For now, let me give you some of the highlights.

This is all based on a survey Bersin & Associates did of talent acquisition professionals, HR practitioners, and recruiters from organizations of all sizes across all industries; the final count was 320 responses. The purpose of this survey was to obtain opinions from talent acquisition customers about the performance of their primary talent acquisition systems, to obtain information on customer satisfaction, implementation challenges, and to identify industry trends.

Time to Deploy

Through our research, we found that the average time for implementation (click on the graph to enlarge it) ranged from three months to more than a year. Since the talent acquisition market is very mature and many companies have implemented talent acquisition systems several times, the majority of organizations (36%) were able to implement this system in three to six months and few organizations took longer than a year for implementation.

Challenges to Successful Deployment

Before an organization implements a talent acquisition system, they need to understand and evaluate all of the potential challenges that may occur during deployment. While the majority of organizations that we spoke to during our qualitative interviews expressed frustration with the solution providers during implementation, many of these obstacles are a result of the lack of preparation and planning from the organization itself. Organizations need to standardize processes in their talent acquisition process before deploying technology. Many organizations cited the lack of a well-defined process and process changes as the top challenge during implementation. We recommend that an organization carefully review best practices in implementation and use initial benchmarks before embarking down this path.

The most common challenge that organizations face during implementation is the system’s support for all of the organization’s requirements. Similar to other talent management systems, early adopters of technology typically implemented the basic features during the implementation period. Today’s talent acquisition systems support many advanced features and can support more requirements. There is enough self-configuration and solution provider configuration options to support these hiring requirements. As a result, in our research few organizations cited “the system is too hard to use” as a top challenge.

One challenge that companies should consider during selection is the “right cultural fit” of the solution provider. During implementation, the provider and organization act as partners during this process to work together to meet requirements, roll out the system, and train employees on using the system. In this respect, the organization needs reassurance that their provider understands their business requirements and will truly act as a partner during this process.

Additional Costs

Most organizations need to set aside additional budgeting for training, configuration, and services that are often associated with implementation. Ask about additional costs not only during your solution provider evaluations but also during customer reference interviews.

The majority of organizations indicated that the amount of additional costs were minimal compared to what they expected, while 20% indicated more than expected and no additional costs. One area of concern is the 12% of companies that “don’t know” about the additional costs. Organizations and talent acquisition professionals especially should be fully aware of what they are spending on these systems in order to show the value and ROI or any discrepancies.

Integration

Integration is an essential component of talent acquisition systems. Best practice organizations consider integration during the implementation stages. Some solution providers provide integration toolkits to handle data structures and make a more seamless process. More commonly, integration should be examined on a case-by-case basis and needs to be custom-built depending on the needs of the organization.

Several years ago, the majority of organizations were not considering integration when selecting and implementing talent acquisition systems. They were making decisions without thinking about a more strategic view of talent. If integration is done correctly and can easily transfer data, organizations do not need to consider one large platform but rather individual systems that can work together. Unfortunately, integration is not a seamless process for most organizations and can cause problems for organizations that did not consider transferring this data during implementation. Today, organizations seem to be more mature in their view of identifying, developing, and retaining talent but still are not making integrating various systems a top priority. This is evident in the number of “N/A” responses with satisfaction in integration (see the graph, click it to enlarge). We recommend that organizations consider their current HRMS, talent management providers, third-party recruiting providers, Outlook, and social media when implementing their talent acquisition system.

Organizations can solve most of the challenges with integration if they begin this process during the implementation timeframe with a full team to support them including the implementation team and additional training and support.

Delivery Models

Although many of the solution providers offer multiple models, the majority of companies we research in both of our qualitative and quantitative survey results use an SaaS delivery model. Seventy-eight percent of companies access their talent acquisition over the Internet where the data is hosted externally, while only 22 percent have the ATS installed locally and running behind their organization’s firewall. The three main industries that have systems hosted internally are banking/finance, aerospace, and technology. These industries have high security needs and need to have more sensitivity around data privacy. As a result, they can not afford to take any chances in hosting these systems over the web.

SaaS has many benefits for both mid-sized and enterprise customers including affordability and scalability, but organizations need to perform due diligence and ask the following questions when implementing their systems:

1. Is there a license fee cost up front? Although SaaS allows for regular payments, some providers require a large amount of money and commitment upfront.
2. Is the data readily available? Organizations need to make sure they have all the information they need on their solution provider’s data center.
3. Internet availability? Does your organization have Internet access for every employee in the organization?
4. Does your provider offer a free trial? Many SaaS providers will offer a 30-day trial.

