American Legion

Corporate Gray

Corporate sponsorships of the Army Reserve

GI Jobs

Helmets to Hardhats

Hire a Hero

Hire Vets First - arm of the U.S. Dept. of Labor

Marines for Life

Military Chefs

Military stars

MOA and ROA career fairs

NCOA career fairs

Operation war fighter

Recruit Army

Recruit Military

Transition offices

VetCentral

Working with ESGR and its Reserve Unit Listings

Wounded warriors

5-star employer recognition

Tell that to nGenera. It has hired 63 people through its employee and recruiter social networks, which accounts for 70% of its 91 hires since last December. For those 63 people, that means no job boards. No third-party recruiters.

nGenera started in March 2007, and acquired six companies in one year. The company’s products (while hard to understand from its website) include call-center software, incentive compensation software, simulation software, and more.

Katie Carty Tierney (pictured) manages the recruiting function for the Austin, Texas, company, which has just under 300 employees, most virtual. “Our recruiters were relying heavily on job boards in the past, and we wanted them to look beyond that,” she says. “They weren’t necessarily getting the right candidates. They weren’t necessarily getting the right matches. There was a lot of turnover. That’s not the way to hire people.”

“How are you going to mine the network you already have?” Tierney asks. “Everyone’s got a network. Everyone in the world has someone they know. They’re not formal networks. They’re loose networks.”

nGenera’s plan wasn’t as simple as “let’s go put an ad on social-networking sites instead of Monster” (in fact, it wasn’t even very successful posting on Facebook Marketplace). It was more about building a culture where recruiters, and more importantly, all employees, spend their work time on social media. “If you’re discouraging people from developing relationships, they’re going to leave when the market’s better,” she says.

Employees were encouraged to explore and build out their social networks. It told them: “Go reach out to people you know. Go join Facebook. Go link out to people on LinkedIn. Join Twitter. In the long run it benefits you as much as it benefits nGenera.”

Meanwhile, the company reached out to alumni, as well as employees of legacy companies (predecessor companies). Tierney also started following people on Twitter who seemed to have the skills it was looking for. If it could “follow” those people on Twitter, those people could see who was “following them” — and perhaps take an interest. Tierney’s also getting her jobs sent out, for example, via AustinTXJobs on Twitter.

nGenera also uses Jobvite (not to be confused with Jobster, which Tierney tried but wasn’t thrilled about). Everyone has access to it — not just hiring managers and recruiters. They can look at openings, send them to their friends, track email conversations, and more. The company pays a flat, monthly fee, rather than a per-person cost.

Job boards aren’t dead at nGenera. Niche boards, in particular, have been used to look for people with OATS (Order Audit Trail System) compliance, for example. But, Tierney says, “I found that LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are giving me what I need.”

The pie chart below shows the percentages of the 4,000 recruiters surveyed who said that “recruiting is viewed as a strategic priority at my organization.”

Slightly better are the results below showing the percentages of recruiters who said “my organization values the work we do (in recruiting).”

The Roundtable suggests the following be done to reinvigorate recruiting (explored in depth in the December/January Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership):

• Building pipelines of critical skills
• Honing attraction and branding efforts
• Strategic talent planning
• Clarifying recruiting roles
• Training (and continuously developing) the recruiting team
• Maximizing selection efforts while maintaining candidate care
• Enhancing measurement and metrics.

Here are some excerpts from that upcoming Journal.

From John Worrall, Rutgers University (pictured):

“My back-of-the-envelope guess is the unemployment rate will be North of 7% in 2009. Do I expect it to be at depression levels? No, I don’t.

I think HR managers will be deluding themselves if they think there will be less competition for talent simply because the unemployment rate is high. There’s a temptation to let people go during downturns — the stronger the downturn, the stronger the propensity for layoffs. They would be well-advised to consider carefully how much they have invested not just in key people but across the management spectrum. They’ve invested a ton in training formal and otherwise. That’s gone if they lose those people in a recession. They might not get them back.”

Thomas Cooley, New York University:

“We’re looking at a recession that is probably going to last well into 2009. I think it will be worse than the recessions of 1991 and 2001. How much worse, I don’t think anybody knows at this stage. There are lots of reasons to be concerned it could be as bad as the recession of the early 1980s.

We are going to be going through tough times for HR departments. They are more likely to be shedding employees, rather than acquiring new ones. In the last recession, companies shed workers too quickly and found it difficult and costly to rebuild their workforces. So there’s reason to be a little bit cautious.”

David Smith, Pepperdine University:

“2009 is going to bring higher unemployment, which means from the standpoint of recruiting leaders more of a buyer’s market when it comes to labor. Take sufficient time to make sure you get the right candidates for positions. You can afford to be a little more choosey, picky, at this point. Be as smart as you can so you can in retaining your best and most product employees — those individuals whose intellectual capital is the key to the company’s success.”

James Bennett, George Mason University:

“We’re in for three-to-five years of rocky times, probably the worst economic times since WWII.

