Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business.

If you haven’t tried it for yourself, go here and test it out. What you’ll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different — and better — than the typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and concepts. A bookkeeper doesn’t need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley; a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you’re going to get CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with accountants and … you get the idea.

It’s “the world’s best search engine,” said Monster’s Javid Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine “that really helps you stop searching.”

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali explained.

It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate results. Monster showed this off during the demo using “business development manager” for the search with the result that all nine listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer: the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants will be of higher quality since an ad won’t just turn up in a search because it happens to contain the seeker’s keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved, know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845 for a two-week access. Right now, it’s a bargain at $260 for three days of searching in an area.

It’s also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a specific keyword in a resume. And it won’t store search histories for OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it’s a big step. For Monster, it’s a $100 million-plus step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35 million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It probably won’t be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than on bookkeepers.

Why can’t they do that now? They probably could, but the technical management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search. But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you’re looking for a CFO, you don’t want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That’s worth something.

Whatever the case, if you have ever felt as though you might be running into legal issues, the U.S. EEOC’s Assistant Legal Counsel Carol Miaskoff says to listen up to the following basic rules:

Facebook and Similar Social Networking Sites

When you have interactions with people on these sites, keep in mind non-discrimination principles, says Miaskoff.

“If race, gender, or age is obvious, you need to not let that control your reaction to the person; that’s the same skill you would bring to an interview. It sounds so basic, and it is basic,” she says.

Encourage team-wide use of simple procedures when scouting sources like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. For example, provide basic training to your team; institute new procedures; or follow a set of questions that prompt your team to move beyond that “gut-level reaction.”

Blogs

Lots of people have them, and some people will blog about things like a personal illness. What to do when you stumble over this information?

Although ADA rules mean recruiters must assess qualifications first, without asking questions about disabilities, there is a caveat.

“If you inadvertently stumbled upon the information, you have NOT violated the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act], which prohibits pre-offer questions about disability,” she says.

Video Resumes

Although there are no court rulings on video resumes yet, Miaskoff says recruiters must be prompted to look at the same qualifications, despite a person’s appearance.

“In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with them. So have feedback from various, diverse sources on your team who all view the video resume,” she says. “Put checks in there so you don’t have one person discriminating.”

Video resumes are also employment records and need to be retained for two years. This is where reluctance comes in to use them, she says. Because people are concerned about keeping a picture of someone who has been screened out of your company’s hiring process, there is sometimes an added fear of litigation.

Still, “that’s not a good-enough reason; if you have good documentation in place as to what your process was, you will be able to show you gave everyone fair and equal consideration.”

Public Information: Criminal Background Checks

The EEOC has some rules governing background checks as well.

“This is an area where the EEOC policy says it is ok to do a criminal background check; there is no prohibition categorically,” she says. But the check has to relate to the job in question and whether the conviction fairly screens out a candidate and his or her ability to do the job.

“Obviously, there are crimes that disqualify people for jobs,” she says, “so look at the relationship to the job.”

Public Information: Credit Checks

There is not half as much legal authority out there about screening people out on a bad credit score, she cautions.

“Now, you must again ask whether not being ‘credit-worthy’ is consistent with the job in question. It might be with jobs related to access to money. You really have to think this through.”

Online Testing

The New Haven firefighter case is the most prominent recent testing case, she says.

Testing is a tool used to decide who you will consider for a job. “Look at the impact and job-relatedness carefully,” she says. “This applies to all tests, including personality assessments.”

Accessibility

ADA rules require that people with disabilities have equal access to all employment opportunities. Beyond reasonable accommodations, online recruiting means having online software and tools available to people with poor vision, are hard of hearing, or have trouble using their hands.

Think of “simple accessibility” when you use online tools, she says, including “employment web pages, online recruitment, and online applications.”

Effective Matching

The first is QuietAgent. It has developed a new approach to matching candidates and jobs. Matching technology is nothing new. Other products have been available for at least a decade. But most matching products are a black box. Using them requires having total faith in the methodology and algorithms developed by the vendors. They do work, but frequently it’s not all clear why candidates get ranked in a particular way. There’s also no way for a recruiter to influence the matching. The vendors are not inclined to let anyone do so because the technology is the result of a big investment in research. Recruiters find this “father-knows-best” approach frustrating when the matching doesn’t produce the kind of results they expect.

QuietAgent has moved beyond these limitations. The technology uses the ONet database as the basis for classifying and matching jobs with resumes. ONet is the largest occupational classification system in the world, and it’s in the public domain, making the basis for matches better understood. More importantly, QuietAgent’s technology can be adapted. Users can adjust how the matching works. A user can specify different combinations of criteria on which to match candidates with jobs. For example, five years of experience and certain skills, or three years and a different set. This is a big deal, as all recruiters know. Hiring criteria are rarely rigid, and search tools, such as the ones on job boards and ATS, allow for little flexibility.

QuietAgent is the technology behind AllianceQ and UnitedWeWork. The former is an association of larger employers that are willing to share resumes of candidates with others. The latter is a free job board. QuietAgent’s association with AllianceQ makes for a powerful combination, because it also provides a supply of candidates. This may not seem like much today, when candidates are in abundance, but the day will come when candidates are again in short supply; then, this makes for a great combination in one package.

Reliable Resumes

I recently heard an interview with a NASA veteran who was hired at the start of the Apollo program. What was most interesting was that he and most other engineers were hired at NASA purely on the basis of their resumes. They sent in a resume and subsequently received an offer letter. This wasn’t unusual, up until the 1960s. Bringing candidates in from out of town was rarely done because of the expense. And no one did phone interviews; long distance calls cost a lot, and the sound quality wasn’t all that great. If a candidate looked good on paper then they were often hired.

How things change. A resume isn’t worth a whole lot today. We use it as the starting point of a long process. That is the way it needs to be. By some estimates a third or more contain significant exaggerations or outright lies.

One company solving this problem is Resumefit. Candidates who complete the company’s assessments get a “certified resume” locked with a digital key. The value here is that any recruiter receiving the resume can be assured that the claimed skills are true. Other vendors have attempted to create equivalent products before, but they’ve focused more on verifying employment, references, and criminal history. That has limited value before a hiring decision is made. Knowing that the skills and abilities described meet a certain level is much more useful to employers using skills-based hiring. This makes the recruiting process much more efficient because recruiters don’t have to waste time trying to read between the lines and can be reasonably assured that decisions they make are based on reliable information.

QuietAgent and Resumefit may not generate the buzz created by Twitter but they are solutions to well-known problems and serve very fundamental needs in recruiting. These needs will still be around when the ardor for social networking cools, as it will. Recruiters use of social media will balance out once its usefulness is better understood, settling into a niche supporting referrals and talent communities. But we’ll still be looking for effective and efficient ways to match candidates with jobs and find resumes with reliable information.

According to Gartner, Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, more than 25 percent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013.

As of this past February, emarketer.com ranked YouTube as the fifth-most popular website in the United States, eclipsed only by the likes of Google (who owns YouTube), Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting. Used together they create a better candidate experience and raise the likelihood of a better hire. They also enrich recruiters by giving them a much deeper perspective on a candidate, in less time, than has ever been possible.

Video is particularly attractive to Gen Y — those young people between 20 and 29 who total about 70 million people. They are avid users of video and expect to be marketed to, taught, entertained, and recruited by video. Go to an Apple store and watch what young folks are doing: watching videos or movies or looking at pictures using the Internet. I rarely see any of them reading an article or an online newspaper.

They have been raised on television and those in the 25 to 34 age group watch more than 140 hours of it each quarter. The percentage of people watching videos and movies on the Internet has nearly doubled since 2006 and is now over 60% of all Internet users.

Some organizations are already leveraging the Internet and video to give them a competitive edge in reaching the millions of people who regularly use such sites as YouTube and Hulu.

Here is how they are doing it:

To showcase their company
They are creating career sites that are heavy with short videos featuring tours of the company, interviews with executives, candid chats with employees, and day-in-the-life scenarios of what people in particular positions do all day. They may include videos about the local area or videos that have been made by news agencies about the company. Examples of excellent career sites that contain video include those of KPMG, Deloitte, and Whirlpool. These have all won awards for excellence based on the success they have had in recruiting the talent they need using their career site. Companies such as RecruitTV and Thinktalk provide the expertise and service to help you produce these kinds of videos.

An interactive, video-based website is the core requirement for employment branding and may be the single best thing you can do to improve your success in attracting and hiring the people you want.

To post or distribute jobs
It is now possible to make a short video specifically describing a particular position, and then use that video instead of the usual written description. In London, three career magazines now provide this as an alternative to the written word. A Twitter-like application called 12Seconds allows you to make, yep, you got it, a 12-second video about a job and distribute it to a group of followers.

Monster Canada allows you to insert a streaming video into any job posting. And climber.com posts your video job description focused on Gen Y candidates to 45 different video sharing sites.

To hold career fairs
Virtual career fairs have been around for a while, mostly focused on college recruiting. CollegeGrad.com offers this type of virtual careers fair. For a broader audience CareerBuilder, Unisfair, and InXpo. A virtual career fair has much greater reach than a physical one and allows candidates to learn more about the positions you have and your organization. They are cost-effective ways to reach out to a broad geographical slice of people, quickly.

To do targeted marketing
Advanced and emerging uses of video include, for example, having your job video display when a person goes to a particular website or webpage. All clicks on your job display are tracked so that you can see who and how many show interest. This information will allow you to narrow down the sites where you display the ads, improve the content of the videos, and control costs.

Product marketers have used similar technology for a while and are now making it available for recruiting. As this technology matures, it will be possible to greatly reduce the number of unqualified applicants by limiting who actually sees a job ad.

To interview candidates
Interviewing candidates by streaming video is becoming more popular now that more than 60% of Americans have broadband access from their homes. With a simple webcam and a decent Internet connection using Skype, a recruiter or hiring manager or both together can interview a candidate from anywhere. This lowers costs and time to offer and provides a candidate and the hiring authorities an experience that is often as good as if not better than a face-to-face appearance.

Many companies offer video interviewing including Greenjobinterview.com, Clooks.com, and Hirevue.com.

