It’s no secret that the speed of change in business is incredibly fast. And as a result products, operational processes, customer expectations, and even business models are constantly changing. Every time one of these business factors is upgraded, it simultaneously requires the raising of the needed skills and the expected performance levels of the employees. Whenever skill requirements and performance levels are raised, the normal practice is to expect your current workforce to adapt and to meet those higher expectations through additional training.

But what would you do in a business situation where instead of the occasional need for incremental change, you were faced with a business environment that demanded both continuous and rapid change. You could call it chaotic change: a situation where products, customers, competitors, operational processes, and performance expectations needed to be constantly improved to the point where even with training, most of your current employees simply couldn’t handle it. When corporate leadership insists that in order to be successful “everything must change,” should “everything” include changing or “rebooting” the entire workforce?

What Does Rebooting Your Workforce Mean?

There are two categories of rebooting the workforce. The first is a situation where the current workforce has simply failed in its performance.

For example, this month, the school superintendent removed and then replaced the entire 150-person teaching and administrative staff at the Miramonte School in LA because of their failure to effectively handle student abuse issues. Similar rebooting has occurred within failed sports teams and at Cabela’s sporting-goods. The second category of rebooting may also involve performance issues, but the primary driver is the fact that the organization is faced with a completely new business environment. And in order to succeed, it needs a level of performance and skills that most of the current workforce simply cannot provide.

The Case of Wendy’s Rebooting its Workforce

The Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain is a bottom performer in its industry. It has more than 64,000 employees and its revenue per employee is $45,590 (compared to 400,000 employees and a markedly higher revenue per employee of $65,900 at McDonald’s). The industry itself is facing dramatic challenges from previously unheard of areas including new competitors for ready-prepared foods like Starbucks, Fresh & Easy, and even Costco. Customer expectations for food have also expanded dramatically to the point where the range of products as expanded to a wide range including breakfast, luxury products, healthy and sustainable products, and high-end coffee products. In order to be competitive, stores must be dramatically remodeled and marketing has to be improved and expanded so it goes beyond traditional advertising outlets (including social media).

In late January, the CEO, Emil Brolick announced a plan that requires literally everything to improve dramatically. All employees must be capable of providing dramatically increased levels of customer service, they must be able to continually learn new processes, and how to handle and sell completely new products. As a result, the CEO has declared that only “five-star athletes” are capable of handling these complex and ever-changing set of new requirements. To meet the changing needs, a key part of his plan is “rebooting” the workforce. Which to him means it will be necessary to re-interview every employee and manager and then only retaining those few individuals who meet the new “five-star athletes” standard.

15 Reasons Why Rebooting Your Workforce May Be Necessary and Beneficial

Cleaning house and starting fresh is certainly not a new concept. It is, however, certainly unusual to “clean out” your entire workforce. Some of the reasons that support this dramatic move include:

Reasons You May Need Completely Different Workers

1. As competitors change, the type of employees need to change also — if your organization is now competing against completely new competitors or even firms in different industries, it will require employees with a broader range of skills and the ability to compete. Hiring employees away from these competitors may be a more effective approach than trying to retrain your current employees.
2. An increased need for innovators — if your organization’s new goal is to dominate your industry like Apple does, you will need to dramatically ramp up your innovation rates. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that you have innovators in your current workforce (they simply weren’t needed) and developing innovators is problematic. As a result, external recruiting may be the only option for dramatically increasing the percentage of innovators in your workforce.
3. New technology, products, and processes may require agile employees — an environment that includes constantly changing technology, processes, and a continual stream of new products may require a different kind of employee: one who is agile. Some individuals are just fast learners with the agility and speed to rapidly accept and perform after major changes, while other employees simply can’t handle a fast paced environment. Because the previous business model didn’t require agility, it is unlikely that many of your current workers will have the new required agility level.
4. Current employee burnout may not be fixable — in some jobs (i.e. french fry cook), job burnout or extreme boredom may be unavoidable. As a result, many of your long-term employees may be burned out. Once they reach that stage, they may not be fixable and under the new expectations, you have no choice but to replace them. Fortunately, the fast pace of change in the new work environment may help to reduce burn out.

Reasons You May Need Completely Different Skill Sets, Attitudes, and Performance Levels

1. Current employees may not be able to meet your expected performance levels – if you expect a significant (i.e. 20% or more) improvement in organizational performance, improving employee performance by at least that amount must be part of the plan. If your previous hiring and retention practices resulted in a workforce comprised of average performers (three star performers), it may be too expensive and time consuming to raise their performance level. And there is another possibility, and that is that these average performers have no interest in ramping up their performance. Or even worse, the individual simply might not be capable of dramatically raising their performance. For example if no one on your basketball team is taller than six feet but new competition requires that you have seven-foot players, no amount of training, incentives, or coaching will turn a six-foot player into a seven-foot one. Your only real option is recruiting a group of seven-foot players.
2. Current employees may be unable to ramp up their skill levels — the continuous introduction of new products, processes, and technology will require completely different and often higher levels of skills. Current employees might not have the capacity to raise their skills to the needed levels.
3. Retraining may not work — although retraining is a traditional solution to upgrading your workforce, raising the skills of current employees may be expensive compared to hiring during a time when there is an abundance of highly skilled talent in the workforce due to the weak economy. Retraining is also time-consuming and it may not meet the timetable set for the overall corporate transformation. One final problem is that the retraining might not work, so you will end up hiring replacements anyway.
4. Employees may be unable to change their attitudes — employee attitudes will also have to improve dramatically. After years of being allowed to work “with a bit of an attitude,” your current employees may be unwilling or unable to change their work attitude and commitment.

HR-related Reasons Why You May Need to Reboot Your Workforce

1. A superior workforce is hard copy — part of your overall corporate improvement plan would include gaining a competitive advantage in every area. In the case of restaurants and pre-prepared food providers, buildings, products, marketing, and equipment can be easily copied but a fast-learning agile top-performing workforce is hard to duplicate. This competitive “people advantage” is hard to duplicate even when other firms know how your HR operates. For example, even though books have been written on their people management practices, no competitor has been able to duplicate the innovative and productive workforces at Apple, Google, or Facebook.
2. Your employer branding may require a dramatic shock — after years of hiring average people, your employer brand image could be rock-bottom and as a result, recruiting top performers may not be possible. This is especially true in retail, where potential applicants have numerous chances to interact directly with your current workforce. Given this negative image, it may take a dramatic and public move like “rebooting your entire workforce” to send a message to top performers that things have changed and that if you work here, you will be working alongside the best.
3. With tenure, employee ROI may flatline – although it’s not true in every case, research has shown that it’s not uncommon for employee performance to level off after a few years of tenure in the job. This may be especially true for dull, routine, and low-paying jobs. With periodic raises over time, longer-tenured employees become more expensive, so you need to make sure that their performance and skill matches their higher pay level. With high unemployment rates, the ROI may be higher and it may be easy to increase employee productivity (i.e. costs versus the value of their output) by externally recruiting replacements with the appropriate skills, attitudes, and performance levels. Incidentally, even the “top graded” new-hires may reach this costs/output plateau, so the recruiting process will also have to be upgraded.
4. High-performers may not cost any more — in the quick service restaurant industry, paying the minimum wage is common. As a result, there may be little or no pay differential between average and top performers. If top performers cost no more, it makes economic sense to hire and retain only top performers.
5. Job security may be part of the problem — if you want continual improvement, offering too much job security may actually cause people to reduce their performance because there are no negative consequences from “staying the same.” If rebooting the workforce is a continuous process, this threat may increase the likelihood that your employees will maintain a high level of performance.
6. Homer Simpson may work here — under the old environment, there were certainly an absence of a performance culture. As a result, it was unlikely that poor performers were identified and released. Under the new performance culture, improved performance management processes may help you find slackers and individuals who are good at hiding their weak performance and their inappropriate skill set.
7. Keeping ahead of the competition when rebooting becomes common – although Wendy’s is currently taking the lead in rebooting its workforce, if it is successful, other firms will surely follow. If you expect to stay ahead of your competitors, now might be the appropriate time to begin planning at least a partial “reboot” of your workforce.

