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Just out this morning: Jobvite’s annual Social Job Seeker Survey and this third edition says fewer working Americans are actively looking for a job, even as the survey found that most of us are open to opportunity should it come knocking.

Of the 1,029 employed workers taking part in the survey, 9 percent said they were actively looking for a job. Last year, 16 percent said they were looking.

Yet even as the active seekers declined, more employed workers moved into the “active” passive category this year. Jobvite says 69 percent of the employed are either seeking a new job or would be open to hearing about one. Last year, 61 percent were in that category.

Add in the unemployed respondents, and it turns out 75 percent of the workforce — employed and unemployed alike — are open to opportunities. Last year, that percentage was 69 percent. keep reading…

Nearly every firm that I have worked with that captures data on the quality of their hires learns that employee referrals produce both the highest volume and the highest quality of hire from any source.

However, the results of referral programs can almost always be dramatically improved when referral program managers become fully aware that a significant percentage of the referrals that are received under most programs would have to be designated as “low-quality.”  Low-quality referrals can be broken into three groups:

1. Bottom performer referrals — Those referrals submitted by your low-performing employees (who might not know or be able to influence top performers to become referrals).
2. Referrals motivated by money – employees who are primarily motivated by money may submit a high volume of low-quality referrals.
3. “They found me” referrals — People who your employees barely know who became referrals because they approached and asked your employee to make them a referral. I call them “they found me” referrals because your employee did not seek them out.

This last group, the “they found me” referrals, is the most significant type of referral to reduce because, according to my research, it can exceed 36% of all referrals. Imagine how much more powerful the results from the overall referral program would be if all three of these types of low-quality referrals could be eliminated, so that they didn’t clutter your referral system.

The Best Referrals Are the “I Find You” Type of Colleague Referral keep reading…

The competition for recruiting top talent is already intense in certain industries and is soon to grow in many others. In this highly competitive environment, you can’t expect to fill your quota, no less recruit the highest quality candidates who you desire, without having a superior recruiting toolkit.

If you are currently dissatisfied with your recruiting results, you must adopt a more aggressive approach and begin to “push the limits” beyond the use of traditional recruiting tools. If you are a bold recruiter and you want to try something aggressive, I’ve compiled a long list of bold high-impact recruiting tools for you to consider. Each one has proven to produce results. The toolkit is broken into five categories, including sourcing, referrals, recruiting at events, college, and advanced recruiting tools.  keep reading…

After 30 years of recruiting outstanding senior staff, mid-level managers, and company executives, I can now state unequivocally that the single most important step in the passive candidate recruiting process is the 30-minute exploratory interview. Here’s why:  keep reading…

Think you don’t need an employer branding strategy? Read on about a few numbers.

88% keep reading…

In the corporate world, HR leaders are frequently considered some of the most conservative and risk-averse. Running HR in a conservative manner might have served your company well in the 1990s, but unfortunately it may be inappropriate and even damaging today. This fast-changing and highly competitive business world has caused senior executives to now expect innovation not just in their product lines but also in all of their business processes.

As a result, it’s time for HR leaders to realize that in a battle to attract and retain top talent and innovators, your firm has to act differently with superior talent management approaches if your firm is to develop and maintain a competitive advantage in the talent marketplace. In fact, from an employer branding perspective, your firm needs to do a few unique things in HR if it is to stand out as a great place to work.

As a professor, I am fortunate to have the time to track and give corporate presentations on the array of leading and “bleeding-edge” programs that a handful of firms have had the courage to implement. Almost by definition, bold HR programs are new, controversial, and full of risk, so don’t be surprised when you don’t agree with many of the listed approaches. I suggest that you compare them to your own programs in that functional area in order to see if perhaps your firm is being too conservative and is falling behind the leading edge.

The Top 10 Bold and Outrageous HR and Talent Management Practices keep reading…

Recruiting is important at any firm, but it is super critical at startup firms. This is because when you have thousands of employees, you can still get by after hiring a few turkeys. At a startup, however, you are so lean that every hire must count and a single bad hire can cause incredible damage.

