ERE.net

“Better late than never.”

Even though ERE Expo ‘09 (Spring) ended more than a month ago, I thought of writing this piece connected to that event. Thanks to an invitation from Todd Raphael of ERE, I flew down to San Diego from India and enjoyed making a presentation on “10 Secrets-to-Success of Employee Referrals in India.” It was one of the breakout sessions and obviously many had other choices to attend. To those who I missed interacting with, I am now making an attempt to share my thoughts again through this medium.

Before I got into the main theme of my presentation I shared some thoughts about India. I assumed that most in the audience would not have experienced India and hence a small introduction helped them to appreciate the context. My PowerPoint presentation is embedded below, along with this write-up. It will be good to go through that with the following synopsis in mind: keep reading…

It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management. Despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and hiring freezes, recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of “standard recruiting.”

After evaluating hundreds of applications, here is part two of the list of best practices in recruiting that I recommend you emulate.

(This article was updated May 4, 2009; it originally said that GE Healthcare “abandoned its outsourcing model,” but this was incorrect. It did not.)

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It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management, despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and widespread hiring freezes.

Unlike the economic turmoil following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst, many recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of what can be defined as “standard recruiting.”

If you work in an organization that has given up on innovation and instead has adopted a survival strategy, it’s important to realize that many of your competitors are not standing still. If your organization chooses to wait for an economic recovery to begin modernizing their recruiting practices, you may find it nearly impossible to catch up.

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practice. In my experience, there’s no better place to learn about practical tools and applications in recruiting and talent management than ERE.net.

Fortunately, ERE Media holds a yearly global competition aimed at identifying the very best “next practices” in recruiting. Each year, ERE receives hundreds of applications in eight recruiting program categories from well-known organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Ernst & Young, Intuit, Accenture, GE, Yahoo!, and from less well-known but equally innovative organizations like DaVita, the American Cancer Society, and Tata.

Fortunately, as a judge for the Recruiting Excellence Awards, I’m given the opportunity to highlight some of these amazing practices that your organization should consider adopting.

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Last night in San Diego, the winners of the 2009 Recruiting Excellence Awards were announced. After an intense judging process that lasted over a month, the finalists gathered in San Diego for the annual ceremony and dinner that kicks off the spring ERE Expo.

Congrats to this year’s winners:

• Best College Recruiting Program - Ernst & Young
• Best Corporate Careers Website - Yahoo
• Best Diversity Program - Microsoft
• Best Employee Referral Program - Accenture
• Best Employer Brand - Ernst & Young
• Best Retention Program/Practices - American Cancer Society
• Best Strategic Use of Technology - Microsoft
• Recruiting Department/Function of the Year - DaVita

Of course, none of this could have been accomplished without the incredibly hard work of our esteemed judging panel who graciously volunteered hours of their time to go through the entries.

If you want to learn more about what they did, tune in this afternoon to the live stream from ERE Expo at 11:15 a.m. PDT to watch the special panel session where many of the winners and finalists (including Valerie Kennerson, pictured, from the American Cancer Society) plan on sharing information about their winning strategies and tactics.

Of all of the issues that are discussed in the ERE communities, at ERE Expos, and at other HR and Recruiting conferences, the one that I find most important is rarely discussed: leading and managing change. This skill is probably one of the most important a Recruiting and Staffing or HR Manager should have in their toolkit.

In our communities, we’re constantly coming up with and discussing great ideas about initiating change, but all of that is worthless unless we can execute and implement those ideas. In this new year, change is a real buzzword — but rightly so! Because we have to change and flex every minute of the day, planning for difficult times and good times alike require excellent change management skills. And as someone who has learned some hard lessons over the course of my 25-year career in not knowing how to manage change, I speak from experience.

For instance, several years back, when I was head of staffing for a large, multibillion dollar company, the whole company participated in a global reengineering initiative. In HR, we decided to take advantage of this effort to implement some changes of our own. We decided to combine all of the staffing functions in the separate business units into a centralized, shared-services model. As the leader of the staffing area, I figured that since the whole company was going through change, there was no need to have any additional communication with our clients about our staffing reorganization — after all, it could be considered as simply another element of what we were all going through. Thus it wasn’t until the head of HR of a business unit and my boss were sitting in my office, complaining about my team’s dwindling performance in the wake of this change, that I realized just how important it is to communicate extensively about, and have a comprehensive plan for, implementing change.