Final Thoughts

Historically, the typical HR response during a business downturn was to protect jobs and to “place people first.” Because we are all people, that may be a natural response. There is of course some logic in retaining the employees who you have invested so heavily in. However, if the issue was instead equipment like computers, it would not be unusual for executives to order the complete replacement of all obsolete computers.

So the question arises, “has the economic and business environment changed so dramatically that the time has come where rebooting the entire workforce should become a standard practice?” I have included the many negatives related to this practice in this article but it is clear to me that a trend has begun. If the practice’s proliferates, the remaining question is, “Are you bold enough and then do you have the courage and the ‘cojones’ to even raise the topic with your executives?”

In response, American Express increased job flexibility and created new job categories so agents could progress through four levels rather than remaining stuck in one. The company also changed its compensation plan, allowing agents to more easily earn bonuses based on customer service scores.

In addition, the company changed the job title from customer care representative to customer care professional. Agents got business cards for the first time.

These were more than symbolic gestures. Agents no longer merely recite company scripts, but use their discretion to figure out how American Express products can help customers solve problems. That’s made the job harder in a way. Agents like Teresa Tate, who works out of an American Express service center in Phoenix, now have to think on their feet. But Tate wouldn’t have it any other way. “We are getting more and more power to make the decisions at our level,” she says.

Tate, who used to run a restaurant, takes calls from AmEx cardholders who operate small businesses. She is now freer to share her wisdom and her concern for these customers. “I genuinely feel like I’m in this company’s finance department,” she says of her callers. “Having been in small business myself, you need that support.”

This sort of passion and compassion for customers translates into high levels of service, into reciprocal relationships.

American Express’s worthiness as an employer predates the Relationship Care program. The company has made Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For 11 of the past 12 years.30 Going even farther back, American Express offered employees one of the first private-sector pension plans in 1875.

These days, Amex combines kindness with cleverness in its people management. It offers a 401(k) plan that’s in the top 15 percent when it comes to company generosity. And Amex has worked harder in recent years to help struggling employees succeed at the firm, rather than usher them out the door. At the same time, it employs workforce metrics to fortify worthiness as a seller. Agents’ performance and pay are determined to a large extent by how well they fare on customer feedback surveys. The results are exposed directly to agents, who can view their recent customer satisfaction results, their aggregate results, and how they stack up against peers.

Relying too heavily on financial incentives can backfire. And workplace measurements can be misguided. Look no further than the way American Express used to track the robotic repetition of customer names. But Amex designed its compensation system based partly on employee feedback. And the strong results of the Relationship Care program suggest the pay approach isn’t distracting employees or hurting service. What’s more, the continual customer feedback measurements act as a self-correcting mechanism for agents – and therefore help keep service quality high.

By blending employee autonomy and a supportive culture with smart metrics, American Express shows that worthiness as an employer works to make companies worthy sellers.

From the book Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era, copyright 2011 by Laurie Bassi. Reprinted with permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth?

If we knew the answer to this question, we wouldn’t be asking you, our readers. It’s a question that comes up often and almost never receives the same answer. Some people think that sourcing is only worth about $6/hr. Others command a hefty $100+/hr billing rate for sourcing projects. Regardless of how you approach this question, the answer will almost never be accurate and I believe that is because there is no cookie-cutter framework in which “sourcing” fits. For instance:

• Some sourcers do lead generation
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach + pre-screening
• Some sourcers do all of the above as well as strategic initiatives, including pipeline development and employment branding projects

…yet they are all “sourcers.” To say that each of these types of individuals should be paid the same since they are all classified as “sourcer” would be as incorrect as saying a person working in sales at a retail storefront should be making the same as a person working in sales at a multi-national ERP software manufacturer, because they both carry the same title.

In my personal opinion, sourcers’ compensation should be determined based on two main items and one sub-item:

• Level of expertise (usually determined by years of experience, but not always)
• Scope of function

If you want experience, you must pay for it. If you want more work to be done, you have to pay for that, too. And if you are not willing to pay for either (translated — you are looking for a “top-notch sourcer” at at $13/hr) then you will engage in a never-ending search — either because you’ll never find a sourcer willing to take your job, or you’ll end up hiring all the wrong ones.

Geography also plays a role in determining a sourcer’s compensation. Where you are in the world makes a big difference — for example, sourcers in the United States and Australia typically get paid more than sourcers in Asia. Cost of living in a given location makes a big difference in what a sourcer could/should earn.

With this in mind, I invite all of you who are sourcers to participate in our Salary Survey so we can get a snapshot of what the actual compensation of sourcers is today. Please follow this link and take a few moments to anonymously fill out the survey. Once we get a good sampling we will share this information on SourceCon.com to give everyone a better idea of how sourcing is compensated.

Kruse is the co-author of We: How to Increase Performance and Profit Through Full Engagement. Our conversation lasts about seven minutes, below.

Starting salaries for professionals in the U.S. and Canada will be going up next year as the hiring climate for experienced workers becomes more competitive and the time it takes to fill jobs lengthens.

Staffing firm Robert Half International  said the average starting salary for white collar professional and support jobs in the U.S. will rise on average 3.4 percent in 2012. Tech positions will see the biggest increase with an average of 4.5 percent. Lawyers and legal support staff will see the smallest increase of the five areas studied. Starting salaries in the legal field will rise on average 1.9 percent.

For 60 years Robert Half has produced salary guides based on information it gathers from its clients, its placements, and surveys of business executives. The five detailed reports produced this year cover finance and accounting, technology, creative and marketing, which includes Internet-related positions, administrative and office support, and legal.

The reports also include Canada, and offer insights on hiring trends in each professional area. Starting salaries can be adjusted for different metro and geographic areas by using the multipliers included in each guide. The salaries are what a new hire can expect to earn. They don’t include the cost of benefits or perks.

Here’s a summary of what Robert Half said about each area:

Finance and Accounting

With hiring expected to be more aggressive in 2012, the average time to fill staff positions will increase to five weeks next year and filling management accounting and finance jobs will take almost two months. Companies say they are having a difficult time finding professionals who have all the requirements, and in some specialized areas, candidates are receiving multiple offers.

However, with the U.S. recovery still anemic, many employers are turning to staffing firms to meet their immediate needs, while they assess business conditions. There’s also a growing reliance on bringing in specialized talent for specific projects and on temporary support staff to handle work during peak periods.

Most in demand is a CPA accreditation. For senior-level and analyst positions, an MBA is high on the list of requirements. Controller and analyst positions top the list of jobs companies most want to fill. In addition, business systems analysts, tax accountants, auditors, and core accounting professionals are being sought.

In the U.S., says the accounting and finance guide, morale and retention are an issue as employees who shouldered additional work during the lean years without getting a raise or promotion are beginning to see opportunities at other firms.

To help retain employees, Robert Half’s survey of some 1,400 CFOs found more companies are looking to non-financial incentives to supplement modest salary increases. Most popular, said 29 percent of the CFOs, is subsidized training and education. Just under a quarter (24 percent) said they’re offering flexible work hours and telecommuting, and a similar percentage offer mentoring programs.

Download the U.S. guide here.

Download the Canada guide here.

Technology

The Robert Half guide calls technology hiring “The Hot List” and says in several tech areas — network administration, security and application development among them — that there are more jobs than candidates.  Two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed about the difficulty of hiring staff reported it was “very” or “somewhat” challenging.

