This leaves people to fend for themselves and attempt to adjust to their new organization and role essentially on their own. It will negatively influence their productivity and personal experience. It will lower your new employees’ perception about your company, and ultimately your top talent will leave. They will leave because they have options. Employees want to feel important, and they want to feel that they have been given a good opportunity to integrate into their new organization.

As the recruiter, your job is to find high-potential talent. You seek candidates who are well suited to your organization both in qualification and fit. People with a high potential for talent have a lot of opportunities, as clearly seen with technical and clinical people, making the race and “fight” for these employees especially challenging. What your company offers in terms of integration, both into the position and into the company, can be, if done correctly, a competitive advantage.

We define talent integration as the process and practice of blending (integrating) new hires into the organization. (It also includes the process and practice for integrating newly promoted managers and executives into their new role.)

What Distinguishes Onboarding from Talent Integration

Onboarding, by definition, is intended to help new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective members of your organization. Tactics commonly used include formal meetings, lectures, videos, print materials, or computer-based orientations to introduce newcomers to their new jobs in new organizations. Yet, what we see is that these processes often default to a more mechanical and routine approach (checklist style) than to a true process of personal and social integration with a developmental approach.

The key purpose of talent integration is to reduce the time for those new to their roles to become productive contributors (i.e., shorten the new job learning curve) and to swiftly anchor them into the organization through establishing strong relationships, support, and loyalty. Clearly, this practice helps retain employees, in addition to serving as a way to attract talent to your organization.

What’s Involved?

Talent integration involves a more formal, developmentally focused transition plan to help the new employee integrate into the organization — usually covering at least the first 90 to 180 days and in addition to standard onboarding tactics named above, it includes four core elements:

1. A purposeful discussion between the new staff and their immediate supervisor within the first few days of hire to define clear expectations regarding job performance and key expected results, and to discuss how best to work with each other.
2. Internal mentorship for the new employee to help them understand the organizational culture and “how work gets done around here.”
3. Coaching for new managers, best done with an external/neutral executive/performance coach, to support the transition, especially if new skills are needed (i.e., technical/clinical person being promoted to a manager).
4. Regular feedback meetings, monthly at a minimum, focusing on what is going well, where the person is challenged, what their ideas are, what they could use for help, etc. These discussions are dialogues and iterative in nature, verses a monologue from the boss.

6 Ways Recruiters Can Lead the Talent Integration Initiative

1. Before you start to search and screen candidates, make sure the hiring manager (or executive or HR manager) have accurately assessed and planned the following.

• What does the job require, and what really needs to be done (vs. what is stated on an outdated job description)?
• What skills, behaviors, and attitudes are required to achieve those requirements for success, now?
• What role adaptation is anticipated for the future?

2. Use behaviorally-based interview questions that probe the candidates’ experience history, decisions made, and accomplishments achieved.

3. Include culture-based questions to help determine their values and motivators, and compare them to your organizational values. A key question to use is: Tell me about your ideal company culture. Do this before you talk about your company’s culture.

4. Include a scenario-based problem for the candidate to resolve and report on.

5. Share with the candidates your organization’s talent integration process and comments and stories from staff who have experienced its value. Talk about success rates in hiring and keeping high potential talent, demonstrating a work place others will want to join.

6. Consider having top candidates complete a personality-based job performance indicator that measures their potential for success in different business environments and roles. (Though such an assessment should never be used as the sole criterion for selection, as part of a selection set, it can be a valuable tool to avoid hiring the wrong candidate for the job.) This can also be used as a tool to support and coach the new employee in areas that need to be addressed to promote a faster and more effective integration.

What if your organization does not yet have a talent integration process? Start by looking at what you do have in place. Make a recommendation to your boss or to management about what is missing, why it’s important to consider, and the value it can offer in attracting and retaining top talent.

This is a gradual death, so don’t expect to see an announcement in the obituaries. The death of the cubicle began at Google and Facebook and is now spreading to numerous startups in the Bay Area. There is no need for a CSI investigation to determine the culprit, because the killer of the cubicle is the higher order need for collaboration and innovation. 

If you don’t believe me, go online and look for a picture of the inside of Google or Facebook. Instead of seeing lines and lines of cubicles, you will instead see broad open spaces where people sit side-by-side with no partitions between them. And periodically you’ll see a “standing desk” where the employee literally stands all day. Obviously without partitions separating employees, there will be less privacy, more noise, and constant interruptions. And that is exactly why cubicles are dying because the increased number of interruptions builds collaboration and sharing, which in turn increases innovation, the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. As an added benefit, the open space environment also increases a sense of community.

Google Began the Slow Death of the Cubicle

I give credit to Google for starting this open space work environment concept. You might think that open spaces and simple desks are a way to save money, but cost is not part of the equation. Google is unique among all firms in that it is essentially a “math camp.” Instead of tradition or history, almost everything is guided by a mathematical algorithm. It has an algorithm for recruiting, retention, leadership, and even the ideal length of the café line. And the root cause of the death of the cubicle is their algorithm for increasing innovation, the lifeblood of Google.

Discovery + Collaboration + Fun = Innovation

For years HR and managers have tried to increase innovation using primarily hit-or-miss approaches. But Google has taken a more scientific approach where it has discovered that innovation is increased only after taking proactive steps to increase discovery (learning), collaboration (working with people from other disciplines) and fun (yes, fun in the workplace). It is the second factor, the need for enhanced collaboration, that is primarily responsible for killing the cubicle. Facebook is also a proponent of this collaboration-building open office movement, as are many other Bay Area firms that rely on innovation.

Maximizing Collaboration Open Space Environment

Imagine if you lined up simple tables (that are no more than 36 inches deep) end to end with nothing separating you from the employees next to you or in front of you. If employees spread their arms out simultaneously, they could literally touch each other. And within a stone’s throw, there is a white board where several people can stand and collaborate on ideas. And within 150 feet, there is a snack area where you can share coffee and collaborate with employees from other disciplines. Some employees even have standing desks which provide even less privacy. All of this may seem crazy, but actually it’s crazy smart. The model is similar to one used by sports teams. Players and coaches don’t sit separately and there are no partitions to reduce collaboration and sharing.

How Cubicles Kill Sharing and Collaboration

There are many reasons why cubicles are becoming dinosaurs in the Silicon Valley. Some of those reasons are listed below. Each is immediately followed with the corresponding advantages that you can expect from the open space collaboration environment.

• Partitions require walking in order to share – the partitions that make up the sides of the cubicle purposely hide a worker from view. Although this isolation does reduce distractions for a single worker, it also reduces interactions between coworkers. And when a single employee has a startling idea, they must literally get up and bob in and out of several cubicles in order to share it with their team. And unfortunately, that extra time and effort required may lead an employee to postpone the sharing of the idea until the next meeting, which in turn causes many ideas to go unshared.
• Advantages of the open space solution: in direct contrast, the table and standing desk environment offer no restrictions to the rapid simultaneous sharing of a new idea. When anyone comes up with a brainstorm idea, it can be shared verbally across tables. And if a teammate becomes obviously excited about a new idea, everyone might even be able to see it. When it is warranted, the entire team can instantly walk the short distance to the nearby standup whiteboard wall area to share the details with the team.

