Effective employer brands are authentic reflections of a company’s culture, values, and purpose. Employer brand flows from the people of the organization, and it belongs to the people of the organization. To this end, employer brands aren’t created; they are discovered, expressed, and managed. While social media has certainly made the management of employer brand more complicated, in some ways, it has also made it simpler. The true impact of the tools outlined in Dr. Sullivan’s article is transparency. Employees have always owned the brand; they just haven’t had the tools to broadcast their opinions to large audiences as they do today.

Due to the transparency created by social media, it is no longer about simply discovering the brand and finding ways to express it through corporate and recruitment communication. Employer brand management has become a dynamic, full-contact sport that has broad implications for organizations. Embracing that the brand belongs to the people raises some sticky questions for human resources teams.

How much should your employees be able to use social media while working? If the employees own the brand and express the brand through their personal stories, how much access to social media should employees have at work? Those progressive folks among us advocate for the wide-open approach to social networking. “Give employees access to everything,” we argue. After all, social media tools are great tools not only for brand-building but also for learning and networking. The flip side of this argument is that these tools are also effective for wasting time, inappropriately sharing company information, and complaining to the masses about the company (brand destruction). Embracing social media and encouraging its use by employees will add tremendous power and credibility to an employer branding effort. Alternatively, blocking these sites at work would limit the potential of a frustrated employee airing their issues on the web in the heat of the moment.

Should the organization monitor what employees are posting on social media? Regardless of whether employees have access to social media at work, they have access to it at home and through their mobile devices. They are using it whether we embrace it or not. So, should we as employers be monitoring what’s being shared by our employees via those tools? This feels very “big brother” to most. However, how we feel about doing it may depend on what we do with the information. Do you monitor this information in order to “catch” people saying the wrong things? Or, do you monitor as a way of staying plugged into the pulse of your employees? The stream of information by your employees to the web via social media is in some ways an ongoing pulse of your employer brand that can be monitored at a very low cost.

Since employees own the brand, how much should you police the content of their social networking pages? Here’s where things get really sticky. How closely linked are the personal brands of your employees with the employer brand of your company? As an example, if your organization professes to be committed to inclusion and the celebration of diversity, how would you handle an employee who is a fan of several religiously oriented pages promoting that homosexuality is a sin and that gay marriage should never be legally recognized? What if this employee doesn’t identify himself as an employee on his page?

Let’s remember: we are talking about an employee’s personal Facebook page. Many argue that the company shouldn’t even be looking at these pages in the first place. On the other hand, this individual has friends on Facebook who certainly know that he works for your company and would make a value judgment about the company based on their impression of him. So, does this employee’s personal “brand” have a direct impact on the company’s brand? If so, what should the company do? Should this employee be asked to change their Facebook page? At what point would an employee be disciplined or even fired for content on their Facebook page?

What should you do when “the masses” are defining your brand in an unflattering way? Your employees (and the rest of the world) are going to talk about your company on social media whether you like it or not. There is no decision to make regarding social media — you must embrace it. Regardless of how great your culture or products, there are going to be people who will have complaints about your company, and they will air them on the web. You can’t stop this from happening, but you should have a strategy for how to deal with these issues. Since these issues are aired on the web in an open forum, the best way to respond to these issues is in the same way. Social media provides a forum to demonstrate to the world in an open forum how you respond to issues. The best model I’ve seen for doing this comes from the Air Force and is described here by David Meerman Scott.

Conclusions

Brand belongs to the people. And as we come to understand how social media is complicating the maintenance of a positive employer brand, our instinct might be that the “control” of social media is the answer. But, that is a battle than cannot be won. No matter what we do to block access at work, employees and others have access to social media in many other places, and there is no way to control what they say. So, what are we to do?

The only way to minimize the potential negative impact of social media on your employer brand is to work on the root cause and give employees less to complain about. What savvy companies are realizing about employer brand is that it is about culture more than it is about websites or logos. Once this mindset takes hold of your organization, your perspective on social media will change. Rather than trying to control and limit it, it will become something to be embraced as a way to get real-time, honest information about what’s going on with your culture and brand.

Think again.

ERE Recruiting Excellence Award applicants found creative ways to redeploy employees, including recruiters, avoiding layoffs and saving money. Others used the recession to redo their career websites, build a new employee-pipelining tool, and change its sources of hire to upgrade the technologically savviness of its workforce.

The judges were impressed. They were diligent and inquisitive, too, so to all judges, thanks.

Here are this year’s finalists. As always, you’ll hear a lot more about them throughout the year — in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on this site, at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (October 25-27), and in the Spring.

As for the Spring in San Diego, there’ll be a reception Monday night where some information on the finalists will be available. The next day, the winners will be announced in front of the whole conference audience, and you’ll be able to ask them questions.

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order within each category:

Best College Recruiting Program

EY: intern leadership conference

Rosetta: more applicants, less money

Best Corporate Careers Website

DaVita: not resting after past victories

Intuit: interactive Flash presentation

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture: higher quality, less money

Aricent: high quality of hire

Best Employer Brand

EY: embedded in all touch points

UnitedHealth: higher new hire satisfaction

Best Retention Program/Practices

Paychex: consistent follow-up by recruiters

PNC Bank: redeploying recruiters

Most Strategic Use of Technology

AT&T: iPhone app

KeyBank: “virtual job tryout”

Tata: online campus portal

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

CACI: hiring disabled veterans

Sodexo: social media success

The timeframe for the reemergence of executive hiring continues to lengthen with each respective survey conducted in this series. The increases in executive hiring currently are largely in consulting and professional services, wealth management, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, and investment management, according to the survey participants.

The executive job market is improved in terms of volume, but seems to be selective not only in terms of the roles being filled, but the demanding qualifications for each of those positions. This is not surprising in terms of hiring firms using their leverage to find the exact fit they seek, but also having less generous offers to attract top quality candidates, with so many seeking a position. Therefore, there is a quandary in filling these executive positions, as hiring managers want the best and most exacting fit without providing the rewards to entice the very best talent and fit to make a move if they are currently employed. Those hiring organizations need to strengthen the quality of their offers to attract the top talent that is employed — and about 90% of the top talent is still employed.

About 70% of employed executives are open to exploring new opportunities, with about one quarter actively seeking new opportunities, according to the survey participants. Employed executives view the scope of a new opportunity, growth opportunity, and compensation as their most important factors in selecting a new position, while unemployed executives were less concerned about compensation levels but more interested in the hiring organization and manager in their new job selection.

While many organizations have reduced their use of executive search firms to find top executive talent with so many executives available and few executive searches occurring, there is still a need to have recruiters deal personally with executives to best attract and complete a hire. With all the talk about social networking, candidate relationship management systems, career sites, and online presence, top executive candidates still prefer having human connections via employees, internal, and external recruiters. Executives strongly prefer being referred by an employee or contacted by a retained executive search firm or internal company recruiter to putting a resume on a job board or submitting a resume to a company career site.

While most executives find the various aspects of their most recruitment process to be acceptable, the aspects that least met their expectations were the overall timeframe to make a decision, interview feedback timeliness, and quality. These aspects are certainly able to be improved by hiring organizations.

For hiring organizations, this continues to be an opportunistic time for hiring top talent to upgrade and gain a competitive talent edge. Forward-thinking organizations are building their executive talent pipeline via employee referrals and working with quality executive recruiters.

About the survey: A survey link was sent to our LinkedIn connections and groups as well as directly emailed to almost 10,000 executives in the Claymore Partners’ database. Six hundred sixty two participated in the online survey conducted from January 26th to February 1st, 2010, for a 7% participation rate. The survey respondents were largely executives over age 40 with annual incomes of over $100,000. There was broad job function and industry representation, with a concentration in the financial services and consulting arenas.

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Becoming a leading-edge recruiter is an admirable goal few corporate recruiters strive to achieve. Not only must a leading-edge recruiter routinely demonstrate a marked increase in positive business impact over other recruiters, but they must consistently monitor trends, devise new approaches, benchmark against emerging practices, and constantly fight with colleagues often resistant to trying something new.

