That company, Get Hired, was really more of an applicant tracking system, with an emphasis on audio and video — and more. This one’s goals are less massive. It’s called Spark Hire, and it has received a million dollars in angel funding from private investors.

Like with other career sites, job seekers can search for jobs, of course. They can also record a 60-second video about themselves.

As for employers, they can do a number of things, some commonly found on other sites, some not.

They can set up a company page, post jobs, showcase their recruiters, do q-and-a sessions with candidates, add a company video, and talk amongst themselves about how the search is going. They can also look through those 60-second profiles I mentioned above. Or, they can send out a question to a bunch of candidates, and have them all respond with a video answer. The system also allows them to do live, split-screen video interviews.

Right now, on Spark Hire, you’ll be able to post, screen, and interview for free. Marketing Coordinator Adeel Alam tells me that Spark Hire wants to build up a good inventory of jobs, and job seekers, and later charge for postings, online interviews, and more, including online advertising on the site. It’s set to launch today.

As fun as it is to judge, it was taken seriously. Some applicants used every hour of their midnight, January 6 deadline (we know — we were on the phone answering their questions) and judges used every minute of theirs (we know for the same reason). Judges wrote lengthy explanations of their choices, and some created algorithms to rank each applicant, and sent us the spreadsheets they created as living proof.

Anyhow, it sounds trite, but great work’s being done, in many cases under challenging circumstances. Some of the companies that didn’t win were so good that we hope they apply again, or share their stories on ERE.net webinars or at future conferences. As for next spring’s conference in San Diego, that’s where the winners will be announced, and that’s where they’ll take questions from you as to how they succeeded, overcame hurdles, and what’s in store next. Without further ado, here are the finalists in alphabetical order within the categories:

Best College Recruiting Program

If you’re looking for good economic/job market news, there’s this: Ernst & Young’s campus hiring is back to pre-recession levels. Already no stranger to these awards, its 200-plus-member campus recruiting team has stepped it up yet another notch. For instance, the firm:

• Launched a new campus recruiting advertising campaign in September 2011, using the tagline “See More” to encourage students to visit the career website for further information. It advertised on wsj.com, businessweek.com, Pandora, CollegeRecruiter.com, Yahoo.com, and Experience.com.
• Teamed with Millennial Media to deliver ads on smart phones to students at select schools.
• Now has more than 78,500 fans on the Ernst & Young Careers page on Facebook.
• Is on the new site CampusLive, which uses scavenger hunts, team events, prize offerings, and more.
• Is using Flexspace, a virtual reality tool, where students can see what it’s like to have a job at Ernst & Young and a life outside of work.
• Held its first Emerging Leaders Summit with about 250 students. This two-and-a-half day pre-internship program is filled with workshops on subjects like ethics in business.
• Added a Global Student Exchange Program for interns to work abroad for four weeks, in Australia, Canada, China, and the UK.

The other finalist is the U.S. Navy, and it’s actually doing the kind of “go beyond the campus career center” campus recruiting we all talk about so much. In 2011, it implemented two new recruiting strategies that significantly improved the NUPOC program. NUPOC — the Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate program — involves recruiting college students and graduates with science and engineering backgrounds for five-year positions to work on nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, become instructors at the Navy Nuclear Power School, or engineers at Naval Reactors Headquarters.

With the first program, the Navy funded trips for 121 educators to experience a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or submarine, visit a submarine learning facility, and interact with sailors. The goal is for faculty to then tell their students, and other professors, about these opportunities.

Also, the Navy Recruiting Command partnered with a group called the University Engineering Alliance — formerly the Big 12 Engineering Consortium — allowing the Navy to provide keynote speakers for engineering summits, nuclear experts for classroom presentations, and otherwise work with faculty to present material in classrooms.

In the end, 242 students were hired through NUPOC program last year, and the accepted applicant’s average GPA was up 5% to 3.43.

Best Corporate Careers Website

You may not have heard of RMS, but one judge says that its website is “hands down, one of the best sites I’ve seen. Graphically and emotionally intelligent, not too heavy on graphic elements. Tells the story. Interaction. Heads and shoulders above all of the other sites.”

The organization has more than 950 people and is in the field of catastrophe risk modeling. It overhauled the career site to make it clearer to people what the company does. Equally important, it wants others to self-select out if they don’t fit.

Its Live Chat allows people to interact in real-time with someone on the talent acquisition team. It released the new site on May 8, 2011. In the 12 months prior, it averaged 12 hires per month. For the six months after, it averaged 20 hires per month.

