That’s a remarkable number, which, even if is skewed by respondents with very in-demand skills, would still go a long way to explaining why you’re not getting calls back. In fact, the survey shows that IT professionals are picky about whose call they will return.

The best thing a recruiter can do when leaving a message or speaking with a potential candidate is to be as detailed about the job as possible. Hearing details about the specific job, the team, the nature of the work, and the company culture is the kind of information that would lead 88 percent of the survey respondents to return the call.

Less important, but still high on the list for the IT professionals surveyed, is the professionalism of the recruiter and the reputation of the company.

“The best recruiters take the time to get to know the client and the candidate in detail. He or she with the most intelligence wins the matchmaking process,” says TEKsystems Director, Rachel Russell.

The findings come from the company’s quarterly IT Professional Perspectives Survey, which surveyed 2,424 IT workers last quarter about how they look for jobs. First, when a tech worker begins to consider a new job, they take stock of their skills, goals, and interests. Then, 96 percent say they hit the job boards.

“Job boards are the quickest way for IT professionals to feel like they’re getting out there and searching for a job,” says Russell. “But given that so many people are on the job boards, it’s a hard place to stand out.”

Perhaps knowing that, once a tech job seeker finds interesting opportunities, the next step for 72 percent of them is to network with other professionals. At some point, many will work with a recruiter. According to the survey, 59 percent say a recruiter is the main resource; 54 percent say colleagues; 53 percent say friends; and, 46 percent rely on their networks.

Recruiters who help job seekers, even if they don’t end up placing them, may still reap rewards. With 45 percent of the survey respondents saying they have 10 or more top professionals in their network, recruiters who remain accessible, helpful, and professional may be able to get a referral. The survey found 65 percent of IT professionals willing to share names if they had a positive experience with the recruiter.

“Most predictions,” says an economic analysis by the Society for Human Resource Management, “are less optimistic now than they were when 2011 began.”

What especially worries economists is whether the slow job growth is due to employer cautiousness — in which case growth will accelerate when economic confidence returns — or whether it is structural, meaning some jobs have been permanently eliminated, much the way automation obsoleted elevator operators.

“It is a fair bet that aggregate demand remains the main problem while pockets of skills mismatches persist, despite the high number of job seekers,” says the SHRM analysis.

The latest economist to weigh in is Gad Levanon, director of macroeconomic research for The Conference Board. Last week, he dissected recoveries of the past to examine the rate of job growth across multiple industries. What he found is that “the current employment recovery is the second slowest on record.”

His analysis led him to conclude that job growth this year is going to be a lot like last year.

Like Huang, the St. Louis Federal Reserve doesn’t see unemployment moving much below 7 percent before 2014 and even then, the Fed says it might even be up around 8 percent. That’s despite the Fed’s guess that real GDP is likely to be over 3 percent, possibly even up to around 4 percent.

Levanon’s analysis, though, offered some support for the SHRM view that it is weak demand that’s limiting job growth. One look at the chart and two things jump out. The first is how small the percentages are now compared to recoveries of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The other is how robust the growth in temporary workers is.

The latter is a good sign. It suggests, at least, that the current pace of job growth is likely to continue. While a nearly 32 percent growth in temporary staffing since June 2009 would historically signal a spurt in full-time job growth, that may not be the case in this recovery. Instead, it may evidence that some structural changes are occurring in how employers manage their workforce.

This is not the same as automation eliminating jobs, but is a response to business cycles — as when retailers add staff in the fall for the holiday season — or project-based needs, or the natural ebb and flow. In other words, more employers may be including the use of temps as a strategic part of their workforce, and not merely as a precursor to fulltime hiring.

This so-called “secular growth” theory is certainly debatable. A Morgan Stanley research paper last spring challenged the notion that temporary and contract workers are becoming a strategic part of corporate employment in the U.S. and worldwide.

However, in a provocative and data-laden analysis of the staffing industry, BMO Capital Markets says “it may be different this time.” While the firm doubted the secular growth notion, now it’s not so sure. The research report issued earlier this month says:

However, by this point in the cycle, we should have seen a significant switch from “temp” to “perm,” but we have not; temp jobs represented nearly 15% of totals jobs added in the current recovery – by far the highest of the first 21 months in the past six post-recession periods – and given the current sluggish rebound, total employment may not return to its pre-recession peak for the first time ever.

There’s evidence now, says BMO, that the proponents of secular growth may be right “and the industry is seeing some secular growth as corporations use temporary staffing more strategically as part of their overall human resource policies.”

Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. Rather than continue time-consuming and expensive external searches, more hiring managers will opt to go with an almost-ready internal candidate who is a good cultural fit and is willing to learn fast. Although hiring managers may push back at this, management will encourage it, and the increasing difficulty in finding and recruiting top talent will help accelerate the trend.

Over the next few years there will be a move to enlarge the skills of current employees so they can be moved around to different functions as demand fluctuates. Employee development will morph from delivering training, to providing accelerated apprenticeships, developing simulations, and finding ways to encourage informal and on-the-job learning.

Recruiters should focus on encouraging hiring managers to look at these internal employees, encourage them to hire internally, and develop better internal talent communities to expose hiring managers to talented employees and employees to opportunities.

Social Goes Mobile

When recruiting does look externally, more of it will happen on mobile devices. The explosion of Android and iPhone apps means fewer potential candidates will be using traditional computers.

Clearly candidates with technical edge and savvy — the ones you are probably the most interested in hiring — will be spending most of their time on smart phones, iPads, and other tablets. If you have not developed specific recruiting apps that take advantage of these mobile platforms, you will be at a disadvantage as we roll into the middle of 2012.

More applicant tracking systems are now capable of using a social profile rather than a resume, and as most candidates already have such a profile it only makes sense that they use it to apply for a position.

Everything from branding to screening to even doing interviews is moving to mobile platforms and using such things as simulations, video, and chat. Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other major players will introduce more mobile apps and functionality during this year.

By the end of 2012, the traditional career site will be mostly obsolete. If it exists at all will be little more than the place where the candidate makes the formal application. Smart firms will make everything they do mobile-friendly and compatible and encourage candidates to interact more with hiring managers, other employees, and even alumni in online forums, chat rooms, Twitter chats, and via video, Skype, and other similar media.

Just-in-time Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing has already moved from searching static databases to using social media, and this trend will continue to grow. Rather than build proprietary databases or talent pools, recruiters can participate in and look for potential candidates in many different online forums and communities. As almost all professionals have an online presence, whether in LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere, and as many are also likely participating in Twitter chats, Facebook conversations, and so on. Searching for talented people is getting easier each month.

A recruiter can find an interesting potential candidate, start a conversation, provide the candidate with a variety of information sources about the organization and position, and even direct the candidate to screening apps and apps that allow the candidate to apply.