For assessment and screening
A final way that video is being used is in candidate assessment. By creating scenarios and games that stimulate real-world experiences, recruiters can gain insight into how people would potentially react to them. These job simulations have been used by the U.S. Army and by retail stores intent on seeing how potential sales associates might respond to different customer problems. The U.S. State Department has recently started using a game to assess potential Foreign Service officers. It is called American Diplomat and recreates many of the scenes and issues a diplomat may encounter.

Another aspect of assessment is the self-assessment that candidates make when they actually see what it is like to do a particular job. Shaker Consulting does a good job of creating validated job previews that help candidates self-assess, as well as help recruiters and hiring managers.

Video is rapidly becoming core to recruiting success. Organizations that do not start to build video into every aspect of talent acquisition will find that they are at a competitive disadvantage, especially with college students and younger experienced hires. This is the age of video and we all need to learn to use it better.

For the last seven years, Rocket-Hire has surveyed users of web-based pre-employment assessment tools, so we again asked members of the ERE community to tell us about their usage of typical pre-employment screening, testing, and assessment programs. As with years past, we zeroed in on the pulse of pre-employment assessment usage. And in an increasing climate of legal scrutiny for testing, and the hoopla surrounding the Ricci case, we decided to focus the content of today’s article on two issues that are inexorably linked: Implications of evaluating one’s assessment strategy, and attention to relevant legal issues.

Those interested in obtaining a copy of our full report can email us (chandler@rocket-hire.com) and we will be sure to send you a full copy once it has been completed.Or, check out an upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, probably the October 2009 issue, where we’ll have an in-depth analysis.

A Word About our Methodology
This year, 148 recruitment and hiring professionals completed the Rocket-Hire Online Assessment Usage Survey. Respondents were evenly representative of recruiters, recruiting leaders, HR executives, business owners, and hiring managers, and featured a wide variety of organizations and hiring situations.

Use of Assessment Tools
Overall usage of assessment tools was generally about the same as in past years — roughly two-thirds of respondents. Of that two-thirds, 54% are deploying both paper-based and online assessment, and 30% are using exclusively online assessment. The remaining employ only paper-based tools. Most use a variety of different assessment methods, with the majority using between one and three different types. The table below reveals the proportion of firms using various common tools.

Usage rates of common assessment tools

Skills and knowledge certifications and personality assessments continue to be popular, with indicators of cultural “fit” and various cognitive ability measures also widely used. In addition, we observed a surge in the adoption of web-based background investigation strategies.

Interestingly, 2009 highlights a trend emerging over the last few years: It is now just as common to find organizations deploying assessment company-wide as it is to find it used for only one or two jobs. These findings reflect the fragmented use of assessment that we have experienced in our client work. To be sure, there are tons of ways assessment can be used, but there is no one major trend in how or how much it is implemented.

Effectiveness of Screening and Assessment Tools

This year, 80% of assessment users felt that assessment had a “positive impact” on their organization. In contrast, only 3% of assessment users felt these tools did not add value. However, only 64% of assessment users collected metrics to judge the quality of their interventions, and 79% judged ROI using one or many indicators. However, definitions of “ROI” vary widely, with some approaches considering a broad, cursory opinion from managers, whereas only a few use a true scientifically derived method such as a validation study.

Wide variation in the real-world evaluation of ROI clearly reveals that, while many companies do collect metrics, few of them are going about this in a way that reflects best practices. This is cause for concern given the fact that these same best practices create the foundation for demonstrating the legal defensibility of assessment measures.

Legal Issues

This year’s Supreme Court decision in favor of firefighters who challenged the City of New Haven, Connecticut, has once again focused attention on the legal aspects of pre-employment assessment. In anticipation of the High Court hearing this case, we wondered how much typical users paid attention to legal and regulatory issues related to using assessment to evaluate candidates.

Percent indicating legal issues are “central to this activity” or “very prominent”

These results express both positive and negative connotations. On the positive side, it seems that a good number of companies pay attention to legal issues related to testing and assessment. On the other hand, perhaps more firms should consider devoting resources to demonstrating and documenting legal defensibility. The lack of understanding of what is actually required for ensuring compliance and defensibility may create problems as both assessment usage and legal scrutiny increase.

The energy spent on legal considerations does not relate to the extent of assessment deployed, or size of the organization, nor number of hires. As with overall usage of assessments, legal concerns do not follow any pattern across survey respondent demographics or assessment strategies.

Legal defensibility is not just another set of meaningless hoops that must be jumped through and checked off. Proper evaluation of ROI via validation and legal defensibility are actually two sides of the same coin, the common goal being to document the job-relatedness of all tools and processes used to select employees.

Though the continued economic turmoil has put a damper on hiring, the adoption of in-depth assessment tools continues to grow, especially as more organizations devote resources to find out if testing and assessment is worth it. The bottom line: Quality hiring tools can improve performance and employee engagement (i.e., provide ROI) while also ensuring the legal defensibility of hiring practices, but it is essential to demonstrate how much they actually benefit your organization.

For as long as I can remember, recruiters have focused on cost as the primary measure of their effectiveness and value to the organization. The most popular recruiting metric has been cost-per-hire, and recruiting functions justify their existence by showing how much less expensive they are than an outsourced solution.

This, however, has begun to change.

Even though we are in a recession, skilled talent is hard to find, and demographic projections indicate a long-term swing toward a candidate-driven market. If you are in Europe or recruit for European operations, the aging workforce and the lack of fresh, skilled talent has to be a major concern.

Positions are open longer and hiring managers ask for more resumes to review, not being satisfied with those recruiters provide. There may be hundreds of candidates on the job market at the moment, but managers are still frustrated at the inability of their internal recruiters to find what they consider quality talent. The most important metrics today are those of speed and quality. The best recruiters are measured on how quickly they present candidates and on the quality of those candidates.

In many organizations, outsourcing decisions are being made on these metrics, not on cost. Managers are finding that having a good employee when they need one is much more important than how much it costs to get him or her.

But one hurdle looms over all of this. That hurdle is to define what we mean when we say that one candidate is “better” than another. How do recruiters and hiring managers define quality? Who defines it? And how can it be tracked? These are the tough questions that need answers.

Quality can be defined and here are a few ideas on how to do it. The only caveat is that this process has to be dome for each type of position in your organization.

Number 1: Establish specific competencies or traits that equal quality in the minds of your hiring managers and use it to assess candidates

Most hiring managers do not have any definition of a “quality employee.” Some managers say that they know a quality employee when they have one, but they struggle with a hard definition.

A recruiter’s job is to help them create that definition. The place to start is to unravel the skills, competencies, and traits of the best performers. Unravel the ones that really differentiate average and superior employees and make a list of those. A list should be short and clear, with levels of accomplishment included. It might look something like the diagram you see with this article. I usually try very hard to keep the list to two key items per topic.

It may also be very useful to look at the worst performers and see what it is they don’t have. By listing the characteristics that are common to both the best and the worst employees in a function, you will begin to develop a profile that can eventually be used for selection, performance management, and development. These characteristics could be traits such as willingness to compromise, an open attitude toward new ideas, or frugality in business dealings. Or they could be competencies such as the ability to create spreadsheets in a certain time, or the capability of editing complex documents. And they can also include a level of knowledge such as expert-level knowledge of Unix or of a manufacturing process.

Most likely any definitions of quality would include elements from each of these categories. Notice that these are all output-based measures — in other words, measures that can be seen or demonstrated in the work an employee does. They are the opposite of input-based measures such as length of experience or level of education. These types of measures tell you very little about the quality of a person’s performance.

You may need to partner with your internal organizational development group or with your training department to do this. It does take time and it takes willing managers to partner with you in the process. The result, though, will be a much clearer understanding of what kinds of people need to be sourced and hired.

Number 2: Educate hiring managers

Very few hiring managers know much about selection or about what it takes to assess a candidate. Even though you may have put all the managers though some sort of interview training, I am sure they have forgotten most of it and have used it less. Most of us are not disciplined nor can we expect the typical manager to become expert with these techniques. One area where recruiters can add value is to pre-screen and evaluate candidates against the criteria that you developed above. These criteria, remember, should have been determined in partnership with the managers. Each of you can use lists of these and behavioral interview questions or a variety of tests can be developed and used to measure these traits, competencies, and knowledge. Managers can help you determine how to weight the criteria, and they should be well aware of the consequences of using the criteria.

You can spend small amounts of time over a few weeks presenting bits of this information and moving the managers to understanding and acceptance. If you can, you could also hold seminars and use case studies and examples from your own organization to help managers understand how important it is to select people with the right skills and the right organizational fit and attitude.

Number 3: Investigate and experiment with new tools for screening and selection

It is still a bit surprising to me that very few firms are taking advantage of the many online tools that are emerging to help screen candidates before investing a large amount of time in interviews. By using the Internet and your corporate website, you can ask candidates to engage in a dialogue and mutual assessment process. While you are looking at their skills and fit, they can be looking at your organization and can make decisions on whether or not they like what they see. Many people I have spoken with have seen one side of an organization while interviewing, and another less attractive one after they are hired. There is still value in letting candidates email other employees for information about the company and work-life. There is a need for job previews and better job descriptions that are based on reality, not what we wish were true.

By defining up front what constitutes a quality candidate, you can remove much of the present frustration candidates have over why they were not chosen for an interview, and you can also reduce the number of unqualified candidates who apply. Many do so because they do not know or understand your definition of quality.

By working with hiring managers, getting them to write down and define for you the competencies and traits of successful employees, and by putting those to use in your screening and interviewing processes, you can improve candidate quality in a measurable way.

Recruiters frequently tell me they have a talent community, when further investigation reveals that they have a huge database of people they do not know at all. These databases have been built up using impersonal methods including the career website, profiles gathered through the applicant tracking system, and perhaps referrals from other employees.

Databases suffer from two major problems when it comes to being effective recruiting tools.

First of all they tend to get old very quickly, and the data about the people is frequently not current and often not even usable at all. While no one that I know of has done actual research on the quality of the data in corporate resume databases, I know from experience and from working with many clients that it is poor.

The second problem databases have is that they tell you very little. All a recruiter knows about the candidate is whatever is in the resume/profile itself. There is no additional information, no personal observations, and seldom any useful reference data. Because the resumes have been added mostly through impersonal methods, the candidates are unknown to the recruiters. This means that the qualification and assessment of a candidate begins after the resume is retrieved (assuming it is retrieved, which is very seldom) and may take quite a bit of time, assuming the candidate can even be contacted. Candidate quality is often poor, and the time to find candidates can become very long, especially for hard-to-fill positions.

