On the Fresh & Easy home page — the company home page, not the careers home page — the words “A Great Place to Work” (as opposed to “jobs,” “employment,” or “careers”) take you to the carers page.

That’ll take you to the redesigned careers page, which includes videos, a q-and-a about the interview process, a blog, and more.

Fresh & Easy is recruiting employees and interns on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The company — which despite its growth is not without challenges — plays up its low energy use, and its food that avoids trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, and high-fructose corn syrup.

Its plans includes TV ads, movie ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertising, and of course the career site, featuring people lifting up their shirts to show military uniforms underneath.

The site plays up the potential for good benefits, travel, community involvement, and personal growth — the latter, for example, exemplified by the prominent quote from a reservist on the site saying: “I wanted an opportunity to step out, try new things, and push myself.”

The Australian Army hopes to use the campaign for at least three years.

Swift Transportation’s new site opts for none of the above. Instead, the trucker used illustrations, something you don’t see a whole lot on career sites.

Swift, a Phoenix-based company whose drivers log more than a billion miles a year, used Bayard Advertising for the site. The two partners wanted to do something a little different than what it sees on a lot of transportation-industry sites: trucks, cars, signs, prices, clutter, and busyness.

Swift and Bayard figured that a little simpler was a little better. They also wanted to capture the employee value proposition, and interviewed current and past employees to see what they liked about their jobs — career paths with stability, growth, good pay, freedom, variety, and good bennies.

Bayard’s National Creative Director Matt Gilbert found the illustrator; the drawings were used through the career site, not just on the main page.

Swift has about 22,000 employees, about 17,000 of those drivers. It also has 31 full-service terminals, so the company tells candidates that “when you’re driving for us, you’re never far from a hot shower, a good meal, and a friendly face.”

Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. Rather than continue time-consuming and expensive external searches, more hiring managers will opt to go with an almost-ready internal candidate who is a good cultural fit and is willing to learn fast. Although hiring managers may push back at this, management will encourage it, and the increasing difficulty in finding and recruiting top talent will help accelerate the trend.

Over the next few years there will be a move to enlarge the skills of current employees so they can be moved around to different functions as demand fluctuates. Employee development will morph from delivering training, to providing accelerated apprenticeships, developing simulations, and finding ways to encourage informal and on-the-job learning.

Recruiters should focus on encouraging hiring managers to look at these internal employees, encourage them to hire internally, and develop better internal talent communities to expose hiring managers to talented employees and employees to opportunities.

Social Goes Mobile

When recruiting does look externally, more of it will happen on mobile devices. The explosion of Android and iPhone apps means fewer potential candidates will be using traditional computers.

Clearly candidates with technical edge and savvy — the ones you are probably the most interested in hiring — will be spending most of their time on smart phones, iPads, and other tablets. If you have not developed specific recruiting apps that take advantage of these mobile platforms, you will be at a disadvantage as we roll into the middle of 2012.

More applicant tracking systems are now capable of using a social profile rather than a resume, and as most candidates already have such a profile it only makes sense that they use it to apply for a position.

Everything from branding to screening to even doing interviews is moving to mobile platforms and using such things as simulations, video, and chat. Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other major players will introduce more mobile apps and functionality during this year.

By the end of 2012, the traditional career site will be mostly obsolete. If it exists at all will be little more than the place where the candidate makes the formal application. Smart firms will make everything they do mobile-friendly and compatible and encourage candidates to interact more with hiring managers, other employees, and even alumni in online forums, chat rooms, Twitter chats, and via video, Skype, and other similar media.

Just-in-time Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing has already moved from searching static databases to using social media, and this trend will continue to grow. Rather than build proprietary databases or talent pools, recruiters can participate in and look for potential candidates in many different online forums and communities. As almost all professionals have an online presence, whether in LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere, and as many are also likely participating in Twitter chats, Facebook conversations, and so on. Searching for talented people is getting easier each month.

A recruiter can find an interesting potential candidate, start a conversation, provide the candidate with a variety of information sources about the organization and position, and even direct the candidate to screening apps and apps that allow the candidate to apply.

Recruiters can also use their network of current employees, alumni, friends, and colleagues to crowdsource good candidates and leverage referrals.

Entire recruiting campaigns can be run in a matter of days or weeks by using referrals, crowdsourcing, social media, mobile technologies, and by rethinking the recruitment process. Through streamlining, simplification and by getting hiring managers more involved, candidates can be found, screened, assessed, and hired in days.

Continued Rise of Contingent Workers

The use of contractors, part-time employees, and consultants has soared during the recession. And it will continue to grow for two reasons: the first is that it provides employers with the flexibility they seek to manage costs and headcount easily and much more cheaply than by frequent layoffs. Second, many people are finding that contingent employment suits their lifestyle and interests well. They can plan other activities around their work schedules, they can budget according to the amount of time they are willing to work, and they get variety in the kind of work they do and who they work for.

It will be hard to return to the model of employment where just about everyone is a regular employee. Strategies changes frequently, world events and business cycles make it necessary to adjust priorities more often than ever before, and people are less and less willing to commit to a long-term employment arrangement that is uncertain and stressful.

The Beginning of Applied Analytics

Look for more vendors to offer analytical software specifically for human resources and recruiting. We will begin to see how various independent events have an effect on the quality of hire by tapping into data hidden away in their ATS and HRIS systems. They will begin to seriously track and use data to decide the best sources of candidates, what key traits lead to retention and on-the-job success, and where they can reduce costs or efforts and still get good results.

All in all, the economy and the election will dominate this year and, as a result, this should be a year of modest employment growth, a focus on hiring returning military veterans, and even more growth in outsourcing volume recruiting and hard-to-fill positions to RPOs.

First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”

Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”

Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.

Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job.

Intel’s still refining it, and still piloting it, but basically recruiters, instead of getting paper resumes and writing notes on them, are equipped with iPads. The iPad application (see graphic at left) is used at a career fair or other conference to collect information from a candidate, such as their name, email address, grades, and interests. The recruiter can mark it up with notes, such as whether the person wants a job or an internship.

The information makes it way into the Taleo applicant tracking system, and candidates can hopefully get an email back from Intel as soon as that day, the day they interacted with Intel at a career fair, and not weeks later.

Stephens says “the app allows Intel to reduce our candidate response time by 25 times, and save over 500 hours per year in manual processing.”

Development started in August, and as I mentioned, is ongoing. The biggest challenge right now, with the application having been tested at three different events, is getting a soft copy of a resume entered into the system; in other words, finding the best way way to get additional information from the job candidate added to their profile.

New Mobile App for Candidates

The college recruiting application mentioned above is generally an internal technology — to make life easier for recruiters and in the end, better for candidates. Intel’s also rolling out an application for job candidates who look for jobs with a smart phone, along the lines of ones Autodesk, Pepsi, and others have had built. It’s first being rolled out for Androids, and then to iPhones and iPads.

It took about six months from the first meeting about it to completion, and is still being tweaked as we speak, particularly with respect to the branding, images, and the security features. “We take our brand very seriously,” says Intel staffing channels manager Keith Molesworth. “Especially in the recruiting space.”

Facebook and Other Social Media

When we last off, a year ago, Intel was trying to make its social media recruiting more social, more consistent, and make sure it didn’t fall behind Silicon Valley competitors. Sejal Patel and others are continuing that work, with new wrinkles.

One of those is Google+. Patel partnered with the Social Media Center of Excellence (within the Sales and Marketing Group) to create the Intel brand page, which has multiple circles such as “technology enthusiasts,” “Newsroom,” “Trends,” and a recruiting-focused one, “Life at Intel.”

Meanwhile, as far as search engine optimization of jobs is concerned, earlier this year, Intel started using a tool from an association called DirectEmployers. The tool costs nothing additional for members of the association. Intel is now trying out Jobs2Web on some of Intel’s critical software jobs.