Recruiters can also use their network of current employees, alumni, friends, and colleagues to crowdsource good candidates and leverage referrals.

Entire recruiting campaigns can be run in a matter of days or weeks by using referrals, crowdsourcing, social media, mobile technologies, and by rethinking the recruitment process. Through streamlining, simplification and by getting hiring managers more involved, candidates can be found, screened, assessed, and hired in days.

Continued Rise of Contingent Workers

The use of contractors, part-time employees, and consultants has soared during the recession. And it will continue to grow for two reasons: the first is that it provides employers with the flexibility they seek to manage costs and headcount easily and much more cheaply than by frequent layoffs. Second, many people are finding that contingent employment suits their lifestyle and interests well. They can plan other activities around their work schedules, they can budget according to the amount of time they are willing to work, and they get variety in the kind of work they do and who they work for.

It will be hard to return to the model of employment where just about everyone is a regular employee. Strategies changes frequently, world events and business cycles make it necessary to adjust priorities more often than ever before, and people are less and less willing to commit to a long-term employment arrangement that is uncertain and stressful.

The Beginning of Applied Analytics

Look for more vendors to offer analytical software specifically for human resources and recruiting. We will begin to see how various independent events have an effect on the quality of hire by tapping into data hidden away in their ATS and HRIS systems. They will begin to seriously track and use data to decide the best sources of candidates, what key traits lead to retention and on-the-job success, and where they can reduce costs or efforts and still get good results.

All in all, the economy and the election will dominate this year and, as a result, this should be a year of modest employment growth, a focus on hiring returning military veterans, and even more growth in outsourcing volume recruiting and hard-to-fill positions to RPOs.

Think that’s an odd question? How about this one: What do you think of garden gnomes?

Glassdoor has 23 more questions just like those, compiled from thousands of interview questions posted to the employer review site during the last year by job seekers, some charmed, others perplexed, and some completely flummoxed by these kinds of oddball questions.

Pity the poor job seeker who did just what all the advice books and columnists advise — researched the company, read up on the industry, prepared for the inevitable “Tell me about your weaknesses” — only to be asked, “Please spell diverticulitis.”

The candidate didn’t get the job, but rated the interview “easy.” The relevance of the spelling test to the position as an Engineering Account Manager is hard to fathom.

However, more than a few of the questions that made the Glassdoor list evidence some connection with the underlying job. There’s the engineering candidate asked to solve this puzzle: “Given 20 “destructible” light bulbs (which break at a certain height), and a building with 100 floors, how do you determine the height that the light bulbs break?” And the candidate for a position as a demand planning analyst who was asked, “How many planes are currently flying over Kansas?”

Like Google’s famous (infamous?) interview questions, which are intended to elicit a candidate’s analytical skills, some of the Glassdoor questions fall into that category. What’s more, these kinds of oddball questions are becoming more common.

The Wall Street Journal says, “Weird interview questions have become a meme, like a joke or a viral video. It’s catchiness, rather than proof of their effectiveness, that keeps them in circulation at many companies.”

The notion, though, that the traditional interview doesn’t really yield a whole lot, is gaining mainstream currency. The Journal article describes a Harvard experiment in which observers who viewed 10 seconds of an interview had similar views of the candidate as did the interviewer themselves. Thus the effort to find alternatives.

In the Glassdoor collection, the planes over Kansas question seems intended to see how well a candidate for a job planning for consumer demand can analyze fuzzy situations. The breakable light bulb test tests both math skills and a candidate’s skill at engineering simplicity. (Incidentally, here’s a solution that takes only 14 bulbs.)

While questions like these have a connection to the jobs, and others are intended to test for fit, more than a few give every sign of being conjured by interviewers for no obvious good reason. The candidate with the garden gnome question described it, and others, during two days of interviews for a clerk position with Trader Joe’s as “bizarre.”

Even so, it wasn’t the questions that left the candidate with a sour taste for the experience. Instead, it was the classic case of failing to communicate. According to the review, even though promised a response, and even after repeated contacts, it wasn’t until weeks later that the candidate learned from an employee at the store that the position had been filled.

About that elephant, “open the door and tell it to go in.”

An “informal discussion letter” just posted to the EEOC’s website says that under certain circumstances, requiring a diploma may run afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the requirement screens out persons unable to earn a diploma because of a bonafide disability, the employer has to justify the requirement as job-related and consistent with business necessity.

Doing that for some jobs isn’t going to be easy. Employers almost as a matter of routine include at least a high school degree requirement in every job posting, including for janitors and cleaners. The U.S. Labor Department, however, says, “Most building cleaning workers, except supervisors, do not need any formal education and mainly learn their skills on the job or in informal training sessions sponsored by their employers.”

Informal discussion letters aren’t policy. That’s up to the Commission members. However, employment lawyers see the letter as signaling the possibility that the EEOC may be looking to step up its enforcement of other provisions.

Says Proskauer Rose attorney Nigel F. Telman, “I could see them potentially … saying at some point” that a high school diploma requirement “may have a disparate impact on a particular class of people.”

For instance, 87.1 percent of the U.S. population older than 24 has a high school degree. However, only 62.9 percent of Hispanics do. So requiring a degree does have a disparate impact nationally. That alone isn’t illegal. But it does mean you’ll have to justify the requirement as both job related and consistent with business necessity.

If it’s the ADA that’s involved, you’d also have to also establish that with or without an accommodation the disabled person is unable to do the job.

The EEOC letter spells out the process:

…if an employer adopts a high school diploma requirement for a job, and that requirement “screens out” an individual who is unable to graduate because of a learning disability that meets the ADA’s definition of “disability,” the employer may not apply the standard unless it can demonstrate that the diploma requirement is job related and consistent with business necessity. The employer will not be able to make this showing, for example, if the functions in question can easily be performed by someone who does not have a diploma.

Even if the diploma requirement is job related and consistent with business necessity, the employer may still have to determine whether a particular applicant whose learning disability prevents him from meeting it can perform the essential functions of the job, with or without a reasonable accommodation. It may do so, for example, by considering relevant work history and/or by allowing the applicant to demonstrate an ability to do the job’s essential functions during the application process. If the individual can perform the job’s essential functions, with or without a reasonable accommodation, despite the inability to meet the standard, the employer may not use the high school diploma requirement to exclude the applicant.

Cautions a blog post from the employment firm of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz:

As a practical matter, employers should now be prepared for the EEOC to second guess whether their educational requirements are job related and consistent with what the EEOC believes to be a business necessity.

 

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

LinkedIn ran a distant second, with 46 percent of job seekers attributing their job to that business-oriented network. Twitter, the short messaging network, got a thumbs-up for its job help from 36 percent.