Most recruiters do not really actively use their talent databases and instead turn to Internet search, cold calling, or hire a sourcer or a third-party recruiter. In effect, a talent database is a legal storehouse, suitable for printing reports and showing compliance, but of little practical value in hiring — especially the hard-to-find candidates.

You might make the case that a good recruiter should know this and develop his own community of candidates. It might be possible to maintain data on and build relationships with 50 to 100 potential candidates, but doing that would be a full-time job.

What makes the talent community I am talking about different is its ability to take advantage of technology to achieve levels of personalization that could not be achieved without it.

There are three distinctive features of corporate talent communities that make them more valuable than databases.

They can serve as initial screeners: A talent community is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, candidates who come to the corporate Facebook fan page and then are referred to a targeted career site are likely to be much more interested in your organization than someone just dropping by the career site to drop off a resume.

Interest is a type of screening, and combined with the right tools a career site can quickly assess a variety of things, including aptitude for the job and skill level. People who achieve certain scores or meet other criteria can be referred directly to a recruiter. This way no one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

This ensures that everyone who ends up in the talent community has been evaluated at some level and knows that they meet the basic requirements for employment in your organization. They have had a positive encounter, although that was entirely or almost entirely without actual contact with you or any other recruiter.

Years of experimentation and use of these tools show that most candidates respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements and are often surprised to get a phone call or personal email from a recruiter because the software has alerted the recruiter to the quality of candidate.

They are much more personal and dynamic: Candidates actually perceive talent communities as very personal. If the talent community is set up well, candidates will frequently get emails and other messages about jobs and about the status of their own candidacy. They may receive periodic requests to update their personal information and keep their address and email current. This means that information is up to date. Candidates can add more information about themselves, and recruiters can ask questions about specific skills or interests. All of this information is kept in the candidate record, and any recruiter can access this. If a new recruiter stats recruiting for a position, there may be many candidates in the community who she can learn a lot about very quickly.

Talent communities are like living organisms. They are always changing and becoming more mature and sophisticated. Recruiters may have never met a person face to face and yet know much more about them than if they have had two or three personal interviews. This computer-aided interaction, as well as testing and assessment, can provide hiring managers with a very complete picture of a number of candidates.

They are far more flexible: All of this means that talent communities are far more flexible than databases. Candidates who may have applied for one position are frequently referred to different ones after the recruiter knows them better through the interaction and testing. One candidate may be an ideal candidate for several positions, and fewer candidates get pigeonholed into a particular channel and thereby missed in the search.  Vigorous and thorough screening and assessment means that quality is as high as it can be and even higher than the quality that comes through employee referral or headhunters.

It is getting easier to set up talent communities every day. Tools such as LinkedIn or Google groups may serve as rudimentary communities. Tools such as Ning can be modified and put to work as active communities. Some organizations build their own.

Communities of candidates are powerful and reduce the need for special sourcing or the use of outside recruiters. They can increase the number of positions a single recruiter can handle and provide higher quality candidates in a shorter time. They always trump databases.

But the hardest part is not the technology or the screening and assessment tools or the acceptance of the idea by candidates. What proves to always be the hurdle that is hardest to overcome is the resistance of recruiters to using the tools and embracing the concept as a way to do what they do better than ever.

It’s an easy-to-use method to apply for jobs through corporate websites without having to reenter the data for each different employer. Jobseekers create a profile once, then by logging in to ResumePal from any participating employer’s site, they just click to apply. When they change their profile, by updating their contact information for instance, ResumePal automatically updates the database of every participating employer to which they’ve applied.

“It’s very similar to PayPal,” says Toole, vice president, employer marketing at Jobfox, which developed the service. “It’s convenient for jobseekers, but there are significant benefits for employers too.”

Keeping candidate information current is but one of those benefits. Another is that the profile is configured to fit the employer’s database specs. A third is the reduction in application abandonment. Who hasn’t begun applying for a job only to quit part way through because the process was too long or complicated for the job being offered?

“Candidate abandonment on corporate sites and job boards will go down, because they already have a profile that gets submitted by clicking the link,” Toole explains.

Simplifying the process to encourage more candidates might not seem a benefit to all recruiters, but another feature, one born of Jobfox’ DNA, reduces the impact of getting minimally qualified applicants. Candidates using ResumePal are matched to all jobs in a company’s ATS, and the quality of the match is ranked. So even as a candidate applies for one position, a recruiter at the receiving end can quickly see where else that person might fit. And yes, the candidate also is told of these other opportunities.

The other nice part of this is that employers using certain brands of ATS technology need do nothing more than opt in to the free program. The heavy lifting has already been done by the vendors who have signed on to offer ResumePal: ADP, Kenexa, Oracle and Oracle’s PeopleSoft, SilkRoad Technology, and Softscape. Plenty of big names there, accounting for several thousand employer installations and jobseeker applications that reach into the seven figures.

“There will be other announcements,” Toole emphatically declared when we asked about some of the other vendors. If ResumePal works as advertised, the momentum for it will build, just as it did for PayPal, he adds.

Jobfox has certainly taken pains to help speed ResumePal’s acceptance. By offering it through ATS vendors, there’s no cost to employers. They simply choose to use it or not. Even when they do, candidates have the option of applying in whatever fashion the company previously used or by submitting a ResumePal profile. No ResumePal? No problem. The jobseeker registers for ResumePal right on the employer’s site.

Jobseekers already registered on Jobfox are automatically enrolled in ResumePal. However, the opposite is not true; ResumePal participants must opt-in to Jobfox. They might as well, however, since they’ll get a list of other jobs matching their interests and background and reach a broader group of employers.

While we think jobseekers will embrace a universal job submission system, and recruiters will appreciate the automatic candidate updates and matching features, even sliced bread has its tradeoffs. In the case of ResumePal, jobseekers have to complete a Jobfox-styled questionnaire to create a profile. Standard resumes alone don’t work. Plus, ResumePal isn’t open to job boards where a majority of the searching is still conducted.

The other, and far bigger challenge, is how ResumePal benefits Jobfox. Toole tells us that once recruiters begin to experience the job matching, they’ll be open to becoming Jobfox clients. We suggested that sounds a lot like a loss leader, and Toole agreed, up to a point.

“Once they (recruiters) see how this works we think they’ll understand the value of Jobfox and become clients,” he says.

Should this catch on (a major consumer publicity push is to happen later this year, says Toole) there is the potential to monetize ResumePal by charging jobseekers. For that to work, the big job boards would have to become partners, as would the remaining big ATS vendors. From a jobseeker standpoint, updating one resume or profile and then having it instantly updated everywhere would be a convenience and a billable value.

Occasionally, though, we come across a site worth sharing. Here for instance are three of the more browse-worthy.

Labor Insight

This is a cool site even if you have no interest in employment analytics. If nothing else, you’ll be wowed by the site’s interactive, graphical displays and ease of use.

Starting with a map of the United States, a simple mouseover of the states gives you such basic employment information as household income, and size of the labor force. Click on a state and you see what cities have the most online job posting activity, an indicator of how robust the local economy is. Drill down, and Labor Insight will list every posted job in the time period you pick.

There’s also a search by company, which will tell you what company has posted the most jobs online during a given period. Or what company has posted the most jobs in Alabama, or check trends in occupations by ONET code (Occupational Information Network) or … well, you get the idea.

The site is a product of EmployOn, LLC, a jobs technology company, that provides jobs searching and matching, data structuring, and other services to education, government, and others. Laborinsight.com is a natural offshoot from the job scraping, and data structuring EmployOn does.

Even if you don’t think you have any use for such business intelligence (if you think that, we suggest you think again), try out the site. The three-day free trial tells us that this is not going to be a free service.

VoiceScreener

If you do a lot of telephone screens, you know what a pain just scheduling them can be. Add in the time it takes asking the same questions over and over and it’s a wonder you can get anything else done. That’s why automated telephone interviews have earned a place in the toolbox of high volume recruiters and staffing agencies.

One of the newest entrants into the field is HarQen (hark-en). Its voice screening and interview system is a little different than some of the others, since it lets you build a library of questions that can be assembled into a complete customized interview. With HarQen’s VoiceScreener you can create custom web pages for your candidates, have them answer knockout questions, and, if they qualify, they’re automatically telephoned for the interview. You, your team, or other designees can then listen to the responses at your convenience.

There are other services. turboVOICE out of Britain is similar and also integrates with its own ATS. Database Systems Corp. has hosted and enterprise IVR systems. There are also video interview systems, which may be overkill for certain types of recruiting. HarQen’s distinction is its ease of use and the handy way a recruiter can assemble custom interviews by selecting questions from previously recorded interviews. HarQen has cleverly integrated the telephone’s simplicity with online’s flexibility. Only missing is the ability for a candidate to handle the interview over the web.

eHire

Launched just last week, this site might qualify as one of those me-too’s, except for the promise contained in its founder’s LinkedIn company description. eHire, writes founder Joe Sabrin, “will help get one MILLION people eHired in 2009.”

eHire is a matching site, which (like nearly every other one of them) likens itself to eHarmony. In the press release announcing the new site, eHire claims to be “the first low-cost candidate-centric and transparent job matching online recruitment platform that gives both candidates a voice in the hiring process and enables recruiters/employers to efficiently find qualified candidates.”

We have no idea what that really means, and the website doesn’t explain it. But the feature set suggests this is going to be more than just another of those matching sites that have been cropping up in the last couple of years. eHire “includes features such as a multi-layered matching engine, a robust scoring mechanism, social networking components, comparative application and qualification views, career check-up services, and the automatic parsing of resumes, and more.”

Though still a little dubious, we’ll give Sabrin the benefit of the doubt. He at least has an understanding of the recruitment business, having founded the first iteration of eHire in 1999 as a boutique recruiter. Still, we have to wonder how he’s going to make eHire work with a business model that charges jobseekers to gain access to the jobs, and charges recruiters to get matches. Versions free to jobseekers haven’t made much progress, let alone matched one million. John Sumser doesn’t think much of eHire. We’re keeping an open mind.