Intel continues to use Twitter, LinkedIn (where it has enjoyed success with a student lounge), and Facebook. When it comes to Facebook — well, that all had gotten a bit unwieldy for Intel, with multiple pages around the world, some even inactive. What it’s doing now is putting jobs tabs on different pages for different countries – UK, Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Vietnam, Israel, Germany, Russia. Those pages will have feeds from Intel’s careers blog, as well as local career-related events. A company called Vitrue helped create the tabs, modules, and feeds.

The Facebook site is pulling from the Taleo system, so people can search for jobs on Facebook, read the job description, and in the end go to the Intel careers site to apply. Work4Labs helps power the job search. “It’s a cleaner, prettier, branded way to search for jobs on Facebook,” says Patel.

It’s not yet using BeKnown or BranchOut, but was recently approached by the latter and is considering testing it, and others in that field.

Intel is also stepping up its use of virtual events in recruiting. Using a company called ON24, some of Intel’s events are mainly chats, where candidates submit resumes and talk to hiring managers and recruiters about working at Intel. Others are more of the webinar variety, on topics like CV writing — with a question-and-answer period.

Allen Stephens provided stats on a recent event: “Over 650 resumes received during two-hour event; 385 students attended; 10 hiring managers plus multiple recruiters in the chat event.”

Still Cracking the Code

Even with all this going on, even with this being Intel and all, if you talk to the Intel team, you find that it’s sourcing and social media challenges aren’t so different from everyone else’s.

You have your Tiffany Peerys (among the Intel team on video here talking about their recruiting in the spring of 2011) who are adept at the social-media recruiting thing, and you have others who aren’t as enthused. To that end, Intel recruiting leaders in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere are brainstorming some ways to better train people on social media, with that training likely to increase toward the beginning of 2012. It’d also eventually like to have a community manager for each region of the world, rather than so much of it being either run out of the U.S, or ad hoc.

PepsiCo has for years been an early-adopter when it comes to recruiting with social media, as well as making its recruiting efforts more friendly to candidates using mobile phones.

You can check out the Google+ page here.

And for more on PepsiCo, Here’s Hoyt and colleagues Paul Marchand and Sheila Stygar talking about their talent acquisition department in a video from the last ERE Expo.

Certainly the new jobs site unveiled by Staples, in Canada, is no exception. Scroll over parts of the site and up pop testimonials from retail and corporate employees, including an IT guy, a general manager, a recruiting/training coordinator, a sales manager, and others.

There’s also a place to see the career path of a Staples employee, and then click on job listings that fall somewhere along that continuum (click to enlarge the graphic below to see what I mean). One other nice touch: the URLs of the retail job listings include the word “great,” thus beginning with “greatcareersatstaples.ca.”

Like with most corporate career sites, many of the job descriptions lack the catchy copy of the rest of the careers site.

Some of the corporate jobs, on the other hand, do opt for the more cute and clever: for cashiers; administrative specialists; “receivers” and technology consultants.

Patelco had been in an old, historic building in San Francisco that wasn’t “seismically retrofitted” — an ongoing issue for many Bay Area organizations, from corporations to churches. Getting it up to code would have involved a lot of money and a temporary move-out anyhow. Conversations about what to do had been going on for years. In 2010, Patelco decided to move about 40 miles away, from San Francisco to Pleasanton.

“This was a huge change for us,” says LeeAnne Giblin, a Patelco SVP and Chief Administrative Officer. Though only about 200 of the company’s 500 employees were affected by the move — others were working out of other offices — going from downtown San Francisco to Pleasanton (home of, among others, Workday) was like … well, think D.C. to Chantilly, Virginia; Manhattan to Westchester; Lincoln Park to Northbrook.

Giblin notes that “San Francisco culture is unique.” Often, you don’t have, need, or want, a car, for example. She and others at Patelco were concerned about losing what she calls the “knowledge base” of employees, particularly as it’s moving to an upgraded new technology system. The credit union has long-time employees — as in 20 years’ tenure, not just 10. Giblin guessed last year that maybe 15% of employees would not make the move.

About a year ago, Patelco started a cross-functional, voluntary team to meet and discuss concerns about the move. There was the main “Employee Move Task Force Team” and two other sub-teams – the Xtreme Team and the Amenities Team.

The Xtreme team planned small events along the way, like shred days to get rid of boxes of old documents and to donate office supplies and furniture to local charities. The Amenities Team focused on the new facility and the new area: the “amenities book” it created tells you where the closest car wash and post office are.

Employees’ concerns, uncovered over a series of meetings of these groups, ranged from where people would sit in the new office to what sorts of restaurants there were in Pleasanton.

Transportation was a big issue of course, even more for people in Marin County, where the potential commute could be around 90 minutes, maybe double what it would be if you left from the heart of the city.

under construction

Patelco decided to add “extras” at the new office, like a fitness room, and twice-a-month massages. It gave tours. It added a shuttle service from the closest BART stop to the office. It expanded telecommuting options. It also had a recruiting ad agency called CKR Interactive make various suggestions as to how it might handle the communications; Patelco ended up having CKR create a special website (later honored at the annual Creative Excellence Awards) to make sure candidates “digged its new digs.” The audience was not just current employees but potential employees; remember, Patelco was assuming that it would need to hire some new people to replace those who didn’t make the move.

The “dig the new digs” site was chosen and unveiled as 2011 began. This theme was used in corporate communications, PowerPoint templates, welcome kits at everyone’s new desk, and more.

(Incidentally: the idea of having the site be mainly an intranet site was a no-go, as the in-house IT staff was too busy and the intranet in need of an upgrade.)

The Patelco move happened at the end of February. Aside from two people at retirement age who ended up retiring, Giblin says she’s “happy to say that we had zero turnover as a result of the move.”

new digs

You might think that the job market’s weakness worked to Patelco’s advantage in creating this zero number. While true, Giblin, as mentioned at the outset, is adamant that this whole effort was about not taking employees for granted –because their options are limited — and not acting like the company was callously uprooting their lives. “If there’s anyone out there who’s taking advantage of employees,” she warns, sharply, “there’s a hidden cost”: Less engagement, less interest, less production, and in the end less-happy customers. “You have to think about people, appreciating people, people being involved in the process.”

Patelco, as mentioned, is currently knee-deep in a technology upgrade. Its mortgage lending department is being moved from Sacramento to Pleasanton this fall, a much smaller deal than the San Francisco relocation.

Apple in Sydney

In Part 2 of this case study on Apple’s talent management practices, I look at its approach to innovation, compensation, and benefits, careerpathing, and online recruitment (its career site). Some approaches discussed are unique to sub-factions within Apple, as would be expected in any organization of significant size. It’s also quite rare for organizations that design, manufacture, and sell through direct retail to have consistent approaches across all units.

Talent Management Lessons To Learn and Copy (continued)

You should not be surprised to learn that the firm that made the term “think different” a brand uses talent management approaches that are well outside the norm. In addition to the lessons presented in Part 1, some approaches other firms can learn from Apple include:

Career paths reduce self-reliance and cross-pollination — in most organizations, HR helps to speed up employee career progression. The underlying premise is that retention rates will increase if career progression is made easy. The Apple approach is quite different; it wants employees to take full responsibility for their career movement. The concept of having employees “own their career” began years ago when Kevin Sullivan was the VP of HR. Apple doesn’t fully support career path help because it doesn’t want its employees to develop a “sense of entitlement” and think that they have a right to continuous promotion.

Apple believes career paths weaken employee self-reliance and indirectly decrease cross-departmental collaboration and learning. Absent a career path, employees actively seek out information about jobs in other functions and business units. In a company where creativity and innovation are king, you don’t want anything reducing your employee’s curiosity and the cross-pollination between diverse functions and units. Automatically moving employees up to the next functional job may also severely narrow the range of internal movement within the organization, which could reduce the level of diverse thinking in some groups.