Historically, staying on top of trends and new approaches was relatively easy, as there were only a few companies isolated in a few narrow geographies that one needed to watch. The War for Talent in 1997 certainly drew a lot of attention to the practices of technology firms in “silicon hubs” like California’s Silicon Valley (home to Google, Cisco, Intuit, Facebook, Twitter, and HP) or Seattle, Washington’s, Silicon Forest (home to Microsoft and Amazon), but up until a few years ago there was no formal process to identify where leading-edge practices were emerging and who was developing them.

ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards and articles by global strategy advisors like Kevin Wheeler and ourselves, who have advised and studied the practices of companies in more than 40 nations, are helping leading-edge recruiters focus their attention where evolution is occurring.

The Hotbeds of Evolution and Innovation are Shifting

No one can argue that rapid growth of the technology sector in 1997 left many technology companies desperate for talent, and that desperation drove many charged with recruiting for such organizations to both collaborate and innovate new practices to help close gaps in supply and demand. While not cheap, importing labor and shifting work to geographies where the supply of labor exceeded the demand has been the dominant approach.

For more than a decade such solutions have helped allocate work across an emerging global talent market, but now many of the geographies that picked up work are also struggling to source qualified talent to staff available projects. While China and India may have a surplus of unemployed/underemployed people, they too have a shortage of skilled professional labor.

As global economic growth focuses on Asia, desperation of firms in Asia to keep pace with the demand for talent is driving more and more talent management focus on excellence in execution, collaboration, evolution, and innovation.

With smaller company sizes, nations like Australia and New Zealand are earning a reputation as being home to progressive companies willing to try new practices. Nations like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, to name only a few, are channeling state investment dollars into industry-sector-focused universities and research parks that elevate public/private collaboration to new levels.

However, nowhere can one find as much focus on recruiting leadership than in India and China. Twelve years ago production standards in both nations were subpar, work ethics were questionable, and infrastructure was lacking, but today both nations have firms that excel in world-class engineering design, international trade, offshoring, and manufacturing. Over the course of those 12 years, firms in India and China have not only studied and adopted Western talent management practices, they have improved upon them if not in design, most certainly in execution.

Examples of Progressive Recruiting and Talent Management Practices

While ERE readers will need to wait until March to learn about which companies won a recruiting excellence award (with finalists announced soon), what follows are a few practices becoming common among leading employers in India based on our work and a review of the ERE Award Applications. Mentally compare this list of practices to those that are currently in operation at your organization.

General Recruiting Practices

• Prioritization of key jobs and skills. Recruiting resources focuses on the most critical 40%.
• Pre-need hiring. Talent pools mapped and individuals assessed prior to requisition opening.
• Tight integration with sales/operations to drive workforce planning. Recruiting leaders often sit side by side with sales and operations leaders during development meetings to coordinate workforce planning efforts.

Employee Referral Program Practices

• Dedicated referral teams employing a proactive referral strategy in which recruiters personally solicit the names of the very best from the very best employees and managers. (In one organization this approach produced 47% of all hires, garnered a 66% employee participation rate, and consistently produced the highest quality hires, all with a cost-per-hire 20% lower than other hiring channels.)
• Employee referral processes that target corporate alumni in order to boomerang them back. (This approach often produces better results than any other alumni recruitment effort.)
• Onsite referral fairs that allow referred candidates to receive on-the-spot interviews and/or offers.
• Online referral status tracking that provides feedback on status and alerts when a referral’s status changes.
• Established referral targets for individual managers and teams.
• Required pre-assessment of referrals by referring employee. To eliminate poor quality referrals many programs require that employees pre-assess their referral and share the assessment as part of the submission process.
• Service-level agreements that guarantee feedback to the referring employee within 72 hours of submission and help-desk response to inquiries within eight hours.

Metrics and Business-case-related Practices

• Advanced statistical analysis processes including six sigma assessment, value chain analysis, and force field analysis for assessing and improving recruiting process performance.
• Quantification of the direct-dollar impact of new hiring processes on corporate revenues. (In one example, the organization identified that reducing time-to-fill in revenue-generating positions by 40% could increase revenue by millions of dollars.)
• Development of “hiring accuracy” metrics that assesses and quantify hiring success/failure rates.
• Distributed real-time recruiter productivity measures. (One organization found that simply measuring and reporting productivity increased it 70% in one year.)

Recruitment Marketing and Branding Related Practices

• Development of in-house recruitment marketing teams capable of supporting frequent communication design/delivery channel changes.
• Using search engine optimization techniques to measurably increase visibility of jobs and brand messaging online.

College-recruiting-related Practices

• Using ambassador programs to build relationships with top students and faculty.
• Adoption of CRM approaches that let recruiters communicate frequently with students via text messages about events in the students’ lives, such as “best of luck” messages during final exams.
• Development of robust campus performance assessment processes and metrics.
• Use of contests, quizzes, and projects to excite top students and more accurately assess them.
• Engagement of market intelligence data to identify employee value propositions that better engage students.
• Online professional training courses covering topics that improve the quality of potential candidates and attract top students to participate in the application process.
• Leverage alumni to give tech talks, classroom lectures, and on-campus workshops.
• Curriculum guidance. Many organizations work closely with academic leaders and key faculty to align curriculum with industrial need, ensuring that courses focus on practical knowledge and skill development that is immediately relevant.

Training and Development Practices

• Extensive focus on deep enterprise training, development, and leadership preparation. (One organization has built the world’s largest leadership and development training center, exceeding in size GE’s famous Crotonville facility. The 270-acre, $60-million plush facility has a hotel, food center, employee care center, theater, and research facility.)
• Overseas residential training programs. Recent grads are frequently provided an opportunity to work internationally for a period of several months prior to accepting a stationary role in their home country.

Are You Leading or Lagging?

I hope you agree that this list represents some pretty progressive practices and strategies. While India’s leadership position is certainly open to debate, there can be no doubt that staffing challenges in India and China are forcing leading firms like Infosys, Tata, Aricent, Reliance, and Wipro to focus on execution and innovation. Some might argue that lack of government regulation and lower cost of labor enable them to do things you couldn’t do in the U.S. or Western Europe, to which my response is simple: it’s not the job of a leader to whine about what they can’t do, but rather to find a way to do what they need to do.

Not all organizations in India are on the leading edge when it comes to talent management and even those that are have areas that need improvement. The point is that if you want to be on the leading edge you need to be aware of other organizations on the edge, and that moving forward more and more of the firms you need to monitor will be in India, China, and other Asian nations.

Final Thoughts

Generally speaking recruiting is a conservative profession. If you’re a “defensive type,” super patriot, or resist being data-driven, you will likely dismiss our contention that the U.S. is/has slipped into second place with regard to recruiting leadership. If, however, you are open-minded, I suggest that you revisit this list of practices and use it to help determine where your firm needs to be if it’s going to seriously compete for talent in the emerging global labor market. Companies in India, Singapore, New Zealand, and China have already started recruiting top scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and finance professionals from leading corporations in the U.S. and Western Europe. The battle is heating up. Are you more prepared to fight or give up?

–

Peyton Manning? Who dat? Who DAT! The Who Dat Nation has spoken. The Saints won the Super Bowl. Decisively, without a doubt, without a question, and in a game that was one of the rare ones that got better and better after every play.

But you didn’t come to ERE to read about the game. You already know the Saints whipped the Colts 31 to 17.

Now comes the other important scores: Whose commercials made it into the top best. For the details on each of the commercials that ran, go to USA Today and its widely watched Ad Meter. All the commercials are available there.

But in the contest between CareerBuilder and Monster for the best job board ad, the highly populist, if less-well-known ERE poll has Monster in the lead by a touchdown. The fiddling beaver commercial had 40 percent of the vote to 30 percent for CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad.

I’m reporting these results at 11:05 p.m. ET Sunday night, a little more than an hour after the game ended and four-and-a-half hours after our poll went live. The results may have changed by the time you check (just go to the poll and check the results), but since halftime, the percentages have held fairly steady.

