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Alan Strauss, who’s doing a talent-acquisition project for Lockheed Martin and is well-connected in the D.C.-area corporate recruiting community, talks below about bringing in “A-players” to corporations; what the best recruiters are doing to keep their jobs; and what sorts of questions recruiters should be asking their customers. keep reading…

New age dads are embracing some old-school ideas about gender roles, according to a CareerBuilder survey out just in time for Father’s Day.

More than two-thirds of the working fathers with kids younger than 18 at home say they would prefer to work even if the family could afford to have them be Mr. Mom. If you prefer to see the bottle as half-full, here’s the other side: 31 percent of the dads surveyed by CareerBuilder say they would quit their jobs to stay home if they could.

Sounds almost progressive, yes? It would be if the percentages weren’t going down. In 2005, CareerBuilder found 49 percent of the dads willing to stay home. When the survey was repeated last year, the number had gone to 37 percent.

It’s possible economic uncertainty can be blamed for dads preferring to stay on the job instead of in the house. The survey doesn’t try to explain the decline, but it offers some hints. For instance, three-in-ten working fathers bring work home at least once a week, up from the 2008 survey when 25 percent reported doing that.

Perhaps a more telling stat is that 53 percent of dads say they spend less than two hours a day with the kids. That includes the 14 percent who say they spend an hour or less. No wonder, therefore, that half the surveyed dads admitted missing at least one significant event in their child’s life during the year because of work; 28 percent have missed more than three. Even Homer Simpson doesn’t do that.

“Many working dads have to contend with heavier workloads and longer hours as businesses struggle to do more with less,” says Jason Ferrara, senior career adviser at CareerBuilder and father of two. “It’s important to have a conversation with your supervisor. Employers are placing more emphasis on work/life balance through creative benefits that encourage employees to better manage their personal and professional commitments. However, nearly half of working dads do not take advantage of any flexible work arrangements offered to them.”

There is a bright spot in the survey. Though the number of dads willing to take a pay cut to spend more time with the family has dropped by 20 percent in a year, 30 percent of the surveyed fathers say they’d take a cut; 40 percent of them would accept a 10 percent cut.

CareerBuilder surveyed only working men. But what happens to the gender roles when dad is suddenly unemployed? The New York Times said this back in February:

“When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV, and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.”

Feeling guilty? Need some help? There are plenty of resources to help dads with that work/life thing. You could start here.

Meanwhile, what are the takeaways from the CareerBuilder survey?

Ties and dress shirts may be more welcome this Father’s Day than in the past. And moms can still be counted on when dad is wherever.

Unemployment is an ugly thing. It not only injures people financially, but socially and emotionally. I was reading a fascinating article by Arthur Brooks entitled “I Love My Work.” He chronicles what happened to a small town in Austria in the 1920s when the local factory closed and most men were unemployed. Despite being paid unemployment insurance, their lives began to take on a very different — and not a happy — shape.

Many of us may have had a bout of unemployment and know how empty a day becomes when it is without purpose or goal. We miss the social interactions, and the distractions and diversions from our own problems. Employment, even when people are not really pleased with the work they are doing, gives meaning to life. It provides a reason to get up, to join social events, and is a primary source of happiness. Certainly, there are many people who for a while enjoy the leisure of unemployment, but almost all eventually became bored, dissatisfied, and start looking for something meaningful to do. Recruiters know this is true because every day they see people who may have the resources to not work but are seeking a job. When we ask candidates what they are looking for, they almost always, somewhere in their answers, mention the desire for a challenge or for social interaction and always for meaningful work.

Ultimately, unemployment becomes an issue that can threaten the stability of governments and lead to riots and worse. Germany’s Nazi government was partly an outcome of the unemployment created by the Great Depression, combined with massive inflation. Organizations are always caught in the space between wanting to be good citizens and keep good people employed, and the need to generate profit and increase stock prices. Many of us work (or have worked) for organizations that had every intention of not laying anyone off, yet in the end succumbed.

Yet, as the United States and other countries struggle to keep people employed, they often forget that the solution is not always about preserving the jobs that already exist. The solution to unemployment is keep reading…

We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission in which the world witnessed the first human to walk on the moon. This event was an historic moment for mankind and one that will live on as one of the most triumphant moments for the human race. keep reading…

A troubling new report from ExecuNet says executive longevity continues to decline at just the time companies most need an engaged, knowledgeable C-suite at the helm.

