ERE.net

At a time when one of America’s largest newspapers is worth perhaps $1 — assuming it can be sold at all — is there any likelihood that the print industry’s single largest revenue category will ever even come close to approaching the $6, $7, and $8 billion glory days of a decade ago? keep reading…

As the summer’s gathering of social-media-using recruiters kicks off at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, recruiters at DaVita, KPMG, CO-OP Financial Services, Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen, and the University of California we talked to over the last couple of weeks say that social media is an ongoing experiment, one that in some companies is being done without any specific plan, but is nonetheless yielding results. keep reading…

Like tens of thousands of seniors across the U.S., Eric Barker graduated this month with no job.

But unlike every one of those tens of thousands, the newly minted MBA from Boston College took the unconventional step of running a job-wanted ad on Facebook.

“You know that old saying,” he wrote us explaining why, “If your stock broker knows so much, how come he isn’t rich? I think the same thing goes for marketing: ‘If that marketer is so good, he’d better be able to market himself.’”

So that’s just what this marketer did. His target is Microsoft; the work is entertainment, and; the results? Well, no job yet, but a boatload of contacts, lots of buzz, and offers of help from people like Glenn Gutmacher of Arbita and JobMachine. “Considering this was just a little experiment in unconventional job hunting that cost about a half hour of my time and less than $50, it’s been insanely successful,” Barker says. keep reading…

A new survey says students choose nursing because they want to help people. But the money doesn’t hurt.

The student nurses who frequent CampusRN by a margin of 4 to 1 say  they chose a nursing career for altruistic reasons. Even after a year or two of chemistry, biology, anatomy, and other challenging classes, 98 percent said they would still choose a healthcare career.

At the same time, 54 percent of the students taking the survey said salary is their No. 1 consideration in picking an employer. Close behind are hours and schedule, benefits, and the quality of management and staff, each with 45 percent.

CampusRN, which, as its name suggests is a niche career site for nursing students, conducted the survey in conjunction with Bernard Hodes. As do most of these online surveys, the report cautions not to draw far-reaching conclusions since the 661 respondents came exclusively from the CampusRN site and chose to participate, coaxed by a contest and $5. keep reading…

As the economy tumbles, and companies right-size their recruiting departments, the bottom-half is the first to go. Under this scenario, those formerly in the relatively secure 2nd quartile are now in the bottom-half. So be wary or get better.

With this sobering news in mind, I offer those of you in all quartiles this short, 10-point personal evaluation guide. While some of them are a bit crazy, they’re based on comparing your performance to the best in the business. It will tell you quickly whether you’re in the top 25% and how to stay there.

keep reading…

Compete has a report on the impact of last week’s Super Bowl ads on traffic to advertiser sites and, Ouch!, for the millions Monster (site; profile) and CareerBuilder (site; profile) spent, they got nothing. Actually, less than nothing. The Compete report says their sites saw declines in reach of 18 percent and 17 percent respectively.

Denny’s, on the other hand, saw a lift in its site traffic on Super Bowl Sunday of nearly 1,700 percent. A traffic bump to the site was to be expected, since the ad was promoting a free breakfast, and users had to go to the website to get the details. The next biggest traffic bump was to Frito-Lays’ Cheetos.com. Traffic there rose 313 percent on game day, as compared to the average reach of the previous week.

Monster ran two ads, one of them a co-promotion with the NFL for the job of Director of Fandemonium. CareerBuilder’s 60 second spot, you may recall, was the one featuring a stuffed Koala getting socked and ending with a guy in a Speedo on the phone in an office cubicle.

Now, in the interest of fairness we doubt either company was expecting a big game-day jump in traffic to their job boards. (Compete didn’t provide details on whether it included traffic to the Fandemonium site.) As Compete itself points out: keep reading…

Getting your company known to the right potential candidates is tough. This is especially the case when trying to attract the right graduating college students. Students at the big schools are flooded with information, career days, job fairs, emails, and posters. The information is often generic and broad — deliberately so and designed to attract a cross-section of students. But, at the same time it can lead to a flood of unqualified applicants and can degrade your on-campus brand and image. Most organizations focus on the bigger schools, so there is no budget or time left for smaller campuses. Students at small private schools and often even at state universities are left out of the active recruiting process for these reasons. Any tool or service that allows you to spread the word about your opportunities with better focus and wider penetration is a winner.

