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I was just reviewing the predictions I made for 2011 written at roughly this time a year ago. Much of what I thought would happen unfolded as expected, except for talent management. I had thought there would more focus on integrating the employee development and recruitment functions, and more internal hiring. I still think that’s on tap for this year. I was on target regarding hiring: There was no great uptick in the volume of hiring, and unemployment remained static. And I was on target with predicting that social media would be core to recruiting success and that RPOs would thrive.

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. 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…

Matt Jeffery said this was coming, as did Kevin Wheeler: Using games in recruiting. It has been tried by a consumer product company and an animal hospital on Facebook, among many other companies, like Siemens.

Now, a company called Upstream, in the mobile marketing business, has created an online game for its marketing campaign manager positions. Candidates are led through seven “missions” or questions — that is, after they put in their contact details, including a resume. (A requirement I wasn’t so fond of, as it deters those without one.)

One question — one of the seven missions — asks, “If you were to promote Skype to a general target audience who are not current users, which features would you highlight?”

Upstream has added about 45 people in 2011, and opened offices in Silicon Valley, Rio, and Dubai, and is still hiring. Part of what it plays up to potential customers is its use of games in mobile marketing.

John Sullivan asked: Are QR codes the next big thing in recruitment technology?

For adidas, an award winner last year, they’re already a big thing.

Craig Larson heads up U.S. recruiting. He started about a year ago, about the same time, he says, that adidas “identified a problem that needed a solution.”

The problem begins with the fact that adidas sends lots of people to trade shows in places like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York. These people aren’t recruiters, usually — and in fact recruiters sometimes are not welcome at the conventions. They are designers, marketers, buyers, and others there to “push product and get orders,” Larson says. “There’s a lot of deals down there and a lot of passive candidates.” Depending on the event, adidas can send a recruiter or two, but “a lot of times they don’t like us tagging along.”

On top of that, trade-show goers are often with their bosses, and not able to talk jobs. keep reading…

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention. keep reading…

Intel is working on a flurry of online recruiting activity, with the biggest being a new technology for its recruiters to manage college recruits, a new mobile application for all job candidates, as well as changes to its Facebook pages.

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. keep reading…

If you are a recruiting leader or recruiter who is constantly on the lookout for new recruiting trends, practices, and tools, you have surely already heard of QR codes.

QR codes are a second-generation barcode that allows potential candidates to quickly and directly access supporting materials and websites using only a camera equipped smartphone. QR codes have many uses, but are most often used to direct target audiences to online content that cannot be easily conveyed in print. keep reading…

If you haven’t invested in mobile recruiting yet, time is running out.

Only 7 percent of corporate career sites are optimized for mobile devices, according to a Potentialpark survey. However, 19 percent of job seekers reported using their mobile device for career activities; 50 percent “could imagine” themselves doing so.

The usage data comes from Potentialpark’s massive annual global survey of students, graduates, and early career professionals. It’s Online Talent Communication Study was completed in June and now, with the 2012 survey underway, the recruitment marketing and research firm says the number of mobile job seekers is already showing “a significant rise.” keep reading…

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

It’s 5:30 a.m., and Joe McHenry, a 36-year-old international tax manager who works in New York City, wakes up, checks his e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter activity from his smartphone all before getting out of bed. By 6:45 a.m. he’s dressed and walking to the train station for his 40-minute commute into the city. From the moment he grabs a seat to the moment he steps off the train, his eyes are glued to the four-inch screen of his personal onramp to his digital life and the information superhighway. Throughout the day, he’ll spend another 4.25 hours engaging with the world through it.

Now consider this: you’re trying to recruit Joe McHenry. He has blown off your e-mails, your voicemails, and even your InMails. This morning, however, his friend who used to work for your firm retweeted a link to the job you’re recruiting for, and it appeared on Joe’s Facebook wall. While on the train, Joe’s curiosity got the best of him and he clicked the link. The browser on his smartphone opened and started to load a page from your career site. He waited and waited, but the page just wasn’t loading. He figured, “I’ll try the parent domain instead.” He typed in yourcompany.com and up came your company’s WAP site, nicely formatted and clean. He looked for the link to jobs, but couldn’t find it. Frustrated, he abandoned his curiosity and went back to catching up with his friends on Facebook.

Sound like a poor experience? Only eight of the Fortune 100 have a career site that detects mobile browsers, and sadly, few of them optimize content for mobile visitors. Among those companies that have invested in building a mobile website, jobs content is more often than not missing. An infant-sized handful have done something for the mobile audience. They have built a careers app users can install on their phone or built out a mobile careers site. You can check out the progressive few: Raytheon, Starbucks, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Hyatt, and AT&T.

The New Normal

Joe McHenry’s lifestyle is the new normal. keep reading…

TMP Worldwide has launched a mobile phone application called TalentBrew Mobile, which its clients could use to make their job listings a lot more friendly to people job-searching on a smartphone.

