirds are more concerned about top-talent retention than before.

On to salaries, benefits, hours, layoffs, and hours.

Salaries: Now, 54% of the companies that have made salary freezes are planning to restore them over the next six months, according to the Watson Wyatt survey of 201 large U.S. employers. That’s a big-time improvement. In August, 33 percent said they were going to unfreeze salaries. In June, 17 percent said they would.

Meanwhile, almost half of companies plan to reverse hiring freezes in the next six months.

Benefits: According to the survey, “of those reversing reductions to 401(k) matches, 70% will restore the match to its previous level.” Many of those reversals are planned for some time over the next year. On the other hand, the benefits news for employees is bad when it comes to healthcare. Watson Wyatt says that of the companies that have increased employees’ contributions to healthcare premiums, two out of three say those increases are here to stay.

Layoffs: More than one in five companies think they’re going to do layoffs during the rest of 2009 and 2010. At least that’s better than in April, when almost 50 percent said they were planning layoffs.

Worker hours: More than 80 percent of employers that instituted a reduced workweek expect to reinstate full weeks in the next 12 months. Most of those plan to bring back the hours over the next six months.

Troxell says this comfort stems from the “frightening” belief among senior management that turnover will stay low.

I caught up with her on the phone to go over a few of those questions. Mary Kay Mauren, senior attorney advisor, was also on the call.

Peter Zollman, for example, wrote in his informative Classified Intelligence Report that he understood from Miaskoff’s presentation that:

If you find a job-seeker’s blog that shows him to be a racist, you cannot consider that information as you consider him for the position.

Zollman, I told Miaskoff, must have misunderstood. I asked her: “Since racists aren’t a protected class, you’re plenty able to reject them just for being racists, aren’t you?”

She agreed.

Video OK but Slippery

I’ve also been talking both on the phone and via email with Joyce Lain Kennedy, the careers columnist. Following the Miaskoff talk, Kennedy wanted to know if the EEOC expects “more official EEOC discrimination complaints in the future that are based on the growth of visual media showing ‘old, fat, ugly’ in the initial stages of the recruitment process?”

“Not necessarily at all,” says Miaskoff. “We see nothing to indicate that there will be a spike in complaints … (but) it also strikes us — a personal observation on my part — the video nature of it, the fact that you can sort of watch someone when you don’t have the social controls face-to-face where you have to keep your opinions to yourself, is sort of a slippery slope for people doing screening.”

In other words, she says, face to face, you’re more likely to keep your reactions and opinions (verbal or non-verbal) to yourself out of politeness or other social norms. With a video, Miaskoff says it’s a lot like watching TV, where you feel more detached.

Again, she says, the EEOC is not “battening down the hatches” for an increase in complaints about video resumes. But “if video resumes are part of the electronic trail in a case, we’ll follow it. It’s part of the record.”

Kennedy is concerned that bias will creep into companies that lack the budgets and staff to add in the checks and balances necessary to prevent discrimination that occurs after seeing a video. She gives the example of Stephen Hawking. What would happen if he had been screened via video?

Miaskoff says two things. One, there “needn’t be the Cadillac of controls.” Just some sort of policy or practice in place for personnel procedures, whether its hiring, promotion, demotion, and so on.

“You’re certainly better off if you have a policy and you give it to people and you train people and make sure they read it (and sign indicating they have), and repeat that process a few times a year — you’re certainly in a better place than if you don’t.”

The second thing Miaskoff says about video resumes is that it’s not like having a big staff and budget with HR pros and attorneys has ended discrimination anyhow. “People are not infallible,” she says.

Blogs, Assessments

My coworker Elaine Rigoli says: “One question that was posed to me after her presentation focused more on legal issues surrounding existing staff (not those you want to hire off the street). For example, what to do when you discover that an otherwise great employee has a blog of some type that bashes the company/product/colleagues. Probation? Fire? Allow it?”

“That’s not an EEO issue,” Miaskoff says. “Unless the employer (for example) only discriminates against women who have nasty blogs about the employer, and doesn’t discriminate against men.”

John Zappe asks how the New Haven firefighters decision affected the determination of when something had an adverse impact on a protected class that rises to the level of a possible Title VII violation. What advice is the EEOC now offering to employers about determining adverse impact?

“We obviously have to comply with the Supreme Court,” Miaskoff says. “That’s the bottom line.”

I got the sense from that answer, and from Miaskoff’s tone, that the ruling made life more confusing for the EEOC.