As I have previously written, video has become king. A recent report by Gartner predicts that 25% of all content will be delivered by audio or video by 2013. Those who want to gain mindshare and generate interest in their career opportunities or organization need to use some kind of interactive media — video, instant messaging, polls — anything that attracts and engages Gen Y. The most useful and powerful interactive tools include social networks — particularly Facebook if you are targeting college students — and even LinkedIn and Twitter — as well as video sites such as Youtube, Hulu, and AOLvideo.

Laura Short at Stout University of Wisconsin has created an interesting slideshow for college students giving them reasons to use LinkedIn and encouraging them to — because it is where you are. In this presentation she encourages students to develop a personal video and post it as a LinkedIn video. She also talks about the importance of a video presence.

As video is becoming the dominant form of communication, recruiters who stick with text-based career sites and even text-oriented social networks will find themselves in trouble if they are looking for younger candidates.

There are many services that produce videos and I have listed a cross-section of them in previous articles. But it is very hard to find any company doing something different enough that it may change the way we interact and communicate with candidates. All the social networks I am aware of are based on reading and writing. You have to create a written profile and list and bullet your experiences, education, and so forth. Recommendations are written. Resumes are written. Any interactivity is through asynchronous conversations (e.g. email), a smattering of instant messaging, and sometimes the ability to post messages, pictures, and videos and make comments.

There is, however, one company that has gotten my attention. It is U.S.-based and aimed squarely at college students.

keep reading…

The recruiting function is constantly looking for ways to improve its business impact and unfortunately, just such an opportunity is about to hit them right in the face.

By now, everyone’s most likely heard of the impending Employee Freedom of Choice Act that will make unionization significantly easier.

As a recruiting professional, have you contemplated what role recruiting can play in maintaining a “union-free” environment at your organization?

Think about it! What better way to ensure that an organization will remain union-free than changing the recruiting, branding, and hiring process so that your organization is more likely to attract new hires who naturally (without any direct influence from management) wouldn’t want to join a union?

Hiring For Tendencies Is a Common Practice

It is common to design recruiting and hiring processes to select individuals with certain mindsets or behavioral tendencies.

Southwest Airlines, for example, has been written up in numerous books and articles for how they successfully attract and hire individuals who naturally behave and act in a certain way. In the case of Southwest, its hiring process targets candidates who naturally put the needs of the individual customer before their own.

Southwest is not alone. A range of organizations, from the FBI to Disney and Google, have all designed recruiting processes that identify and hire individuals prone to certain behaviors and actions. So why not adapt that recruiting concept to focus on individuals who prefer an independent work environment?

The Time to Act Is Now

Now is the opportune time to act before union-related publicity increases to the point where the spotlight is continually on any union-avoidance activities and while most recruiting functions are facing a reduced hiring load.

Rarely do recruiting leaders have as much time as they have now to strategize and to reengineer their processes.

The goal is to redesign your recruiting and hiring processes in order to improve the chances of attracting and hiring individuals who, when given a choice, have a higher probability of selecting independence over “big brother” group action (i.e., unionization).

Don’t Have A Cow

Upfront, you need to realize that it’s ok for management to resist unionization. Most firms rely primarily on the “traditional approach” which focuses heavily on anti-union propaganda campaigns among existing workers.

However, there’s no reason why that approach can’t be supplemented by an effective recruiting campaign that proactively acts “on the front end” before workers are even hired.

Now, I’m not suggesting even for a minute that you go out and purposely hire only “union hating” new employees, because that actually would be illegal.

What I am suggesting is that recruiting can make a major contribution in maintaining your workforce’s flexibility and competitiveness by revising your firm’s employment processes so that they now include elements that “naturally” attract more independent-thinking workers.