Matt Lamphear, senior vice president of interactive products at the recruiting ad agency, said that TMP looked at what job boards and others — including TMP itself — were doing with job listings, and realized they weren’t quite there yet. Job listings were being optimized, but they weren’t really being — I’ll sort of coin a word here — mobilized. Says Lamphear: “There’s nothing mobile-friendly about six paragraphs of text.” keep reading…

There are three things to know about mobile recruiting, says Eric Offner, managing director of CareerBuilder Mobile. And each of the lessons applies to mobile marketing for consumers, too.

1. It’s about them. Using a mobile phone and a mobile phone application, Offner says, have to be a no-brainer or people will bail. “Make it easy. Let’s capture them and not let them go to waste,” he says, referring to potential employees using smart phones.
2. There are two Internets. There’s the web and the mobile web. Says Offner with a grin: “You either suck on one of them and are pretty good on the other, or you’re pretty good on both.”
3. Know your audience. “You have one today,” he says. “Start catering to them.” Hertz, he notes, gets the importance of mobile marketing when it comes to consumers, and should extend that effort to recruiting. “I love that site,” Offner says. “I can rent a car in a minute. I just can’t wait to rent cars because it’s so easy. They need to apply that same technology to recruitment. Anyone who rents a car could work for them.”

The PepsiCos of the world are leading the way in mobile recruiting, but most companies are still figuring out what it is job candidates want to do with a mobile phone, how they’ll use it, how much time they’ll spend on it, and what sort of experience they’ll want as compared to what they might want in a corporate career site.

With all that in mind, Charles Purdy, from Monster, speaking at a conference on mobile recruiting a few minutes ago in San Francisco, gave some advice for those corporations looking to put career information on smart phones: keep reading…

Master Burnett sent over the infographic at right (click on it, probably twice, to enlarge) that he put together with Dave Martin from Brave New Talent.

Burnett emailed to say: “The digital world is globally moving at a huge pace to mobile Internet. The explosion of the smartphone and tablet is taking over the pockets of the world and will over take desktop web in 2013. The recruitment industry took 15 years to migrate from printed media to Internet media. Recently the impact of social media has provided innovation in recruitment and a new level of community driven and web-driven hiring outside of the traditional job board. Disappointingly employers have failed to maximise the mobile web and mobile apps.

Given the intrinsic partnership between social media and mobile web, employers around the world must recognize the value being missed on mobile. The attached infographic illustrates the opportunity and the failure to adopt mobile recruiting solutions.” keep reading…

Citigroup has turned parts of its college recruiting site into an iPhone application for students, with added features only for the smart phone users — a project handled in house in 27 days.

The “Chief Technology Office” at Citi wanted to deliver the application before the mid-September recruiting season began. The team — mostly recent grads – worked with recruiters on the concept, prototype, and final product to get it done in less than a month.

Using the app, students at select schools see a list of nearby Citi recruiting events (there are 156 upcoming events at 72 locations); get a Twitter feed from Citi; get directions to events; view “day in the life” videos, and more. Right now, it covers North America, but will later include other events in other parts of the world. Citi’s also working on making the application available on other smart phones.

Citigroup is cutting costs and limiting hiring, but a spokeswoman says the firm has “added talent in businesses and regions that are targeted for growth.”

In a provocative piece on ERE the other day, Jody Ordioni argued that “Facebook will destroy LinkedIn.”

She offered five reasons for her thesis, with volume and the externalization of Facebook’s social graph as the main movers. Ordioni may be right.

Time will tell. In the meantime, there is an elephant in the room and its name is Google+. Launched late in June, it has already surpassed 25 million visitors, a rate of adoption far exceeding the growth curve of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or MySpace.

At last count, the service was growing at the unrivaled rate of about 1 million visitors a day, a number which does not include mobile users. Despite some conflicting reports, engagement with the site was increasing at double-digit rates. keep reading…

A number of the big-name innovators in talent acquisition — the Sodexos, the PepsiCos, and others — are all trying to find a smooth way to get candidates using smart phones excited about a job at their companies, to apply for jobs without having to navigate a corporate careers site on the phone, all the while staying compliant with government rules, and not wreaking too much havoc on the employer’s applicant tracking system.

Matt Jeffery, who wrote that article on ERE that went quite viral, says his employer, Autodesk, is among the leaders in the mobile race. More on Jeffery and what his company is unveiling in a minute; first a look at how we got to this point.

A page from the Autodesk iPad version

What the amorphous term “mobile recruiting” has meant to many people so far is encouraging candidates to send a text message companies about jobs, like UPS has done, or the tinkering around with a careers website to make it show up better on smart phones, like companies such as Hyatt have done. Randy Goldberg and the Hyatt team are looking into having candidates submit some quick information on themselves using a cell phone, so they wouldn’t have to type in a whole resume or application. But right now, Goldberg believes that having candidates actually apply for a job using their cell phone would be quite a hassle for a candidate.

Most everyone tends to agree — including many folks you may have heard of who have an interest in mobile recruiting, people like Geoff Peterson, Craig Fisher, Gordon Lokenberg, and Chris Russell.

Lokenberg has helped Deloitte-Netherlands with its mobile recruiting. “There are a lot of apps out there that are mostly shortcuts to an Internet career site of the company,” he says. “That makes it hard to navigate.”