Global Implementation

As companies become more global in scope, implementing a talent acquisition system across multiple countries requires additional planning and support. Global implementation of a talent acquisition system can create a new set of challenges for organizations. In order to overcome obstacles such as localization and data privacy, we recommend that organizations understand both their global objectives and their local needs for each county they will be rolling out the system. Also, organizations should expect a longer implementation time when rolling out the system to various locations in order to address various across different geographical regions. Some of these global implementation challenges include:

• Differences with labor markets
• Differences in technology adoption
• Security issues/data privacy issues
• Translation resources
• Compliance and legal issues
• Gaining support from local offices

Despite these challenges, organizations will find great value in implementing a global system. Some of the benefits for organizations to implement a global system include:

• Standard quality of hire
• More consistency in the recruitment process
• Reduced costs using one system
• Increased reporting capabilities
• Increased communication

Organizations also need to plan for the future and consider what decisions and choices they will be making around their global workforce. How many languages will they need to support? Where will they expand? What support will be available? What is the level of technology adoption from region to region? Organizations should create planning committees and include representatives from each country to participate prior to implementation.

Making the Business Case

Implementing a talent acquisition system can provide results in streamlining the recruitment process and improving overall efficiency. McDonald’s UK is one example of a company that moved from a paper-based process to an online recruitment system. Shortly after, McDonald’s experienced a 30% reduction in 90-day turnover.

Although most organizations like McDonald’s UK will be able to measure this efficiency shortly after going live with their system, within the first few months of implementation, organizations need to continually evaluate and measure this efficiency to make a case for this system. The most common efficiencies experienced with the implementation of a talent acquisition system include time savings and compliance, two critical drivers of an organization’s decision to automate.

Here’s the data comparing this year and last.

Compensation Data For Executive Hires
(2008-2009)

As you review these positions, find out if there is a person or persons in the organization who could take that individual’s position should it become vacant. Document who could fill the void, and/or make note if there is no one who could fill the position, should it become vacant. You might also make note of any imminent retirements in any key positions over the next few years as well. Once complete, you will have a clear understanding of which positions you need to plan recruiting for and when that recruiting might be coming online. Make this a subset of your strategic workforce plan.

After you complete this top talent succession planning exercise, compute the following ratio:

Numerator: the number of top-tier positions with at least one fully qualified person who is ready to take the place of the incumbent.

Denominator: the total number of top-tier positions assessed.

This is what Jac Fitz-enz refers to as the “human capital readiness level.” According to Fitz-enz, “this is the percentage of key positions with at least one fully qualified (competent) person ready to take over now. Applying the readiness criterion to key positions yields a picture of what he calls the organization’s “general human capital health.”

As you make plans for succession over time, your ratio will go down. Track and measure this and share with your executives. This is a highly strategic exercise and of great value to your organization. Planning our workforce for the future, especially our key leadership positions, are the most important outcomes recruiting leaders can deliver to our organizations.

Imagine if every single one of your employees, from front-line staff to senior management, was 100% engaged, doing the work they were cut out for, contributing to the success of your organization by focusing on their core competencies.

Can you envision the collective power you would unleash? No laggards … just a company filled with rising stars. Absenteeism would drop instantly, worker defections to your competitors would cease entirely. Entire departments would start exceeding quotas.

You would become a preferred employer, and employee recruitment would be an exercise in picking the talent you wanted. Better yet, what if I told you this can be achieved and without the tremendous cost and resource drain of investing in hard-to-measure training programs? That long-sought-after seat at the management table would suddenly materialize for you.

Does this sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not. There is a beautifully simple tool called a “human capital development audit” that you can implement immediately to achieve these results.

Here’s how it works: For each employee in your organization, you match the roles and responsibilities of the job they are employed in with their skills, core competencies, and experience. Be as expansive and broad as possible in identifying their skills. Consider their academic training, software skills, certifications, professional development, leadership, cultural diversity … everything!

The diagram above illustrates a human capital audit conducted for the fictitious customer service rep Jessica Rivera. After identifying all the roles and responsibilities she is tasked with accomplishing, you then detail her skills. Use a spreadsheet and simply line up the roles and skills along one another in facing columns.

These should be obtained through interviews with Jessica, her current (and any past) managers, her coaches/mentors, peers she has worked with, etc.

After that is accomplished you drill down to identify which skill sets that she possesses that are not being used. In order to maximize the positive impact to your organization from an ROI perspective, you should prioritize those skills that she is not currently using, based on her ability to generate revenues, reduce costs, improve your organization’s processes, etc.

Next, you must develop an action plan for all of the highest priority non-leveraged skills that Jessica possesses. For each untapped skill, set a time frame for completion and any contingencies, or potential barriers, that would prevent her (and her manager) from making those untapped skills part of her newly redesigned job description.

In Jessica’s case, she is adept at using her persuasive, good-natured personality to suggest complimentary products to cross-upsell to her company’s existing clients. It’s her nature to take care of her clients, and she naturally knows how to ask probing questions. She also has an uncanny knack for being a leader on her team. She’s the one who other customer service reps in her unit turn to for advice, even before they engage their own line managers. These are powerful skills to have in a customer care manager and yet, in this scenario, they are not being used.