Incidentally, I started my working career as a card-carrying union member and now as a professor, am currently represented by a union, so don’t automatically assume that I don’t understand the value unions can provide.

However, I would remind you that as an HR employee, if your executives choose to go down the “maintain a non-union environment road,” it’s your responsibility to make sure that recruiting makes a substantial contribution to that effort.

Start With Market Research

After getting management’s approval for the overall concept and strategy, identify the types of personalities, demographic groups, and regional locations where you’re likely to find a large percentage of “independent thinkers.”

keep reading…

If you don’t invest in finding tomorrow’s candidates today, you’ll become history.

This article is one component of a Web 2.0 and rich media demonstration. It consists of a variety of simple broad-reach tools including webinars, surveys, discussion walls, Twitters, and videos. The purpose of presenting the article this way is to demonstrate how an individual recruiter could expand his or her visibility using similar low-cost technology. As you read the article, click through to the links and take the action suggested. Then imagine how you could apply similar approaches to your job postings to expand both its visibility and interest.

As a example, start by texting the word “sourcing” to 96625 and take the instant survey. Then create your own survey like this and Tweet me at LouA with your quick take. Then create a similar process for hiring by asking your employees if they know a great person for a new hot job, or pinging your resume database asking prospects if they’d be interested in exploring a potential career move.

Now back to the article. It describes some of the latest Web 2.0 recruiting and sourcing tools and likely future trends.

keep reading…

With the use of cents-off coupons soaring it’s probably no surprise that someone would think to offer them for job postings. But for its sheer size alone, the Job Board Savings Book is an audacious effort.

It offers discounts ranging from 5 to 50 percent on the price of a job posting for over 1,000 niche, diversity, and regional job boards. Most of the boards are part of the JobTarget (profile; site) network, which is to be expected since the coupon book was produced by JobTarget and the Society for Human Resource Management. The two have been partnering on a job posting service since 2007. The majority of coupons are redeemable there.

Included in the coupon book are such national job boards as Monster, offering a 5 percent discount, and Jobster, Net-Temps, and SnagaJob. There are also hundreds of job boards offered by professional organizations, as well as several dozen regional boards powered by JobTarget.

Anyone can use the coupons to get the discount. Simply choose the job boards you want, then look up the discount codes and enter them at the SHRM job posting site when you place your order. Besides downloading the book, which will be updated periodically during 2009, printed copies will be inserted in the January issue of SHRM’s HR Magazine and the Winter issue of SHRM’s Staffing Management magazine.

Way back in the 20th century, I learned an important fact about recruiters. We’re all salespeople. There are good salespeople and bad salespeople, but every recruiter has to be in sales if they are to function.

This is not up for discussion. We sometimes dance around the premise, but recruiting is essentially the selling of a company on a candidate and a candidate on a company. Those who choose not to engage in selling can pretend to be noble, but they’re doing a disservice to their clients and employers. It’s engraved on stone tablets for every third-party recruiter who makes it longer than three months, and even the most sales-averse HR generalist has to admit that at one time or another, they’ve tried to talk a manager into meeting with a candidate based on their internal interview. It’s the nature of our business.

Where we sometimes butt heads is in the implementation of a sales mentality versus that of a process-oriented human resources approach. I have good news: The sales mentality is remarkably effective for finding high-quality candidates or hiring large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, no company needs that kind of structure forever, and the friction caused by a sales mentality in hiring can lead to management, administrative, and even legal obstacles. The human resources approach of a kindler, gentler HR works when you don’t have urgency, and when you have an enlightened HR/executive management relationship, but process-oriented hiring turns off the top creatives and results in the hiring of a stable, but less aggressive workforce. That’s no way to run a company in uncertain times.

keep reading…

A top-down command-and-control structure leads to power grabbing, not power sharing. It prevents people from seeing the bigger picture as groups defend their turfs and fight off change at all costs. This sounds like Detroit, and until Detroit develops and implements a customer-driven strategy with a culture of success before self-interest, the bailout won’t work.

A comparable situation exists in how most corporations have designed their hiring processes.