By now, everyone’s most likely heard of the impending Employee Freedom of Choice Act that will make unionization significantly easier.

As a recruiting professional, have you contemplated what role recruiting can play in maintaining a “union-free” environment at your organization?

Think about it! What better way to ensure that an organization will remain union-free than changing the recruiting, branding, and hiring process so that your organization is more likely to attract new hires who naturally (without any direct influence from management) wouldn’t want to join a union?

Hiring For Tendencies Is a Common Practice

It is common to design recruiting and hiring processes to select individuals with certain mindsets or behavioral tendencies.

Southwest Airlines, for example, has been written up in numerous books and articles for how they successfully attract and hire individuals who naturally behave and act in a certain way. In the case of Southwest, its hiring process targets candidates who naturally put the needs of the individual customer before their own.

Southwest is not alone. A range of organizations, from the FBI to Disney and Google, have all designed recruiting processes that identify and hire individuals prone to certain behaviors and actions. So why not adapt that recruiting concept to focus on individuals who prefer an independent work environment?

The Time to Act Is Now

Now is the opportune time to act before union-related publicity increases to the point where the spotlight is continually on any union-avoidance activities and while most recruiting functions are facing a reduced hiring load.

Rarely do recruiting leaders have as much time as they have now to strategize and to reengineer their processes.

The goal is to redesign your recruiting and hiring processes in order to improve the chances of attracting and hiring individuals who, when given a choice, have a higher probability of selecting independence over “big brother” group action (i.e., unionization).

Don’t Have A Cow

Upfront, you need to realize that it’s ok for management to resist unionization. Most firms rely primarily on the “traditional approach” which focuses heavily on anti-union propaganda campaigns among existing workers.

However, there’s no reason why that approach can’t be supplemented by an effective recruiting campaign that proactively acts “on the front end” before workers are even hired.

Now, I’m not suggesting even for a minute that you go out and purposely hire only “union hating” new employees, because that actually would be illegal.

What I am suggesting is that recruiting can make a major contribution in maintaining your workforce’s flexibility and competitiveness by revising your firm’s employment processes so that they now include elements that “naturally” attract more independent-thinking workers.

Incidentally, I started my working career as a card-carrying union member and now as a professor, am currently represented by a union, so don’t automatically assume that I don’t understand the value unions can provide.

However, I would remind you that as an HR employee, if your executives choose to go down the “maintain a non-union environment road,” it’s your responsibility to make sure that recruiting makes a substantial contribution to that effort.

Start With Market Research

After getting management’s approval for the overall concept and strategy, identify the types of personalities, demographic groups, and regional locations where you’re likely to find a large percentage of “independent thinkers.”

Work with psychologists, sociologists, and market researchers in order to identify the types of individuals and the “traits” that are common among independent thinkers. After you better understand what it takes to excite and attract them, refocus your recruiting process and materials.

Refocus Your Employment Brand

The next step is to shift your “employment brand message” so that it better highlights the elements of working at your firm that would get the attention of your target candidates. That could include emphasizing the fact that your firm excels in flexibility and allowing your employees to make independent decisions.

In reverse, remember that an over emphasis on security, seniority, and great benefits in your branding campaign might actually attract individuals that prefer a unionized environment, where those features are often heralded.

But branding your organization with characteristics you cannot possibly deliver and have no intention of attempting to deliver will do more harm than good.

If you want to remain union-free and the employer attributes most likely to attract and retain a workforce committed to that status are not attributes that characterize your organization, you may just need to change!

Recruitment Advertising

Work with your recruitment advertising agency and vendors to see if they can help you in repositioning your recruiting collateral so that it focuses on attracting the type of individuals that you are now targeting.

The content of your ads, positioning of your ads, and your position descriptions as well might also have to be modified so that they better attract a more desirable target audience. A little research can help you find out whether you are more likely to find a higher percentage of your target candidates in specific demographic groups, age groups, geographic regions, etc.

Screening Processes

Tread lightly in this area, because you don’t ever want to directly confront the issue of whether applicants are pro-union. All you can reasonably expect to accomplish in the assessment area is to “screen in” a larger percentage of individuals who have characteristics and traits that make them both great workers and a preference for remaining independent.

There are, of course, numerous vendors that specialize in hiring for “fit,” so work with them to see if they have valid and legal ways to target your “assessment” toward traits that are shared both by excellent workers and by individuals with independent leanings.

One of the biggest complaints unionized labor voices about being in a union is that negotiated work standards and seniority-based pay systems are not fair. Focusing your assessment efforts to identify individuals who have historically been frustrated with organizations that define equitable as equal could be a good start. Of course, only if your organization doesn’t do that as well.

Other Employment-Related Approaches

Here are additional actions to consider:

• Increase the percentage of your workforce classified as contingent workers. Not only are contractors easier to release, working with them for a period of time makes it easier to assess whether they “fit” your independent-minded profile before you act to convert them.
• Re-design your employee referral program so that it educates your workforce about the types of behaviors and personalities that you’re now targeting.
• Begin targeting your recruiting at specific firms that are known for attracting and retaining employees that have a long history of independence.
• Work with consulting and law firms that specialize in maintaining a “union-free environment” to better understand best practices and what other approaches may be acceptable under the law.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re facing unionization efforts or not, focus your recruiting efforts on these independent-minded workers because the traits they possess might by themselves be valuable to the business. Their willingness to try new things and to innovate is likely to be higher than many recruits.

If you’re going to act, now’s the time, before labor laws and policies change to make it more difficult to use recruiting as another “union-free environment” maintenance tool. If you are looking for an opportunity to act strategically and outside the box, this is it.

This well-written and researched piece is somewhat groundbreaking in that it is the first article in a mainstream media outlet to provide evidence of cheating on employment tests. Those of us in the testing industry have always been concerned with the security of our tests and have taken a variety of precautions to defend against it, but this is the first time I have ever read actual evidence that documents the existing of cheating.

As a testing expert and someone who has a high degree of familiarity with Unicru/Kronos (the company whose tests are the subject of the piece), I figured it would make sense for me to weigh in on this important article. Here are some thoughts about the article and the issues it raises:

• Overall, the article should definitely serve as a wake up call to the testing industry that times are changing; but, I do not think that the problems it identifies should spell doom and gloom for employment testing. Security is an important issue for any industry that conducts business online (banking, shopping, etc). However, dealing with security issues has not served as a barrier to progress, but rather an evolutionary force encouraging adaptation and prevention.
• The case of Unicru/Kronos is somewhat unique in the testing industry because it tests such a huge volume of applicants each year. It is a safe bet to say that no other testing company does the volume that Unicru/Kronos does. Therefore I would be very surprised if the same systematic and premeditated cheating on personality-type tests was occurring with the tests of any other vendors. Differences between the way the Unicru/Kronos tests and those of other companies would make cross-test cheating a complete disaster for anyone who tried.
• Because the Unicru/Kronos test is used to provide a way to provide efficiency to high-volume hiring, its results are often used to make “go — no go” decisions. While it is not always advised to use a test as the only piece of information to eliminate an applicant from consideration, high-volume hiring often necessitates it. How else can one have any chance of evaluating 1,000 applications for 10 or 20 openings? Considering the current state of unemployment and the sheer number of folks involved, high-volume hiring starts to show some similarities to standardized testing. That is, lots of applicants and high stakes. While cheating on high stakes tests is not too common in the U.S., it is a significant problem in other countries such as China and India. I have had a good deal of experience implementing standardized testing in these countries and I can say with authority that we do have a variety of techniques that can be employed as preventative measures. As with any type of security, multiple layers provide the best defense. We as testing professionals have the ability to use item banks, alternate versions of items, parallel forms, and computer adaptive testing to minimize the chance that a reconstructed answer key will actually match a test.
• Consider the type of test in question when evaluating the potential for cheating and the impact it may have. The WSJ article claims the Unicru/Kronos test is a personality test. This is partially true, as it does have some strong ties to traditional personality tests. However, the most common personality tests do not actually have right or wrong answers for the individual questions. Rather, the scoring for the questions usually varies quite a bit relative to the specific job in which the test is being used (if the test has been properly configured). While the science behind Unicru/Kronos’ tests is beyond reproach and is actually very innovative, their tests are still a good bit different from those of the rest of the herd. Unicru/Kronos’ unique formula works for them and their tests are highly predictive when compared to many others out there. Why does this matter? I won’t go into the mechanics of it, but suffice it to say that it would be much harder to identify right or wrong answers on a more traditional personality test. Most traditional personality tests also have faking scales built in to identify those applicants who are answering in a socially desirable pattern. Figuring out the scoring algorithms that account for this makes cheating in any meaningful way even more difficult.
• Traditional personality tests by themselves really aren’t the best predictors of job performance. There is a ton of research to support the fact that cognitive ability tests are much better across the board at predicting job performance. These types of tests are much more susceptible to cheating, and test vendors are very aware of this fact. In many cases, these types of tests are administered only in proctored situations. If I were to really worry about cheating, it is cheating on cognitive tests that would be my major concern.
• Another interesting wrinkle in this whole thing is the fact that job applicants are actually resorting to cheating the companies that they wish to potentially work for. To me this is a clear indicator of the need for companies to take a good long look at not only the messaging around the test itself, but also at the manner in which the applicant is treated throughout the entire hiring process. Of course it is unrealistic to think that we will ever be able to keep all applicants from cheating, but I do believe that the more applicant-friendly the hiring process, the less likely applicants will be to cheat. Time and again I have seen the testing portion of the application process handled in a cold and unfriendly manner, with very little information about the reason for the test being provided to the candidate. This type of thing makes it much easier for a candidate to feel fine about breaking the rules. There should be messaging to candidates about the fact that testing is beneficial to them because finding a good fit between applicant and job is beneficial to all parties involved. No one likes to work in an environment where they do not fit in or where they do not have the competencies required to succeed.
• The bottom line here is that tests such as those offered by Unicru/Kronos do offer tremendous value. We I/O psychologists have collected more than enough evidence to demonstrate that testing, when done right, offers a huge advantage over more informal and unstructured hiring practices such as resume reviews and unstructured interviews. In the case of high volume hiring, the ability to provide an automated tool for screening out applicants is tremendously useful. Are these methods perfect? Absolutely not, but then again very little in this world is. Error and noise are accepted parts of the testing process. The goal of test providers and hiring professionals is to mitigate these to the best of their ability. In high-volume testing, cheaters make up a very small percentage of the total population of job applicants, making cheating just another source of noise that we must work on minimizing.