Those are among the findings of Jobvite’s Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 released this morning. The survey doesn’t say how the social networking helped the job-seekers. Other data suggests it may mean seekers researched the companies on social networks, reached out to their contacts for information, got a referral, or were contacted directly. Since most job seekers use more than one social network, the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.

In terms of sheer numbers, the results are not too surprising. Facebook has in excess of 800 million members, while LinkedIn has about 135 million. What is surprising, however, is that by an even larger margin recruiters in an earlier Jobvite survey reported making hires through LinkedIn.

Nevertheless, regardless of which social network they prefer, job seekers with the most contacts do more job hunting and get better results than their counterparts with fewer than 150 connections, friends, or followers. Of these “super social” job seekers as Jobvite calls them, 28 percent found a job directly through their online social networking.

As you might expect, Facebook has the largest percentage of super social job seekers — 37 percent — compared to LinkedIn’s 10 percent and Twitter’s 11 percent. Super socials, as the Jobvite survey discovered, are young and strong earners: 62% percent are under 40; 42 percent earn over $75,0;0, and 40 percent have a college degree. They divide almost evenly on gender with 49 percent female.

“Our new national survey shows that socially savvy job seekers have an advantage over their fellow job hunters and it’s paying off,” said Dan Finnigan, Jobvite president and CEO. “While referrals are still the top source of new jobs, online social networks play an increasingly important role in job hunting today.”

One curious data point is the number of workers who, Jobvite reports, say they find their job through social networking. Jobvite puts the count at more than 22 million, an increase of 7.6 million since its 2010 survey. If that’s accurate, then 15.8 percent of the 48 million jobs filled in the year ending Sept. 30 would be the result of social networks.

From Washington, where Michelle Obama announced yesterday that corporate leaders will hire 100,000 vets and military spouses in the next two years, to a Phoenix job fair today where Chase Bank is encouraging veterans to attend its job fair, the focus has been on addressing veteran hiring. Late Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a veterans jobs bill.

Without a doubt, it is a worthy effort. But it is also one that faces challenges very much like those plaguing the civilian employment situation. The fact of the matter is that unemployed veterans look a whole lot like unemployed civilians: young and undereducated.

A second, smaller, but still substantial problem, is the one facing Reservists and the National Guard: multiple call-ups and the legal obligation to rehire them when they return from duty, makes many employers reluctant to hire them in the first place.

Testifying before Congress four years ago, Ted Daywalt, CEO and president of Vetjobs.com and himself a veteran, said, “The military knows that returning members of the National Guard and Reserve are having civilian re-employment problems.” He told a Congressional committee back then that VetJobs received several calls a month from veterans telling how they were asked about their interest in the Guard or the reserves. “While the question is illegal, it is occurring.”

“Most disturbing,” he added, “as this trend grows, returning National Guard and Reserve personnel — the very people who have been fighting to keep the United States free — will find it harder to obtain meaningful employment equal to their education and experience.”

Little has changed, Daywalt says, since his testimony to Congress. “If you are leaving the military today,” he told me just a few months ago, “companies want to hire you, until they find out you’ve joined the Reserves or are in the Guard.” The call-ups of Reservists and the National Guard may have abated, but employers who had to endure the loss of people in key positions they couldn’t fill or, if they did, had to figure out what to do when the employee returned from service, those employers are reluctant risk it again.

That may explain why the rate of unemployment for the Guard and Reservist veterans of this century’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was 14 percent last year. For all veterans, including the Guard and Reserves, the rate was 11.5 percent.

Under federal law, “returning service members are to be reemployed in the job that they would have attained had they not been absent for military service, with the same seniority, status and pay, as well as other rights and benefits determined by seniority.”

Officially the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act and known by its initials, USERRA, the law is supposed to protect returning vets from being penalized for their active duty service. But, Daywalt says, small and mid-sized employers in particular have found ways to game the system, out of necessity, he adds, not malice. One of the examples he offered in our discussion was of a company where the HR department laid off workers before the acutal call-up orders were issued, thus circumventing the USERRA rules.

According to the Department of Labor, in fiscal 2010, there were 34,612 calls to the customer service center run by the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. ESGR is typically the first place employers and veterans turn for help with the requirements of USERRA. Of those contacts, 3,202 resulted in actual cases that required mediation.

When a formal complaint is filed by a veteran, an investigation is launched, which can, though rarely does, lead to a federal prosecution. In fiscal 2010, there were 1,438 new cases; 117 were referred to the Justice Department. Five resulted in DOJ complaints.

Just this month the Justice Department settled a case against Lowe’s, which fired a National Guardsman without cause within a year of his reemployment. Lowe’s paid $45,000 to the fired veteran.

Although, as Daywalt’s Congressional testimony points out, the Guard is also subject to being called out with some frequency for natural disasters, the reemployment and discrimination problems should diminish with the reduction of overseas forces. Less tractable is the high unemployment of young veterans.

Despite what seems to be a prevalent theme that veterans can’t find jobs, the reality is that it is veterans under 25 who are having the most problems finding work.

For all veterans, regardless of age, the unemployment rate last year was 8.7 percent. For the nation, it was 8.8 percent. (The percentages are not seasonally adjusted.) But as you drill down, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics did in a special report on veterans, it becomes obvious quickly that veterans 18-24 are faring the worst. Last year, 20.9 percent of them were unemployed. Those 25-34 had an unemployment rate of 12.6 percent.

Not to minimize the problem, but young vets aren’t much worse off than the youth population generally, especially when you consider the participation rates: more vets are in the labor force than civilians their age. The BLS data for 2010 says the unemployment rate for all 16-24 year-olds was 18.4 percent. (The data for just the 18-24 year group isn’t available. However, the BLS rates for 18-19 year olds in 2010 was 24.2, and 15.5 percent for 20-24 year olds.)

Says the BLS, “In general, Gulf War-era II (Iraq and Afghanistan this century) veterans had unemployment rates that were not statistically different from those of non-veterans of the same gender and age group.” The BlS might also have added educational level to that statement.

Gulf War II vets older than 24 had an overall unemployment rate of 10.2 percent. Those with only a high school degree had a rate of 12.7 percent and about the same for those with some college. However, only 3.9 percent of vets with a college degree were unemployed.  Last month, 4.2 percent of the U.S. labor force with a college degree was unemployed. (The number of vets who didn’t graduate high school was too small to include.)

Thursday, the U.S. Senate approved a bill giving employers tax breaks for hiring disabled and unemployed veterans, and, of particular importance to younger veterans,  providing education and job training benefits.