• Cubicles cut eye contact and they make it hard to approach – the partitions of the cubicle essentially eliminate eye contact because you sit facing away from the entrance. The depth of a cubicle itself even requires you to walk in and disturb someone who is sitting down with their back to you. Because the interrupter can’t see what they’re working on, there may be a resistance to approach and interrupt.
• Advantages of the open space solution: with a simple table and a chair (with no partitions) you can easily establish eye contact with anyone in front or next to you. In addition, you can literally approach another employee from the side with no obstructions. Some Google offices even include semicircular couches so that everyone can maintain eye contact while relaxing during team meetings. Employees at standing desks are the most approachable and thus they offer the most opportunities for collaboration. When someone approaches an employee at their standing desk, they can approach from 360°. And as an added benefit, there is no need for someone to get up from their chair to talk to you. At Facebook, more than 10% of the employees use standing desks. There are even treadmill standing desks where employees get the added benefit of exercise while working. And because the employees are already standing, it is effortless to walk a few feet to the white board wall to collaborate with others.

• Cubicles reduce energy-creating noise – cubicles are designed to reduce noise, which may seem like a good thing, but working in a quiet environment may actually reduce performance.
• Advantages of the open space solution: strange as it may sound, the right noise level may actually increase productivity and innovation. Just as bars and restaurants plan to create a certain noise level in order to create a sense of excitement, managers can have the same result. The noise of all employees working may act as a motivator to keep everyone else doing their part. But in order to get the right amount and the right kind of noise, managers can use noise filtering and canceling technologies to provide the right amount and the right kind of background noise. And if an individual needs quiet for a period of time in order to think, the simple answer is that they put on their own private music or noise canceling earphones.

• Cubicles are too small for collaborative meetings – because of the size and layout of a cubical, any amount of collaboration needs to be shifted to traditional conference rooms. These unfortunately must be scheduled in advance, and they are often in short supply.
• Advantages of the open space solution: managers in the open space environment realize that the delays involved in finding and scheduling a conference room are collaboration- and idea-killers. As a result, they have created numerous collaboration white board walls adjacent to the workspace, where a small group can leave their tables in order to get together to hash out an idea. Even when walking to the cafeteria, there are numerous alcoves where team members can stop and outline an idea immediately when it comes up. Overall, there is a conscious effort to provide an overabundance of “instant” team collaboration spaces that require no scheduling or advance preparation.

• Cubicles increase personal privacy – cubicles don’t really provide very much privacy because they have no doors or walls. However, the personal privacy that they do provide emphasizes individualism. And thus it is a collaboration killer that must be partially sacrificed for the good of the team.
• Advantages of the open space solution: although privacy may seem like a good thing to you, it is a collaboration reducer. Rapid innovation requires a complete team and community environment. Managers educate their team members about the value of collaboration and innovation. In addition, with the growth of the Internet and social media, most employees in the high-tech world have long ago reduced their concern for personal privacy. Managers at Google and Facebook for example understand that there is a periodic need for quiet team meetings, so they have provided an overabundance of team meeting rooms and quiet spaces, and Google even offers sound and light proof decompression/stress reduction chambers for individual employees. In an electronic world, even the desire to view personal pictures is not sacrificed; it is simply transferred to one’s computer files. And although plain tables provide no room for in-baskets, file cabinets, sticky notes, or cups full of pens, there is no need for them because this is a 100% paperless electronic environment.

Additional Collaboration-increasing Options

In addition to “killing the cubicle,” there are many other actions that firms are taking in order to increase collaboration. For example, offering a shuttle bus to work may seem like an expensive proposition. However, because workers in the same team don’t live close together, shuttle buses provide a valuable opportunity for workers to interact with others from many disciplines. This cross-functional interaction helps to speed up learning and best-practice sharing. And if the riders are members of an overhead function, it may help to reduce bottlenecks and roadblocks by increasing understanding and empathy. Google headquarters even has a laundromat which also helps to improve cross-functional collaboration, and the physical placement of business functions are often determined based on how walking patterns can increase collaboration between interdependent but disparate functions.

When Sun built a new office years ago, it even dramatically increased the width of the staircases so that teams would not have to break up into a single file and thus lose collaboration while walking to the cafeteria. The most outrageous implementation of the concept has to be the Google “conference bike,” where six team members can collaborate and exercise at the same time, while riding around the campus.

Enhancing Collaboration With Remote Workers

Many high-tech firms in the Bay Area offer remote work options, so efforts must be undertaken to increase collaboration with workers who do not physically come into the office on a regular basis. The most obvious solution is a widespread use of internal and external social networks to enhance collaboration and idea sharing. Firms like IBM have developed a number of tools and approaches which educate both remote and regular employees on how to increase team collaboration and innovation between each other.

Final Thoughts

HR and talent management leaders may think that I’m exaggerating about the importance of physical space in increasing productivity, sharing, collaboration. and innovation. But if they do a little research, they would rapidly adopt the idea. One study by USC showed a significant increase in productivity. Firms like Google and Facebook don’t do things on a whim; they have hard data to show that these approaches produced measurable business results.

If you’re still cynical, do some research into the value of innovation at your own firm. Once you or the CFO calculates its extremely high economic value, it’s easy to gain support for approaches for increasing the collaboration that eventually results in implemented innovation.

Almost a year after launching BeKnown, its Facebook-based business network and competitor to BranchOut, Monster is now enabling its network members to see who they know at companies offering jobs on Monster.com.

It works just as you expect: Job seekers searching Monster are invited to “See who you know.” A click pops up a list of their BeKnown connections who work at the company. Those not already on BeKnown get an invitation to join, needing only a Facebook login.

As Tom Chevalier, Monster’s director of product management, explained during a demo a week ago, the integration now enables job seekers to connect with their friends and associates, engaging them in a job “conversation starting right on Monster.”

The advantage for job seekers is obvious. Getting inside a company with a personal connection and recommendation is so far superior to merely clicking the “Apply” button that it makes the latter only a little better than buying a lottery ticket.

For employers, the advantages aren’t quite as obvious, but they are there. For one, employee referrals are generally better qualified, so it helps the cream rise to the top. It’s also an opportunity for Monster clients to use their employees’ connections to reach better candidates, something that Jobvite has now been doing for years.

Passive candidates, uninterested in job searching, might even be moved to get a referral by knowing who among their friends works at a company whose job they’ve been sent or stumbled across.

Certainly, this is a win for both job seekers and employers, especially since the feature costs nothing.

Monster, however, is likely to be the biggest winner here. It can only help its struggling BeKnown network, which is barely a blip compared to BranchOut. Monster won’t discuss its BeKnown numbers, but AppData says it averages 10,000 users daily and 190,000 a month. BranchOut averages 420,000 a day and 11.5 million a month.

BranchOut’s usage numbers have been declining for the last several weeks, while BeKnown’s have improved slightly. Don’t put too much weight on these changes. They cover only a short period so technical changes to counting methods and news events, such as BranchOut’s $25 million in new funding and mobile app launch, can skew the picture. The longer view shows little growth for Monster, while BranchOut’s growth curve is more hockey stick.

