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It’s no surprise: the role of executive recruiters has changed, and so has corporate America. The critical focus of a CEO is the health and long-term growth of his/her company and to identify, recruit, and secure the top three percent of employees.

The top three percent? The top three is a small core team that is absolutely essential to set the stage for the next 10 years of a company. The remaining 97 percent? Increasingly becoming a commodity. Recruiters must develop a process to find the “best of the best” who can focus on short-term quarterly goals and drive the company on a daily basis. The key to identifying this ever-changing, fluid group of individuals is to use both global and local social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) effectively. Recruiters will need to use these tools to identify, track, and be ready to reach out and entice individuals to join their company.

With these changes, the question remains: how can recruiters stay on top of their game? I have the inside track of the CEO perspective and his/her needs from its corporate recruiters. I see three reccurring trends: keep reading…

Do you know what an experienced recruiter “looks like”? If hiring a recruiter to build a talent strategy, would you know the interview questions to ask to determine if candidates can do the job like any top talent you’re in search of?

I pose this question because I see a multitude of job postings for “experienced” recruiters with five years of experience. To me, this is an oxymoron. I had extraordinary search training, broke the 100k barrier in my third year, had lots of clients, and I was just beginning to really know what I was doing in year six.

Each year I learned more and got better at my craft. Recruiting is highly complex, when done properly, and it concerns me that companies that wouldn’t consider hiring a sales rep with five years of experinece would hire a recruiter to build a talent process who only has five years of experience. There seems to be a considerable disconnect here and I’d like to try to get to the bottom of it.

Since this is my assertion, I posed this question to a number of recruiters I consider “experienced” to determine if I was barking up the right tree. One of them has six years, one has 10, and the rest have at 15-30 years in the industry. They do retained and contingent work. Here are the three responses I found most interesting and believe they say it all: keep reading…

Anna Jarvis was from my home state of West Virginia. She introduced the traditional Mother’s Day celebration in 1907. It became a national holiday only seven years later. You may think Anna was delighted with how quickly her idea spread throughout the world. Actually, she spent the rest of her life and all of her savings protesting how the true meaning of Mother’s Day had been lost. She believed printed cards and candy were insufficient to honor one’s mother. On one occasion, her protests landed her in jail for disturbing the peace. Imagine what her reaction might be to people who simply Tweet their moms on this special day. keep reading…

Thinking of changing jobs? It seems almost everyone is.

CareerBuilder says 15 percent of workers are actively looking, but 76 percent of the rest would jump ship if the right opportunity comes along. Given the acceleration in hiring, that right opportunity may come along sooner rather than later.

Manpower said this week that 16 percent of employers expect to add jobs in the second quarter, which begins tomorrow. When seasonally adjusted, Manpower says its Net Employment Outlook is a plus 8 percent.

CEOs are even more optimistic, a good thing since they are the ones to give the thumbs-up to hiring. The Business Roundtable’s CEO survey found 52 percent of them expect to increase hiring over the next six months.

So if you happen to be one of those active job seekers, or you’re just waiting for the right job to come along, you should know that HR jobs generally and recruiting positions in particular are trending up.

Next week, Indeed adds HR as the 13th category to its employment trends report. We won’t know until Tuesday what the March numbers show, but last week Indeed’s Jason Whitman gave us a preview at ERE’s Expo in San Diego. keep reading…

Recruiting is unfortunately often a way station in a career. It is one stop on the way to becoming an HR executive or to moving on to other things. There are often very limited opportunities for advancement as a recruiter within most organizations, which further limits the number of people who choose to dedicate themselves to doing it well. Success also requires abilities that are not necessarily the strengths of those who choose traditional human resources as a career. I have found that many of the most successful recruiters had no intention of working for or in HR. They were interested in sales, marketing, communications, or similar areas and found themselves accidently being asked to do recruiting.

If you take the time to talk to recruiters who have garnered a reputation for success, you will discover that they share a few traits in common. keep reading…

Those seemingly sober-minded folks at Zapoint are cooking up a sales gimmick as clever as it is provocative. Over the next 12 months, Zapoint will compile dossiers on the HR, sales, and marketing employees of 300 of Fortune’s biggest companies.

Then, says Chris Twyman, Zapoint’s founder and CEO, the HR departments will be presented with skills maps for their company’s personnel.

“If some of the 300 don’t like what we are doing that is fine,” says Twyman in a press release going out today. “It will not be long before they need to consider the implications of this campaign.”

Talk about throwing down the gauntlet. The 300, as the project is called, is nothing if not ambitious and attention-getting. keep reading…

Finding a programmer is easy. Resumes are everywhere: Dice, Craigslist, CareerBuilder, personal websites. You name it.

But how do you sort through the stack to create your short list? (I’m deliberately ignoring the issues of availability, interest, and candidate affordability.)

Like most recruiters and software ranking systems, you look at skills, years of experience, types of projects they worked on, career progress, and the like.

What if you could also factor in the opinion of their peers? Suppose you could see how their peers rated your prospect’s solutions to problems that befuddled other programmers?

That’s the idea behind the revamped careers site on StackOverflow. It’s a popular Q&A coding site, where programmers can post their programming challenges and see what solutions others offer. Responses — and the questions, too — are rated by the programming community, and result in a reputation score. keep reading…

Long time no Howard. If you’re wondering whatever happened to Howard Adamsky, author of some highly commented upon articles on this site, he has been toiling over a new book. (The writing took only 23 days but then he had to deal with those pesky editors.)