This category has, appropriately, shifted over the years; for instance, this year’s applicants, in many cases talked about their mobile initiatives. UnitedHealth Group, one of this year’s finalists, is no exception.

It built its mobile site with similar goals as others like Matt Jeffery talked about: engage candidates, don’t just let them search. Using GPS technology, the site can find candidates local events (and directions to those events) or jobs near where they live. Candidates get Twitter feeds during career fairs and recruiting events.

In year one of the mobile site, UnitedHealth had 213,000 unique mobile visitors on the site. The healthcare company also says that “read rates” are much higher for mobile phone users than for candidates it sends emails to.

Back to engagement: it measures that a number of ways, including pages per visit and whether people return — and about 35% of all traffic (whether mobile or to the normal corporate careers site) comes from return visitors.

It has been particularly happy about using smart phone recruiting to find people globally, such as in India and the Philippines. By using mobile technology to simplify (and personalize) its workflow surrounding recruiting events, the company has saved more than 200 recruiter hours, and more than tripled the hiring rate of new candidates from these events.

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture again is a finalist, after winning last year. One of its recruiting leaders spoke at last fall’s Expo (see video below). Since winning last year, it focused on:

1. Strengthening its global employee referral platform, which has an interface with Taleo, and allows employees to search for open jobs, share them through social media, track the status of their referrals, and more.
2. Increasing the number of quality referrals, through LinkedIn’s Referral Engine.
3. Creating an “employee referral concierge service for senior executives” — including a dedicated team that looks after senior exec referrals and provides extra service.
4. Creating a dedicated global team to pull daily “pipeline reports” and monitor referrals. Local recruitment leads receive weekly updates about the referral candidates in their pipeline.
5. Improving the referral experience; for example, employees receive a thank-you email from senior leaders for their referral contribution to Accenture.

It received more than 200,000 referrals in 2011 and hired just under 20,000 people through the program. Said one judge: “Its referral mobile app shows that it is two steps ahead of its competitors when it comes to technology.”

Improving Enterprises is what we March Madness fans would call this year’s “Cinderella Story” in the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. Even after its recent growth, it has only 148 employees.

Briefly, the way its referral program works is this: if employees refer someone, they get a point. Points add up and are paid on a quarterly basis. Points are considered when the software-developer distributes its profit share. Top performers are recognized at Town Hall meetings.

It has a ‘Two by Tuesday” program designed, the company says, to mitigate “extremes in the ebbs and flows of recruiting.” On Tuesday, it spreads the word of the most important company openings. People have a week to submit referrals. There’s a race to be the one who refers the most, with daily updates provided.

The company might get 100 referrals in five days, with two or more hires made.

There’s a lot more: open houses, pizza parties, several mini-conferences on the weekends, Monday Night Football and Movie Nights, all aimed at having referred candidates show up.

It also works a lot on having a really good workplace, and has won a number of awards for that. In 2011, it hired 54 top-level technology consultants from referrals, with a team of three technology recruiters. Around 90% of hires come from referrals and the related marketing programs mentioned above. Interestingly — very interestingly — it believes that people who were referred, but who didn’t join the company, have resulted in more than $3 million in additional revenue in the last two years. This calculation includes such things as whether the candidate ended up referring business to Improved Experience even though they weren’t hired.

Best Employer Brand

“This year marked the most dramatic employer brand shift our company has ever seen.”

Hotels planned for Russia

That’s what Marriott says about its global brand launch, done mainly by a team of three for under $200,000. It’s aligned with the company’s consumer brand, which is about “opening doors to a world of opportunity.” The “Find Your World” employment value proposition is similar.

In fact, though developed for job candidates, the tagline is being used by Marriott’s consumer marketing a bit, too.

The brand was launched with a video contest among employees, which attracted 200 submissions in 11 languages. And, it’s localized. So the China careers blog, for example, communicates the message in a different way than in other countries.

As you may have read, Marriott launched a Facebook game, now being played in 128 countries, to showcase work at the company and the “find your world” message.

Sodexo is moving from more of a foodservice company to a solutions/partner sort of company. A great example is its energy management services business, which involves energy audits and consulting for clients. It’s new for Sodexo, and competitive.

Sodexo quickly launched an enhanced employer brand aimed to be compatible with the new, consultative/solutions consumer brand. In the 2011 fiscal year, it hired about 50 specialized and tough-to-recruit professionals within a few months. Doing that involved positioning itself as an expert in the energy field, which involved such things as guest blog posts on websites for the energy industry and having people speak at industry conferences.