Create and manage a culture of innovation — most firms have a culture with a singular focus on one attribute like performance, quality, customer service, or cost-containment. Apple is unique in that it has two dominant cultural attributes that exist side-by-side. The first (discussed in part one) is “performance,” with the second being “innovation”; the latter may actually be the strongest of the two. The dual emphasis works at Apple because the firm operates in the consumer technology field, where there is a universal expectation for “disruptive” performance.

Producing $2 million-plus in revenue per employee certainly establishes Apple as a performer, but it is its industry-dominating product innovation that differentiates it from competitors like HP, Sony, Microsoft, and IBM. Three factors drive the innovation attribute, including the expectation of continuous innovation, extreme secrecy within the product development process, and continuous brainstorming/challenge meetings (even at play just days before a product launch).

“I expect a pony”

Apple’s culture of innovation is unique because the goal is to produce a “pony, not a real horse but instead something so desirable that everyone wants it and considers it ‘gorgeous.’” Simple evolution doesn’t cut it — only extraordinary industry-leading innovation that results in WOW products does. To accomplish that, Apple doesn’t do what most consumers assume it does. Instead of developing completely new industry technologies, Apple takes existing technologies and then bundles numerous small developments on top to produce what appears to the public as giant step forward. It takes a powerful culture and group of managers to delay taking great work public faster, but Apple knows that numerous small releases don’t produce the same media and consumer buzz.

The expectation of innovation permeates the culture

The expectation of innovation is driven by Apple’s history of innovation, its leaders (who forbid the use of “that’s not possible”), and the peer pressure among employees to be among the contributors to the final product that the customer sees. In order to generate this expectation of innovation, it doesn’t rely on posters or motivational slogans (although they have those too … around here, changing the world just comes with the job description). Instead, every communication, process, product launch event, and even advertising slogans (Think Different, Imagine the Possibilities, Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. Etc.) make it crystal-clear that innovation is at the heart of Apple’s success. Innovation has driven Apple’s past and current successes, and it will continue to drive future success. After walking in the door of the corporate offices in Cupertino, California, you can literally “feel” the expectation to innovate.

Secrecy drives internal competition

The second critical driver of innovation is the product development process. This innovation process is unique in that it doesn’t rely on a formal “ideation” type model; instead, it has been described as an “iteration” process energized by peer competition and Apple’s famous siloed/secret approach to teams. Apple does many things using small development teams, as many firms do, but doesn’t rely on a single team to design each product element. Multiple teams may be assigned to the same area (or they may accidentally wander into the same area). The approach has been called 10 to 3 to 1 because 10 teams may work on a product area independently. When work is ready for review a formal peer review, it will whittle 10 mockups to three and eventually down to one. It is an approach that is unique to Apple. Outsiders may consider it expensive and slow, but they can’t argue it isn’t effective.

Apple is well known for its obsession with secrecy in order to heighten the impact during a product release. Secrecy is also the most unique element in its innovation process. In order to maintain secrecy, development and design teams are intentionally siloed. As a result of these communication barriers, team leaders may not be initially aware of how many teams they’re competing against and what those other teams are working on. The level of open collaboration that you might find at other firms like Google is not possible under this process, but neither is early-stage groupthink. Once possible feature solutions move forward to peer review, the organization benefits from broader scope best-practice sharing and collaboration. While it may seem counterintuitive, Apple has turned “team silos” that would be a negative factor at most firms into a positive force.

Paired design meetings force free-thinking to continue until the end of the design

Another element of the design and innovation process is the holding of weekly “paired design meetings.” Every design team is expected to hold two meetings each week. The first is a traditional production meeting where small refinements are discussed and made. The second is a “go crazy” meeting, in which everyone brainstorms and uses free-thinking to scope out parameters. Most organizations stop these brainstorming meetings once the design parameters are clear, but Apple continues them long into the development cycle to guarantee that completely new ideas will constantly raise the innovation bar.

The talent management lessons to learn in the area of innovation include the concept that intense competition may produce innovation faster than any formal ideation process. In addition, peer vetting of ideas, delaying collaboration until toward the end of the development process, and requiring the continuous use of brainstorming processes may result in bolder innovations and higher levels of risk-taking.

Tying economic rewards to overall company success can reduce selfish behavior – You won’t find anyone who will publicly argue that Apple pays well with regard to base compensation. Economic rewards at Apple are significant, but largely tied to the company’s valuation. The primary monetary motivator at Apple is “the opportunity for wealth creation” as a result of stock ownership. Most employees at Apple get periodic stock grants to reward their contribution. By putting the focus on the stock, they send every employee a clear message that individual accomplishments are important only if they directly contribute to the overall success of the company. This approach, coupled with the firm’s famous “product focus,” keeps everyone focused on product success rather than individual results and individual rewards. Individual rewards are provided based on performance and consist of stock grants and cash bonuses up to 30% of base salary. Apple’s retail employees also have stock opportunities. They are paid on an hourly basis and do not receive a sales commission.

Benefits and even pay play a secondary role in recruiting and retention — at Apple, the primary long-term attraction and retention factors are stock growth and exciting work. Because of the importance of these two factors, its message on benefits is clear. If you’re doing the best work of your life and having a major impact on the world, do you really need sushi in the cafeteria? (It has that also.) Although most talent competitors to Apple spend huge amounts of money on benefits, Apple’s offerings are spartan when compared to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. While Apple’s health plan is well-funded, and it has good food and an on-campus gym, neither the food nor the gym is free. One perk that does excite potential applicants (especially in retail) is the employee discount on Apple products which is given to every employee. These discounts further support and reinforce Apple’s companywide emphasis on the product.

Your corporate jobs website should boldly inspire — because the primary goal of most corporate career/jobs websites is simply to provide company and job information to potential candidates, most corporate job pages are chock-full full of information. Apple’s website is lean on information but strong on inspiration. As a result, after exploring the site, the potential applicant comes away inspired rather than with a pile of information about the company.

There are two categories of inspirational messages on the site, and each one is bold. The first group of corporate messages makes it clear that Apple is “anti-corporate.” In fact, the first bold headline you see is “corporate jobs, without the corporate part.” They also highlight what they are proud not to have including endless meetings, being bureaucratic, having executive perks and managers wearing suits. Instead they boldly tell you “don’t expect business as usual.”

The second category of inspiration on the website concentrates on openness, innovation, and changing the world. Key phrases include “open minds, collaboration, and of course innovation.” You will also find the phrase “there’s plenty of open space — and open minds” (obviously perfect sentence structure isn’t a high priority either). Finally, they promise to “give you a license to change the world” and “be inspired.”

Its focus on inspiration is so strong that for a tech firm, there is a surprising lack of technology-speak on the page. You will not find blogs, videos, or any mention of Apple’s availability on Twitter or Facebook easily. When it comes to mobile access, the site will render fine on the latest smartphones, but receives a 1.51/5.0 with regard to meeting mobile standards. If you visit the site, you might even find links that don’t work and features that load very slowly. What you will find is inspiration — loads of it.

I’ll leave you with this introductory statement from its career site:

“There’s the typical job. Punch in, push paper, punch out, repeat. Then there’s a career at Apple. Where you’re encouraged to defy routine. To explore the far reaches of the possible. To travel uncharted paths. And to be a part of something far bigger than yourself. Because around here, changing the world just comes with the job description.”

Next week, Part 3: Employer branding, recruiting, retention, and other talent management approaches to copy and learn from.

I’ve personally tracked the photo to eight HR-related sites where it shows up illustrating employee engagement, consulting services, headhunting, and a company’s commitment to diversity recruiting. I know there are more. Google has 19 pages of results.

Is your company among them?