Mid- and senior-level IT positions are among the most difficult of all to fill, particularly for companies who seek skilled tech professionals with an understanding of business strategy. On average, Robert Half found it now takes sevein weeks to fill managerial positions.

The guide also highlights five specific jobs now in demand. In addition to the three noted above, the other two are data warehousing and business intelligence professionals and quality assurance business analysts. Mobile is growing in importance so rapidly that the guide devotes a column to discussing the rise of tablets and mobile devices generally. The demand for experienced mobile professionals will be a major trend next year, says Robert Half, a primary reason starting salaries for mobile applications developers will rise 9.1 percent to range between $85,000 and $122,500.

Least anyone should miss the point, the guide illustrates the section on hiring trends with a flaming red chili pepper.

Canada will see similar, if somewhat smaller, increases, though the demand there is also growing.

In most cases, professionals with specific skills — for example, AJAX, Java, SQL server — can command premiums as high as 12 percent on the base ranges in the guide. And in some areas like Silicon Valley, IT workers can get as much as 35 percent over the average starting salaries.

Download the guide here.

Creative and Marketing

The average increase for this group as a whole is 3.5 percent. However, for the most in-demand jobs in tight markets like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Stamford, Connecticut, employers can expect to pay significantly more to hire top talent.

Hottest are Internet-related positions in project management, search engine marketing, web analytics, site developer, and user experience designer. Video producers to manage and direct projects are also in short supply as demand for video content — for the web, mobile, training, and other services — grows almost exponentially.

The guide says “Finding top creative talent can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.” Among the reasons is the burgeoning demand for professionals in a still youthful industry that forces managers to make quicker hiring decisions and extend offers without delay. To get quicker acceptances, offers include hiring bonuses, extra paid time off, and telecommuting options, in addition to generous traditional benefits.

Hiring managers are relying on referrals and their own networks to identify potential hires, and also on specialized search and staffing firms.

The guide specifically mentions healthcare as a high demand industry, not only for creative staff to develop and manage niche campaigns for patients, prospects, and trade groups, but analytics experts and interactive professionals to develop and monitor online efforts.

Five broad categories covering traditional marketing, interactive, public relations, content development, and design and production are further broken down into specific jobs showing the range of starting salaries.

Canadian salaries are listed for the Toronto market, where much of the advertising and marketing industry is located.

Download the guide here.

Administrative and Office Support

Replacing downsized staff as business improves is the key driver for the 3.4 percent growth in starting salaries for the 60 or so administrative positions included in the guide. Another driver is the ever-growing healthcare sector, says Robert Half.

The company says that many of the workers will come from staffing firms as companies exercise caution in hiring permanent staff. However, managers and executives surveyed by Robert Half say productivity has been hurt by not having enough support staff, which requires existing workers to take on multiple tasks.

Most in demand will be executive and administrative assistants, so these positions are seeing increases of between 4 and 4.5 percent in starting salaries. Employees already in these jobs may see their own salaries grow by at least that mush or more, as 63 percent of HR managers polled by Robert Half said they are concerned about retaining their best support staff.

The most sought after technical skills for support staff, says the report, are: knowledge of database management software; project management; nonprofit management software; SAP and other enterprise resource planning software; and social media.

Download the guide here.

Legal

Firms are being cautious in their hiring, but demand is rising for experienced professionals, especially at firms that reduced staff during the depth of the recession. Corporations are expanding their Internal legal departments to contain costs.

Most in demand, says Robert Half, are lawyers with 4-7 years experience in litigation, employment and labor, real estate, and corporate law. For recent law school grads and new lawyers, the guide calls the hiring environment “challenging.”

The situation in Canada is similar, though more cautious. Compensation is increasing, but doesn’t yet have the attention it does in the U.S.

The guide is available here.

Apple in Sydney

In Part 2 of this case study on Apple’s talent management practices, I look at its approach to innovation, compensation, and benefits, careerpathing, and online recruitment (its career site). Some approaches discussed are unique to sub-factions within Apple, as would be expected in any organization of significant size. It’s also quite rare for organizations that design, manufacture, and sell through direct retail to have consistent approaches across all units.

Talent Management Lessons To Learn and Copy (continued)

You should not be surprised to learn that the firm that made the term “think different” a brand uses talent management approaches that are well outside the norm. In addition to the lessons presented in Part 1, some approaches other firms can learn from Apple include:

Career paths reduce self-reliance and cross-pollination — in most organizations, HR helps to speed up employee career progression. The underlying premise is that retention rates will increase if career progression is made easy. The Apple approach is quite different; it wants employees to take full responsibility for their career movement. The concept of having employees “own their career” began years ago when Kevin Sullivan was the VP of HR. Apple doesn’t fully support career path help because it doesn’t want its employees to develop a “sense of entitlement” and think that they have a right to continuous promotion.

Apple believes career paths weaken employee self-reliance and indirectly decrease cross-departmental collaboration and learning. Absent a career path, employees actively seek out information about jobs in other functions and business units. In a company where creativity and innovation are king, you don’t want anything reducing your employee’s curiosity and the cross-pollination between diverse functions and units. Automatically moving employees up to the next functional job may also severely narrow the range of internal movement within the organization, which could reduce the level of diverse thinking in some groups.

Create and manage a culture of innovation — most firms have a culture with a singular focus on one attribute like performance, quality, customer service, or cost-containment. Apple is unique in that it has two dominant cultural attributes that exist side-by-side. The first (discussed in part one) is “performance,” with the second being “innovation”; the latter may actually be the strongest of the two. The dual emphasis works at Apple because the firm operates in the consumer technology field, where there is a universal expectation for “disruptive” performance.

Producing $2 million-plus in revenue per employee certainly establishes Apple as a performer, but it is its industry-dominating product innovation that differentiates it from competitors like HP, Sony, Microsoft, and IBM. Three factors drive the innovation attribute, including the expectation of continuous innovation, extreme secrecy within the product development process, and continuous brainstorming/challenge meetings (even at play just days before a product launch).

“I expect a pony”

Apple’s culture of innovation is unique because the goal is to produce a “pony, not a real horse but instead something so desirable that everyone wants it and considers it ‘gorgeous.’” Simple evolution doesn’t cut it — only extraordinary industry-leading innovation that results in WOW products does. To accomplish that, Apple doesn’t do what most consumers assume it does. Instead of developing completely new industry technologies, Apple takes existing technologies and then bundles numerous small developments on top to produce what appears to the public as giant step forward. It takes a powerful culture and group of managers to delay taking great work public faster, but Apple knows that numerous small releases don’t produce the same media and consumer buzz.

The expectation of innovation permeates the culture

The expectation of innovation is driven by Apple’s history of innovation, its leaders (who forbid the use of “that’s not possible”), and the peer pressure among employees to be among the contributors to the final product that the customer sees. In order to generate this expectation of innovation, it doesn’t rely on posters or motivational slogans (although they have those too … around here, changing the world just comes with the job description). Instead, every communication, process, product launch event, and even advertising slogans (Think Different, Imagine the Possibilities, Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. Etc.) make it crystal-clear that innovation is at the heart of Apple’s success. Innovation has driven Apple’s past and current successes, and it will continue to drive future success. After walking in the door of the corporate offices in Cupertino, California, you can literally “feel” the expectation to innovate.

Secrecy drives internal competition

The second critical driver of innovation is the product development process. This innovation process is unique in that it doesn’t rely on a formal “ideation” type model; instead, it has been described as an “iteration” process energized by peer competition and Apple’s famous siloed/secret approach to teams. Apple does many things using small development teams, as many firms do, but doesn’t rely on a single team to design each product element. Multiple teams may be assigned to the same area (or they may accidentally wander into the same area). The approach has been called 10 to 3 to 1 because 10 teams may work on a product area independently. When work is ready for review a formal peer review, it will whittle 10 mockups to three and eventually down to one. It is an approach that is unique to Apple. Outsiders may consider it expensive and slow, but they can’t argue it isn’t effective.