For this human capital audit to work, it has to be embraced by your senior management, owned by human resources, and conducted for all departments and levels of your organization. It should be reviewed quarterly, and merit-based compensation plans should be developed for employees that integrate untapped core competencies into their new roles and responsibilities.

Having said that, most HR professionals that I work with and lecture indicate this is not possible. They claim it is a big-time commitment, and doesn’t seem to be something that can be quantified, in terms of impact to the organization.

I would offer that, in this challenging economic environment, even if you only achieve a 50% increase in each employee’s productivity, the positive potential impact to your company would be great. I guarantee that a 50% increase in your entire organization’s productivity will force senior management to take notice of human resource’s role as a strategic partner in driving value through the organization.

The astute Shannon Seery Gude of the company Bernard Hodes says that employers aren’t always looking in the right place for answers to that question. They’re looking at Google Alerts, perhaps. Maybe Glassdoor. But, she says, they often neglect the Indeed Forums. “Look for your company and see what’s going on in the forums.”

She suggests searching for “working for IBM” – filling in your company name for IBM.

(I also tested out the use of quotes, by putting “working for Google” in quotes to sharply limit my results. And I couldn’t resist trying a search for Hodes.)

“What we will often find is the No. 1-returned search result in Google comes from the Indeed forums,” she says. That means job-seekers are ending up on Indeed, so recruiters should, too.

• Pipes. Yahoo’s tool allows you to “filter and process feeds.” Here’s one explanation.

• ConnectTweet. Multiple employees can Tweet through one handle. Best Buy does this. “It’s really unusual to have multiple employees represent one brand,” says Kahn.

• Retargeter.com. Actually, Kahn didn’t bring this one up; an attendee did. It’s the Hotel California of online-advertising tools. Your customers can leave your site any time they want — but you’ll follow. Here’s a similar tool, by the way.

• Job searches on Facebook. Add some code here, add a search box there, and voila, you may have come to the Best Buy Mobile page looking to read about the Palm Pre, and you ended up searching for a job.

• Jobs2Web. Marvin Smith, from Microsoft, will likely mention it on September 10.

• Yelp. Kahn likes it for reviews. I like it. Angie’s List isn’t bad either, though their telemarketers won’t stop calling me, asking me to write reviews.

• SlideShare. A site for sharing your documents, such as a PowerPoint file.

You’ll get much more detail there, but I wanted to whet your tastebuds with this sample paradigm for a workforce plan.

I. Workforce Analysis
a. Organization’s vision and strategy
b. Comprehensive internal employee analysis of core workforce
c. Analysis of labor market relative to your organization’s core workforce
d. Recruitment patterns
e. Turnover patters
f. Retirement patterns

II. Labor Projections
a. Forecast of anticipated core workforce needs
b. Demand of core workforce in the broader market — competition
c. Alignment to organization’s strategic plan

III. Gap Analysis
a. Documented disparity between where your organization is and where your organization needs to be over time (5 years, 10 years, 15 years)
b. By core workforce job category
c. Aggregate hiring needs

IV. Close the Gap (talent management)
a. Succession plan
b. Workforce development plan — training and education of staff; partnership with community education and training institutions
c. Retention plan
d. Recruitment plan
e. Compensation and benefits strategies that target the core workforce (total rewards)

Since I wasn’t part of the judging process (maybe next year), I don’t have their answers, but as a researcher, I do have lots of questions and so should you. Your company’s career website is the hub for all applicant traffic and you should be asking yourselves the hard questions about how it’s measuring up.

That’s where Web usability testing comes in handy. As the name implies, these are studies that enable you to evaluate your career site by testing it on users, employees, or even yourself.

In a study conducted almost exactly one year ago by Forrester Research entitled “Best and Worst of Career Web Sites,” the 12 websites examined all received failing scores due to poor performance and usability. Common problems included missing content and functions, flawed navigation flows, illegible text, and poor use of space. Do any of those sound familiar?

Step one is admitting you have a problem.

Usability testing can measure just about anything, but here are the key factors you need to consider:

Efficiency: How many steps did it take the user to accomplish pre-specified tasks (did the user develop carpal tunnel or fall asleep)? Was there a call to action? Was it easy to respond?

Performance: Did the user make any mistakes, and could they easily recover from them?

Recall: What information did the user remember afterwards. Does it communicate important information clearly and accurately?

Emotional connection: Would the user recommend the site to a friend? Is the site on-brand (i.e. did the experience match the expectation)? Did it make the user smile or cry?

Conduct your own Usability Research Study

After my last move, I set up the kitchen and called my kids in: “Quick! find me a bowl and spoon.” If they went for the right cabinet first, I knew I had successfully unpacked. They checked the dishwasher. Try again.

Your usability study will be a lot like that. Pick out a range of employees from various disciplines within your company and watch them perform 7 to 10 pre-determined tasks based on various scenarios. Be prepared with a pen and paper to take notes, and have a stopwatch ready so that you can measure time-on-task. Remember to reassure participants that their jobs are not on the line as you stand behind them with a stopwatch, or you’ll be witness to some rather erratic web browsing and sweaty palms. You won’t need to test it with more than five users. The first test will probably tell you 35% of all you need to know.