To further complicate the matter, large firms have a product and employer brand that can attract applicants. Startups have no name recognition, no recruiters, and only an informal recruiting process. The recruiting is made even more difficult because startups are often targeting engineers and IT staff, which are the second- and third-most difficult-to-fill jobs.

Don’t despair. It is possible to recruit great people to a startup if you are aggressive and you know the right tools to use. The following is a list of recruiting approaches and tools that are tailored to the limited resources and the special needs of startup firms.  keep reading…

With so many new recruiting- and human resources-related companies sprouting up (perhaps about one a day), we thought we’d do a little roundup of some recent and upcoming startups that we haven’t covered yet on ERE. Here are some video interviewing, employee referral, and other launches, including the ambitious launch of an outfit called willbeHired.

Zao Like Wow

We were double-checking how to pronounce “Zao,” and asked CEO Ziv Eliraz. He said it’s pronounced “like ‘wow,’ as in what we hope people’s reaction to our platform will be.”

The system helps you match a job description to the friends of referrers; track referrals; collect notes from references; and, it serves as a free little applicant tracking system, too. Pricing is explained here.

Eliraz started the company while working in Palo Alto but has now moved back to Israel, where he wanted his four kids to grow up. He says that unlike some other referral sites, this one is based on “people you trust” rather than being an open marketplace for referrals, which contradicts the whole purpose of an employee referral in the first place.

Zao just completed what Eliraz calls a “nice size round” of angel funding (including from some fairly high-profile investors, like one who also put money into Chegg). It’s in beta, invite only, with that changing in a couple of weeks. It has nine employees: salespeople in LA/Newport Beach, with the CEO and R&D in Israel. Zao, says Eliraz, isn’t going to disappear any time soon. “Even if we don’t make a dime,” he says, “we have at least a year and a half, maybe more. We have companies using us and a business plan that makes money.”

Square One

Foursquare recruiter Morgan Missen is starting a company of her own called Main. For entrepreneurs, it’ll help them recruit tech talent; for employees, it’ll help them with the hiring process, such as negotiating pay.

New Video Service keep reading…

They are the perfect recruiting target because these prospects are currently employed (i.e. passives); they are diverse; it costs almost nothing to get a recruiting message in front of them and best of all; and they already know and like your company and its products. These perfect candidates are your customers.

Even though customers are generally the most-ignored recruiting source, some firms like Google, McDonald’s, Marriott, and Wells Fargo have realized that some of the best recruiting targets are their own customers.

Let’s take Wells Fargo as an example. It literally has millions of customers that use their ATM machines every year, so it only makes sense to try to recruit them as employees. Its approach is simple and cost-effective. It is reaching these customer prospects by merely adding a recruiting message to the receipt printed out by its ATM machines. The message is: “Now hiring. With you when you want a career opportunity that is right for you” (see the inserted sample of a “recruiting receipt”).

Why Customers Are Near-perfect Recruiting Targets keep reading…

Employee referrals are up at eBay, the owner of such brands as PayPal and StubHub, up enough that it has candidates in a pipeline that is hasn’t gotten to yet.

The percentage of hires coming via referral is about 32% at eBay, up about 5-8%, according to Debbie Roeder, the global talent attraction programs manager who oversees branding and messaging activities, referral and other programs, and works with the company’s recruitment advertising agency, TMP.

Roeder’s basic belief is that employee referrals are generally a better source of hires for all companies, hers included. She says people who know someone on the staff are typically “more suited to the culture,” more likely to fit in, and have quicker ramp-up times, partly because they may get help from the friend who referred them. Also, she says, they tend to stay longer. Part of the reason for all that, she says, is that the candidate wants to make it work because their friend gave them the lead. And, they’re probably going to be good or wouldn’t have been recommended. “I don’t just refer anybody,” she says. keep reading…

Monster took another step last week in its drive to become more social adding a “friends” connection to the thousands of listings on its jobs board.

Almost a year after launching BeKnown, its Facebook-based business network and competitor to BranchOut, Monster is now enabling its network members to see who they know at companies offering jobs on Monster.com.