Hiring manager satisfaction at Sodexo went up from 4.49 on a 5-point scale in 2009 to 4.56 in 2011 (recently rising to 4.63). Its quality of hire increased from 4.37 on a 5-point scale in 2008 to 4.53 in 2011 (recently hitting 4.56).

For years a leader in social media recruiting, it is relying less on job boards and paid ads, which has saved it money. Traffic to its career site is up nearly 325% since 2008. Employment engagement is up and company finances are strong.

Best Retention Program/Practices

Broward Health, a healthcare system based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, faces what many medical facilities have been contending with: a shortage of nurses and allied health professionals. It’s putting part-timers, working as few as 21 hours a week, on its health plan and paying 65% of their premiums.

In a nutshell, its other retention programs include:

• A competitive and comprehensive total rewards program.
• Identity theft protection.
• Employee discounts for massage therapy.
• Up to 10% provided to employees with five or more years of service who have reached the maximum of their salary range.
• Overtime pay and bonuses for eligible RNs, allied health and other clinical positions to work additional shifts.
• Continuing education courses regarding leadership and staff development; E-learning courses for clinical, computer applications, compliance, safety education and mandatory licensure.

Its 2011 turnover rate was 9.2%.

The Support Equipment & Aircraft Launch & Recovery Equipment Department — part of the Research & Engineering department of the Naval Air Systems Command — began hiring again after many years of limited entry-level engineer and scientist hiring. There were what it calls “delays, confusion, and lost opportunities in the hiring process, and success was dependent upon an individual supervisor’s knowledge of the hiring process and determination.”

A Workforce Development Team was established to overhaul the antiquated recruiting process. Now, candidates at career fairs are screened based on qualification requirements — GPA, communication, prior technical experience, professionalism, career compatibility — and interviewed. The new workforce team notifies candidates of continued interest, and schedules an on-site visit within two weeks. It keeps in touch with them throughout the process, offering a personal touch onsite and even after the decline of an offer, trying to see what went wrong.

The 10-member team’s focus is expanding into mentoring, internships, and more, helping to hire 50-100 engineers and scientists annually. It’s prescreening more than 2,000 candidates and interviewing more than 200. What it calls hiring “cycle time” – the time from the initial meeting of the candidate at the career fair to the offer of employment — is down 80%, diversity is up, and more than 400 new engineers and scientists have been hired since 2006, with a 80% acceptance rate and 95% retention rate.

Best Military Talent Program

AT&T provides localized job notifications to the Transition Family/Support Centers of all branches of the military. In 2011, it participated in more than 50 traditional and virtual military career fairs.

Its recruiters reach out to military transition offices, Army alumni programs, and elsewhere. It created a program where veterans working at AT&T provide job search assistance to veterans applying for AT&T jobs.

It’s working on a Marine Corps job-shadowing program with Camp Pendleton in southern California.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s educating hiring managers and recruiters on the value of veterans, how to make heads or tails out of military jargon on resumes, and on the myths about veterans’ ability to integrate into corporations.

AT&T has added a number of features to its http://att.jobs/military site. It worked with Direct Employers to pilot and offer a military skills translator on the site.

T-Mobile provides assistance on resume, interview, and job search skills at Army career centers, and at military events. Through the Army’s Partnership for Youth Success program it provided interviews to 42 transitioning soldiers and 10 career opportunities.

Online its T-Mobile Military Talent Network helps transitioning military receive communications from the company; the database includes more than 350 people.

The company also provides health benefits for people called to active duty beyond what’s required. It has received a number of awards, honors for helping wounded veterans, and for being a military-spouse-friendly employer.

Most Strategic Use of Technology

Last year’s winner in this category, Informatica, is back, and better. It uses a cloud-based format and user-friendly dashboard for viewing such things as the time it takes to fill a job.

It’s showing the company’s leadership that the talent acquisition department is doing what it needs to do within its budget, and meeting objectives like time to fill, costs, and who’s in the pipeline.

And — since it not only has a slick system but its metrics are strong — it’s making a case as to why the internal recruiting model and not outsourcing is the way to go.

Informatica has improved the candidate experience; improved its interview scheduling; and in its words, “dedicating ourselves as an organization to stop using archaic tools.”

UPS is one of the answers to the questions: is anyone actually hiring someone from Twitter? Does recruiting by text message work?

It found job boards, print, and radio to be working so-so. So it turned to new technologies. It launched an ad program for people to respond to job openings with text messages from mobile phones. And they did by the tens of thousands.