Task 1: First Impressions
Task 2: 5 minutes of free exploration (where did they go first, second, and third?)
Task 3: Learn about employee benefits (timed task)
Task 4: Apply for a job (timed task)
Task 5: Replace upload forms
Task 6: Give them a place to go (i.e. “job description”) and check the path they took
Task 7: Return Exploration: let them go anywhere they felt confused about or wanted to revisit. Capture the stops.

Save time at the end for some open-ended discussion on recall, branding and overall user experience. “What did you like best?” “What would you change?” While you’re at it, have some employees perform this test on one of your competitor’s sites. Use that as a benchmark for your site as you track it over time.

If the results are eye-opening (in a bad way), then it’s time for a sit-down with the head of your IT team. Be sure to come armed with the results of your test and a positive attitude, or you may experience some resistance. Have an open discussion about how to make usability improvements and offer your assistance in finding the right vendor that specializes in this work. Worse comes to worst, have your IT manager participate in your next usability study.

It was great to see the social media world, especially Twitter, come to life from the many people ‘tweeting’ live, up-to-the-minute posts during the presentations. You can still access the twitter stream to see some of the insightful tidbits shared by all of you.

For some other follow-up thoughts, check out some of the blog posts here, here, and here.

Naturally, we’re not done talking about it either. John Sullivan is working on a further look at some of the award-winners. And Tuesday on ERE.net we’ll offer tips for your careers website in hopes you can win next year’s site award like Yahoo did this time around. Accenture (employee-referral winner) will be featured in the May Journal, and the American Cancer Society will speak this Fall.

Speaking of the Fall: If you weren’t able to make it to San Diego, our annual ERE Expo 2009 Fall conference is approaching. Still a few weeks to take advantage of our big early bird discounts as well so check it out soon.

Here is what is going on in the ERE world this week:

• On Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. ET, our sister site debuts its newest Fordyce TV show – Living the Dream with Jordan Rayborn. Jordan has taken working virtually to the next level. Often called the RV Recruiter, this big biller works wherever his heart and business take him, and typically some of the most beautiful places in the country. This episode will be coming from the hill country outside of Austin, TX. See more about the show and Jordan’s story here.
• Also, in The Fordyce Letter world, the third annual Fordyce Forum is returning to Las Vegas in just a few months. If you are in the search and placement side of the business you won’t want to miss this.
• On Wednesday, sign up for this week’s free ERE webinar — 2009 Sources of Hire: What is Different in Today’s Market and Why You Should Care, led by Gerry Crispin from CareerXroads.
• Did you see that last week we announced the launch of our newest event – Social Recruiting Summit? The agenda is still being completed, but see where we are now and register for the early bird discount. If you are on Twitter, make sure to join the discussion by following @socrecruiting.
• A few weeks ago, we asked for your help as we are getting closer to launching the new community side of ERE.net. The other day we added some new features and are getting even closer! Here is your chance to help us help you develop the most valuable community in the recruiting industry, so take a look and let us know what you think!

Have a great week! If you have any questions about any of this feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Discover a Company’s Phone Number Prefixes

A telephone number’s prefix is the first three numbers after the area code. Often, the phone number for a company’s receptionist will have a different prefix than that of the direct-to-employee phone numbers. For instance, the receptionist might be 703-123-4567 whereas the employee numbers begin with 703-934-xxxx or 703-434-xxxx.

To discover the various prefixes, place the company name and area code in a Google search box and hit “enter.” If you’re lucky, you will come up with more than the main number as employees are often listed in various places with their direct lines.

I was recently researching the phone banks of a company that only used one prefix — the same one for the main number and employees. When this happens, it’s a good bet the “direct dials” are going to lie somewhere “around” the main number. For instance: The main number is 703 456 2000. Dialing 703 456 2001 and then 2002 and then 2003 will, many times, reveal employees seated behind those numbers. Pretty cool, huh?

I could tell looking at the Googled results that the numbers appeared to fall in the 5000, 6000, 7000, and 8000 ranges even though the main number fell in the 6000 range. This told me that I was probably dealing with a location that held 2-3,000 employees.

Call After Hours

The next thing you want to do is dial through a long list of consecutive numbers around the numbers you have found. The goal is to get the name associated with each number.

If someone answers, usually they don’t reveal their names. The best time to get the name is to call after hours and on the weekends when you are more likely to get voicemails.

Program Your Phone to Dial Repeated Numbers Automatically

When I am dialing through a long list of phone numbers that all begin with the same seven digits, I program these first seven numbers into my telephone to allow me to dial them by pressing one button.

What Voicemail Reveals

A few voicemails will contain not only a name but other information as well.

