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Talk about win-win. There’s a job networking event tonight in San Francisco where everyone comes away with at least a new pair of designer jeans.

!IT Jeans is giving away jeans that retail for around $65-$70 a pair to everyone who shows up with proof they’re unemployed and proof they tweeted or posted to Facebook about the event at Lime, a retro-60s restaurant and bar in San Francisco’s hip Castro district.

With the jeans carrying names like “Hottie,” “Industry,” “Dream Diva,” and “Studio,” don’t expect to see any resume-carrying, tie-wearing, business-suited, job-seeking mid-managers at this event. But it also doesn’t look to be just a group of 20- and 30-year-olds surprised to be out of work. Judging by the profiles on the MeetUp site that the Bay Area Job Seekers & Professionals Looking to Network group calls home, there’s a curious mix of talent coming to make contacts and learn how to get into consulting, which is the theme of the evnt.

According to the description, “This event will also focus around the theme of ‘Creating your Consulting Career,’ which simply put, means how to focus your job search efforts on consulting positions instead of permanent positions.”

One of the sponsors of the networking event, the MeetUp group is organized by Mark Thomas, CEO of the equally curious job site, WorkYourCareer. It’s a sort of job board that incorporates classic job postings with an interview auction. Participants apply for a job in the usual way, with one exception: neither application nor resume may carry contact information. If an employer shows interest, the job seeker is invited to bid for an interview. The top bid gets the pick of interview time, with other bidders winning slots until they’re filled.

And yes, the job seeker must pay; most credit cards are accepted.

Thomas, whom we couldn’t reach, also has MoneyBackJobs.com. Pointing back to WorkYourCareer, it seems to have faded with the recession. Its business concept, though, is similar to the many bounty programs that have been tried over the years. Job seekers who accept a job with an employer participating in the MoneyBackJobs program get paid between 4 and 10 percent after 30 days on the job. There are some hoops they have to go through, but the concept is fundamentally bounty.

Tonight’s event, however, is free and open to all job seeking members of the MeetUp group or co-sponsors Pinkslipmixers.com and Slipsquad.com, both of them national networking groups for the laid-off and unemployed. Recruiters from IKON, LOLApps, Jobspring Partners, and Magley & Associates are expected, says Slipsquad.

Most people coming out of schools “don’t really want to build bridges when they grow up,” says Andrew McCarty.

McCarty, sourcing manager at the infrastructure/construction company Parsons, is trying to address this recruiting challenge partly by spreading the good Parsons word through social media. McCarty, along with Yahoo’s Carmen Hudson and TMP’s Louis Vong, is speaking at a workshop put on in Los Angeles (where he’s apparently a rare non-car-owner) by SHRM’s staffing-management association. He was brought to Parsons partly to help infuse higher-tech tools into the company, where many employees are in their 50s.

To help craft their Web 2.0 strategies, McCarty says companies should ask themselves the following questions: keep reading…

About 25 years ago when the self-help gurus came on the scene, I heard Jim Rohn say something that still sticks:

Things will get better for you when you get better.

Sage advice indeed, and now might be the best time to take heed. keep reading…

I am always looking for trends, new ways of doing things, or emerging practices that are changing, or at least influencing, the way we attract, source, assess, and recruit talent.

Some of them will most likely slip into history with little impact, but others will become the new way we do things.

Twitter is a recent example of an application that seemed of little practical use to recruiting until hundreds of people began to apply their creativity and developed interesting and useful ways to use Twitter for recruiting. It is being used by many organizations to announce new jobs to those potential candidates who follow them. It is used to help the recently unemployed stay connected and aware of open positions. It is used to communicate with a select group of prospective candidates or to students on a campus.

Here are three trends that I see as potentially significant. Please leave a comment letting us know what you are seeing, and what other tools, applications, or practices you think are emerging. keep reading…

Several excellent articles have appeared here recently that have offered useful advice on how to deal with challenging economic times; certainly, many of us find ourselves helping our friends update their resumes, deciding where to trim out budgets this year, and coaching our organizations through headcount restrictions and freezes. ERE continues to be a great source of useful, timely information no matter what the business climate happens to be.

Right now, the business climate happens to be a little frightening. Since it looks like things will be like this for a while, I’d like to offer some thoughts on something that you’re certain to encounter in the next few months: a notable increase in executive referrals.

Anyone who spends time here knows that employee referrals are a simply fabulous way of bringing talent into your organization. The benefits are legion: employee referral hires are cheaper, pre-screened, more likely to be successful, increase employee morale, etc. A well-run program that delivers a consistent experience to both the candidate being submitted, and the person doing the submitting, will pay for itself many times over.

Executive referrals are a little different . . .

