HireRight and USIS merging.

HIRE stock is booming.

Only one year ago, it went public .  

Three new recruiting campaigns I thought I'd mention today ... Microsoft, which we recently said is kicking off a campaign to showcase (and increase) its diversity, has launched a new site at youatmicrosoft.com. Despite the lame cliches and generalities ("diversity is critical," "the best thing about Microsoft is the people," etc.), the design is great, and who doesn't love baby pictures? ... Speaking of new sites, Spirit's new careers page features the tagline "Dream Big, Make it Fly" -- check it out with your sound on for full "whooshing-sound" effect. Spirit's being helped out by its new RPO vendor The RightThing ... Lastly, General Dynamics is touting its "Jobs That Rock" and is hiring engineers, particularly because of a big contract it got from the military to work on the Warfighter's Information Network.

Word on the recruiting street has it that Austin Cooke, the VP of recruiting for VistaPrint, is getting promoted to VP of HR for all of North America.

Here's a mini-clip from Cooke, talking at ERE's Spring Expo about paying non-employees for referrals.

And, another clip, this one of Cooke on why money can be overrated in a referral program.

For the whole Cooke presentation, check out http://www.ereexpoblog.com/video.

Four hours of driving to and fro last night's HR Strategy Forum was worth it, because the HRPS affiliate serves you up a higher-level audience than the annual swag-a-thon. The Forum's audience is a lot like the Journal audience, but not as recruiting-centric.

One attendee is Debbie Rocco of Amylin, a fast-growing bio-pharma that's hiring for many of the positions you'd expect as well as for an Ohio manufacturing facility. Interestingly, and fairly unsually, it also has a link to recruiter information on its website.

Amylin is a lot like a startup, and is just starting to do such things as "capacity planning." It's finding, for example, that in the past it hired a lot of specialists and needs to either hire more generalists or do more training to give people a broader background needed to start a new project when their last one ends.

Rob Reindl's here from Edwards, a company that once received Workforce Management's Optimas award. Every time you hear him talk, and I've hung out at his HQ with him, you can't help but think about how special the work is that his firm does. It's easy to convince candidates that a job at Edwards would "make a difference"; it would save lives.

There's a recruiting job open at Edwards, which the company's website bills as a "great opportunity for 3rd party recruiters looking to 'break in' to corporate recruiting." Indeed, Edwards likes to recruit in-house, not with agencies, when it can. It also likes the "time-to-fill" stat -- one that's not a Sullivan favorite. Reindl pooh-poohs the idea that his hirers would compromise quality just to put a warm body in a seat quickly.

Not everyone here's growing in the 20% range like Amylin; one HR leader from a large packaging firm says the economy's been real slow, and for a really long time. Like all year, and then some. That's both bad and good news. Bad news for them, of course, but good news in the sense that with the average recession lasting somewhere in the range of one year, maybe less, it means that if we're even in one, it may already be more than half over.

Some people I talk to generate dang-good results from their employee-referral programs without shelling out much money -- some not even spending a penny.

Tom Mazzocco, for instance. He's the VP of HR for the San Diego Convention Center. The center recruits from Jobing, Craigslist, Monster, CareerBuilder, military bases, and other sources (like when it needed a Greek-speaker and just headed over to a local Greek restaurant and talked to the manager about bringing one of his employees onboard for a while). Anyhow, the convention center brings in about 40-45% of its hires via referrals, which isn't bad when you consider it pays nothing for a referral.

And then there's AmTrust Bank, one of the ERE award-winners this year. The more I look at AmTrust's three-year employee-referral increase (graphed below), the more I'm wowed. AmTrust pulled out all stops to increase referrals (something that's explored in-depth in the May Journal, by the way), including donating money to charities for employees (such as recruiters) who provided referrals but aren't eligible for money, as well as giving time off to the first team of people to reach 100% participation in the referral program. AmTrust pays up to $5,000 for the hardest-to-fill jobs.

In the end, it's not money that makes a referral program work, as Mazzocco showed. But, as AmTrust's charts below demonstrate, sometimes it can't hurt.

It's still a bit daunting, but hopefully it's easier to download.

The recruiting-costs spreadsheet mentioned earlier "contained a flaw in the calculator related to the macros," according to MTS.

We've loaded up a new version, and buried it under those same words "Excel File" where the old version was. Hopefully it'll fix the flaw and help those people who had trouble downloading it from the get-go.

... so far at least.

MTS Driver Recruiters wanted its customers to know just how much goes into hiring someone. Actually, how much work goes into not hiring someone. While corporations may think MTS is watching Oprah all day, it's actually trying to find the one to three people out of 100 applicants who will end up being hired.

At least that's what it's trying to say with this impressive Excel file. It works, though some of it is confusing and overwhelming. Again, that's all by design, as it gives MTS the chance to talk it over with prospective clients.

If you're in the transportation industry, you may find this tool useful. If you're not, you also may find it useful -- because you'll sleep easier knowing you're free from so many regulations.