The jobs report we wrote about today was more of the so-so stuff, with fears of a recession decreasing but life still tough for job-seekers in many fields. Here’s what Johnson and I talked about today as we thought more about the numbers:

We needn’t wait for a magic bullet. You may have read that for unemployment to go down to 7 or 8 percent, we need to grow the economy by some ungodly number that’ll never happen unless we find a way to invent another Internet, make milk chocolate out of solar power, and so on. Johnson’s not sure it’s all that bad. Sure, he says, we’ve lost maybe 8 million jobs and gained only a quarter of those back. So at this rate, depending on who you ask, it’ll be until 2018 or 2020 or 20-something-crazy until life returns to normal. But Johnson says it needn’t take a miracle, or a decade. For one, he says, there are jobs, of course, and some people will go back to school to prepare for them. Also, he says, some things will just improve, like the next bullet point here, construction.

More houses need to be built. Johnson says the country needs somewhere between a million and a million and a half homes to be built each year — but only a half or a third of that is being built now. More housing construction, he says, needs to happen, and eventually will happen, sharply increasing employment in the construction industry. “We aren’t all going to move in with our parents.”

Meanwhile, cheaper housing is making life cheaper for some. Although it may seem like few people are buying and selling houses, Johnson notes that maybe 5 million houses are being sold annually, or about 20 million over the last four years. This, he says, is an economic silver lining because this was “pretty cheap housing,” he says, houses bought somewhere around a third cheaper than before, perhaps enabling some couples to more easily forgo one income for a while, or for one spouse to cut back on hours.

It’s still tough for college grads. I told Bob Johnson that although the unemployment rate is floating around in the 4% range for college graduates, it sure doesn’t feel like it when I know people applying for jobs with 300 other candidates competing. He agrees, saying that the unemployment rate for graduates is in the 2% range in a stronger economy, so indeed, “it’s not as strong as it usually is.”

He also notes that the figure includes anyone who has ever graduated. In other words, to take an extreme case to make the point here — every graduating senior could have trouble getting a job, and it would still not increase the unemployment all that much, since there are tens of millions of Americans who’ve graduated college, and maybe less than a million graduating annually looking for jobs (since some go to graduate school). Johnson notes that his daughter, a Dartmouth senior, knew of an informal survey done at Dartmouth showing that only about 27% of the senior class had a job a month before graduation.

Stores and shopping are changing. I told Johnson it sometimes feels like a deep recession here in Los Angeles, with stores going out of business and the (not atypical) sign on a restaurant door I saw last week saying, “after 16 years, we just couldn’t pay our lease.” I also told him that I thought Amazon and other, more-or-less sales-tax-free shopping options like Diapers.com, are hurting in-person retail. He said that “retail numbers are pretty good,” but that “stores don’t want to compete on price, they want to compete on hours.” Target is finally opening up at midnight, Thanksgiving night. He also notes that self-checkouts at stores, like the groceries he visits in Chicago, are resulting in fewer jobs. Anyhow, he says, “retail employment hasn’t been as robust, but it isn’t fall-of-the-cliff awful.”

Fear of the unemployed lives on. Of course, people’ve talked about this on ERE like Ron Katz, and he’ll get into it more in San Diego next spring. Johnson says “people don’t want to hire someone who doesn’t have a job,” and that they think, “there must be something wrong with this guy.” A big contrast, he says, to engineers, and many accountants, he notes, who, as ERE regulars are experiencing, can choose between multiple offers.

A little harder to see is that they are better educated than most of the population, and far better off financially.

Catbert notwithstanding, human resources is a pink-collar profession that looks very different from the rest of the corporate workforce, let alone the U.S. as a whole.

More than a few surveys have noted the gender imbalance in human resources. A dozen years ago the federal Office of Personnel Management reported the dramatic change in its own workforce. In 1969, 30 percent of the HR jobs were held by women. By 1998, the percentages were reversed, with men holding 29 percent of the jobs. A SHRM survey from 2007 came up with similar numbers.

Now, one of the most extensive profiles of HR professionals ever conducted not only confirms that what the OPM found in the federal workforce applies to the private sector, but the diversity there is just what you would expect from eyeballing conference attendees.

What HR Thinks and Feels: The 2011 HRxAnalysts Psychographic Survey of HR Professionals is a collaborative effort between The Starr Conspiracy (formerly, Starr Tincup) and John Sumser’s HRExaminer. The report is available for sale at HRxAnalysts. Primarily a tool for vendors, the report offers a view of the denizens of the HR world right down to their political leanings (evenly split between liberal and conservative) and their leisure time activities.

The psychographic makeup of the profession is gold to marketers and salespeople, helping them understand their potential customers and how to better talk to them. (“Given that HR professionals are generally older than other departments, your sales folks should be experienced in the market,” is one of the many vendor tips in the report.)

For those working in the field, however, the report exposes the uncomfortable homogeneity of a profession charged with promoting diversity in the workforce, even as it celebrates the strides that women have made.  (“HR is a paragon of success for women who dominate the ranks at every level,” Sumser writes.)

The survey is not a statistically perfect profile of the profession. Survey participants tended to be from mid-sized employers, leaving the smallest and the largest companies under-represented. And some industries are either over-represented or under-represented. Yet as a look at the kind of people who populate the profession, the report manages to confirm some of the conventional wisdom, while contradicting other.

For instance, two-thirds of the profession is female; 92 percent is white; the average age is 47. On the other hand, the survey found, “While the stereotype is that only generalist experience is foundational in HR, the data suggests that a large majority of HR workers have spent time in recruiting and staffing.” The survey found 88 percent of HR professionals worked in recruiting and staffing early in their career, compared to 68 percent who spent time as generalists.

Rarest are those with experience in diversity (34 percent), executive education and development (27 percent), and labor negotiations (17 percent). Notes the report,

Diversity, for example, is a controversial practice area often seen as offering more obstacles than solutions. Given the overwhelming lack of diversity within the HR department, diversity professionals (who, as a group, are more ethnically and racially diverse than their colleagues) have a difficult trajectory in internal career paths. Given the specificity of their role, diversity experts are more likely to find career mobility by staying in the practice area and moving between companies.

One of the other unexpected findings of the survey is that 82 percent of HR workers have experience in other areas. On average, they spent eight years working in departments other than HR, with the top three being customer service (38 percent), sales (35 percent), and general management (31 percent).

“It’s worth noting,” says the report, “That these are people-oriented and extroverted practice areas. Given the amount and type of cross-functional experience, it is clear that the predominant HR personality suggests a high level of emotional intelligence.”

These details are just a sampling of what’s in the report. There are specifics about the professional certifications (48 percent have at least one), education (46 percent have at least some post grad; 16 percent hold and MBA), affluence (72 percent have a household income greater than $90,000), and longevity (15 years HR experience, on average).

Its 96 pages go well beyond the demographics of the profession, not only providing vendors a clearer picture of who will be buying and using their products, but describing the lifestyle, professional competencies, and more of a profession that touches every worker from entry-level clerk to CEO in every industry and in nearly every business.