Miaskoff says employers “need to go through the validation process for all of their tests. They need to do it carefully. They need to have their documents in place (showing) that they’ve done it. Once they move forward if a test is validated which it means it’s predictive of success in a particular job they’re hiring for, even if it has a disparate impact on minorities, it will be legal. People assume that if it has a disparate impact it will be illegal.”

If the test has a negative impact on minorities, she says, “the employer is in the spotlight and has to prove it’s truly predictive of success. Qualifications trump race.”

She says the general wisdom as she understands it, from talking to I/O psychologists, is that “written tests almost always have an impact on minorities, so you have to be careful. You have to make sure you’re using the least discriminatory alternative.” Some really big corporations, she says, are moving away from written tests and toward more functional tests.

Here’s the video of Miaskoff speaking at the ERE conference last month in Hollywood, Florida.

Below, Toole talks about these job-market trends, and the upcoming need for a lot of recruiters who have left the profession to come on back.

• Does your top HR leader report to the CEO?

• Are HR reports and metrics reviewed and analyzed? Do they drive the company’s talent strategy?

• Do you have a compensation philosophy? Was it driven internally?

• Is the top HR leader involved in decision-making for C-level searches?

Carroll was speaking at ERE’s Fall conference today. She also spoke at ERE’s Spring conference (those Spring slides are online, by the way. And let me know if you want her slides from today). She also has a good article about succession planning, full of handy tools to tear out, coming up in the November Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

Here are some of the characteristics that Carroll says are associated with a human resources department that is healthy, influential, and if we can use an overused word, strategic.

• The human resources professionals and particularly the department head identifies solutions, not just problems.
• They understand and helps drive business goals and financial objectives.
• They’re a mentor to senior leaders.
• They don’t just implement changes, but create them.
• The department head is an effective, strong, determined leader.

Here’s the data comparing this year and last.

Compensation Data For Executive Hires
(2008-2009)

• Amazon is live with a new talent acquisition system, courtesy of iCIMS.
• Cytiva, whose product is SonicRecruit, says its third quarter will be the best of the year, and says it is seeing a “definite loosening of budgets.”
• JobTarget has bought Career Liaison, a company that’ll help it keep better track of source of hire, such as whether applicants arriving via Craiglist are less likely to complete an online job application. Word has it another acquisition by JobTarget may be coming.
• McLeod Health saw an uptick in applicants, according to the folks at SilkRoad, after it added a video to its careers site touting the fact that it helps employees with financial education.

(Bear with us as we work out the kinks with this new technology; the audio starts off a little rocky but should improve — at least a little bit — after a minute or so.)

It’s an innovative program which kills two Nestle birds with one stone: using social media (online user-generated videos) to market candy, and providing job experience that potential employees may not get elsewhere.

Nestle’s Daniel Jhung, who manages the Butterfinger brand, launched the program in June after he had been hearing and reading about how cynical young people were about jobs and employment — Gen Y’s feeling that the job market was rotten, and that many big-corporation jobs were pretty dreary anyhow. Plus, Jhung figured Nestle could stand to learn a thing or two about social media from the Gen Y-ers.

He did a pretty wide sweep for candidates. It included the HotJobs job board (Nestle and Yahoo are tight); colleges; casting-call agencies in New York and LA; film schools; the Improv chain of comedy clubs, and more. After getting about 450 applicants in three or four days, that was enough to shut down the search.

Nestle narrowed down the field to a top-10 list in each city, and had each produce a video. From there, it interviewed two per city, and made its final selection.

A.J. Mayers is a FUNtern in Los Angeles. He heard on the radio that Nestle was having an in-person event to talk about the opportunity. He couldn’t make that, but did follow-up when he saw a posting for the internship on Craigslist, which pointed to HotJobs.

The University of Texas-Austin grad got the internship right before he got brought on at MTV. Because the Butterfinger gig is flexible, and can be done during off hours, from home, or at the beach (where he has passed out candy bars), he opted to take both the internship and the MTV job. There’d be no need to commute from his West Hollywood home to Santa Monica for MTV and then back to Nestle’s building, which could’ve been hellacious. Plus, Mayers was looking for experience in the entertainment industry and wants to be a TV producer, and for Nestle, he gets to make videos as part of an online user-generated video contest. The contest is part of Nestle’s re-introduction of its “Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my Butterfinger” tagline.

Mayers, whose Butterfinger stint ends at the end of August, is making a last video that will be a “very fun, dancing, High School Musical-esque production,” he says, “with the Butterfinger man dancing around. It’s funny, silly. It’s my way to go out with a bang.”