Chevalier said he expects that with the new integration, BeKnown’s “growth trajectory will be pretty dramatic.” Because joining the BeKnown network from Monster takes hardly any effort, he’s probably right. How many will then go on to fully populate their BeKnown profile and add contacts will depend on how useful it is.

LinkedIn does the same thing for its job postings, telling you how many connections you have and specifically who can refer you. LinkedIn handles this automatically. Monster requires you to ask for the information.

It’s a difference in philosophy, says Chevalier. Monster won’t make connections automatically; it’s a matter of trust, he says. BeKnown is “not extending beyond where we should be.”

In an email sent Sunday, the SHRM Members For Transparency said “it has become apparent — as many of you suggested it would — that continuing to meet is unlikely to be a successful means to achieving our goals.”

At this point, says the unsigned email, “We are reaching out to you now because we need your feedback to help determine SMFT’s future direction.” Encouraging the members and the SHRM regional, state, and local leaders who also were sent the email to complete a questionnaire, SMFT says, “your responses are critical and will guide us in identifying our next steps.  In many ways, your feedback may determine the future of SHRM.”

Timed to coincide with SHRM’s annual conference coming up the end of June in Atlanta, the SMFT group says the results will be made public before then.

How the survey results will be used by SMFT isn’t explained; however, the email says that after the last meeting with SHRM board representatives, the organization “will continue to use other avenues to vigorously pursue positive change in Board practices.’

The email doesn’t say what transpired at that March 4 meeting, between three SHRM Board members and CEO Hank Jackson, and two SMFT representatives. But it does point to a position paper on the group’s site, which says of the meeting, “the Board was not receptive to seriously alleviating our greatest concerns – the Board compensation and premium-class travel benefit.”

The SMFT group formed two years ago in reaction to a growing schism between some of SHRM’s most prominent members and its board. (TLNT has been covering this issue in detail since the group was formed.) Among the issues raised by SMFT has been the board’s quiet decision to award itself a salary and premium travel perks, the hiring of a CEO with no direct HR experience, and the multi-million dollar expansion of the organization into China and India.

It took almost a year for the SHRM board to agree to meet with SMFT; and five months for a second meeting. In recounting its view of the last meeting, the SMFT position paper says:

In conclusion, very few changes resulted from the two meetings. It is important to note that, prior to scheduling the second meeting, the SHRM Board Chair wanted to withdraw the agreement to meet a second time. Only after we protested was the second meeting finally scheduled.

Just this week, General Motors confirmed it was cancelling $10 million worth of ads on the site because, said the Wall Street Journal, it found they “had little impact on consumers.”

The article arrived like a bombshell, coming just days before the IPO. It set off all sorts of debate in the marketing community — and beyond, of course — as experts weighed in on both sides. Rival carmaker Ford even jumped in, firing a shot on Twitter saying, “It’s all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Remember that part about “engaging content & innovation.”

For recruiters, this is more than just an interesting sidebar to the stock sale story; which, is opening (but won’t stay) at $38 a share, giving Facebook a market value of $108 billion. Rather, the General Motors withdrawal raises anew the whole issue of the effectiveness of social media recruiting, and Facebook specifically. 

There’s even doubt Facebook has staying power. An AP-CNBC poll found 46 percent of respondents believe the site will fade away over time, replaced by something else. (43 percent believe it will survive.) Surprisingly, among its young adult users, while 51 percent say it will stay around, 35 percent say it won’t.)

Whatever its fate, social media as a whole has been embraced by the recruiting industry in a way that’s entirely out of proportion to what it gives back. Every survey I’ve seen on source of hire puts social media so far down the pecking order that it neighbors with print, career fairs, and walk-ins. That is, assuming the survey got that detailed.

(I know there is plenty of disagreement over the entire “source of hire” metric. Chris Brabic at Smashfly quotes Master Burnett on the subject, and CareerXroads this year chose to title its annual study, “Sources of Hire: Channels That Influence.“)

Other surveys, less subject to the hand-wringing uncertainty of where a hire came from, show Facebook produces less of the results marketers care about than does Google or, for that matter, the Internet generally. Based on some 11,000 campaigns, Webtrends found Facebook’s click-through rate for banner ads to be .051 percent, half the industry average of .1 percent and way less than Google’s display network average .4 percent.

The AP-CNBC poll found 57 percent of users never click on a Facebook ad.

Employers haven’t much experimented with banner ads on Facebook, though they have spent on SEO and Google’s AdWords. An average click-through rate for an AdWords campaign is about 2 percent. Some rates can be considerably higher, depending on position and subject.

Recruiters who put at least some marketing dollars into improving their position on search engine results pages (SERP) can expect to get the highest click through rates of all. Slingshot, an SEO company, says getting the top position on a Google SERP gets you a click through rate averaging 18.2 percent.

What this says is that in a choice between spending on ad campaigns and search engine positioning, go with the SEO (search engine optimization).

But getting to the heart of the matter, Facebook at this time just isn’t delivering. It’s heresy, especially on a day when the social network is making millionaires out of many and billionaires out of a few. However, the reality is that the number of hires sourced directly from Facebook is all but negligible for most companies. (As they say in the car ads, your mileage may vary.)

The CareerXroads survey, this year asked the recruiting leaders of a few dozen major companies — companies that typically have the resources to manage a significant social media presence — what impact Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and social media sites generally have on their recruiting.

The short answer is: not much, when it comes to Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Twitter actually fared better than Facebook for direct sourcing. The full results in the accompanying charts plainly show that with the exception of the company profiles, Facebook otherwise doesn’t deliver a whole lot.

LinkedIn, which I maintain is a job board dressed up for a social, did, on the other hand, have an impact; an especially significant one when recruiters used it to source candidates by searching the profiles.

The only other high value social activities were search engine optimization and marketing. That fairly confirms what the click through surveys show.

Before moving on from this, one more stat from the CareerXroads study is worth noting: 20.1 percent of the external hires came from job boards. Only referrals yielded more.

If that doesn’t make you wonder about your priorities, I suggest it should. Silkroad, which surveyed the data from 700 of its ATS customers, confirmed what CareerXroads found, and said the fremium board, Indeed.com, was the best at sourcing external hires.

Not for one minute am I suggesting you abandon your social media presence. You should be there because you are expected to be there by the next generation of your workforce. And social media is an ideal way of building a community of interested potentials, and developing or reinforcing a brand.

The problem I see is that too many employers and recruiters think a social media strategy consists of tossing up a company profile that reads like something from an annual report, and then posting jobs.

Those of you squirming uncomfortably right now, I am talking about you. The essence of social media is conversation, not distribution. Conversation is two way, and it includes things we would rather not hear, as well useful information we share with our friends, fans, members, or audience.

Treat Facebook that way, and you won’t be disappointed that it isn’t a stronger source of hire. At least stronger in the sense that you can directly measure its impact.

However, with a limited marketing budget, Facebook would not be where I’d make a big play. The data says employee referrals and job boards yield better results. The company career site, as dismal as so many are, warrants a much bigger investment than many companies make. A PotentialPark report says even college students about to enter the workforce go there for information about the company. To make it easier to find and improve its position on search engine results pages, spend on optimizing the site.