It’s not that I didn’t communicate at all about what was happening; it’s that I didn’t “get it” in terms of what was necessary with respect to engaging others and making them “partners” with me in this change. I was subjecting my plan to what we like to call “Death By PowerPoint” — I was going around with my little PowerPoint presentation tucked under my arm, informing everyone as to what was going to happen versus truly engaging and communicating with them.

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1.10.09. You couldn’t walk the floor of the Expo without seeing someone wearing the rectangular Monster button showing that date. They were part of the buzz the company is creating in advance of the launch of what it’s telling people is a new improved user experience.

Taking to heart the message CEO Sal Iannuzzi has been touting that users are as important as recruiters, the company is set to roll out a new look and new features on January 10th. Monster was previewing some of what’s coming at its well-trafficked booth, and what we saw suggested the kind of career and succession planning tools found in higher-end talent management systems.

“It’s a seeker-centric appoach,” Monster’s VP of Client Adoption, Eric Winegardner, told us during a tour of the features.  There were no live demos because Monster’s development teams are still making tweaks.

But the slides showed tools that should appeal to passive candidates, as well as the traditional active seeker.

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Thursday’s highlights will include ESPN’s Steve Lavin (himself mentioned as a job candidate these days) and his tales of roundball recruiting at UCLA. Lavin’s 9 a.m. Eastern presentation is scheduled to be broadcast live on the home page of www.ere.net.

Dr. John Sullivan is scheduled for broadcast at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, talking about recruiting during the downturn. Krista Bradford will discuss passive candidates at 3:15 p.m. Eastern. Also look for a panel called “How well do you know  your company?” at 1:30 p.m. Eastern.

Also on the agenda from the “posh” Westin but not broadcast: Coke’s talent-acquisition director; AIRS; a session on building pipelines of candidates, by the Recruiting Roundtable; Tony Blake, who has written a killer article for the Journal; Mr. Ted’s demo of its new ATS; and the vendor smackdown — where “job-matching” sites will strut their stuff.

As for yesterday (which, was in a sense, a cloudy day): Jobfox’s Rob McGovern released a white paper PDF warning that hiring won’t stop even in this slower economy); Kevin Wheeler said it will be “economic suicide” for companies to insist on keeping jobs in the U.S. that could be outsourced; attendees talked about the challenge of attracting out-of-towners who can’t sell their homes; Penelope Trunk and Jason Warner talked blogs; and speakers touted new tools like the Insider Referral Network and Ping.fm. On Wednesday, the focus was less about the slowdown, and more about passionate recruiters leading the way in their companies.

After two years in the vertical search business, JuJu was looking to make an impression. So the job search engine is sponsoring the coffee breaks at the ERE Expo. Now coffee is always welcome at conferences, but what really is getting the attention of recruiters are the hundreds of brushed aluminum travel mugs JuJu is giving away at the breaks.

“We want to let everyone know about us,” explains JuJu’s Euan Hayward. Around since 2006 (with the JuJu brand) and with respectable visitor numbers, Hayward says it was time for the company to reach out to recruiters. “This is our first booth experience.”

A job search engine with roots in the late 90’s, JuJu is nearly identical in concept to the better known Indeed and SimplyHired, both of whom are also at the Expo here in Hollywood Beach, Florida. Like them, it “scrapes” job postings from commercial and corporate job boards making a jobseeker’s search a one-stop effort.

Does the world need another vertical — or meta — job search site? Hayward thinks so. “There are some additional opportunities,” he says. “Innovation is not dead in this market.”

There was other evidence of innovation on the show floor.

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Did you catch former CNN anchor and business reporter Jan Hopkins this morning giving her keynote live from the ERE Expo, here in Hollywood Beach, Florida?

She talked about the world economic conditions and her own challenge selling a home after four years on the market for less than the mortgage balance. She illustrated the negatives and positives (yes, there were and are some) of the creative financing that is fueling the financial collapse, but which also enabled a young couple to buy her parents’ home with 104 percent financing.

“Imagine,” Hopkins told the audience of about 400 as she referred to President Bush’s call for a world financial summit, “we’re talking about rebuilding the financial structure of the world.”