“This is Sheila Jones. I’ve begun my retirement but if you have issues with the WolfCamp project call so-and-so at the site at xxx xxx xxxx or so-and-so here at the main office. Her number is.”

“Hi. This is Mike Peterson. I’m traveling overseas on business and will be back in the office on March 31. The best way to reach me is my email — send me an e-mail at MPeterson@thecompany.sw.com and I’ll get right back to you.”

“Marcus Meters here, HR Manager for the southwest. I’m out of the office until April 6, but if your matter is urgent contact Sandra Morelli at xxx xxx xxxx or Elizabeth Southland at xxx xxx xxxx or Fred Kloppers at xxx xxx xxxx.” Man, is that the whole HR department, or are there more?

“Jim Delaney’s office. If you need to schedule some of his time, contact me, Rachel Evans, at xxx xxx xxxx.”

“I rarely check this location’s voice mail. To reach me, call my cell at xxx xxx xxxx. I’ll get right back to you.” (Oh, by the way, calling the cell number revealed the guy’s name!)

These tiny bits of information give you a feel for what’s going on inside a company. For instance, I found that all those people Marcus counted off fell within 10 numbers of his number. This is a pretty good clue that people who worked in the same departments shared extensions close to each other. This makes it easier to identify people with specific skill sets inside the organization.

Jim Delaney is important enough to have someone answering his phone and scheduling his time, so this is a pretty good indicator he is in upper management or maybe even a C level. Checking an information source like Hoover’s sometimes will reveal that (and the correct spelling of his name!)

By the way, Rachel sat three numbers away on the extension tree so this bolstered my suspicion that whole groups mostly hung together in the phone directory.

Mike Peterson was so gracious as to reveal the company’s email domain and that is of interest many times to the customer. He also told us his job includes oversees travel and is a hint that maybe he is engaged in project management? Sales? Business Development? Could be anything but those come first to my mind.

Cell numbers left on a voicemail often indicate that a person is working in a sales capacity.

If this kind of work is too time-consuming and monotonous for you, there are people out there who are dying to do this work for you. For about a buck a name you can capture a particular company’s telephone directory that includes names, direct-dials, a few titles, and some information that gives you an insider’s feel for a particular company’s location. Imagine what you could do with all that!

Let’s try to find some clarity. I’ll write about Google here. Though other search engines are similar in many ways, each has its own syntax, somewhat different from Google’s.

Google syntax does, of course, implement Boolean logic, though in a limited fashion. It’s not what I want to talk about here; I’d like to talk about the additional, “non-Boolean” part of Google. Google syntax (shall we call it Googlean?) contains much more than an implementation of Boolean logic.

There are operators and special characters that instruct Google on how to use keywords in a search string. One doesn’t need to learn about all of the operators to become successful in one’s searches, but adding a few operators to your search will help quite a bit. Here I’ll cover some operators that I think are a must for a serious web sourcer’s toolbox.

Part 1 of 2 “Googlean” and Special Characters

One very important special character is the minus “-”, and in fact the minus works as part of the Boolean logic implementation. If you use it in front of a word, no spaces in-between, then it will mean “NOT”: -jobs

(But if you write 7-3 in your string, Google will make a different guess and use its calculator instead — try it!)

Most Special Characters Are Ignored

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is trying to search the web for certain characters. In the majority of cases Google simply ignores special characters such as “@”. If you think your string with a “@” finds you this character in the search results, try to replace it with another special character of your choice and you’ll see the same results.

You almost never can search for any of @#$%^&*()=+[] and other special characters. There are some exceptions; for example, you can search for C# (a programming language), but these exceptional cases are few.

Quotation Marks

If you put a phrase in quotation marks, Google will look for the whole phrase. As an example, you could search for “Database Administrator”.

Interestingly, Google will recognize the operator OR within the quotes. You can search for
“Database Administrator OR Developer”
and you will find pages with either “Database Administrator” OR “Database Developer”.

Here are some sample uses.

Got a job post to work with? Use quotation marks to find out who is competing with you. Pick a several-words-long phrase from the job description, put it in quotation marks, and search for it on Google. You will land on all web pages that advertise the job.

Or, if you see a job description posted by a recruiter and you are interested who the client is, do the same as above, and you are likely to find the same job post made by the employer.

Looking for a person? If the person’s name is rare enough, putting it in quotes and Googling it may help. I also use Google advanced image search with the “faces” option and often land on the person’s blog or homepage.

Asterisk

Asterisk * is a very mysterious symbol in Google. Though it formally means “some words,” in reality (or is it better to say in practice?) it stands for “one word or very few words.” (The symbol * does not stand for a part of a word on Google as it does elsewhere.)

Here’s a quick example showing how it works. Search for “Oracle * Administrator” (plus keywords) and you will find Oracle Database Administrator, Oracle Discoverer Administrator, etc.

The asterisk * is actually a very powerful tool. Here are some uses.