And connect it all up with your social media presence, which, by now, you know needs personal contact.

It’s interesting to note that years ago, founder Mark Zuckerberg suspected Facebook might eventually be a recruiting tool. In an email in 2004, an irritated Zuckerberg blasted co-founder Eduardo Saverin for launching a job board and running ads for it on the fledgling Facebook:

You developed Joboozle knowing that at some point Facebook would probably want to do something with jobs. This was pretty surprising to us, because you basically made something on the side that will end up competing with Facebook and that’s pretty bad by itself. But putting ads up on Facebook to advertise it, especially for free, is just mean.

Mean? Who knows. Ineffective, looks like it.

As Facebook went public came two interesting pieces of news. The first was a CNBC poll that shows that about half of all Americans consider Facebook to be a fad that will fade away as new things come along. The second was an announcement from GM that it plans to stop advertising on the social network.

The auto manufacturer says it no longer believes that the ads produce much in the way of sales. This seems to be supported by the CNBC survey in which 8 out of 10 respondents said they hardly ever or never click on online advertising or sponsored content when using the site.

This has some implications for recruiters using social media as a sourcing channel. With users essentially ignoring ads, job postings are not likely to be effective. Even employers that have accumulated large numbers of fans for the Facebook pages are likely to reach only a small portion of them with their job postings – one analysis found that the average page post only reaches 17 percent of the page’s fans. Five out of six of a page’s fans never see it, unless supported by new likes and comments for every new post. So even if you have built up a large fan base of prospective candidates, the vast majority of them will never see your jobs.

It’s About Engagement

GM is not severing all ties with Facebook. It will continue producing content for its Facebook pages, as a means of engaging with customers. When it comes to social media, success in selling a product or attracting candidates is all about engagement. Facebook’s popularity is entirely based on the content the 900 million (and counting) members create. The site itself is not particularly remarkable, but what keeps people coming back and spending hours on it is the engagement that results from content, much of it spontaneously created. Interesting conversations, often around interesting stories, is what makes it so addictive.

This is what GM has determined works. Just visit one of the GM pages — like Chevrolet – and see for yourself. They’re vibrant communities, full of stories, pictures from buyers, and rich in conversations. It’s real people talking about real things. Who needs boring ads when you can have so much more interesting material that people actually want to read?

Why would it be any different for job postings? We keep hearing about how much value branded career sites on Facebook can do for attracting candidates but there’s little evidence to show such an approach is likely to be successful. What’s likely to work is talent communities.

Talent Communities Done Right

A talent community is like any other community — offline or online — a place where people with shared interests gather to engage in conversations. Think about the communities you belong to and what keeps you going back, and it’s always the same thing: the level of engagement you have.

Developing a talent community requires creating the conditions for engagement. Pick a category of jobs, identify a topic that prospective candidates will be interested in, and start developing conversations around that topic. Great content can kick start conversations. The jobs need to have a high degree of commonality — nurses, doctors, mining engineers, marketing analysts, recruiters. It helps if the prospective candidates like to share stories and learn from each other.

Most people who join a talent community are interested in the community first, and finding employment may be a very distant second. But that’s the precisely the type of candidate we want to attract — the truly passive. Some of them may become interested in a job or may be persuaded to consider one, but it could take a long time. This is a long-term investment, more of a pipeline than a ready source of talent.

The Medium Is Not the Message

One lesson from the CNBC survey is that people aren’t particularly attached to Facebook — as a platform. People like to talk, and Facebook makes it easy to do so, but if something better or different comes along then they may not stick with the site. Look at how fast users abandoned MySpace. There are plenty of contenders, starting with Google+, and Path, which limits users to 150 friends, or FamilyLeaf that’s intended for family members, or Pair that’s a network for two people. Coming soon: Solo, for those who really like themselves.

The point being that a recruiting strategy centered on Facebook may not be a good long-term solution. What’s more important is understanding how to use social media effectively — building engagement, rather than relying on any particular platform.

A new “matching” site, a new social media/employee-referral site, and the negatives of stripping.

Yes, it’s our regular roundup of recruiting and HR happenings, below.

Social Referrals

We don’t want to shock anyone, but there is another new site in the social media/employee-referral genre, with one co-founder in India, one in Boston, both grads in computer science. ProMapr is looking for funds, getting good feedback, but frustrated it’s not getting more buzz. Site users earn money for employee referrals, which are shared on Facebook and Twitter.

“We are still learning daily and refining our flow/UI and adding features,” says Kshitiz Anand, one of the founders.

He’s Baaacckk. Sort of.

It was only a few years ago (not quite three to be specific) that one of the must-reads for recruiters was a newsy, noisy, opinionated blog that went by the name “Cheezhead.” Joel Cheesman, its author, gave it a unique voice, rarely failing to skewer industry giants while building the site with a weekly video program, and adding a writer or two. Then, one day, he sold it to a job board, and Cheezhead, the site, was promptly closed.

There are signs, now, that Cheesman is bestirring the stillness. For at least the last few weeks, he’s been sending occasional emails commenting on recruiting industry developments. Here’s one about the LinkedIn buying Monster rumor:

The thought of a high-growth business like LinkedIn strapping on an albatross like Monster is a bit ridiculous if you think about it for a second. So who, one like me must ask, would buy Monster?

As far as I can tell, the answer is: No one.

Yeah, nobody. John Doe. The invisible man.

Does this mean he’s back? Says Cheesman, “I’d go with ‘hobbyist’ at this point.”

The Adverse Impact of Stripping

A society and fashion writer for the Houston Chronicle, fired after her other job as a nightclub stripper got reported in a competing publication, has filed a sex discrimination claim with the EEOC.

The newspaper, says Sarah Tressler, fired her because she failed to disclose her other job on her employment application. She insists it was because the paper was embarrassed. Her lawyer, Gloria Allred, says, “to terminate an employee because they had previously been an exotic dancer would have an adverse impact on women, since it is a female-dominated occupation.”

And yes indeed, she is on the part-time faculty at the University of Houston.

More Matchmaking

The latest of a very long line of “matching” sites, in the spirit of eHarmony, is JobSync, out of Santa Monica, California. Candidates fill out an assessment (which about 700 are doing weekly now). Using its proprietary matching algorithm, JobSync decides which candidates are a fit for your jobs based on their experience, qualifications, and personality, the latter through a partnership with Profiles International.

It costs $350 per job for a one-off, less for higher volume. Right now, Avery Dennison, Kimberly-Clark, and Office Depot are among the companies trying it out.

JobSync is also looking at selling this as a talent management tool. A company would email its employees, telling them to fill out a profile that’ll help them find future internal opportunities. Then that company could send JobSync a job listing; JobSync would look through the profiles, as well as do an external search, and find the best matches.

