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

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

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

Tool #1: Facebook or MySpace

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

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

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

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

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

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Retailers have a sale, manufacturers slow production, but what can recruiters do with all those excess candidates? A few talent acquisition leaders are fast becoming inventory-management gurus and they are pursuing innovative ways to deal with all those extra candidates.

“We didn’t add any staff because responding to candidates didn’t add more work — we just changed our process,” says Catie Cowher, candidate experience leader for Recruiting Strategy and Initiatives at Wachovia Corporation.

Wachovia posts some 600 to 800 openings per week on its website, which includes both newly created positions and vacancies, and averages 10,000 applicants. According to Cowher, rejected candidates receive an e-mail informing them about their status and the reasons behind Wachovia’s decision. Most candidates are declined early in the recruiting process, following a resume review by a recruiter. Nearly 90% of applicants responding to job postings at Wachovia are declined. Giving candidates immediate feedback about their status was a process change that served up numerous benefits.

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In the United States, students are just beginning to return to campus after the summer holidays. For most organizations, college recruiting will also resume with the timeless routine of information sessions and campus visits for job fairs, interviews, and other related events.

But smart organizations are foregoing the traditional campus activities, in favor of leveraging the Internet. In fact, if you want to attract and hire the best students, forget going to campus at all; it’s not necessary.

College students tell me they are confused by the entire recruiting process. Organizations on the leading-edge of technology are still using the most traditional of methods to recruit them.

While every student has a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile, most companies do not use them in the recruiting process at all. Students are actually a bit surprised that recruiters seem to use recruiting tactics that their parents relate to better than they do. Many are involved in virtual worlds, take online webinars, download lectures as podcasts, and learn from virtual professors. Yet, they must listen to a hiring manager and watch a PowerPoint presentation about some company in a stuffy room on campus.

Unfortunately, recruiters’ belief in the efficacy of past practices is reinforced with surveys by a variety of organizations and institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. But if you take a few minutes to sit down and actually talk to students, you get a different picture of what they would like, what would impress them, and what would engage them.

As demand for college graduates continues to steadily rise, the supply and demand figures for college students should be warning that times have changed.

The number of college students is fairly flat, growing at perhaps 1% a year, and is projected to remain that way for at least another four or five years. Another little-noted fact is that more women than men are enrolled in college and, unfortunately for the high tech and engineering worlds, women don’t tend to major in engineering, mathematics, physics, or computer science. All of these fields are facing significant declines in enrollments and in graduates.

Also consider the students of all age groups graduating from virtual universities that have no campuses. These students are valuable resources for corporations that are currently almost untouched and unrecognized.

Facing these challenges, I don’t see how organizations can focus on just a few campuses or limit their reach to elite schools. Here are a half-dozen tactics to guide your virtual efforts on campus:

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You’ve done your homework and sold the boss on getting a company video made. In fact, you did such a good job the CEO is hinting around about having a starring role, and since it was your idea, you’re in charge of the project.

Now what do you do?

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The basic foundation for all recruiting is the ability to communicate and share information with potential candidates directly. In our modern, high-tech world, corporate recruiters have numerous channels they can use to communicate directly with candidates ranging from face-to-face visits to video chat.

However, there is only one tool that provides a “single point of contact” allowing the use of every form of messaging in use today at any time during the day and from any location. This tool, of course, is the immensely versatile smart phone.

Today’s modern smart phones pack more computing power than most computers did just a few short years ago. They can not only handle your basic person-to-person and conference voice calls, they can also interact with websites, publish blog posts, aggregate RSS feeds, send text messages, send multimedia messages, record/transmit video, record/transmit audio, send email from multiple accounts, take/send pictures, send and receive faxes, edit office documents, and interact with social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

While many organizations empower their recruiters with smart phones, few build a corporate-wide recruiting strategy that leverages the phone as the hub of recruiter activity. Aggressively using smart phones requires forward thinking, something many recruiting managers who came up through the ranks as a transactional recruiter dedicate little time to. In organizations where technology isn’t pervasive and doesn’t permeate every process, the smart phone is seen as just a phone that happens to be mobile, despite its potential to be so much more.