For recruiters, Hopkins said, the economic conditions mean:

• Morale needs to be boosted, especially among workers whose options and 401(k) plans have taken a big hit;
• Compensation plans need to be rethought;
• Plan for the possibility of more mergers and acquisitions;
• Difficulty in recruiting workers who have stable jobs;
• Growing interest in unions, fueled in part by the security of pension plans.

Now is the time for HR to be more proactive, Hopkins says, to “take a seat at the table, closer to the power.”

Turning to the audience, Hopkins began an interactive exchange, asking about the challenges recruiters were facing.

One recruiter said he finds it hard to attract experienced manufacturing workers because they can’t sell their homes to move. Turning to the “Wisdom of the Crowd,” a theme conference chair Jason Warner of Google sounded earlier, Hopkins coaxed solutions from the group, including one where a company seeking to relocate workers from a community looks for companies bringing workers into the community to work out a house swap.

Warner, in his introductory comments, encouraged recruiters to look for solutions by tapping into the collective wisdom of the group. Putting the economy in perspective, Warner of Google took the stage this morning flashing images of Time magazine covers from years past. Those dealing with economic conditions hailed from recessions past with headlines remarkably like those of the past several weeks.

Michael Marlatt (rhymes with day, say, and Wednesday) will be one of the highlights of a day’s agenda that’s packed to the hilt. Penelope Trunk is appearing at 4 p.m.; an all-star panel on hiring military veterans is at 2:15; a host of startup companies will be on the hotseat also at 2:15, and tons more. There’ll be podcasters and bloggers and Twitterers.

And ERE’s Expo is being broadcast this year on www.ere.net. Today we’ll plan on streaming on www.ere.net the following (among other videos):

• Jason Warner, from Google

• Jan Hopkins, former CNN anchor

• Kevin Wheeler (tour of the recruiting world)

• Gerry and Mark’s panel on cutting-edge technology

• Michael Marlatt on the future of recruiting

• Mike Beckman from Freddie Mac

and others.

Gerry Crispin of CareerXRoads claims that about 55% of corporate careers websites cannot answer the question, “Why come here?”

That means most candidates are lost as soon as they stumble on one of these sites, Crispin told a pre-conference workshop at ERE Expo on Tuesday.

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ERE Expo Fall opened this morning in Hollywood Beach, Florida, starting with a series of practice workshops covering everything from how to source passive candidates to how to interview for results, improve Latino recruitment and plan strategically.

Dozens of recruiters are attending these special workshops and pre-conference events. In all, some 800 registrants are expected over the Expo’s three days. It formally kicks off Wednesday morning when conference chair Jason Warner of Google offers his welcoming remarks.

Today’s pre-conference sessions are focused on recruiter skills. Judging from the attendance and some of the comments, the world economic condition has not had much of an impact on the recruiters.

Hands down the biggest attendance was at the sourcing workshop run by Shally Steckerl and Glenn Gutmacher. There, some 50 recruiters from the U.S., the Netherlands, and elsewhere, learned the secrets of Internet sourcing and such remarkable bits of information as only .18 percent of the Internet is accessed via search engines. (The rest is in password protected databases or otherwise similarly hidden.)

Here’s a tip from the session: Want to find resumes that keywords don’t turn up? Use the command intitle:. Too easy for you? Then the afternoon’s Master Level Sourcing workshop is for you.

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This Wednesday will mark the 15th time that I’ve kicked off an ERE Expo in the U.S., but running conferences is a people business, and it’s different every time. The people, personalities, and subject matter changes from show to show — I always come away with something brand new.

The ERE team works hard to introduce new aspects to ERE Expo every time we run one. Last show, we experimented with Twitter, running a live feed on screens in the front of the room so attendees could share their comments with the entire audience. (You can still follow the official ERE Expo twitter feed here).

On Wednesday morning, and throughout the ERE Expo, visitors to ERE.net will be able to share in our latest ERE Expo experiment. We’ll be broadcasting large portions of the conference for free, live on the home page of the site! You’ll see a live video feed from many of the sessions, and also be able to share your thoughts about the presentations with other recruiters via chat.

Nothing is the same as being at the event, but this is our way of saying thanks to you for being visitors to the site. Enjoy, and let me know what you think once we start broadcasting — I will be hanging out in the chat as often as I can during the show!