The Staffing Management Association of Seattle (one of the nation’s most progressive professional associations for recruiters) has selected this topic for the closing keynote session I will deliver at its seventh Annual Symposium on November 9.

I’ll incorporate your views into my presentation and share my final list with the ere.net community following the event. Helping rank my list and identify missing things shouldn’t take more than five minutes and could prove very helpful to the entire recruiting community. Look through my list of 30 dumb things and select the five that you see as the most common and most egregious.

Use the comments functionality following this post to share your answer and also let me know what things I overlooked.

My Starting Point (please select the top five)

1. Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — it’s a mistake for recruiters to use the same search process, search tools, and sources for every job; tailoring the process to the job is more effective.
2. Using “active” approaches to recruit “passive” candidates — most who apply for jobs are active candidates however, many recruiters make the mistake of using the same active approaches to find the currently employed who are not looking for a job.
3. Not taking advantage of employee referrals — referrals almost universally result in the highest quality and volume of hires, so it’s a mistake for recruiters to discount them. A related problem is spamming employees with referral requests.
4. Not learning the business — top talent thrives in most organizations because they understand how the organization makes money (hint, it’s not selling a product). Recruiting top talent requires recruiters who can articulate the value the business creates and link specific roles being recruited for to that larger picture.
5. Not checking if a competitor is also hiring — recruiting is a zero sum game, so it’s a mistake not to know whether your talent competitors are simultaneously hiring for the same job.
6. Failing to identify and use the best sources — it’s a universal truth that if you don’t have top candidates in your applicant pool, you cannot hire a top person. It’s a major blunder for recruiters not to use metrics to identify the very best sources for each job family.
7. Underusing mobile — it’s an error to underuse the most powerful unified channel communications platform both to reach and support talent engaged in the recruiting process.
8. Trial-and-error social media use — social media is powerful but can produce mediocre results if not proactively managed and focused on the most impactful activities. A related error is spamming jobs on social media.
9. Mistaking software as systems or solutions — software is a tool that supports or automates process, but by itself it accomplishes little. Great efforts require that tools be wrapped in well-designed processes and procedures, which combined make up a system or solution.
10. Not quantifying the impact of great/bad hires — failing to make hiring managers aware of the financial difference of great hires and the negative cost associated with a bad hire can make hiring managers less engaged.
11. Not prioritizing  jobs — it’s a major mistake not to differentiate jobs and to focus on those with the highest business impact.
12. Failing to develop a business case because the organization doesn’t require one — developing a business case forces you make sure all the pieces of plan fit together, and that you haven’t overlooked components. Failing to develop a plan because the funding is easily available leads to ad hoc program development and inefficient use of resources.
13. Not learning fast — recruiting is a fast-changing profession, so it is an error not to continuously learn and adopt new approaches.
14. Not preparing for innovators — innovators are increasingly important, so it is a mistake not to change processes so that they effectively attract and select innovators.
15. Overemphasizing generic competencies — lots of organizations are guilty of this error. In a fast-changing world, competencies by design maintain the status quo. In addition, most are defined so loosely that they mean little.
16. Not identifying  job acceptance criteria — accepting a job is a major life decision, so it’s a mistake not to identify the factors and the criteria that top candidates use to decide whether to apply for and accept a job.
17. Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews contain many possible “error points,” so it is an error to overly rely on their results without secondary assessment.
18. Assuming resumes are accurate — almost everyone agrees that more than 50% of resumes include misstatements or major omissions, so it is a mistake to rely exclusively on the information in them. Doing so will result in some serious screening errors.
19. Assuming that recruiting tools work — it’s a mistake to use the approaches that “everyone else is using,” good recruiters assess on their own what tools work and what tools don’t work.
20. Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — if position descriptions don’t excite, you’ll miss many top applicants, so it is a mistake not to compare them to competitors and not to make them sales documents.
21. Not managing the candidate experience — it’s a mistake to treat current applicants and candidates poorly because it will negatively impact the willingness of future candidates to apply. It’s also an error not to sample candidate satisfaction.
22. Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are snapped up quickly, so slow hiring can dramatically decrease a recruiter’s results.
23. Dropping the overqualified — prematurely dropping candidates who are overqualified can cause you to lose some superior talent.
24. Dropping  job-jumpers – prematurely screening out job-hoppers can cause you to lose some ambitious and rising stars.
25. Dropping  rejected candidates – it’s a major mistake to discard the resumes of top candidates who were not hired, rather than shopping them to other hiring managers or revisiting them later.
26. Not measuring the quality of hire – even if your organization doesn’t do it for you, it’s a major mistake for recruiters not to check to see if their hires perform better and stay longer them the average hire.
27. Overemphasis on the past — it’s a major mistake for assessment to focus exclusively on past performance without also assessing how the candidate will handle current and future problems.
28. Being a requisition coordinator — it’s an error to focus too much of your time and effort on requisition approvals and administrative matters, rather than sourcing and selling.
29. Allowing hiring managers to hire for their needs — hiring managers can be selfish and hire for their own immediate short-term needs, so it is a mistake not to provide direction so that the resulting hires are also the best ones for the future needs of the organization.
30. Investing or developing brand positions that fail to differentiate — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that most of the employment brand positioning content developed to date makes all organizations seem pretty much identical with the exception of what it is the company does. Most brand positions are overly generic.

It’s Your Turn!

Tell me what you think the top five are from this list or what you think I have missed using the commenting functionality below.

She struggled to earn a living, for a time clerking at Wal-Mart. But her goal was to find work as a professional in a career that could allow her to be independent. With the assistance of Virginia’s Department of Rehabilitative Service, Chitalia received job counseling and speech therapy.

Today, she is a project manager with Anthem Wellpoint and was recently lauded in the company newsletter.

Her story is but one of dozens being cited as examples of the success disabled workers can have when, with a little assistance from the government, employers reach out to the disability community.

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. The U.S. Department of Labor is taking the lead in promoting the month around the theme of “Profit by Investing in Workers with Disabilities.” Managed by the DOL’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, the month-long campaign to build awareness of the contributions of the disabled includes the posting of stories like Chitalia’s, as well as lending support to state and local efforts to increase the hiring of disabled workers.

Despite laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring against people with disabilities, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for disabled persons at 16.1 percent, compared to 8.5 percent for persons with no disability. While the unemployment for the bulk of the population declined from 9 percent in September 2010, it increased from 14.8 percent for the disabled.

An even more telling statistic is the percentage of the disabled who are in the workforce, whether working or looking for a job. Only 21.1 percent of disabled persons are considered in the workforce, compared to 69.7 percent of the population without a disability.

When you look at unemployment rates and workforce participation for other protected worker classes — by sex, age, ethnicity — there are disparities, but few as wide as for the disabled. (Young workers and black males are the leading exceptions in the unemployment rate spread. But even among the youngest workers, their participation in the workforce is higher.)

