This morning’s monthly report from the U.S. Department of Labor blasted through even the most optimistic of expectations. The jobs gain would have been the largest since May 2010, except that the Labor Department’s data group adjusted 2011′s jobs numbers. Now, only March (+246,000) and April (+251,000) had stronger numbers.

January is the second consecutive month to beat estimates. Economists predicted anywhere from MarketWatch’s tepid 121,000 to the more optimistic 182,000 in the Bloomberg survey. None of the widely reported surveys saw a decline in the unemployment rate.

Indeed, the unemployment rate, which has been declining very slowly since hitting a peak of 10.1 percent in late 2009, is now at the lowest point since February 2009. The government report also put the number of unemployed at 12.8 million. A year ago it was at 13.9 million.

While governments continued to cut jobs — federal jobs were cut by 6,000 and local government cut 11,000 positions — the private sector added 257,000. This was more than 50 percent higher than the ADP estimate earlier in the week.

Most sectors added jobs. Manufacturing accounted for 50,000 new jobs. The services sector as a whole added 176,000 workers, with much of the gain coming in what the government calls “professional and business services.” This includes temp workers and employment services (+33,200) and accounting and bookkeeping services (+12,500), likely due to ramping up for tax season.

Healthcare, a consistent growth area, was up by 30,900 positions. Leisure and hospitality, another growth area for several months, was up by 44,000. Even the battered construction industry managed to add 21,000 jobs during the month.

Only finance (off by 5,000 jobs) and the Information sector (-13,000) lost workers. The latter sector includes far more worker categories than computer professionals and data processing, although these areas also lost workers. The bulk of the loss — 7,900 — came in the motion picture and recording industry.

On top of the strong January numbers, the revisions by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics resulted in improving the overall hiring numbers for 2011 and further. For November and December alone, the BLS revisions showed 60,000 more jobs than initially reported.

Finally, the government said average hourly wages for all non-farm workers rose 4 cents during the month to $23.29. While the average workweek for all workers was unchanged in January, the manufacturing workweek increased by .3 hours to 40.9 and overtime increased to 3.4 hours.

The overall report was so strongly welcomed it sent stock futures soaring before the market opening. The Dow Jones Industrial average futures jumped 95 points.

One cautionary note: The Monster Employment Index, which tracks jobs posted on career sites and job boards, including Monster, has been declining since October. For January, the Index stood at 133, down from October’s 151. The Conference Board, which also tracks online job postings, showed an increase in January, as it did in December. But the total online listings are still not as high as they were in April last year.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain.

Of course, the bright move (watch what we did there) is to keep up with your prospects. BrightMove, the talent acquisition and staffing software vendor, thinks so, too. So just this week the company added a “Social Bar” to its toolkit. With a click of the ‘sync” button, BrightMove will pull in your prospect’s updated info from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

Now you know without waiting for that callback that your prospect has a new job and a better title than what you’ve got to offer.

Sure, this is something you can do on your own. And, you will, the first time you pull up a resume. Once you tag it, the process is automatic. BrightMove’s COO Mike Brandt says everything could have been automated — no human touch required — but then no system is smart enough to know which of the hundreds of Michael Brandts on LinkedIn is the one in question.

It won’t make sense to make the effort for every resume you get. But for your hot, if not immediately placeable prospects, tagging them when you get them and letting BrightMove update them for you, is, well, a bright move.

Jobaline

Matching, as anyone who has ever dated or recruited can attest, is an imprecise art. Yet that doesn’t stop anyone from insisting there’s enough science about it to improve the odds.

For hiring, I won’t argue against it, which is why when I checked out Jobaline last year I admitted not knowing quite what to think. Besides the usual requirements matching and ranking, Jobaline introduced a “seriousness” quotient. On the theory that the more interested and committed a candidate is to a particular job, the more time they will spend filling in all the info the employer demands.

Whether there was any validity to a seriousness ranking, even the founder wasn’t prepared to say.

A year later and Jobaline, as they say, has gone in a different direction. Today’s Jobaline is a sort of job board servicer, where employers post jobs for free, then get to review the basic info about applying candidates. When you see what you like, you pay.

Founder and CEO Miki Mullor calls it “pay-to-pick.”

The Interviewer Who Fell Asleep

There’s nothing like explaining to an interviewer just what it is you can do for the company to make a difference — only to discover they’re sound asleep. That’s a pretty clear hint of what your job prospects are like.

Alas that happened to poor Irwin, who was on his first interview after graduating college. Turns out the interviewer was a narcoleptic who, after snoring away for a few minutes, awoke and resumed where he left off.

I don’t know if Irwin got the job, but he did win $100 from OneWire for telling the most memorable interview story in the firm’s contest. OneWire, as we noted in last week’s Roundup, is a sourcing, tracking and, most significantly, matching system for the financial industry.

Quick Hits

Unrabble, the un-resume, SaaS ATS for the SMB market (we are partial to acronyms here at ERE), has just introduced a free version. It doesn’t do a lot, but it will give you a taste of a world without resumes.

Looking for a way to measure your branding efforts, or the performance of your career sites (besides just counting apps), or your social media significance? Here’s a list of 20 free tools. The list is intended for marketers, but then, isn’t that what we’re all becoming?

SHRM’s latest ANSI standard proposal is available for comment. The draft proposal is on workforce planning.

Hours after the company reported it nearly doubled its fourth-quarter profit over the same quarter in 2010, meeting Wall Street’s expectations, its stock price took a 16 percent beating. In afternoon trading in New York, Dice Holdings was selling for $8.40 a share, down $1.59 on the day.

Last week Monster’s stock took a 20 percent hit after it missed analyst profit expectations and announced layoffs. The company earned 11 cents a share, rather than the 12 cents Wall Street expected. Yet, the company grew revenue for the year by about 14 percent and turned 2010′s loss into a 37 cents a share profit.

Dice, however, not only met the Street’s per share earnings prediction, but its $47.36 million in revenue was slightly ahead of what analysts expected. For the year, Dice reported revenue of $179.1 million versus $129 million in 2010. Profit for the full year was 49 cents a share. In 2010 it was 28 cents.

Those results did little to cushion the company’s 2012 prediction that revenues and earnings will come in below analyst expectations. For the current quarter, Dice says it expects revenue of $46 million and net income of $7.1 million. Analysts are looking for  $46.83 million in revenue and per share earnings of 13 cents.

For the year, Dice is looking at revenue of $197 million. Wall Street wants $201.1 million.

In the announcement of the company’s financial results, Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland called 2011 “a terrific year for the company.” Calling 2012 “a more uncertain recruiting environment,” Melland said he expects the company to grow.

“Our strategic priorities are unchanged: expand the number of customers using our services, capitalize on the global opportunity in our energy vertical and serve more markets around the world.”

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

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

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

Yep, programmers are getting expensive. But my experience has been that most great programmers don’t really have salary as their No. 1 consideration when deciding where to work. They only worry about salary when the job is so awful that it has to pay well or they couldn’t imagine sticking around.