The survey of some 5,000 executives, search consultants, and corporate HR professionals says the average tenure of a business executive declined 15 percent between 2005 and 2008 to an average of 2.3 years. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of the HR professionals surveyed say their company has knowledge management and succession plans to address the loss of management skill.

“It takes roughly three years of deep entrenchment in a job to reach peak performance. With executives spending less time in organizations and often being judged on short-term stock price performance, they stop short of reaching their full potential,” says ExecuNet Vice President and Executive Editor Lauryn Franzoni.

While the economy may have tamped down the voluntary turnover rate for 2009 — executive recruiters expect their searches to be down 14 percent for the first half of the year –  it has also increased the length of time executives spend searching for a job. The report says executives now expect to spend an average of 10.1 months looking before landing. keep reading…

Fast forward to January 15, 2010. What are some of the hiring challenges you’re now facing?

As you put the list together, consider these assumptions:

1. The trough of the economic downturn was reached in April 2009.
2. Job losses continued through October 2009, but at a declining rate, with job gains finally turning positive in November 2009, at around 20,000 or so.
3. The unemployment rate peaked at 9.7% in September 2009 and although still at 8.5% in January 2010, it is forecasted to drop to 7.0% by June 2010.
4. The number of searches on Google with the words “jobs” (e.g., “jobs nurses Seattle”) peaked at 7.3mm/day in April and has been declining by an average of 10%/month since then, but started inching up again in October 2009.
5. An article by Lou Adler on ERE in November 2009 suggested that this pickup was due to people who are fully employed but now getting itchy to leave. He contends that the pent-up demand for a new job is finally being seen and that this is a new group of people entering the job market. Note: this will be unexpected for unprepared companies.
6. Hiring for critical positions will begin in earnest three to four months before a general improvement in the jobless rate is seen. This will be exacerbated by an increase in voluntary turnover.

These assumptions are pretty realistic. The question is, are you ready for this scenario? If you are, here are some of the things you’ve probably been doing over the past six months:

keep reading…

Not a lot of surprises in the latest career trends report from Beyond.com. Healthcare and medical jobs are the largest segment represented on the 15,000 site Beyond network. They represent almost a quarter of the jobs posted to the network during the first quarter of the year. Beyond says it’s a top spot the industry sector has held for the last three quarters.

IT jobs accounted for the next largest group, but their 11 percent of the total showed the continued weakness in the sector. The job count was off on a year-over-year basis, decreasing almost 3 points from the 14 percent of jobs in the first quarter of 2008. Even so, they were up slightly from the last quarter.

By far, the largest number of jobs on the Beyond network are essentially entry-level. The report says 59.5 percent of the jobs during the quarter specified less than one year of experience. Another 22.5 percent sought 3-5 years of experience.

That’s bad news for the 68% of network candidates whose resumes show five or more years of experience. The largest increase in candidates was the 2.1 percent jump in older candidates — those with 21 or more years experience. The biggest drop was among candidates with less than a year of experience (1.62 percent).

While the percentages suggest that companies, when they hire, are looking for cheap labor, which typically means entry-level or close to it, the survey results are specific to the Beyond.com network. Big though it is (traffic is among the top 25 employment sites), Beyond.com itself is the only all-purpose site; most of the company’s job boards are regional or industry.

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

–Yogi Berra

You read it here first, folks: Twitter — at least as it is structured today — is going down. Oh sure, it’s easy to be a contrarian: simply watch where everyone is going and then head in the opposite direction. But the media attention on Twitter means we need to monitor its impact on social interaction — especially recruiting. That said, there are real reasons why the social media phenom Twitter is poised to become a victim of its own success. keep reading…

It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management. Despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and hiring freezes, recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of “standard recruiting.”

After evaluating hundreds of applications, here is part two of the list of best practices in recruiting that I recommend you emulate.

(This article was updated May 4, 2009; it originally said that GE Healthcare “abandoned its outsourcing model,” but this was incorrect. It did not.)

keep reading…

It may be the worst recession in decades, but that didn’t stop Bayard Advertising Agency from launching a new recruitment consulting and RPO business.