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What if the box had said “Shut-up Mark” when the cornflakes started talking to him? There would be no JobAngels. Or to be more precise, there would be no #JobAngels. And that would be too bad for @digitalbart,  who’s looking for web design work, or @Cooper108 who was laid off from the LA Times, or the dozens (probably hundreds by now) of others who have been tweeting in 140 letters their need for a job.

It was only two weeks ago that Mark Stelzner was eating breakfast and got to thinking about the gloomy job news. A long-time recruiting executive who now runs his own HR management consultancy, and, curiously, moonlights as a voice actor, Stelzner recalls wondering what would happen if each of his contacts could help just one person find a job.

With 700 followers on Twitter, a large percentage of them recruiters, he sent this message: “Was thinking that if each of us helped just one person find a job, we could start making a dent in unemployment. You game?”

Game they were. Today, 14 days after that January 29th tweet, Stelzner has a movement on his hand.

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Have you gotten that call lately? Someone you know, respect, admire, used to work with, contacts you to let you know they are in transition and was hoping they could submit their resume to you. Of course, we are used to getting those calls. As recruiters, it’s common, everyday business to receive unsolicited resumes. In the past, we were much more able to help, and at times, some resumes that came our way were absolutely great matches to some of our searches.

But things are different now. The openings are few and the calls from candidates are multiplying. We are now hearing from our own friends, co-workers, relatives, neighbors, people we really care about. How can we help when there aren’t any openings? It’s a new game out there, but we still can make a difference, if we take a bit of time. Even though we cannot directly hire these people there are still many things we can do to help tip the scales in their favor with their search.

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Many employers are eager to tap the potential of social networks as sources of talent. The potential is huge, and facing difficult economic conditions, these can be a cheap source. But it’s easier said than done. Some employers have put up their own corporate pages on Facebook. But this accomplishes nothing more than to prove ignorance of online social media. What makes social media so popular is their, well, social nature. They enable people to meet social needs. This may seem as obvious as the nose on your face, but it’s amazing how many employers don’t get it.

The word “social” has many definitions, but some of the more appropriate ones are 1) pertaining to friendly companionship or relation; 2) Seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; and 3) living or disposed to live-in companionship with others rather than in isolation. The point being that people use social media as a two-way street and to get a sense of community. To belong to a community one has to have something to contribute and be accepted as a member. A community is people interacting with each other. It requires free flow of ideas and thoughts. None of that is delivered by a corporate web page, which is essentially static. People do not invite companies to be their friends. The same is true for recruiters wanting to get hires off Facebook. Creating and cultivating a network to the point where one actually has a hire can take a long time, and the ROI can be impossible or very difficult to justify. It’s not possible to say that X number of hours spent networking will result in Y number of hires and it is not a replicable model.

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John Q. Gladwell’s departure from Do It Right! Extrusion (DIRE) didn’t seem like such a big issue at the time.

On the afternoon of the morning that John was let go, a Friday, most people were too busy anticipating the weekend fun to actually miss him. He managed the administration function for his division, and he wasn’t the most inspiring of people, so he was easily mistaken for an office plant.

Then, about two years ago, people discovered that for some strange reason John-in-admin knew this new “social networking” area very well. He had connections in the most obscure locations, and for a fleeting moment his star burned brightly.

If you needed to get at someone in the industry, or contact a potential hire in a competitor, John was the go-to guy. He was always happy to help, but as everyone in the company joined LinkedIn and Xing, his star gradually declined.

Management noted the time spent with social networking, and decided that it was not time well spent.

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Do you use LinkedIn for sourcing? Everybody does these days, right? Would you like to be more efficient, reach more relevant people, and do this all for free? Perhaps you are aware of some of the points below, but I hope you will find something new here too.

keep reading…

If you work at a company that has recently cut back on its recruiting budget, but not on its high expectations, attempting to deliver can be frustrating.

Fortunately, if you have the courage to shift your approach you can still produce significant results using recruiting approaches that require little or no money. I am sure you are probably thinking that the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true, but I am sure you also realize that there are exceptions to every rule (after all, ERE.net is free!).

Over the course of my career, I have compiled hundreds of innovative steps that recruiters and line managers have taken to reach top talent when other solutions simply were not working or they didn’t have the money to fund them.

I recently put pen to paper and completed a new book entitled 1,000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent, which as the name implies, offers numerous recruiting ideas, all of which have been used successfully.

The following is a checklist of some of those ideas that require little or no budget to implement. These approaches also work during strong economic times but they are especially appropriate during a major business downturn.

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Hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.