Apple is well known for its obsession with secrecy in order to heighten the impact during a product release. Secrecy is also the most unique element in its innovation process. In order to maintain secrecy, development and design teams are intentionally siloed. As a result of these communication barriers, team leaders may not be initially aware of how many teams they’re competing against and what those other teams are working on. The level of open collaboration that you might find at other firms like Google is not possible under this process, but neither is early-stage groupthink. Once possible feature solutions move forward to peer review, the organization benefits from broader scope best-practice sharing and collaboration. While it may seem counterintuitive, Apple has turned “team silos” that would be a negative factor at most firms into a positive force.

Paired design meetings force free-thinking to continue until the end of the design

Another element of the design and innovation process is the holding of weekly “paired design meetings.” Every design team is expected to hold two meetings each week. The first is a traditional production meeting where small refinements are discussed and made. The second is a “go crazy” meeting, in which everyone brainstorms and uses free-thinking to scope out parameters. Most organizations stop these brainstorming meetings once the design parameters are clear, but Apple continues them long into the development cycle to guarantee that completely new ideas will constantly raise the innovation bar.

The talent management lessons to learn in the area of innovation include the concept that intense competition may produce innovation faster than any formal ideation process. In addition, peer vetting of ideas, delaying collaboration until toward the end of the development process, and requiring the continuous use of brainstorming processes may result in bolder innovations and higher levels of risk-taking.

Tying economic rewards to overall company success can reduce selfish behavior – You won’t find anyone who will publicly argue that Apple pays well with regard to base compensation. Economic rewards at Apple are significant, but largely tied to the company’s valuation. The primary monetary motivator at Apple is “the opportunity for wealth creation” as a result of stock ownership. Most employees at Apple get periodic stock grants to reward their contribution. By putting the focus on the stock, they send every employee a clear message that individual accomplishments are important only if they directly contribute to the overall success of the company. This approach, coupled with the firm’s famous “product focus,” keeps everyone focused on product success rather than individual results and individual rewards. Individual rewards are provided based on performance and consist of stock grants and cash bonuses up to 30% of base salary. Apple’s retail employees also have stock opportunities. They are paid on an hourly basis and do not receive a sales commission.

Benefits and even pay play a secondary role in recruiting and retention — at Apple, the primary long-term attraction and retention factors are stock growth and exciting work. Because of the importance of these two factors, its message on benefits is clear. If you’re doing the best work of your life and having a major impact on the world, do you really need sushi in the cafeteria? (It has that also.) Although most talent competitors to Apple spend huge amounts of money on benefits, Apple’s offerings are spartan when compared to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. While Apple’s health plan is well-funded, and it has good food and an on-campus gym, neither the food nor the gym is free. One perk that does excite potential applicants (especially in retail) is the employee discount on Apple products which is given to every employee. These discounts further support and reinforce Apple’s companywide emphasis on the product.

Your corporate jobs website should boldly inspire — because the primary goal of most corporate career/jobs websites is simply to provide company and job information to potential candidates, most corporate job pages are chock-full full of information. Apple’s website is lean on information but strong on inspiration. As a result, after exploring the site, the potential applicant comes away inspired rather than with a pile of information about the company.

There are two categories of inspirational messages on the site, and each one is bold. The first group of corporate messages makes it clear that Apple is “anti-corporate.” In fact, the first bold headline you see is “corporate jobs, without the corporate part.” They also highlight what they are proud not to have including endless meetings, being bureaucratic, having executive perks and managers wearing suits. Instead they boldly tell you “don’t expect business as usual.”

The second category of inspiration on the website concentrates on openness, innovation, and changing the world. Key phrases include “open minds, collaboration, and of course innovation.” You will also find the phrase “there’s plenty of open space — and open minds” (obviously perfect sentence structure isn’t a high priority either). Finally, they promise to “give you a license to change the world” and “be inspired.”

Its focus on inspiration is so strong that for a tech firm, there is a surprising lack of technology-speak on the page. You will not find blogs, videos, or any mention of Apple’s availability on Twitter or Facebook easily. When it comes to mobile access, the site will render fine on the latest smartphones, but receives a 1.51/5.0 with regard to meeting mobile standards. If you visit the site, you might even find links that don’t work and features that load very slowly. What you will find is inspiration — loads of it.

I’ll leave you with this introductory statement from its career site:

“There’s the typical job. Punch in, push paper, punch out, repeat. Then there’s a career at Apple. Where you’re encouraged to defy routine. To explore the far reaches of the possible. To travel uncharted paths. And to be a part of something far bigger than yourself. Because around here, changing the world just comes with the job description.”

Next week, Part 3: Employer branding, recruiting, retention, and other talent management approaches to copy and learn from.

Not at all. In fact, it costs to be agreeable, especially if you’re a man. How much? On average, $9,772 annually, says a study presented today to the Academy of Management, meeting in Texas.

Three researchers analyzed 20 years of data collected in three different surveys of some 10,000 workers to find that men, and to a lesser extent, women rated as agreeable earned less than their more disagreeable colleagues.

A fourth survey, conducted by the researchers themselves using students acting as HR managers, found that, with the only difference among candidates for an entry-level, fast-track position into management being their agreeableness, “agreeable candidates were less likely to be recommended for advancement.”

Gender plays a role in this, note the researchers in their aptly titled paper, Do Nice Guys – and Gals – Really Finish Last? The Joint Effects of Sex and Agreeableness on Income. However, the income gap between agreeable and disagreeable women, at $1,828, is far less than it is for men.

These days, when companies claim to place a premium on collaboration and teamwork, “it would seem that people high in agreeableness would have at least a slight economic advantage over those low in agreeableness. The fact that researchers repeatedly report the opposite is puzzling,” write the authors of the paper.

They suggest a few possibilities for the disparity, including weaker bargaining for salary by the more agreeable types, a greater focus on building relationships rather than advancing themselves, and they simply may be less verbally assertive in meetings.

Although altruistic behaviors are a facet of performance, they involve self-sacrifice and are often not rewarded. Voice behaviors may, on the other hand, attract rewards, particularly when they are directed toward persuading others of the value of one’s ideas.

Here’s one observation you can test in your own workplace. According to the authors, citing research by others, note that “people who were highly critical of others were rated as more competent than those offering favorable evaluations.”

Does that hold true where you work? Are the managers who do the toughest performance reviews paid more and more likely to advance than those who are less critical?

“People who are low in agreeableness may be perceived as more competent by virtue of their lack of warmth,” the authors write. And this phenomenon  holds true for recruiters and hiring managers. Citing a 2001 study, the authors observe, “people recommended a higher-status position and higher pay for job applicants who expressed anger — a display that is more likely among disagreeable people.”

Other studies, not to mention the personal experience of millions of workers, attest to the cost of bosses who are disagreeable to the point of being unreasonable. Administrative staffing firm OfficeTeam published a survey that found 46 percent of American employees have worked for an unreasonable boss in their career. Some just quit outright. The majority — 59 percent — stayed and either tried to deal with it or just lived with it.

In the United Kingdom, a study by the government there found that worker stress was costing $42.2 billion (U.S.) annually in lost time, productivity, and worker turnover. The leading cause of workplace stress: line managers.

Disagreeable people may well be bad bosses, but they are probably not the cinematic version of Horrible Bosses. As the authors of the study note, “People low in agreeableness are basically amicable. They are just slightly more likely than people high in trait agreeableness to behave disagreeably in certain situations by, for instance, aggressively advocating for their position during conflicts.”