Here are 10 things that many programmers think about first, long before salary even comes into play:

1. How much do they believe in the company and identify with its goals? Are they excited about what the company makes? Do they love its products?
2. How do they feel about the team they work with? Are their coworkers the same people they would want to hang out with after work?
3. How cool is the technology that they’re using? Will they have a chance to learn powerful new programming languages and systems, or will they be using pedestrian, safe, corporate technologies?
4. How much of the work they’re doing is new code, and how much of it is bug-fixing and maintenance?
5. What is the work environment like? Are there plush private offices, nice espresso machines, and free gourmet lunches? Or does it look and feel exactly like a sitcom parody of a miserable office?
6. How smart is the team? Will they have a chance to learn and grow from their co-workers, or are they going to be carrying the load for a lot of deadweight?
7. How smart is the organization? Will the bureaucracy fight them every step of the way, or does it exist to enable brilliant work?
8. Where is the work? Is the commute convenient? Can their spouse find fulfilling work (probably in another field) nearby? Are the schools good?
9. How much control do they have over their work? Are they required to conform to obscure rules and capricious diktats or do they have the freedom to do great things?
10. What kind of computer hardware do they work? Are their systems upgraded every year with the latest and the greatest? Can they have three 30” monitors if they want?

You may think that some of these things are completely out of your control … and they may be. Sometimes people run job listings on Stack Overflow and get very few resumes. Then they ask me, “why didn’t we get any applicants for our job listing?” And I look at it and think, “baby Moses in a basket, why would anyone want to work there?”

I know, it’s hard to say, but it’s true: some jobs are just not that attractive, and it’s not a problem of “finding programmers,” it’s a problem of “making this a place where people want to work.”

The first thing to learn is that company founders and CEOs don’t care about the same things as programmers. Usually, if you’re doing what your founder/CEO thought would be nice, you’re not really optimizing for programmers. Founder/CEOs, for example, like to save money, and they like to know what’s going on, so they think having a big room where everyone can overhear everything is a terrific work environment. Programmers need to concentrate, so they would work in a brown cardboard box if it was quiet and free from interruptions.

If you’re scoring kind of low on the “desirable workplace” scale, all is not lost. There’s a lot you can do to fix these issues, even if you are a company that makes atom bombs run by a megalomaniac micromanager with an office on a platform in the Arctic Ocean.

Come to the ERE Expo in San Diego in March, and I’ll go into this in a lot more depth in my keynote. I’ll tell you what I know about how programmers work, what they like, what they care about, and I promise you’ll leave with a lot of ideas of how to make your workplace way more attractive and interesting to the average programmer.

Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in.

Branded “Inside Connections,” the new service adds networking to the Glassdoor features, making the site, as Tim Besse, co-founder and vice president of product and marketing, said, “The most complete listing of information about jobs.”

It’s that completeness, Besse argues, that gives Glassdoor the advantage over all other careers networking sites, including, he insists, LinkedIn. “The two most trusted ways to find out about a company,” says Besse, “People you know and, two, people who worked there.”

LinkedIn has both, but if you aren’t connected to one of them, that won’t be much help. At Glassdoor you could always see what people had to say about an employer. Now, you can also see who among your connections works there.

“We have all the tools,” Besse adds.

LinkedIn’s advantage is the completeness of its user profiles. Because it is oriented toward careers and business networking, LinkedIn users tend to be thorough in posting their professional information and prompt in keeping it current.

Facebook users tend to provide only limited employment information. While data is hard to come by, Glassdoor says a survey it commissioned shows 65-70 percent of Facebook users have entered at least some employment data. However, Besse points out that Facebook’s Timeline will prompt ever larger numbers of people to complete their profiles and provide more details.

(Timeline was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in the fall. Its rollout has been slow, but its anticipated impacts are large and have been discussed in detail by marketers, researchers, and others.)

A post on the Harvard Business Review site about the impact of Timeline on careers notes, “If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it’s time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.”

If Facebook users do as the writer suggests, then sites like Glassdoor stand to benefit and it won’t matter that LinkedIn has locked out BeKnown, BranchOut, and others, refusing to share its data.

Besse, in that case, could realize his goal: “I am out there to build the world’s largest and most trusted” career site.

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

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

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

In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.

Facebook reported in its S-1 filing that it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, most of it coming from advertising. It reported having 845 million monthly active users as of the end of the year, a 39 percent increase over the year before. In the U.S., Facebook saw a 16 percent bump over 2010, ending last year with 161 million monthly average users, or about half the country’s total population.

Its average daily user count is 483 million, meaning more than half those who visit the site in a month do so every day. The company also reported 425 million monthly mobile users, a number it expects will grow with some of it replacing PC access.

With numbers like these it’s not surprising that employers have been flocking to build Facebook profiles and encourage their workers, customers and others to “like” them.

Recruiters began embracing Facebook years ago, seeing it as a way to expand the reach of their employer branding. Many began by combing through Facebook profiles as part of candidate vetting.  Now, companies regularly see Facebook as both a branding tool and a way to develop prospect communities.

Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a sourcing tool. BranchOut, which launched on Facebook 18 months ago, enables users to create business-only networks that can be accessed by recruiters. BeKnown, launched by Monster last summer, is similar.

Both BranckOut and BeKnown also connected with LinkedIn. But not long after the BeKnown launch, LinkedIn shut off access. That hasn’t put much of a damper on either site. BranchOut has about 2.7 million monthly average users. BeKnown has 260,000.

A third site is poised to announce its own Facebook connection later tonight, Pacific time.

Indeed the January number came in below the average of 182,000, which is what economists in a Bloomberg survey were expecting. A Dow Jones Newswires survey however put the number right at 170,000.

The ADP report also adjusted down the December numbers from the initial 325,000 to 292,000.  Nearly all the January gain, says ADP, came from companies with fewer than 500 workers, and all but 18,000 of the new jobs were in the service sector. Manufacturing added 10,000 workers during the month.

A year ago, ADP said 190,000 private sector jobs were created in January.

This morning’s report, says Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, “compares to the 2011 monthly average of 160,000 and thus points to a continued recovery but the mediocre pace this far into a recovery still remains frustrating,” He estimates that Friday’s official report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show 165,000 non-farm jobs created in January.

The ADP National Employment Report, produced jointly with Macroeconomic Advisers, is closely watched by economists as an indication of what the official U.S. Labor Department jobs report will show. The government report is usually released on the first Friday of every month.

The two reports rarely match, largely due to differences in methodology. The government report also includes public sector employment. ADP’s report does not. However, as the Globe and Mail (Canada) said in reporting this morning’s report, “Take the number with a large pinch of salt, but pay attention to the trend.”

That trend, though, is hard to read. While there hasn’t been a negative month since September 2010 (when census layoffs influenced the numbers), job gains have hovered around 100,000 for most of last year. Only in four months did the official numbers break 200,000. In three months, they were well below 100,000.

Like the job numbers, other signs are positive, if tepid. The Conference Board last week said its Leading Economic Index improved slightly in December  to 94.3. It was the third consecutive monthly increase in the index. (The Board also announced changes in how the index is calculated.) This morning, the Board’s monthly count of jobs posted online showed 61,300 more jobs in January than the month before. It’s only the second increase in job postings in eight months.

Economists, now, are not expecting any surprises in Friday’s government report. The Wall Street Journal says economists are expecting it to show 125,000 new jobs and no change in the current 8.5 percent unemployment rate.  Reuters puts the number at 150,000. And Bloomberg, which wrote a long piece this morning about growing optimism in the financial markets and among economists, says the Friday jobs report will come in at 145,000.