UPS has had success with Twitter pages and a mobile-friendly career website.

Everything integrates with its applicant tracking system, and, the company notes, “with trackable URLs only  … no candidate self-selection or recruiter bias.”

UPSjobs.mobi drove more than a half-million page views in its first four months and the average time spent on the mobile site was 1 minute and 34 seconds, with 2.74 average page-views. The Facebook page attracted 18,000 fans in two years and 36,600 by the end of 2011.

What’s different about UPS is not that it uses social media but the degree to which it uses so many technologies together, and does so much tracking — like with its packages. In 2010 a minimum of 955 hires that its ATS could track were delivered by UPS through social media and mobile marketing integration. In 2011, between text messaging, QR codes, Twitter, Facebook, mobile phone recruiting, and social media networks, almost 3,000 hires were made.

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

Last year’s winner CACI didn’t exactly rest. It worked on improvements in areas like employee mobility, alumni hiring, and college recruiting. It also experimented with new ideas like personalized coaching for hiring managers and recruiters, implementing “just in time” coaching for managers. Says CACI: “When a candidate reaches certain hiring milestones, an automated email is sent directly to the hiring manager containing links to ATS and interviewing training modules. This has enhanced manager knowledge throughout the hiring process, decreased recruiter time to train, and increased our quality of hire.”

It hired a Personal Recruiter Coach to develop and implement individual recruiter learning plans, like improving people’s LinkedIn skills. CACI reports that “over 50% of our recruiters have seen an increase in offer acceptances and hires due to their coaching.”

CACI added QR codes to its marketing materials; mobile visitors have doubled. It has worked on search engine optimization, increased marketing to its talent community, and improved its social media recruiting. Facebook followers increased 172%, LinkedIn followers increased 813%, and Twitter followers increased 2,600%.

It implemented software that matches candidates to positions by extracting relevant data from candidate profiles, such as skill set and clearance level. It saves recruiter times and lowered days to fill. Cost per hire is down to $2,863 — 13% down — and company revenue is up 14%. Said one judge: “They were able to show more meaningful results than others, with improvements in speed, cost, and revenue.”

Informatica enhanced how managers request requisitions, how candidate feedback is given, and how employment offers are generated; “all systematically and in complete contrast to the ‘paper and pencil’ which preceded in prior years,” according to the company. It developed a recruiting dashboard for the corporation’s executives, allowing leaders among the different company divisions to see how its talent acquisition organization is doing.

Like CACI, it has done a lot of SEO work. Its “resource scorecard” was created to evaluate recruiter effectiveness against set targets.

Managers have been trained better on interview skills. Recruiter training has increased, something the company believes has helped it win three recent awards for sourcing.

It has found ways to reduce administrative work in the requisition creation process and in scheduling interviews. It revised offer letters, and started a global background check process. Results include decreased time-to-fill from 114 to 68 days; increased hiring manager satisfaction; a 100% increase in career site traffic; and reduced time to fill by 70 percent.

Said one judge: “I’m impressed by the great work done at Informatica — their significant leap into technology, their cloud application, and their talent mapping tools.”

On the Fresh & Easy home page — the company home page, not the careers home page — the words “A Great Place to Work” (as opposed to “jobs,” “employment,” or “careers”) take you to the carers page.

That’ll take you to the redesigned careers page, which includes videos, a q-and-a about the interview process, a blog, and more.

Fresh & Easy is recruiting employees and interns on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The company — which despite its growth is not without challenges — plays up its low energy use, and its food that avoids trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, and high-fructose corn syrup.

Its plans includes TV ads, movie ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertising, and of course the career site, featuring people lifting up their shirts to show military uniforms underneath.

The site plays up the potential for good benefits, travel, community involvement, and personal growth — the latter, for example, exemplified by the prominent quote from a reservist on the site saying: “I wanted an opportunity to step out, try new things, and push myself.”

The Australian Army hopes to use the campaign for at least three years.

It’s called “Get Hired,” it’s backed by private equity investors, and it’ll be free, at least for now.

The company, which has raised $1.75 million, has been building up a list of job-seekers and employers, and then contacting signers-up to send them a distinct URL to use in spreading the word via Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. “The more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll get access,” Get Hired tells them.

To explain what this site does, it helps to provide a super-brief history. Suki Shah had started a company around the time you don’t want to start a company — about when Lehman Brothers collapsed. Called Statacor Biosciences, it specialized in nutritional therapy and dietetics.