“The technology’s not 100% there,” says Peterson. “You’d have to have your resume already loaded up online and have a link to share, or something else like that. In theory (applying straight from a mobile application) can be done for sure, but do I see a lot of being done now? No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve seen promise from a few different companies,” says Fisher. “But I’ve never seen a working product yet.”

Many of the applications out there are for certain groupings of people, like Lokenberg’s application created in 2009, which works only for companies that are a part of his database, and is called “Shake Your Job.” Or, Monster’s mobile application, for candidates to apply with the Monster accounts. LinkedIn says it does not yet have an “apply now with LinkedIn” mobile-phone application; Russell believes that in general, as LinkedIn makes its moves, it “should speed up the innovation around mobile applying.”

Anyhow, multiple recruiting departments I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on this, with help from various technology vendors. Among those many vendors is a small husband-wife Ohio consultancy working on an “apply now” mobile application, whose work is so private that it doesn’t want its name to be mentioned.

Pepsi, one of the innovators in the mobile arena, was aggressively working on an apply-with-a-cell-phone project, the company told me in the spring, though a spokeswoman tells me it’s not there yet. A little-known UK firm called AllTheTopBananas is its vendor of choice, a company that raves about the success of Pepsi’s mobile efforts to date. AllTheTopBananas has only about 13 employees, mostly developers. It started off in April 2007 as a job aggregator, sort of like a British version of Indeed or SimplyHired in the U.S.

AllTheTopBananas notes that “from the first 60 days from the apps going live, a soft launch only in the U.S., with the apps only being featured in only two places, on their careers website and in the app stores, PepsiCo had received over 3,500 downloads. Out of the 3,500 downloads, 85% of the candidates had job alerts set up on their device for targeted jobs they are interested in. When tracking the candidates who came from their apps, they have hired two new employees and have 10 in the recruitment process. Again, this was within the first 60 days of launch.”

Sodexo, not yet naming the vendor it’s working with, expects to launch its mobile application in about a month, allowing candidates to search and apply for jobs on their phones. keep reading…

No longer just the shiny new object in the toolbox, social media recruiting has become an integral part of sourcing and hiring.

A Jobvite survey out this morning says 89 percent of the respondents to its poll (most of them not Jobvite customers) said they are either already using some form of social media in their recruiting or will in the next year. They are also having success; 64 percent said they’ve actually hired people through a social network.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has followed the development of social media. From their roots as a teenage clubhouse, social media networks today have become so ubiquitous and so much a part of American life that half of all adults use at least one of the sites. Pew Research Center says that last year, 48 percent of those over 35 are on a social network.

Facebook is far and away the most popular network. Pew says 92 percent of everyone using a social network use Facebook. No wonder then that 47 percent of North American companies are spending money to reach Facebook’s 700+ million users via PPC. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of businesses — Facebook doesn’t release the actual number of the so-called Fan Pages — have set up sites. keep reading…

Do you use your personal phone to access the company ATS when you’re not in the office? Or maybe just to contact that hard-to-reach hot prospect? Of course you do.

How about texting prospects from your personal phone? Or tweeting out a note to your talent community? Or downloading a spreadsheet or document to your flash drive so you can work on it over the weekend?

All of this is so routine you may be wondering why I’m even bringing it up. Well, it may be more routine than you suspect; 95 percent of information workers use at least one personally purchased device for work, according to a study by IDC/Unisys. The average number of consumer devices used for business by workers in a day? Four.

The big deal about this is that most companies haven’t caught up to what’s going on in the workplace. A 2009 study by Robert Half Technology found more than half of companies block access to one or more sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Only 19 percent allowed access for business purposes.

Remarkably, a CareerXroads survey about the same time found 35 percent of recruiters and hiring manager were blocked from social media sites. keep reading…

I was recently sitting on a commuter train in the Chicago area enjoying what turned out to be a record blizzard for the area. Looking around I could see that a majority of people were just staring at their smartphones, most likely searching the web, checking Facebook, or tweeting about the blizzard. You see this same behavior when waiting in line for your coffee or when sitting in the waiting room at the dentist office. Google recently reported that mobile searches grew 130 percent compared to last year, and ERE frequently posts articles about mobile recruiting.

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: keep reading…

At every HR trade show, demo, product announcement, or webinar technology vendors of every stripe talk about their mobile interfaces. Even if it never occurred to you to manage a workforce by cell phone, you can.

And now would be a good time to start thinking that way. Just last week the Pew Research Center reported that 85 percent of Americans own a cell phone vs. 76 percent who have a computer. Among the 18-29 year group, 96 percent own a cell phone.

Pew didn’t report the percentage of smartphone usage in this latest report, but earlier this summer another Pew survey found that 40 percent of adults use their phone to access the Internet, IM, or email.

That report also found cell phone use for things other than voice communications were higher for Blacks and English-speaking Latinos. Cumulatively 87 percent of the two groups own a cell phone versus 80 percent for whites. Half (51 percent) of the Latinos surveyed use their phone to access the Internet, while 46 percent of Blacks do. The survey found only 33 percent of non-Hispanic whites do. keep reading…