Other FUNterns are in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York. They’re doing different kinds of work revolving around promoting the candy bar and the video contest. The Chicago FUNtern is headed to BYU when the internship is over; the New York intern, who is also working for a wireless company, is also headed back to school. The Atlanta intern is doing the internship as part of some time off she’s taking to explore freelance projects.

Jhung didn’t say who might at some point be offered jobs from the group, but did mention that Nestle is considering one or two of them, pending among other things, the remaining videos they make. My guess is that AJ is one of them (if so, it’ll be interesting to see whether he picks MTV or Nestle; he mentioned to me that MTV is part of his TV-industry career path, and doesn’t sound eager to leave). Anyhow, below is one of his videos. Perhaps I should warn you that I’d give it a PG-13 rating.

Adidas will be going live at the end of August with a corporate careers site it’s convinced will be an “industry disruptor.”

It took a year and a half for adidas to put its new site together, with help from Carat (which is now Freestyle Interactive). Steve Fogarty, adidas North America Recruiting Captain, was the project leader. Other major stakeholders included adidas Group Global Head of Recruiting Steve Bonomo; Reebok Recruiting Manager Tara Gallone; and TaylorMade Recruiting Manager Kate Hinshaw.

Fogarty, who with Bonomo is speaking at ERE’s conference coming up in Florida, is underwhelmed by what he sees in corporate careers sites. (He does like, however, the U.S. Army’s recruiting work — “they put genuises behind it, Fogarty says” –  helped by a huge budget and support from McCann Erickson. He’s also fond of Microsoft’s Hey Genius campaign, and what Cirque does with its high-profile entertainment jobs.)

Anyhow, Fogarty found that most companies either brand themselves well, but make it hard to find what you want on their career sites, or they do the flip side of that: offer a truckload of information but the brand is lost.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, as part of an in-depth article on branding, Fogarty said that the best-marketed products don’t let the customer forget the brand:

Absolut Vodka is one of the best examples of this. The Absolut bottle has a distinct shape. Every single ad over emphasizes this shape by creatively integrating the ad into the shape of the bottle. When you walk into a liquor store, whether you are looking for Vodka or not, your eyes always go to the Absolut shelf …

Let your creativity run wild. How can you develop advertising and marketing campaigns that burn your brand positioning into the minds of your candidates?

On top of that, the sites, he finds, are rarely genuine: usually, they’re loaded up not with actual employees speaking candidly, but with stock photos, carefully calculated to check off the right diversity boxes.

The adidas recruiting department got the company’s marketing department to let it borrow, so to speak, some of the star athletes who are adidas sponsors. “Our employment brand,” adidas recruiters told adidas marketers, “is as important as our consumer brand. You give us an athlete and we’re going to shape what they do. We’re going to script what they do.” In other words, canned, generic messages from athletes that didn’t relate to employment wouldn’t be pigeonholed into a recruiting site.

Adidas doesn’t want candidates to think of athletes as the demigods they’re often portrayed as in the media. At this company, a superstar is someone you might actually meet through your job. Says Fogarty: “We take athletes off their pedestal so they become more like you and I.”

A trio of these adidas sponsors will be featured prominently for candidates who land on the new site. There’s Candace Parker, of the Los Angeles Sparks’ WNBA team, Ben Watson, from the New England Patriots, who is associated with Reebok, and golfer Natalie Gulbis, pitching the TaylorMade brand. Current employees, talking about their jobs, are also featured prominently.

Right now (with the old site), adidas has one group website representing all brands. Fogarty says, of the new site, that “Instead of saying the group supersedes the brand, the group is symbiotic and made up of the brands.” So if you want to work for TaylorMade, you’re immersed in a golf-careers site. The parent company adidas group, Fogarty says, “should be thought of as the collection of brands.”

Fogarty believes the site will work because it won’t fall into the trap so many career sites do. Companies have been playing up their “best company to work for” and “employees are our greatest asset” catchphrases that aren’t really differentiators. They clutter up their career sites with confusing navigation, boring corporate-speak, the stock photos we mentioned earlier, and unnecessary multimedia.

Focus group participants, in fact, told adidas they didn’t want tons of cluttered information thrown out them right away when they land on the site. So the site, Fogarty says, will “serve up information as it becomes relevant. Only when it’s narrowed down to the thing you are most interested in will it give you the majority of information on that particular area. Most candidates don’t care about 50 bells and whistles. They want it to be easy. I really don’t give a &*()& how my refrigerator works. I just want my food to be cold. The technology shouldn’t be apparent on the site. It just should work.”