In this analogy, this means the needs of top candidates must drive every aspect of a company’s hiring processes, not the ego of managers, nor the bureaucrats in legal and HR. Your company falls into this category if you worry more about preventing average people from applying instead of figuring out how to attract more top performers. You’re equally culpable if hiring managers won’t see someone without all of the skills listed on the job description, if these same managers think they’re great interviewers, if they won’t spend time discussing real job needs with their recruiting team, or if they expect candidates to be enthused during the first interview.

I neither like nor dislike unions, but I do believe that they can make companies uncompetitive if they restrict management’s hand in optimizing business performance. However, I also believe that employees, whether unionized or not, need to be given a certain set of rights to protect their collective interests. Too much power in the hands of anyone unlevels the playing field. As a result, some regulation is required to preserve an appropriate balance of power. Finding this equal balance is pretty tricky, and history doesn’t offer many good solutions.

Now what does this all have to do with sourcing and hiring more top performers?

The idea behind all of this is something called sub-optimization. Sub-optimization occurs when the rights of a sub-group override what’s best for the primary group. In essence, the sub-group can’t see beyond its own self-interests. I’d suggest lawyers, government regulators, corporate bureaucrats, and academicians prevent companies from hiring the best people because they don’t see the bigger picture. Include here untrained interviewers, managers who rely on the gut, and recruiters who act more like vendors and car salesmen, than consultants.

In sourcing, a top candidate perspective is necessary when designing hiring processes, not some power grabbing bureaucrat or unsophisticated neophyte. Some examples will help clarify this cynical viewpoint:

keep reading…

An interview with Rich Kenny of Northwest, who talks about the company’s combo with Delta; reducing time-to-hire; background checks; on-the-spot hires; recruitment advertising; and improving the candidate experience.

keep reading…

ESPN’s Bruce Feldman’s new book “Meat Market” chronicles the business of recruiting in big-time college football, with a focus on Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron. In his talk with ERE, you may get ideas (including when he discusses “negative recruiting”) that can work in the corporate America.

keep reading…

Progressive companies are now implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) sourcing programs to ensure they have a ready pipeline of top talent once the economy recovers. This will provide early adopters a significant competitive advantage and an increased share of the best talent.

In fact, these are the same companies that everyone else will be benchmarking in 2010 and beyond. So if you’d rather be the presenter at ERE Expo instead of sitting in the audience hearing about what you should have done, here are some things to consider as you begin implementing a JIT sourcing program.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, supply chains became very sophisticated with concepts like material requirements planning, demand-pull procurement, Kanban, and just-in-time sourcing becoming commonplace. Recruiting is now starting to apply these same supply-chain ideas to improve the quality and timing of hiring efforts. This parallels the increased application of advanced consumer marketing and advertising concepts to recruitment advertising. It is the adoption of techniques from these two fields that makes JIT sourcing possible.

The basic concept behind JIT sourcing is the development of a dynamic candidate database of resumes and prospects. On top of this is a drip marketing program nurturing and engaging with this database on an ongoing basis.

When jobs become available, appropriate candidates in the database are notified and invited to evaluate them. As long as the database is filled with enough high-quality candidates and if primed properly, enough people should raise their hands for consideration. This means that jobs could be available for interviews within hours after a req is formally opened.

Even better, a recruiter could query the database ahead of time to determine whether there are enough candidates available to meet upcoming hiring needs. If not, sourcing programs can be accelerated to meet future supply needs.

keep reading…

A number of organizations are recruiting in Second Life. They are realizing significant branding benefits by recruiting in a virtual world. The real question is, How successful at recruiting employees? The challenge becomes more acute for those attempting to find talent outside of the IT world.

A common theme that I usually hear when I discuss recruiting in Second Life is “Second Life is great for technical organizations recruiting young IT talent like Java programmers, but it really would not address our needs.”

