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The U.S. economy continued to chug along in December, much as economists were expecting, adding 155,000 jobs, while holding unemployment at 7.8 percent.

Labor economists, on average, forecasted a gain between 150,000 and 160,000, and no change in unemployment. The rate reported this morning by the U.S. Department of Labor was higher than the November rate initially reported; however, it and a few other months were changed slightly as part of the annual data revision.

The December numbers were substantially below the estimate offered yesterday by ADP and its data partner, Moody’s Analytics. Automatic Data Processing said 215,000 private sector jobs were created during the month. The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which prepares the monthly government report, counted 168,000 new private sector positions.

The BLS also revised up November’s jobs increase from 146,000 to 161,000, while October’s jobs count dropped by 1,000 to 137,000.  For the year, job growth averaged 153,000 new non-farm jobs  a month, the same as in 2011. keep reading…

In a report buoying hopes for a strong jobs showing in the official government report out tomorrow, ADP this morning said 215,000 new jobs were created in December.

It’s the largest increase in jobs reported by ADP, and its data partner, Moody’s Analytics, since February when the company said 227,000 private sector jobs were created. The report also adjusted up its November job growth from an initial 118,000 to 148,000. keep reading…

The employment outlook here at the start of 2013 is a lot like it was just last week at the end of 2012: cautious, slow, but with a few areas — high tech, for instance — where competition for talent will be even keener.

On the employee side, there’s a little less optimism now, with more workers than at any point during 2012  saying they don’t expect things to change much where they work in the next six months. As recently as the third quarter of last year, Glassdoor’s quarterly survey of workers found 48 percent of them expecting their company’s business performance to improve in the months ahead. Now, the fourth-quarter survey released this morning, says only 40 percent feel that way.

The findings of Glassdoor’s Employment Confidence Survey mirrors the monthly Consumer Confidence survey conducted by The Conference Board. The business organization’s much-watched Index declined by 6.4 points between November and December. While worries over the impact of the fiscal cliff accounted for a big part of the decline, The Conference Board said fewer consumers expect business conditions to improve in the next six months. In November 21.3 percent thought things would get better. In December only 17.6 percent said that, while those expecting business conditions to worsen increased to 21.5 percent from 15.8 percent. keep reading…

After closing 2007, at Veterans United Home Loans, the leading dedicated provider of VA Loans, we employed a 109-person workforce, all within our centralized Columbia, Missouri location. We will will advance into 2013 with more than 1,200 employees and a 22-office nationwide presence.

As the human resources director for one of the country’s fastest-growing private companies, I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing the highs and lows, the meltdowns and meaningful moments, and seen the best and worst in people, along with the downright bizarre.

While the previous list would make a great piece in itself, that’s not what I am most passionate about. What drives me is the opportunity I’ve been given, which has been hiring more than 1,000 extraordinary employees in the past five years, leading to recognition from Inc. Magazine as the nation’s No. 29 job creator — No. 1 in the financial and banking industry — and being listed on Fortune Magazine’s Great Place to Work list as the No. 21 best medium workplace.

Results like this are not the production of a boilerplate hiring method or template that fits every company, but the collective achievement of a unit that believes in working as a team to produce a superior end result for the user.

To understand what it takes to assemble a successful entity like Veterans United, read on before you hire your next applicant. keep reading…

The hiring process is tough on everyone, especially the job seeker. It’s even a little bit harder on them actually, since while talent acquisition and management pros are used to dealing with the complicated ins and outs of applicant tracking systems, assessment programs, video and mobile technology and much, much, more — job seekers only have to deal with the front end of those systems when they’re looking, which is not “quite” every day.

And when they do go through your hiring process, they hate it. Here are the top reasons why: keep reading…

While hiring by all employers is likely to be lackluster in the first part of next year, the intense competition for tech workers that has marked the last two years will continue in 2013.

Dice Holdings, parent company of the IT specialty job site Dice.com, and others in the financial service and energy sectors, says its most recent survey of tech recruiters and hiring managers found that 64 percent of them will add new tech workers next year. Compare that to a second survey of hiring professionals in all sectors, which found only 46 percent expecting to add new hires.

The results of the tech-only survey does show some softening of the market. In the spring, when Dice asked this same question, 73 percent of the respondents expected to make tech hires in the last half of 2012. That tracks with the general job survey in the spring when 51 percent of hiring managers planned second-half hiring. keep reading…

All of us have heard about messy terminations, and some of us have witnessed them firsthand. The most memorable are the employee who is escorted from the building, scowling at managers on the way out, or the guy who punches a hole in the conference room drywall in a fit of frustration. There’s also the person who quits without confrontation or communication, packing up their things when nobody’s watching, and leaving an “I Quit!” note for their supervisor.

The circumstances around other terminations are just plain awkward, and when you see the ex-employee in the grocery store, you unknowingly head to the Tampax aisle (even though you’re a single guy) just to avoid the conversation.

How can you avoid ugly terminations? Here are four suggestions for building the right culture: keep reading…

Anyone who has been recruiting for the last five-plus years has likely experienced the holiday candidate snatch-up. Most veteran recruiters understand that recruiting, unlike other professions, doesn’t take a break over the holidays as candidates and hiring managers are both unique and unpredictable.

Some hiring managers have an abundance of down time during this period, making it the perfect opportunity to interview and maybe even hire while a competitor is on vacation.

Though everyone needs some time off and has family obligations throughout the holiday, if prepared ahead of time, every recruiter has the opportunity to block an opponent snatcher, if not to be a snatcher themselves. Losing a candidate to another recruiter over the holidays can be avoided if certain precautions are set in place. keep reading…

The war for technical talent is so intense that a handful of firms like Google, Facebook, Cisco, Apple, Twitter, and Zynga have shifted to a powerful but rare recruiting sub-strategy known as acqui-hiring. It involves established firms acquiring startup firms not for their products (only Facebook admits it) but instead primarily to capture an entire team of talented engineers and designers at once.

Marissa Mayer

If in the past after reading about an announcement of an acquisition you’ve wondered to yourself why a technical giant was bothering to buy a startup with no profit, a seemingly unrelated product, and a product that was in a completely different field, now you know why. The strategy has recently received some added publicity because Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer recently announced that she was going to adopt the strategy used by her former employer Google, a king of acqui-hires. Mark Zuckerberg has boasted that “Facebook has not once bought a company for the company itself. We buy companies to get excellent people” (“Engineers are worth half a million to one million” — V Smith).

Acqui-hiring (acquisition hiring) is in direct contrast to most traditional corporate hiring, which simply doesn’t work when you are recruiting innovators who prefer startups over what they consider to be onerous “corporate jobs.”

The Benefits of an Acqui-hire Strategy keep reading…

If you’re a startup recruiter, before you set out to compete for world-class talent, ask your client, “why will the 20th talented person to join your startup join your startup?” keep reading…

I have spoken numerous times about both the benefits and the potential detriments of using cultural fit in the hiring process. On one side many hiring managers measure candidates by cultural fit believing that candidates will stay longer if they gel well with their organization’s work environment. Others argue that cultural fit provides hiring managers an excuse to discriminate and dissuades diversity in the workplace which studies show leads to a greater flow of ideas and creativity.

A recent survey published in Forbes indicates that in an effort to increase workforce attrition, 88% of employers are looking for cultural fit over skills in their next hire.

They believe cultural fit is so important because most executives understand that a bad hire can cost between two and three times that departing employee’s salary and so hiring an employee who works and plays well with others is more important than if they are the most skilled to do the job. The theory is that if the employee likes their manager and colleagues, they will be happier and stay longer. If you’re from a big family like I am, at least on my in-laws’ side, you easily recognize the significance of cultural fit, especially when it comes to deciding who to sit next to at the dinner table.

You visit your family or your in-laws on Thanksgiving Day and the moment you walk into that crowded living room your body deflates as you realize who made it to dinner and with whom you might need to talk.  keep reading…

As the nation prepares to celebrate Veteran’s Day Sunday, there is encouraging news about the progress American business has made in hiring veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The unemployment rate among veterans of what the government calls Gulf War II is the highest of all veterans.

Collectively, veterans have an unemployment rate of 6.3 percent, well below the national rate of 7.9 percent. However, post-9/11 veterans have an unemployment rate of 10 percent.

A year ago in October (the most recent month for the data), the unemployment rate for those veterans was 12.1 percent. That month the national rate was 8.9 percent. The gap between the national unemployment rate and that for veterans is still wide, but it has closed considerably in 12 months, narrowing from 3.2 points to the current 2.1.

What’s helped is the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, and in particular the Vow to Hire Heroes Act, which gives employers a tax credit of up to $9,600 for hiring unemployed and/or disabled veterans. That program, like so many other tax programs and rate reductions, will end on December 31 unless Congress acts to extend it. keep reading…

One of my frustrations with the recently completed political campaigns was the implication that if we elected Candidate A, our business problems would be solved. You and I know that’s not true; an organization determines its own fate. We have the ability to navigate towards success — especially if you’re a recruiter or hiring manager.

Here’s a mistake holding back many businesses: recruiters and hiring managers overemphasize industry experience and immediately dismiss candidates who do not have specific job-related experience. That might be fine if you’re hiring a doctor or a mechanic. But for most jobs in the business or non-profit sectors, it’s not the right tactic.

Companies miss out on candidates who, if taught the necessary skills, could be excellent employees. It’s unwise to base your conclusions solely on a candidate’s résumé or LinkedIn profile. Always be on the lookout for people who have the personality and character that can advance your organization.

I’m known in some HR circles as the author of a hiring book, but my full-time job is president of a publishing company. A little over two years ago our operations manager resigned, and the first person I called and asked to consider the position was someone who had zero publishing experience. I knew he possessed excellent critical thinking and people management skills based on this real-life experience he and I shared.

I had crossed paths with Kyle off-and-on over the years in recreational basketball leagues. When a neighbor of mine told my wife about shoddy treatment she received from a local fitness center (where Kyle worked as a manager), I gave him a call. keep reading…

Deming, around 1980, in Japan

I was training a group of hiring managers in New York City a few weeks ago on the fine points of Performance-based Hiring. The conversation quickly focused to quality of hire: how to both measure and maximize it. One of the sales directors in the room was quite frustrated with his recruiting team, and suggested the way he controlled quality of hire was by rejecting 9 of 10 candidates their recruiters presented. The rest of the hiring managers then chimed by saying how disappointed they were with the quality of the candidates sent by their recruiters.

They attributed the primary cause to their recruiters’ lack of understanding of real job requirements. I suggested the problem was more likely a quality-control issue: using inspection at the end of the process to control quality of hire, rather than defining and controlling it at the beginning. keep reading…

Good news for all the “Larry the Cable Guy” types: You’ll never get a Ph.D., but you will get the job.

Start by applying to be a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The dean there, Roger Martin, says in a blog post on the Harvard Business Review site that he’s more or less inclined not to hire the smartest person he can find.

Resurrecting a 21-year-old article “Teaching Smart People How To Learn,” Martin says it “convinced me of the exact opposite of what I had believed before I’d read it.” And that was that the smarter the people he hired, the better.

If Tom had a smartness rating of 10 and Sally was a 12, then she was just plain better. And if Jorge was a 15, he was better still.

Nowadays, he’d be hiring Tom. keep reading…

We have finally found the reason why the American economy has been able to do so much with so few employees. Before we explain the roots of this high productivity we need to explain that a new survey shows that “nearly 50% of men are hiring the women they date in this economy.”

Who were the respondents to this survey? None other than 40,000 members of SeekingArrangement.com, which bills itself as “the world’s largest dating website where women seek (the) ‘well-to-do.’” Yes, this totally perfectly clearly scientific report shows that “46% of ‘Sugar Daddies’ have employed, gone into business, or helped start a small business with their ‘Sugar Babies.’” keep reading…

I was talking to an old client of mine the other day. He was the CEO of a fast-growing manufacturing company in the 1990s, and now he’s on the board of seven mid-sized companies in southern California. My firm placed about 10 people on his management team in the company’s heyday. While I don’t do much real executive search anymore, he asked me if I had the script we used then to convert traditional skills-based job descriptions into performance profiles — aka performance-based job descriptions.

Many of his companies now need to replace some of their senior executives and he wanted to make sure their CEOs totally understood where the incumbents were falling short, and why they need to hire a new person. He believed this type of weak vs. strong performance comparison would get the hiring executives to move more quickly.

Following is roughly how the discussion went for a CFO position. You can use the same approach to better understand how work should be defined for any type of job, and if the current office holder is performing adequately.  keep reading…

You are ready to hire, but before you start slinging out job postings consider these seven questions.

How fast do you want the candidate? Many hiring managers say they need the candidate right away but drag their feet responding to qualified candidates to set up interviews. Lengthy delays in the recruiting process may convey to the candidate your organization is not interested in them and they may take another offer. If you are planning on being on vacation, out of town, or just unavailable, then this should be clear to your recruiters from the start so they can best establish the time frame expectations with your candidates. keep reading…

If you like someone when you first meet, you maximize their positives and minimize their negatives. If you don’t like someone, you maximize their weaknesses, and minimize their positives.

Now consider how many great candidates didn’t get the jobs they deserve because someone on the hiring team made a superficial judgment in the first minute, and then spent the rest of the interview seeking evidence to prove it.

In the last 30 years I’ve been involved in over 750 different separate hiring decisions. After the first 50 or so, I realized I had to personally intervene to prevent flawed hiring decisions based on emotions, perceptions, and biases. I did this for many reasons. The big two: I didn’t like doing searches over again and I didn’t like good people not getting the jobs they deserved for some dumb reason.

The solution to the problem started with everyone on the hiring team having a clear understanding of real job requirements. When an interviewer doesn’t know what it takes to be successful in the job, the person substitutes his or her own superficial, subjective, intuitive or biased criteria. For proof, consider managers that like to hire people who went to the “right” schools, have the “right” experience, are too brilliant for what’s required for success, and are just like them in how they look, talk, and act. For further proof, consider all of the people you’ve presented to your hiring managers, who possessed world-class talent, but didn’t pass through this filter.

Overcoming this defect in human nature starts by defining the job based on what the new hire needs to accomplish in order to be successful, rather than what the person must have in terms of skills, experience, looks, intelligence, background, and communication skills. For the past 20 years, I’ve been calling these achievement-oriented job descriptions performance profiles. A performance profile defines the actual work in terms of performance objectives, e.g., build a team of accountants, design a circuit, make quota in six months, etc. Most jobs have 5-6 tasks like this that represent the bulk of the job. The interviewer then needs to determine if the person can accomplish the tasks. If so, it’s then obvious the person has the appropriate amount of skills and experiences to successfully handle the work, regardless of how they seem in the first one to two minutes.

However preparing a performance profile is not enough to eliminate perceptions, biases, and emotions from affecting the decision. Here are some other things that can help increase objectivity:

Some Things You Can Do to Minimize Perception-driven Hiring Mistakes keep reading…

Calling it the “most optimistic fourth quarter projection since 2007,” CareerBuilder said this morning that 26 percent of employers expect to add full-time, permanent workers by the end of December.

The percentage rivals those for the same quarter pre-recession, and is a full 5 points higher than the 21 percent last year who predicted their company would be adding permanent staff. keep reading…