For a company that must be happy to put 2007 in the past, this week's Peopleclick user conference seems well-attended (about 175 registered), in a stunningly pretty but not-too-accessible oceanfront Ritz in Orange County ... Ed Newman asked the crowd, "Who thinks their company is doing a decent job of workforce planning?" and maybe two hands in the whole audience went up, sheepishly ... John Sullivan lists some of his favorite companies for workforce planning: Microsoft (partly because of its willingness to move people to partner companies), Intel, Aimco, Booz Allen (for its strength in moving people internally), Valero, and Sodexo ... At lunch, one customer tells ERE that Peopleclick's VMS is improving enough that he feels like he could someday scrap Fieldglass, which he says offers inferior reporting ... A Peopleclick partner says the apparent recession isn't all that severe; meanwhile, CareerBuilder, as usual, didn't seem to be tight on money either, as evidenced by the money it spent on a martini party  ... Who cares that the labor market is tight in Montana? Peopleclick client GlaxoSmithKline does, as it has critical operations there and is playing up the lack of traffic and outdoorsy lifestyle to candidates.

The corporate site http://www.peopleclick.com has been down, for at least a substantial part of today.

A job search at least for one of its clients seems to not be working either. 

If someone's looking for a job right now, they'd probably not want to be looking in Michigan, a state infamous for its high unemployment. Nor would they want to target the mortgage and related industries.

So a mortgage company in Michigan seems like a double negative.

Then again, maybe not.

Robert Rahal, president of the southeastern Michigan company Shore Mortgage, which specializes in government loan products, says he's looking to hire about 100 people for underwriter, loan officer, and support jobs. That's about a third the size of the whole company as it now stands.

"We've been known to do FHA loans," Rahal says. "The market moved in that direction in the last two to three months. Banks had become more conservative. Ultimately things fell in our direction, frankly."

Shore's running a multimedia recruiting campaign: press releases, TV ads, print media, and online recruiting.

You'd think there'd be tons of people in struggling Michigan who fit the bill.

Maybe not.

"It's skilled work," Rahal says. "You have to have the experience, and the more experience you have, the better off. This is very labor-intensive work that requires hands-on knowledge. It's not the automated type of loan process that people have become accustomed to."

To recruits, Rahal plays up the private firm's family atmosphere. "We're not the type of institution that's going to hire people and fire them," he says. "That's not our formula. We're very conservative. We could probably grow double [our size], but we're not looking to bulk up and lay off. That's too arduous a process for us."

Retail sales turnover, according to Rahal, is about 60%, which he says is "better than the national average" and puts him in the 26th percentile." High turnover, he says, "is just the nature of sales." Conversely, Shore turnover among the administration jobs runs in the single digits.

Friday chatter:

• Big job cuts are apparently coming to Merrill Lynch, but Tom Wilson -- who heads up the recruiting function -- said today that he's quite busy recruiting. "We're certainly not freezing hiring many parts of our business," Wilson tells ERE. "Last year was a record year in a number of our businesses. A lot of people don't know 40% of the firm's revenue last year came from non-U.S. operations" including Europe, Russia, Singapore, India, and Dubai. Among Wilson's favorite recruiting tools: Affinity Circles.
• Recession? What recession?
• Interesting data from the feds today on employment among people with bachelor's degrees -- unemployment rates of college grads are lower than at the end of last year.
• Accenture's whopping hiring numbers this year.
  
  

Heard or overheard at last night's poker party, as well as today at lunch:

• More on the CRI buy ... I'm hearing that Manpower approached CRI for its domestic RPO prowess (as opposed to CRI having been out trying to find a buyer), and that CRI got an offer it couldn't refuse. I'm also hearing that some back-office type of positions (such as payroll) will be eliminated, but the company will generally be brought over intact. A Manpower rep has told my co-worker Elaine Rigoli otherwise, that no one will be laid off (although that would very much surprise me if a company of Manpower's size would in the long run keep all of CRI's administrative employees). 
• NAS is doing some new branding work for Columbia Sportswear and some recruitment strategy work for P.F. Chang's. NAS is hoping to do work on the career websites of both companies in the future.
• Meanwhile, this Friday, a team of about a half-dozen people from Bayard Advertising will be in Colorado with a new client, Sports Authority.
• Joshua Akers, who'd been working with Bill Warren at DirectEmployers, is now involved in a soon-to-launch (about three weeks from now) community for the life-sciences industry. The site will feature career information and jobs, training, and online networking, and will appropriately be called Beaker.

Overheard today at lunch:

• Business is hot at HRchitect, which sees few signs of a recession.
• Ladd Richland will stick around CRI, even after the buyout.
• "I love this crowd," says Charlie O'Donnell, who's used to dealing with third-parties.

The U.S. Labor Department says people will have up to eight separate careers in their lifetimes.

"Why not have all of them at FedEx?" asks FedEx's John Leech, speaking at the ERE Expo right now in San Diego. Leech says an employee can do everything from IT to metereology to security to sports marketing (because of the company's sponsorships) and more, all without quitting.

Indeed, the FedEx careers website (though not perfect ... searching for the terms "CEO of large company marketing experience master's degree" in the resume box at left apparently didn't produce any results, and a few postings are on the drier side) sells you on the company, not just the job. Some postings play up a potpourri of good company benefits. Many other postings play up the ability to get a promotion.