Why the gulf when it comes to the disabled? In a study of the issues affecting the hiring of the disabled, a group of scholars found employer attitudes had much to do with the low employment rate. “While employers tended to espouse positive global attitudes toward workers with disabilities, when specific attitudes related to the hiring of this group were assessed, views were more negative,” the researchers wrote.

“It is apparent that an overarching concern among employers has been that the costs associated with hiring people with disabilities will outweigh the benefits,” they said.

The evidence suggests that the cost issue is largely a red herring. Studies going back several years show the cost of making accommodations for disabled workers was almost insignificant. The most current data — from the Job Accommodation Network — says 56 percent of the employers participating in the survey reported no cost to accommodate a disabled employee; 38 percent reported a one-time cost they estimated at $500.

Other studies have found that the benefits of hiring disabled workers outweigh the costs, even when they are at the top end.

At an April conference organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, its president and CEO said, “Individuals with disabilities make great employees. In fact, employers report that the work ethic of disabled employees has a positive effect on the morale and production of other employees.”

(The Chamber has a free, best practices booklet –  Leading Practices on Disability Inclusion –  that highlights the inclusion programs of several companies.)

Besides the cultural effects and the productivity gains, there are also tax benefits to hiring disabled workers. Small businesses can take up to $5,000 off their tax bill for costs related to providing accessibility for their disabled workers. Hiring certain qualified disabled persons may be able to claim a $2,400 credit; double that if the disabled person is a veteran.

Many states offer their own incentives as well as providing vocational and rehabilitative services for disabled workers. Last month the Department of Labor awarded seven states a total of $21 million in grants under the Disability Employment Initiative.

If the carrots don’t work, there’s one other reason to seek out and hire the disabled: enforcement by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Disability claims at the EEOC have been rising steadily since 2004, when the number hit a low of 15,376. Last year there were 25,165, the EEOC reports.

Today, disability charges account for a quarter of the individual charge filings. Additionally, in 2010, the EEOC collected $76 million on behalf of aggrieved individuals.

However, the point of National Disability Employment Awareness Month is not to emphasize the legal obligations, but to encourage employers to consider the benefits and dispel the concerns, legitimate or otherwise, of employers about hiring the disabled.

The authors of the study mentioned earlier note in their research report that, “though benefits are considerable, the employment rate for people with disabilities remains low. This gap suggests the pressing need to educate the business community about the benefits of having a disabled workforce, and how these benefits may outweigh perceived costs.”

Or, as Jennifer Woodside, president of  The Disability Training Alliance, says, “Because of the looming labor shortage which will happen in the next decade, companies must be visionary, prepared to recruit a native talent pool and welcome an under-served demographic in their communities: qualified, highly educated candidates, including STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) grads and combat injured veterans who just happen to have a disability.”

Nerds in Paradise

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

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

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

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

This Time Is Different

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

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

Weird and Weirder

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

Last week, at Facebook’s f8 developers conference, Monster said it was tightening the integration between its BeKnown networking app, and Facebook, on which it built the professional network. The enhancements will make it easy for BeKnown members who update their business profile to add those updates to their more social Facebook profile.

In the weeks before, Monster released smartphone apps for the iPhone and Android devices, allowing members to update their BeKnown profiles, send messages, make connections and, naturally, search Monster for jobs. Now, European members of the BeKnown network have the same capabilities. An Android version was released in Europe previously.

With the sweeping changes being made to Facebook, Monster’s decision to build its network-in-a-network on the social site seems almost prescient. Despite the current roil by the users who will have to get used to the changes Facebook is making, they eventually will. As they fill in their new Timelines, some of it will spill over into their BeKnown profiles. As Monster’s announcement last week noted, the opposite will also happen.

Sure, this is going to take some time. My colleague, Lance Haun, has an insightful post on TLNT about the furor over the Facebook changes, which, incidentally, makes for an excellent case study about change management. But once over the angst, and using some of the new Lifestyle apps, Facebook members who now number somewhere around 800 million, will find the frictionless sharing of their lives to be second nature. That is, assuming (which is far from certain) that Facebook can resolve the growing, and righteous concerns about user privacy.

Monster, which like all job boards that host resumes, has broad experience with privacy and security issues. So when it launched its BeKnown app (it’s an app; it’s a network; it’s all the same), it built a wall between users’ social Facebook friends, and members of their professional network. BeKnown users control what is shared across that wall.

Now when BeKnown launched, it pulled in data from LinkedIn, as well as Facebook. But LinkedIn shut down the Monster connection (and some others);  an obvious move to protect its own growing recruitment profit center. For now, that matters. But with Facebook’s “frictionless sharing,” much data will flow to the site without the need for users to actively post it, and, even, when users log out of Facebook. (That’s a whole privacy controversy already underway.)

Still, I suspect users will want to add some things to those Timelines that are rolling out now, and among the first and simplest will be to add employment information. On BeKnown you can fill in the employment blanks and leverage the connections there when it comes time to job hunt.

Is it possible that the Facebook changes, along with the apps that are coming, will make the lack of a LinkedIn connection irrelevant for Monster and BeKnown? The short answer is “maybe.” But with what Facebook is doing — and the way Monster is staying up with the changes — the case for BeKnown to succeed as a professional network grows stronger.

Following close behind, Facebook unveiled some sweeping changes of its own, rearranging its News Feed and adding a real-time update ticker to profile pages.

The nearly simultaneous announcements, probably just a coincidence, are nonetheless evidence of the escalating competition between the two powerhouse companies.

Ever since Google+ launched in June (growing quickly to 25 million users who had to be invited to join), Facebook has aggressively added, enhanced, or otherwise changed key features of the site. Hangouts, which lets Google+ users video chat, was Google’s one-up on Facebook. Not even two weeks later, Facebook called a press conference to announce a partnership with Skype and its own video chat service.

When it launched, one of the more compelling Google+ features was its “Circles,” allowing users to organize connections as they see fit. Different messages can be sent to different circles.

Facebook’s one-group approach didn’t allow for different levels of connectedness; lists were available, but so clunky to create and manage that few people used them.  Last week, Facebook addressed that shortcoming, improving Friend Lists. Now, not only can users easily create lists where photos and posts are in one place, but the Smart Lists features automatically assembles groups based on common interests. The latter feature is optional to use.

At the same time as the lists improvements, Facebook also introduced a Subscribe button, letting users choose what they want in their news feeds and to get updates from non-friends.

Now Facebook has gone a step further still, rolling out a reorganized news feed. Instead of presenting status updates in chronological order, Facebook will present what its algorithms decide is the hottest or top news from your friends and people to whom you’ve subscribed. The more frequently you check Facebook, the more recent the posts. But if you visit only every so often, your top news item might be days old. Top news items are marked with a blue corner.