A moment’s digression: Google has a new, handy image search that lets you drag an image into the search box to find where else it appears. You can also upload a picture, search by URL or, with the right extension, right click an image. Google explains it all here.

MarketingProfs.com has a dozen pictures on its list, which it put together as much in fun as to make the point that imagery is not immune to cliche. The images are all stock photos, available at little or no cost, which is one reason they’ve become so ubiquitous.  They are a cheap way to spice up a site.

The downside for recruitment marketers is that like elevator music, no one pays much attention. And when they do, instead of thinking “diversity” (in the case of our suspect picture), they think, “Now where did I see that photo before?”

I found it on the internship page of a company that boasts of being the “best of the best.” It may be, but consider the message communicated by the picture  (and, oh dear, the site has several more offenders). The message it sends is more along the lines of, “We’re just like everyone else.”

Is that what you want candidates to remember? Think of another cliche, the one about a picture being worth 1,000 words. Behind that trite expression is an enormous amount of research that all says the same thing: Images evoke a more powerful response, and are more easily recalled than words.

You can probably guess why. We see the image first, then zero in on parts, just the opposite of how we read. In a journal article a few years ago noted market researcher Dr. Alan Braithwaite, managing director of Ignition Marketing Research, explained it more scientifically:

Images have an immediate impact, as they are perceived holistically rather than in the linear-sequential fashion of verbal accounts. Whereas verbal messages are processed rationally and consciously, visual imagery is perceived and partially processed preconsciously.

You don’t have to be a market researcher, however, to appreciate the value of choosing images wisely. The web has plenty of sites with tips on how to select images. Here’s a simple starter from Brand Innovation Group.

Note the first point BIG makes: Fit images to the concept you are looking to communicate. I’ve sat in on enough meetings to know just how tempting it is to edit an idea, a concept, or a message to fit the image. This is especially true with logos, and thematic color choices.

I very clearly remember one heated creative discussion about choosing the “look and feel” for a website. The design team pitched hard one particularly attractive look. It was slick, modern, almost avant garde, with colors that popped. It was also totally inconsistent with the message we wanted to convey.

So here, in addition to the tips and advice from BIG and others you’ll find online, are mine:

1. DO NOT choose images until you have written out the message and impression you want to convey. Writing it out will (literally) ensure everyone is on the same page. And it will keep you from backing down when the design team comes up with the wrong image.
2. Avoid using images that have become Internet cliches. Search Google to see where else that cool, stock image appears. If it shows up more than just a few times, or if it shows up on other recruitment sites, don’t use it.
3. Before going live, invite in employees not involved in the image selection. Instead of asking them what they think of the picture, show it to them in context, and ask about the impression the entire project conveys.
4. Whenever you can, use real people. Have a photo day and engage your employees in shooting photos for the web site. Give them a photo credit online. Mount the best submissions and hang them where everyone can see.
5. Be ruthless in your selection and your photo editing. It may be a great picture, but if it isn’t consistent with your message, it doesn’t get used.
6. Change the imagery periodically. This is especially important to make sure the workers on your site are still your workers and haven’t moved on.
7. Candids are better than posed.

Yes, technology is wonderful — when used effectively. That’s the caveat. Too many people have just jumped on this bandwagon without evaluating how, when, and why they should be using various technologies in business. It has become so pervasive that some of the tried and true methods of doing business have fallen by the wayside. Let’s look at a partial list of some of the technologies used in recruiting:

Applicant Tracking Systems: Companies need these systems to help manage their candidate pool. There are so many out there to choose from. Where do you start? Do you need it to integrate with payroll and HR? Why? Why not? Do you know the right questions to ask so you don’t end up with a product that doesn’t suit your needs or is so complex that your employee compliance is low? There is one very well-known company out there today whose product I’ve yet to hear one positive thing about from any recruiter using it. Remember, just because you recognize the company’s name does not mean it’s a product you should buy or that it will suit your requirements. More bells and whistles are not necessarily a good thing.

Corporate Careers Page: How many of you have considered the pros and cons of requiring applicants to register on your careers page? Are you thinking, “We want them to register so we can have their information.” or “We’d like candidates to feel comfortable coming to our careers page”? The first is about you. The second is about the candidate. I’m going to assert you want them to register so you’ll have them in your database for the times you need to search out candidates who have already applied. Probably the most significant concern for applicants is confidentiality. I know if I was confidentially looking around to see what types of jobs were available I wouldn’t want to register for some company’s website. There’s just no guarantee of confidentiality without knowing who may be looking at my personal information. Call me paranoid, but it’s not something that gives me the warm and fuzzies.

I popped onto a few sites today and one F50 company allows you to search everything they have open globally without registering for their site. Bravo for them. I looked at several postings and there wasn’t one that didn’t have at least one typo. Do you think the CEO would be happy about this? This is a reflection not only on the head of their recruiting organization but on the company as a whole. Are they this sloppy when it comes to building and selling software? This also tells me a lot about their recruitment department.

Twitter: Are you spamming out tweets about open reqs or really thinking about the best way to use 140 characters? How can you capture someone’s attention and have them take notice? How many followers do you have? Are your followers really reading your tweets and potentially forwarding them to their friends? Have you really thought out your Twitter strategy and how you should be using it for it to be most effective?

LinkedIn: Are you using LinkedIn in the same way as Twitter? Are you sending the same messages to LinkedIn and Twitter? Do you connect with people in order to have quality connections, or just for quantity? If you’re one of those people who connects to any Tom, Dick and Harry, I’d assert you don’t have a strategy. More is not neccessarily better. I know some of you will think I’m an idiot for saying it, but LinkedIn is NOT about seeing who has the most connections.

How is your profile? Is it professional? Is it complete? Is there a professional picture? If you have a picture of you with your kids, at a bar, at a sports event, etc., put it on Facebook. Does is look like a resume or is it conversational in nature while showing your strengths, accomplishments, responsibilities, etc? Does it have real content for someone to see what you’ve done and what you’re currently doing? If you were a candidate and read your profile, are you someone you’d want to work with or connect to?

How are you using LinkedIn to source candidates? Are you sending emails to people or picking up the phone? Why? Why not? People are busy. Have you really thought about what to put in an email or voicemail so that there’s a higher probability of a response?

Video Interviewing Applications: There are a growing number of these and it feels like I’ve evaluated all of them. What I can tell you is that there’s only one I like, and this is becasuse it can be customized to suit each client’s needs. Most of the apps out there now have limited abilities or a set of questions they give you to ask in an interview. I know that wouldn’t work for any of my clients. Can a third party be on the call and be invisible? Sometimes it benefits my hiring interviewers to have me on the call and invisible and sometimes they want me to be part of the interview.

Make sure you are clear about your requirements before you spend money on this “now” technology.

Facebook: Are you posting to your company page? Your personal page? Is it the same strategy as Twitter and LinkedIn? Do you have “friends” of the page who are going to see what you’ve posted?

Telephone: You may be thinking that the phone isn’t high tech. You’re right in one respect but sorely lacking in another. I could, and probably should, write a post about the art of the telephone. How are your phone skills? Do you say “um, uh, you know” a lot to fill space? Shame on you if you do. Some people may think I’m a dinosaur, but I firmly believe there is no other technology more important than the phone (your oral skills). The phone is where you get to know people, build relationships, and gain trust. No other technology can do this for you. Not even lots of LinkedIn recommendations.

I’d like you to look at the examples I’ve given and put a percentage of use to each. Are you using some more than others? Why? Is the percentage you spend using one or two far outweighing the others? Is that large percent of time you use a particular technology returning that amount in candidates? In other words, if you’re spending half your time in your ATS, is that generating half your candidates and are they qualified? If not, you need to reevaluate your processes and procedures to align with your company’s strategies.