If you’re still considering cutbacks in your recruiting staff, think again. Recruiting top people is a repeatable sales process that’s fundamentally different than hiring average people. Instead of cutting back, replace the underperformers with people who can sell complex intangibles and services, those who can learn solution selling, and those who have demonstrated they can follow a realistic sales process including meeting quotas and being managed by the numbers.

Forget the Lone Rangers and those experienced recruiters who have not gotten significantly better over the past two years. Hiring top people is a business process, equivalent to selling your firm’s products and services. Now is the time to start implementing new training programs and changing your outdated pre-recession recruiting processes.

The amount of stimulus Obama, Bernanke, and Paulson/Geitner have already induced and are planning to induce into our economy system will jumpstart the recovery faster than can be imagined. So get ready to rumble. The best people are now sitting on the sidelines waiting for some reason to think about the future, rather than holding onto the past. (Take our annual recruiting challenges survey if you want some instant insight on what’s happening.)

Instead of minor changes and improvements, I’m going to suggest a wholesale rebuilding of your recruiting department is in order. This will give you a chance to hire the best people as soon as there is evidence the economy is changing direction. So starting with a fresh clean slate, here are three things you should be doing right now to get ready for the upcoming hiring recovery.

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We ran a webinar today with Elaine Orler and Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion about what changes we should expect from recruiting technology in the next year.

I learned a lot on the call, but one of the polls that we took really made me stop and think. Here it is:

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Social networks like Facebook and others are good for building relationships and for keeping track of all 156,977 of your closest friends — but no one really gets hired from them, right?

Tell that to nGenera. It has hired 63 people through its employee and recruiter social networks, which accounts for 70% of its 91 hires since last December. For those 63 people, that means no job boards. No third-party recruiters.

nGenera started in March 2007, and acquired six companies in one year. The company’s products (while hard to understand from its website) include call-center software, incentive compensation software, simulation software, and more.

Katie Carty Tierney (pictured) manages the recruiting function for the Austin, Texas, company, which has just under 300 employees, most virtual. “Our recruiters were relying heavily on job boards in the past, and we wanted them to look beyond that,” she says. “They weren’t necessarily getting the right candidates. They weren’t necessarily getting the right matches. There was a lot of turnover. That’s not the way to hire people.”

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ERE was at RecruitFest in Toronto last week. Organized by Jason Davis, it featured some great speakers such as Susan Burns, Scott Love, Craig Silverman, and John Sumser. We asked speakers and attendees about what changes and challenges to expect in 2009.

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Here we are in 2008, soon to be 2009, and almost a decade into the 21st century. The Internet is maturing: it’s been around for ordinary people to use for almost 15 years and has already earned its place as a technology and a social movement as important as electricity.

Most recruiters, corporate or agency, have finally developed career sites and use the Internet for attracting, sourcing, and communicating with candidates and clients. The website is the bedrock of an effective recruiting practice, and while it may still be possible in local or niche markets to avoid it, for mainstream and volume recruiting a website is essential. In this article I am assuming you already have a decent website that has interactivity, video, audio, and other graphic material and updates frequently. That is old news.

But, to get a jump on your competition and to attract the savviest candidates, it takes more than a good website and good recruiting skills. Here are four essential tools for success.

Tool #1: Facebook or MySpace

You should have a personal and a corporate presence on a social network. I have only listed Facebook and MySpace because they represent the largest share of the social networking world in the United States and a significant percentage outside the U.S. If your organization has global operations and recruiting needs, then there are networks for China, India, and many other places that you should also consider.

College students and most other young professionals turn to these networks for information about you, to ask their friends about you, or to join a community of practice that you have created.

IBM DB2 developers have a Facebook community developed and maintained by IBM. KPMG in South Africa has developed a Facebook page to attract and communicate with potential candidates.

The U.S. Army, faced with massive recruiting challenges, has numerous Facebook and MySpace pages. Some of the pages act as testimonials or provide videos of real people talking about why they joined the Army. Other pages are focused on fun experiences such as simulations of driving a tank or on gaming.

However you use these networks, you will be exposing your brand to thousands of potential candidates who, at least to some degree, will judge their potential work experience by the quality of the content. That’s why these pages have to be done thoughtfully and have to connect to the type of viewer and what they are expecting to see and hear.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote an article about an imaginary Willie who was faced with some challenging issues.

He heads recruiting for a large construction company where business is good and hiring strong. There are many open positions for experienced, senior-level people and there will soon be many more as a large number of boomers are approaching retirement. He is being urged by some on his team to begin using Web 2.0 techniques and to develop a more exciting and interactive Web presence in order to get ready for both current and projected needs.

So Willie is wondering….would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do)?

What would you do if you were Willie?