The issue of cheating is something that warrants a good deal of attention but one that should not stop our progress in the quest for better and more accurate hiring procedure. The issues discussed in this article serve to strengthen my stance that we need to be working on a new generation of hiring tools that are simulation-based. The more the testing part of the hiring process relies on scenario-based activities that mimic the work environment and the tasks that must be completed within it, the more realistic and engaging the application process will be for applicants and the harder it will be for someone to cheat. Of course we are a long way away from this goal at the present time, but we will get there eventually. Until that time, those using testing should be sure to make test security a critical part of the design and implementation of the testing process, while also bending over backwards to make sure the candidate is treated just as any valued customer of the organization would be.

If “Reevaluate background screening program” isn’t on your list, add it now because you can bet that should the EEOC come calling it will do it for you.

Ever since 2006 when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission adopted a series of changes that have come to be known as the “Systemic Initiative,” EEOC field offices have been aggressively pursuing cases where one or more forms of discrimination permeate a company’s hiring practices. These can be as overt as the $20 million settlement last month against LA Weight Loss Centers for refusing to hire men. Or they can be as unintentionally discriminatory as refusing to hire anyone with a violent criminal record.

This latter instance was the heart of the leading U.S. case on background screening, El v. SEPTA.

Douglas El was fired as a driver of the mentally and physically disabled when a criminal check turned up a juvenile murder record. His attorneys sued showing that the policy has a disparate impact on Blacks who are more likely to have a record than whites. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld the employer in the case, but recruiters should take little comfort in that decision.

“The third circuit dropped lots of hints,” says EEOC attorney Carol Miaskoff, that it would have ruled differently, but for a lack of expert witnesses on the part of El’s attorneys. They chose not to counter testimony by noted criminologist Dr. Alfred Blumstein that a person with a criminal record is more likely to recidivate, even if, as in El’s case, the conviction was 40 years old.

So why should this prompt a new year’s review of hiring practices?

Arthur Cohen

This means that it’s not enough to simply adopt a policy against hiring felons, say, or someone with a poor credit history or with a less-than-honorable military discharge. Instead, says Merrily Archer, a former attorney with the EEOC who is now in private practice with Fisher & Phillips in Denver, employers need to ask “Is there any nexus between the criterion and the job we are hiring them to do?”

Merrily Archer

While the policy seems logical enough, is it really? Why pick five years and not four or two or seven?

Cohen, himself an attorney and vice president of operations and general counsel of background screener Concorde, Inc., counsels that employers “ought to be considering how they would articulate, if they are ever asked, why they chose the policy they did, on what research was the policy based, and why was it structured the way it was.”

The basis for a particular need not be unassailable, if that were even possible. Instead, said the federal court in the SEPTA decision, “We require that employers show that a discriminatory hiring policy accurately — but not perfectly — ascertains an applicant’s ability to perform successfully the job in question.”

How did SEPTA, the employer, show that? By bringing in a criminologist to testify to recidivism. Had El’s attorneys brought in one of their own, many lawyers including most of the labor lawyers we spoke with, suspect the appeals court would have decided differently and sent the case back for a jury trial.

If only for that reason you should have some data to support your employment policy.

“What makes the SEPTA case so noteworthy in my opinion is that the indication is that the participation of a criminologist has relevance to the preparation of a policy involving a review of the criminal records,” says Cohen says.

Or to put it another way, if an unsuccessful candidate sues says Cohen, “By all means this could turn into a war of the experts.”

So as you go about reviewing your pre-employment screening procedures it would be wisest to test the policies in two ways: Against the EEOC’s own guidelines for criminal convictions and against the SEPTA court’s declaration that “discriminatory hiring policies accurately but not perfectly distinguish between applicants’ ability to perform successfully the job in question.”

One more thing to consider: Congress has shown an inclination recently to expand protection against discrimination. In September it passed a law that expressly overrode the Supreme Court’s narrow reading of some of the protections of the Americans With Disabilities Act.  And the new Congress is expected to approve two measures expanding the right of workers to sue for past discriminatory acts and limits an employer’s defenses to equal pay actions.

As attorney Archer suggests, “Better buckle your seatbelt and get a good attorney.”

Greg Scott, co-founder and CEO, harbors no illusions about the challenge he and his partner, Stephen Race, have set for themselves. “Well,” he said, explaining his vision, “it takes some companies a while to understand the value of being entirely open. It’s still a small percentage, but I was quite surprised (at how many do).”

What he’s talking about is Diialog, a sort of company-wide 360 assessment that takes the measure of company culture. It’s designed to reveal the culture as it is and compare it to the culture employees — and company leadership — desire it to be. In its purest form, the results would be reported to the entire company and made available on Jiibe.com, a site that matches jobseekers to companies based on “fit.”

There are categories for management style, vision, and social consciousness; 10 factors in all. When enough employees complete the assessment, the results can be revelatory, showing the gaps, as well as the company strengths.

“I kind of think of this like management by wandering around,” says Scott, referring to the communications that open up when executives hit the plant floor and talk with the troops.

Founded in 2007, Jiibe Solutions (a takeoff on jibe, meaning to be in harmony or agreement) has two products:

• Diialog is the flagship product. It’s a proprietary corporate assessment survey completed by a company’s employees. It produces a profile of the culture and environment its employees experience as well as producing a composite portrait of the workplace they desire. The tool is intended to be a continuous sort of self-assessment that shows where the gaps are and helps company leaders address them.
• Jiibe.com is the completely free self-assessment tool that helps individuals discover the kind of culture and work environment that best fits them and then matches them against suitable companies. It is essentially a generic version of Diialog.

Jiibe’s data comes from surveys completed by users of the site and, in some instances. from the internal Diialog surveys undertaken by Jiibe Solutions’ clients. Most of the companies on the Jiibe site have only one or two survey respondents; too few, Scott acknowledges, to provide any statistically reliable data. “These are interesting,” he says, “not scientifically valid, but a point of discussion.”

His hope is that as more companies participate (in a Diialog survey) they will be as open as Quicken Loans to make the results available on Jiibe. “They have great openness,” Scott says.

The value for a company in performing this psychoanalysis, according to Jiibe Solutions, is that those “willing to be this open and engage their employees are the ones that are most able to quickly adapt to a very dynamic and competitive marketplace.”

The founders have years of experience in the recruitment field. Greg Scott founded an early online ATS company (Vision2Hire.com) which he sold in 2004 to Canadian IT staffing and recruiting firm Brainhunter Inc. A serial entrepreneur, he founded and ran a theatrical production company in Las Vegas, before launching Jiibe Solutions.

His partner, Stephen Race, is an occupational psychologist with a decade of experience working on recruiting assessments and issues of cultural “fit.”

The two worked together for a brief period at Talent Technology (profile; site), best known for its HireDesk ATS.

The challenge for Jiibe Solutions is the same every user-dependent Web 2.0 site has: Getting a large enough number of employees to participate to make the results statistically meaningful.

Thus, says Scott, a priority for the company is to “partner with other groups that have benchmark data.” observes Scott.

As Scott told one blogger, “The beauty of this is that we’re taking advantage of the crowd and turning the traditional job search on its ear.”

by Dr. Charles Handler and Mark C. Healy, M.A.

We I/O psychologist-types tend to be real data hounds. Much of the work we do for our employers/clients involves the use of data to investigate specific hypotheses in order to illuminate the underlying truth in a situation. The outcome of this work often has tremendous value to organizations because it provides them with hard data on which strategic decisions can be based. Additionally, the collection and analyses of data often helps us to identify new trends that we haven’t yet thought about.

Many of you who follow our articles know that we have a keen interest in the pre-employment assessment industry, and write quite a bit about its trends and happenings within. Our interest in data and trends has led to an annual online screening and assessment usage survey.

The idea for this survey was born back in 2002, when we became frustrated over the lack of available information about the usage of pre-employment screening and assessment tools. This lack of information has been a challenge because though everyone seems to be saying that screening is becoming a hot area, there’s little actual data available to confirm this statement or to tell us how hot it really is. This lack of information also makes it hard for those of us who follow this industry closely to provide factual information about how companies are using online screening and assessment tools, and what the results of this usage have been. This year we have made a few changes to the survey questions to help us be sure we are staying up to date with some of the major trends and issues that pertain to assessment and the manner in which it is integrated into the hiring process.

At the end of this article, you’ll find a link to this year’s survey. Take a few minutes to help other members of our community by providing information about your company’s screening and assessment practices. The more data that’s collected, the clearer existing and emerging trends will become. Last year, we had a record number of responses, a fact that seems to indicate the increased interest level in screening and assessment. Given the steady increase in interest and the lack of information about this industry, we feel the results will continue to have value for the ERE community. We look forward to reporting our findings right here on ERE sometime this coming Spring.

In order to provide some extra motivation, here’s a quick summary of the trends identified in last year’s results.

Summary of Findings

One hundred and forty one professionals completed the survey, representing a very small increase of over the previous year. Respondents represented a wide range of company sizes. The results confirmed what most of our previous surveys have found:

• Having an ATS installed is now nothing particularly innovative, especially if you work in a medium or large organization. For some, it’s hard to even imagine the old stacks of resumes and bulging file folders of applicant information.
• Prescreening and assessment are continuing their gradual penetration into the mainstream of recruitment and hiring.
• Qualifications screening, personality inventories, and skill and technical certifications continue to be the most popular online assessment tools. Assessments of cognitive abilities as well as fit with the company culture have expanded their footprint as well.
• Respondents report a lack of understanding, weak budgets, or a general lack of support for online tools as their primary obstacles to adoption or greater use of modern prescreening and assessment technology.
• Those organizations that formally evaluate their hiring practices tend to support the use of prescreening and assessment, but a large number of organizations are still failing to evaluate the effectiveness of their screening and assessment tools.

There clearly is a growing interest in scientifically derived hiring tools. This trend is encouraging but not particularly surprising; these numbers will continue to grow as more organizations understand the value in properly evaluating the impact of screening and assessment tools, seeing for themselves how quality hiring tools can improve a workforce.