Worst Practices HR

A lawyer with enough of a sense of humor to do an Elvis impersonation? That’s what we think the big news is here. But Steve Toth, Manpower’s chief legal officer, sees it as a teaching opportunity. Either way, here’s a look at a not-as-far-fetched-as-you-might-think  job interview. There are, Toth says, at least 50 errors (not necessarily EEOC issues) occur in the video below. Here’s a hint: Error #1 is not knowing the candidate has been dead for 30+ years. And here’s the answer key.

Millennial Hiring

From this week’s surveys is one telling us that 91 percent of employers think an internship is essential preparation for college students entering the workforce. Seems reasonable enough. Similarly, says the survey produced by Millennial Branding, 87 percent of employers say an internship should last at least three months for it to be of benefit.

Now comes the money-where-your-mouth-is part: Only 50 percent of employers have actually hired an intern in the last six months.

If you like that little contradiction, you’ll enjoy some of the other tidbits. For instance, 98 percent of employers look for “communication skills” when they hire students. Of course. So where do they do their looking for young talent? Pretty much everywhere except social media, which is just where young people spend much of their time.

You may have read about the company as it launched quietly and later said it had signed on an 80,000-candidate-a-year customer. It was picked among six finalists, including Goood Job; Lab of Apps; Ongig; Traitperception, and Venturocket. They came from as far as the UK and Israel, and as close as San Francisco to take the stage in Mountain View today at the Recruiting Innovation Summit to show off their products and fight for the grand prize.

Nick Price, director of Mystery Applicant, said after the award was announced that he’ll use the money to invest in product development. “The money is brilliant,” he said, “but the recognition of what we’re doing is really good too.”

Tweets flew fairly frequently during the competition, and the startups were grilled from judges Jason Warner, Steve Boese, and Ethel Chen, including being asked:

• How will you make money?
• How will it work with an iPad?
• What’s your go-to-market strategy?
• Does your product do so many different things that the message gets muddled up?
• How do you solve the problem that some people in our networks are people we don’t really know?

Judges were asked to choose a winner based on such things as whether the companies actually solved a business problem; how well they focused on a target market; and how well they positioned their product in the marketplace.

Videos from the demos are below, broken up into two parts and followed by the announcement of the winner, which included comments by the judges.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, the Chamber of Commerce paid $40,000 to Experience to work on the site. Employers will pay membership fees to Experience use the site, and Experience will share some of that revenue with the Chamber.

We then got around to talking about the skills gap in the U.S. workforce, whether it was real or imaginary, and if anything could be done about it. “Plenty” was my instant comment. Here’s what came next:

1. We don’t have a skills gap; we have a thinking gap. I suggested that the real problem was the wrong strategy. In a talent scarcity world, you can’t use skills to screen out people who don’t have them. I describe this as the sourcing Catch 22. (Here’s a video I did for LinkedIn summarizing the problem.) The solution is rethinking how we screen, assess, and hire people. (Here’s a link to an upcoming webcast on one way to do this.)
2. HR leaders aren’t willing to own and implement the “talent is No. 1” vision. I’m working with a number of CEOs right now on how to get HR leaders to take a lead on owning the whole talent process from beginning to end. It seems that all too often, HR leaders aren’t chosen for their ability to execute the vision of making talent No. 1, despite their lofty pronouncements and best intentions. To me, HR leaders should be equally as committed to ensuring great people are being hired as the CFO is to maximizing profitability. This means being more forceful in implementing programs that raise the talent bar, not maintain the status quo. Few people enjoy preparing a detailed ROI analysis to justify a $200,000 capital investment. Yet HR allows these same people a great deal of leeway in spending the same amount to hire someone.
3. U.S. Department of Labor regulations worsen the problem. The government is equally as culpable, if not the root cause, of the national skills gap. Here’s why: its compliance method of choice is to use “objective” criteria as a means to ensure fairness in the hiring process. Somehow this got translated into using a list of quantifiable skills and experiences to advertise and screen candidates. This is the Catch-22 mentioned above, screening out people for something we already know they don’t have. Making matters worse, there is very little science behind the objective criteria used for screening. When people ask me how much experience people need for a job, I always say “enough to do the work required.” Taking this one step further, maybe we should define the work instead of the skills needed to do it. It seems to me that, something like “design a circuit to double battery life in the iPhone 5” is more objective than “5 years of power circuit design experience and a BSEE from a top-tier university.” The screening would then consist of proving they can do the work or learn how quickly.
4. Hiring managers aren’t fully committed nor capable. Most hiring managers aren’t rewarded or promoted based on their ability to hire outstanding people. Short-term performance is at the top of their priority list, reinforcing the apparent need for a full laundry list of skills and experience. Flipping this mindset is part of the solution. Amazon’s raising the talent bar approach is another, where a talent advisory team ensures that every hiring decision balances both short-term performance with long-term potential.
5. Substitute achievement, potential, and ability to learn to bridge the skills gap. This is really the key to the solution: the best substitute for the skills gap is to hire people based on their ability to learn, motivate, and lead others and achieve results. This would instantly open the prospect pool to vets, wounded warriors, and all types of diversity candidates. One of numerous ways of assessing this is to ask candidates about their biggest accomplishments where they had the least amount of experience. Then focus on their ability to learn, deal with ambiguity, leadership, and achieving results with limited resources. Regardless of how achievement is assessed, the only way to implement the concept is to first break the institutionalized habit of over-reliance on skills and experiences.
6. Offer more apprentice-like programs to bridge the skills gap. A skills and experience gap of 10-20% can usually be addressed with specialized in-house training, coaching, and management support. This amount of “stretch” represents the typical promotion or lateral transfer. Skills gaps bigger than this need to be more formalized with some of the training offered by community colleges and trade schools in combination with local business support. Businesses need to pay for much of this training — not the taxpayer. One of the CEOs I worked with in the past created and paid for a state-sponsored apprentice program for toolmakers. Much of the hands-on was conducted at his facilities, and of course, he had the first chance to the hire the best of the group.

Eliminating the skills gap starts by first figuring out the real problem. Unfortunately, most HR execs don’t start here; instead, they follow the leader, purchase off-the-shelf solutions, cover the problem with a few Band-Aids, or apply short-term fixes, mistaking activity for progress. Long ago, a CEO I worked for loudly proclaimed that strategy drives tactics, not the other way around. Maybe this would be a good place to start.

Cornerstone's billboard tonight on Santa Monica Blvd

It’s very early in the branding-advertising effort by Cornerstone OnDemand, one its CEO Adam Miller says will involve social media, and has already involved 18 employees running the LA marathon with company shirts on, partly to raise the firm’s profile.

Los Angeles is a massive, sprawling (the 37-mile drive home tonight from the Cornerstone conference took me a mind-numbing 3 1/2 hours) metropolitan area of about 13 million, but it’s not a magnet for tech talent like Silicon Valley is. (This despite a growing number of tech firms — including some in the HR field – that are setting up shop and calling the tech community by the monicker “Silicon Beach.”)

The value proposition for Cornerstone OnDemand candidates is multi-fold. It includes the chance to be at a hot, growing company in one of the hottest areas of technology (human resources); and opportunities to advance (25% of the company’s employees were promoted last year). Perhaps most of all, the ad campaign is aimed at making people aware of a company that most people in LA don’t even know of in the first place. ”Not all cool tech jobs are in Silicon Valley,” Miller says.

