For being so out of fashion, so yesterday, job boards manage to come out on top or top-adjacent on nearly every source of hire study. In a Bersin & Associates survey this fall job boards tied for first with internal transfers as the leading source of all hires. CareerXroads says job boards produced 24.9 percent of all external hires in 2010, second only to employee referrals (27.5 percent).

The latest survey comes from tech vendor Talent Technology, which reports that job boards are the leading source of candidates, according to the 1,100 North American HR professionals who participated. Job boards account for 17 percent of the candidates, followed by employee referrals, which provide 15.8 percent.

What’s remarkable about the evidence is how few accept it. Even after reporting that “job boards remain popular and are used to fill 19 percent of open positions – making job boards the No. 1 source for candidates,” Bersin titled that section of the report “Job Boards: Not Dead, but Dying.”

Even more remarkable is how little the job board industry has done to promote itself. The major boards have their own, proprietary data, guarded more carefully than the U.S. does its diplomatic messages. Second tier and certainly mom-and-pop operations have little data beyond gross traffic counts. So for all practical purposes employers do their own market surveillance.

Now, finally, seven years after it’s founding by Peter Weddle, the International Association of Employment Web Sites has bestirred itself to do some serious research about the industry.

Financed by Jobg8, the job board industry’s candidate marketplace, 100 sites participated last summer in the first benchmarking survey of commercial employment sites. Before you get too hopeful about the prospects, know that none of the biggest job boards participated, the survey was designed for the benefit of the industry, and most of the results aren’t being shared publicly. Those that are may be helpful to some buyers; they’re certainly interesting. More important is that it gives individual sites a yardstick against which to measure their own results.

“It was,” confessed Matt Hoffner, president of Jobg8′s Americas operation (the company is HQd in the UK), “a lot harder than we thought … Just getting all the terms right was quite a challenge.”

Still, after struggling through some 65 questions and their accompanying 22 footnotes, the industry found:

• Three-quarters of a job board’s visitors are “window shoppers” who neither apply for a job nor register. That suggests there’s a high degree of self-selection that occurs, as the next point demonstrates.
• Job postings that direct to a company’s ATS get five applicants on average. Those with only an email address get 3.3 applications. Niche sites and those in business more than three years have slightly higher apply rates.
• Job aggregators (the Indeeds and SimplyHireds) provide about 22.8 percent of a U.S. site’s traffic and only 11.6 percent in Canada. Depending on the region, sizable percentages also came from the job board’s own search optimization efforts and their pay-per-click campaigns.
• The average site has 3.5 employees; 22 percent have one or less; 9 percent have 30 or more.
• Individual marketing expenses varied widely, ranging from 1 to 14 percent. The average is 6.7 percent of revenues spent marketing the site.

Hoffner observed that the industry is increasingly aware it needs to do a better job telling its story. From the survey discussions that took place at meetings in Ft. Lauderdale, during the IAEWS Congress in September, and in London, Hoffner said there was a “clear understanding that we can’t sit still.” The public part of the report says, “Job board owners are looking for new sales and marketing models and resources but expect that promotion and sales efforts will increase in 2012 and beyond.”

One powerful motivator for putting more effort into promotion, besides simply to stand out from the huge number of job boards in the world, is that organic traffic produces better results than that from aggregators. Says the published report: “Many participants stated that aggregator traffic was expensive and may not yield the same rate of applications or registered users as traffic from other sources.”

Board operators are also looking at a changing pricing model. Most sites still charge a fee to post a job; a few charge employers for each click. Hoffner says a “pay per applicant model came in for discussion. It’s an evolving pricing model that has the operator share risk with the customer. That’s a direction they seem to be heading toward.”

Indeed the January number came in below the average of 182,000, which is what economists in a Bloomberg survey were expecting. A Dow Jones Newswires survey however put the number right at 170,000.

The ADP report also adjusted down the December numbers from the initial 325,000 to 292,000.  Nearly all the January gain, says ADP, came from companies with fewer than 500 workers, and all but 18,000 of the new jobs were in the service sector. Manufacturing added 10,000 workers during the month.

A year ago, ADP said 190,000 private sector jobs were created in January.

This morning’s report, says Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, “compares to the 2011 monthly average of 160,000 and thus points to a continued recovery but the mediocre pace this far into a recovery still remains frustrating,” He estimates that Friday’s official report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show 165,000 non-farm jobs created in January.

The ADP National Employment Report, produced jointly with Macroeconomic Advisers, is closely watched by economists as an indication of what the official U.S. Labor Department jobs report will show. The government report is usually released on the first Friday of every month.