The big takeaway here is that no technology will fix a process that doesn’t work, is ineffective, and/or lacking quality recruiters to implement it. Technology must be looked at as an adjunct to enhance a quality, well-thought-out process. It is really nothing more than a tool to help you do your job.

I really want to hear your thoughts on this. My request is that you answer any or all of these questions in the comments sections (or you can send me an email directly) and ask any other questions you’d like to see addressed. This way I’ll be able to write a follow up to this post. Thanks in advance for your participation.

This confirmation of what most of us intuitively suspected comes from StartWire, a job search networking collaboration service launched six months ago by Chris Forman, formerly of AIRS, and his partner Tim McKegney, also an AIRS alum.

As part of the research and testing for StartWire, Forman collected hiring information from employers across 10 industries. Cumulatively, the companies shared data on 6,600 hires. From that emerged the correlation between speed of response and hiring.

What Forman and StartWire found was that almost 50 percent of the hires the companies made had applied within the first week a job was posted; 27 percent of the hires applied within two days. And three-quarters of those hired had applied within the first three weeks.

Forman says it sort of a “duh” revelation, but since he’s never seen a study that examined the matter, he decided it might be interesting. In the aggregate, the conventional wisdom about applying early improving a candidate’s chances is correct, he notes. On a job-by-job basis though, it might not be so.

“It’s all a function of supply and demand,” he points out. A security cleared, experienced Java developer can expect to hear from a recruiter regardless of when they apply. A customer service rep needs to get the application in on day one.

“Getting to the front of the line is important if it’s a long line,” adds Forman.

The study, however, has some potential OFCCP implications for recruiters. If the majority of your hires are coming from the applications submitted within the first three weeks, what, then, does that say of your candidate pool?

Online job postings can linger for weeks or even months. And many corporate careersites pull their listings from an ATS, which keeps a listing alive until the req is actually closed. Under OFCCP regs, a job seeker becomes an applicant by submitting “an expression of interest,” having the necessary qualifications, being “considered,” and not withdrawing.

Forman’s study implies that within a week or two of a job being posted, the future hire’s resume is likely already in the in-basket. Job seekers applying after the third week have a much lower likelihood of getting the job. With so many ATS’s not only searching for the basic qualifications, but also ranking candidates — an assessment, of sorts — the paperwork compliance provisions come into play, even if the short-list interviews have already begun.

Since OFCCP regs apply only to federal contractors and subcontractors, this may not be a major issue. But it does suggest that including a time limit on applications might be useful. Placing limits is an approved practice. The OFCCP FAQs say: “if there are a large number of expressions of interest, the contractor may limit the number of individuals it considers by using random sampling, absolute numerical ceilings, or other data management techniques, provided the sampling procedure is appropriate.”

Miko Covin, who manages the employment marketing group, is one of the key players. She and others in that group — people like Alison Foy — came up from recruitment ad agencies like Bernard Hodes, TMP, and JWT Inside.

Covin arrived in 2008 from JWT, wanting to use the basic marketing and advertising skills she’d learned at agencies and apply them to social media and recruiting. In early 2010 (late in the game, she admits) she opened up a personal Facebook page after a friend invited her to be a Facebook member. She also saw the agency world struggling, social media increasing its role in recruiting, and wanted to move Home Depot in the social media direction.

She spent 2010 on education. There were HR people in Home Depot who didn’t get social media; in fact, some even used the now-awkward word “The” preceding “Facebook.” “I don’t know about The Facebook,” one person said.

Covin kept talking up the importance of social media in recruiting. By the spring of 2010 Home Depot began testing two things on Facebook, targeting people based on the information in their profiles. First, it tried advertising store jobs to females, part of an effort to reverse the perception as a company for male jobs. It casted a “huge net first,” Covin says.

It narrowed after that, targeting people — now both male and female — whose profiles indicated they were in HR, and were based in areas where an HR district manager was needed.

It brought on JWT, the recruitment marketing agency, to help with the Facebook project.

By August, satisfied with the approximately 100 resumes it had received over the summer from these efforts, the recruitment marketing team was feeling that Facebook was a success in recruiting, and it should be expanded.

By October 2010, it launched its Facebook careers page.

Building it Out

What’s happened since and what is happening now is taking a lot of forms.

There is, for example, the work Maya Garner is doing. She joined the team 3-4 months ago and is rolling out a series of five games “designed to add a little fun to the community,” she says. One, “Cart Hustle,” involves assisting customers with carts, showing the job’s not just mundane but can actually be fun. Another game is a do-it-yourself quiz. Another is “Paint Misbehavin,’” involving helping customers at the paint counter. Another is a “Helpful Homer” game about customer service.

While Home Depot wasn’t the first company to get a careers page up and running on Facebook (Deloitte New Zealand was among the early movers), it believes its games section is well ahead of what most U.S. companies are doing. (Reckitt, a UK company, was out of the gaming gate early.)

“The main purpose is to add a little fun,” Garner says. “Facebook has become such a big part of the online social media lexicon, if you will — people join to have fun catch up with old friends. It has provided an avenue for brands to have a little fun as well.”

Alison Foy, who I mentioned at the outset, is a project leader in the employment marketing group. She has run Facebook ads aimed at people who are bilingual, by targeting people who choose to view Facebook in Spanish. She also works on recruiting for job functions like supply chain employees. She’s upgrading the company’s LinkedIn pages, segmenting them by supply chain, IT, retail management, and merchandising. If you’re in IT, you’ll see the IT page. If you’re in, say, communications, you’ll see none of the pages I just listed. Expect this to happen in about a month.

Foy and others on the team also help out in keeping up the day-to-day goings-on with the site. JWT is helping with creative, analyzing results and metrics, and is helping to manage the Facebook posts.

Lifting an Orange Veil

Few companies’ hiring and interview processes are totally clear to job candidates, of course. Where one stands in the process, or even how to figure out where one stands, are ongoing mysteries to many candidates. But, Home Depot’s using Facebook to at least shed a little light on the process. As you’ll see in the conversations I’ve captured in the (click to enlarge) graphics, job candidates who’ve been left wondering what ever happened to their applications are asking the company, and getting some answers. Those answers are sometimes coming from Home Depot, and other times coming from others posting responses on Facebook.

It’s a valuable and candid look at what job seekers and current employees experience at any company. In one back-and-forth, a job seeker wrote, “I applied online quite a few months ago, got the email, the phone interview, and that was it. i don’t mind not getting the job, but a simple form email saying thanks but no thanks would be appreciated. besides you guys lost out in not hiring me!”

A Home Depot representative (Jacquese Brown) wrote back with an 866-number to call to check on her status.

In another post, shown here, a current employee complains about the company’s promotion policy.

Brown, a branding specialist, spends about a third of time reading posts, responding to them, and thinking of related site enhancements or other site issues. She says the company’s open-book policy is not just about helping people get their questions answered, but about Home Depot improving. “It shows us where we can better our process,” she says. “It shows us opportunites where we can help the user experience be very transparent.”

Brown says the heavy communication has another benefits — big benefits. It’s a way of taking a briefly-established relationship between a Home Depot recruiter or another employee and keeping it up. Let’s say a Home Depot rep meets someone at a Hispanic MBA event. They can have the candidate “friend” them on Facebook and begin receiving information about upcoming events, jobs, and so on. Home Depot, for example, will send out communications to fans in a specific zip code or area. If a contact — a candidate — asks a question to Brown, or a Home Depot recruiter, through Facebook, Home Depot’s policy is to respond within 24 hours.

Brown and colleagues laugh when I ask if they get questions or comments that don’t meet the guidelines. “We get comments that are more interesting than others,” Brown says. “Day to day you really don’t really know what’s going to be posted.”

More Work

Facebook’s expansion as a recruiting tool has led to quite a few new things that must change.