There are many reasons why non-technical organizations can benefit from recruiting in SL. Most organizations would agree categorically across industries that there is a growing demand for a technically proficient employee base outside of the IT department, especially as more baby boomers head off for retirement and web 2.0 applications proliferate in the enterprise. There is a compelling benefit to having access to a geographically diverse pool of candidates during these tumultuous economic times, when fuel costs are exceedingly difficult to manage as well as travel budgets. Value is also realized by branding and screening in a virtual world that is typically the domain of leading organizations.

There are also numerous arguments that can be put forth as to why non-technical organizations will not be successful recruiting in SL. There is limited information on either technical or non-technical employees who have actually been hired through an interview conducted in SL. There should be more information readily available if this was a frequent occurrence. Virtual job fairs and islands of employment are not well-known, and I’m sure many job seekers have no interest in engaging in a virtual world. Even if a non-technical person did find a job fair and decide to participate, there is the challenge of operating within SL. It takes time to become adept at controlling your avatar and getting the right appearance for an interview.

What type of employees if any are being hired in SL?

keep reading…

Is your company’s recruiting video boring? If you didn’t think so before, you might think it’s a yawner after you check out Liz Claiborne Inc.’s new recruiting video “Runway of Opportunity” (embedded at the end of this article). When Helene Richter, director of talent operations for Liz, set out to create a recruiting video that matched the energy of the company and the fashion creativity pitched to consumers in the company’s clothing ads, she watched a lot of recruiting videos. Her conclusion: “They were sometimes humorous, always educational, but mostly boring, and certainly not artful,” said Richter.

Richter teamed up with Yahoo! HotJobs (profile) creative director David Lam and created “Runway” which features Liz Claiborne’s chief creative officer and mentor from TV show Project Runway, Tim Gunn.

Lam approached several clients late last year about creating recruiting videos as part of a Yahoo! HotJobs pilot program, and Richter jumped at the chance. She also came up with the video’s main concept and the basic script. Richter said that the video’s production costs would typically average $20,000 to $25,000; she received a discount for being part of the pilot program.

Besides revealing the company’s creative side, Richter also wanted to show prospective applicants that not everyone who works in the fashion industry looks like Kate Moss and that a typical day at Liz doesn’t begin with a cry of “gird your loins” as it did when Miranda Priestly arrived at the office in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

keep reading…

One of the hottest topics in talent management today is employment branding, in part because applicants rank brand as the second most influential factor when deciding whether to accept an offer.

Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.

Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.

Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.

To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:

• Your branding program’s design elements.
• The information that you provide.
• The approaches used to establish each of your sub-employment brands.

Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.

Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.

keep reading…

Larry Horton, a police-officer-turned-recruiter for the Phoenix police department, talks about one of his favorite of the general job boards (hint: it’s not Monster, CareerBuilder, or HotJobs). He also discusses the part of the U.S. where he’s finding the most physically fit applicants; his employer brand, and more. keep reading…

For months (and years) I’ve wondered what the number of monthly searches was for job-related keywords on Google. I always knew it was a big number, but I was shocked to see it was over 100 million searches just in June — with June being the “dog days” of recruiting and job searching. The average month is more around 124 million searches.

Historically, the search engines haven’t shared numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed its external keyword research tool to show us the search numbers for the previous month and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job- and career-related search activity is happening monthly on Google.

Anyone can access this free tool at Google by typing in this URL to view how many people are searching for jobs in your locations and/or hiring need areas:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Some interesting facts, which you can validate using the tool above:

TOP CAREER AREAS: (Monthly)
• Sales jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Customer services jobs - 1 million searches
• Administrative jobs - 823,000 searches
• Accounting jobs - 673,000 searches
• Human Resource jobs - 673,000 searches
• Nursing jobs - 673,000 searches
• Finance jobs - 368,000 searches
• Legal jobs - 301,000 searches

TOP LOCATIONS: (Monthly)
• Georgia jobs - 2.7 million searches
• Illinois jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Arizona jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Massachusetts jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Michigan jobs - 1.5 million searches
• New Jersey jobs - 1.5 million
• Jobs In Chicago - 823,000 searches
• Dallas Jobs - 673,000 searches
• San Diego jobs - 550,000

keep reading…