If you are looking for an email pattern for a company or are trying to collect email addresses, you can use
“email * companyname.com” or
“mailto * companyname.com “

Since the symbol * typically stands for one word, you can add more asterisks to these strings and get different results.
(”email * * companyname.com” etc.)

Please note that since Google ignores special symbols, including the symbol @ in your strings is not necessary.

Here’s one of my favorite sourcing “tricks.” You can look for phrases and land on blogs, forums, and homepages, not resumes, but this may put you ahead of the competition if they only look for resumes.

Here are examples of Google searches for phrases. This would bring up pages written by people who work or used to work for or have something to do with Accenture. (Replace Accenture with your target company name.) Add your keywords to these strings to narrow down the searches:

“I work * Accenture”
“I am * Accenture”
“when I * Accenture”
etc.

You can use phrases as a research tool. You can be really creative!

Note that we didn’t even use Boolean logic in these last few examples but we got interesting results.

Tilde ~ and Plus +

Tilde in front of a word means any word “like” this word. It needs to be used with care since you have no control over what Google may think is “like” your word. However, if the number of results is small or if you suspect you may not know of some synonyms for your keyword, using the tilde may help.

The plus sign in front of a word tells Google to use exactly this word. This may be useful for two reasons. One, Google typically ignores what they call “stop” words, meaning very common short words like “the” or “in”. If you put a plus + in front of the, it will be included for sure. Two, Google “auto stems” which means that it will look for some variations of a word you include; if you search for manager it will show results with management as well. Put a plus in front of manager and the results will contain exactly this word. (Sorry, this may sound a little too technical, but it’s important to understand how your results are put together.)

Here is a good summary of using special characters.

Part 2 of 2 Google Operators

Let’s take a deep breath, stretch, walk around a bit, and move on to the second part of my story, Google Operators.

Operators are special words that Google recognizes that instruct it to treat keywords in a special fashion.

X-ray

The operator site: tells Google to look only within a specific website; this is commonly referred to as X-raying.

How can you use it? As an example, there are certain sites that are likely to have resumes posted, such as resumebucket.com
On Google, search for
site:resumebucket.com <your keywords>

to find resumes. I would search for
site:resumebucket.com Java weblogic

to find resumes of people with those skills on the site resumebucket.com.

inurl:

This operator tells Google to go only to the pages that have a given word in their URL (URL means “web address”). Since all LinkedIn profiles have either “in” or “pub” in the addresses, we can search for LinkedIn profiles like this:
site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub <keywords>

Let’s combine this with the phrase search we discussed previously. Here’s an example:

site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available <your industry and/or location keywords here>

The string
site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available SAP ~Consult
will look for profiles that have the word SAP and a variation of “consult” such as consultant or consulting.

intitle:

…will be the last operator to discuss today. It tells Google to look for the given word in the title of a web page.

Since the introduction of social networks, we have started searching for “profiles.” Profiles on a given network often have a similar structure to the page titles and/or URLs. If you figure out the structure, you could use it to look for profiles from a given site or a network. Here are a couple of examples, in addition to the LinkedIn example above.

Look for someone on social networks:
site:ning.com intitle:page <name here>

Look for resumes on craigslist:
site:craigslist.org inurl:res <keywords>

There are many more Google operators (see here for descriptions) but you can get very far by using just the ones I have mentioned.

If you are interested in the subject, please join our network called (as we now know, somewhat inappropriately) Boolean Strings Network. We discuss all sides of web searches and sourcing there. See you online!

Right Management had International Communications Research conduct the study in 28 countries. Of the 1,524 survey responses received, 45% were from the Americas (including 456 from the United States), 34% were from Europe, and 21% were from Asia Pacific.

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

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.

A common theme that I usually hear when I discuss recruiting in Second Life is “Second Life is great for technical organizations recruiting young IT talent like Java programmers, but it really would not address our needs.”

There are many reasons why non-technical organizations can benefit from recruiting in SL. Most organizations would agree categorically across industries that there is a growing demand for a technically proficient employee base outside of the IT department, especially as more baby boomers head off for retirement and web 2.0 applications proliferate in the enterprise. There is a compelling benefit to having access to a geographically diverse pool of candidates during these tumultuous economic times, when fuel costs are exceedingly difficult to manage as well as travel budgets. Value is also realized by branding and screening in a virtual world that is typically the domain of leading organizations.

There are also numerous arguments that can be put forth as to why non-technical organizations will not be successful recruiting in SL. There is limited information on either technical or non-technical employees who have actually been hired through an interview conducted in SL. There should be more information readily available if this was a frequent occurrence. Virtual job fairs and islands of employment are not well-known, and I’m sure many job seekers have no interest in engaging in a virtual world. Even if a non-technical person did find a job fair and decide to participate, there is the challenge of operating within SL. It takes time to become adept at controlling your avatar and getting the right appearance for an interview.

What type of employees if any are being hired in SL?

Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy engagement at EMC, discusses a recent experience EMC had with career fairs in Second Life. EMC generated two hires for its effort. One hire was a developer with an accomplished IT skill set and the other a financial controller who had experience with large, global organizations. An article by ThinkBalm mentions the Accenture Career Island in SL paid for itself after five or six events, which I am guessing focused on recent college graduates.

The foodservice firm Sodexho is probably one of the last organizations one would expect to be recruiting at job fairs in for IT talent. MSNBC published an article on “How your fantasy life can get you a real job.” The article follows the journey of Ray Giordano, a job candidate rather new to SL, as he prepares to participate in a Sodexho job fair at the suggestion of a Sodexho recruiter. This is a caveat to others that it might be worth the investment to learn the basics of SL in case you also end up in this situation. The job candidate’s efforts in learning the nuances of SL eventually paid off and led to a job as a chef in the senior services division of Sodexho.

The Vancouver Sun wrote about the efforts of the Vancouver Police recruiting talent in SL. Inspector Kevin McQuiggin, in charge of the department’s tech crimes division, notes almost every major crime has a technical aspect to it. “Any new media that comes out, any new form of communication, crime is going to migrate there. As we move into the future, we’re going to need people who understand technology — that are conversant with it, that understand the impact of it, and understand how to use it,” McQuiggin says. Given the prevalence of identity theft and various cybercrimes that continue to challenge police departments not often equipped for the technical challenges, McQuiggin has an excellent point. I have yet to see any hard data on how many hires this effort has generated.

Toronto law firm Davis LLP is also open to recruiting in SL. The SL office was opened by the law firm’s Video Game Law & Interactive Entertainment Group. “The virtual world of Second Life gives us the opportunity to interact with our current and potential clients in a unique way,” says Dani “Lemon Darcy” Lemon at Davis LLP. “We also aim to generate business leads and attract job candidates for our bricks-and mortar business through Second Life.” SL may prove to be an ideal location for finding attorneys adept at defending the misappropriation of the intellectual property of others in the virtual realm. Still, given the specifics of practicing law in a specific locale, I would guess this is a very difficult area to recruit talent in.

The potential of recruiting talent in SL is vast but there is not a large amount of information suggesting this has been highly successful yet. The growing demand for technical talent may eventually lead others to leverage SL for connecting with talent as the generational shift in the workforce accelerates. SL may one day become a leading recruiting tool, but I think many would agree the verdict is still out.

Targeted sourcing is the second step in hiring top performers, as shown in this chart (click to enlarge) illustrating the complete quality of hire process, from Taleo Research.

Most recruiters instinctively return to the same source when searching for candidates, because historically the source has produced a quick response from a large number of prospects with the required skills. But a deeper dive into employee turnover statistics and performance ratings might result in some surprises about the quality of the candidates secured through each source, according to Andrew Carges, vice president of worldwide talent acquisition for Success Factors.

Carges says that he found first-year turnover was high for employees sourced through agencies, during his experience at SuccessFactors and in his previous roles as a talent leader. A closer review as to why those employees left revealed that many had a history of job-hopping, and he concluded that employees represented by recruiters were frequently hunting for new opportunities and had easy access to other positions. Now he evaluates source effectiveness and its impact on quality of hire.

“To drive quality of hire, compare the employee’s first-year performance rating to their hiring source and the cost of hire,” says Carges. “It’s something every company can do to evaluate the effectiveness of the hiring source in delivering top performers and value.”

(See the example of hiring-source analysis provided by SuccessFactors.)

Managers frequently request candidates with previous industry experience because they believe it’s a predictor of on-the-job success. That hiring criteria often limits the sources recruiters can tap to find experienced prospects. A review of the employees’ actual performance ratings and the competencies possessed by top performers might be the first step in shifting the hiring paradigm, which in turn opens the door for new sources of hire.

At R.L. Polk & Co., a review of the company’s top performers revealed that previous industry experience had little correlation to job performance, according to Jay Marshall, manager of talent acquisition. In fact, the requirement accelerated the cost of hire because candidates came from a boutique industry and often had to be enticed with higher salaries.

And at the same time, industry dynamics were changing, forcing employees into more business-facing roles that required different skills. As Marshall dug a bit deeper into what was really making employees successful, an entirely new profile began to emerge.

“When I looked at the behavior behind the performance, it was driven by teamwork,” says Marshall. “The bottom line is that it really altered what we were looking for, and now we look for team players with strong business acumen. That opened up many new candidate sources, and our average cost of hire has dropped $10,000 in the last 24 months.”

Today, Marshall says he no longer worries about how long it takes his team to hire new employees or how much a new hire costs, because by focusing on quality of hire, he has improved all the recruiting metrics at Polk.

Without sounding like an Apple sales representative, I discovered that the iPhone opens up a huge playing field specifically for recruiters and sourcers who frequently travel, work in the field, or who work virtually.