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Are you a recruiter constantly away from your desk and unable to keep up with the recruiting cycle? Do you find yourself trying to find, evaluate, and recruit candidates while on the go? If this sounds like you, get an iPhone, and get access to everything you need right in the palm of your hands.

Without sounding like an Apple sales representative, I discovered that the iPhone opens up a huge playing field specifically for recruiters and sourcers who frequently travel, work in the field, or who work virtually.

The iPhone acts like a mini-computer, where users can access work email, use the Internet, read and produce documents, take notes, and stay organized all while on the run away from an office setting. The iPhone offers a view of the Internet that is exactly the same one would see through a web browser on a desktop computer. With new 3G wireless speeds and advanced security features, the iPhone is now also a very safe product to allow mobile access to systems, programs, sensitive files, key company information, and important documents.

With this in mind, the iPhone can significantly boost recruiter productivity and help to shorten the time-to-fill cycle for open positions. When a recruiter is moving between appointments offsite, the iPhone can access an ATS to update candidate information, grab key files on a shared drive online, or produce a report and email in a timely fashion to various managers and team members.

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Everyone in recruiting and employment branding strives to demonstrate to potential candidates the excitement that can be found within their organization. Most rely almost exclusively on “words” in paid advertising, brochures, and websites, but words are “so last year.”

Each month, fewer and fewer people read newspapers and books, and more of us get our information from moving media, including online videos, film, and TV. Why? Because videos require little effort to watch but still provide a powerful message. Written “words” are weak tools for quickly transmitting the energy and the passion that your employees have for their work. A better alternative is pictures, but they too can be limiting.

If a picture is worth a thousand words…then a video must be priceless. Recruiting videos can excite by allowing potential recruits to better “see, feel, and hear” the passion and the excitement at your organization. Videos allow an outsider to “meet” your employees, to see your technology, and even to tour your facilities.

However, for some reason, despite their incredible power, videos are the most underutilized powerful electronic recruiting tool.

Let’s face it, most traditional recruiting tools are waning in power. Brochures are time-consuming to develop, hard to distribute, expensive, and seldom read. Still pictures and narratives posted on corporate websites have value but they seldom stimulate or excite the visitor.

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We have been bombarded for a decade with news reports, articles, stories, and books about the looming talent shortage about to overwhelm our industries, businesses, and economies.

Taken at face value and looking at traditional work styles and jobs, there is some validity to these stories. Human resources people, recruiters, and some business people will affirm the shortage anecdotally. But it’s hard to find real examples and real numbers.

Certainly, anyone trying to hire a surgeon in North Dakota, a Starbucks barista in Oklahoma, or a stock broker in Alaska may have to look long and hard. But if you are looking for these folks in urban areas or places with significant populations, the number of qualified applicants increases substantially.

After all, it has never been easy to attract skilled professionals to rural areas, and it has become even more difficult as people leave the country for large cities. Rural parts of the world are emptying into cities — especially those located in coastal areas or those with significant educational and cultural activities.

Richard Florida’s books on the Creative Class point out in stark numbers and colorful graphs and charts the shifts in population away from some less desirable (and often semi-rural) cities and toward others that offer the lifestyle and engaging employment desired by the emerging creative class.

Sure, thousands of baby boomers are poised to retire over the next decade or two and, yes, there are somewhat fewer young folks behind them; but is that really going to be a problem? And will the number of boomers who choose to retire reach the predicted numbers?

Studies I have seen indicate that boomers will most likely defer retirement for some time because they have not saved enough to make retirement possible or because they remain healthy and want to continue working.

We will most likely also need fewer people to reach the same productivity levels of today.

The nature of work has changed dramatically. Today only about 2% of Americans grow food or work on farms. This is truly amazing considering the amount of food produced and exported. Farms have grown much larger and are more automated. Completely automated, GPS-guided tractors cultivate fields that used to take a dozen men and several dozen horses to plow.