If you missed the ads or want to see them again, just click here and you can check them out and still vote in the poll, which we, in a completely shameless attempt to kick up the hype, will leave open until no one cares.

You’ve also probably noticed (unless your Super Bowl party was a lot more fluid than mine) that the poll numbers above only add up to 70 percent. The other 30 percent of the voters said both ads were about the same. (I told you we were into populism.) You can read that to mean anything you like.

While you’re reading into things, here are a couple of coincidences I noticed that you might as well read something into as well.

Wildlife of one sort or another figured in several of the commercials. Like Monster, CarMax had a commercial featuring a beaver. Vizio did, too, though their beaver had a minor role. There was a squirrel in another ad and Bridgestone had a whale.

The CareerBuilder ad, featuring a nearly naked casual Friday office, was followed by a pantsless Dockers ad.

But we’re a recruiting-focused site, so we’re asking you to choose between Monster’s fiddling beaver and CareerBuilder’s (very) casual Friday.

If you’ve actually been paying more attention to the game than to the commercials , the two videos are below.  If you’ve been mostly watching the commercials, then you should know that as this is being written, it’s half time and the Colts are ahead of the Saints 10-6.

So much for the high scoring game me and everyone else was expecting. The Colts’ defense, by the way, is amazing.

But back to the poll. Conveniently, both commercials aired before the half. So take a look at the commercials, and cast your vote.

Here’s Monster’s fiddling beaver:

Here’s CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad:

The following was written Friday, before the Monster ad was available.

Our poll, unlike the USA Today poll or those marketing professors at Western Michigan University is limited to only the two job boards whose ads ran during today’s Super Bowl.

As this is written on Friday afternoon, Monster hasn’t released its Beaver-themed 30-second spot. CareerBuilder, which offered a choice of three for visitors to its website to vote on, hasn’t said which it will run.

So even though we’re opening the poll at the kickoff, you really do need to wait until both ads have run. When the game is over, we’ll try to remember to find the ads online and either post them here or provide links.

If you can’t wait for us, then try going to Spike.com, which religiously posts all the commercials that run during the Super Bowl.

We’ve set the poll up to allow everyone one vote. And don’t waste your time clearing our poll cookie; we’re also tracking your IP. We’re wise to you.

At some point when the Colts and the Saints aren’t going head-to-head, CareerBuilder and Monster will go head-to-head with TV commercials that will set the tone for the great 2010 matchup between these titans of job-boarding.

We’re going to have some fun ourselves with these multi-million dollar branding campaigns. (The ad time alone is running between $2.5 million and $3 million.) A few minutes after the 6:25 EST kickoff on Sunday, our poll goes live asking you to pick the best of the two job board commercials.

I can’t show you those commercials now, because neither company has posted what will air. But here’s a preview.

CareerBuilder began building buzz months ago with a $100,000 contest for the best user-created Super Bowl commercial. After reviewing more than 1,000 submissions, CareerBuilder awarded three of the $100,000 grand prizes. Its ad agency turned them into professionally produced spots and the world began voting for a favorite.

Go ahead and vote. But don’t expect the fan favorite to actually wind up being broadcast. CareerBuilder’s little disclaimer says, “The results of voting will not affect the outcome of CareerBuilder’s choice of commercial to air during the Big Game.”

Still, it could. Here’s the video that got the most votes on You Tube.

Monster, which returned to the big game in 2009 after a six-year hiatus, hasn’t posted its commercial online, yet. It’s got that negative buzz thing going. Get the world jonesing to see it by making them wait.

That hasn’t kept Monster from teasing us, though. The company ran an ad during a playoff game two weeks ago featuring an inept Boogeyman who finds his true calling on Monster.com. The ad was great.

Within days, The New York Times was reporting that Monster’s Super Bowl commercial would feature a beaver. Said beaver, fiddling away on what appears to be a subway platform, then turned up in an online teaser. Another got posted to YouTube on Thursday, which is what’s below.

At the same time, there’s a whole website devoted to beaver-mania called fiddleafriend. According to an incredibly straitlaced business story on Monster’s hometown newspaper, the website will “allow viewers to personalize their own friendly dam-building rodent in music videos and photos.”

Hmmm. That sounds vaguely like the monkey campaign that CareerBuilder ran several years ago. So successful and popular was it, that CareerBuilder still has the Monk-e-Mail online.

We’ll have to wait to see just what Monster has up its sleeve. But heck, I’ll go out on a limb. Based on what I’ve seen, the early edge has to go to Monster.

But don’t listen to me, go here to place a bet on what ad will come out on top. (Isn’t Internet betting illegal?)  Check the odds here.  And here’s a list of all the ads that will get ranked by USA TODAY.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised its reports for November and December. In November, the BLS now says the economy gained 64,000 jobs, up from its previous estimate of a 4,000 job gain.

That improvement was more than offset by the bureau’s revision to its December number. Instead of the 85,000 job loss it first reported, the BLS now says 150,000 jobs were actually lost.

The report prompted Morgan Stanley’s David Greenlaw to tell Marketwatch, “All in all, we see encouraging signs of progress in labor market conditions and expect to see much better payroll performance in coming months.”

Economists had been expecting a job gain in January, but also a slight worsening of the unemployment rate. A Reuters survey said the average of the economist predictions was for a gain of 5,000 jobs. Marketwatch’s survey put the job growth at 25,000.

The BLS report was complicated by adjustments the bureau made to its data and the introduction of expanded reports, including reports detailing the labor situation of veterans, individuals with disabilities, and the foreign born, and more depth in other areas.

The data revisions adjusted the size of the labor force back to January 2009, which meant that the monthly job changes as first reported were too low. The revisions added 617,000 more lost jobs to the 2009 totals, making the official count for the year a loss of 4.78 million jobs. And the December number is subject to still further revision.

The BLS also reported that the number of unemployed persons by reason of job loss decreased by 378,000 to 9.3 million. Nearly all of this decline occurred among permanent job losers (which, according to the BLS, means “persons whose employment ended involuntarily and who began looking for work”). However, the long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was up in January to 6.3 million. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of long-term unemployed has risen by 5.0 million.

Other indices reflected essentially the same yin-yang as the BLS. The Monster Employment Index was down 1 point, while The Conference Board’s count of new, online jobs, showed a gain of 381,800 over December. That’s the biggest jump in new online postings since the Help Wanted OnLine Data Series began in May 2005. But the total number of jobs posted online is still lower than every month in 2008 except for December.

The Consumer Confidence Index also ticked upwards slightly, mostly due to consumers’ more positive outlook for the short term. (The Consumer Confidence Index is a composite of multiple indices derived from a monthly survey conducted by The Conference Board.)

Says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, “Consumer Confidence rose for the third consecutive month, primarily the result of an improvement in present-day conditions. Consumers’ short-term outlook, while moderately more positive, does not suggest any significant pickup in activity in the coming months. Regarding their financial situation, while consumers were less dire about their income prospects than in December, the number of pessimists continues to outnumber the optimists.”

As we started placing more people (typically staff and managerial positions in accounting, engineering, and operations) and tracking their performance, it was clear that a number of traits stood out as the best predictors of on-the-job success. Some of these included technical competency, motivation to do the work, team skills, job-related problem-solving, and trend of past performance over time, among others. (You’ll find the complete list of 10 factors and the assessment grid in my book Hire With Your Head.) To get buy-in from hiring managers we later came up with this short formula for hiring success:

Predicted Performance = (technical competency) times (motivation)2 plus team skills

From our experience of over 1,000 placements, it was evident that motivation or drive to do the work was the most important predictor of success. Daniel Pink’s current hot-seller Drive reconfirms this and provides much of the science behind it. While a minimum threshold of technical competency and team skills were necessary, without personal motivation to deliver timely and consistent results, the person would never be a top performer.