That’s from a new Medicus Firm survey of 2,339 physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants in the U.S, about two-thirds of whom are in a practice, with about a third in a residency or fellowship.

Tampa General Hospital

More on doctor pay follows in the chart at the bottom of this post. Before that, these other tidbits from Medicus, a medical-recruiting firm with 25 recruiters.

• 75% of respondents say they get inquiries about three times weekly about jobs.
• Networking with colleagues (36%) was cited as the best resources for hearing of new opportunities, with recruiting agencies second at 29%. Physician job boards were just behind recruiting agencies, with journal advertisements cited the least.
• Doctors, by far, want to be contacted by email, not by phone or text.

The chart below shows pay, not including benefits, and not including resident or fellow income.

First, the salary news.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported Wednesday that the average starting salary for newly minted college graduates is $51,018. That’s up 4.8 percent from last year’s $48,661.

It’s the third time the quarterly NACE salary survey has reported an increase. It contrasts with 2010, when average starting offers were below those in 2009.

“The steady increases in starting salary offers we’re seeing this year is a good indication that the job market for new college graduates is gathering strength,” says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director.

Engineering graduates saw some of the biggest increases — and biggest salaries generally. Petroleum engineering graduates got average offers of $80,849, up 8.1 percent over the summer 2010 survey. The average offer to computer engineering graduates rose 7.6 percent to $64,499.

While their starting salaries were much lower, even students in humanities and social science programs saw increases.

Average salary offer rose 15.3 percent over last year to $40,057. However, growth there may be slowing, since the summer average is only 1.3 percent higher than the $39,527 average in the Spring 2011 survey.

Still, English majors saw a 6.6 percent bump over last year to $39,611, while offers to history majors rose 8.1 percent to $40,051.

The full report is available free for NACE members or by purchase, but more details are available in the press release here.

While college counselors and the Class of 2012 digest the salary data, Work4Labs released its latest Facebook app, which it calls Jobs For Me. Its first app, Work For Us, simplifies the posting of jobs to company Facebook pages. Jobs For Me does that — and more — for college career centers.

The free app posts jobs from the career center to the school’s Facebook profile. A setting in the app can be adjusted to limit access to only those with a school email address.

Work4Labs has made the interface remarkably convenient. Clicking into a job opens it right in Facebook, rather than elsewhere. Click into the apply link and a popup opens that allows a student to upload a resume and cover letter.  The popup, wisely, informs applicants that nothing from their Facebook profile will be submitted or accessible by others.

Students can also share jobs with their own network.

There’s a search tool useful for colleges and universities that have lots of jobs, and easy access for recruiters to post jobs.

Work4Labs says there’s a dashboard providing real-time and historic analytics on views, applies, likes, and sharing, among other data points.

The app had its beta launch in Europe, where Work4Labs was founded. The announcement says more than 100 universities there have installed it and some 8,000 companies have used it for their jobs.

Want to take a look at an example? Here’s the Facebook page for ESEI International Business School in Barcelona.

“Why won’t you be reachable?” he wanted to know.  He just read the email about my being out of touch with the office.

Because, I started to explain, there are no cell towers or service in the middle of the wilderness. He cut me off with a curt, “Maybe you should vacation somewhere else.”

An isolated incident? Not anymore. Today, says a Manpower survey, nearly two-thirds of the responding workers at least sometimes get emails in their off-hours from bosses who expect a reply.

“It’s now taken for granted that everyone has to check their work email during the weekend,” says Monika Morrow, SVP for Manpower’s Right Management unit.

That’s most true for exempt workers, who likely made up the bulk of the 569 survey respondents. Non-exempt workers, however, have to be paid. Maybe not for every contact, but, as we’ll see in a moment, more often than not.

For exempt workers, it’s pretty much black and white. Employment lawyers agree that for those salaried people, after-hours contacts just go with the job.

Anthony Oncidi

“It’s not a wage and hour issue” if the employee is exempt, says Anthony Oncidi, head of the California Labor & Employment Law Group at Proskauer Rose in Los Angeles. “They do the work or they can choose to leave.”

For non-exempt workers though, “it’s very much an issue we are beginning to see percolate through the courts.”

The U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act and state labor rules require employers to pay non-exempt workers for after-hours work that goes beyond minor, almost negligible amounts. Responding to a supervisor’s call about where a certain file might be, or if a bill was paid might be considered de minimus and not compensable if the time involved was trivial. Historically, such time slices weren’t easily measured and were too small to be worth the effort. The rule of thumb was less than 10 minutes.

Now, though, digital devices easily record and track messages and online time. As Oncidi notes, “it is no longer a swearing contest.” And companies that previously issued BlackBerries to only certain employees now are distributing them widely.

In Chicago, a police sergeant brought a class action suit for overtime pay because he and others were required to check and respond to messages on their department issued devices while off duty. The case is awaiting trial. A similar sort of case was brought by an ATT worker in California. The case was dismissed last year.

It will only be a matter of time before one of the cases reaches an appeals court, which will have to wrestle with the de minimus issue.

Todd Fredrickson

Attorney Todd Fredrickson, managing partner in the Denver office of labor firm Fisher & Phillips, says his rule of thumb for duration is five minutes. But things get fuzzy in situations where, say, there are multiple emails each of which may entail only a few moments.

What he’s telling his employer clients is “if you don’t want to pay for it, don’t let it happen.”

“This is a hot one for collective action,” he cautions.

Under the FLSA a successful plaintiff collects the back overtime, plus “liquidated damages” equal to the amount of back pay, and the employer pays attorney fees. And the FSLA provides for class actions, but the employees must opt-in. However, that’s not a major hurdle, so employers shouldn’t take much comfort in that.

What they should do, says Oncidi, is to reexamine who gets electronic devices, and make clear what the overtime policy is — to the rank and file as well as to managers.

“Don’t just let these things go on,” he says. Companies need to be “having a specific consciousness about these things.” Even unauthorized overtime has to be paid if the company “permits or suffers the employee to work. That’s what the language says,” explains Oncidi. Even if the policy says no overtime unless authorized, if the circumstances implicitly mean work is to be done but no express authorization is included, it has to be paid.

His example: An executive on an overseas trip who emails his non-exempt assistant who is off the clock to rebook a flight and rearrange the itinerary has implicitly authorized the overtime.

While exempt workers have no legal rights to a 40-hour work week, it doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences for an employer.

In California, even exempt employees are entitled to a real vacation. Text, call, or email an exempt vacationing employee and if they do work, the law forbids you from counting it as a vacation day.

Even so, Right Management’s Morrow points out that employers shouldn’t expect everyone to be “on” 24/7. “If this is everyday, you can’t sustain it,” she says. Tired workers lose focus and productivity is hurt. Turnover goes up and the company employment brand is hurt.

“The 24/7 workplace is here to stay. But workers need a break. They need downtime to decompress.”

Workers regularly swamped by after-hours emails, texts, or calls should raise the issue with the boss. Rather than complain, she suggests inquiring, counseling employees to, “Talk to them about their expectations about the emails. What do they expect in the way of a response.”

Some bosses will just fire off an idea, a project, a reminder as they think of it and not expect an immediate response.

Morrow has one other suggestion: take an electronics-free weekend. Let everyone know that you’ll be unavailable all weekend.

And hope that unlike my boss, yours will understand.

Partly this is driven by the commonly held assumption that these skilled and experienced people have been affected by the recession and are actually in the job market. Recruiters know this is not the case and that many candidates have become even more difficult to find and entice away from a secure position.

While demand for lesser-experienced, educated, and skilled candidates has slacked, it has risen for those with higher-level skills. Many firms are trying to replace the employees they had with moderate skills or who were in learning roles, with people already accomplished in their profession.

This is a poor time to be an apprentice or a mid-level worker, as the focus is on paying a bit more for people with better skills who are more capable of achieving goals with minimal help right away.