Fake bird seed represents many vendors’ test claims … and, what users don’t know about birdseed and test validity can cost them a fortune. Test validity does not mean people like the test; or, the test has zero adverse impact; or, the EEOC approves; or, the test looks sexy. Validity means test scores consistently predict some specific aspect of job performance. For example, if high scores predict more mistakes, then low scores should predict fewer. Validity predicts on-the-job performance … both ways.

Reputable test vendors (i.e., those who follow professional test development standards) eagerly show controlled studies of test results … and, welcome questions about them. Bird seed vendors enthusiastically produce client testimonials … andget defensive when questioned. How can testimonials be unacceptable? For the same reason you cannot trust political ads. They have an agenda and are seldom supported by facts. Here is an example using a sales job:

Sales Manager Anecdote: We used XYZ test and our sales productivity increased.

OK. What is your definition of productivity? What else was happening at the time that could have affected the numbers? Did you land a big customer? Did the economy improve? Did lower and higher scores predict lower and higher sales? Are you using group results or individual data? Sales dollars are only one part of the job. What about satisfaction, service, returns, cross-selling? You see, anecdotes are rhetorical. They might sound good, but seldom tell the whole story. Anecdotes and validity are not equal. Birdseed vendors, because they don’t follow professional test-validation processes, don’t know they don’t know this.

Define Performance … or Else!

Let’s continue with our sales example. Nothing is more important than a highly productive sales staff. But wait. What does that mean? Are we discussing acquiring new customers? Farming or hunting? Cross-selling? Delivering great customer service? Customer retention? Solving service problems? Favorite golf buddies? Job turnover? Learning new products?

Get the picture? I have learned over time, especially with call centers, that many performance areas even conflict with one another. Problem Solving Quality and Calls Completed are often negatively related (i.e., it generally takes more time to better resolve problems). It drives employees crazy when an organization sets mutually conflicting objectives. So which one should they test for?

Performance is a loosey-goosey catch-all term that could actually mean something entirely different to different people. In my experience, few sales managers and even fewer HR departments ever take the time to think this through. So, before you decide on a test vendor, carefully define what you want to measure. If you think “performance” is a singular thing, then you are in a heap of trouble. If someone does not know what he/she wants to control, then any solution will be like bed wetting … warm and comfy at night, but cold and miserable in the morning.

Truth or Dare!

My bathroom scale is heartless. It tells me when I am overeating. It also tells me when I am at my healthy weight. Your hiring test should do the same thing. Good scores should have the same strong causal relationship with high performance; and, bad scores should have the same strong causal relationship with low performance. This is really important. Vendors who do not follow professional test development standards don’t seem to really understand that validation is a two-edged sword. Let’s look deeper a very common, and very wrong-headed practice.

Vendor A separates people into a good group and a bad group. The good group takes the test and the vendor averages their numbers. From that day forward, every applicant is benchmarked against the good-group average. Sound’s good? Sorry. It’s a clear sign the vendor is selling fake birdseed.

Let’s start by asking how the people were group-classified. What constitutes performance? Are good schmoozers in the same group as slow learners? How about group size? Are there enough people in a group (i.e., it takes at least 15 to 25 people before you can draw a decent conclusion). Is the bad group the same size as the good group? (Groups should always be about equal-sized.) Are the differences between groups strong or subtle? (If everyone is at least good enough to stay employed, you will probably be able to see only strong differences.)

What about the test itself? Can the vendor show proof every item in the test directly affects group performance? How strong is it? Research shows that virtually all self-reported motivation, personality, and attitude test scores have weak relationships with “hard” job skills like learning ability, problem solving, and so forth. If the test factor doesn’t strongly predict job performance, the test won’t make any difference in hiring quality … it will just make your job more difficult.

One more comment about group scores. They tell you about groups — nothing about individuals. Consider the following: people in the Top Group have scores of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 (average = 45). The Bottom Group scores are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 (average = 35).

So the person doing this analysis figures that producers score an average of 45 — so let’s go test people and hire the ones who score 45 or more. Whoops! If we used top-group averages as our standard, we would eliminate three top producers and hire two bottom ones. Fake birdseed alert!

Separating Pros from Pretenders

Setting hiring-test standards is an all or nothing game. There are no shortcuts. In my personal experience, wrong-headed vendors are seldom intentionally deceitful. They enthusiastically believe in their fake birdseed; after all, people who make things with their own hands seldom welcome criticism. So, they rely on client anecdotes, claiming that is sufficient proof of validity. Some will even claim that the EEOC has validated their test. Sorry. This is completely wrong-headed and foolish thinking.

If they rely on vendor claims, users will never know how many good candidates they turn away, nor how many bad ones they will hire. They always pay the price for this mistake later. You see, legal challenges seldom happen in the hiring phase. They happen on the job. Challenges begin when incompetent employees challenge termination or being overlooked for promotion. Forget the short term and six-month guarantees. Bad hiring decisions start showing themselves about a year later.

So how do you identify a pretender? Anyone who is:

• Producing client testimonials (not tightly controlled studies) claiming their test is valid;
• Getting defensive when questioned;
• Claiming their test doesn’t actually predict performance, but can be helpful;
• Claiming the EEOC has approved their test;
• Setting standards based on group or job averages;
• Focused primarily on training, not professional test development;
• Giving everyone a broad-based test (i.e., not based on performance requirements) and then measuring averages;
• Giving everyone a broad-based test (i.e., not based on performance requirements) and then measuring differences;
• Believing a self-descriptive test strongly and accurately predicts job skills;
• Not able to produce a technical manual documenting what the test measures and why that factor leads to job performance;
• Not clear on the definition of what the test actually predicts;

There are others, but this is a good start. Here is a quickie birdseed question users should ask every vendor: “Was your test specifically developed to predict job performance? If so, what part?” Any answer other than “Yes” means the test probably won’t work.

Birdseed or Not Birdseed!

As you might imagine, birdseed vendors complain the loudest. That’s really shameful. Validation principles are taught in major universities throughout the western world and religiously followed by every professional test development house. Just because a vendor does not know what they are is no excuse. It reminds me of Gary Larsen’s little fat boy trying to enter the School for the Gifted and Talented by pushing hard against a door that clearly say “pull.”

Here are some believe-it-or-not examples:

V1: Vendor (who sells a self-reported personality test) … All you care is about assessment. Don’t you care about performance?

A: Hello! Assessment is anything used to evaluate a candidate and predict performance. Besides, there is abundant literature showing self-reported tests are miserable predictors of skills like problem solving ability, planning, and teamwork. You want accuracy? Start selling tests that measure hard-to-fake applicant skills.

V2: Vendor (who sells a post-WWII NAZI atrocity test). Our test is validated. See our report. Wanna be a distributor?

A: No, thank you. I am not in the market for a concentration camp commandant. Besides, a technical report filled with anecdotes from unqualified people venturing their unsupported personal opinions about your test does not meet professional test standards.

V3: Vendor (who does group-level averaging). Group averaging is just another form of validation.

A: No. It’s not. Your test has no clear performance criteria; no proof a specific factor causes performance; group data is being used to make individual conclusions; and, your groups are so small, the numbers are either nonsense or chance.

U4: User … If I use a test, I’ll never place a candidate!

A: If there was ever a statement concerning the sad state of applicant screening, this was it!