Another critical point we discovered was that personal motivation was not universally transferrable across all jobs. Motivation depended on the manager, the type of work involved, the resources available, the degree of independence, the compensation, the growth opportunity, and the company culture. This is why I’ve always had a problem with traditional behavioral interviewing. While behavioral interviewing helps prevent emotional decisions due to its structural nature, it doesn’t pinpoint whether the candidate would be a top, average, or below-average performer since it doesn’t directly address these critical fit issues. This was especially important for us, since we offered a one-year guarantee as part of our search process.

While hiring managers intellectually adopted the concept, it did require them to do something they didn’t particularly like — define the real job requirements up front. This meant clarifying the critical performance objectives, their management style, the specific team issues, and the company environment before starting the search process. Shifting to this performance-profile approach rather than relying on the traditional job description listing skills, duties, and responsibilities, was a critical step it assessing job fit more accurately. For example, rather than requiring an MBA and 4-6 years in technology product marketing, the candidate would be assessed on his or her ability to launch the new series of 10 iPhone apps during the first year.

The one-question performance-based interview was a logical outgrowth of the performance profile. It’s actually nothing more than asking the candidate to describe an accomplishment comparable to each of the required performance objectives. Since candidates don’t naturally provide all of the required insight, the interviewer needs to peel the onion, probe, and ask numerous follow-up questions getting specific details, facts, dates, and verifiable data. It takes a least 15 minutes per accomplishment to do this, but when done you’ll have all of the evidence needed to defend your candidate from superficial interviewers, emotional biases, and gut feelings.

(Here’s an ERE article I wrote that describes this fact-finding process in more detail.)

To assess motivation to do the actual work required, not generic motivation or drive, we developed a series of additional fact-finding questions and a 1-5 scale to further refine the assessment. For example, as you were asking the candidate to describe her most significant product launch accomplishment, you’d follow-up with these probes to better understand the person’s motivation to do this type of work:

• Related to this accomplishment, give me a few examples of where you went the extra mile
• What aspects of this work did you enjoy the most?
• What did you have to learn to do this work, and how did you do it?
• Were there any times you had to go 24/7?
• What did you like least about the work — where you had to struggle to get going?
• Were there any aspects of the work you didn’t like, but you pushed on through anyway?
• What aspects of the work gave you the most personal satisfaction?

If you’ve checked-out the other fact-finding questions, you’ll discover they’re behavioral-like questions, but all tied to the specific accomplishments. This way you have evidence of the behavior as it directly relates to a specific performance objective. This is important when it comes to assessing fit. This point is more clear by examining the 1-5 guidance we use for assessing motivation to do the real work required:

Rank the candidate on the following 1-5 scale for motivation to do the work specified in the performance profile:

Level 1 — Not qualified: Passive. There is no evidence the person wants to do this work. The person has no interest in this type of position. The person would need far too much direction and support to meet minimal needs.

Level 2 — Adequate: Will do the work required if urged or pushed. There is no recent evidence that the person has done this work at peak levels. Not a good fit for this type of work. The person avoids issues, makes excuses, or is reactive. There is no recent evidence that the person is self-motivated to get better at performing this type of work.

Level 3 — Strong: There is significant evidence that the person is internally self-motivated to do this type of work at high levels of quality with normal supervision. The person has a track record of consistent performance doing this type of work. The person has proactively sought out and handled key issues related to the type of work required. There is evidence of significant self-improvement related to this type of work.

Level 4 — Great: Significant evidence indicates that the person consistently takes initiative to do more of this type of work, do it faster, or do it better. Seeks out problems to solve before they become disruptive. Strong evidence of constantly self-improving skills related to enhancing ability to do this type of work.

Level 5 — Superb: Evidence is overwhelming that the person is totally committed to do whatever it takes to get the job done. The person wants to excel and will not quit regardless of the challenges. Demonstrates constant self-development in all areas related to improving job performance.

To increase assessment accuracy we suggest that the evidence of each interviewer is shared during a formal debriefing. Furthermore the only assessments that are accepted are those based on the evidence provided, not feelings or beliefs, so it’s not a vote, but an evidence-based evaluation. When done properly, there is little variation among the rankings of the individual interviewers (plus or minus half a point is reasonable). When the rankings are wider than this, it indicates the process is out of control (this is a six sigma point), requiring further evaluation.

The big idea behind this approach is to eliminate the flawed process of adding up a bunch of yes/no votes based on biased and limited evidence. Instead, each of the 10 factors should be discussed with the interviewing team sharing their evidence. This way the collective evidence of the team is used to make the decision across all job needs, rather than adding up a bunch of yes/no biased votes.

While traditional structured behavioral interviewing might minimize big hiring mistakes, it’s somewhat problematic if the person will be a great performer or a good person in the wrong job, since behaviors and competencies aren’t universally transferable. The assessment is further compromised when the hiring decision is made by adding up a bunch of yes/no votes.

Since self-motivation or personal drive is the core predictor of on-the-job performance, you might want to try out the one-question interview technique described above to see how it works. Start by asking your hiring managers what the new employee would need to accomplish in order to be considered a top performer. Then during the interview ask the candidate to describe significant accomplishments related to these job needs. Use the fact-finding ideas presented as part of this, looking for evidence that your candidate has recently gone the extra mile doing comparable work. If so, use this evidence to defend your candidate against any naysayers. Don’t be surprised if these people get hired and perform as expected.

For the fourth quarter, CareerBuilder reported $131 million in revenue, a 30.5 percent decline from the last quarter of 2008. For the whole year, CareerBuilder’s North American revenue was $542 million, down 26.7 percent from the year before.

As a privately held company, CareerBuilder isn’t required to report any of its financials. It releases North American revenues voluntarily and has for some years. However, the company doesn’t disclose its international income or provide a profit and loss statement.

Monster, though behind in North America, has been aggressively growing its international business. In the fourth quarter of 2009, its international revenue nearly matched its combined U.S. and Canadian revenue.

It announced that it had bought HotJobs for $225 million and that it lost money in the last quarter of 2009.

The HotJobs purchase brought it a sharp rebuke from Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel who downgraded Monster from a HOLD to a SELL. He said Monster “overpaid” for the acquisition, which will cost it $225 million. His change of heart about the company was also based on Monster’s 4th quarter loss and his belief that improvement in the job board industry will be slow.

No other analyst took as strong a position as Patel. The AP reported that Credit Suisse analyst John Blackledge, who has a “Neutral” rating on Monster, said while current operating results are not impressive, things are improving.

Meanwhile, CareerBuilder issued a four-point statement this morning, that essentially contradicts Monster’s claims of traffic supremacy, questions the wisdom of the deal, and wonders what impact regulatory review of the transaction may have.

The statement’s four points are:

• CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.
• CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future.
• History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval.
• Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively.

In detail, here’s what CareerBuilder had to say:

“CareerBuilder is the clear leader in North American revenue and will continue to be even if the deal goes through.In 2009, CareerBuilder’s North American network revenue totaled $542 million compared to Monster’s $407 million. Estimates of HotJobs’ 2009 revenue were $80-$100 million. CareerBuilder’s positive revenue trend and associated increasing market share have been steadily increasing since 2006 when we became the undisputed market leader. As of today, even if the acquisition is approved and it is completely accretive to Monster, CareerBuilder’s $542 million revenue remains greater than the combined Monster/HotJobs at approximately $487-$507 million.

“CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future. Monster will most likely run the business as two separate companies with separate products and separate revenue streams. In that situation, CareerBuilder’s industry-leading 21 million unique visitors per month will remain the leader over Monster’s average of 11 million unique visitors per month. In line with CareerBuilder’s current portal traffic deals and Monster’s previous portal traffic deals, Monster should expect an additional average five million unique visitors per month from Yahoo, leaving CareerBuilder the undisputed leader in traffic in the U.S.

“History could repeat itself and Monster will have a difficult time securing regulatory approval. Monster attempted to buy HotJobs in 2001. After an initial review that spanned several months, the federal government announced it would conduct a second round of reviews. The HotJobs board ultimately chose to sell the company to Yahoo instead. This transaction will require an intense U.S. Department of Justice review. This deal could take an extended period of time to close. During that time both Monster and HotJobs will continue to lose market share to CareerBuilder.”