Cornerstone OnDemand this year launched a “recruiting cloud,” entering into the one part of talent management where it had thus far had the least presence. Miller says about a dozen companies are purchasing the technology, some mid-size, some quite large. This “cloud” was a “good first release,” he says, but this summer, upgrades including a way to manage offer letters will, he says, make it “extremely competitive.”

The investigation doesn’t involve NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Nor is there any evidence that NACElink was ever hacked or that any attempt was made to illegally access the system. However, Marilyn Mackes, executive director of the nonprofit association, says the organization is monitoring the situation and has been sending periodic updates to its member schools and employers.

“Is NACE going to be looking out for the interests of its members,” Mackes said rhetorically. “Of course it is.”

At this point, she says, it is “kind of premature” for the organization to make any decisions about the hosting of its career services network. 

NACE connects college career services professionals and employers of new college graduates, providing them with research on placements, salaries, internships, and other issues relevant to college recruiting. One of those services is NACElink, in essence, a college job board network.

Technical management of NACElink is provided by Symplicity Corporation. The Virginia company provides the platform and the data warehousing for the service.

Symplicity’s offices and its data center were searched by the FBI, which seized a number of computers, drives, storage devices and some documents. It declined questions, but issued this statement in response to my email:

As this matter is in very early stages, it would be premature for us to comment on your questions. We can say that we have cooperated fully with investigators and look forward to putting this matter behind us as quickly as possible.  We can provide further information at that time, and are eager to do so.  Most importantly, we are certain that none of this will have any impact on our product deliveries or customer service and, for Symplicity, it’s business as usual.

NACElink is only one of Symplicity’s programs. Through its career services manager technology, the company offers recruitment programs geared to business schools offering MBAs, law schools, and others. Its partners include DirectEmployers Association, InterviewStream, and Going Global.

Besides recruitment, Symplicity also provides admissions management, student conduct tracking technology, asset and inventory management, and several more programs, including versions for higher education, government, commercial, and non-profit sectors.

In 2002, Symplicity made a bid to run the federal Office of Personnel Management’s career site, USAjobs.gov. The contract was awarded to Monster, but, after Symplicity protested and the General Accountability Office upheld it, the contract was rebid and Monster again won. (The government decided last fall to take back operation of the site, and almost immediately found itself floundering.)

According to a search warrantfiled in connection with the investigation, Symplicity and its founder and CEO Ariel Friedler are under suspicion for allegedly attempting to access computer networks operated by Maxient and Pave Systems. The companies compete with Symplicity in the student conduct technology area.

The search warrant alleges that,

The United States, including the FBI, is investigating a series of unauthorized access attempts, some of which were successful, into the computer systems of Maxient, LLC (Maxient) and Pave Systems, computer software companies that produce Student Conduct Records Management systems. …these attempts to access Maxient’s and Pave’s computer system appear to have originated with a competitor, Symplicity Corporation…

The FBI searched both the company headquarters and its data center, seizing computer drives, storage units, laptops, CDs, and some documents. Details on what was found, or where the investigation is headed next were not provided.

Pave Systems has a statement posted on its website. Maxient has so far made no public comment.

So says PotentialPark, a Swedish recruitment market research firm. Its annual survey (U.S. results were not posted as of this writing) of 3,552 U.S. college students and recent grads found young job seekers are comfortable with social media and expect that you will be too. While 86 percent of them make use of company career sites, more than half (56 percent) expect to find a company on Facebook, and 69 percent expect you to be on LinkedIn.

What PotentialPark found when it audited the corporate career sites of almost 500 U.S. firms was that only 57 percent link to their Facebook page; 79 percent connect to LinkedIn or some other professional network. The career site itself, says PotentialPark, “rarely offers any interaction.”

That’s a mistake, considering 61 percent of the young job seekers say their reason for interacting with employers online is to get in touch with recruiters. (Other reasons that ranked almost as high were: finding interesting jobs (60 percent); building their professional network (55 percent); and, getting realistic insights and interesting background information (51 percent).

“No matter which channels they use,” says PotentialPark, “jobseekers want to find relevant information quickly and easily with no time wasted searching. Customized, target job offers (opportunities), email job alerts, and a way to track the status of their applications are high on their wish list.”

Says Julian Ziesing, head of research at PotentialPark, “Jobseekers in the U.S. have gone multi-channel. The question is, ‘Can employers keep up?’”

The answer is that some can. According to PotentialPark’s detailed analysis of 117 top employers, Accenture ranks at the top in online recruitment communication. It not only has the best career site, Accenture has the best mobile presence, and ranked 10th for its Facebook efforts. It’s on Twitter, has a career blog, and its LinkedIn presence includes employee testimonials, a video, and career path information for its global operations.

Accenture and several of the other companies that made PotentialPark’s top 30 list also appear on lists of companies rated for Europe, the U.K., France, and Germany. What they all have in common, says the market research firm, is that they learned from experience. “They have gone through a learning process that typically involves trial and error,” says PotentialPark.

They design their efforts from a job seeker’s point of view, leveraging the attributes of each channel for maximum value.

Much of what PotentialPark’s young job seekers said was important to them is echoed in a report on the candidate experience, issued last month by the Talent Board. The non-profit group of prominent recruiting industry leaders, manages the Candidate Experience Awards, which recognizes employers practicing “exceptional and exemplary recruiting, and hiring methods.”

Some of the companies on PotentialPark’s top 30 also earned recognition for their candidate experience. These include addidas, PepsiCo, Deloitte, and General Mills.

After reviewing some 11,700 candidate surveys, submitted by some two dozen employers, the Talent Board found the company career site was the only channel used by a majority of candidates. Direct contact, either via phone calls or email, was a primary communication channel for job seekers. LinkedIn was the most commonly used social media platform. Job seekers went their primarily for research, not for specific positions.

The whitepaper from the Talent Board goes into much more detail about the entire job seeker experience, including what happened when they submitted an application. (Some 40 percent reported hearing nothing.)

What’s after the slash is what Nitro tries to give you in its new careers site feature, a little game built by Nitro’s developers. The San Francisco company, in the paperless office/document management business, wants to show that it is creative, fun, Australian-influenced, and un-corporate. So it asks candidates if they want to take the “wombat pack” career track or the “corporate drone” career track, as well as a few other quick questions to that effect.

On the site, it says it’s looking for engineers and product managers (and even a recruiter) who are “rock stars” and who “get *%$@ done.” Except it doesn’t use those characters.

Like most every other careers pages, it unfortunately loses a bit of the cool factor once you click on the job descriptions. Anyhow, check it out here.

Big Improvement

New York has long struggled with hiring a diverse workforce in both its fire and police departments. Of the 11,200 uniformed firefighters in New York City, just 9 percent are Black or Hispanic. The FDNY may have finally implemented an effective (though court-ordered) recruitment effort and attracted a diverse group of applicants.

John Combs, president of the black firefighters’ group called the Vulcan Society, made an important point by saying he “hopes the increases in minorities taking the test translate into actual employment.” Those from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g., minorities) often fail to pass all of the selection components, and even if they do, they do so at a lower level than others.