U5: User … We like the DISC/MBTI/ACL/CPI/16PF/MMPI/Caliper test so much, we decided to use it for hiring.

A: That’s interesting. As far as I know, none of these publishers claim their test predicts job performance. Some even strongly recommend against it. Perhaps, you know something the publishers do not? Think about it. Just because a test measures a difference between people, does that mean it also predicts someone’s job performance?

U6: User … We use tests to match candidate personalities to managers.

A: That might be a good idea, unless company culture never changed; managers never changed jobs; people never changed departments; or, cloned personalities never lead to group-think.

U7: User … We interview. We don’t use tests.

A: If you ask questions and make hiring decisions based on applicant answers, how is that not a test?

V8: Vendor (after learning what it takes to meet professional test requirements) … I can’t do that!

A: That said it all.

V9: Vendor … We keep adjusting top group scores until we get the maximum individuals in the group to pass. The results become our hiring standard.

A: Fine-tuning junk science yields finely-tuned junk science.

V10: Vendor … We compare every applicant against a country-wide manager/salesperson/driver/XZY job norm.

A: So, you are assuming all jobs/companies/industries with the same title are alike; everyone in the group norm performs just like your people are expected to perform; every individual in the group norm matches the group average; jobholder answers are identical to applicant answers; applicants never try to make themselves look good on tests; and, every factor in the norm affects performance? Sure.

Over the years it has come to be accepted that the average number of new hires coming from employee referral programs is somewhere between SHRM’s 24 percent (for non-exempt positions) to about a third. Some programs do much better.

From CareerXroads now comes evidence that the hires from employee referrals are undercounted.

“Referrals permeate the recruiting process more than we think,” says recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a CareerXroads principal.

He and his partner, Mark Mehler, surveyed their clients and others about employee referral programs and found that most of the 50 respondents have a referral program, most pay a bonus of some kind, and on average 28 percent of their external hires are referrals.

Most of the results, says Crispin, were expected. However, in comparing data from that admittedly limited, and unscientific survey with the early results of the consultancy’s annual Source of Hire study, “we’re finding referrals are a part of every source or almost every.”

For instance, rehires, a small, but steady source of hires, include a sizable percentage of individuals referred by employees. The rehires may first come to the attention of recruiters through a referral, but when they’re onboarded, the source of hire tends to get reported as a rehire.

It’s a “classification issue,” explains Crispin. A similar situation occurs with sourcers. They will be reported as the source of a hire even when they identified a candidate as a result of a referral from an employee.

Crispin and Mehler included an early indication of the pervasiveness of employee referrals in their survey results, posted online here at SlideShare. The numbers are still being crunched for the forthcoming source of hire survey (tentatively to be titled “Channels of Influence”), so there’s no data cited for the contribution referrals make to these other sources.

However, the share of the pie that referrals make to the total hires attributed to these other sources is labeled. As Crispin observed, “With just what we can count, referral programs make a big contribution.”

Much of the other data in the survey report will be useful to recruiters for comparing their own results. The surveyed companies, the report preface notes, are “large, highly-competitive firms.” Some make upwards of 10,000 hires a year. More, though, make 1,000 or less.

Big or small, two-thirds of the respondents offer a bonus for every referral hire. Most common (44 percent) is $500 for a non-exempt hire. One-in-five will pay $1,000 and a few more (28 percent) will pay that for difficult to fill non-exempt positions.

It takes about 10.4 referrals on average to make a hire. Some companies are either so picky or get so many referrals that only one referral in 25 or more results in a hire.

One other significant stat coming out of the survey is that the majority of employers don’t give the referred candidate any special treatment. Of the 39 percent that do, the comments cited in the results suggest that many don’t do much more than review the resume or application.

On the other hand, 85 percent of the employees who made a referral will get a thank you whether or not a hire is made.

One of the survey’s only surprises, Crispin said, it that employers that don’t dedicate staff to managing and promoting the referral program actually do better than those with staff assigned.

The 53.6 percent of companies that divvy up the work among the recruiting staff average about 33 percent of hires from referrals. Those with some dedicated support average about 24 percent.

“It’s counterintuitive,” Crispin agreed. The result could be just an aberration. Or, he speculated, it could be spreading the work means there’s more overall time invested in the program. Or, it could be the “silo effect” effect, that is when one person is tasked with a job, everyone else leaves things up to them.

“Now that I’ve seen that,” Crispin notes, “I’d be curious to see if someone could replicate it … for now, it’s just an artifact.”

It’s a brand new year, great things are on the horizon … and for me, I have had it up to my eyeballs with a particular topic. I am so fed up with this topic that I want to climb to the highest peak and scream, bang my head against a wall, and even toss my desk around the room over and over. This topic that’s making me and others so irritated is Passive Candidates.

Yes, that’s right. The topic or even the mention of passive candidates now a day makes me want to throw up. In conducting my own personal year in review and through scouring HR topics, articles, blogs, etc., it seems as if 2011 was the year of the “Passive Candidate.” My response … so the heck what.

I guess I am at a loss as to why there is so much over-emphasis on “passive candidates.” Whatever happened to simply hiring the most-qualified, best-fit individual who can add their strengths in order to advance the organization? Now we have resorted to “Commandments of Recruiting Passive Candidates,” “Rules to Recruit Passive Candidates”, “Your Guide to Passive Candidates” — you get my point.

So here are some questions for you to ask yourself and answer:

• What does passive mean?
• Are “passive candidates” better qualified than active candidates?
• Are “passive candidates” perfect?
• Do “passive candidates” even know they are passive?
• Are “passive candidates” just acting passive and playing the recruiting game?
• Do hiring managers even know what passive means, or are they following another trend?
• Has a “passive candidate” ever been hired and then performed poorly, or are they all major rock stars?
• On a company employment application, where is the check box that asks whether one is passive or active?
• Is there something wrong with being an active seeker?
• What is most important to you in making your next hire?
• Why does it seem that some of these “passive candidates” seem to change companies like it’s nobody’s business?
• How come when I am speaking to a “passive candidate” and ask that individual what other opportunities they are currently looking at, the list is most of the time extensive?

Passive, active, semi-active, inactive, submissive, reactive, retired, separated, etc. — shouldn’t we want to hire the best and most qualified individuals for our positions? Don’t we want to seek out and hire those who possess the strengths to improve the organization?

Right now, there are individuals knocking at our doors, and while not all of them are qualified, a lot of them are very qualified. Yet, a lot of these individuals are facing discrimination by hiring managers and recruiters who want someone who is working or someone who is passive. I have yet to see any study or statistical data that proves passive candidates to be more qualified, make better employees, or add additional value than those employees in the “other” categories.

I am after the most qualified individuals for my positions. I hire for experience, qualifications/strengths, and fit. I have never asked whether an individual is passive or not because to me it doesn’t matter. If you have the skills, meet the criteria of the position, and are determined to be a fit, then there is a great possibility in making a match.

I recently completed an internal search for an executive-level position in one of our most prestigious business units. After taking the order and obtaining full details, I started my search process. Fast forwarding to the end, I presented five candidates in my final slate: two passive, two semi-active, and one active. The end result — the active candidate received the offer after a thorough and extensive interview process.

It turns out this active individual came from a competing company who had shut its local doors months prior. To no fault of her own, a little bad luck had her now in a position that she had never been in before — in active search mode. In my own evaluation, I found her to be no less qualified than other passive candidates I interviewed for this same role. In fact, she was the most qualified and turned out to be the best fit.