It works just as you expect: Job seekers searching Monster are invited to “See who you know.” A click pops up a list of their BeKnown connections who work at the company. Those not already on BeKnown get an invitation to join, needing only a Facebook login. keep reading…

I strive to be the world’s most prominent advocate of employee referrals simply because there is no more powerful tool in recruiting. Well-designed referral programs not only identify top prospects that are not in a job-search mode but they also require employees to assess candidates for skills and fit and to sell them on the company and the job. Taken together, this identification, assessment and selling feature make referrals superior to any other source.

If your corporation is not getting close to 50% of your hires from employee referrals, I have gathered 10 compelling numbers that should change your perspective. keep reading…

Most organizations need to work on how they develop and articulate their employer brand strategies. Just over half of employers claim to have an employer brand strategy (51%), a fifth (19%) are in the process of revising one, and 24% are working towards one. That’s what Bernard Hodes Group learned from our new research, called The Growing Value of Employer Brands.

Of those employers that claim to have a strategy, the average age of it is 4.3 years. The results suggest that many employers are using strategies pre-dating the Great Recession. Relying on an old strategy is a recipe for disaster given the changes in workers’ attitudes wrought by turbulent labor markets and the rise of new channels such as social media.

The survey polled 175 employers across the U.S. in a spectrum of industries from education to manufacturing. About 240 employees were surveyed and were not necessarily employed by any of the participating employers. When comparing the two sets of data, there are some stark disconnects (see the graphic in the upper right). Some of the most noteworthy include:

• Only 25% of employers indicated that compensation is one of the most important attributes of an employer brand, compared with 64% of employees.
• Job security was ranked highly by 41% of employees, but only 21% of employers.
• Just 15% of employers felt that recognition is important in attracting new hires, while 33% of employees ranked it highly.
• Nearly half of employers (44%) felt career growth and advancement opportunities are important to attracting talent, while just over a quarter of talent (27%) agreed.

Looking at the data, one gets the impression that many employers may have lost common sense. keep reading…

We started measuring quality of hire a couple of years ago. What started out as a simple exercise to see how we were doing turned into an interesting experiment. We realized in order to save the company money and increase productivity, we needed to measure quality of hire and sources of hire together. The results were interesting, and in one case the result was actually surprising.

There are a few hire-quality formulas out there, and you can make it as simple or as complicated as you deem necessary. In our case, we took the simple route.

Quality of hire is defined as the percent of new hires who pass their one-year anniversary and score at least “meets expectations” on their first review. For example, we grouped together all the new hires from the first quarter of 2010. We then ran a report dating to the last day of the quarter a year later, 2011. We determined what percent of those hires were still employed and were not on performance improvement plans, etc. We did this on a quarterly basis.

This is simple but effective. It doesn’t matter whether the employee was a poor performer, an excellent worker who was disillusioned, or a job-hopper.  Ultimately, the business is negatively impacted if it loses talent in the first year, or is dealing with a poor employee.

The results of our experiment have been illuminating. keep reading…

SelectMinds, TheLadders, an RPO, and more are making announcements at the ERE Expo in San Diego today. Just a sampling:

First SelectMinds, which “moved deeper into the employee referral world” a couple of years ago and then into the “talent communities” competition, today is launching what it calls the “first-of-its-kind software to allow corporate HR to automate all aspects of social recruiting.”

It’s an upgrade to the company’s TalentVine product with six new modules: a jobs distributor to send out listings and links to company Facebook pages and Twitter accounts; a talent community module; a referral program module; a Facebook jobs page builder; a social-media-friendly career-site builder; and a module that optimizes job listings for mobile phones. keep reading…

HR technology provider SilkRoad says jobs search site Indeed.com is the leading source of external hires for its 700+ customers, providing 42 percent more new employees than CareerBuilder, the #2 source.

Overall, the SilkRoad results show job boards accounting for a high percentage of hires that aren’t either internal candidates, referred by employees, or come through the company career site.