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Job boards? Social networks? Search engines? Wikis? Blogs? Microblogs? The list could go on and on. What are you using? Some of the above? All of the above?

Recruiters and sourcers have a wealth of options at their fingertips to find, reach out, and connect with active and passive talent. Every recruiter and sourcer has a different set of sites, tools, and communities that they use to find their talent. This is what I like to refer to as the “recruiting portfolio.”

A recruiting portfolio can be comprised of countless sites and tools.

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For the first time in many quarters Workstream (profile; site) was in the money - sort of - eking out a half-million dollar finish to its 2008 fiscal year. The talent management software company reported Thursday evening that it had an EBITDA of $516,000 for the fourth quarter that ended May 31. That compares to an EBITDA of ($4.5 million) for the previous quarter and ($1.3 million) for the fourth quarter last year.

Still, the company reported losing $14.9 million in the last quarter and $39.4 million for the year.

Only sketchy and incomplete numbers were released by the publicly traded company, so it isn’t possible to detail the company’s income and expenses other than to say the fourth quarter revenues were $7 million, up from the $6.2 million of the third quarter.

The company attributed the incomplete financial statement to an “on-going goodwill analysis.” “This item does not have an impact on EBITDA, revenues or cash,” the company noted in the announcement of its financial results. However, goodwill is a business asset that has to be adjusted if its fair value is different from the value carried on the books. Workstream valued its goodwill at $45.3 million in an April filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But in the financials it released Thursday appears to be anticipating a reduction of $13.6 million.

Regardless of the eventual accounting decisions, Workstream is a troubled company. Its operating expenses have exceeded its revenues every year since the company went public in 1999 and for two years before that as well. It is very likely to be delisted by NASDAQ, where it trades under the ticker symbol WSTM. To remain on the active exchange Workstream would have to lift its stock price to at least $1. It closed today at 16.27 cents. A planned merger with payroll processor Empagio fell apart in June.

Still, Chief Executive Officer Steve Purello says in the press release announcing the financial, “Workstream had a solid finish to its fiscal year.”

Purello could not be reached for additional details.

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

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

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

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

But Willie faces some major challenges.

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FriendFeed is a social networking community of roughly 75,000 people currently. FriendFeed is technically a microblog, in the same space as Twitter, but with more options.

Per its site, FriendFeed “offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.” I have been using the site for the past few months; it’s a new craze among the technically savvy and Web 2.0 crowd. If you are looking for a way to connect with passive technical talent and the young Gen-Y crowd, this is a site you want to invest some time on.

With FriendFeed, users setup a free account and customize a “feed” of content they share from other sites online. Everything then funnels into FriendFeed for people to see. The content shared can be from sites you have accounts with and use already to include news, bookmarking, status, video, photos, blogging, music, and more. These sites can include Twitter, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, Google, Blogs, and up to 30+ others. My feed allows others to see status updates and comments I posted out on Twitter, in addition to updates to my LinkedIn profile and articles and posts from several blogs. If you don’t use a lot of sites for sharing content, you can simply post and share anything directly on FriendFeed. It’s dead simple to use.

Users of FriendFeed have the option to subscribe to “feeds” of other users and in turn they can discover yours. When a user shares something in one of their feeds, they are telling the rest of the site and users who subscribe to them what they are doing currently, what they are interested in, and what they want to talk about.

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While U.S. recruiters debate the value of text messaging, one of the largest franchise operators in the Middle East has jumped in with enthusiasm.

“From now on,” says Nic Beesley, a senior HR vice president with M.H. Alshaya Co., “All jobseekers applying for Alshaya vacancies will henceforth know exactly where they stand. Whether they are short-listed or called for an interview, every candidate will receive real-time SMS updates, regardless of which part of the world they live in.”

The company operates some 1400 retail outlets for brands such as Starbucks, Estee Lauder, Mothercare, Foot Locker and Pearle Opticians. More than 14,000 people work for Alshaya in 15 countries, mostly in the Middle East, but also including Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic.