“Companies run together for me,” Fogarty says. “Even the best of the best out there aren’t doing it well. Google does great at marketing tactics. I’ll give them all the credit in the world for that,” he says, referring to such things as clever recruiting billboards. But Google, Fogarty says, largely failed to use its real differentiators, such as employees’ ability to spend 20% of their time on experimental projects.

Adidas’ version of the famous Google 20% rule — in other words, adidas’ employee value proposition — is a focus on sports and in particular on athletes, as people you can get to know and not merely worship, and how that is part of the adidas employment experience. If a job candidate leaves the site feeling like they could, if hired, someday get to shoot a hoop or two with Candace Parker, adidas will have succeeded.

We’ve said before that companies often redo their career sites, and leave the job descriptions boring. Fogarty wants to avoid that. It has created what it calls a “brand book” for recruiting leaders in every country. It’s basically a presentation showing, among other brand examples, samples of what the company wants to see in a job description. “We will hold the recruiters accountable for writing good job descriptions,” Fogarty says. “Right now that accountability is a little loose,” he says, with so much work being done on getting the new site up, among other things. “It’s a huge focus for us,” Fogarty says of job descriptions. But, he says, a good job description doesn’t make up for a bad job. “Is the job itself crappy?” he asks. “I’d rather have the job right than a perfect job description.”

Indeed, Fogarty wrote in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership:

Our hope is that a top candidate who may have browsed the site and then left without action in the past is compelled and inspired now to apply. No matter how great your brand positioning is, your candidates won’t come back if your jobs suck. This is where you need to work up front to ensure your organization’s jobs are scoped correctly and you are writing compelling job descriptions.

Adidas is still working on the site and the way it coordinates with its back-end applicant tracking system from Jobpartners. Originally scheduled to go live in the Spring of 2009, it should be ready later this month.

The list of companies offering resume writing, enhancement, and tracking continues to grow faster than you can say LinkedIn, with new vendors entering the market this summer.

You may have already heard of some of the resume managers, like ResumeBear. The Bear’ll follow your resume and tell you who’s opening it, forwarding it, and printing it. New features are on the way. Or you may have come across the Resume Donkey. The Donkey’ll rewrite your resume, using professional writers.

Let’s not forget VisualCV. Recruiting-industry junkies might recognize this guy’s resume using the VisualCV tool.

Likely, you’ve heard of Zapoint, which will “take a resume and transform it.”

And a friend of mine (who has to toil in the uncomfortable environs of Laguna Beach) will be launching a “free, online professional resume builder.” Jeff says his new tool will allow employees to create or redo their resumes the way employers want ‘em.

Those are just a few. You’ve got your Pongos and your Emurses; you’ve got your Resume Creator, Resume Maker, Resumizer, and resume everything else, some of which seem a little blah compared to all the new multimedia sites out there like VisualCV.

Now, at least three new players, some you may not know about, are joining the field:

• Verbal Summary. Recruiters can use it either to present a candidate to a hiring manager, or to describe a job to candidates. The important part is the audio; see its demos. What Verbal Summary’s doing that’s a little different is focusing on third-party recruiters (the founder was amazed to see how little money is spent by agencies to differentiate their candidates compared to how much is spent on sourcing, social media, tracking applicants, and branding). Verbal Summary is $50 a month, $500 a year paid in full.
• FacesForce, in beta, obviously excluded the word resume and its many variations, deviations, and permutations, from its name; the company hopes to be more than just for job-seekers. FacesForce wants to stay with people throughout their careers, such as if people want to record a video to pitch new business. Pricing, it says, is simple.
• Rezbuzz. This offshoot of Corp Shorts offers a long list of features, but in a nutshell, candidates pay $495 to have a resume made, and housed for a year. For the time being, at least, companies access the resumes for free. It sees consistency as its advantage: one community of quality professional resumes, not a hodge-podge of do-it-yourself bios. The CEO is executive search veteran Mark Sadovnick, who’s enjoying the good PR Rezbuzz is getting.

The careers columnist Joyce Lain Kennedy, author of Resumes For Dummies, says that when it comes to all these new fancy resume variations, she’s “up for anything new and improved that connects people with jobs.”

But, she warns, “the new wave of infinite Internet spotlighting can have unintended consequences.”

For one, Kennedy says, the multimedia features “revive with a heavy dose of steroids the classic photo-on-resume argument — legal exposure to charges of bias against protected classes.”

Kennedy also says the “wild card for the recruiting industry is what will happen when the federal government takes an updated look at discrimination and the ‘Internet Walking, Talking Applicant.’”