I call on my fellow HR and talent leaders to not follow trends or fashions. Rather, stick to and follow the fundamentals of recruiting and search, build relationships, treat others well, hire for skill set, fit, and strengths, interview like a pro, and lastly maintain an open mind.

The EEOC said total new complaints during fiscal 2011 were just slightly ahead of 2010. Last year it received 99,947 claims compared to 99,922 the year before. It also reported taking in $455.6 million through its administrative program and litigation.

Released last week, the stats show charges of retaliation by employers against workers who raised discrimination issues accounted for 37.4 percent of the commission’s workload. Complaints alleging just violations of Title VII (discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and national origin) accounted for 31.4 percent of the complaints.

Retaliation claims are rising faster than any other category of complaint, up 10 points in the last decade. Race discrimination claims, historically the most frequent, were the second-most commonly received complaint by the EEOC. They’ve hovered around 36 percent for years and last year represented 35.4 percent of the total charges.

(Note that a charge may contain multiple discrimination claims. The percentages represent the charges that include a specific discrimination claim.)

Retaliation claims may well continue to climb this fiscal year. Announcing a lawsuit earlier this month, an EEOC regional attorney in the New York office said, “We will pursue vigorously retaliation claims against employers whose managers would rather not comply with court orders and fire individuals who object to threats based on their religion and bias based on race.”

Mintz Levin attorney Martha Zackin, discussing the retaliation charge statistics, bluntly declared, “Retaliation claims are here to stay.” “ Recent developments lead us to conclude that this trend will continue, in 2012 and beyond,” she said, citing Department of Labor retaliation guidance under the Fair Labor Standards and Family and Medical Leave acts.

After retaliation and race, sex, disability, and age charges ranked third, fourth, and fifth respectively. However, while charges of sex and race discrimination declined, age and disability claims increased over 2010.

The EEOC said that its enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act “produced the highest increase in monetary relief among all of the statutes: the administrative relief obtained for disability discrimination charges increased by almost 35.9 percent to $103.4 million compared to $76.1 million in the previous fiscal year. Back impairments were the most frequently cited impairment under the ADA, followed by other orthopedic impairments, depression, anxiety disorder and diabetes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s wrong with corporate job interviews? Pretty much everything.

Interviews are the second most used and “flawed” tool in HR (right after performance appraisals). They are used and relied on around the world for hiring, transfers, promotions, and for selecting leaders. After studying and researching interviews for over 40 years, I find it laughable when people think they can become interview experts simply by conducting a few of them.

Despite their many flaws, the purpose of this article is not to tell you to stop using interviews. Instead, the goal is to make you aware of the things that can negatively impact the results of an interview. My premise is that if you encounter these problems and you understand their causes, you can take steps to avoid or minimize them.

A Complete List of the Top 50 Most Common Interview Problems (split into five categories)

A) The 15 most critical problems that can occur with interviews

1. Some things should not be measured in an interview – few start an interview with a list of the things they want to assess. Many things just can’t be measured accurately during an interview including: many technical skills, team skills, intelligence, attitude, and physical skills. Giving them a work sample or test is often superior.
2. Using historical information to predict the future — interviews cover what happened in the past. Unfortunately, “the way you did something yesterday” simply wouldn’t work in today’s “new normal.”
3. Interview questions are not directly related to the needed skills – most questions and “solve-this-problem” scenarios are developed independently and are not tied to a specific “required” skill or knowledge. There is no script or plan to ensure the right things are covered so that interviewers don’t just make up whimsical questions.
4. Inconsistent questions – there is no interview question script prepared for most interviews, so that the same questions are not asked of each candidate, which causes serious comparison and reliability issues.
5. No weights – interview questions are frequently not “weighted” or prioritized, so minor questions receive the same weight in the final rating as the most important ones.
6. No scoring sheet — there is no scoring sheet to ensure that interviewees are rated consistently on the same factors. Many final decisions are made based solely on memory. Scoring sheets forces the interviewers to make their decision based solely on the factors on the scoring sheet.
7. No agreement on good answers — almost universally, interviewers asked questions without first determining what is a weak, good, and great answer. As a result, the exact same answer will get different “scores” from different interviewers.
8. Interviews are inherently misleading – the basic foundation of the interview is based on the premise that during the interview, candidates are acting normally and are telling the truth. This is unlikely because most candidates are scared to death before, during, and after interviews.  The interview situation is by definition “unreal” and words often should not be taken as proof. It is not “the job” and therefore what happens during the interview might not be representative of what one would actually do on the job. The goals of many interviews are unfortunately focused on finding faults in the candidates, as opposed to finding their positive aspects.
9. Saying what they want to hear — interviewees frequently provide the answers that they believe that the interviewer wants to hear, rather than the most accurate answer. Interviewees frequently lie or omit key facts; unfortunately, interviewers do the same.
10. Non-job related factors influence decisions – numerous subjective factors like body language, accent, height, handshake, dress, and coming late may distract from a focus on the answers provided. Because of stereotypes, demographic factors (race, sex, age, national origin) may also impact the results.
11. Practice makes perfect – preparation changes interview results. So if you think you are getting spontaneous answers, be aware of the thousands of Internet articles, sample questions, and videos that can super-prepare candidates for anything. Individuals who have not been in a job search for a long time might be rusty in their interview skills. While unemployed candidates that have recently gone through numerous interviews could benefit from their extensive practice and do better.
12. Your specific interview questions may be known in advance — in addition to generic questions, with the use of glassdoor.com, be aware that whatever specific questions your firm has asked in the past (and their answers) are likely to be posted.
13. Behavioral interviews have inherent weaknesses — behavior interviews rely 100% on candidate-provided (and possibly exaggerated) descriptions of how they handled a problem in the past. Also be aware that they may have acted that way because of cultural rules and constraints that would be completely different today, at your firm. Extrapolating forward on how they would act six months from now, even though they have long since changed, and in your unique culture/environment can be misleading. Asking candidates to describe how they “handled” a certain situation has some serious inherent problems. First: what the candidate is describing to you may have happened, but you can’t actually know the extent of their contribution to the described action. Second: if their verbal descriptions or their delivery happens to be clumsy, their accomplishments will likely be underrated (even though they actually did what they described). And third, in our current fast-changing world, you might not even want them to act the same way.
14. Lack of future view — most interviews and all behavioral interviews focus on the past but whoever is hired will be working in the present/future. Most interviewers fail to ask candidates to forecast the future and to provide an outline of the plans that they will use to identify and solve upcoming problems.
15. Not hiring for “this” and “the next job” — hiring managers can be shortsighted. They frequently interview and hire based 100% on their own short-term needs. Companies should hire individuals for both “this” and a future job but most interview questions are not designed to assess future competencies that will be needed in their next jobin the company.