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As we enter the dog days of summer here in the United States and Europe, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on some of the blogs and websites that I find valuable. As an avid bog reader, I know how hard it is to sift through the hundreds that are available and narrow it down to just a few.

I have chosen four blogs/websites that I think are useful to recruiters and add new knowledge and perspectives. Each blogger that I have chosen is also an author of a book or two and is a researcher in his/her area. They all are looked upon as experts by their peers.

This list could be much longer, of course, and I know I have missed some other equally good blogs.  If you have a favorite, please send me a link and let me enjoy it too. I will do a new column from time to time and add more to the list.

Value Networks is a site that adds depth to the discussions we have about social networks. Verna Allee, the principal behind this site and discussion group, is known all over the world for her work in mapping networks – in other words, graphically showing us how people interact and with whom in a value chain. She has written several books on knowledge management and on social networking and has been a regular faculty member at my Future of Talent Retreat. Her website discusses and provides tools for value network analysis, which is a methodology for understanding, using, visualizing, optimizing internal and external value networks, and complex economic ecosystems.

While this may sound overwhelming, the site contains rich information about social networks and how to understand the interactions and interrelationships between the members of a network. The methodology is being used by many organizations to better understand how their customers interact with them and each other, how suppliers interact with customers, and how employees network both within and outside the organization.

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• Zacky has settled with the OFCCP. Because of hiring practices the Labor Department believes disproportionately rejected female applicants for some jobs, the company will pay about $347 to women turned down for jobs; hire some who weren’t hired; and monitor its hiring process to make sure it’s not discriminatory.

• A new report on healthcare and manufacturing in Ohio finds that, regarding healthcare, “In a worrisome trend, some of the healthcare occupations that experienced the strongest growth also had declining real median wages. These jobs tended to be healthcare support positions that required little or no classroom training. This trend was exemplified by the home health occupation, which grew by 56 percent in just three years by adding 17,100 jobs. The real median wage in this occupation fell by 5.6 percent.” And regarding manufacturing, “Guidance counselors do not understand the opportunities available for manufacturing careers or choose to direct students to other fields.”

• One group says it has “something exciting” to announce, which it says will be the “next best thing in Web 2.0 recruiting.” Meanwhile, InovaHire says its “design and functionality will be Web 3.0.” What’s on the Inova site isn’t much now, but we’ll keep in touch with the company and fill you in.

• CareerBuilder has launched a new job board, for retail.
  

• Speaking of CareerBuilder, which recently launched a new iPhone app … Nate Swanson, who analyzes HR/recruiting-related stocks for ThinkPanmure, says the recruiting/HR field will move quickly into mobile-device adoption. He writes: “With early movers such as salesforce.com, Oracle, and CareerBuilder already live with mobile applications on the App Store, we believe that it is only a matter of time before the human capital management space begins to push into the mobile frontier … we actually project an inflection point in growth 12-18 months from now as HCM applications converge with social networking and Web 2.0 technologies … We believe that the iPhone is pushing these boundaries fast, really fast, and other mobile device manufacturers are now scrambling to catchup.”

• A lousy candidate experience? According to Dubai-based Hiring Solutions, its client Alshaya, also in Dubai, is one exception. Hiring Solutions says in an email: “Every job seeker at Alshaya will henceforth receive SMS updates on their job application, regardless of which part of the world they live in. The SMS will inform candidates whether they are short-listed or called for an interview and ask them to check their email for complete details. This spares jobseekers the agony of second-guessing their application status and helps Alshaya to reduce its average time-to-hire.”

Ron Hanscome’s serious thoughts of moving from HRchitect to Kenexa (profile) began during Kenexa’s “analyst day” this past April. But Hanscome, the new veep of product strategy, met Kenexa’s CEO more than five years ago, when Hanscome was at the META Group, and always had in the way back of his mind that Kenexa could be an interesting future employer.

At the analyst day, “the connection got rekindled,” he says. The company was looking for someone who could “bring it all together, think holistically” — with “it” referring to the company’s diverse group of products.