This Year’s Survey

The goal of this year’s survey is to continue building on the information gathered from past surveys and to verify the fact that usage rates for online screening and assessment are increasing.

In order to help provide the ability to track changes in usage rates, this year’s survey is similar to last year’s, with a few minor changes to help account for trends that have developed since last year. Specifically, this year we have reduced the focus on screening systems and added additional questions about the impact of the economy on assessment programs, legal issues related to assessment, and budgeting/ROI for the use of screening and assessment tools.

While this is hardly a scientific survey, and its length limits the depth of the information that we are able to collect, there is tremendous value in the information your survey responses will provide. For instance:

• This survey will help to provide some reality to speculation regarding increases in the use of both online screening tools and online assessment tools.
• Your survey responses will provide information that is extremely useful for gaining a broader perspective on the evolution of the entire staffing process.
• The results of this survey will help provide companies with some basic benchmark information about how online screening and assessment are being deployed.
• The data from this survey will confirm our speculation that while many companies are using online screening and assessment tools, few are collecting the metrics needed to help them understand the true value they are providing. This is a problem that must be addressed, and we hope that verifying its existence will help to serve as a wake-up call.

All survey responses are confidential and individual responses will not be shared with anyone. By participating, you will help provide yourself and other members of the ERE community with up-to-date, accurate information about trends in the use of online screening and assessment tools.

We are interested in collecting information from anyone who is involved in the staffing process for his or her organization. This includes recruiters, hiring managers, staffing and HR executives, consultants, etc. We welcome participants from companies of all locations, sizes, and industries. We are not able to use information from individual vendors of screening and assessment tools or persons who may consult to multiple organizations.

Just click here and you’ll be taken to the survey page. This page has all the information you will need to complete the survey. Please feel free to forward the survey to anyone you feel might be interested in participating. If you have any questions, just contact chandler@rocket-hire.com.

The results of the survey will be featured in an ERE article sometime this coming Spring. We look forward to sharing our results with you.

High-Level Observations

• The rise of talent management. This seems to be the age of  “talent management” when it comes to the use of technology in HR. I saw a ton of companies offering “talent management systems.” These platforms use technology to cover a broad footprint of key HR areas/functions such as branding, recruiting, onboarding, learning, development, and communication. Talent management products are starting to provide HR practitioners with a technology based backbone that will allow them to integrate major HR functions. The integration of more functions into one platform is a trend that can have significant value given the traditional walls that tend to exist between the major areas of HR in larger organizations. There seems to be variation in the functions offered by the various talent management platforms as well as some gray area around what defines a talent management product. These gray areas are nothing new, and are indicative of the nature of an industry-wide trend that is causing vendors to jump on the bandwagon. While my overall thoughts about talent management products are definitely positive, one wonders how many vendors have just dubbed themselves as “talent management” providers to be trendy, and have not significantly changed their products.

• ATS Not Hip Anymore. Is it just me, or does there seem to be a significant decrease in companies selling products referred to by the term “ATS”? I could not help but think that much of the momentum in the use of hiring and technology seems to be in the idea of the broader, strategic, idea of talent management and less in the more tactical area of applicant tracking. The concept behind applicant tracking and its related functionalities are still of great importance; it just seems that the term itself is losing favor as traditional ATS functionalities are being baked into other products such as advanced screening/assessment management platforms and talent management systems.

• Goodbye paper resume. It seems that there is continued movement toward removing the resume from the hiring process. This is definitely true of the paper resume, but there is a broader movement afoot to deconstruct the resume and extract the types of data it usually provides (i.e., skills and experience). Key information about candidates is being collected via other opportunities in the search and application process such as the creation of detailed profiles that have fields that guide the entry of important candidate information in a standardized format. Parsing, another method of deconstructing resumes, seems to be continuing to evolve as a means of extracting important data from resumes. Resume deconstruction methods allow for much more efficient searching, and matching between candidate data and important job requirements. These methods are part of an overall trend that will see the integration of a variety of candidate information into a digital platform that will allow it to be standardized, categorized, and compared to key requirements for a job or career. While we have a long way to go toward the complete death of the resume, technology is helping us to continue the slow march towards the inevitable.

• Web 2.0 is hot. It almost goes without saying that the latest in HR technology is leveraging the benefits of easy access to information, communities, and data that are at the core of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was everywhere at this show. It seemed to me that the applications of web 2.0 seemed to be concentrated more in the space of performance management products, but there is no doubt that it is having a large impact on the thinking of those creating recruitment-oriented products as well. I saw a heavy focus on the use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook and on products that provide companies with platforms on which to build communities. The data-driven nature of web 2.0 provides a good deal of promise for the area of recruiting and hiring.

• We’ve come a long way. The products I saw at this show provide a sign of continued progress and evolution that seems significantly more advanced than the products available five years ago in many ways. While the core function of many products may remain the same, we are continuing to develop new ways to connect people and information. The products I looked at seem slicker, cleaner, and more usable than ever before. While it is often hard to cut through the smokescreens when one is looking at products on the tradeshow floor, the overall level of tech-savvy seems higher than ever. I was able to see firsthand the positive impact of technology on a variety of recruiting- and hiring-related products. Of course keeping up and separating faddish technologies from those that truly are game-changers will continue to be a challenge in years to come.

Assessment-related Trends

• Assessment is still an outsider. While there were a decent number of assessment vendors at the show, as an overall area of HR technology, assessment is still a very small piece real estate. This makes sense to me given the problems that organizations seem to have in understanding the value assessment can provide.

• Two directions of evolution for assessment. Technology is helping assessment to slowly evolve in two directions. The first of these involves assessment being integrated into the functions provided by bigger, broader systems and products such as job boards, ATS, and talent management. Embedding assessment into other products makes sense when one understands that the core value of assessment is to provide information that can be used in conjunction with other information to support informed decision-making. Pre-employment assessment actually may have the most value when it is an integrated part of a process-based approach into which its results are integrated. This trend has been very slow to develop, but we will continue to see a trend toward embedded assessments. The second direction in the evolution of assessment is toward the productization of assessments to be sold transactionally. While assessment has been sold transactionally for decades, the present state of evolution leverages millions of data points to help provide a new level of clarity about what content predicts certain traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This evolution allows for off-the-shelf products that are more accurate than ever before, while providing documentation to support the relevance of these products for specific jobs.

• Hello, talent management providers? Assessment seemed to be conspicuously absent from the slate of services provided by most talent management systems. While assessment is part of the deal for some of the big players in talent management, it does not seem to be a core part of the concept at this point. This is upsetting given the value assessment can have, not only during the hiring process, but throughout the entire employee life cycle. Anyone who considers themselves to be a player in the realm of talent management should strongly consider embedding quality assessment tools.

• Platforms evolve nicely. The software platforms that accompany pre-employment assessment products are evolving nicely. I refer to these as “candidate management systems.” Today’s candidate management systems offer many of the functionalities once seen only in ATS products. This evolution should help support the value proposition of assessment as products become easier to use and provide additional decision-making support.

• Simulations still lacking. While there has been some definite positive movement toward the creation of more advanced simulations, we still need to be pushing ahead in this area. While there are some nice simulation products currently available, the future of hiring will continue to move toward the increased use of simulations. Not enough steps are being taken toward the development of truly innovative and unique simulations. This is an artifact of a lack of buyer interest and the absence of “killer apps” that are needed to allow simulations technology to advance.

When it comes to HR technologies that support the recruiting and hiring process, we are moving in the right direction and have come a long way over the past five years. The technology level available for assessment both as a core process and as a supporting cast member is more advanced than ever. However, there is a lot more that we can be doing to integrate assessment into the products that seem to be marking the trends in HR and technology. Assessment still seems to remain the misunderstood stepchild of HR, which is a shame since there is so much evidence for the value it can have. I remain optimistic that assessment will continue to be brought more tightly into the fold in years ahead.

At ERE’s Fall Expo in Hollywood Beach, Florida, recruiters will meet the newest businesses to launch. Two of the founders will talk about how their respective companies are harnessing the power of video to help recruiters make better hiring choices and save the environment while also saving the hiring company a few dollars.

Greg Rokos, founder of FutureResume.com and its affiliate, GreenJobInterview.com, and Darryn Severyn, founder and CEO of Interactive Applicant, will try to convince recruiters that video resumes and video interviews are effective ways to screen candidates without the cost or carbon expenditure of bringing them onsite.

FutureResume.com is where candidates post a video and standard resume, the latter searchable by the usual means. Then, instead of bringing in a candidate for a first meeting, they can be interviewed online.

Interactive Applicant takes a little different tack, pre-screening applicants via an automated series of questions that candidates can be required to answer via video, audio, text, or any combination. Then the recruiter can review the candidate’s presentation skills before bringing them in.

SnapTalent’s CEO and founder Sumon Sadhu will describe how his company’s online advertising service helps recruiters and hiring managers source better candidates. It’s similar to a keyword marketing campaign but places targeted ads on content sites, rather than on search results pages.

Jeff Stewart, Urgent Career’s serial entrepreneur founder, will show how linguistic technology can be used to match sales candidates to jobs. That’s different than voice analysis, though there are some similarities. Just how it works and how effective it really is are questions that Stewart will be answering next week.

If the Spring show is any guide, these founders will get questions as tough — maybe tougher, since the audience knows recruiting — as any venture capitalist will ask. Hardly a shy bunch, the Spring ERE audience point-blank asked that crop of company founders and executives how they intended to make money and why an employer should do business with them.

Ben Yoskovitz, founder of Standout Jobs and one of the presenters at the first Startup Forum, told us that since the show he’s learned more about the HR industry than he thought possible. “The panel was a good place for us to start getting feedback, ” he told us recently.

His company provides easy-to-use software for smaller companies to build their own career sites.

Since the spring, Standout Jobs has grown to over 200 customers. While still a free service, that will soon change. An upgrade to the service is also planned. And, Yoskovitz says, now that the intensive testing and learning period is mostly behind the company, promotion of Standout Jobs is the next major effort.

