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Last Week Dan Loeb of Third Point Capital sent a letter to the board of directors of Yahoo asserting that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson actually did not have a degree in degree in computer science as his executive biography indicated. Yahoo replied that this was an “inadvertent error.” Mr. Loeb wrote a response to the board demanding his removal for cause by noon on Monday.

Stories are being written by Kara Swisher, Michael Arrington, and many others about the incident. Most articles discuss the integrity of Thompson or the board of directors itself. Some might ask the legitimate question of whether an executive of a technology company even needs a computer science degree. Answer: They don’t. After all, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner did an amazing job turning around in the 1990s after initially turning down the job because he didn’t consider himself a technology guy. It makes the actions of Thompson all the more puzzling.

Ultimately this begs the following question, “How in the world did a Fortune 500 company recruit and hire a CEO with inaccurate statements in his biography?” This might indicate symptoms of a more broad and disturbing problem, such as lack of proper recruiting budget investment, formal process, and execution of proper human capital processes. To view this as a Yahoo problem and move on would be missing a rare opportunity to drive positive change. keep reading…

I recently read an article suggesting that recruiters only spend six seconds reviewing a resume to determine whether or not a candidate was a fit to the job they were attempting to fill.

6 Seconds?!

My initial thought was, “How can a recruiter get enough information to determine whether or not a candidate is worth talking to in such a sparse amount of time?” keep reading…

Employers of hourly labor in industries including fast-food dining, retail, and contact centers often struggle with high turnover, and the associated costs of constantly hiring and training new employees. A common screening technique used by recruiters is to weed out “job hoppers” — those candidates who have held many short-term jobs. But a recent study by Evolv’s analytics team found that work history is a poor predictor of future job tenure.

The study analyzed applicant data and employment outcomes from more than 21,000 call center agents drawn from five major contact centers to determine the relationship between previous work experience and future employment outcomes. The results show zero correlation between the number of positions employees have had in the recent past and how long they’ll last on their next job. A candidate who’s had five jobs in five years is no more likely to quit than someone who’s had one job for five years. In addition, the study reports people who are unemployed when they apply for a job also have the same expected tenure as any other candidate.

Job-hoppers and the “Perpetually Unemployed” keep reading…

I met with a client today who made me smile — a Cheshire-Cat-Eating-Grin Smile, as a matter of fact.

He said, “Heather, I need to invest in the screening phase to figure out if these candidates are a good fit for our culture and our clients. That way, I don’t have to give up resources when I fire them later.”

DUH! 

After I wiped the grin off my face, I told him I was proud of him and glad to hear it. (I refrained from reminding him I’ve been preachin’ that for years.)

Pay now or pay later … either way you’ll pay. 

If you are a recruiter, HR professional, supervisor, or leader who wants to fill the seat, there is no need to read more of this post. Good luck to you.

However, if you want to fit someone with your organization and have him stick, read on. keep reading…

Regular readers of this roundup, and of ERE, will be so very not shocked to know that there is a new website calls itself the “eHarmony of talent.”

But before we get to the love, we turn to the latest installment in the epic saga we call .JOBS, or, if you prefer, Dot JOBS.

To  refresh your memory and bring you up-to-date, this is the story of how .jobs, an Internet extension like .com or .net, became the focus of an international legal dispute when the wholesaler of .jobs addresses began to lend it out to DirectEmployers Association, which uses it today for its job board universe. That wasn’t the intent back in 2005 when SHRM and Employ Media (the for-profit registrar/wholesaler) when they partnered up to convince the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create the new extension. keep reading…

the Marriott in Kaua'i, Hawaii

Candidate selection and assessment is one of the most conservative processes in all of talent management. Many think the topic is not worth a detailed examination, but a weak assessment or interview process can be the primary cause for not hiring top candidates. For decades, the majority of firms have relied heavily on the basic trio of resume screening, interviewing, and reference checks to choose the best candidates. Fortunately, the growth of metrics, the Internet, and technology in HR is now challenging these traditional approaches.

Over the last couple of years, a significant number of new approaches have evolved, and as a result, recruiters and hiring managers now have a wide range of alternative approaches to consider. This article is designed to make you aware of some of these alternative leading-edge candidate assessment approaches that firms have tried. If you are bored with interviews, you should enjoy reading about these new approaches.

A Long list of Alternative Candidate Assessment Approaches to Consider keep reading…

The site mentioned at the end of 2011 to match MBA graduates with employers has launched. Better Weekdays is aimed at capturing the “values, interests, skills, and style as they relate to leadership development and career enhancement” and comparing it to other MBA alums, and to hiring organizations.

Briefly, it works like this.

The site is bootstrapped by the founder, Chris Motley, who tells me “we have received a lot of interest from Fortune 100 companies — however, our initial focus is on building the community.”

Better Weekdays was also part of the Silicon Valley Founder Institute.

What Facebook Reveals About Candidates

In recent weeks there have been a lot of stories about employers asking candidates for their Facebook passwords or accepting a hiring manager as a friend, apparently sanctioned by HR. This is the kind of behavior that so endears HR to others in the organziation, and why it’s true that no child grows up wanting to work in HR. I suspect this has more to do with some people trying to justify their existence and demonstrate that they belong in the 21st century than with accomplishing anything useful. The problem may solve itself since such acts are a violation of FB’s privacy policy – but never underestimate the tenacity of an HR professional determined to prove their usefulness.

But the more relevant question here is: what do they expect to find? keep reading…

Remember that California gaming company from a year ago, looking for coders to work for six weeks?

IGN is back. Its “no resumes allowed” program again involves recruiting people for six weeks, and possibly more. IGN says it cares little about where people went to college, or if they did, or what their experience is.

Its president, in fact, points out that “the average age someone learns to code is 13.4.”