Not only were the times challenging, but Shah realized while hiring people that HR practices were, too — “even more archaic” than physician practices, he says. He found the job boards’ prices to be “mind-blowing” and found himself inundated with many hundreds of applications when hiring for his new firm, which has grown to 25 employees in seven states.

So Shah had applicants record an audio, minute-long explanation about heart disease, to see how they’d sound to a patient, or to a sales prospect. Instead of hundreds of applicants he now had maybe 30 good ones for a job, and could go through them quickly. He added video, too.

This takes us into 2010. Shah felt that he was onto something. In 2011 it was time for his brother to run the other company and for Suki to focus on making money off of this video-audio-more-to-come business.

What is launching today is supposed to replace a job board and an applicant tracking system — particularly for a company that finds that about $400 for a job listing on a job board to be expensive. Job candidates can find jobs, record video or audio (Shah says that when given the chance to talk about their strengths on video or audio, they’re anxious to), upload a resume, references, and more. They can see who has viewed their profiles, and can receive interview requests through the system.

For employers, the system can push jobs out to people using social media, a little bit like other systems you’ve heard about, like Jobvite. Employers can look at candidates’ video or audio profiles, set up video pre-screening questions, ask text-based (written) screening questions, and interview people online. It also enables you to schedule interviews.

Thinking of all the other companies launched in recent years, I asked Shah: “Haven’t other people built stuff like this?”

He smiled, and shook his head horizontally in the ‘no’ motion. “That’s why I built it,” he says. He says — quite excitedly — that the biggest job boards are “archaic.” Their price, the number of resumes people are bombarded with, etc. – he feels it’s all designed more for quantity than quality.

I have never met an unhappy, urologist anywhere.

You may not have thought you want to be a urologist. That’s perfectly understandable. But after watching a video — one that ended with the quote above — that won a marketing award, you may change your mind.

This clip called ”Why Urology?” was just honored with a platinum from the International AVA Awards competition. That’s a contest put on by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, which gets about 1,700 entries.

The video was produced by the American Urological Association, and has been viewed nearly 5,000 times on YouTube.

Swift Transportation’s new site opts for none of the above. Instead, the trucker used illustrations, something you don’t see a whole lot on career sites.

Swift, a Phoenix-based company whose drivers log more than a billion miles a year, used Bayard Advertising for the site. The two partners wanted to do something a little different than what it sees on a lot of transportation-industry sites: trucks, cars, signs, prices, clutter, and busyness.

Swift and Bayard figured that a little simpler was a little better. They also wanted to capture the employee value proposition, and interviewed current and past employees to see what they liked about their jobs — career paths with stability, growth, good pay, freedom, variety, and good bennies.

Bayard’s National Creative Director Matt Gilbert found the illustrator; the drawings were used through the career site, not just on the main page.

Swift has about 22,000 employees, about 17,000 of those drivers. It also has 31 full-service terminals, so the company tells candidates that “when you’re driving for us, you’re never far from a hot shower, a good meal, and a friendly face.”

“We’re charging through the time of transition,” says Kat Drum, who’s the manager, social network and employment branding, and a familiar face to ERE conference-goers who saw her speak to rave reviews while working for Starbucks.

RIM’s co-CEOs are stepping down – a move that caused Jim Cramer and Barron’s to say, essentially, “too little, too late.” It has been the subject of buyout rumors, and is one of the brands consumers don’t envision lasting beyond 2015. (Then again, they also see the U.S. Post Office going bye-bye, something that seems unlikely in just three years.)

Meanwhile, in the works for several months is a new joint consumer/employment brand campaign that’ll emphasize the excitement, challenges, and ability to overcome obstacles at Research In Motion, and the possibilities to do all that on a global scale.

The goal is to find people who have what Drum calls a “builder-type personality” rather than craving stability. “We get these dynamos who want to take a risk and join us because they like the excitement,” Drum says. “They say, ‘I love your brand and want it to succeed and I want to get in on the action.’”

Some recent company tweets have hinted at this theme, using the expression #BeBold as a hashtag on Twitter.

It’ll be unveiled internally first, and then externally on the careers site, Twitter feed, and elsewhere, and discussed in more detail on an April 11 ERE webinar. Drum says she hasn’t seen many branding campaigns where the consumer and employment brands are developed this jointly, as opposed to the employment brand being a subset of the larger product brand. The daring-risk-taking-bold-brave sort of theme will be a “cultural shift” embedded not just in recruiting but in human resources, such as in performance reviews.