The two reports rarely match, largely due to differences in methodology. The government report also includes public sector employment. ADP’s report does not. However, as the Globe and Mail (Canada) said in reporting this morning’s report, “Take the number with a large pinch of salt, but pay attention to the trend.”

That trend, though, is hard to read. While there hasn’t been a negative month since September 2010 (when census layoffs influenced the numbers), job gains have hovered around 100,000 for most of last year. Only in four months did the official numbers break 200,000. In three months, they were well below 100,000.

Like the job numbers, other signs are positive, if tepid. The Conference Board last week said its Leading Economic Index improved slightly in December  to 94.3. It was the third consecutive monthly increase in the index. (The Board also announced changes in how the index is calculated.) This morning, the Board’s monthly count of jobs posted online showed 61,300 more jobs in January than the month before. It’s only the second increase in job postings in eight months.

Economists, now, are not expecting any surprises in Friday’s government report. The Wall Street Journal says economists are expecting it to show 125,000 new jobs and no change in the current 8.5 percent unemployment rate.  Reuters puts the number at 150,000. And Bloomberg, which wrote a long piece this morning about growing optimism in the financial markets and among economists, says the Friday jobs report will come in at 145,000.

It’s a brand new year, great things are on the horizon … and for me, I have had it up to my eyeballs with a particular topic. I am so fed up with this topic that I want to climb to the highest peak and scream, bang my head against a wall, and even toss my desk around the room over and over. This topic that’s making me and others so irritated is Passive Candidates.

Yes, that’s right. The topic or even the mention of passive candidates now a day makes me want to throw up. In conducting my own personal year in review and through scouring HR topics, articles, blogs, etc., it seems as if 2011 was the year of the “Passive Candidate.” My response … so the heck what.

I guess I am at a loss as to why there is so much over-emphasis on “passive candidates.” Whatever happened to simply hiring the most-qualified, best-fit individual who can add their strengths in order to advance the organization? Now we have resorted to “Commandments of Recruiting Passive Candidates,” “Rules to Recruit Passive Candidates”, “Your Guide to Passive Candidates” — you get my point.

So here are some questions for you to ask yourself and answer:

• What does passive mean?
• Are “passive candidates” better qualified than active candidates?
• Are “passive candidates” perfect?
• Do “passive candidates” even know they are passive?
• Are “passive candidates” just acting passive and playing the recruiting game?
• Do hiring managers even know what passive means, or are they following another trend?
• Has a “passive candidate” ever been hired and then performed poorly, or are they all major rock stars?
• On a company employment application, where is the check box that asks whether one is passive or active?
• Is there something wrong with being an active seeker?
• What is most important to you in making your next hire?
• Why does it seem that some of these “passive candidates” seem to change companies like it’s nobody’s business?
• How come when I am speaking to a “passive candidate” and ask that individual what other opportunities they are currently looking at, the list is most of the time extensive?

Passive, active, semi-active, inactive, submissive, reactive, retired, separated, etc. — shouldn’t we want to hire the best and most qualified individuals for our positions? Don’t we want to seek out and hire those who possess the strengths to improve the organization?

Right now, there are individuals knocking at our doors, and while not all of them are qualified, a lot of them are very qualified. Yet, a lot of these individuals are facing discrimination by hiring managers and recruiters who want someone who is working or someone who is passive. I have yet to see any study or statistical data that proves passive candidates to be more qualified, make better employees, or add additional value than those employees in the “other” categories.

I am after the most qualified individuals for my positions. I hire for experience, qualifications/strengths, and fit. I have never asked whether an individual is passive or not because to me it doesn’t matter. If you have the skills, meet the criteria of the position, and are determined to be a fit, then there is a great possibility in making a match.

I recently completed an internal search for an executive-level position in one of our most prestigious business units. After taking the order and obtaining full details, I started my search process. Fast forwarding to the end, I presented five candidates in my final slate: two passive, two semi-active, and one active. The end result — the active candidate received the offer after a thorough and extensive interview process.

It turns out this active individual came from a competing company who had shut its local doors months prior. To no fault of her own, a little bad luck had her now in a position that she had never been in before — in active search mode. In my own evaluation, I found her to be no less qualified than other passive candidates I interviewed for this same role. In fact, she was the most qualified and turned out to be the best fit.

I call on my fellow HR and talent leaders to not follow trends or fashions. Rather, stick to and follow the fundamentals of recruiting and search, build relationships, treat others well, hire for skill set, fit, and strengths, interview like a pro, and lastly maintain an open mind.

“Most predictions,” says an economic analysis by the Society for Human Resource Management, “are less optimistic now than they were when 2011 began.”

What especially worries economists is whether the slow job growth is due to employer cautiousness — in which case growth will accelerate when economic confidence returns — or whether it is structural, meaning some jobs have been permanently eliminated, much the way automation obsoleted elevator operators.