One of Kennedy’s favorite resume writers is Kathryn Troutman. Troutman is the CEO of The Resume Place, among the oldest resume services in the U.S. still operated by the original owner. Her firm’s sales doubled this year over last.

Troutman explains the multimedia-resume startup boom this way.

“Entrepreneurs recognize that the vast majority of potential customers have little idea of how to go about living their job hunts in public — adding videos, video clips, audio bites, and even RSS feeds to flesh out their digital beings. Resume providers are counting on a lack of technical skills, especially in adults of earlier generations, to boost demand for their wares. That’s probably why anyone who understands technology and writes well, but who lacks deep pockets for heavy investment in other industries, decides to start a resume-writing service on the cheap and jumps in. This inclination is especially true if the entrepreneur has a background in HR, recruiting, or some other claim to career management fame.”

Troutman says that if history repeats itself, the industry will shrink in a few years when the job market revives. “By then,” she says, “job seekers will have become more adept at preparing their own digital presentations.”

The percentages below indicate how many people gave the item a 4, meaning “very important.”

The 601 full- or part-time employees were randomly selected from the U.S. telephone population.

Not any more. Gore will be telling scientists, engineers, and other prospective employees its story by launching a new global branding campaign from Arizona to China with a modest little theme: Join Gore & Change Your Life.

Barbara Pizzala is one of Gore’s global leaders in recruiting. Well, sort of: Gore does without official titles, direct reports, or indirect reports. She’s one of two co-champions of the project; the other represents the company’s corporate communications team. Pizzala says work started on the campaign about three years ago in Europe. It was put on hold, and then work began anew about a year ago. The ad agency TBWA, in Hamburg, has been involved.

The hub is a website, which spells out such things as the company’s fundamental beliefs and what it’s like to work there (if you need more structure, try the Gap).

As with most other corporate career sites, if you make it all the way through the Taleo system to the job descriptions, you may find them a little boring (something I said a year ago about Cellular South.) Says Pizzala: “Job descriptions will have a more brand-reflective look to them. This is something we are still working on. Each and every posting will be more brand-reflective than today.”

A second website, modified for European locations and using German and British English, will launch in Europe in about four weeks. A third site, in Chinese and English, will launch in Asia about four weeks after that.

Pizzala says Gore will drive site traffic using 1) big boards like Monster and CareerBuilder, and to a lesser extent, niche boards for the medical device field; 2) a minimal amount of print newspaper ads in Arizona, Delaware, and Maryland (and significantly more print ads in Europe); 3) campus recruiting and career fairs (it has bought new booths); and 4) social media, which hasn’t really begun yet.

Gore has brought on Jobs2Web to help with social media. “They’re educating us, Todd,” Pizzala says. “This is new for us.”

Senior Leaders Got It

Gore has never had a global employment brand.

“It is a first ever,” Pizzala says. “Historically, Gore does not go out and boast much about who we are. It’s a part of our culture — humbleness, humility. We expect our products will speak for themselves.”

But, senior leaders knew that had to change. They realized that the company wasn’t visible enough in some of its markets — in the Asian medical-device field, for example.

“If there’s one thing that really worried us,” Pizzala says, “It’s whether we were going to be able to hire enough of the right people. It was a pretty widely held belief among our senior leaders that talent would be one of our biggest constraints for growth.”

Gore has had little to no decline in its medical-division hiring, Pizzala says. While it has used the slow economy to develop and move people internally, there are some things you can’t train overnight — like when you’re trying to hire a scientist with experiencing dealing with the FDA. So, she says, “We’re finally telling our story.”

Branding junkies can learn more about the topic by checking out your April 2009 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership; seeing Steve Fogarty’s presentation coming up September 10th; or by doing a search.

We’ve got the Fall conference in Florida well stocked with social recruiting sessions, if you missed the event we just had. Marvin Smith of Microsoft will be presenting; there’ll be a couple of legal-related sessions about recruiting using Facebook and other sites; Knowledge Infusion is talking about putting together a social-media strategy; and we’ll be adding another social media session in the coming days. Shoot me an email if there’s specific information on the topic you’d like. In the meantime, a few of the videos are below.

A Conversation with LinkedIn Co-Founder & CEO Reid Hoffman

Ubiquity & Authenticity in Social Media with Laurie Ruettimann (Audio Only)

Awesomest Job Search Ever! with Sacha Chua

LinkedIn Networking with Shally Steckerl

Online Employer Reputation & Social Recruiting with Shannon Seery Gude

Social Recruiting Summit Wrap-up