Both Sides of the Field

In addition to the branding project, RIM has also been playing recruiting defense. “We’re constantly having to battle the negative media,” Drum says. Working with inside PR professionals, who in turn also work with outside PR pros at the firm Edelman, the recruiting team develops messages to respond to candidates who inquire about what they’re reading. “It’s a real-time, immediate response to negative press,” Drum says. “And reporters like negativity.”

The messages to candidates generally boil down to this: despite what you read, we’re not standing still. We have lost market share in some areas but have gained it in others. Our subscriber numbers are up to 75 million. We are progressing with QNX, and, Drum says, “the innovation isn’t stopping.” RIM’s new CEO plans to focus on marketing to make sure that what the company feels is the full story of RIM is getting out.

All the offense and defense is going on with a much-smaller recruiting staff at RIM, shrunk as part of company-wide layoffs last summer. The brand work has been taking place as req loads have increased and as it has become harder to recruit due to the perception of the company as one that’s struggling. “We’re doing more with less,” she says.

Drum notes that in recent months, RIM groups on LinkedIn, like the BlackBerry Vine, have thrived. It’s having success using job aggregators like SimplyHired and Indeed, as well as with Beyond.com. Glassdoor has been a good source of candidates over the last approximately five months, Drum says; RIM has done search engine optimization on Glassdoor to drive people to RIM’s career page there.

She notes that “RIM is Waterloo, Canada” and without it, “Ten thousand people would be without a job, the community would die.” This, she says, is unlikely to happen, and the company will pursue the type of candidates who won’t want it to.

Students can go to the site each day and take an assessment and use other tools to get feedback on their careers. Monday, they’ll decide based on their strengths what path’s best for them. Tuesday it’ll focus more on their passions. Wednesday, the tool will be about their values, and what volunteer opportunities fit for them. Thursday is a day for their online reputation, and Friday they’ll create a “brand plan” — for themselves.

PwC recruits on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

A science and engineering festival will be held April 28-29, in D.C. It should be big — last year’s attracted half a million people. Hosted by Lockheed Martin, the D.C. event is aimed at getting high school and college students psyched about left-brain careers.

The “career pavilion” at the fair will include 1) leaders in the field, such as the CEO of a space-tourism company; 2) representatives from universities like Georgia Tech, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering; 3) a “Meet the Scientists Area” with, among others, Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and neuroscientist; and 4) reps from companies who recruit science types — firms like AT&T, Microsoft, the CIA, and others.

Besides Lockheed Martin, event sponsors include the Northrop Grumman Foundation, AT&T, the Life Technologies Foundation, Microsoft, 3M, Baxter, Raytheon, Biogen Idec Foundation, and others.

The crux of this “Big Break” as it’s called is a reality-TV-style day of speed interviews, a videotaped Q&A session, and a presentation. It starts with an online application to become part of this process, which is a partnership between the non-profit Ochsner Health System and an agency called Intellect Resources, which has been tweeting about this. Candidates “advance or face elimination” based on their “professionalism, presentation skills, communication skills, poise, attitude, teamwork and ability to think on their feet.”

The winner (winners, actually — 200 of them) will be a $20-25/hour trainer, teaching people the use of an electronic medical records system for at least a five-month contract.

“American Idol merged with a career fair,” is how this is all described on a recruiting video.

The online application is open through January 19, with the big audition day held on the 21st at the International House Hotel in New Orleans, and the job starting February 6.

This isn’t a Sunglass-Hut-style lavish affair; in other words, travel expenses aren’t paid, so Ochsner prefers locals.

“NO HEALTHCARE IT EXPERIENCE REQUIRED,” a Facebook page emphasizes. The same is said below by Chad Jones, an Ochsner executive.

A year later, we’re not done yet. At least one new site is hoping to join the bunch. Called “Better Weekdays,” it is being built behind the scenes, with one major player in the company, who’d rather we not use his name, telling us it’s about five months off from launch.

The site has an abbreviated website up, in addition to a LinkedIn page and Twitter feed. It’s looking to hire recruiters or other recruiting-industry insiders. Better Weekdays hopes to use a combination of tests already built and used in recruiting, along with some of its own “secret sauce,” as one of the site’s founders says. People’s skills and “personal culture” — what’s important to them — will be captured and matched with companies looking to fill jobs with MBA graduates.

Better Weekdays is working on its site and on spreading the word among potential customers. But, unlike the “Mystery Applicant” site we mentioned, it’s not focusing on applicant tracking systems right now. The company doesn’t want to deal with the issues involved in integrating an application with those systems. And, it sees its sweet spot to be mainly hot, growing, small and medium-size companies, not as much Fortune 500 firms.