Nurses are still going to be hard to find. Truck drivers, not so much. Truck drivers can fairly easily be trained — three months, six months — that’s not a big deal. But nurses - there’s a lot of hands-on instruction that can only be done in small groups. It’s very expensive training.

Being a physician is a pretty good idea. Health care is a pretty good idea. Being a tenured college professor is a pretty good idea.”

Although “I’m betting that this downturn will become nasty fast,” he says, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a recruiting department that could have too much time on its hands should be axed.

He argues that before recruiting-department pink-slips get printed, companies should:

• Figure out what the chances are that next year they’ll need recruiters who really know their company.
• Then calculate what it’ll cost to hire such recruiters next year if the company has laid off its critical recruiters and needs to start from scratch.
• Lastly, decide whether it might be better off just keeping who they’ve got.

It’s an exercise that could and should be done in another departments on the proverbial chopping block.

Similarly, in a Bloomberg video, embedded below, he notes that “the slowdown has been going on for nine months or longer … and I’d like to think we’re somewhere in the middle” of it, headed toward the end.

Are you cutting headcount in the department? Or, is your company slowing down the hiring of new recruiters, but not cutting existing recruiter jobs? Is your budget being cut or frozen?

Or, is it business as usual, and growth continues?

Post your thoughts.

Google “has essentially stopped hiring” for about one month, according to CNBC. It also is apparently filling vacancies internally, CNBC’s David Faber says. The video of Faber’s report is online.

So much money is being driven into the system that we should have a nice recovery starting by Q2 of 2009. …

Q4 (2008) will be bad, possibly with a -5% in annualized Gross Domestic Product. Yet with $2-2.50 gas and trillions ‘loosening up’ the system, we could have a quick recovery …

4,000-5,000 Dow predictions abound, citing the Depression market that didn’t recover ’till the 50s (20+ years). The 7,200 ebb in 2002, a level I foresaw a year in advance, might be the next bottom if 7,882 doesn’t hold. …  I don’t see this market struggling for more than a few months due to the infusion of trillions. Markets project 6-plus months in advance, and the inevitable real estate ‘crash’ that highlighted this mess should stabilize by mid-2009 …

There is no doubt we are in a recession …  unemployment estimates range from 200,000 or more jobs lost, perhaps more, in October, and nearly a million so far this year. The workforce increase, legal and illegal, requires 2 million new jobs a year for healthy growth (cut to 1 million now that a million returned to mostly Mexico, mostly construction workers who cannot find work). …

How bad will it get? Possibly 1.5 million jobs lost this year and an ‘official’ unemployment rate of close to 7%. This is why the average supervisory & upper level of unemployed should expect an average of 4.4 months currently to find a job, vs 4 last quarter.

Dr. John Sullivan is scheduled for broadcast at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, talking about recruiting during the downturn. Krista Bradford will discuss passive candidates at 3:15 p.m. Eastern. Also look for a panel called “How well do you know  your company?” at 1:30 p.m. Eastern.

Also on the agenda from the “posh” Westin but not broadcast: Coke’s talent-acquisition director; AIRS; a session on building pipelines of candidates, by the Recruiting Roundtable; Tony Blake, who has written a killer article for the Journal; Mr. Ted’s demo of its new ATS; and the vendor smackdown — where “job-matching” sites will strut their stuff.

As for yesterday (which, was in a sense, a cloudy day): Jobfox’s Rob McGovern released a white paper PDF warning that hiring won’t stop even in this slower economy); Kevin Wheeler said it will be “economic suicide” for companies to insist on keeping jobs in the U.S. that could be outsourced; attendees talked about the challenge of attracting out-of-towners who can’t sell their homes; Penelope Trunk and Jason Warner talked blogs; and speakers touted new tools like the Insider Referral Network and Ping.fm. On Wednesday, the focus was less about the slowdown, and more about passionate recruiters leading the way in their companies.

And ERE’s Expo is being broadcast this year on www.ere.net. Today we’ll plan on streaming on www.ere.net the following (among other videos):

• Jason Warner, from Google

• Jan Hopkins, former CNN anchor

• Kevin Wheeler (tour of the recruiting world)

• Gerry and Mark’s panel on cutting-edge technology

• Michael Marlatt on the future of recruiting

• Mike Beckman from Freddie Mac

and others.

Hewitt’s survey of 411 large companies revealed that 42 percent of companies “are revising their salary budgets and variable pay spending strategies related to the economic downturn or because of increasing cost pressures.” Of that 42%:

• 49 percent plan to reduce variable compensation payouts
• 66 percent will cut bonuses by more than 10 percent in 2008
• Salary increases will be about 3.1 percent in 2009, or about 1 percent smaller than they would have been.

Thirty-eight percent of companies are reserving part of their salary-increase budget for their highest performers. And 23 percent are creating supplemental, discretionary incentive pools for high-performers. Another 20 percent are offering employees retention bonuses for them to stay a certain amount of time.