Hanscome’s name and face are as familiar to recruiting-conference-aholics as Jason Corsello, Sammy Jo’s Pop, and stress balls. Before Kenexa and HRchitect (profile), he was an Oracle VP, overseeing its HR tech products.

Hanscome had joined HRchitect about a year ago, and led that company’s creation of the “The Suite Life of Integrated Talent Management” report.

“Ron is not the kind of resource that is easily replaced, and he brought a lot to the table,” says HRchitect’s bizdev director Matt Lafata. “Fortunately, everything we do at HRchitect is done in a very collaborative manner so one person doesn’t make or break any project, or practice. Ron worked with a team of consultants who are continuing on projects without skipping a beat. Ron was very good at sharing knowledge and working as a team player. As a result of all of that, we are certainly keeping our eyes and ears open for a similar-caliber person to lead our strategic planning group and in the meantime, our VP of Consulting Services, Dan Katavola, is overseeing the handful of people we have involved in strategic planning projects.”

Hanscome found Kenexa attractive partly because of its emphasis on the science of assessment and “fit”; it brags about its 100 I/O psychologists on staff. “They’ve got science around measuring fit, measuring assessment, that really adds to the technology as the delivery vehicle,” he says. “Case study after case study.”

Three Favorites

In a recent report for Think Panmure, Nate Swanson analyzed Kenexa and its competitors from a Wall Street perspective, writing:

Our best three HCM ideas are Taleo, SuccessFactors, and Kenexa. Taleo and SuccessFactors, pure-play on-demand vendors within the HCM space, are pulling away from competitors such as Oracle and SAP with product depth, breath, and functionality. We see Taleo and SuccessFactors creating innovative ways to further extend their product reach through the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and the integration with new social networking sites. With recurring revenue contract terms lasting three to five years, Taleo and SuccessFactors should have some near-term insulation even if the current economic environment gets worse. We expect each company to meet or beat our estimates. We like Kenexa as an attractive value play within the HCM space, but note the company’s recruitment outsourcing services may be more sensitive to the current economic headwinds. The company’s recently announced acquisition of Quorum should help diversify this risk as the company is able to expand and strengthen its services in EMEA, an area previously identified as a weakness.

At mid-year, employers are choosing to dip their toes in the outsourcing pool, rather than jump in feet first. Attempts at wide-scale HR outsourcing haven’t been successful, mainly because vendors are underestimating the costs and companies won’t settle for cookie-cutter solutions.

A more selective outsourcing approach allows vendors and employers to tackle each function independently, understand the requirements, and then customize the implementation and refine the processes before moving on. At least for now, that’s the direction managers are taking.

“Comprehensive outsourcing of HR administration hasn’t worked out as expected for either party,” says Mark Marcon, senior research analyst and director for Robert W. Baird & Company, Inc. “I think most of the vendors under-estimated the costs and the profitability of these contracts, so there’s been significant pull-back and a more selective adoption approach.”

A survey of 182 U.S. companies by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide validates that selective, rather than comprehensive H.R. outsourcing is the clear preference among employers, with 6% of the respondents indicating they plan to outsource recruiting in the near future. keep reading…

For several years I have been part of a virtual network called NextNow. It was founded and is stewarded by an eccentric ex-Sun Microsystems engineer who likes putting interesting people together.

It is for the most part virtual, except for the few locals. A handful of us get together maybe once a year and one of us always hosts visiting NextNow members from other places. From this network I have made connections and friends with people in Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and elsewhere. Many I have never met but we correspond regularly and help each other with ideas and opinions.

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Much of the hiring process from sourcing to closing to onboarding has changed significantly over the past 20 years. Much hasn’t. And therein lies the problem.

In some cases we’re past Web 2.0, in other cases we’re still using stone-age techniques to find, recruit, and hire top performers.

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Are you overwhelmed with the hundreds of new tools, applications, websites, and services that have sprung up over the past few months?

Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are all the rage. Some recruiters are charging forward with Twitter and other SMS-type tools. Websites are being revamped with videos, blogs, and simulations.

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