Those small/medium companies, Better Weekdays figures, are less likely to have much of an HR department, and could use Better Weekdays to hire someone, probably with a pay-per-hire model, rather than a pay-per posting.

“Hasn’t this all been tried before?” I asked my contact there. “Yes,” he says, “but still no one’s cracked the code.”

Guy Krief, VP of innovation, said the company had been failing in its efforts to fill its job through more traditional methods. The game was, Krief said, an “act of desperation.”

That act, he says, was bringing up to 100 candidates a day until Christmas slowed things down for a few days.

The Missions

The seven “missions” are weighted differently in Upstream’s scoring. So, for example, one’s worth twice as much as one of the others when it does its scoring, because that mission is testing an aspect of the job that’s more important. The submissions — for the approximately 90% of candidates who do them all — are being scored. Top scorers are being interviewed. Fifteen people have been interviewed so far — personally by Krief. Twenty-five may be interviewed in total. “The impressive thing,” he says, “is that 10 are actually very, very good matches. On paper we would have never spoke with them. They really seem to be the right candidates for this particular job.”

I asked Krief what role the resume plays in the selection of people to interview; after all, as I mentioned in that first article, it seems to be required. “It plays no role,” he says.

Krief says it does help weed out people who really would not be interested in the job — he mentions a 52-year-old CEO who sent in a resume but was “way too senior.”

Upstream will make hiring decisions in about a month. It has five openings, but likes what it sees and will “keep sourcing the very good candidates,” Krief says. Plus, more Upstream jobs may open up, and, he says, some people who took the challenge say they became much more interested at working for Upstream than they were prior.

Indeed: the chief brand officer at Women’s Healthcare Associates, LLC is Anita Jackson. The director of human resources is also Anita Jackson.

In the video below, about 7 minutes long, Jackson and I talk about her unusual dual role at this Oregon gynecology and obstetrics organization. She shares whether this model could work in a larger organization, and how this structure affects the candidate experience.

The German company has about 336,000 employees, 1,640 locations, and about 60,000 people, and growing, in the U.S.

Rachel Romaszewski, who recruits for Siemens’ energy business, and I talk about the skills shortage and what’s being done about it. She tells me (out of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) which social media site is working well, which one works less well, and which one’s hit or miss.

“We are just growing like crazy,” she says, in the seven-minute video, below.

Astronaut Candidate Selection Manager Duane Ross says “we have many, many more people than we could ever take. It’s a “good-news, bad-news scenario,” he says, meaning NASA will have great people to choose from but wishes it could hire more. “It’s a very competitive job.”

About 3,565 applicants came in last time around — the 2009 class. Of those, about 2,900 met basic qualifications, 113 were brought to Houston, 48 selected as finalists, and nine brought on.

This process happens ever few years: “when we need astronauts,” Ross says. But this time around, given the advent of social media, the NASA ad blitz was bigger and the candidates are coming in more quickly. 

NASA advertised the jobs — well, in brief, everywhere. This included diversity magazines, news releases, public service announcements on radio and TV, Twitter, NASA TV, blogs, Facebook, contacts with universities, and all military branches.

NASA made astronaut Rex Walheim, who was on the final Space Shuttle flight, available to answer questions about NASA and the application process (in one response, for example, Walheim noted that he’s surprised how many people look healthy but fail medical tests).

Planning Ahead

The application process for an astronaut job is more typical of a a government job than you might think: put your resume in a recruiting technology system, along with references; submit your transcript; eventually take a drug test, and so on.

star forming in the constellation of Monoceros

NASA’s looking for someone who’s ambitious, team-oriented, creative, and daring. You have to be willing to travel for three to six months at a time — and by “travel” NASA doesn’t mean your basic trade show in Vegas, but rather “distant destinations in deep space.”

You’ll need a degree in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics. An aviation degree doesn’t count. You have to pass a swimming test your first month of training, and eventually will need to learn Russian.

After the January 27 deadline, interviews, reference-checks, and medical exams will begin. The folks hired now are really hired based on future needs. Basic training’s about two years long, and mission-specific training about 2 1/2 years long. So NASA’s hiring people based on projections about 4 1/2 years in the future.

Now, a company called Upstream, in the mobile marketing business, has created an online game for its marketing campaign manager positions. Candidates are led through seven “missions” or questions — that is, after they put in their contact details, including a resume. (A requirement I wasn’t so fond of, as it deters those without one.)