This has put a huge burden on recruiters. It has increased the number of searches needed for the hard-to-find candidates while almost eliminating the need to source for the easier-to-find positions. This, in turn, has driven recruiting leaders to take a hard look at developing specialized internal sourcing functions or finding an outside firm or individuals to do it for them.

Things to Consider

Before deciding whether to keep sourcing inside or find an external provider, a recruiting leader needs to make sure they have answered three questions carefully: (1) is there a sufficient volume of need that will last over some period of time to justify focused sourcing, (2) do you need to simply have the names and contact information of potential candidates so that a recruiter can screen and assess them, or do you also need screening and assessment or even more than that, and (3) do you have the internal staff with the capability, knowledge, and bandwidth to be effective?

If there is an ongoing need and you lack staff, looking at an outsourcing provider might be both time and cost effective. Building an internal sourcing capability can take months of training in addition to the time needed to find recruiters with the needed skills. Many firms turn to contractors for this service, and that may make sense. Contractors are often local, may be very familiar with your organization and both its culture and skill needs, and work for a reasonable fee. However, they also often increase the leader’s workload significantly.

When sourcing needs are high, timelines are short, needs varied and changing, and the skills hard to find locally, then other solutions may be better.

What Kind of Outsourcing Do You Need?

There are three types of outsourcing:

1. Generating names of potential candidates, often called research, which results in a list of names and contact information. These may turn out to be viable candidates, but many will not. All screening and assessment is made by internal recruiters and hiring managers. Results are most likely measured by how many names were generated, how quickly it was done, and how closely they met the previously-agreed-to specifications.
2. Generating names and then screening and assessing them. This usually means that only candidates who meet certain qualifications are presented. Results are measured by how many qualified candidates are presented and by the speed with which this takes place.
3. An emerging type of sourcing involves all of the above but also includes developing and managing a proprietary talent community of qualified candidates. This might include frequent communication with candidates, setting up and maintaining a Facebook page or something similar, and providing a means for internal recruiters and perhaps hiring managers to communicate with candidates.

Tips for Outsourcing Success

Clarity and Transparency: You need to have a clear strategy that outlines how sourcing fits into your overall success, where it is most needed, and be very open about why you are seeking an outside source.

Know which of the three types of outsourcing above you are primarily interested in: Obviously that choice will affect which outsource partner to use and will impact what level of relationship you need to have. Names generation can be performed by individual contractors and they can be located almost anywhere. The major choice criteria are ability to find the people you are looking for and the speed they can do it. Other sourcing arrangements are more complex; often need face-to-face contact at some point; and require a more sophisticated level of negotiation.

Choose an appropriate partner: Many times I see recruiting leaders choosing outsourcing partners without full knowledge of how deep their skills go or what their previous clients thought about them. You need to get references, spend time making sure their expertise matches your needs, and perhaps even start with a trial to see how they perform. You also need to make sure they can grow with your needs and fit your corporate culture.

Define your service level expectations: Work with your outsourcing partners to write down a set of expected performance levels, including time to find candidates, how many need to be presented, and what constitutes quality. Defining what a quality candidate is often becomes the most difficult aspect of a relationship. Take the time to be sure the definition is clear and how it will be measured is agreed to by the hiring manager, the outsourcing provider, and yourself.

Establish a vendor relationship manager: Relationships don’t just happen, and they are far more than a contract. Good communication, access to hiring managers when needed, and a willingness to negotiate through difficult issues are necessary components of any successful relationship.

Having a single person who acts as the account manager with the outsource provider is the best way to begin building a long-term-success model. When I speak with parties to failed outsourcing arrangements, lack of communication and difficulty to get issues resolved are significant factors.

Develop conflict resolution processes: Be sure to set up some informal and formal ways for conflicts, disagreements, and uncertainties to be addressed. This can be through the vendor relationship manager or through a committee or other body that is set up to deal with conflicts. The more defined this process is, the better it will be. It should answer questions such as: when is a conflict at the level of needed more formal resolution, how is a complaint raised, and whose decision is final.

Allow access to hiring managers and other key employees: Make sure you allow an appropriate level of direct interaction between the outsource team and the hiring managers. After all, the goal should be finding and placing a quality candidate, not about internal power struggles and politics.

There are many success stories, and all of them are because these basic steps were followed.

eFinancialCareers reports

Of course that means that half of Wall Street is expecting a bigger year-end bonus; better than 70 percent bigger, say 7 percent.

Market conditions, the Dodd-Frank financial industry regulation overhaul, and restraint by the firms themselves, were cited by the survey respondents as responsible for limiting bonuses. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has been up and down, though it has been climbing steadily since late September. And after the public reaction to the bonus disclosure of the last couple years, it’s not a surprise that firms are tightening up.

Those most optimistic about their bonuses are younger Street workers. Of those with 15 or more years experience, 38 percent are bracing for no or lower bonuses this year.

In reporting the results of the global survey, eFinancialCareers says compensation is a particular challenge for Wall Street firms. “It’s never an easy balance when retention continues to be an issue,” says Constance Melrose, eFinancialCareers North America managing director. “In fact, nine percent of those expecting fatter payouts said the primary factor was switching employers.”

The No. 1 sweetener, as might be expected, is more money. But flexible working arrangements, including telecommuting, and commitments to new technologies, also rank high as talent attractors.

“Money is important,” says Tom Silver, senior VP/North America for Dice. But other incentives can be compelling, he adds, especially to those candidates who live in metro areas, where telecommuting might be worth more than a few extra dollars.

Workplace flexibility “is a big deal,” says Silver.

Dice released the results of a late August survey of 1,357 recruiters, consultants, and staffing firms who look for IT professionals on Dice.com.

Although 69 percent reported they haven’t needed to improve candidate offers, the other 31 percent said they have. And the No. 1 reason — cited by half of them — is that the labor pool is getting smaller as IT hiring picks up. Another 22 percent of recruiters who have sweetened their offers say they had to because “technology professionals are still hesitant to leave their current employer.”

Silver says the tightening labor market for IT is due to a pickup in hiring. Since August of 2009 Dice has seen a 40 percent increase in the number of openings advertised on the site.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics bears out what Dice is reporting. In July of 2009, the job openings rate for information occupations was 1.8. A year later, it was 3.5. For the private sector as a whole in the U.S. the rate in July was 2.7, up from 2.0 a year ago.  (The job openings rate is the ratio of openings divided by total employment plus the number of job openings.)

Hiring, on the other hand, is about the same as it was a year ago. The BLS puts the hiring rate at 2.6 for information workers in July versus the 2.7 rate of July 2009. For all private sector workers, the rate stood at 4.1 versus the 3.9 of July 2009.

Those numbers suggest that IT recruiters are increasingly having a hard time finding the talent they want. Silver says that after money, a powerful attractor for tech professionals is the nature of the work and especially the opportunity to be involved with new and emerging technology.

In tech, he says, “the skills and skill requirements are always changing.” Workers want to keep abreast of those changes and improve their skills, so recruiters who can offer those opportunities — the “latest and greatest,” Silver says — are at an advantage.

Indeed, the Dice survey shows that after money and flexible working arrangements, recruiters offered the opportunity to work with new technology as an incentive. Among all recruiters — those who have had to sweeten offers and those who haven’t — company culture is their favorite selling point, followed by the type of projects.

What this should mean to a recruiter is that money is important, but flexibility and challenging projects can be deal-makers.

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan

HR software maker Kenexa will have a lot to talk about at its annual Kenexa World Conference later this month in Philadelphia.

That’s because Kenexa announced today that it has agreed to acquire compensation specialist Salary.com in an all cash offer for $80 million, or $4.07 per share.