The iPhone acts like a mini-computer, where users can access work email, use the Internet, read and produce documents, take notes, and stay organized all while on the run away from an office setting. The iPhone offers a view of the Internet that is exactly the same one would see through a web browser on a desktop computer. With new 3G wireless speeds and advanced security features, the iPhone is now also a very safe product to allow mobile access to systems, programs, sensitive files, key company information, and important documents.

With this in mind, the iPhone can significantly boost recruiter productivity and help to shorten the time-to-fill cycle for open positions. When a recruiter is moving between appointments offsite, the iPhone can access an ATS to update candidate information, grab key files on a shared drive online, or produce a report and email in a timely fashion to various managers and team members.

Major companies, in addition to popular social and business networks, have taken notice of the power and usability of the iPhone by offering “mobile” and iPhone versions of their websites, as well as downloadable software applications. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, Google, Yahoo, FriendFeed, Pownce, Salesforce, Oracle, and Digg, which all have various uses and functionality for recruiters and sourcers.

CareerBuilder has jumped on board as well, and offers an “iPhone” friendly application, although the early version is more geared toward job seekers. There are even applications which help iPhone users “record” their voice and take recorded notes to access at a later time.

The iPhone is the only product for recruiters and sourcers that offers such a unique and wide-ranging combination of tools in a small handheld device. Think about it. A recruiter can sit in the back of a taxi cab, flip through profiles on LinkedIn, check those potential candidates against an ATS, double-check these names in recruiting reports, call and screen the candidates, type, voice record, and update notes, and finally email resumes and a candidate presentation to a hiring manager. All this from one device.

But a successful negotiation doesn’t mean coming out on top with a low-ball offer that gets accepted. That can cause the candidate to get turned off and in the worst-case result in the candidate walking away. Even if accepted, it could leave the candidate with a sour taste in the mouth and essentially starting off with a negative attitude toward the employer. An overly generous offer on the other hand is a waste of the employer’s resources and can upset internal equity. Getting it right is not easy as few recruiters are trained in negotiating.

The number of books that have been written on negotiating can fill a large room — several thousand are in print. But an easier approach can be discerned from recent research at Northwestern University. A study by Prof. Adam Galinsky and his colleagues suggests that a powerful way to influence the outcome to be closer to a win-win situation is to view the situation from the candidate’s perspective — also know as the perspective-taking approach.

What this means and how it works is explained below, but the research has demonstrated that recruiters using such an approach consistently achieve the highest level of economic efficiency, without sacrificing their own material interests. They produce a better overall outcome for both sides.

Getting Inside the Candidate’s Head

The perspective approach means try to get inside the candidate’s head. To achieve an understanding of the candidate — their motives and likely behaviors — consider the world from their viewpoint. Basically, put yourself on their side of the table. This is not as ridiculous as it may appear. The research demonstrates that recruiters adopting such an approach achieve the best possible outcome close to half the time.

To be able to do this well recruiters need to do their homework before arriving at the negotiation. First, have an understanding of the likely issues. These always fall into three categories.

1) Distributive: issues for which the parties’ preferences are diametrically opposite. For example, the candidate wants a higher salary and the recruiter wants to pay a lower one.

2) Compatible: issues on which the parties’ preferences are identical. For example, the job location.

3) Integrative: issues on which the parties have different high and low priorities. For example, bonus and vacation time. The candidate may care more about the bonus amount because of a belief in her own ability to earn it. The recruiter may care more about getting the candidate to accept a smaller amount of vacation since that represents guaranteed income.

The solution to the disagreements is not to split everything down the middle, but rather to try and maximize the joint outcomes. That requires having a good idea about what makes the candidate tick — taking their perspective. Recruiters need to make an effort during the interview process to gauge what is important to a candidate. An assessment can help to fill out the picture, but even without that it’s important to pick up cues about what drives a candidate. That does not mean to ask questions that are unrelated to the job, but to probe for what a candidate considers important or not.

Head not Heart

There is a danger that a recruiter attempting to take the candidate’s perspective may end up empathizing with them — that is, show compassion for the candidate’s situation. Successful negotiation, especially where economic outcomes are involved, do not require having an emotional connection with the other party. The research demonstrated that empathizing recruiters achieved the poorest individual outcomes, and the gains went almost entirely to the candidates.

It’s better to “think for” than to “feel for” the candidate. It is more beneficial to get inside their heads than to have them in your heart.

Conclusion

Taking the perspective approach is easier said than done. It requires serious effort to try and understand a candidate, based on a lot of information that may not be readily available to the individual handling the offer negotiation. The more people who are involved in the selection process, the harder this gets, especially since most interviewers do a poor job of documenting what they learn about a candidate. Recruiters may also be constrained by the extent of flexibility they have in negotiating particular issues.

That being said, the Galinsky research does show that a failure to take a disciplined approach to an offer negotiation will produce a poor outcome for all concerned. Ultimately, organizations that fail to recognize this will suffer the consequences of losing good talent.