Here is one of the first responses that I received from a reader:

“I would suggest Willie fishes where the fish are. Web 2.0 is fun, new, different, exciting and sexy, however the fish he is looking for are not feeding there. 45-55 year old engineers and project managers are not on social sites on the Web. . .”

There is certainly a lot of merit in this argument. While a recent Pew study suggests that a very large percentage of people over 50 are using the Internet, it is likely few of them would use the Internet to find a job.

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A significant part of my work involves giving presentations around the world on the hottest recruiting topics. It is an aspect of my work that I truly enjoy because it affords me an opportunity to continuously learn about where our profession is headed.

Through speaking, I not only help companies understand the latest recruiting trends, but I also learn from hundreds of professionals about what they see as hot topics, emerging trends, and how they are approaching them. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on what recruiting trends will top the agendas of Global 500 recruiting managers in the next 12 to 18 months based on my interaction with more than 300 organizations around the globe this year.

The Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting

Based on conversations with recruiting leaders, questions asked during seminars, advisory requests, and best-practice research, expect to see an increased emphasis in:

• Upgrading employment branding. Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. Firms throughout Asia, in particular, are increasingly adopting employment branding as a wildly important activity for 2009. The success of Google, a firm that has built the world’s strongest employment brand over an amazing five-year period, has led others to focus on this impactful long-term strategy. Key focus areas include increasing media coverage, increasing visibility online, building your “green” brand, and countering your “negative” employment brand. Firms to watch: Facebook, Google, Yum Brands, Tata, E&Y, Enterprise, U.S. Army, and Sodexo.
• Reinvigorating referral programs. Despite the growth of career-related Internet sites, the highest volume and quality candidates still come from well-designed employee referral programs. While heavy adoption was initially hampered by cultural issues around the world, today such programs are proving highly effective everywhere. Key focus areas include proactively approaching key employees for referrals (program targeting), leverage non-employee referrals, making reward systems more comprehensive, immediate, and visible, and last but not least, helping employees leverage social media to restore relationships, make new relationships, and build stronger relationships. Firms to watch: AmTrust Bank, Edward Jones, Whirlpool, and Amazon.com.
• Renewing the focus on quality of hire. As a result of strong research by organizations like staffing.org, recruiting leadership has begun to refocus its efforts on identifying factors that increase the quality or the on-the-job performance of new hires. Key focus areas include improved quality of hire metrics, calculating the performance differential between average and quality hires, and identifying sources that produce high-quality hires. Firms to watch: Aimco and Wipro.
• Reinforcing the business case for recruiting. As budgets tighten and slow economic growth continues, recruiting budgets will face constant constraints. Instead of whining, many leading talent organizations are seizing the opportunity to reposition themselves as non-transactional organizations. When the focus in recruiting is placed on non-transactional, more systemic issues, such organizations can work with the CFO and risk management to demonstrate the importance of supporting recruiting even during times of reduced hiring volume. The key focus areas include predictive modeling, dollarizing recruiting results, and showing the dollar impact of vacancies in revenue generating positions. Firms to watch: Aimco, DFS, Wipro, and Google.

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Web 2.0, Web 2.0! That’s all Willie is hearing from some of his recruiters, and the words seem to pop off every page he reads. This morning he picked up the Wall Street Journal and there was a big headline espousing the many benefits of social networks and Web 2.0-enabled websites.

Willie is a progressive guy, usually the first to try out new technology or bring new ideas into a conversation. He was one of the first recruiting managers to adopt an applicant tracking system years ago, and he is an advocate of maintaining close relationships with candidates via email. He is just not sure how to go about implementing a Web 2.0 strategy or how to create a social network.

Willie’s organization is a construction company with over 1,000 employees, mostly all located in the United States with a handful in China setting up a new operation.

Despite the economy, they have lots of work. Many of their contracts are local and state government jobs that are funded by tax dollars and have strict deadlines. Revenue is excellent and the firm projects to earn more than US$1 billion this year. The future looks bright given the poor state of the U.S. infrastructure. They project doubling revenues within 5 years as more roads, bridges, airport runways, and water systems need to be replaced.

But Willie faces some major challenges.

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I wrote a post awhile back in the MagicMethod group here on ERE called “Get a Group, Get a Blog, Get a Website” and I know at least one person (Sam Medalie) followed my advice and started two groups here on ERE - the informative “Finding Passive Candidates” group and the ever-interesting “Interviews With Hiring Managers” group.

I hope (and believe) both these excellent groups will give Sam exposure for his phone sourcing business, Longfellow Search. More than that, I know Sam will personally go places he never dreamed he’d go as moderator of these groups! (How are those working for you, Sam?)

Recently I’ve been watching (and thinking about) the changes that are coming over our ERE site.

keep reading…