One question — one of the seven missions — asks, “If you were to promote Skype to a general target audience who are not current users, which features would you highlight?”

Upstream has added about 45 people in 2011, and opened offices in Silicon Valley, Rio, and Dubai, and is still hiring. Part of what it plays up to potential customers is its use of games in mobile marketing.

The draft of the proposed rules, to be printed later today (Friday the 9th), would create a big new set of rules related to hiring people with disabilities.

Federal contractors and subcontractors would have to try to have 7 percent of their workforces be people with disabilities, among other requirements. It’s not a hard mandate, but a goal to work toward for various job groups (in other words, as the proposal spells out, a company shouldn’t mask low levels of disabled employment in certain job functions by building up a high number in low-paid jobs). Contractors would have to take certain recruiting, training, and other steps to work toward the goal, “similar to those that have long been required to promote workplace equality for women and minorities,” says the U.S. Labor Department.

Page 26 describes a new requirement about surveying your employees, “providing an opportunity for each employee who is, or subsequently becomes, an individual with a disability to voluntarily self-identify as such in an anonymous manner, thereby allowing those who have subsequently become disabled or who did not wish to self-identify during the hiring process to be counted.”

There’s much more. On page 36 it says the contractor should “promptly list all of its employment opportunities, with limited exceptions, with the nearest Employment One-Stop Career Center. It also requires the contractor to engage in a minimum of three additional outreach and recruitment efforts …”

And around pages 38 and 39, it says contractors would need to “review the outreach and recruitment efforts it has undertaken over the previous 12 months and evaluate their effectiveness in identifying and recruiting qualified individuals with disabilities, and document its review.”

You’d have to look at how many employee referrals and applicants were people with disabilities, examine if your efforts are not working, investigate why, and implement changes.

There are provisions about recruitment training; for example, related to making sure you’re training people in being sensitive to applicants and recruits.

Two Months for Your Two Cents 

There’s much more in the proposed rules, which we’re sure many labor and management lobbyists will be poring over when they awaken. The process for commenting on the regulations, before a final rule is made, is spelled out briefly on page 2. Comments must be received by February 7.

Sadly, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is 13 percent — a problem I have been interested in since being involved in lobbying in favor of a disability-related tax credit called the WOTC, championed by New York Democrat Charlie Rangel, in the 1990s.

In the meantime, for more on the topic of disabilities in the workplace, the Job Accommodation Network has long been a great source of information.

For adidas, an award winner last year, they’re already a big thing.

Craig Larson heads up U.S. recruiting. He started about a year ago, about the same time, he says, that adidas “identified a problem that needed a solution.”

The problem begins with the fact that adidas sends lots of people to trade shows in places like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York. These people aren’t recruiters, usually — and in fact recruiters sometimes are not welcome at the conventions. They are designers, marketers, buyers, and others there to “push product and get orders,” Larson says. “There’s a lot of deals down there and a lot of passive candidates.” Depending on the event, adidas can send a recruiter or two, but “a lot of times they don’t like us tagging along.”

On top of that, trade-show goers are often with their bosses, and not able to talk jobs.

Using Avature, adidas built a portal to capture some of these passive candidates. If you haven’t heard of Avature — it’s a bit like Jobvite, in that it’s in the “CRM” business — an acronym that may sound familiar but in recruiting many folks consider the “C” to stand for Candidate, not Customer, Relationship Management.

Anyhow, the project was rolled out at a large footwear/apparel event. To drive people to the site, adidas put up a display (see photo above) with a QR code you could scan, and handed out small (3 x 5) cards with the QR code on them. Show attendees could thus discretely take a photo of the QR code and then type their contact info into the portal. The candidate information was collected and divvied up to adidas recruiters by function, like design, for them to contact people.

Larson’s excited about this as a way to build a relationship, a pipeline of candidates, to start talking to people who might be candidates. And, he says, it showed hiring managers that the adidas recruiting team could get to recruits without a lot of recruiters, and without a recruiting event. Says Larson, figuratively: “Basically we have a recruiter on site with this banner.”

He is still working on a full analysis, putting solid numbers on the project. In the meantime, he says, “it was a vast improvement over last year when we didn’t use technology to support us. In the future this will be a cost savings, time savings, and the ROI will continue to grow.”

Jody Ordioni, who’ll be leading a session at the Expo in March, and I talk about Twitter — what we notice, what seems to work, and what seems to not. It’s a bit over six minutes, below.