Here’s why: The number of candidates selected compared to the number who apply is very low. There are insufficient preparatory and information sessions for applicants about the job, recruit school, selection process components, and the personality traits needed for both the job, and the extended hiring and training program. While it appears that the New York Fire Department offers information on its website, information about the job, recruit school, and the remainder of the selection process is lacking. The most important information — how to prepare for the process — could not be found online. Fire department selection processes may include background investigations, interviews, physical ability tests, and more.

More often than not, candidates from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and women who are often unfamiliar with the public safety environment are much less prepared to compete in the selection process than those who have sufficient information needed to succeed. The solution to limited exposure is a comprehensive study and dissemination of the information applicants need to advance in their careers. Here are some examples of exposure that could potentially help applicants land a job with the New York Fire Department:

• Volunteering in a fire department. A person who volunteers and learns about the environment walks into the Fire Department selection and training process better prepared than a person without this experience.
• A person who studies building construction manuals and hydraulics for the fire service would have an advantage in this process.
• A person who can demonstrate that they are a team player will have an advantage because firefighters live in the same firehouse and work together on fire incidents.

In the interview process a candidate who has this type of knowledge, skills, abilities and exposures, will increase his/her probability of success.

These examples are an extremely small sample of the information needed to ace the selection process. Collecting information and preparing for a selection process takes time and effort, but it pays off in the long run.

Facebook mobile users have a choice of downloading an application, or using the mobile Facebook. Eighty percent of mobile Facebook users use the application. With Twitter, users prefer the application, too. This data has confused many industry commentators, with many bloggers writing that applications are “winning the battle.” This interpretation is wrong.

Unfortunately such mistaken onlookers have driven many talent acquisition directors to ask me if they should develop a mobile recruiting application and forget about optimizing their mobile websites. After all, a mobile social media application, downloaded from Google Play or Apple AppStore, offers us a better experience so we can more easily enjoy and interact with social media.

On the contrary: your mobile recruiting strategies should have nothing more important than offering your candidates an optimized mobile website. Here’s why.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. are channels. We all “browse” media through these social channels. The people and businesses we follow within social channels curate web content, which we discover and consume. The Twitter and Facebook apps are our preferred window to consume the web; not only do these apps direct us to new content, they fetch it and display it for us in one place.

Frequently we click links on Twitter from our mobile app. The webpage loads in our Twitter app. We do not take the URL and open a web browser and read the content. Social channels are the true “browsers.” We do not have to search or have a pre-conceived idea of what we are looking for. Instead we browse the social channel and when we see something we like, we order up more content by tapping the hyperlink.

Empowered with the knowledge that Twitter and Facebook apps on our mobile are the new browser, and knowing the enormous volume of users and time spent consuming these channels, what do you feel matters when it comes to mobile recruiting optimization? As recruiters wishing to reach a market it is very simple: a mobile-optimized career site/recruitment campaign coupled with social media activity puts your message in front the audience.

Check out the top mobile native apps: Instagram, Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, etc. As a user I expect to return to these apps frequently either for fun or social interaction or new content. Looking for a new job at a single company is not a repeat process. The effort and reward of downloading an app to work at just one company does not add up. The native app will attract downloads from those doing additional research, those really interested in your firm, but these people have probably already applied for a job. Unless your employer brand creates incredible hunger and has millions of people desperate to work for you, an app in AppStore or Android is unlikely to deliver high ROI when it comes to talent attraction.

The mobile site is becoming a must-have for candidate marketing. The mobile application is typically better positioned to assist the selection and onboarding process.

If you’ll excuse the bravado, what TalentBin is trying to do is actually quite impressive and has leaped forward since I saw the beginnings of its private beta at the HR Technology Conference last October.

What it is trying to do is fairly simple: create a searchable database that merges information about a person from all over the web into a single profile so that recruiters can get all of the information about them in one, digestible place.

Pre-launch Reviews Were Strong

When TalentBin quietly went into private beta, several prominent folks got an opportunity to use the product hands-on. And the reviews from those people were strong.

Megan Hopkins wrote here on SourceCon a few months ago that, “in the four months I’ve been using TalentBin, I’ve located, extended offers to, and hired nearly a half-dozen candidates (all top-notch engineering and design professionals) and my pipeline is robust with killer talent that will, at some point, be looking for a new company to join.” She adds, “In terms of time, it took me a fraction of the time it used to take me, allowing me to be so much more efficient and contribute more to my employer. And, it saved us money — the ultimate ROI.”

Irina Shamaeva wrote on her Boolean String blog last November, “TalentBin is one example of a sourcing product that has a potential to become the Dream Software.” She concluded, “if you have a sourcing budget, I do recommend checking TalentBin out.”

Also in the press release is a customer list that includes companies like Groupon, Intuit, and Yahoo.

Profiles Built Based on Implicit Data From 30+ Sources

In talking with TalentBin co-founder Peter Kazanjy, he said that TalentBin has expanded its reach since its beta launch last year. “We’re now using over 30+ sources from the open web,” said Kazanjy yesterday by phone. “We’re going whole hog on creating an implicit database of potential candidates.”

Kazanjy explained that the implicit database it is building is better than competing search tools by LinkedIn or job boards because it takes in information people are creating elsewhere. He used the example of software engineers who may have a terrible LinkedIn profile and no (or a severely outdated) resume on a job board but have been active on Twitter or Quora or even specialty sites like GitHub or Stack Overflow. They use contextual clues from what the person tweets or works on based on less traditional sources of data and compile it all into a single profile.

Like LinkedIn, the bigger your network, the better your reach will be. That’s why TalentBin focuses very heavily on having your co-workers connect to your TalentBin so you can search resumes from their networks.

Added Chrome Plugin and API Access

One of the things that launched with the move from private beta to public was the addition of a Google Chrome plugin that allows you to have easy access to the consolidated profiles TalentBin offers when you’re cruising social networks. As an example, if you bring up my Twitter profile and click on the TalentBin plugin, you’ll get this:

That has a link to all of my social profiles as well as my contributions on websites like SourceCon and ERE. And even with a basic account, you can find a lot of information about me (and potential ways of getting in touch as well).

Kazanjy also said his company also added API access to the platform for the public release. “One of the things we heard from our [beta] customers is that they would love it if this could be integrated into their ATS,” he said. “This is a first step.”

The product itself still has some rough edges. Most of my tech contacts are admittedly based in the Northwest and while I wouldn’t call it a representative sample, TalentBin didn’t have some of these people in their system. As Kazanjy said, “If you’re looking for someone in Iowa, you’re probably not going to find a lot right now.” Indeed, it seems the further away you are from a technical background (or from Silicon Valley), the less chance there is that a profile will be in the system. He claims they are continuing to expand the number of profiles but they started with technical talent since that’s where the greatest need is at right now.

Pricing is on a sort of seats-based, freemium model. Kazanjy said they are debuting with a $4,800 per seat/per year price point for the full version of the product. He said that’s about half of what LinkedIn Recruiter costs.

To catch the live stream for free, go to this page Thursday and Friday. The event kicks off at 9 a.m. PDT both Thursday and Friday.

All of the sessions at the summit will be streaming live at http://recruitinginnovationsummit.com/mv2012/live/. In addition to watching the great information the session leaders are providing, you can also join the discussion with others, both in attendance at the Computer History Museum and participating virtually via Twitter using the #RIS12 hashtag.

Here is what you will see this week:

Thursday May 17:

9:00 AM – 9:15 AM – Welcome remarks from conference chair Jenny DeVaughn
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM – Innovation Inside and Out: How Recruiting Powers Global Growth At LinkedIn led by Steve Cadigan
10:15 AM – 11:15 AM – Driving Innovation In A Borderless Recruiting World led by Brad Cook
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM – Recruiting Tech: Evolving, Innovating, and Keeping Ahead of the Pack panel moderated by Jenny DeVaughn
1:30 PM – 2:30 PM – This is NPR: Recruiting for a big brand without the big budget led by Lars Schmidt
2:45 PM – 4:45 PM – The Recruiting Innovation Summit Startup Competition moderated by Master Burnett
4:45 PM – 5:00 PM – Closing Session

Friday May 18:

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM – Opening remarks from conference chair Jenny DeVaughn
9:30 AM – 10:30 AM – Chasing Purple Squirrels led by Mike Junge
10:45 AM – 11:45 AM – “A” Players? Or “A” Results? led by George Anders
11:45 AM – 12:00 PM – Closing session led by Jenny DeVaughn

To view more about the sessions, check out the full agenda.

I also want to thank our live stream sponsor Dice for helping make it possible to bring this to you!

Lisa Sherr, senior director, global staffing marketing & analytics, talks with me about this training of “brand ambassadors,” “coaches,” and “certified social media experts” in the audio below. She covers:

• Why this was started in the first place
• Basic vs. advanced use of social media
• The use of recruiters to train ADP employees in other departments in social media
• Whether the training is tactical (e.g. how to use Twitter) or strategic (making and carrying out a plan)

It’s about nine minutes, below.

• Company X has a rigorous succession planning process, but the results of this process sit in binders in several HR business partners’ desks. Mary, a senior manager, has a critical vacancy, so she calls her recruiter, John, to fill it. John hires a retained search firm at great cost and expends a great deal of effort, but finally fills this critical but difficult-to-fill position. After the hire, John gets a call from his HR business partner, who asks, “Why were the three ready-now internal successors identified during talent reviews not even considered for this position?”
• Brad, a manufacturing site manager at Company Y, reviews his staffing needs on March 15 and determines that his plant is fully staffed. However, on March 22, he calls his recruiter, Jane, and tells her a change in business strategy has occurred, and he needs 100 new people at his plant by the end of April. Jane thinks, “Senior leadership must have known about this change three months ago. If only I had known ahead of time, I could have proactively pipelined external talent, and worked with Learning and Development and Succession Planning to pipeline internal talent. At this point, I’ll never be able to meet Brad’s timeline!”
• Peter, a new employee at Company Z, meets with his manager, Lisa, two weeks after his start date. In that meeting, Lisa tells Peter that HR requires every employee to have a development plan. She hands him a copy of the development plan template, and tells him to put anything he wants on it. Peter thinks, “I wish Lisa would give me more direction and support for my career development. I interviewed with so many people to get this job; you think they’d have some sense of my development areas and some suggestions for how to grow. I guess this company’s stated commitment to employee development is just lip service.”

Integrated Talent Management: the Solution

Many companies are trying to solve these issues by abandoning their siloed talent management models and replacing them with an integrated talent management function. But organizations are still struggling to understand what integrated talent management is.

An integrated talent management function has several distinguishing characteristics:

• Talent Strategy and Workforce Plan Are Tied to Corporate Strategy: An integrated function is meant to help the business meet the human capital needs of the corporate strategy. As a result, an explicit talent strategy and workforce plan are key to ensuring that talent management activities are aligned with the business. Workforce planning also allows an integrated function to rapidly adjust to changing business needs.
• Talent Management Processes Are Aligned to the Talent Strategy: The talent strategy and workforce plan should drive all talent management activities. In an integrated function, the talent strategy and workforce plan are the puppet-master, and the talent management processes are the marionettes.
• Talent Management Processes Share Inputs and Outputs (see the graphic): This is a crucial piece of breaking down the siloes of talent management. All three of the examples of siloed behavior discussed above can be partly attributed to a lack of data sharing: Succession Planning not sharing bench successors with Talent Acquisition; Workforce Planning not sharing scenario-based hiring needs with Talent Acquisition, Learning & Development, and Succession Planning; Talent Acquisition not sharing hiring evaluations with Learning & Development.
• Competency Model as a Common Language: Each talent management process performs evaluations of talent. A consistent competency model ensures that each process can share that evaluative data with other processes by ensuring that those evaluations are using a common language. If talent acquisition is using a different competency model than Learning & Development, the value of hiring evaluations in the development planning process is greatly reduced.
• Technology Enablement for Talent Management: In some cases, the sharing of data across processes in Talent Management can be achieved without technology support, through cross-functional participation in meetings, or paper and email communication. However, technology support is critical to ensure these interfaces are scalable as a company grows.
• Change Management as a Foundation: The journey to integrated talent management is transformational, not incremental. A detailed and pervasive change management effort is absolutely essential to ensure that your business is able to follow your lead on that journey.

Creating an integrated talent management function is not just HR navel-gazing; it has been proven to have direct and measurable business results. According to the 2010 Bersin & Associates Talent Management Factbook, companies with strategy-driven integrated talent management functions have significant advantages over their siloed counterparts:

• 26% higher revenue per employee
• 28% less likely to have downsized during 2008 and 2009
• 40% lower turnover among high performers
• 17% lower overall voluntary turnover
• 87% greater ability to “hire the best people”
• 156% greater ability to “develop the best leaders”
• 92% greater ability to “respond to changing economic conditions”
• 144% greater ability to “plan for future workforce needs”

Integrated Talent Management: the Challenges

The benefits of integrated talent management are compelling, and the descriptions and diagrams above seem simple enough. So why don’t all companies have it? In the final analysis, most companies are struggling to develop a practical, simple, and systematic approach to designing their integrated function and determining a path to get there.

Consider this analogy. Assume that 300 engineers are tasked with designing a suspension bridge. In order to accomplish this, the group is split into three teams of 100 engineers: Team 1 is responsible for designing the towers; Team 2 is responsible for designing the cabling; and Team 3, the roadway. If this bridge were designed the way HR functions are designed, the head of the project would send all three of these teams to different locations, and simply say, “go.”

Once the team starts, Team 1 designs the towers, Team 2 designs the cabling, and Team 3 designs the roadway. But when all three pieces are put together, the bridge falls over. No one has taken the time to determine how the pieces fit together before beginning the design. The tower team doesn’t know what the cabling team expects of them in supporting the cables. The cabling team doesn’t know what the roadway team expects of them in supporting the road. And the roadway team doesn’t know how to design the road to fit into the towers.

So what is the antidote to this ill-fated bridge-building method? Come to my Fall ERE Expo pre-conference workshop to find out.