B) Problems with the interviewer

1. The interviewer – the sex, age, and experience of the interviewer dramatically impacts their assessment of any candidate. If the person they are interviewing is different than them, the result will also be different. All too often, interviewers act like they are junior psychologists and may make snap but inaccurate judgments about candidates.
2. Bias and prejudice — some interviewers have biases or make stereotypes that eliminate individuals for nonbusiness reasons.
3. Interviewers are not trained – almost everyone assumes that interviews are easy and don’t require training. Managers only receive cursory training and don’t know the pitfalls that can lead to bad interviewing and hiring results. Because “mystery shoppers” are not used, HR has no direct way of knowing what might be happening during an individual manager’s interviews.
4. The interviewer has arbitrary knockout factors – many interviewers seem to arbitrarily make up subjective “knockout factors,” which prematurely and often unfairly screen out qualified candidates. Many of these knockout factors are based on personal prejudices.
5. Interviewer fatigue — after many interviews in a row, the interviewer is tired and their judgment weakens.

C) Common interview process errors –the actual design of the interview process can cause many problems.

1. No structure — the less structure, the less reliable are the results. Using the same structure around the globe may be a problem because local cultures and laws vary.
2. The timing – the time of day that the interview was held has an impact upon its results because the energy level of interviewers and interviewees changes. Someone that has gone through five back-to-back interviews will perform differently than someone who had a break. And because multiple candidates are involved at different times of the day or on different days, it makes accurately comparing interview results that occurred at different times or days difficult.
3. The length of interviews varies — interviews are often very short, making realistic assessment difficult. And due to time and business pressures, managers often eagerly make snap, first-impression decisions, which can be inaccurate. Comparing candidates who had interviews of significantly different lengths is also difficult.
4. The order of the interview — If you are the first among all candidates in the interview process, you’re less likely to be hired then if you are the last candidate. Unfortunately, where you appear in the order of interviews impacts your odds of success.
5. Consistent location – even the place where the interview is held (if it is not consistent for all candidates) can influence the candidate’s assessment (i.e. lunch interviews produce different results than conference room interviews).
6. Interviews are held in person — This makes them expensive, because of the use of an interviewer’s time. Also requiring an in-person interview means that many working people simply won’t show up. Advances in technology now make it possible to hold inexpensive live video interviews over the Internet. Live video interviews and telephone preliminary interviews can save both travel costs and candidate time without impacting quality.
7. Travel fatigue — often interviewees are flown in for the interview the night before and jet lag makes them underperform. Interviewers can suffer the same issues.
8. Selling is limited – not enough time is spent during the interview selling the candidate, so those with multiple choices might not accept.
9. Skills demonstrated in the interview are not required for this job – interview scores tend to vary based on the candidate’s interpersonal and communication skills, but this particular job might not require even average interpersonal skills. Thus some jobs (i.e. receptionist, salesperson, and recruiter) lend themselves to being assessed through interviews, while for some other jobs (like programmers, artists, and meter readers), interviews may be horrible predictors of the candidate’s on-the-job success because they work alone.
10. Panel interviews – panel or group interviews are often intimidating because of the number of people in the room hurling question after question at the single interviewee. Often an assumption is made that panel interviews reduce the chance of bias or prejudice, but that is not automatically true if the team leader is powerful and successfully encourages others to share their bias. Candidates can also become frustrated when “the wrong person” asks a question (for example, when an HR person asks a technical question and a technical manager asked a question that should have been asked by HR).

D) Psychological issues and problems –if you study the research on interviews, you will find that there are many psychology-related issues.

1. Looking for reasons to reject — often interviewers spend almost all of the time trying to find a reason to reject the candidate, and as a result, they miss the candidate’s positive aspects. In some cases, negative responses are given twice the weight, so a candidate can be mentally rejected after a single error.
2. Halo Effect issues — often the evaluator is overly impressed by one or more personal characteristics (i.e. great looks). And they mistakenly assume that everything about the candidate is positive because of that single exemplary factor.
3. Recency comparison (the contrast effect) – if an interviewer has several bad interviews in a row, the next person who performs much better may be inaccurately rated as outstanding, simply because they are so much better than the recent poor performers. The reverse effect is also possible.
4. Personalities come across differently — shy, nervous, and slow people can be assessed poorly even though the job does not require speaking up or boldness.
5. Fooled by enthusiasm — some interviewers are so smitten with candidate enthusiasm and passion that they fail to accurately assess other important job requirements.
6. “Fit” assessment — many managers use interviews to measure an individual’s fit with the team, job, or the corporate culture.  Unfortunately, there is little evidence that untrained managers can accurately assess “fit” in 60 minutes. In addition, if innovation is being sought, individuals who do not “fit” may instead be the correct hire. Often candidates who are “just like me” (the interviewer) are automatically given higher ratings even though the job does not require someone “just like you.”
7. One-way conversation – unfortunately, many interviewers spend more time talking then listening during interviews.  Most interviewers don’t leave equal time for the candidate to ask questions and to present information that they want to present, which can frustrate them, and then limited information is used to make the decision.
8. “Too perfect” performance — occasionally interviewees with a lot of experience interviewing (often from HR) get extremely high ratings but they are rejected because they are “too perfect” and the evaluator assumes that something is wrong (cheating).

E) Legal issues

1. No accuracy check – the validity or the predictive ability of interviews are not checked by later on comparing whether those who received high interview scores turn out to be top on-the-job performers and vice versa. Interviews are a test, according to the EEOC, but most firms do not formally validate interviews or individual questions. The reliability of interviews is also not assessed.
2. Illegal questions – it’s not unusual for illegal questions to “pop out.”  It’s also possible for candidates to inadvertently volunteer illegal information.
3. No written record – because most interviews are conducted without being taped or even with a written record, there is little evidence (should legal or EEOC issues arise) as to what actually occurred or didn’t occur during interviews. When notes are taken, the unfettered handwritten notes taken by interviewers can be embarrassing should they see the light of day in a court proceeding.
4. Language, cultural, and disability issues — interviewees who normally speak a different language may be slower and may provide less precise answers merely because of language or cultural issues. Disabilities that affect speaking may impact scores, even though accommodation may be required and speaking is not a major job requirement.
5. Icebreaker issues — the interviewer may offer an icebreaker story or joke that may be inappropriate or illegal. It may negatively impact the responses from the interviewee.

F) Candidate-experience related issues – most candidates either hate of fear them. Further angering or frustrating candidates may cause you to lose top candidates, hurt your employer brand, or even harm product sales.

1. Candidates are forced to lie to their boss — because most interviews are held during work hours, currently employed candidates coming to an interview are essentially forced to lie to their current boss as to why they are away from their current job.  This can cause them to prematurely drop out of the hiring process.
2. Uncertainty and being kept in the dark — abuse of candidates occurs when managers keep them in the dark about the interview process and what is expected during it. They are not told what will occur during the interview and what skills will be assessed. In addition, they are not told who will be there during the interview, the role of each interviewer, and who will make the final decision. Failing to educate the candidate may cause them to under-prepare in key areas. Candidates also get frustrated when they are left in the dark and not given feedback about where they stand after an individual interview or after the process is complete.
3. Candidates are given no input — the interview process and whom they will interview with is determined by the organization. However, top candidates should be asked for their input, who they need to talk to, and what information they need in order to make their decision. Because without this information, they may drop out or reject your offer.
4. The number of interviews for each job — “death by interview,” which is where an excessive number of interviews over many days wears out a candidate. There is also death by repetition, when candidates during multiple interviewers get frustrated when they are asked the same questions over and over because interviews by different managers are not coordinated.
5. Scheduling difficulties prolong the process — when multiple candidates are brought in for interviews, the time that it takes to schedule all of these interviews almost always stretches out the hiring process to the point where most top candidates will be lost because of the long time delay.
6. Managers act inappropriately during interviews – sometimes interviewers act inappropriately by taking phone calls during interviews, canceling and rescheduling interviews, appearing disorganized, or even asking illegal or silly questions. Such behavior is disrespectful but it may also scare away the top candidates. Candidates often say they rejected an offer because of the way that they were treated during the interview process.
7. Ghost interviews may frustrate — in order to meet legal requirements, external interviews are often held even though an internal candidate is already preselected. This wastes candidate time and adds to frustration.