A perfect example is the corporate career site. Covin says Home Depot needed to ensure consistency between the Facebook experience and the career site experience, the latter being the place where candidates end up applying. You can “have the flashiest site and flashiest advertising, but the corporate career site,” she says, “well, let’s just say it had great opportunities (for improvement).”

She said the company asked itself: “‘Are we completing the candidate experience on a high note?’ I can’t say we were.”

That site was redone, relaunching in 2011.

Meanwhile, Home Depot is researching what it will do to optimize its Facebook Careers pages for mobile phones.

Also, when you’re on the Facebook page for customers, there’s little sign of the careers page, a move that would turn a customer into an employee. That could change in the future.

I asked the Home Depot folks about metrics, and in particular, hires. They said that this is all about branding. They’re not measuring success by hires yet. The marketing group remembers, like it was yesterday, when it had 500 fans. Now, it has 16,000. The number rises about 2% weekly. Covin says that “we all knew that once we started, this would take more time. We knew it wasn’t going to be a one-hit thing where you just put it up there and you’re done.”

The spring tends to be the chain’s busy season, a little like tax season for accountants, but, says Covin, “employment marketing has never really had a downtime.”

Today there are more job boards than there were five years ago, some of which are attempting to be more social, just as the social networks themselves are looking at how best to serve the employment space. While the job boards have demonstrated a steady pace of evolution, corporate career sites have not. Yes, the graphics are getting better and widgets here and there are displaying live feeds from social media sites, but in the end they serve up the same loathed experience they did five years ago.

Corporate career sites have never been compelling enough to capture an audience. Despite huge advances in content management, content aggregation/curation, and content sharing, most sites remain little more than a thin veil for the ATS-delivered online application. The always informative Doug Berg of Jobs2Web once shared in conversation that all research indicates someone desperately seeking new employment will ignore all content and go direct to whatever link is labeled with a variant of “apply now.” Knowing this, is it still worth it to build out pricy, glossy career sites no one is paying attention to when other avenues to apply are emerging?

I say emerging, because studies now show that about 20% of candidates find their opportunities via social networking, nearly 30% via employee referral, 25% via job boards, and another 10% via direct sourcing. On average, that equates to 85% of the external candidate pool arriving at the application from an origin point other than the corporate career site. Add to that university programs, event-based efforts, and occasional agency usage, and it’s clear the corporate career site is a questionable spend at best.

I’m arguing they don’t need to survive, and I don’t think those in the employment advertising world would be sad to see career sites disappear even though they are a huge source of revenue. The traditional career site costs a lot and is wrought with problems and shortcomings. Most career site development initiatives start out with unclear goals and an even more vague evaluation. If you’re interested at all in the future of recruiting, looking at the factors that are leading to the demise of corporate career sites might help you spot other “dinosaur” practices in recruiting and save your organization millions.

Reasons Why Corporate Career Websites Are Becoming Irrelevant

Just like job boards, some variant of corporate career sites will exist for years to come, but here are 20 reasons their value will continue to dwindle.

1. There are superior ways to gather information — with the growth of social media, it is now much easier to find out what you want to know about a firm and its jobs. You can learn almost anything you want, including things an organization knows are true, but would never admit. Sites like glassdoor.com and jobvent.com provide an insiders view, and Glassdoor even provides you with a preview of the interview questions, interview answers, helpful tips, and what to expect during the interview process. Only a handful of corporate websites provide any description of what to expect during the interview. It’s even possible to find side-by-side comparisons with competing firms on external sites, something you’ll never find on a corporate site.
2. Out of date – with corporate HR budgets slashed, the design of corporate websites frequently remains unchanged for three to five years, during which there is virtually no content curation. The information on websites is painfully old, especially compared to the current information that is available on the Internet and through social media.
3. There is nothing there for the non-job seeker – it’s no secret that 100% of the features and information found on most corporate career sites are designed for the “active” job seeker. Most career sites provide no value (i.e. learning best practices, becoming a better professional) for a working professional not searching for an immediate opportunity to visit.
4. Authenticity — applicants want authentic and believable answers to their questions, and let’s face it, every word on a corporate career website is pure propaganda.
5. The black hole — with a high rate of unemployment, the volume of resumes that a firm receives stresses the available resources. Because so many individuals apply for jobs they are obviously not qualified for, most recruiters are unwilling to spend much time searching the database of those that directly apply.
6. They are referral killers – the highest quality hire and volume of hires almost always come from employee referrals, a recruiting channel that is aided significantly by advances in social media. Research with early adopters of social media revealed a significant fact: when social efforts point contacts back to the career site your chance of conversion to an applicant are less than 1:10.
7. They aren’t mobile friendly – a surprisingly large number of corporate websites cannot be accessed from a mobile device (the most powerful recruiting communications tool on the planet). Recruiting leaders that ignore mobile should be waterboarded. It’s unfathomable that creative agencies continue to leverage flash based navigation (invisible to most mobile devices) when HTML5 works.
8. Honesty — potential candidates want to know about both positive and negative factors, but no one in legal or PR would let a single negative bit of information survive on a corporate-controlled site.
9. Painful to lurk on – the abandonment rate (the percentage of visitors that leave a site prior to completing a profile/application) on corporate websites is 92%. Yes, you read that right. While most of the abandonment can be attributed to lack of compelling content and features, some of it can also be attributed to the huge gap in experience between career sites and other service-oriented commercial websites. The pictures are staged, the videos lame, and the news obviously written by an idiot. Absent are believable stories and compelling reasons why your organization is “different.” Zappos has learned how to tell stories on their site; you should check it out.
10. Painful to apply for a job – often the process of filling out the application or posting a resume is painfully slow. (If I can custom order a new luxury car with hundreds of configuration options in minutes, why can’t I apply for a job in the same amount of time?)
11. You can apply other ways – even if you decide to apply, you can easily apply for most jobs without ever visiting the site, because the same jobs are listed on numerous job boards.
12. Many don’t have the features that candidates want – a significant percentage of corporate career sites lack blogs, videos, podcasts, and the live chat features that can often be found outside of the site.
13. You can’t ask questions – career sites are designed for one-way communications. Corporations tell you what they want you to know. The best that most sites can do is to offer “canned” questions and answers, yet you can ask a variety of questions “live” and get answers on Facebook, Twitter, and Internet forums.
14. Not global — in a world now dominated by global recruiting, most career sites are still primarily focused on the country and the language where the company is headquartered. Although jobs might be listed by country, the available information about the company’s facilities and jobs is likely to be painfully insufficient.
15. Diversity is a joke – although every corporate career site mentions diversity and has the obligatory diversity picture, most never provide targeted information relative to the specific interests and needs of diverse groups.
16. Access to employees is not allowed – many corporate sites provide no employee profiles. However, those that do limit access and provide only one-way communications. None have the courage to provide the whole name of the employee being profiled and a means of contacting them.
17. The job descriptions are vague — they are brief, incredibly dull, and they provide little information about the projects you will be working on and the team you will be working with. Most websites of course provide no avenue for getting more details about the job, the projects, or the team. If you don’t know the correct corporate job title for the job you are seeking, it may also take you an eternity to find the right job for you.
18. No Amazon-like features – on a commercial site like Amazon, the visitor gets “prompts” informing you that others who have bought item A also bought item B. The “others like” feature if it was available could alert you about similar jobs that you haven’t considered and other information that you might not have viewed.
19. Direct sourcing makes a website less necessary — as a higher percentage of corporate hires come from direct sourcing approaches (where recruiters proactively identify and target individuals), there will be less need for unsolicited applications.
20. Uniformity and consistency drive away innovators — it is a common recruiting goal to attract the innovative and creative. Unfortunately, the level of consistency and uniformity is so pronounced on corporate career sites that anyone with an ounce of innovation or creativity in them will realize right away that this organization doesn’t tolerate variations and diversity. The words on the page might actually say innovation, but the monotonous page design and site layout sends a clearer message of massive corporate restrictions.