SilkRoad pulled the source of hire data directly from its clients’ OpenHire systems. Doing it that way, says SilkRoad, yielded data from “200,000 job postings, 9.4 million applicants, and over 100,000 hires.”

In reporting the results on the company blog, SilkRoad said that because its OpenHire system automates candidate source tracking, “The metrics in this study offer a uniquely accurate measure of source effectiveness.” keep reading…

Walk into any workplace and what’s in the air? Besides the burnt popcorn. We mean that other thing. That sweet scent of romance.

Yes dear reader, just in time for Valentine’s Day CareerBuilder tells us what you’ve been suspecting all along: your office mates are mating up. If the survey is to be believed — and why not?; they surveyed 7,780 people who all can’t be pranking us — then almost 4 in 10 workers have dated someone they met on the job.

Awkward, if one of them thinks it’s going places and the other one … you get the idea. Fortunately, 31 percent of those relationships lead to marriage. (Which is no guarantee things won’t get even more awkward a little down the road. But this is the season for love, so ignore our dose of ugly reality. Or read on to the part where we tell you how Challenger, Gray, & Christmas snuck in a warning about office violence.)

HR people out there, this stat’s for you: CareerBuilder says 18 percent of office dating is between boss and their report. Women were more likely to date up than men, 35 percent to 23 percent respectively.

Of the industries reported, you just had to know that hospitality by far (47 percent) has the most co-dating co-workers. Healthcare also made the top five list, which, considering how many parents hoped their offspring would marry a doctor, is no surprise. But financial services (40 percent)? And transportation and utilities (43 percent)? And IT (40 percent)? These also made the top five? Really?

Now moving on to that warning about workers pulling a Valentine’s Day Massacre  from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (hereinafter CG&C). “Some companies are facing an entirely different problem: their workers have lost that loving feeling and the consequences can be dire,” reads the press release we got from the global outplacement firm.

“Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.  This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” says CGC CEO John Challenger.

The press release offers a whole bunch of ideas to increase civility and reduce animosity. Missing from the list, and very conspicuously considering Valentine’s Day started this whole thing, is the free supply of large amounts of chocolate.

A Vowel Please

From the “Can I buy a vowel?” department comes Goood Job, the latest in a long line of companies entering the employee-referral-social media business we’ve talked a lot about (and includes socialcruiter, socialreferral, and many others). In short, here’s how Goood Job works:  keep reading…

Employee referral programs may produce more hires — perhaps many more — than surveys would suggest.

Over the years it has come to be accepted that the average number of new hires coming from employee referral programs is somewhere between SHRM’s 24 percent (for non-exempt positions) to about a third. Some programs do much better.

From CareerXroads now comes evidence that the hires from employee referrals are undercounted.

“Referrals permeate the recruiting process more than we think,” says recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a CareerXroads principal.

He and his partner, Mark Mehler, surveyed their clients and others about employee referral programs and found that most of the 50 respondents have a referral program, most pay a bonus of some kind, and on average 28 percent of their external hires are referrals.

Most of the results, says Crispin, were expected. However, in comparing data from that admittedly limited, and unscientific survey with the early results of the consultancy’s annual Source of Hire study, “we’re finding referrals are a part of every source or almost every.”

For instance, rehires, a small, but steady source of hires, include a sizable percentage of individuals referred by employees. The rehires may first come to the attention of recruiters through a referral, but when they’re onboarded, the source of hire tends to get reported as a rehire. keep reading…

We have traditionally operated a global employee referral system that captures employee’s quality referrals. Should they become hired, it automatically puts their name into the queue for a guaranteed cash reward. Similar to many corporations, different rewards giveaways have been offered over time as incentives: cars, boats, and home renovations.

In 2011 at Quintiles, however, an adventurous theme was implemented (one I hinted at a year ago).

keep reading…

Recruiting never seems to change very much. As I have often written, even with computers, smart phones, cheap video, big bandwidth, and years of accumulated experience, the way we look for people and select them looks very much the same as it looked 50 years ago.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section. keep reading…