The application deadline for Code-Foo 2012 is April 30. Applicants should hear back by May 18 as to their status. Last year, 75,000 ending up viewing the application, 104 completed it, 30 were selected to participate, and eight were hired.

The New York Stock Exchange will be using a new hiring tool from a company that’s launching today and is backed by a million dollars in angel funding. Charles Handler is among the advisors to the firm, called EmployInsight.

In short, here’s how it works.

keep reading…

Facebook, and potentially other social media as well, can be used to assess a person’s potential for job success.

That not-so-surprising conclusion is reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and comes out of two studies — one dealing with academic performance, the other with job performance — conducted on college campuses in Indiana, Illinois, and at Auburn University.

What is surprising about the study is that a group of modestly trained evaluators could better predict success after spending a few minutes on a Facebook profile than could a self-assessment of personality traits often used by industry.

“SNW (social networking websites) ratings correlated with job performance, hirability, and academic performance criteria,” the researchers concluded, “and the magnitude of these correlations was generally larger than for self-ratings.” keep reading…

I continue to be impressed by the evolution of pre-employment assessment tools. This evolution is being driven by the continued growth of the value proposition assessment provides. As a result, an increasing number of new product include embedded assessments designed to help predict which applicants have the best chance of success.

This past year has brought a proliferation of firms that are using assessments to provide a new twist on matching online job applicants with job openings (and conversely allowing firms to match their job openings to candidate data residing in a database).

To understand the origin of Internet based matching, one has to turn the clock back about 15 years to the dawn of the job board. Job boards provided arguably the biggest overall change to the status quo for the way — both in the way people are hired because of the increased ability for individuals to find out about job opportunities, as well as for those hiring, to locate viable candidates.

Things have not changed much as even in the present day. The basic Internet job search equation involves a matching process in which each party provides information about who they are and what they are looking for. Behind-the-scenes algorithms living on servers evaluate the data provided by each party and calculate a match.

Although the job boards would argue otherwise, my basic description of the matching process used by most of them can be summed up with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” keep reading…

Video didn’t kill the radio star and it hasn’t killed the job boards so far, but another new career site would like to take a chunk of their business. This startup hopes to marry video, screening, and job searching. Ring a bell? Well, we were talking about something a little similar two weeks ago.

That company, Get Hired, was really more of an applicant tracking system, with an emphasis on audio and video — and more. This one’s goals are less massive. It’s called Spark Hire, and it has received a million dollars in angel funding from private investors.

Like with other career sites, job seekers can search for jobs, of course. They can also record a 60-second video about themselves.

As for employers, they can do a number of things, some commonly found on other sites, some not. keep reading…

In this webcast, Dr. Charles Handler, president and founder of Rocket-Hire, a vendor neutral assessment consulting firm, shares his proven methodology for developing an assessment strategy and choosing the best vendor to help you execute it.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

In this webcast, we will show what the most important components of fit really are – the factors that matter in a person’s on-the-job performance. We will demonstrate how these factors impact performance. We will show what can be done and is being done to increase the likelihood that everyone in every job – not just new hires – has a high degree of fit with the position. We will describe specific steps to take, including time commitment, budgets and resources, to achieve the objective of high quality, high performing employees more likely to remain in the organization where they fit best.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Has anyone asked you “what’s your Klout score?” If you are on the leading edge of corporate recruiting and you are constantly on the lookout for new tools and approaches, one of the emerging tools that you should be aware of is social media analytics that measure online influence.

In a business world that is increasingly dominated by social media, it simply makes sense to hire individuals with extensive social networks and the ability to communicate with and influence others. keep reading…

It’s not often that a hiring process is described as “exhilarating” — a mystery with no clues is how candidates are more apt to feel about most such processes — but exhilarating is how one company is describing its selection for a healthcare technology trainer.

The crux of this “Big Break” as it’s called is a reality-TV-style day of speed interviews, a videotaped Q&A session, and a presentation. It starts with an online application to become part of this process, which is a partnership between the non-profit Ochsner Health System and an agency called Intellect Resources, which has been tweeting about this. Candidates “advance or face elimination” based on their “professionalism, presentation skills, communication skills, poise, attitude, teamwork and ability to think on their feet.”

The winner (winners, actually — 200 of them) will be a $20-25/hour trainer, teaching people the use of an electronic medical records system for at least a five-month contract.

“American Idol merged with a career fair,” is how this is all described on a recruiting video.

The online application is open through January 19, with the big audition day held on the 21st at the International House Hotel in New Orleans, and the job starting February 6. keep reading…

Recruiting never seems to change very much. As I have often written, even with computers, smart phones, cheap video, big bandwidth, and years of accumulated experience, the way we look for people and select them looks very much the same as it looked 50 years ago.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section. keep reading…

We began 2011 talking about new “matchmaker” job sites starting up. As 2011 progressed, as Jeff Dickey-Chasins said, such sites, some more art than science, “proliferated.”

A year later, we’re not done yet. At least one new site is hoping to join the bunch. Called “Better Weekdays,” it is being built behind the scenes, with one major player in the company, who’d rather we not use his name, telling us it’s about five months off from launch. keep reading…

No matter who you’re meeting with, make a good impression. But hiring managers even more so. You will potentially be partnering with these individuals during your entire stay at the company you are with, and potentially beyond.

During my first corporate recruiting position I felt that my role was as a “service provider” to my managers, so when they said jump, I did. Looking back on that now I realize how many opportunities I missed to set myself up as an expert in my profession of recruiting because I lacked the confidence to command a meeting and initiate a true partnership during the beginning of that relationship.

During my time as a recruiter I have run across several different types of managers and most can be intimidating. Below are some of the most common personality types that I’ve run across and ways that you can forge strong relationships with them despite some of their traits. keep reading…