Final Thoughts

There are many defenders of corporate career websites, most of whom have a financial interest in their survival, but even they cannot ignore the overwhelming evidence that suggests the money spent on them might be better spent on other channels of communication/engagement. If you continue to buy into their value, you should be prepared to evaluate and prove their effectiveness at getting the people you need to apply to actually do so, because the vast majority of commonly used website metrics tell the opposite story.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, the glory days of the corporate career site are over.

Conducted by Swedish research firm Potentialpark Communications, the firm surveyed almost 4,800 U.S. students and grads from a variety of business schools and universities. They were asked what they most wanted from career sites and the application process. From the features and component lists developed from the survey, Potentialpark analyzed 755 sites worldwide, including 102 in the U.S.

Bertelsmann came out on top on both the career site ranking and on a second ranking for the application process.

“The biggest strength of Bertelsmann’s career website,” says the report, “is to focus on the information flow within the site itself. The thinking starts from the job seekers’ point of view and what questions they have, rather than what the company gets across.”

On the career site rankings, Bertelsmann is followed by Accenture, Ernst & Young, Deutsche Bank, and Deloitte. On the application rankings, adidas, Ernst & Young, Roche, and Northrup Grumman round out the top five.

The Potentialpark surveys come just a few days after a related survey on the candidate experience by CareerXroads. In that survey, principals Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin and a team of volunteers applied to the 100 companies on the Fortune best companies to work for list. Three months after the last resume was sent, 25 percent of the companies failed to even acknowledge receipt.

Many companies had pre-screening questions. One had 144 multiple-choice questions that had to be completed before an application could be submitted.

Other companies had online forms that had to be filled out, in addition to uploading a resume. “Point, click, upload, and go,” Mehler says, is the ideal candidate experience. Few were set-up to do that.

Ease of applying was an important consideration in the Potentialpark research as well.

Potentialpark has conducted its Top Employer Web Benchmark study since 2003. Last year, Ernst & Young came out on top. However, this was the first year for the application process study, which it calls “Applying Online and Loving It” (APOLLO).

”Students and graduates have accepted that applying online is ‘what is common today’,” says Potentialpark. “The problem is, the more they apply, the more they dislike it.”

In the application rankings, Potentialpark lists the ATS each company uses. Of the 3o highest ranking companies, 17 use a Taleo system. But, says the report, “no service provider is a guarantee to be in the top.” Many of the most popular systems as often were among the bottom-scoring companies as they were among the top.

“In fact,” says Potentialpark, “how candidate-friendly an online application is seems to depend more on how the employer drives the project, embeds the system into the career website, and adjusts the implementation to its needs.”

Besides the rankings, the Potentialpark research found that the majority of the surveyed students and graduates don’t want to connect with prospective employers on Facebook. Instead, they prefer to engage with them on business networks.

Yet, the research found that 39 percent of the surveyed U.S. employers link their corporate career site to their social network presence. Only a quarter of them connect to a business network.

Potentialpark suspects that students may unreasonably fear that “liking” a company on Facebook will expose their personal lives to recruiters. It also theorizes that few students have business network profiles, and that companies simply prefer Facebook because it offers much more functionality and dynamic interaction.

Notes the report: “All in all, the opinion that many of the most forward-thinking employers in U.S. have come to is that it can pay off to be on both types of networks, but in different ways: Facebook for branding, LinkedIn for recruiting.”

Three months after applying to the last of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, Santa has no idea if the job has been filled at 78 of them. He doesn’t even  know if 25 of them got his resume.

Applying under his given name, Chris Kringle (Anglicized from the original German), the jolly old guy was looking for a job as a systems engineer in logistics or product security.

With his uncanny ability to know who has been naughty or nice, and to manage overnight global delivery of billions of packages, Kringle should be a shoo-in for every recruiter’s short list. And even though he got turned down by 22 of the 100 companies, a few recruiters did call him up for a phone screen.

So you can imagine their embarrassment when Mark Mehler, principal in the recruiting consultancy CareerXroads, pointed out that Chris Kringle is another name for Santa.

“I would say, ‘Would you please read the bottom of the resume’.” And there it was, the disclaimer: “This is a CareerXroads Mystery Job Seeker.”

“Obviously,” says Mehler, “They hadn’t read the resume.” There were other tip-offs. Chris’s resume says he once worked for the CIA at the North Pole where he “analyzed coded messages from around the world from children asking for holiday gifts.”

Over the 10 years that Mehler and his partner, Gerry Crispin, have done this survey, they’ve created resumes for Ted E. Baer, Gold E. Locks, and, last year, for environmental technician Jack Coostow.

While the names are all in fun, the exercise has a serious purpose: To survey the responsiveness of companies to their job applicants.

“Our objective is to see how the job seeker is treated,” explains Mehler. “If these are the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S., they should understand how to treat the job seeker.”

“You would think,” he adds. And in so many ways, you would be wrong.

Not only did companies fail to acknowledge receiving an application, but the process itself was so arduous that one of the volunteers helping submit applications said it was almost impossible to do more than a handful a day.

“It’s just amazing what we find when we do this,” Mehler says. “And these are the best companies.”

Many companies had pre-screening questions. One had 144 multiple-choice questions that had to be completed before an application could be submitted.

Other companies had online forms that had to be filled out, in addition to uploading a resume. “Point, click, upload, and go,” Mehler says, is the ideal candidate experience. Few were set-up to do that.

Like the fictitious Chris Kringle, real candidates want acknowledgement of their application and to know when the job has been filled. A survey of candidates by Shaker Consulting Group showed they valued both of those communications more highly than anything other than knowing when they can expect to hear.

To recognize companies that do the best job of meeting candidate expectations, and to spur others to improve their application process, a group of recruiting professionals have created The Candidate Experience Awards.

Sparked by a suggestion from Chris Forman, CEO of Startwire and former head of Airs, now a part of The RightThing, a group of recruiting professionals formed The Talent Board, a non-profit specifically to produce the awards. Its mission “is to facilitate the evolution of the employment candidate experience principally through the annual production of The Candidate Experience Awards.”

Employers of every size and from any industry can participate. The first step is a 40-question application that not only provides the basis for the initial screening, but will allow applicants to see how they compare to other companies.

The competition FAQs say, “Each applicant will, at a minimum, receive specific survey feedback on how they compare to the applicant group. In other words, each applicant will get specific feedback on how they can improve their candidate experience.”

Only the winners will be publicly identified, and recognized during a ceremony at the HR Tech show this fall in Las Vegas. Others remain anonymous. There’s no cost to enter. The deadline is June 30.

And finally, and least surprising of all, referrals continue to be the leading source of external hires.

These are among the highlights of the 10th annual Source of Hire study by CareerXroads. Released today, the study reports the results of a survey of 36 large, “well-branded” but anonymous U.S. companies who cumulatively employ 1.32 million workers and hired not quite 133,000 employees in 2010.

This is the 10th year that Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have conducted the survey to see where companies source their hires. As has been the case from the beginning in 2001, referrals from employees, vendors, alumni, customers, and other sources was the leading source of external hires. Last year, the surveyed companies reported 27.5 percent of their external hires came from referrals. The percentage has fluctuated only modestly over the years.

What is somewhat surprising about the referrals is that 51.7 percent of the responding companies said that up to 20 percent of their referral hires come from sources other than employees. On the other hand, 45 percent of the respondents said ALL their referral hires were recommended by employees.

Click to Expand

As strong as that number continues to be, job boards in 2010 took a big leap into second place, with almost a quarter of all external hires being sourced there.Last year, 13.2 percent of external hires came from job boards, a percentage more in line with the historic data.