In order, the best are:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Australia
4. Germany
5. Canada
6. Japan
7. France
8. Netherlands
9. South Korea
10. Sweden
11. Switzerland
12. Italy
13. Belgium
14. New Zealand
15. China

Also ranked: individual colleges and universities, with Harvard and Yale on top, and Johns Hopkins, Duke, Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, and small-but-very-rigorous Caltech also ranked high, among others. Lesser-known schools in the top 100: University of California-Davis, and Case Western Reserve, in Ohio.

Moving up in the rankings: Wash-U in St. Louis; University of California-Santa Barbara; University of Virginia; and Stony Brook, among others.

Back to the country rankings — QS says its “innovative methodology avoids the pitfalls of ranking nations simply according to the number of universities those nations have in the top 200.”

Instead, its comparison uses the number of universities in the top 500; how good a country’s system is at getting students into internationally reputable universities (calculated by taking each country’s number of full-time equivalent students at the top 500 universities, factored against its population); a score based on the position of the top institution in each country; and extra points for having high-performing schools compared with the country’s GDP.

Eighty-seven percent of 2008 graduates expected to work more than 40 hours a week. Lo and behold, the exact same percentage, 87, of the class of 1982 also expected to work more than 40.

There’s more evidence that work/life balance isn’t any more important than it ever was. Nowadays, 40 percent of grads are willing to spend six or more nights away from home each month, for their job. Back when “Eye of the Tiger” and “Down Under” topped the charts, only 34 percent were willing.

In both generations, graduates rated family, health, happiness, and ethics as more important than the job. Not so for community, free time, and vacation — all of which were not deemed more important than the job, by both generations.

This rising tide of new applicants converging with the gale force buffeting going on in our own organizations creates a perfect storm for uncharacteristically bad behavior. The disruption and uncertainty it produces will undoubtedly increase the stress and anxiety we feel on-the-job, we feel about our own well-being. Those emotions are difficult to bear, but for us, they can have a doubly pernicious effect. Not only can they eat away at our self-confidence, but they can undermine and weaken our sense of self, as well.

Hard as it is to accept, awful economic fundamentals can negatively affect the fundamentals of our character and cause us to act awfully. They can push us from patience to impatience, from even-tempered to short-tempered, from willing to listen to unwilling to listen and worse. They can induce us to forget that applicants are just like us. They are working men and women who, just three months ago, thought everything was fine in their lives, only to discover three weeks ago that it wasn’t. They are our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our coworkers and our bosses. And they deserve better.

So, let’s resolve to give it to them. However distressed the economic fundamentals may be, let’s stand by the strong fundamentals of our character. Whatever our role — whether we’re an HR professional or a corporate or third party recruiter — let’s reaffirm our commitment to compassion and thoughtfulness, to caring and courtesy, to kindness and respectfulness and to basic human decency. There has been no run on those attributes. Today, we are just as good as we were before this mess began, and we can be just as good — and maybe even better — as long as it lasts and beyond. Indeed, the goodness of our character has never been more important and more needed in the workplace. Now more than ever, we must stick to our fundamentals and our commitment to using them in our work.

That’s my modest plan for these hard times. Let’s remember who we are no matter how bad the evening news may get. Let’s stand by the caliber of the person we have always been no matter what the pressures may be on-the-job. Let’s teach those who were greedy and self-indulgent what true wealth — the wealth of the human spirit — is all about. Let’s be recruiting professionals who understand what fundamentals really count and let’s put our faith and future in them so that others can come to appreciate their value.

He has, however, been bullish on Taleo. Swanson — who like Randy Mehl is one of the few stock analysts really focused on HR companies — is now taking a job there, as VP of investor and analyst relations.

Taleo’s CFO Katy Murray says that in addition to the investor/analyst duties, Swanson will “work closely with the corporate development team in developing and executing on our market and strategic opportunities.”

Carolyn Bass and Market Street Partners have been working with Taleo on investor relations; they’ll be handing it over to Swanson.

Ask five people, and you’ll get five definitions. Look for resumes, and you’ll get hundreds of people doing vastly different things.

Mark Bielecki is trying to clean it all up with a new site, Joblish. (And you thought startups had used up every possible fanciful variation of the word “job”!)

It sounds more complicated than it is. Employers can fill out some drop-down menus as to what they’re looking for — let’s say, for example, that the employer wants these four things in a candidate:

• a functional area of engineering;
• the R&D department
• division head reporting to chief executive
• supervising 10 or more people directly.

The employer picks those four attributes from the drop-downs, and generates a code that looks something like this:

joblishDENERBE

Job candidates who fit that criteria will, in theory, have added the code joblishDENERBE to their resumes or LinkedIn pages or elsewhere, and employers searching for joblishDENERBE can find them.

Like so many new ideas, the success of this one will depend on getting a critical mass of both job candidates and employers to use the codes.