According to a press release from Kenexa, “The agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of both companies, and Salary.com’s board intends to recommend that the Salary.com stockholders tender their shares in the offer.”

Salary.com, based in Massachusetts, makes software that helps businesses and individuals manage pay and performance, and, is very well-known in the HR space. Kenexa says that it expects to close the transaction for Salary.com in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Analyst Kris Tuttle at Seeking Alpha lists three things that “investors may or may not like” about this deal:

The price at just under 2x sales is reasonable. However Salary.com hasn’t grown much in the past two years, thanks in part to the weak employment market. Worse still, the company has done little to control spending and has been losing money at an $18M annual rate.

Due diligence has been limited and Kenexa participated in an auction process, which means that they are likely to discover far more information once the deal closes and there are bound to be some negative surprises.

Current customers of both companies may demand price concessions before any benefits of “cross-selling” can materialize. Most of the management commentary has been focused on opportunity but we know corporate customers are also interested in leveraging consolidation to get better “bundled” pricing.”

Tuttle added: “At the functional level the acquisition makes plenty of sense given that Kenexa has been focused on “talent management” and Salary.com has been in “compensation management” and on-demand HR solutions. Both companies have the same business model which is the classic on-demand/SaaS model we have all grown so accustomed to…. (But) as with most acquisitions, the value is going to be in how Kenexa can aggregate an excellent combined customer set with a rich set of data for better decision making and more efficient businesses processes.”

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan said of the deal, “We believe there is a tremendous opportunity to take Salary.com’s best-in-class compensation management solutions to Kenexa’s customer base, which includes some of the largest corporations in the world. In addition, Salary.com has several thousand customers that provide a fertile opportunity for Kenexa to deliver our suite of software, services and content. We believe Salary.com’s acquisition by Kenexa is a major positive for both of our respective companies, employees, partners, customers and prospects.”

The acquisition of Salary.com by Kenexa is part of an ongoing consolidation in the human resources space. Although it is small potatoes compared to something like the Aon-Hewitt deal earlier this summer, it does show that larger players in the HR space are looking to make deals that help to round out their product offerings so they can offer a wider array of services and software for end-to-end customer solutions.

This doesn’t suggest that the “best of breed” product approach is dead, just that companies like Kenexa see an opportunity to leverage and perhaps up sell their customer base if they can offer a wider variety of software and services across the board.

So, don’t be surprised if you see more of these kinds of deals in the months to come.

(This story was originally published on TLNT.)

I just returned from ERE’s Spring Expo in San Diego, California, where hundreds of recruiters were upbeat and positive (quite possibly the most upbeat in several years.) Regardless of the subject being discussed, the outlook by nearly all was optimistic; that is, until the compensation department was mentioned. Anytime the conversation touched on the working relationship between compensation and recruiting, the tone of the conversation turned darker.

Phrases like “hard to work with” and “out of touch” emerged frequently, and words like dislike, roadblock, and yes even “hate” characterized the relationship. It’s like water and oil. Compensation and recruiting don’t seem to mix well and rarely work together smoothly. Here are some quick reasons that justify being critical of the compensation department.

Slow Offers: As recruiters, we know that the very best candidates have multiple offers and that you have to act quickly to successfully land them. Unfortunately, compensation doesn’t seem to be aware of the negative consequences associated with a failure to respond rapidly. All too often it takes compensation days, and in some cases weeks, to approve a final offer. For firms with lengthy processes, the added delay from compensation means that all too often top candidates will have already accepted an offer at another firm before an offer can even be presented.

Lowball Offers: You would think that by chance alone occasionally a recruiter would receive an offer from compensation that was “too high,” but every recruiter knows that compensation professionals seem to take pride in undervaluing talent and generating “lowball” offers consistently. Undoubtedly, at some point in your profession you have been asked to present an offer so ridiculously out of touch with reality that you were embarrassed to do so, knowing in advance that the offer would not only be rejected but damage the candidate’s perception of the organization and the hiring manager in particular.

Equal Doesn’t Cut It: Compensation departments routinely set uniform market pay targets across the organization. Regardless of the mission-criticality to the organization of the role, all comp ranges are set at some percent of market. (I won’t dive into the lack of data-based decision-making used to determine that target rate, as the entire concept is flawed.) As recruiters, we realize that easy-to-fill roles or roles with little performance differential between top and average performers should be compensated at market, but also that hard-to-fill and mission-critical roles should have target compensation rates above market. A uniform pay target penalizes the most valuable talent and rewards the least valuable

Ugly Job Descriptions: Great recruiters understand that job descriptions are “sales collateral.” If crafted well, they can excite potential candidates, but the reverse is also true. History tells us that if the compensation department is involved in producing job descriptions, they will most likely be long, dull, full of generic jargon, and littered with antiquated compensable factors that do nothing to excite but are easy to benchmark. To make matters worse, the woefully-out-of-date job descriptions of job structures rarely get refreshed at the rate the business itself is changing. As recruiters and former candidates ourselves, we know that out-of-date job descriptions that include dated terminology and approaches can scare away even mediocre applicants.

No Brand Connection: Recruiters are always striving to make it easy for potential candidates to learn about what features position their organization among the best. Unfortunately, the compensation department is of little help in building brand image because they’re hung up with secrecy. Organizations rarely publish pay and benefits information that is honest and compelling. Even organizations that pay extremely well and offer a bevy of unique people programs that impact employees’ lives find it difficult to get compensation to package information in a way that potential applicants and employees can easily grasp.

No Rewards: It’s well established in business that “what you measure and reward gets done.” Unfortunately compensation departments rarely if ever tie HR function and hiring manager compensation to great recruiting and retention. By not measuring and rewarding great talent acquisition/retention, compensation schemas send a clear message about the relative importance compared to those activities that are directly bonused. Because managers are not measured or rewarded on recruiting, recruiters end up suffering, as reading resumes and interviewing candidates is not a high priority. In order to increase their level of commitment, cooperation, and understanding, compensation professionals should have a significant percentage of their pay tied to successful recruiting.

Salary Survey Lag: The concept of using yearly salary surveys to at least partially determine market compensation is a sound one, unless of course, you’re in a market or region that is growing/evolving rapidly. In those cases, the rate at which market compensation is changing far outpaces the cycle time required to produce the benchmark data, making such research outdated upon completion. As many firms adjust such studies to account for aging using a uniform approach, it is likely that highly competitive talent areas where market compensation is growing exponentially will be undervalued in your schema.

Integration and Accountability: Most interdependent business functions are willing to work together to ensure that their efforts work toward accomplishing a common goal. To improve their chances of success, many leverage clear communication channels, documented processes, service-level agreements, and shared performance metrics. While service-level agreements and shared performance metrics have become common in recruiting, I have yet to see a functional example of such efforts emerging from compensation that unite the two departments under a shared set of goals.

Final Thoughts

Successful recruiting truly requires an integrated team effort. It takes a high level of cooperation between interdependent HR departments and hiring managers to produce optimal results. Each of the players need to understand how their actions directly impact one another and the overall success of the hiring process. Recruiters need a compensation department that provides a higher level of customer service and that accepts accountability for their role in ensuring that the organization attracts and retains the very best talent. Should that ever occur, “hate” would transition to “love” rather quickly.

Up at 6am. 15 points. Hit the snoozebar once. Minus 5 points. Brush your teeth for three full minutes. 50 points (with a bonus from the toothpaste maker). Right-sized healthy breakfast. 25 points.

Arrive at work on time. 25 points. Attend all meetings on time. 75 points. Make meeting contributions recognized by peers. 100 points. Return all emails and phone calls. 25 points. Healthy lunch. 30 points. Walk after lunch. 50 points. Make five calls (or widgets or requisitions or whatever) as described in objectives. 40 points. Stay 1/2 hour later than usual. 25 points.