“Maybe it is a crazy time,” laughs Mark DeChant. “But our clients were asking us for this. There might even be a bigger need now, with HR departments handling so many other things.”

DeChant is managing director of Worklight, LLC, Bayard’s new RPO subsidiary. He comes to the company from CareerBuilder, where he was an area sales manager. His background includes a stint as business development manager at staffing firm Ranstad.

Although Bayard is only the second large recruitment ad agency to branch into RPO (the other is Bernard Hodes) DeChant says it’s a natural extension of the business. “The deliverable at Bayard, without an RPO, is an electronic version of a person,” he explains. Adding the recruiter between the sourcing and delivery to the client simplifies the process for an employer.

It also gives Bayard another service to offer its 1,100 clients. DeChant says Bayard reps are routinely asked to recommend screeners, sourcing firms, RPOs and the like. “This allows us to keep the revenue in house and makes it easier for the client since we already know them and helped them plan their recruiting strategy,” he adds.

Worklight is offering a complete RPO menu from screening of resumes to the complete sourcing and vetting of candidates. Worklight also provides HCM consulting and training. “Sourcing, interview techniques, OFCCP compliance,” are part of the training curriculum DeChant notes.

“Now,” he adds, “with this set of services, when a client asks, we can say, ‘Yes, we can help with that’.”

It has been an amazing year in recruiting and talent management, despite severe economic hardships, budget cuts, and widespread hiring freezes.

Unlike the economic turmoil following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst, many recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of what can be defined as “standard recruiting.”

If you work in an organization that has given up on innovation and instead has adopted a survival strategy, it’s important to realize that many of your competitors are not standing still. If your organization chooses to wait for an economic recovery to begin modernizing their recruiting practices, you may find it nearly impossible to catch up.

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practice. In my experience, there’s no better place to learn about practical tools and applications in recruiting and talent management than ERE.net.

Fortunately, ERE Media holds a yearly global competition aimed at identifying the very best “next practices” in recruiting. Each year, ERE receives hundreds of applications in eight recruiting program categories from well-known organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Ernst & Young, Intuit, Accenture, GE, Yahoo!, and from less well-known but equally innovative organizations like DaVita, the American Cancer Society, and Tata.

Fortunately, as a judge for the Recruiting Excellence Awards, I’m given the opportunity to highlight some of these amazing practices that your organization should consider adopting.

keep reading…

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

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

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

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

The recession we’re in will have long-run consequences for employment and consequently recruiting. The world is about to see the biggest increase in unemployment in decades. The World Bank and the IMF predict that global trade will contract at the fastest rate since 1930 and global economic output will drop for the first time since the Second World War. Employment is a lagging indicator of problems in the wider economy, so unemployment will continue to rise even if economies start to recover today. The consensus estimate among economists is that in the developed world average unemployment will exceed 10% before the end of 2010.

There are glimmers of hope. Inventories have fallen to such low levels that production will have to be increased just to meet the current level of demand. The fall in consumption is beginning to level out. In the U.S., auto dealer and homebuilder surveys are heading up. Japanese automakers have announced production increases. A broader indicator of an upturn — JPMorgan’s global manufacturing index — posted a second consecutive gain in February, and its new-orders index is rising. A realtor friend just wrote that she has five closings this month. 5. F-i-v-e. 5. Way to go.

What Will Emerge?

keep reading…

Recruiter Academy Founder David Szary joined me and over a thousand others yesterday to cover how the role of the recruiter is changing in 2009. With a myriad of factors such as a struggling economy, new sourcing tools and technologies, and Gen Y entering the workforce, it was apparent that the recruiting industry is going through a period of major change. Szary addressed the need to adapt in order to succeed, stating that “the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting your results to change.”

In examining the trends, Szary predicted the end of an era for the “generalist” recruiter. As more sourcing technologies and specialties emerge, he made the point that being a jack of all trades and a master of none is no longer feasible. “Make yourself invaluable” was the number one takeaway of the presentation. By specializing and becoming an expert in a select few areas, recruiters are less likely to be considered expendable in tough times like these.