Monster and CareerBuilder were the leading suppliers of hires, with 88.9 percent of the responding companies reporting they made at least one hire from Monster alone. (The similar stat for CareerBuilder was 85.7 percent.)

In past years, corporate career sites occupied second place, as a source of external hires. However, Crispin and Mehler have regularly observed that candidates come to corporate sites often by clicking on job postings on job boards or search engines.

The current report makes the same point. “Career sites are critical but they are more likely to be the end point, not the beginning or middle,” write Crispin and Mehler. There’s a diagram in the report from Jobs2Web, which, they note, “helps to illustrate that the 18.8% hires attributed to company career sites very likely came from somewhere else.”

Getting a handle on the originating referral source is still a challenge for most companies in the survey. Two-thirds of them simply don’t track their search engine marketing or optimization efforts.

The picture is much the same when it comes to their social media efforts. Most companies are able to identify candidates sourced through LinkedIn, but half can’t when it comes to other social media sources, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

Nonetheless, 57.1 percent of the respondents reported that social media played an important part in their direct sourcing program. That was the percentage reporting they researched candidates on social networks. Asked to rank the impact of social media on various parts of their recruiting program, respondents said its influence was greatest on direct sourcing, college hiring, and on hiring from job boards.

The report contains dozens of other data points, including contingent worker hiring, RPO use, and talent community management. Even with the small number of companies reporting, the report is now a classic, identifying trends and offering pints of comparison for recruiters everywhere.

As Crispin and Mehler note, “The set of conclusions from our February, 2010 9th Annual SOH Report is still valid. The 2010 data presented here merely underlines the need to continue improving how we measure the interaction of multiple sources i.e. the channels of influence that result in a hire.”

I had a chat with Gerry Crispin today and I can assure you he is passionate about the experience job seekers have as they navigate through a corporate career site in pursuit of information. So passionate, that he approaches the subject with near missionary zeal.

Yesterday he, his partner at CareerXroads Mark Mehler, and a group of friends released a monograph on the issue of the candidate experience. I posted about it here, but could not detail every valuable morsel in the paper.

Now, the group is hoping to take the matter to a higher level. Crispin, Elaine Orler, and Ed Newman want help with a survey about what it would take and how much information you would be willing to share to create an industry award around the candidate experience.

There’s 11 questions, two have multiple parts. It should only take a few minutes to complete. You can answer it without having read a word of the paper or my post. But if you don’t read the report do yourself a favor and go there now. At a minimum, head to page 4 where you’ll find such blunt, useful, and data-driven observations as:

• “Delays at any stage of the recruitment process are almost guaranteed to negatively impact candidate reactions — and this is especially true of better quality candidates!”
• “Two characteristics recruiters exhibit to successfully generate more influence with applicants are: perceived ‘warmth’ (enthusiastic, personable, empathetic, and helpful) and knowledge about the job. Nothing else they (recruiters) do seems to matter much to applicants.”
• “Hiring managers influence the applicant more than recruiters.”

If that last one made you say “Duh,” then why do you just turn them loose on unsuspecting candidates? That was rhetorical, so no need to comment about the realities of working with hiring managers.

The point of this post, however, is not simply to double-dip the issue. (But I will take a moment to note that a job-seeking acquaintance of mine suggested a better title would be “Candidate Mistreatment.” And he’s not even one of the bitter seekers who email me about their experience.)

My shameless self-interest in promoting the survey is the hope that the team does  establish some form of recognition for candidate experience. Because then there would be detailed data about how the candidates and the window-shoppers saw things.

The survey is open until March 15 and whether you have any intent of applying for an award or not, Elaine, Ed, and Gerry want to know what you think.

That would seem to be an easy question. But try it and you quickly see how tricky it is to answer.

The candidate experience is the emotional impression created in a person as they proceed through the process of seeking, applying, and being considered for a job with a specific company.

That’s my off-the-cuff answer. Considering a simple Google search turned up 99,000 references to a definition, mine seems as good as any.

Which is exactly the problem Gerry Crispin, Mark Mehler, and friends say is hobbling the industry. It is “evident,” they argue in a new, and provocative monograph, “that the stated opinions are too often unsubstantiated.”

“Unfortunately, among the 100,000 or so people claiming expertise about what the candidate experience is (literary license) the few common themes we have found have little substantive support for their conclusions,” the authors note in the introduction.

Over the following 33 pages, the team details the transformation from hiring — including an entertaining discussion of selection by citrus possession — to recruiting and why, today, candidate experience matters.

“The controversy among staffing professionals isn’t about whether a candidate experience exists,” the authors note, “but why it is so important now when, in the past, employers could generally ignore it at will.”

Why indeed. With millions out of work and millions more underemployed, why does it matter what the candidate experience is? The short answer is that the better the experience, the better the hire, and the better and more valuable the employee will be. At least, that’s the street wisdom.

You won’t find that spelled out in the monograph, which is a bit unsettling, particularly since gaps between employers who post jobs and take applications, and those offering a best-in-class candidate experience are substantial. Of the Fortune 500 firms surveyed (yes, all 500 of them), only 8 percent (40) earned a best-in-class rating. Almost 60 percent were considered undistinguished or worse.

The team’s criteria for best-in-class is high. Their corporate career sites are mobile-accessible, they offer information about specific jobs and the work environment, navigation is clear, contact information is readily apparent, they engage candidates in two-way conversations via social networks and talent communities, and, though the evidence supporting it is “a mile wide and an inch deep,” they make efforts to say “why a candidate should come and stay.”

By comparison, candidate expectations are meager. A survey by Shaker Consulting Group confirms just how little window shopping job seekers expect. Job descriptions, a place to apply, contact information. Once they actually apply, what they really want is an acknowledgment, a timeline, and to know where they stand, or at least when the job was filled.

As the monograph points out, and the articles it references, and the research by Crispin and Mehler it cites shows, there’s so much more to the candidate experience than that. Which brings us back to just what is that elusive “Candidate Experience?”

It is, offers the team:

“The attitudes and behaviors of individuals who aspire to work for a firm about the recruiting process, the stakeholders in the process, the work and the company itself as a place to work.”

In August 2008 Dr. John Sullivan posted an article about recruiting trends for 2009 about the importance of mobile-accessible corporate careers sites. We all know how important mobile accessibility is, yet only a few companies are truly optimizing the application experience for mobile. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

1. Search for your company name and careers on your mobile device; for example, “hyatt careers.” Your own career site should be right on top of the list. Click this link. What do you see? Most of you will see a very small version of your full career web site. A few of you will see your company’s mobile site appear but without any career links or career information. Not a single Fortune top 10 company to work for has their site mobile optimized. I’m guessing a lot of people read about the Fortune list on their mobile devices. I wonder how many potential candidates were missed when they could not easily access career information for these companies.
2. Open up your company’s main web site on a mobile device. Many companies do have a mobile version of their main web site. Where is the career link? We all fought hard to add career links to our company’s main sites years ago; get your careers link added here as well.
3. For those of you who have optimized your job postings for search engines: Search for one of your jobs on your mobile device and then click on the link. Do you see a very small version of your ATS career portal or a mobile optimized version of the job that can be read and shared with others?

Creating an optimized version of your web site should be simple and relatively inexpensive. Keep the content simple and focus on the most important content. At Hyatt our site allows a potential candidate to search for jobs, view mobile video from YouTube, discover ways to connect with us through social media, and learn about our culture. Most ATS systems do not yet offer mobilized versions of their career sites, but many job SEO vendors can easily do this for you.

Just like your main career site, obtaining analytics is simple. At Hyatt we have thousands of people visit our mobile career site every month and over six thousand monthly visits to our mobile job search page. AT&T and Sodexo offer a great mobile experience as well.

In the U.S. over 300 million people have a mobile phone. We take our mobile devices with us everywhere. Don’t leave your mobile viewers stranded, start mobilizing your career content.