"It's not all planes, trains, and automobiles," Leech says. "It takes a a whole company to ship one package."

Some soundbites from the keynote by Gene Stanaland, former head of the Auburn University economics department:

-The U.S. economy has been resilient through a tumultous period of several major events packed into a few years: a recession, terrorist attacks, war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, stock market and accounting scandals, controversial elections that ended up in the Supreme Court, a hurricane, and more. 

-Chances are good Democrats will take the White House.

-Campaign promises have no meaning whatsoever until they are passed into law. The American public has far outsized expectations about the president's influence, mistakenly thinking a president can control the stock market or offer universal healthcare.

-"You don't mess with the AARP. They've got nothing else to do." 

-Increases in the rate of spending growth are often unfairly called "cuts." If the government was planning on spending $60 million more than last year on a program, and tries to cut it down to $50 million in growth, opponents complain that it's being "cut."

-The Federal Reserve is now practicing "preemptive monetary policy" ... a new phenomenon aimed at anticipating the state of the economy 8-12 months out.

-Greenspan seemed to be fixated on fighting inflation. Bernanke believes in a "target rate of inflation" ... picking a rate and trying to achieve that rate. The Fed seems to be in panic mode.

-Says Moody's predicts the recession will end around June, and 250,000 jobs will be lost. This would be about a mild recession of about seven months. 

Manpower is buying recruitment-outsourcing vendor CRI, a Los Angeles company that CEO Ladd Richland has kept somewhat under the radar.

Some words of wisdom from Ed Davis, star VP of staffing, leading a workshop today from the ERE Expo in San Diego on competency-based interviewing:

On the 80-20 rule:

Find out what the most critical 20% of jobs in your company are. "The 20% the CEO is really concerned about, that sweet spot. You have to be great at producing top talent in that sweet spot and good at everything else."

On competencies and diversity:

So many pilots now are female, but there was the time when "people assumed you had to be in the military, you had to be a fighter pilot ..." to prepare yourself for a pilot job. But when you break down the job into core competencies, you can identify what's really needed to do the job, and those experiences and skills aren't exclusively male.

On panel interviews:

"Panels can work very well if you have the right structure. The only caution is what you don't want is 'groupthink.' Be cautious. Make sure your hiring managers aren't thinking that everyone has to agree to hire the candidate. That's the route to non-recruiting."

On managing meetings to review candidates and similar meetings:

"Smart executives let everyone else go first ... if you go first, what you're going to say colors what everyone else says."

On the relationship between HR and line managers:

"HR doesn't own talent. They own talent. We're here to help, we're here to facilitate, but at the end of the day," managers own it.

Davis is the writer of some killer articles for the print Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership (for leaders in recruiting), as well as the author of the online article about the role of the hiring manager in recruiting.

The company has seen its share of bad news, but not today. 

ChoicePoint is being bought by the British company that owns LexisNexis. ChoicePoint's stock is up dramatically today, about 43%.

... for the first time in nearly 4 1/2 years.

Unemployment, however, doesn't rise.

There's "no way" I'll stay at my job through year's end, more than 1 in 10 European employees say.

Around the world, the consulting firm BlessingWhite found that people just seem less interested than they used to be in sticking around. A year ago, 65% "definitely" planned on staying through the end of the year. Now, 58% are ready for that sort of commitment. Below are the survey results.

• TheLadders' new ad campaign plays up the site's exclusiveness, while trying not to seem elitist.
• The National Association of Colleges and Employers says 54% of employers are offering bonuses to potential hires, up from 47% a year ago. The amounts are up, too: among employers that will offer bonuses to all college hires, the average bonus is up 25% to $4,450.
• Turnover at at least one trucking company is running 100-140%.
• An interesting contrast.
• United Airlines has renewed its Spherion RPO contract to 2010.
• CFO magazine is giving advice to people about working with headhunters.

• TheLadders' new ad campaign plays up the site's exclusiveness, while trying not to seem elitist.
• The National Association of Colleges and Employers says 54% of employers are offering bonuses to potential hires, up from 47% a year ago. The amounts are up, too: among employers that will offer bonuses to all college hires, the average bonus is up 25% to $4,450.
• Turnover at at least one trucking company is running 100-140%.
• An interesting contrast.
• United Airlines has renewed its Spherion RPO contract to 2010.
• CFO magazine is giving advice to people about working with headhunters.

Fortune's annual list of the top 50 employers is out.

Google, no surprise, is king of the mountain. Less predictable: Quicken Loans, in the #2 spot.

Fortune's annual list of the top 50 employers is out.

Google, no surprise, is king of the mountain. Less predictable: Quicken Loans, in the #2 spot.

With government employment rates of people with some disabilities headed in the wrong direction -- downward -- the U.S. EEOC issued a report discussing strategies to reverse the trend.

The EEOC says the federal government should be a "model employer" in this area, which from the looks of things, it isn't at the moment. The participation rate in the federal workforce of people with "targeted disabilities" is at a 20-year low.

Targeted disabilities includeds deafness, blindness, mental illness, mental retardation, paralysis, convulsive disorders, missing extremities, and limb/spine distortion.