In my experience, most interviewers have a cavalier attitude toward interviewing. That is partly because they will never know if a major mistake was made and a top candidate was never hired. However, if you 1) study and fully understand the potential problems; and 2) have some empathy for what the candidates are going through and how much they will suffer when rejected, the quality of interviews will automatically increase.

So let’s get on with it: Guess who says they want to grow their influence at the top corporate levels?

HR you say? Sorry, not the answer we were looking for. The answer comes from MarketingCharts, which says, ”An overwhelming majority (79%) of global CMOs say they want their influence in business strategy and development to grow.”

Here’s another factoid from the article, which is based on a survey from Forrester Research and Heidrick & Struggles: 89 percent of CMOs identified visioning and strategic thinking as a top competency. There now, don’t you feel better?

Here an ATS, There an ATS

Is there anyone left in the world who wants an ATS and doesn’t have one? There’s no reason for that these days, what with an ATS in every price range.

At the free end, there’s Zoho Recruiter, if all you need are the basics. For our money (actually no one’s money) there’s SmartRecruiters, which is a surprisingly full-featured, sophisticated ATS that’s priced at an even-more-suprising free.

At the other end of the scale, a company can spend upwards of a million on a enterprise, in-house talent acquisiton system that handles reqs, posts jobs, parses, sorts, manages, and stores hundreds of thousands, even millions of resumes you will never look at.

Despite this virtual cornucopia of systems, humanity’s indomitable drive to build a better mousetrap leads to the near monthly launch of just one more ATS. The latest to find its way into our inbox is Zartis. It’s a minimalist SaaS ATS out of Ireland that’s aimed at the SMB market. (Got all those initials?)

Zartis offers more than Zoho, and less than SmartRcruiters. That would be fine except for one thing: Zartis is mostly fee-based. What you get for free is a single open job allowance, which makes it more of a S than an M market tool. If you have more jobs and want more functionality — like posting jobs to aggregators — you have to pay.

Bottom line: Check out Zartis if you’re curious, then choose SmartRecruiters.

Since the ATS door is now open, OneWire got some strokes in an investment report from Feltl and Company, an investment banker and advisor. The report includes long excerpts from a discussion between analyst Scott Berg and OneWire President and COO Brin McCagg.

Berg obviously was impressed. “Overall,” he writes in his report, “We believe OneWire is creating an intriguing and unique approach to talent acquisition software and we are quite excited to track its progress in the coming years.”

We (our royal usage here refers to us — another use of the royal pronoun!), we wrote about OneWire in 2009,  not long after it was launched by founders McCagg and Skiddy von Stade. (Von Stade heads the financial executive search firm FS von Stade and Associates.)

OneWire was then, and still is, both intriguing and unique. It stands between the applicant and a corporate ATS, though an ATS isn’t a required component. It functions as a matching system, with the players completing profiles far more detailed than a mere resume.

It borrows from social sites, networking, and classic job sites to create a rich database of prospects that, as we (there’s that royal pronoun again) said in the 2009 article, if you want a Harvard grad who was on the crew team with international banking experience in pharmaceuticals, OneWire will find everyone who fits and rank them for you.

OneWire is being used by hundreds of financial firms and many Fortune 1000 companies. If you need another reason to take a look, consider that OneWire was named “One of America’s Most Promising Startups” by BusinessWeek. Here’s one more: OneWire has gotten $30 million from individual investors, a fundraising method intriguing and unique enough to warrant Mashable attention.

What’s the singsong experience?

It’s when a Gatekeeper starts offering information, in a continuous pattern, to your request.

Don’t misunderstand — I had spent several hours sourcing into a particular entertainment company with very little — almost none — success.

Several hours.

Admittedly, the customer said it was a challenge.

Then I got “lucky.”

It was 7 my time and 4 on the West Coast where my target was located.

I was frustrated.

I was slightly angry.

That’s how I get when I get frustrated.

Infantile — I know — you don’t have to tell me but sometimes it serves me. Other time I just try to stay away from other people, but last night what felt like an unproductive day motivated me.

I hate to go to bed feeling like a loser.

I kept dialing.

Finally, on one call I was transferred from the Gatekeeper’s console to an executive assistant (to one of the Executive VPs who reported to the CEO).

She answered!

Most at this company had not been answering throughout the day. I had been doing a lot of “stabbing in”* with few results.

I had been given a list of names inside the company and the request was to fill in the reporting structures under those names.

I needed the reports of the EVP she reported to. I had one of them from the customer. My gut was telling me there were several more.

‘Hi Judy — whatcha’ need?” she asked, all friendly-like.

I’m sorry, Marla, this is Maureen–”

(Before the receptionist/gatekeeper transferred me I asked her (quickly) whom she was transferring me to. She gave me the EA’s name (Marla) so that’s why I knew it. Marla didn’t say her name when she answered.)

She cut in before I could finish. Actually, I was finished. I say as little as possible when I’m calling.

“Oh, you’re coming in from the reception desk — no matter!” she chirped. “Whatcha’ need?”

Now, don’t ask me why she said “no matter” and then don’t ask me why she asked me what I needed. She just did. It happens, sooner or later. You just have to get to the later sometimes.

I told her what I needed:

“I was trying to reach Peter Boyle’s group — I understand you support him?”

“Yes,” she answered, pleasantly.

“I understand Matt Hogue’s title has changed (the receptionist/gatekeeper had given me that much).”

“Yes, he’s the CFO now. He was the VP,” she confirmed, still pleasant.

I could feel myself tensing. When you’re phone sourcing you reach a do-or-die moment when you can sense if the person on the other end is going to proceed (or not). I was at that moment and my neck and shoulder muscles were hurting from the day’s frustrations. I sensed she would go on.

“But I don’t have the other members of the group. Can you tell me who they are?” I dice-rolled.

Like I said, this do-or-die moment is fraught with emotion for many phone sourcers — the phone sourcers reading this know what I mean. Phone sourcing is a high-stress activity, admittedly. It’s a big part of why many people don’t like doing it.

She trilled off seven names.

I was tired so I misspelled a couple, tripping on the keys as she was trilling but I got them down best I could without interrupting her roll.

I knew once I had the names I could cipher out the titles somehow.

Maybe even with her.

The names are the most important thing.

I gambled further, knowing from experience if she told me this much she’d go further with me:

“And can you tell me, Marla, what Jerome’s title is?”

“Accounting Manager,” she shot back.

“I think I misspelled Ann’s last name. What is it?” I asked, all the while horrified at the indecipherable mess I had made of it.

“Schuster?” she asked. I recognized the incongruent letters I had typed and also recognized how the mess I was staring at could be Schuster.

“Yes; with a ‘c’ or no ‘c’?” I vollied.

“With a ‘c’: S-C-H-U-S-T-E-R,” she slowly spelled.

I said nothing, listening to the silence when she finished.