Following the presentation (about 45 minutes into the video) Szary took questions from the audience, addressing a variety of topics. I particularly enjoyed David’s thoughts on the future of middle class recruiters & sourcers and changing mindsets around the use of new sourcing tools. View the slideshow and archived video of the presentation below to learn more!

keep reading…

Last Friday I was joined by talent acquisition gurus Jeremy Eskenazi and Dan Kilgore of Riviera Advisors to discuss what 2009 has in store and how we can gain an advantage even in these difficult times. Although hiring is expected to continue to weaken throughout 2009, they showed that by thinking creatively, companies are able to survive and even succeed during the recession.

For instance, companies have been able to compensate for a reduction in placements by insourcing what is typically outsourced, unbundling packaged services, and conducting internal assessment to weed out inefficient practices. Sometimes practices are so steeped in tradition that it takes a step back to realize they are no longer working. It’s a time to optimize your business and resources such as applicant tracking systems to be as efficient as possible.

They also discussed how difficult recruiting passive candidates has become as people have become afraid of leaving the security of their current jobs. There are still pros and cons to passive recruiting, but the dangers of exclusively recruiting passive candidates in the current economy were made clear.

At the conclusion of the presentation (about 45 minutes into the video) Jeremy and Dan fielded questions from the audience. I found their thoughts on recruitment process outsourcing and passive recruiting to be particularly interesting. View the slideshow and archived video of the presentation below to learn more!

keep reading…

Why is unemployment higher than it has been for decades and massive layoffs announced daily? Is something going on that is deeper than a recession? In past recessions the general reason for layoffs is twofold. The first reason is to use the recession as an excuse to remove the less-productive employees. Every organization has employees who perform marginally, but are not bad enough to discharge outright in normal times. The second reason is because customer demand for the products or services has declined and there is no need for workers who have nothing to do. The underlying assumption is that at some point customers will return and the workers will be re-employed as before. That’s the reason unemployment insurance (in the United States) is limited to a few weeks. The expectation is that workers will be brought back or rehired elsewhere in a short time.

On the other hand, recruiters and hiring managers still report that it is exceedingly difficult to find workers for certain key jobs which include computer-security experts, computer engineers, pharmacists, health workers, and even senior-level executives. The time it takes to fill open positions seems to have increased, and hiring managers frequently complain that they have to settle for “second best.”

Is there something we don’t understand going on?

keep reading…

I believe it was Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” that gave us the ever optimistic “Always look on the bright side of life.” While times are certainly tough as we get rolling in the new year, prospects may not be as bleak as anticipated at the close of 2008. Join me, along with talent acquisition experts Jeremy Eskenazi and Dan Kilgore, for a webinar this Wednesday as we discuss what we can expect, both the good and the bad, in 2009.

As we all know, the recruiting industry is always changing and we can certainly expect more new developments in the months to come. We’ll be taking a look at trends to see what kinds of big picture changes we can expect this year, and more importantly what this means for YOU.

Jeremy and Dan will be taking questions after the presentations to address your thoughts and concerns for what awaits us in 2009. We already have over 400 people registered but still have plenty of space so make sure to sign up today!

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When: Wednesday, January 28th
2:00 - 3:00 PM EST
Register Here
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If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at brendan@ere.net.

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

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

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

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

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

keep reading…

Ah, another recession — maybe the mother of all recessions - is upon us. Predictions for recovery range from a few months to two years, but however long it is it will permanently change how we work and recruit.

This recession is our real introduction to the 21st century. For the first eight years of this century, most things stayed as they were with a few small modifications. The Internet infiltrated relatively slowly into the lives of ordinary people. Traditional work remained central, organizations replaced and added workers according to traditional formulas; travel got more uncomfortable, but remained a requirement for those who worked nationally or globally; and the media remained dominated by movies, DVDs, and paper. Energy and the environment became issues — but primarily only for the educated and wealthy. Few of us could identify really major differences between, for example, 1995 and 2005.

But the differences between 1999 and 2009 will be obvious.

keep reading…

From October 15 to 24, 2008, Towers Perrin surveyed human resources executives and staff at more than 450 companies, asking what they’re likely to do now that the economy’s quite a bit less peppy than it was. Seventy-nine percent of the companies have more than $1 billion in annual revenues.