Perhaps needless to say, since every Facebook change seems to be met with resistance, user comments are mostly negative. The Baltimore Sun offers a collection of some of the funniest of them. If you have any doubt about the growing number of Boomers among Facebook’s 750 million users, here’s one of the comments on the Sun’s page: “Zuckerberg apparently hired the genius behind New Coke to run Facebook.”

Meanwhile, Google, which used its heavily trafficked search page to promote Google+, began offering a mobile version of Hangouts. Now users with Android-powered phones with front-facing cameras can hold video chats. An iPhone version is coming, Google promised.

The other improvements to Hangouts (the 100th was the public launch of Google+) include screen sharing, Google Docs integration, and a broadcast feature it calls Hangouts On Air, which makes recording and broadcasting of a session. Not all of these are fully available, but they are on their way.

The interest in the competition between Google and Facebook is evidently high. New features and enhancements in services will usually get a mention in the tech blogs. But the Facebook changes and the Google+ public launch has garnered wide interest. Event the Christian Science Monitor has weighed in with a post it headlined “Facebook changes vs. Google+: Who made the best updates?“

Let me explain. Yesterday, Forbes, TechCrunch, and some others detailed the beta launch of Identified. This is a startup that connects to your Facebook profile and assigns you a score that in the words of the company’s PR “shows people how their professional brand is perceived by the world.”

Identified assesses your work history, education, and your social network, crunches it together, and voila, a score. Since this is supposed to be a recruiting tool — it’s billed by the founders as the “World’s Largest Professional Search Engine” — companies can use Identified to search for candidates with certain qualifications, plus a score range. And just so everyone knows they really are using Identified, there’s an activity box that lets you know “Levi Strauss & Co. has viewed profiles of candidates with scores from 16 to 77.”

Some very smart people have poured a bunch of money into Identified; $5.5 million from the likes of Bill Draper, founder of Sutter Hill Ventures and Draper Richards; Alexander Tamas, partner at DST; Chamath Palihapitiya, a VP at Facebook; and from Innovation Endeavors, a VC founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The founders say Identified is an alternative, even a competitor, to LinkedIn.

The problem with LinkedIn, founder Brendan Wallace told Forbes, “is it just outputs a lot of data. We’re really a search engine that delivers professional information in a professional way. You get the best results at the top.”

Ranking candidates is nothing new. ATS vendors and job boards have been at it for more than a decade. Their method is to rank candidates against the description of the job for which they’re being considered. Even the least sophisticated match keywords, ranking candidates on the number of matches. Better systems take a semantic approach, looking to concepts and context as much or more than the frequency of keyword matches.

Identified weights the breadth and quality of a person’s network. Says Wallace:

We saw that companies cared as much about a person’s network as they did about their education and work experience. So we built Identified to show people how they appear to world based not only on what they know, but who they know.

Forbes addresses some of the obvious issues with the Identified approach, including what it calls the “philosophical question” of reducing a person and their contacts to a score.

For recruiters, though, there are bigger issues with Identified. The biggest is that Facebook itself says that less than half the 700 million users enter any of their professional information. How many, like myself for instance, provide a minimal bit isn’t known. That skews Identified’s scoring. For people who really care, Identified encourages you to fill-in the missing information to improve your ranking.

Even with some detailed work and education background, the other part of the system can skew the results. Like so many social networkers, I use LinkedIn professionally, and Facebook socially. My Facebook friends have an eclectic assortment of professional experience and education. Most don’t bother with those categories.

My business colleagues are almost exclusively part of my LinkedIn network.

So I’m a zero on Identified because I chose not to provide much professional and personal background and few of my friends do either. As a recruiter, how valuable is that?

And I thank you in advance for not taking the obvious opening provided in my first paragraph.

The carefully planned launch had been scheduled to occur tomorrow, but an error in distributing the press release forced the company to lift the embargo it had placed on bloggers, analysts, and others who got a preview of the service earlier this week.

It’s a straightforward search, identical in most regards to the site’s job search. It is keyword based, though it will accept some Boolean and Google query types. Searches can be easily narrowed by simply selecting from a menu on the left that shows up on results pages.

Searching and reviewing resumes is free and will remain that way. But contacting the candidates — free for now — will eventually cost. How much, said Chris Hyams, Indeed’s VP of Product, who piloted the demos, won’t be released for a while.

For now, the “goal is to introduce the system to as many people as possible,” said Hyams.

Job seekers will appreciate the simplicity of the system. It accepts all forms of resumes and will import a user’s LinkedIn profile. Users can elect to keep the resume private and not findable in a search, or make it public. In the latter case, the contact information is stripped out. Employers use a form to contact the job seeker, who decides whether or not to respond. Job seekers can also apply to jobs they find on Indeed with their resume.

The interface, said Hyams, was designed for ease of use. “We always start with the question: What is best for the job seeker?”

Since Indeed began collecting resumes several months ago it was only a matter of time before the site offered resume search. After more than a million resumes, the time, obviously, has come.

Even Hyams more or less joked about the resume service being an open secret, especially to the job boards whose relationship with Indeed can best be described as “frenemy.”

“This is not going to be an earth-shattering surprise,” Hyams said earlier this week during a preview.

Pardon the pun, but indeed it isn’t. There’s been no response from the job boards, nor is it likely any of them will have much to say publicly. Many of them are Indeed customers, buying PPC ads to drive traffic to their own sites. Many of them, though far fewer these days, depend on Indeed to distribute their own listings to a broader market.

Indeed and SimplyHired, the two leading job search engines, built their business by scraping listings from job boards. But in the nearly seven years they’ve been at it, both sites have developed relationships directly with employers. Many of them provide a daily feed of their jobs to each site. Many of the job boards do that, too.

However, in the last year, fewer listings from job boards have been showing up in searches on Indeed and SimplyHired. The CEOs of both sites told me directly they are not discriminating against job board listings, but clearly, the preference in cases where the same listing comes from a direct employer and also from a job board is to go with the employer’s listing.

It’s a matter of benefiting the job seeker, Indeed’s Paul Forster told me, as did SimplyHired’s CEO Gautam Godhwani. The employer’s listing is one click closer than the job board’s.

Yet, as recently as a few weeks ago, I’ve heard from job board operators who insist they’ve been told by employees at one or the other of the search sites that there are problems with the format of their feed, or they have poor quality listings, or they have been the subject of job seeker complaints, or … In each case the operators swear they’ve made no changes and had been indexed previously, in some cases for years.

For smaller job boards, the traffic from Indeed and SimplyHired — now the 3rd and 4th most trafficked job sites respectively — can be critical. Some job boards exist almost entirely because of the distribution they get from the two search sites, so not being indexed can spell disaster.