Take public transit home. 70 points. Watch TV (an enormous point bonanza). Bush teeth for three full minutes. 50 points (with a bonus from the toothpaste maker). Get in bed early enough to earn the well-rested points bonus in the morning. – Adapted from Design Outside The Box

It’s the logical extension of performance management programs. By coupling frequent-flyer style points systems, game design, and performance management, the world has become points crazed. Work performance is ranked along with every other aspect of life.

The points system allows companies to identify and harvest their true fans. They compete in every aspect of life for the opportunity to build an “authentic” relationship calibrated by measurement. Payment for the consumption of advertising, which in 2010 is already somewhat expected, has exploded into a global preoccupation.

Rather than an Orwellian “Big Brother,” life is an interaction with a storm of “little sisters” who measure us and offer incentives for performance. Like Life in Public, our hunger for recognition, achievement, and progress increasingly makes our lives public and transparent.

As each individual becomes a monetizable data stream, first the marketers join in. Sooner or later, the employers begin to understand that you can mine the point system as a cross-check on employee potential and performance. Ultimately, the point system becomes a combination of pipeline and reference.

It’s as if MeritBuilder‘s wildest fantasy took shape. As the point system expands, there’s little reason for employers not to make it a part of compensation. After all, if you can use the Frequent Flyer miles and the company gives them to you for a bit more than they got them wholesale, why wouldn’t you take them?

And so, we are entering a post-national currency system. With points available for barter across product and company lines, the ATM of the future is likely to allow access and movement between monetary and non-monetary point systems. After all, Money Wants to Be Free.

It’s the all-gaming, all-the-time future.

The keys to mastery of career, manpower, staffing, workforce planning, compensation, and a host of other issues are the same for all sides. Knowing what you want, with extreme specificity, is the core capability required to navigate the all points universe. With incentives and compensation for every increment of behavior, the ability to alter specifications on demand and align compensation systems accordingly is where competitive advantage lies.

This implies a deeper and more robust connection between HR, recruiting and line management. The fine tuning of job offers and delivery of novel compensation structures requires a constant collaboration amongst the three groups.

You can easily imagine workforce planning becoming an exchange. You can, as easily, imagine this as the structure for an all-contracting economy.

The traditional conference model makes this sort of weird assumption that the split between “person on the stage” and “audience” is somehow normal and appropriate. In the age of the Internet, it is rarely true that the distance between speaker and participants is as great as it once was.

We all have access to the same content. That wasn’t the status quo even five years ago. I am constantly astonished by how well read, smart, and experienced my colleagues are. In this experiment, I hope to create a collegial atmosphere for conversation.

If you come and are so inclined, I’m happy to run the conversation about the Future of Recruiting and the coming disruptions well into the evening.

• Five Scenarios: I Introduction
• Five Scenarios: II The Trends
• Five Scenarios: III The Marketplace
• Five Scenarios: IV The Future Matters
• Five Scenarios: V Guild Cities
• Five Scenarios VI: Invasion of the Shallybots
• Five Scenarios VII: The Pandemic

Also, Peter Clayton’s Total Picture Radio has a podcast that gives a good overview. Here’s the transcript.

Thank You: Pinstripe Talent. Without their visionary support, this project would not have been possible.

In fact, most of the C-suite has seen their base take a hit, says Compdata, which surveyed some 5,000 organizations across the country to compile its proprietary report Executive Compensation. CIO pay is down 2.1 percent while COOs are down 11 percent.

But unless you happen to hold one of those titles, don’t get all weepy over the news. The average CEO is still earning $346,000 in base pay a year. COOs average $214,000 and CIOs average $175,300.

Only CFO base pay was up. Not much — barely 1 percent — but it was up. The press release from Compdata doesn’t say what the average CFO earns, but it does offer some industry examples: “The average base salary of a Chief Financial Officer in the insurance industry is $232,200, while CFOs in healthcare earn $208,900. The utilities industry pays their CFOs $194,900 on average, compared to those in banking and finance, $191,500. CFOs earn the least in the not-for-profit industry, $173,900.”

Lest you think that these numbers are skewed by the inclusion of some of those highly compensated C-people, even modest-sized firms with 500-1,000 workers pay their CEOs an average of $361,300. At a company with under 100 workers the CEO averages $264,700.

The $600 report has much more information than this, of course. It covers 65 job titles — including HR — and has the data arranged by region and industry, covering bennies like company cars, travel expenses, stock options, and the more usual health, life, and other insurance coverage.

If you decide, despite the decline in salary, to climb up the alphabet titles, keep an eye on your company’s succession plan. Or, if there isn’t one, get one started.

Korn/Ferry says more and more companies are developing them; so many, in fact, that the giant talent management firm issued a press release saying it has seen a 400 percent surge in its CEO succession planning consulting work. And that’s just in the first six months.

The company didn’t offer a number, but it did say, “This is more than twice the number of succession planning projects in the prior two years combined.”

It currently is at work on more than 25 CEO succession planning projects.

“With increased government business regulation, the turbulent business environment and real-time examples of corporate boards that did not have immediate CEO replacements at the helm, we are seeing a significant increase in corporate boards planning for CEO succession,” said Joe Griesedieck, vice chairman and managing director of Korn/Ferry’s Board & CEO Services.

In late January, despite opposition from the Society of Human Resource Management, President Obama & Congress eliminated the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination. “This is a game-changer,” said Gerry Crispin, recruiting industry icon, at a recent conference, referring to this new legislation. “Companies need to pay attention to this.”

Crispin is right. Just last week the Wall Street Journal reported that a former Anheuser-Busch executive sued the beer giant for discrimination, saying she was paid less than male executives. Francine Katz, a former Anheuser-Busch vice president of communications and consumer affairs, filed a lawsuit last in a state court in St. Louis, “accusing the brewer of maintaining a corporate culture that ‘adversely impacts women,’ resulting in lower salaries and bonuses and fewer opportunities.”

This well-publicized lawsuit is the first of many more such suits to come. As a result of this legislation, companies are now required to meticulously document pay decisions and retain detailed employment records to ward off lawsuits like Anheuser-Busch is facing. This legislation is forcing you as a recruiter to more closely consider factors beyond what it takes a candidate to accept an offer. In light of this legislation, as a recruiting professional you need to advise your client on compensation best practices beyond closing the deal. Before constructing any offer for a candidate you should:

• Analyze comparables. Run the numbers on all your employees’ compensation packages, including starting pay, merit raises, cost of living increases, and benefits. Individuals who perform the same jobs and have the same qualifications should be paid similar rates. If your candidate requires a significantly larger package, you must ask whether this one deal is worth the risk. If you do not have access to this type of data — you probably should.
• Analyze market data. There are many tools available to research what professionals are earning in any given area. Consult Towers Watson & Co or other leading compensation market research data. Any offer you prepare should be close to what market data suggests is appropriate.
• What is your candidate earning now? Any significant pay increase beyond their existing package often triggers additional scrutiny. Be ready to defend this type of decision with detailed documentation.
• Ensure there are demonstrable business reasons for any disparities in compensation with an offer you are preparing.
• Keep everything. Because there is no longer a statute of limitations, you need to indefinitely retain records relating to compensation. Remember, there is no longer a 180-day statute of limitations, an employee can go back years. This type of data gathering is protecting your organization in the future.
• Most important: have your compensation director on speed dial. When’s the last time you paid him/her a visit? Schedule an appointment and partner with that organization to ensure best business practices.

Now go find that perfect candidate and close the deal.

Here’s the data comparing this year and last.

Compensation Data For Executive Hires
(2008-2009)

That’s according to a survey released today, taken in March, of top HR and reward executives in medium- to large-size organizations across a range of industries.

Here’s what else is being done to hold down compensation costs: