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One of the hottest topics in talent management today is employment branding, in part because applicants rank brand as the second most influential factor when deciding whether to accept an offer.

Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.

Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.

Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.

To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:

• Your branding program’s design elements.
• The information that you provide.
• The approaches used to establish each of your sub-employment brands.

Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.

Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.

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I don’t run into many recruiters/staffing/HR professionals who don’t agree with the statement: Recruiting is just like sales.

While we can argue over the differences between the two professions (please don’t lose sight of the trees through the forest on this one), we all know the parallels are overwhelming.

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In my sales management career, I would bet that I’ve seen about 5,000 resumes for salespeople. Yet, I still haven’t seen one that shows someone who has achieved 40% of quota. Every single resume shows 100%, 200%, or 2,000,000% of goal. Where are all of the people who have had less-than-stellar sales performances? Did they all leave the sales profession? If all of the resumes that I saw truly represented the performance of the individual, the U.S. economy would be thriving, to say the least. Every company would be enjoying record revenue performances.

If you have read my past articles, you’ve felt my passion for creating sales marriages, those relationships whereby a mutually-beneficial relationship is formulated between a sales professional and a company based on synergistic matches of needs. This is not easy to do as, right off the bat, the relationship begins with a flawed tool: a resume. It is this tool, not necessarily the individual, that dupes, tricks, and stretches the truth of a person’s pedigree. Yet, as an employer, that is what you have to work with when hiring a sales professional. You need to find a way to mine through the information in a quest for the complete truth.

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As recruiting professionals, quite often our clients solicit our advice when defining the roadmap of a particular business unit within their organizations. Some of us even go so far as to become third-party consultants on subject matter with which we have particular expertise.

Regardless of the industry vertical in which we specialize, our clients rely on our guidance to assist them in reaching/exceeding their revenue goals by leveraging the benefit of our experience. Telephone selling brings with it a unique set of challenges and opportunities that, if managed correctly, can produce new incremental revenue streams and deliver an impressive ROI.

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There are few decisions more critical for a company than the hiring of the leadership of their sales organization. Yet, few know how to do it well. Many err and “promote” their best seller to a sales management position.

Why this is called a promotion is beyond me. The job of the sales manager is vastly different than that of a sales person, so why is this considered employment elevation? Often sales managers earn less than the top sales people. Promotion?

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Many cars today tell the driver when it is time to perform maintenance. Even better, some tell the driver that maintenance is needed in 1,000 miles with updates along the way. It would be great if as a business executive or small business owner, you had this kind of technology at your fingertips.

Unfortunately, managing a sales organization will always be a manual effort. Sure, CRM systems and contact managers help, but there is no technology that replaces the leadership associated with sales management.

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It’s a common assumption. A good sales manager should first be a good salesperson, right? Wrong. It is a big jump from being a skilled “doer” to being a skilled “coach of doers.”

In many cases, the top sales person is an enigma. Salespeople are ego-driven and competitive and want to be recognized and rewarded. But like a cup with a hole in the bottom, no matter how much water you add Monday, it needs to be refilled by Tuesday. Top salespeople are often driven by ego-validation that comes from each sale and public recognition, and it never stops.

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The importance of a good market analysis in your area cannot be over emphasized, and whether you’re a large corporation or a small firm, understanding your market will help identify many different factors that can have an impact on your business or clients.

As a recruiter or consultant, the employment market analysis will give you an overall projection of industries within a specific state, region, or ZIP code. There are many different companies offering detailed employment or industry data along with many different factors. I like to use www.economicmodeling.com, which has detailed data on occupations and industry location quotient, to name a few.

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There is something truly magical about that precise moment when a product is bought or sold. I suppose it’s because our species has relied upon this most fundamental form of capitalism for so long.

As humans became more efficient in drawing sustenance and were no longer engaged 100% in the act of survival, we learned to plant a little more rice or catch a few more fish. This abundance was then taken to the “marketplace” where people traded it for something they didn’t have but nonetheless needed. I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I’d be willing to bet the act of buying and selling activates some ancient and primitive part of the human brain.

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By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Over the course of the last three weeks, we have laid out a model for managing the portfolio of job opportunities an organization produces similar to that used by organizations to manage their product/service portfolio.

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This is an article about how to find more top candidates. It might not seem like it until the end, though. To start, conduct a Google search using these terms: Internet marketing (basics OR 101) class You’ll find the this link in the top five listings: Online Class - Internet Marketing 101 - eLearning Certification. You might want to click on the link to see the whole course agenda. Just reading the agenda will make you a better recruiter. Here’s the agenda topic that stood out for me:

Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines ó Top Search Engines; How They Work; Page Rankings Explained; Keywords; AdWords; Optimization; Submitting your site; Pay-Per-Clicks; Link Popularity; and more.

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We’re now in the midst of my annual recruiting and hiring challenges 2005 survey. You might want to take it. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by participating in an important industry study. It will be especially important to you if you’re not hiring enough top candidates right now. The survey will show you what you need to do to break this bottleneck. The preliminary results so far are quite revealing. Two big findings stand out:

1. Few corporate recruiters are actually cold calling passive candidates. The survey shows that less than 30% of corporate recruiters do it, and few of them are any good at it. This is a big issue if you want to compete effectively with external search firms. It’s one way to hire more top people without paying agency fees.

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