In the podcast below, he talks about his upcoming book, called “Employment Rage.” keep reading…

I had lunch with a colleague a few weeks ago who is the author of a book called “The Paradox of Excellence: How your great performance can kill your business.” He had been CEO of a midsize public company for many years and more recently a consultant for several well known Bay Area tech firms. He told me there are indicators that can be evaluated and fixed before companies or people in business fail.

I’ve taken the liberty of interpreting the questions he asks company CEOs and translating them into recruiting terms.

The core questions are the same. keep reading…

Any small business can fail.

A small business that has been in existence for more than five years has a sizable advantage over a business that you start yourself if you can afford to purchase it.

Most people can’t.

In lieu of that route there are ways to start your own business that don’t require large outlays of cash and there is (probably) considerable cash already in your budget that you could use to start your business. keep reading…

There are many lists that highlight great places to work. Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” and BusinessWeek’s “Best Places to Launch a Career” are two of the most compelling for general jobseekers. However, I have never come across a credible list designed specifically for those early in their career in the field of talent management. I’ve been researching and working in the field for 40 years, and it is obvious to me that there are a number of firms that clearly stand out above the rest. keep reading…

“But that’s not my job.”

There are 6.2 million long-term unemployed in the United States.

Many get up each and every morning and go to their computers looking for work as if their computers will soon offer (will it be today?) a panacea to their worry.

Guess what? If you’re not willing to do anything, anywhere, at whatever price, you may as well hang up your tool belt now. There it is — the nail on the wall. Go ahead. Reach high, stretch.

While you’re stretching, think about this: keep reading…

A talented group of corporate recruiting leaders and others talk about what the expanding economy and improving job market mean to recruiters; how recruiting departments are changing; how contract work and RPOs are being used, and why many employees now bitterly resent their employers.

Among those on the podcast:

• Amit Pal Singh, the operations director at Labor Finders, a large staffing firm with about 200,000 customers
• Erin Peterson, the former VP of global talent acquisition at Hewitt, now leader of the RPO business at Aon Hewitt
• Indrajit Sen (from India), a recruiting/HR leader at Aricent and past ERE Recruiting Excellence Award recipient
• Carrie Corbin, a talent-attraction strategist at AT&T
• Jenifer Lambert, a big-biller recruiter and founder of Talentum keep reading…

Silicon Valley, California is one of the most competitive recruiting environments anywhere. And if you’re a recruiter there, the competitive pressure can make you lose perspective and make you terrible at your job if you let it get to you. The opening keynote from Carol Mahoney at the Seattle SMA Staffing Symposium was both inspiring and cautioning in its message today.

I had the chance to catch up with Mahoney (who’s speaking this Fall in Florida) after her presentation to talk to her about recruiting in Silicon Valley, getting out of the rat race, and finding perspective to recruit better.
keep reading…

The relationship between the corporate recruiter and the hiring manager is not always a good one. True, in some organizations the working relationship between the two is strong. In others, however, there is a schism between them. And in still others, the schism became a chasm. In the latter two situations neither the candidate, the hiring manager, nor the organization is best served. And in situations like this, the chance of an unsuitable hire, in our experience, is heightened.

The responsibility to establish a positive and productive working relationship with the hiring manager rests with the corporate recruiter. Whether this is the way it should be or not is not the point. What is important is that the corporate recruiter has skills and abilities that will provide significant benefit to the hiring manager, and the key is to develop the relationship and demonstrate it.

So the two questions that need to be addressed first are:

1. How does the corporate recruiter enhance the organization’s ability to select, hire, and advance the right talent for the organization?
2. How do they accomplish this when they have no direct authority over the hiring manager making the final decision?

The answer to these two questions is: You do this by understanding and practicing influence. Influence (something we’re doing a workshop on at the Fall Expo) is the ability to achieve your objective — to get work done — when you do not have complete control or the authority to accomplish your objective alone. keep reading…

Looking for a job as a recruiter? After a long lean period, things are looking up. The long night has ended and we’re still here. It’s over. After two years of layoffs the economy is now creating more jobs than it’s losing. In March, the economy created 162,000 new jobs. The Dow is 70% of the way back to where it was before the recession started. Retail sales are up. Housing starts are up. The ship has righted itself now that the storm has passed.

After two years of decline, any good news will do, but let’s not get carried away. 162,000 new jobs given that 15 million Americans remain unemployed is barely a drop in the bucket. About a third — 48,000 — of those jobs are result of the census. They’ll go away in a few months. 150,000 new jobs are needed per month just to keep up with growth in the population. Since December 2007, the economy has shed 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million, for a total of more than 11 million jobs that are missing. So even with a recovery that was producing 300,000 jobs per month it will be five years before we’re back to where we were before the start of the recession.

How is that supposed to happen? keep reading…

What do you think of doing a performance review in public and posting the written evaluation online? And then inviting people to contribute their own opinions and vote on the review, in the interest of being fair and balanced?

Raise your hand if you think this is a good idea. I see no hands. Wait, there’s one. Thank you St. Dymphna. The rest of you, however, should stay away from Unvarnished.

This is a new site, just launched this week into private beta. It describes itself as “an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews.”

TechCrunch, which reviewed the site yesterday, calls it “Yelp for LinkedIn.”

Personally, I call it trouble. keep reading…

What do you get when you search your name online?

Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.” keep reading…