Path 101, a content-intensive community networking site, is still in alpha, which, though growing in depth, is about where it was last Spring. But then, it’s an ambitious effort, which founder Charlie O’Donnell, at the forum, described as a site for job-seekers to research their career options before they apply for jobs. The site itself says it is a place where “Job candidates can figure out what “people like me” are doing with their careers and the site aims to be the first stop for career research.”

At Jobscore, CEO and founder Dan Arkind told us that the last six months have been a learning and testing period. “Not much to report,” he said at first. After a little prodding he said the resume-sharing site has been making inroads into the smaller employers the company is targeting. Especially those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Jobscore is headquartered.

The company was developed to help smaller businesses source better candidates by sharing resumes and easily post jobs to one or multiple sites. Companies can choose to pay to gain access to the resumes or earn free access by sharing resumes. So far, Arkind said, 96 percent of the customers share.

He has intentionally kept Jobscore low-key. Soon, he said, it will be making a bigger splash. When? “When it’s ready,” Arkind said.

Finally, there’s VisualCV, a site where jobseekers build an online presentation of their experience, background, skills, and more using text, multimedia, and even work samples. It’s an adjunct to the standard resume, not a replacement, at least not yet. Though COO Doug Meadows told us, “What we want to do everyday is wake up and replace the resume.”

We didn’t get to talk to our presenter co-founder Clint Heiden, but Meadows said the company has been “going gangbusters.” VisualCV has been the most visible of all our startups. Cheezhead, alone, has featured the company no less than four times since the Startup Forum in early April. It has a new CEO.  It’s also added new features, most recently a VisualCV Marketplace.

There are now 800 companies signed up with VisualCV, meaning they accepting the VisualCV and have their own posted on the site. Participation in the program is still free; the company is generating revenue from private labelling VisualCV to business groups, associations, alumni organizations and others. The China Business Network uses it to help its thousands of members better connect. Search firm Heidrick and Struggles uses it for its elite group of candidates. A few firms are also using the site to search for candidates, Meadows said, paying a findersfee when a VisualCV member is hired.

What will the next six months bring for these startups and for the four new companies presenting next week? That’s an even tougher question today than it was last Spring because of the economic conditions in the U.S. and around the world. We don’t know how they will adjust, but you can be sure that’s a question our latest crop of presenters will be asked.

Many companies are not prepared to go through the offer step of the process. As a result, they damage the relationship with the candidate. This leads to one of two unfortunate conclusions. Either they lose the candidate or the candidate comes on board, but with scar tissue. Applying some of the best practices from the sales world into a sales talent screening program helps to avoid that scenario.

The offer stage of the hiring process parallels the proposal phase of sales. Best practices in sales say that you don’t present a proposal until a thorough needs analysis has been completed. If a sales person is presenting a proposal to a prospect, he has acquired the information needed to design a solution, has discussed budget, has a full understanding of their solution requirements, and has set an expectation on pricing. This is certainly the case if the salesperson is going to be successful in winning the account.

Looking at this process in relation to the offer stage of the sales talent screening program, many of the same best practices from sales hold true. During the screening program, information needs to be gathered from the candidate to determine their financial requirements. Unfortunately, many sales talent screening programs focus exclusively on screening the candidate for fit, but do not consider the needs for the offer phase of the process. This leads to a last-minute scurry to mine the information from the candidate, or they design the offer blindly. Neither of those are best practices for the offer stage.

In sales, it is said that if you are going to lose, lose early. This prevents you from making a huge investment in a relationship that will not generate revenue. The parallel to screening sales talent is understanding the financial requirements of the candidate early enough to stop the process before over-investing in the relationship. There is no point in continuing a process with a candidate who requires a compensation level 25% above what you can offer. This probably seems logical, but hiring executives rarely focus on this as a de-selection element early in the process.

Just like discussing pricing with a prospect, the financial-needs discussion requires finesse. The candidate knows that you are asking questions about their financials, just like a prospect knows a sales person is fishing for budget information. The better-skilled salespeople tell their prospects, “I don’t want to waste your time by getting you excited about a solution that will not fit in your budget constraints…”

In much the same way, this discussion can be had with the candidate, “I don’t want to excite you about an opportunity that might not be a match for your financial needs. As you look at making a change in position, what thoughts have you given to your compensation requirements?”

With continued finesse, you can dig further into the mix of salary versus commission. Some candidates may rebuff this discussion as they feel the information will be used against them. In some instances, they are justified for having that concern. Hopefully, that is not the case in your company. We’ll come back to this point later. The bottom line is that the two goals of this phase are to gather information that allow you to formulate an offer and to de-select those candidates whose requirements exceed your financial package.

In sales, the proposal phase should not be like a magic show. The prospect should not be shocked by what is included in the proposal. In essence, the proposal is the documentation of what has already been discussed. No surprises. The same holds true for candidates. The time to review the compensation plan details is not after they are hired, or even at the offer stage. The compensation plan should be reviewed at the point where you have a genuine interest in pursuing the candidate and they have a complete enough understanding of the company that they will be able to comprehend the compensation plan.

One of the core requirements associated with any process is that it is measurable. The offer phase of the sales talent screening program should be measured statistically to determine effectiveness. The key statistic is number of offers made versus ones that are accepted. If the acceptance level is less than 80%, the process should be reviewed by asking the following questions.

1. At what point of the process are the candidate’s financial requirements reviewed?
2. When it is known that the candidate’s financial requirements exceed the package, is the candidate removed from the process?
3. At what step is the compensation plan reviewed with the candidate?
4. In what level of detail is the compensation plan reviewed with the candidate?
5. How often is the initial offer to the candidate rejected, and subsequently, negotiated successfully?

The last question in the list above ties back to my opening position about damaging the relationship. Again, this ties back to lessons that can be learned from sales. Many years ago, a procurement training specialist shared a pearl about the counsel he gives to salespeople who ask about pricing strategy. He said, “Provide us with the best pricing that you feel comfortable providing and either way you are happy.” This always puzzled salespeople so he explained further. “If you provide your best pricing and are selected, you are happy because you won the account. If you are not selected because we found lower pricing elsewhere, you are happy because you would not have been happy at that price point. Again, either way you are happy.”

Consider this when making an offer to the sales candidate. Develop an offer based on what was learned from the candidate that represents the best offer you are willing to make. Early in the process, tell the candidate that you don’t negotiate offers, but rather put your best offer on the table upfront. It demonstrates a professional message to the candidate and reduces their fear of attempts to lowball them. When companies negotiate offers, while they may “win” the candidate, they damage the relationship. This person is onboarded with the worst scar tissue of all, a lack of trust. The salesperson will always be on the lookout for the company to try to cheat them.

As with any component of the sales talent screening process, preparation is the key to success. Organize your team and design a process that achieves your desired results. This will allow you to create longlasting, fruitful sales marriages.

Like white? Then interior decorating is for you. (Too easy. Everyone knows white goes with everything.)

How about if your favorite colors happen to be black and red and orange? Maybe you just really like Halloween. Otherwise, you are “The Evaluator,” says a press release from CareerBuilder (profile; site), which just added a color wheel (parked on the old CareerPath.com website) to help jobseekers better assess their personality.

Before we get scolded for making light of a serious assessment tool let us note that the Color Career Counselor has been scientifically vetted with the results published in the North American Journal of Psychology. You can read the paper here, but fair warning: it’s full of the kind of statistical analysis we avoided in college.

The CareerBuilder service is powered by the Dewey Color System, which uses color selection to determine your personality type and traits. These then suggest certain types of careers that others with smilar personalties have found rewarding and successful or which typically attract people like you.

Dewey offers its colors-based assessment to companies as a pre-screening tool, touting the Dewey Employee Predictor as “the world’s first nonlanguage-based test that defines occupational interest, workplace behavior patterns, styles, traits, and temperaments, as well as an additional 16 personality factors.”

Invented by Dewey Sadka, a veteran recruiter who founded and ran his own employment agency, Temp Force, he’s written several books on the use of color in personality assessment and employment. Sadka’s latest book is on using colors to find love. His clients include Georgia-Pacific, Honeywell and SHRM. And now, CareerBuilder.

Taking the test takes only a few minutes. And we will say this, the analysis was right in more ways than we would have thought. It helps if your monitor is properly calibrated. We couldn’t see much difference between indigo and blue.

Now about that black and orange and red thing. According to the CareerBuilder press release, those who picked those colors seek “the most efficient way to accomplish tasks. Using facts, compiled from past mistakes and successes, you deliver strong opinions with valuable perspectives that maximize the bottom-line.”

And the favorite color for that bottom-line presumably would be black.

In this article, I praised the progress being made in understanding the value of quality assessment products in the modern hiring process.

I strongly believe that the words I wrote in 2006 are as relevant today as they ever were; in fact, they are more relevant now than ever. The days of the big job boards and their keyword matching strategies are numbered.

A lot has happened in the world of online recruitment in the last decade. The focus of most of the evolution has been on candidate quality and on increasing accuracy. This is in opposition to the focus a decade ago, which seemed to be on quickly delivering a large volume of candidates. What we have learned since then is that without a way to quickly evaluate candidate quality, we end up saddled with information overload. So, the objective for recruiting products is shifting to one that is focused on the alignment of personal characteristics with those that are required for performance on the job. This is a good thing. This movement has definitely been aided by the choice of several leading career portals to embed candidate quality into their bag of tricks.

A slice of the content of the original article from 2006 appears below. It has been updated to include a few examples of a few career portals that are now using assessment to help them better serve their clients (both job seekers and employers) by providing them with a way to quickly focus on candidates who have what it takes. Before we get started, I want to offer a few disclaimers here.

1. I am not saying that using assessment as part of the job search and match process provides all the data needed to make a good hiring decision. Rather, I am saying that it provides an excellent way to address the idea of “garbage in, garbage out.” By creating an applicant pool of individuals who are at least qualified and motivated, we are taking a very important first step towards ensuring systematic quality in the hiring process. I think of it as pre-screening that comes before pre-screening because it provides an applicant pool that will give one much better odds of making a successful hire.
2. In this article I am going against my policy of not ever naming the names of any vendors who provide the type of products discussed. Please note that none of the vendors discussed here have been included due to anything other than my personal opinion that they are good examples of the trend I am documenting. I was not compensated by them, nor does my inclusion of them in this article mean they are the perfect solution for your problems.
3. Although I am an expert in this space, I do not know everything, and there is definitely a chance that I failed to mention a company that provides the exact type of service I have described. I encourage someone from such companies (or a fan of one of these companies) to contact me to let me know what you are doing.