I felt she wasn’t (finished).

“And she spells her first name with an e,” she added, breaking the silence.

“Thanks. I had it without,” I told her, matter-of-factly.

I was fighting to control my voice.

“And Lisa? What’s Lisa’s title?” I went on, holding my breath.

“Reservations VP,” she said.

Here comes the singsong part — it’s always music to my ears.

“And Jan is Marketing Director, John is Director, Business Operations, Pam is Regional Director of Sales and Ken — Sr Director Product Development,” she sang trippingly off her tongue, getting the job done.

“And you have Matt — CFO,” she finished.

It’s almost like they go into some sort of trance.

“Yes, I do have him,” I admitted, with an emphasis on “him.”

That’s it?” I asked, doing a final check while still typing what she had just told me, the last part from memory. I’m lucky in that voice/sound seems to “implant” itself into my memory (I keep hearing like what it was said) for a few seconds after I hear something.

“That’s it,” she answered, convincingly.

Quickly, I then said, “Marla, you’ve been a great help — I do appreciate it. Thank you and Good-bye!”

She said “Good-bye” and I hung up.

I breathed a long sigh and sat back, arching and stretching my arms around my keyboard and adjusting my head on my shoulders. I heard cracking and felt relief.

Now, you’re wondering why she told me all that she did and why, finally, it got easy? I don’t know for sure but I have my suspicions. I’d like to hear yours first, though. Tell me what you think.

*stabbing in When you call in to a company’s internal dial system; willy-nilly with the expectation that someone will answer at their desk who will be able to give you information. It’s (usually) a very effective phone sourcing technique!

Monster’s stock price was down almost 20 percent at lunchtime in New York, a drop of $1.79 on the day. Trading below $10 for so long that Standard & Poors moved the company out of its S&P 500 stock basket in December, Monster’s price is now right at $7.19 a share.

The jobs advertising company, which yesterday laid off 400 employees, issued its fourth-quarter and full-year financials this morning before the markets opened. Despite growing revenue by almost 14 percent for the year, the company fell short in the final quarter. It earned 11 cents a share versus the 12 cents analysts were expecting. Monster’s revenue for the quarter also fell short, coming in at $250 million instead of the $259 million average estimate of Wall Street analysts.

Compared to 2010, Monster was profitable, earning 37 cents a share for the year (after allowances for one-time and similar expenses). In 2010 the company lost 7 cents a share.

Looking ahead, the company is not optimistic about where the job market is heading. Bookings (posting and search contracts) are expected to be down 6 to 10 percent from the 1st quarter of 2010. Part of the explanation for the decline is that there were strong signs of economic recovery at the beginning of 2011 leading employers to anticipate adding staff. But the economy sputtered, slowing hiring.

Now, with employers carefully monitoring headcount and with surveys suggesting that if hiring accelerates at all, it will be in the second half of the year, Monster says it expects its revenue will be lower this quarter than the year before. The outlook, says the company’s report, is for a 3 to 7 percent decline in revenue.

“First quarter earnings are expected to be in the range of break-even to $0.04 per share,” the company says.

However, from a purely employment view, posting and search revenue actually was up globally. While North American revenue (principally the U.S.) declined 2 percent in the last quarter, Monster’s international revenue grew by 8.3 percent. For the year, revenue from its international operations was up 23.3 percent, and is now approaching parity with North America.

The biggest revenue reduction came from Monster’s advertising income. Monster said earlier this year it would be getting out of the advertising business, so the decline here was to be expected. For the fourth quarter, Monster’s advertising revenue was $21.3 million, a 34 percent reduction from the year before.

The layoff of about 7 percent of its 5,700 employee workforce is expected to save about $100 million annually.

Said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, president and CEO, “We are taking difficult but necessary steps to implement cost savings initiatives that will provide us the flexibility to enhance our marketing and sales efforts to continue to improve long-term growth prospects and profitability.”

Next week, CareerBuilder will release its North American revenue for the fourth quarter and full year. The privately held company voluntarily releases only select data. LinkedIn, now the leading recruitment competitor to both Monster and CareerBuilder, will report its financial results on Feb. 9. Dice Holdings, operator of Dice.com and other niche boards, will report its results Feb. 2.

For the past several months, my team has reviewed dozens of articles, blogs, and white papers that outline foundational and basic aspects of “How to do Metrics.” There is a tremendous resource available by simply using search engines to find information on metrics.

I am encouraged by the amount of content that is dedicated to subjects such as what metrics can be tracked, the quality of hire conversation, the candidate experience, and how metrics can serve as a stepping stone to a real relationship with business leaders. I will also admit that the meat behind many of these blogs, articles, or white papers is pretty lean, but there are exceptions. Shout out to Chris Brabic at Smashfly for his tutorials that break into some of the detail.

As I prepare for the metrics panel for the spring ERE conference, it occurred to me how statistics and analysis tends to not be standard training for recruiters. There are some recruiters who were engineers, programmers, or MBAs, and as such they would have some basic to intermediate statistics training. But it is likely that statistical analysis or training is likely reinforced by using Excel with tables, pie charts and graphs — not using the actual definitions, architecture, and structure of true statistical analysis.

Which brings me to this post, and the danger of correlation and causation. It is not new to hear that metrics, when pulled together and compared to each other, tell a story. Much of that story has to do with correlation. As an example, if you spend more money (increase cost per hire), you may reduce your time to fill. Well, sometimes that is true. Sometimes.

That relationship may not be a causal relationship: One does not necessarily cause the other. The dependence that we wish was there is actually not there in the strength that we need it to be, or even at all. There is a common scientific and statistical concept that states “correlation does not imply causation.” I find that to be very true in recruiting and talent acquisition metrics.

We try so hard to find how one metric impacts the other. Technologies, branding companies, consultants, and so on use metrics to drive home value — and they should. We all try hard because we just really want to sort out why things are happening and what can we do to change what is happening, and that is a worthy endeavor.

However, I caution trying to correlate metrics together in order to force causation. It is more likely that two or more metrics correlate and have less of a causal relationship then having a causal relationship.

As you review your metrics and measures for 2012, I encourage you to:

1. State which metrics you are correlating together, and challenge yourself to see if you are hoping for a causal relationship, or if a causal relationship actually exists.
2. Prove that the causal relationship has validity and can be repeated time and time again.
3. Go back to your executive presentations and record where you did indicate that correlations and causal relationships exist. Remember that those statements are now out there, and it is possibly expected that the causal relationship will sustain.
4. As you create or refine goals for your recruiting teams or the hiring managers, be aware of these causal and non-causal correlations, as it will help you declare and meet expectations in the marketplace.

Happy metric-ing, and see you at the Spring ERE!

According to a recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes to their job-hunting status. While this is a huge and important pool, most companies over-emphasize the 17% of candidates who are active. Then to make matters worse, when they do target passive candidates, they clumsily use their active candidate processes.

To assist talent leaders in understanding the differences between active and passive candidate recruiting, I’ve developed a recruiter competency model addressing the similarities, differences, and overlaps. Contact me directly if you’d like to learn more about this. It’s highlighted in the graphic showing the 12 most important competencies alongside a very rigorous 1-5 ranking system. For example, a 4-5 ranking requires outstanding performance, some type of significant recognition, and continuing accolades from the recruiter’s hiring manager clients.