“It is a fair bet that aggregate demand remains the main problem while pockets of skills mismatches persist, despite the high number of job seekers,” says the SHRM analysis.

The latest economist to weigh in is Gad Levanon, director of macroeconomic research for The Conference Board. Last week, he dissected recoveries of the past to examine the rate of job growth across multiple industries. What he found is that “the current employment recovery is the second slowest on record.”

His analysis led him to conclude that job growth this year is going to be a lot like last year.

Like Huang, the St. Louis Federal Reserve doesn’t see unemployment moving much below 7 percent before 2014 and even then, the Fed says it might even be up around 8 percent. That’s despite the Fed’s guess that real GDP is likely to be over 3 percent, possibly even up to around 4 percent.

Levanon’s analysis, though, offered some support for the SHRM view that it is weak demand that’s limiting job growth. One look at the chart and two things jump out. The first is how small the percentages are now compared to recoveries of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The other is how robust the growth in temporary workers is.

The latter is a good sign. It suggests, at least, that the current pace of job growth is likely to continue. While a nearly 32 percent growth in temporary staffing since June 2009 would historically signal a spurt in full-time job growth, that may not be the case in this recovery. Instead, it may evidence that some structural changes are occurring in how employers manage their workforce.

This is not the same as automation eliminating jobs, but is a response to business cycles — as when retailers add staff in the fall for the holiday season — or project-based needs, or the natural ebb and flow. In other words, more employers may be including the use of temps as a strategic part of their workforce, and not merely as a precursor to fulltime hiring.

This so-called “secular growth” theory is certainly debatable. A Morgan Stanley research paper last spring challenged the notion that temporary and contract workers are becoming a strategic part of corporate employment in the U.S. and worldwide.

However, in a provocative and data-laden analysis of the staffing industry, BMO Capital Markets says “it may be different this time.” While the firm doubted the secular growth notion, now it’s not so sure. The research report issued earlier this month says:

However, by this point in the cycle, we should have seen a significant switch from “temp” to “perm,” but we have not; temp jobs represented nearly 15% of totals jobs added in the current recovery – by far the highest of the first 21 months in the past six post-recession periods – and given the current sluggish rebound, total employment may not return to its pre-recession peak for the first time ever.

There’s evidence now, says BMO, that the proponents of secular growth may be right “and the industry is seeing some secular growth as corporations use temporary staffing more strategically as part of their overall human resource policies.”

Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. Rather than continue time-consuming and expensive external searches, more hiring managers will opt to go with an almost-ready internal candidate who is a good cultural fit and is willing to learn fast. Although hiring managers may push back at this, management will encourage it, and the increasing difficulty in finding and recruiting top talent will help accelerate the trend.

Over the next few years there will be a move to enlarge the skills of current employees so they can be moved around to different functions as demand fluctuates. Employee development will morph from delivering training, to providing accelerated apprenticeships, developing simulations, and finding ways to encourage informal and on-the-job learning.

Recruiters should focus on encouraging hiring managers to look at these internal employees, encourage them to hire internally, and develop better internal talent communities to expose hiring managers to talented employees and employees to opportunities.

Social Goes Mobile

When recruiting does look externally, more of it will happen on mobile devices. The explosion of Android and iPhone apps means fewer potential candidates will be using traditional computers.

Clearly candidates with technical edge and savvy — the ones you are probably the most interested in hiring — will be spending most of their time on smart phones, iPads, and other tablets. If you have not developed specific recruiting apps that take advantage of these mobile platforms, you will be at a disadvantage as we roll into the middle of 2012.

More applicant tracking systems are now capable of using a social profile rather than a resume, and as most candidates already have such a profile it only makes sense that they use it to apply for a position.

Everything from branding to screening to even doing interviews is moving to mobile platforms and using such things as simulations, video, and chat. Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other major players will introduce more mobile apps and functionality during this year.

By the end of 2012, the traditional career site will be mostly obsolete. If it exists at all will be little more than the place where the candidate makes the formal application. Smart firms will make everything they do mobile-friendly and compatible and encourage candidates to interact more with hiring managers, other employees, and even alumni in online forums, chat rooms, Twitter chats, and via video, Skype, and other similar media.

Just-in-time Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing has already moved from searching static databases to using social media, and this trend will continue to grow. Rather than build proprietary databases or talent pools, recruiters can participate in and look for potential candidates in many different online forums and communities. As almost all professionals have an online presence, whether in LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere, and as many are also likely participating in Twitter chats, Facebook conversations, and so on. Searching for talented people is getting easier each month.