Below are some relevant highlights from my original article.

Folks are finally starting to get the idea that assessments are but one component of a broader process designed to help hiring professionals make systematic predictions that result in good hiring decisions. There’s much to be gained from this process-oriented approach, so it has been great to see assessments being used to help at various phases of the hiring process.

Despite the continued integration of assessment, there’s one area in which assessment has been underused. This area is the use of assessment tools during the job-searching process. Specifically, the integration of assessment tools into the searching/matching component of career portals.

Traditional methods available to users of career portals for locating jobs are extremely crude, consisting mostly of keyword searches or matching based on simplistic profile elements.

The fact that this basic process has endured as the standard for almost a decade now clearly reflects the quantity-over-quality focus that has reflected the marketing-centric attitude of many job boards since day one.

Blocking Out the Noise

This crude matching process results in excess noise. For applicants, noise means they’re presented with, and encouraged to apply for, a ton of jobs for which they’re not qualified. For hiring professionals, noise means no mechanism to assist them in making an initial high-level determination of applicant quality.

Noise makes it difficult to make good hiring decisions because it greatly increases the chance to make systematic errors.

The good news is that I am starting to see a shift in focus that will go a long way toward a reduction in noise and an increase in the ability to differentiate candidates based on various quality factors.

This shift involves the use of assessment tools as an integral part of the services provided by career portals. The use of assessment to help fill the hiring funnel with applicants who have the attributes required for success has numerous advantages, all of which are explained by simple probability theory.

Think about it: the more qualified the individuals in your applicant pool, the better chance you have of hiring someone who has what it takes. Over the past few years, I have learned of an increasing number of companies who are seeking to change things by integrating assessment into the matching process.

The basic aspects of this include the following:

• Seekers create profiles. This part of the matching process works as part of a registration process, before a job seeker has even expressed interest in a specific position. Along with other information collected during this process, the job seeker creates a profile based on a short assessment of basic qualities such as work attitudes, personality measures, etc.
• Corporate users define high-level requirements. This part of the matching process requires hiring personnel to create a template of the basic things it takes to do the job well. This often includes standard things such as skills and experience but also includes qualities often measured by assessments (personality factors, dimensions of fit, work values, etc).
• Noise is squelched. When a job seeker searches for a job using the profile he/she has created, results include jobs for which they are suited based on the compatibility between their profiles and those of available jobs.

There are many twists on this formula but the basic idea is the same: deliver an applicant pool that has less noise and makes the recruiter’s job easier. This is the start to ensuring quality hires because it’s sure hard to hire superstars if they aren’t even in your applicant pool to begin with.

Admittedly, my description of this process is overly simplistic. In job matching, just as with making hiring decisions, assessment data should serve as one of many data points that are used to identify the best candidate for the job. Truly effective matching systems will use parameters that include other key determinants of success such as experience, knowledge, and skills.

Weighing the Pros and Cons

Overall, the use of assessment in the matching process offers the following five advantages:

• Reduces noise. Allows filtering based on actual job-related parameters.
• Helps determine corporate fit. This process is a good way to find and hire applicants who fit a company culture.
• Increases quality. Allows insight into applicant’s ability to deliver what it takes for success.
• Educates job seekers. Allows applicants some insight about themselves and how suited they are for a particular job or career.
• Results in branding. It can provide a good applicant experience, leading to support for employment brands.

Of course, there are potential drawbacks to the use of assessment as part of the matching process. These include the following five issues:

• Learning curve. Users must learn to understand how to define jobs in terms of relative importance of the parameters used for matching.
• Accuracy. It is critical to match the templates against which applicants are matched to accurate reflections of the job.
• Uncertainty. Predicting performance is a difficult task, to say the least. Assessment-assisted matching is not a panacea and does not eliminate possibility that mistakes will happen.
• Quality control. To be effective, assessments must be created using the proper methodology; substandard assessment products will produce substandard results.
• Legality. While the use of assessments in matching is not illegal, it does require awareness of some potential legal ramifications (see original article for full coverage of legal issues related to the type of products discussed in this article).

So who is actually using some sort of assessment as part of a career portal or job board? I believe the companies below are all doing great things to move us forward toward an era of embedded assessments that can help reduce the noise associated with finding and applying for jobs online.

Climber: Climber.com uses some really cool technology to create a comprehensive applicant profile that includes an assessment of work values. The complete applicant profile is then compared to a profile created by employers making job postings. Part of this process includes an employer work-values profile that helps capture the values of the organization in order to help ensure that users (both applicants and employers) are matched based on a mutual “fit.” Climber goes beyond the norm for this type of exercise by using sophisticated data analysis techniques and AI in order to help optimize the search/match process for its members. It is truly on the cutting edge when it comes to delivering candidate quality via tight searching/matching through the use of sophisticated data analysis techniques and AI.

Jobfox: Provides applicants with the opportunity to take a short personality assessment once they have registered. While the results of this assessment are not currently used to help match job seekers and employers, Jobfox members are able to see the results of their assessment and use them for self-understanding and developmental purposes. Jobfox also has a very nice skills matching technology in which applicants take the time to create a skills profile that is then matched against the skills profile that is created for each position that is posted by organizations using Jobfox. The result is a match score that provides candidates with an idea of which of the jobs available on Jobfox are a good fit for their skills and experience.

Monster: Monster has partnered with DDI, a leading assessment firm, to provide its clients with the ability to add assessments to any job posting. This product is known as the Monster Performance Assessment or MPA. The ability to provide the MPA for most job postings is made possible by DDI’s extensive experience with assessment tools as well as the data it has collected over the past several decades. The MPA package represents a groundbreaking offering, as it is the first time assessments have been sold transactionally as part of the process of posting job openings. The MPA does not use assessment to help candidates identify jobs for which they are matched; rather, it provides recruiters with much richer data about a candidate’s qualifications for the position of interest. This allows recruiters to quickly shortlist candidates based on a set of standardized, job related data. While there are still some details being ironed out, Monster’s approach represents an interesting and potentially effective way to help deliver quality. Monster is also the only one of the mega-boards that has been bold enough to step out with an assessment-related solution.

eBullpen: eBullpen is a job board that uses a personality assessment as part of the process used to match job seekers with available openings. eBullpen has been working on its process for several years now and provides a legally sound, useful approach. This approach asks companies posting jobs to outline the personality traits, activities, and requirements for the job. Job seekers provide data on their personality traits, work preferences, and qualifications. Matching alogrythms are then used to help match job seekers with available openings.

Each of these four companies are stepping out into uncharted territory and is doing so with a slightly different approach. The specifics of these approaches aside, the big picture is what matters the most here.

This big picture is the idea that each of these folks provide a way for job posters to break down a job into a series of key data points which are then matched to a series of related data points in a profile or assessment snapshot created by job seekers.

Detractors have often lobbied against this kind of matching, saying that no candidate (or company for that matter) is interested in taking the time required to create the profiles needed to fuel this kind of process. I firmly disagree. Good hiring takes an investment on the part of both the job seeker and the employer, and good investment often takes a bit of effort. The old adage, “you get what you paid for” along with my personal favorite “garbage in, garbage out” both apply to this situation. I am confident that as we travel further down the road of embedded assessment, the data will bear out the fact that the small amount of time taken to fuel the matching process will prove to be time well spent

Despite this, within the next five years I expect to see career portals offering an increasing amount of value by beginning to change the focus from quantity to quality, with assessments as one of the core elements of this switch.

I think all stakeholders involved in the hiring process, including applicants, stand to benefit from this trend.

Ravi Subramanian recommends hiring manager surveys and assessments. Michael Chernesky asks a very relevant question…who is accountable? Bonita Martin says recruiters and Steven Yeong says hiring managers. Joshua Letourneau offered some great insight based on his experiences. While many of his clients do measure quality of hire, their process often fails because of one of three problems. They don’t measure quality of hire beyond the first day; the hiring manager survey turns into a game since “recruiters are incentivized to make the survey look good”; or feuds spark between HR and the hiring manager. Josh’s solution to overcome these challenges lies in performance assessments that measure expected versus actual performance. Anyone out there having great success measuring QOH? Share your story; we would love to hear it.

Wednesday’s Question of the Day
Anna Patterson’s latest Internet search engine, Cuil, is backed by $33 million in venture capital and expected to outshine Google. I read negative reviews of Cuil and wanted to know if anyone is using it and seeing results. Glenn Gutmacher, Sourcer extraordinaire, is not a fan…it is slow and produces poor quality results. Without launching an alpha or beta version, Glenn believes they “set high expectations and they ‘way’ underdelivered.” T Tallis agrees. Amanda Blazo is more optimistic. She acknowledges Cuil’s shortcomings but encourages us to give it time.

Phone Screening Candidates
Diane Propsner wonders: before a third-party recruiter sends a resume to a corporate recruiter, How much time should he or she spend on phone screening and what questions should be asked? She gave us an overview of her process and the questions included. Andrew Stone agrees with Diane that 10-15 minutes is not enough time for building a relationship with a candidate. Tania Murray recommends “tailoring your cover sheet to your client to focus on just what they (candidate) told you is important to them.” According to Tania, it is critical to know the candidates goals and motivations. Joy Naui offers a different approach by suggesting that third-party recruiters first contact the hiring manager. The phone screening should include key points based on that conversation. Questions should include more than technical skill questions. If a candidate recognizes that you are genuine about finding them the right job, they will agree to answer more questions.

Thursday’s Question of the Week
After hearing Dr. Wendell Williams’ Selection and Assessment webinar on July 23, an attendee wanted to know if behavioral or situational screening questions are better and why. I thought I would ask you. Joe Payne is in favor of behavioral questions since they are a good indicator of past actions and can allow interviewers to dig deeper. Matt Cooper brings up an interesting point that most candidates are too prepared for behavioral questions with the amount of information available on the Internet including examples and preparation tools. Interviewers need to be creative and get more specific. KT Connor agrees with Matt and also cautions against self-reporting assessments instead recommending objective decision tools.

Are Job Boards Becoming Obsolete?
This is a hot topic of debate, check it out!