(Here’s some background on the previous bid by Monster for HotJobs. The deal in 2001 had gone so far that Monster even issued a press release saying it was buying the company, only to find Yahoo had outbid it. Marc Cenedella, now CEO of The Ladders, was on the negotiating team back in 2001 and posted the press release on his blog.)

“Yahoo traffic does not monetize effectively. Yahoo purchased HotJobs in 2001 for $436 million. They are planning to sell HotJobs to Monster for $225 million today, a decline in the value of HotJobs by nearly half. During the same period, CareerBuilder’s revenue has grown 500 percent, while HotJobs revenue has declined over that period of time. It is clear the Yahoo traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains. We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”

What’s particularly interesting is CareerBuilder’s estimate that HotJobs had 2009 revenue of $80-$100 million.

Besides being in line with the guesstimates of others in the industry, it’s an indication that the chaos at Yahoo has made HotJobs a poor cousin. While all job boards have seen year-over-year declines in revenue, even at the upper end of the estimate, HotJobs would have been losing ground faster than many others, and this would have been occurring while its traffic was surging.

That certainly lends support to CareerBuilder’s fourth point about the value of the traffic. “It is clear the Yahoo! traffic does not lead to revenue growth and market share gains,” CareerBuilder’s statement says. “We don’t expect that to change when Monster takes over that traffic.”

Them’s fighting words, but probably a bit overstated. Yahoo’s internal struggles over what business it wants to be in — and its C-suite shake-up — certainly diverted focus. And, of course, HotJobs has been for sale since at least the summer of 2008. Monster, incidentally, began making a serious run at the company at least as long ago as October 2008 when it signed an NDA with Yahoo! No wonder at yesterday’s analyst conference call Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi said, “This was a long and interesting negotiation.”

While CareerBuilder didn’t think much of the purchase, Dice Holdings CEO Scot Melland had a contrary view. He told me the deal “has the potential to be a win-win for both” Monster and Yahoo.

The devil’s in the details, of course, but Melland says Monster will get a big traffic boost and picks up some 600 media partners that have strong local sales teams. Even accounting for the overlap in customers, Monster will see revenue growth.

For its part, says Melland, Yahoo manages to shed an asset it no longer considers core to its business, while getting a brand-name player for its career channel. And it gets paid for the traffic.

Melland wouldn’t discuss whether Dice had taken a run at the HotJobs deal, though more than one industry source told me it had. However, he said the HotJobs acquisition would have little impact on Dice, which operates a few niche job boards, including the technology focused Dice.com and one for the financial industry.

For the broader industry, Melland said he thought the impact would become clearer over time. It does make Monster a much stronger player, he said.

It is no longer possible to be a passive corporate college recruiter; you have to have an aggressive and well-thought-out strategy if you even hope to attract the candidates you really want. Social media and the Internet have changed the game, and college students are looking for and will expect you to have a strong and interesting online presence. Going to campus to hold information sessions is definitely 20th century, and should be phased out over the next few years.

It will be replaced with online networks, brand-building, interactive and virtual information, and virtual mentoring programs. I have compiled a list of 40 elements that I think a 21st college recruiting program should have. I’d love your thoughts and feedback. Let’s get a good discussion going as to whether the virtual approach that I advocate will really be the way it is done.

Here is my list of the elements that make up a 21st century college program.

1. You have a focused and clear picture of the ideal college hire. This has been vetted with hiring managers and is based on past success. In other words, you know who you want and what competencies and personality traits make them successful in your organization.
2. You have established clear criteria for why you recruit at a particular school. These criteria have been correlated with success (i.e. you know acceptance rates, turnover rates, and performance ratings for everyone hired).
3. You have reduced or eliminated all physical presence at campuses in favor of frequent virtual visits and tight communication channels for students, recruiters, and hiring managers.
4. Key schools are becoming less important. Focus is now on finding people with the “key skills and traits” that you are looking for.
5. Recruiting activities start early in the life cycle — as early as kindergarten and elementary school, with online informational programs and interactive programs that continue into high school work programs and school-to-career programs.
6. You have programs to locate and track freshman and sophomores and you have criteria to determine whether to drop them or continue to follow them into their 3rd and 4th years of secondary education.
7. You have developed web-based activities/games/simulations as well as instructor feedback methods that help you identify outstanding fourth-level students and encourage them to pursue graduate work under the tutelage and mentorship of senior employees. Ideally you also provide financial support.
8. You have internship/cooperative/summer employment programs that are used to help candidates pre-screen job opportunities and to help you assess candidates. It has formal entrance requirements and you conduct a formal assessment of the participants. Work is meaningful and relevant to the student’s major/interest.
9. You are using social media such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to connect with students and  provide them with information and connections within your organization.
10. You make an effort to identify and attract students who are not actively seeking a job in your organization. You have a variety of activities and online campaigns to entice and attract the students you want.
11. You have a college website that is interactive, contains videos, has interviews with a cross-section of internal employees at different levels, and gives a candidate a thorough idea about what your company does, what your passions are, and why you are in business.
12. You have a social network that selected students and employees can join to exchange ideas and information and that can act as a sourcing tool.
13. You are actively involved in creating a brand for the company that is appealing to college graduates. You have done market research to know what students are looking for in your industry and you have tailored your online look and feel, promotions, and marketing. You are focused on brand creation for the recruiting program.
14. You have exciting job previews online that really tell what it is like to work in your company at a specific job.
15. You guarantee selected faculty members (who understand your company and your needs) at selected schools that you will interview any student they refer.
16. You offer students a chat room or some other electronic means to communicate with managers and employees within your company.
17. You take a market and customer-oriented approach to recruiting and do market research, surveys, and interviews so that you really understand your market and customer.
18. You apply a multi-pronged strategy to your selection process by using interviews, tests, referrals, and self-screening techniques. You add depth to screening techniques by asking students to make presentations, work on projects, help with simulations, or through contests.
19. You use tests to establish capability and/or organizational fit.
20. The selection process is quick. Hiring decisions are made in hours, not days.
21. Managers or other employees are the primary interviewers and decision-makers, not human resource personnel or recruiters.
22. At least some portion of the interview process is done virtually using video/audio tools such as Skype.
23. You have statistics and other data to validate your selection criteria. You know how each part of your selection process contributes toward the final decision.
24. You assess and track candidate and manager satisfaction with the selection process and make periodic changes.
25. You try not to hire “in your current image” but seek to find candidates with fresh ideas and who can bring a different and perhaps higher level of performance to the organization.
26. You know why students have said “no” and have established ways to overcome and respond to objections.
27. You can make a flexible offer that meets an individual student’s needs. You don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.
28. Start dates are clearly established and communicated and there is flexibility in these dates.
29. Managers keep in touch with new hires before they start through Facebook, email, and other online tools, as well as by telephone.
30. All new college hires access an online tailored assimilation and orientation program that starts on the very first day they accept an offer.
31. Each new college graduate is assigned a mentor for his or her first three to six months. This mentor is trained and has specific goals and objectives. There is frequent feedback to the recruiting department.
32. A “college club” or other group is set up for the college hires to meet each other, share experiences, and have social activities together.
33. All new hires are given an initial assessment and feedback with their first 60 days. This assessment includes feedback from customers where it is appropriate.
34. All your systems and processes are easy to use and simple.
35. You strive to be innovative and leading edge in your college program. You make obsolete your recruiting style and practices frequently and try new approaches.
36. You have a shorter cycle time and lower costs than your competitors and you have figured out how to get that information.
37. You track and measure everything. You know your costs, your cycle time, your acceptance rate, your turndown rate, and you know why.
38. All policies and rules governing college recruiting have been critically looked at, and only the demonstrably valuable and important ones are in use. You have a philosophy that says: “You do not write a policy or procedure unless it directly affects productivity, safety, or legal compliance.”
39. Paper is virtually eliminated. Forms, policies, interview results, and applicant tracking are all online and available electronically.
40. Your management team would say that the college recruiting effort is one of the best and most effective of all HR practices in your organization.

Let me know what YOU think.

A key driver of the evolution of recruiting and HR is the amount of growth in the economy and in a specific business. Recruiting for new roles is significantly different than recruiting to replace. The more clearly a role is understood and documented, the more the market behaves in competitive fashion. Once the new role is completely commoditized, it’s easy to talk about job descriptions, resume analysis, and community development. As long as the role represents growth and innovation, it is hard to characterize, and recruiting involves more intuition.

Status also makes a difference. Methods and processes used for recruiting and HR vary on two dimensions: level of compensation and the degree to which the job involves intellect. When compensation is low and involves brute force, the issues revolve around safety and reliability. When the questions involve enormous fees and lots of conceptualization (and notably, few real safety issues) the game is very, very different.

The following brief scenarios will give you some idea of the way that talent acquisition and management could evolve given a shifting landscape:

A: Oil Prices Move to $200/barrel a Year From Now

Globalization, food prices, and the way we all get to work all share one common underpinning. Each relies on the continued availability of cheap energy. At $200/barrel, the economics of the later 20th century change dramatically. In the first years of the transition, things that once were disposable (electronics, for example) become extremely expensive. The ability to “leverage” wages in other parts of the world depends on the ability to transport finished goods at inexpensive rates.

Spiraling ever higher, energy prices bring changes to local economies. Television repairmen become vogue. The maintenance of now-expensive luxury objects becomes the fastest-growing vocation.The automotive industry collapses (even further), displacing millions in the supply chain. Food prices skyrocket.

As work returns to the mother ship from outsourced destinations, a huge imbalance between available and needed skills develops. Recruiting grows in size and complexity as companies rush to train workers to do tasks that once were completed in other countries. Interestingly, the need for immigrant labor grows tremendously, as does the requirement for training of those guest workers. This is a future in which “competency management” is in the ascendant, where recruiters can translate a resume into the necessary competencies and make a decision. Education, credentialing, and structure become essential elements of an employee portfolio.

(If you’re interested in learning more about this possibility, Read “Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and The End of Globalization and watch this video)

B: The Downturn Is Followed By Sustained Growth

There are plenty of good reasons to believe that conventional wisdom (the recession marks a permanent lowering of expectations) is off base. Global economic growth has persisted over a very long time period. The United States has a tendency to take a dour look at its prospects. The geopolitical reality is otherwise.

In a world of continued growth, population issues take the front seat. All of the Western industrialized countries will be competing for the hearts and minds of immigrants. While the United States has an advantage, other players are already beginning to compete and will be better at it. Government subsidies for guest workers will be common.

In the future with enduring economic growth, global warming is mitigated by the slowing rise of population while the energy shortage is solved by a range of innovations including the wireless broadcast of energy. Recruiting, in this scenario, is focused on the complex process of finding the right people to work in and lead new endeavors. Skills and predispositions are the central facets of recruiting in this future. Workers aggressively exploit their leverage in relationships with multiple employers.

(If you want to know more about this scenario, read The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century and watch this video, Part 1 and Part 2)

C: More of The Same: Growth Slows to a Permanent Crawl

This is the Eeyore scenario.

As happened in Japan, investment moves away from aging population centers and toward youthful countries. In essence, the flow of capital moves toward the southern hemisphere. The North is left to deal with aging and the associated health problems. Auto aftermarkets shift from a technological focus to seat padding and comfort. Attempts to build economic momentum seem sabotaged by a series of natural and unnatural disasters.

Housing sits vacant even as prices fall through the floor. With no growth and no means to attract immigration, the housing stock is 30 percent too large. As tax revenues continue to fall, the stress between regions results in a crumbling of large national identity in favor of small regions.

Young professionals learn to hang on to a job, which is the only meaningful asset. The corporate attrition problems goes from “too much” to “not enough.” Recruiting becomes exclusively about filling empty slots while corporate mobility and development are in the ascendant.

(If you want to learn more about this scenario, read the paper and watch the network news.)

In the next four scenarios, we’re going to concentrate on the evolution of recruiting and it’s impact on the market segments we identified last week.

What should be clear from this short example is that the future of recruiting and HR are extremely dependent on the way that the world evolves.

This research is sponsored by Pinstripe Talent.

To read the rest of the series:

Five Scenarios: I Introduction

Five Scenarios: II The Trends

Five Scenarios : III The Marketplace

The $225 million deal gives it HotJobs, a presence on Yahoo! sites in the U.S. and Canada, and partnerships with some 600 newspapers and media outlets.

No wonder that Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi told Wall Street analysts in a conference call this afternoon, the purchase makes his company the “No. 1 global firm in our industry.”

Monster’s closest rival CareerBuilder may not agree, but Iannuzzi’s comment is no idle boast. Monster’s overseas revenue is on a par with its North American revenue. (In the 4th quarter of 2009 it had international revenues of $88.5 million. Revenue from the U.S. and Canada was $90.9 million.

Uncharacteristically, CareerBuilder did not respond to requests for its North American revenue (the only number the privately held company provides). However, in the third quarter it had North American revenue of $135 million to Monster’s $95.2 million.

The company also did not respond to an email request for comment on the HotJobs acquisition.

In terms of pure traffic counts, the HotJobs acquisition plus the agreement that keeps HotJobs on the Yahoo! homepages in the U.S. and Canada for three years, pushes Monster ahead of CareerBuilder, which has held the lead for several years. No other career site in the world comes close.

The most recent U.S. traffic numbers I’ve seen put Monster and HotJobs at a combined 32.3 million to CareerBuilder’s 21.7 million. Even though Monster won’t hold onto all that traffic — there is overlap among the job boards — it will be ahead when the sale closes and the dust of systems integration settles.

Monster will pay Yahoo! for the traffic it sends to the career channel, which is a fairly typical arrangement. How much Monster will pay wasn’t disclosed, but without Yahoo providing traffic, HotJobs wouldn’t have been worth much.

The “traffic deal,” Iannuzzi said, “will establish a No. 1 traffic position for Monster in the U.S.”

The newspaper network that comes with the sale probably helps more with the traffic than with sales. However, even today, newspapers still have a sizable (if diminishing) piece of the recruitment pie, especially with smaller and regional businesses and local staffing firms. These are the employers who call into the newspaper to place an ad or go online at the newspaper’s career site to do the same.

Reaching the smallest advertiser directly is not cost effective, yet with a White House focus on boosting hiring by small businesses and so many of them in the U.S. that they are the long tail of employment, Monster’s new newspaper partners will certainly help it there. CareerBuilder, owned mostly by three newspaper companies, has only a fraction of the more than 1,000 dailies and weeklies that are now in Monster’s orbit.

Globally, there are important benefits, too. Monster gets the exclusive right to negotiate with Yahoo’s overseas properties to power their career sites and buy traffic. The U.S. and Canada traffic deals becoming a “template,” Monster’s CFO said.

There’s no doubt Monster will pursue those deals. Iannuzzi made it very clear he has been shifting resources to strengthen the international business and that he sees opportunities in South America and Eastern Europe.

While the HotJobs news grabbed the headlines, Iannuzzi focused much of his attention during the analyst call on Monster’s new products and site reengineering. This week, Monster officially launched 6Sense search technology, which it built out of the Trovix architecture it got when it bought that job-matching firm 18 months ago.

The brains behind its Power Resume Search and PowerSearch, 6Sense is a hit, Iannuzzi said during the call, with customers as well as seekers. The first major improvements Monster introduced in years came under Iannuzzi’s watch. In January last year, Monster introduced career mapping tools, community groups, and other services to encourage job seekers to stay with Monster even after finding a new job.

A few months later, a pre-beta group of recruiters got to test the new resume search. It was a hit, helping them to find candidate resumes that matched their needs far better than did the standard (and long-time) keyword search. It got rolled out in beta in the fall and I was bowled over by how effective it is.

Since then the job-seeker version was introduced and that, too, is a (big) step up from Monster’s “Standard Search,” as the company calls it now.

Now, three months after becoming generally available and some six weeks into selling the higher-priced Power Resume Search to contract customers, Iannuzzi told the analysts, “What we are seeing is very encouraging … based on six weeks of selling … vast majority of what we are selling is 6Sense technology.”

Curiously, he went on to say 6Sense can be a tool to make recruiters more efficient because it cuts search time, making searches far more precise. But he also said it’s a threat to the industry for that same reason. “The recruitment industry,” Iannuzzi said, will have “to reconsider their business model in light of what we have developed.”

What to make of that very pregnant comment? Iannuzzi didn’t offer any help on that: perhaps because he didn’t want to; perhaps because the conference call ended at that very point.

While we wait to see what others and the market make of that, the financial markets bid up Monster’s stock price slightly in after-hours trading. Evidently, the news of the acquisition and the new product success were positives, despite the cautions from Iannuzzi and CFO Tim Yates.

The first quarter, the one we’re in, is going to be a challenge. They expect, in Iannuzzi’s words, “A rough quarter from a P and L perspective.” The rest of the year, though hardly smooth sailing, should be better.

The deal includes a three-year agreement in which Monster will power the career channel on Yahoo’s homepage in the U.S. and Canada. Yahoo will continue to manage the 600+ newspaper advertising and content consortium it has put together over the last several years. Monster, however, will get the recruitment advertising, giving it a print and online network of more than 1,000 daily and weekly newspapers across North America.

The financial terms were not detailed in the press release, but are likely to be one of the topics to be discussed at a 2 p.m. PST conference call with financial and other analysts. That conference call was scheduled weeks ago to coincide with today’s release by Monster of its 4th quarter and 2009 annual financial results.

Monster’s financial report, released at the same time as the announcement of the HotJobs deal, shows revenue was off for the quarter by 27 percent and off 33 percent from the same periods in 2008.

For the 4th quarter, Monster lost 2 cents per share or $2.1 million. The average of analyst estimates had been a loss of a penny per share.  After accounting for certain adjustments, Monster’s pro forma performance was in line with the analyst average.

For the year, Monster posted a $18.9 million profit, which translates into earnings per share of 16 cents.

If that’s what hospitals are like in Canada I’ll be certain not to get ill if I’m north of the border, but apparently as a recruiting tool, it worked pretty well. The video has been viewed more than 60,000 times since its online release in mid-September. And the hospital received some 2,600 resumes within the first few weeks after its release, which equalled the number it received in the previous six months. It also managed to make 200 hires.

Dancing seems to be a popular theme when it comes to recruiting. Here’s a recruiting video from the Japanese Navy that features a group of dancing sailors. I don’t know how successful that one has been in recruiting sailors, but it makes me wonder if the Japanese Navy could win a skirmish with, say, the Canadian Navy.

Unusual recruiting practices aren’t limited to other countries. The University of Tennessee has some interesting ideas when it comes to recruiting for its football program. The University has been using recruiting hostesses, who often travel far to attend high-school football games and to “influence” players the University is interested in. The approach seems to have worked well since Tennessee has managed to recruit several top players. One recruit summed it up: “You don’t want to go to a college where they ain’t pretty.” However, the NCAA is investigating the practice.

I’m surprised the University’s diversity officer hasn’t insisted that they have recruiting hosts as well; after all, why make potentially discriminatory assumptions about the candidates. That may well have happened had the Volunteers’ head coach, Lane Kiffin, stayed with the program since he liked to motivate his new recruits by having his coaching staff rip off their shirts and do a chant, in what he described as his version of “topless recruitment.”

It’s too bad that Lane Kiffin won’t be recognized for his recruiting prowess. Since he quit Tennessee for USC after just one year, the city of Knoxville is planning to name a sewage treatment plant for him.

It was an improvement over the $104.7 million loss the company posted for 2008. However, that loss included a $167 million downward adjustment for goodwill. The 2009 report includes a further $33.3 million goodwill reduction.

Without the goodwill hit and some additional minor and one-time charges, Kenexa earned $15.9 million last year on revenue of $157.7 million. That’s down from 2008 when the company earned $36.6 million on revenue of $203.7 million.

Kenexa’s numbers, released this afternoon, mirror the HR technology sector’s as a whole. Although most companies in the sector are privately held, the public ones have generally reported quarterly earnings in 2009 below those in the previous year. Most companies have also reduced the value of their goodwill.

In releasing the quarterly and annual numbers, Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan said, “As we enter 2010, we continue to believe that Kenexa’s financial performance will remain consistent with recent quarters as the unemployment rate approaches stability, which is currently expected to occur around the middle of the year. As this occurs, we believe that Kenexa is well positioned to begin scaling its quarterly revenue run rate.”

The company said it expects revenue in the current quarter to be in the $38 million to $40 million range, resulting in net income between $2.2 million and $2.6 million. For the year, the company expects revenue to be in the $160 million to $168 million range and income between $14.5 million to $18.5 million.

To me, the truth lies somewhere in between.

Let’s face it: 2009 was certainly not a good year for business and talent acquisition, and we’re all glad it’s over. Conversely, we’re seeing signs of a rebound and there’s little doubt that 2010 will be better than 2009. But will we have a huge rebound in 2010? Probably not. Nonetheless, through all this, there have been many positive things to come from talent acquisition, and there’s every reason to hold real hope for the future.

But first, let’s look at 2009. There’s no question the downturn was difficult and a “game changer” for recruiters. Not only are there many fewer recruiters than before, but those who left likely won’t be returning. The reason for this is we won’t need as many as before. Why? Among many other things, because HR generalists have become much more sophisticated about recruiting.

You heard me right. I’ll say it again: HR generalists have become much more sophisticated about recruiting.

“But wait, Jeremy,” you say, “in the past, haven’t you talked about how HR generalists were slightly inept at recruiting?”

I have, but alas, things have changed … and I am more wrong about that now than ever. Since then, generalists have been forced to pick up the slack. They’ve learned to be better project managers and are more open to hiring additional resources, such as outsourced providers, search firms, etc. And because they’re closer to the business than their former recruiter brethren/sistren, as the economy continues to improve, companies won’t need as many recruiting specialists (and those recruiting jobs that do return won’t pay as much).

I have spent some time talking to some key recruiting leaders to get their perspective on these phenomena. Whether or not these developments are good for recruiting is debatable. However, what is clear is that the following things recruiters and recruiting leaders have had to do in 2009 to survive, in fact, will help them prosper as the recovery continues:

• Recruiters Are Using More Skills and Building the Skills They Have. According to Ginny Eagle, former director, talent acquisition, T-Mobile USA, “As requisition volumes shrank, I downsized accordingly. This caused us to ask recruiters to expand to other functional areas and stretch themselves a bit. We also took advantage of the lull to build on our foundation. Essentially, we focused on the four pillars of a corporate recruiting function: process & policy; organizational structure and alignment to the business; technology; and metrics. We used this time to strengthen each of the four foundational pieces.” Brad Warga, vice president, talent and employee engagement, Harrah’s Entertainment added, “We made some tough decisions in order to control our destiny in 2009. Despite the initial pain of downsizing, we’ve witnessed more innovation this year than any year in my tenure with the company. This economy has truly made us better and we hope to preserve the controls we put in place as we return to growth.”
• Greater Adoption of Talent Acquisition Functions in Europe. Companies and divisions with operations in Europe have seen a greater adoption of the talent acquisition and recruiting functions. For instance, in 2009, Coc- Cola Enterprises streamlined its processes and used technology tools globally to achieve cost savings. In addition, CCE implemented a European Talent Acquisition function, which improved service to hiring managers and reduced costs (in the past, it primarily used agencies to recruit teams).
• Upgrading of Talent. In 2009, companies were also able to take advantage of the downturn to clean their “talent houses” by terminating under-performing employees. This enabled them to clear space to upgrade talent and make some strategic hiring decisions. According to some corporate leaders, the biggest change in 2009 related to the business downturn was the opportunity to speed up performance management and upgrade talent. Some organizations incentivized executives to see the opportunity to go after talent from the other industries (especially those hit hard by the downturn, such as automotive and financial services) and make some strategic hiring decisions. These organizations continue to capitalize on the employer market by using their performance management process to free up space for upgraded talent.
• Increase Brand/”Talent” Market Share. Warga continues, “We knew the importance of continuity with our key business schools, and while many companies scaled back significantly, we decided to take market share. Through innovative low-cost efforts we have improved our presence on campus and continue to hire students into our leadership development pipeline with the confidence that we will absorb them into our business. Maintaining this continuity took some convincing on the part of executive recruiting.” This strategy will pay off in droves when the economy rebounds. Campuses and students remember companies that were their fair weather friends, and those who stayed through the downturn will benefit.
• Focus on Talent Acquisition/Employee Morale. According to T-Mobile’s Ginny Eagle, “We had to determine a different way to recognize and motivate people. Budgets were cut and we weren’t able to do the things that have always been available. We took a very personal approach to help the team feel a sense of community. Recruiters are very social and this is important to them. I spent a lot of time walking the floor and chatting with people.”

Finally, a key point that Ginny Eagle made: “In my opinion, the single most consistent reason for the demise of a corporate recruiting function (in 2009) is that the recruiting leader did not create an optimal environment for recruiters to be successful. No solution is better that a great in-house recruiter. The caveat is that, as recruiting leaders, we must be able to identify the great recruiters, train them effectively, and hold them accountable. This is what a great recruiter wants!”

So what about 2010? We know there won’t be a big hiring bump but rather small incremental jobs growth. As a result, there are many things that can be done during this time to prepare for the upturn:

• Streamlining Processes. 2010 can be a year in which companies can continue to become more efficient, streamline their processes, and get their “houses in order.” For instance, in 2009, many organizations were so sensitive to adding any new costs that they created systems of “over-approving” offers and hires. This not only seriously impacted the cost of hiring (ironically) but created inefficient systems. In 2010, these processes need to be streamlined. More accountability needs to be put in the hands of hiring managers and, as a result, the process becomes more effective, is less costly, uses fewer talent acquisition resources, and makes greater use of technology. Thus whether it’s giving tools to hiring managers to help their efficiency, improving the assessment process, or setting up the interview process so that when key talent is needed, the right person can be hired, much can be improved in this area.
• Innovation. According to Harrah’s Warga, “Despite having a smaller team, we’ve managed to focus on innovation alongside the day-to-day hiring. We’ve had to find cheaper and more efficient ways to recruit. We took the money used for advertising and used it in a couple of different areas: external awards in order to increase our brand awareness, creation of social networks (Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc), and integrated our career site with our social networks through interactive blogs and channels.”
• Upgrading Skills of HR Generalists. Though necessity was the mother of invention with this last year, the smart companies will continue to upgrade the recruiting and project management skills of their HR generalists. This entails having HR professionals continuing to improve their project management skills (how to effectively use outside resources, such as external contractors, outsource providers, third party search firms, etc) and/or actually handling some recruitment execution on their own.
• Using Recruitment Process Outsourcing more effectively. In the past, I haven’t been a big fan of full outsourcing because I always felt that developing an internal talent acquisition capability was key to an organization’s success. However, I now see a strong benefit to using RPO when there is a need, especially with respect to a geographic or specific expertise requirement. A talent acquisition function needs to be really good at sourcing and finding the core key job areas within their company (this is different for every organization — you need to find out what the top four or five key job areas are for your organization that are most core!) Outside of that, the savvy recruiting professional can likely add more value to his/her company by project managing effectively vs. doing everything themselves. In addition, many RPO companies are unbundling their services in unique ways. I’ve seen these companies take on just the scheduling of candidates, or the web sourcing of candidates, etc. Spend some time and learn more about this.

There are many other ways 2010 can be used to help your talent acquisition team become more efficient and better prepared for the upturn. In fact, I would love to meet you in person and spend more time talking about these issues. Please join me at the upcoming 10th Annual ERE Expo Spring 2010 in San Diego, California. I will be hosting and moderating an exciting ERE Expo General Session panel discussion entitled “Beyond The Downturn: A Panel of Survivors — Surviving the Year & Planning for the Decade,” March 16, 2010, 10:15-11:15 a.m. My panel will include Ginny Eagle, former director, talent acquisition for T-Mobile USA; Brad Warga, vice president of talent and employee engagement for Harrah’s Entertainment, as well Jason Farr, vice president, global talent acquisition, Coca-Cola Enterprises.

During our session we’ll have a direct, hard-hitting, transparent, and very interactive conversation about this topic. Not only will we be looking to get feedback from the audience, but if you have any comments or questions that you would like us to discuss during our panel discussion—feel free to shoot me an email or leave a comment here. Our goal is to be very open and talk about anything. We’ve all gone through some real challenges in 2009 and 2010 won’t solve those problems. But there’s great work to be done and I look forward to doing it with you and seeing you there.

As a barometer of the political economy, the employment report is closely watched, which will be especially true this week, coming on the heels of a State of the Union speech in which every other paragraph seemed to mention the word jobs. Friday’s release will offer the best indication yet of how much improvement there is in the jobs picture.

While many economists expect the report to show flat job growth — itself an improvement over the last two years of almost monthly job losses — there is a growing feeling of hope it might show the economy added jobs.

The Conference Board’s monthly report on job openings released today showed the number jumped 382,000 over December. According to the report, there were 4.024 million jobs advertised online in January. That’s the most since November 2008 and is the third month in a row that openings grew.

Contrast that with what happened in January 2009. That month the Help Wanted OnLine Data Series report showed openings dropped by 473,000 over December 2008, which itself had 509,000 fewer listings than the prior month.

It’s a positive sign that companies may be willing to finally fill some of the positions that have been frozen.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management rose in January for the sixth consecutive month. The 58.4 is the highest the index has been in five years, strong support for the GDP report from last week.

That’s good news, as is the ISM’s manufacturing jobs index, which came in at 53.3 in January, the highest in nearly four years.

Coming up Wednesday is ADP’s monthly jobs report, compiled from its payroll data. The ADP National Employment Report is a harbinger of the BLS release that comes two days later, though it often differs significantly from the numbers the government issues. (The ADP report counts only private payroll data, while the BLS includes public payrolls as well.)

By then the financial news services will be reporting their surveys of economist predictions of what the BLS report will show. The Wall Street Journal today took a first shot at it, reporting Morgan Stanley expects the report to show the economy added 75,000 jobs in January. The Journal also said the unemployment rate would edge up slightly to 10.1 percent.

• Sign up for this week’s free webinar on Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET – The Art of Identifying and Recruiting Passive Candidates: Next Generation Search, led by Krista Bradford. Krista will share her secrets of this next-generation search so you can fill searches faster, better and more affordably.
• If you are on the search and placement side of the business, check out the just announced agenda and speaker roster for the fourth annual Fordyce Forum 2010 taking place in Las Vegas from June 9-11. Over fifteen big billers and industry experts will share their success strategies on how to increase your billings and improve your process. And register by Friday to lock in the $400 early bird discount.
• On the events front, both SourceCon 2010 & ERE Expo 2010 Spring are quickly approaching next month in San Diego. SourceCon, the premier sourcing event for our industry takes place March 14-15. Corporate recruiting leaders are getting ready to converge on San Diego for the 10th annual ERE Expo on March 15-17.
• During breaks at the Expo in San Diego, we’d like to show some of your videos. Make a 1-minute or shorter video of you telling your favorite recruiting story — it could be the most heartwarming advice or experience you’ve had, one that made you proud of the profession — or, it could be bad behavior by a candidate (or a manager!) during an interview, an employer brand gone awry, a botched recruitment ad campaign, or something else. Email Todd Raphael (he prefers PG-13 or cleaner) the Youtube embed code and we’ll pick some of the best to show at the upcoming conference.

If you have questions about any of this, please post them in the comments below. Have a great week!