Listings from CareerBuilder and Monster, mainstays of the jobs inventory for both sites for years, have also dramatically diminished in volume. A Monster spokesman said his company never provided a direct feed of its listings, but was scraped. Any change there was made by the search sites. However, he added that Monster has seen no impact on its traffic. A comment echoed by CareerBuilder.

But she did list some of the sites, applications, and services she finds interesting. Here’s a sampling of those services to manage your time, life, contacts, and information online (and in the comments section, add any you find valuable):

• Babelwith.me. As you send a message to someone, it translates it into another language.
• ReferenceUSA. Research information on millions of businesses in the U.S., Canada, and internationally.
• Evernote. Bookmark parts of the Web for yourself with your own little virtual sticky-notes.
• Contact Caputure from Broadlook. Find a contact on the Internet, and quickly and easily save it to your contact list.
• FriendorFollow. Previously in beta, you enter your Twitter name to see who’s following you, who’s not following you, and so on (explained briefly here). By putting in your competitor’s Twitter name, you can see the same about them. You can also export into a CSV file. Other Twitter tools include TwitterGrader, Twiangulate, Twellow, Twingly, Follower Wonk, and InboxQ. InboxQ, for example, helps you decide the best Twitter users to answer a question for you.
• fefoo. Search multiple search engines at once.
• Best Vendor. In beta, by invite only, a place to see how others are rating products and providers.
• Gist. A way to manage your contacts. Another tool in this genre is Xobni.
• Social Text and Mango Spring. Two different places to build better, social-media driven intranets.
• Meebo. A messaging tool that works with AOL, Yahoo, and other services.
• Seesmic, cotweet, MarketMeSuite, and PeopleBrowsr. Like better-known tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck, these help you manage your social media life, search social media, schedule posts, see where and when you’re mentioned, and more.
• DownThemAll. A plug-in to your Web browser so that you can download more quickly. OutWit Docs is one of the other browser plug-ins Myers likes.
• TinEye. One of a few sites excellent for searching for images.
• Radian6, Viralheat, Crowdbooster, and other monitoring tools. More analysis and monitoring of your social media.
• Diigo and StumbleUpon. “Social bookmarking” tools to keep track of your favorite sites and see what others like.
• “Forms” from Google Docs. A way to create an online form, such as if you want a job candidate to fill something out online.
• Know em?. See if the username you’d like to use on social media is available on different networks. Also use it to find a job candidate: their Yahoo or Gmail address, for example, may be similar to their social media handles, so if you can find them on a social site, it may help in finding their contact info.
• Focus Booster. A time-management tool to help you break down your work period into 25-minute increments, separated by breaks. Also, for people wanting to focus better, Myers suggests separating your desktop out into two different users. As an example, you’d set up one RSS feed for your celebrity gossip, and another for work. When you need a break, you look at the celeb feed, but by keeping it out of your main work feed, you don’t get distracted.
• Social Mention. Like Google Alerts, but for social social media.
• MeetingBurner. One of the newer tools for hosting online webinars.

When it comes to all these tools, Myers says, “it’s not always how many or how new the tools are, but how well you know and use them.”

Yes, I know. Astronomically, summer won’t end for another 18 days. But, I’m talking symbolically, not scientifically. And in that context, the U.S. Labor Day marks a transition from summer white to fall brown. It’s when kids go back to school, and the pace of the office quickens as workers return from vacation.

Once a day of parades and political speeches in praise of American workers, which still occur here and there across the country, Labor Day is mostly now a time to head for the beach or the park, fire up the barbecue, and kick back.

In the spirit of years past, however, I present you some inspirational words on life and work in the 21st century, from two of the most widely seen commencement addresses ever delivered.

First, is the advice given to the graduating class of 2010 at Auburn University by  Tim Cook, then Apple’s COO and now, its CEO:

I know of no one who has achieved something significant without also in their own lives experiencing their share of hardship, frustration, and regret. So, don’t believe that something in your past prevents you from doing great work in the future.

“Give up on the idea of developing a life plan that will bear any resemblance to what ultimately unfolds,” he tells the graduates.  Instead, “Paint in your mind the most grand vision where you want to go in life. Prepare. Trust in, and execute on your intuition. And don’t get distracted by life’s potholes.”

Take the 16 minutes to watch the video. Besides the advice, which is every bit as relevant for mid-career workers as for new grads, Cook’s speech provides clues to the stamp he will put on Apple in the coming months. (Start the video at the 2:20 point to skip the lengthy introduction.)

The second video is three stories, told to Stanford’s graduating class in 2005, by one of the greatest entrepreneurs in all of Silicon Valley: Apple co-founder, its former CEO, and current chairman Steve Jobs.

Story one is about connecting the dots. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards,” Jobs says. “So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. ”

Story two is one the graduates may not have much experience with, but will be familiar to everyone else. It’s about love and loss. It’s moral, says Jobs, is this:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

His final story is about death:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

So aggressive was the action on Monster in particular that its stock soared 21.45 percent today, leading the gainers on the S&P 500 Index. Monster’s shares closed the day at $9.91.

LinkedIn rose 6 percent today, closing at $87.49. Monday, LinkedIn was up 7.5 percent. Dice Holdings was up 2.16 percent to $10.40.

All three companies had a tough few days last week, with LinkedIn sinking on Thursday to $70.05, its lowest price since going public in May. It closed its first day of trading back then at $94.25, after hitting a high of almost $123 a share.

Monster, which has been drifting in the mid teens for months, started heading south in late July, closing on August 22 at a low of $7.13.  Friday, the stock began inching up, and Monday, despite news the company had replaced its CIO Darko Dejanovic, it continued to rise. Today, after the company reported that three of its senior executives cumulatively bought more than 87,000 shares, the stock took off. 

That news helped boost the stock price, giving the three — Chairman, President and CEO Sal Iannuzzi, CFO Jim Langrock,  and EVP Tim Yates — a one-day profit of more then $152,000. Keep in mind that all three men are holding other Monster stock bought or granted at a higher price.

Bloomberg’s take on the rise is that investors have more confidence than the population generally that the economy is improving, and that the President and Federal Reserve will encourage job growth.

Bloomberg quoted William Blair & Co. analyst Tim McHugh as saying of LinkedIn and Monster in particular, “The stocks had embedded a high probability of entering a recession, but have been rebounding along with the market on the hopes that we will be able to avoid the recession … The companies could benefit from economic stimulus or a jobs program.”

Dice, which sold for as much as $18.75 a share as recently as April, didn’t fall as much last week as either LinkedIn or Monster. Its lowest point was $8.51.

Friday, the Labor Department releases its August employment numbers. Economists expect only about 75,000 new jobs will have been created during the month, a sharp drop from July’s 117,000.