A recruiter can find an interesting potential candidate, start a conversation, provide the candidate with a variety of information sources about the organization and position, and even direct the candidate to screening apps and apps that allow the candidate to apply.

Recruiters can also use their network of current employees, alumni, friends, and colleagues to crowdsource good candidates and leverage referrals.

Entire recruiting campaigns can be run in a matter of days or weeks by using referrals, crowdsourcing, social media, mobile technologies, and by rethinking the recruitment process. Through streamlining, simplification and by getting hiring managers more involved, candidates can be found, screened, assessed, and hired in days.

Continued Rise of Contingent Workers

The use of contractors, part-time employees, and consultants has soared during the recession. And it will continue to grow for two reasons: the first is that it provides employers with the flexibility they seek to manage costs and headcount easily and much more cheaply than by frequent layoffs. Second, many people are finding that contingent employment suits their lifestyle and interests well. They can plan other activities around their work schedules, they can budget according to the amount of time they are willing to work, and they get variety in the kind of work they do and who they work for.

It will be hard to return to the model of employment where just about everyone is a regular employee. Strategies changes frequently, world events and business cycles make it necessary to adjust priorities more often than ever before, and people are less and less willing to commit to a long-term employment arrangement that is uncertain and stressful.

The Beginning of Applied Analytics

Look for more vendors to offer analytical software specifically for human resources and recruiting. We will begin to see how various independent events have an effect on the quality of hire by tapping into data hidden away in their ATS and HRIS systems. They will begin to seriously track and use data to decide the best sources of candidates, what key traits lead to retention and on-the-job success, and where they can reduce costs or efforts and still get good results.

All in all, the economy and the election will dominate this year and, as a result, this should be a year of modest employment growth, a focus on hiring returning military veterans, and even more growth in outsourcing volume recruiting and hard-to-fill positions to RPOs.

The report this morning from the U.S. Department of Labor says 364,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits were filed last week, a decrease of 4,000 from the week before and 59,000 fewer than the same week last year. It’s the third consecutive weekly drop. (Numbers are seasonally adjusted.)

A Reuters poll of economists in advance of this morning’s release predicted the number of new claims would rise to 375,000. The lower-than-expected number helped get stocks off to a strong start this morning despite a Commerce Department report that the third quarter GDP grew at a revised 1.8 percent rate. Previously, the rate had been estimated at 2 percent. Economists were expecting the 2 percent growth rate to stand.

However, there were other positive economic reports. The Thomson Reuters University of Michigan consumer sentiment rose to 69.9 points in December from November’s 64.1, besting expectations it would only reach 68. The index is derived from monthly surveys of consumers nationwide.

The report noted that, “Good times economically were expected in 2012 by 29 percent (of consumers) in December, up from 19 percent in November and the recent low of 14 percent in August. While more consumers heard news of employment gains in December, they didn’t expect that those gains would have much impact on the national unemployment rate in the months ahead.”

However, the survey measures were below last year’s levels and consumers reported being worried about their personal finances. That prompted surveys chief economist Richard Curtin to warn, “If the payroll tax holiday is not extended, it would be a significant drag on economic growth, and would increase the likelihood that weakness in consumer spending would again put the economy at risk of a renewed downturn.”

With Congress stalemated over extending the payroll tax cut, business associations are warning that hiring plans are beginning to be put on hold. The International Franchise Association said this week that failing to extend the cut will “jeopardize the creation of 168,000 new jobs” next year.

If there’s no action by the end of the year, workers will see fewer dollars in their first paychecks of 2012, at just the time bills for their holiday shopping begin to roll in. For workers earning $50,000 annually, it would mean about $19 a week less take home pay.

Much of the attention has been focused on the impact of ending the 2 percent savings on Social Security taxes that has been in effect for a year; without a break in the impasse, some 2.6 million Americans could lose their unemployment benefits. CNN/Money says that by mid-January, nearly 700,000 would lose benefits, which average $300 weekly. By March 3, the number rises to 2.6 million, according to White House estimates.

The quarterly Manpower survey of hiring intentions released today shows 14 percent of employers expect to add to their workforce in the first three months of 2012. Nine percent expect a decline; 7 percent don’t know; and, 70 percent predict no change. With Manpower’s seasonal adjustment, the net result is nine percent overall increase in job growth intentions.

Intentions, of course, don’t necessarily translate into actual hiring. But next quarter’s employer plans at least show the first improvement in a year. Throughout this year, Manpower’s survey of hiring intent stayed at a consistent 8 percent. It’s also the ninth constitutive quarter of positive hiring intentions.

“Slow, but steady momentum has improved employer confidence, which is likely why more employers are planning to hire in the first quarter,” said Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup president of the Americas.

However, there’s an unusually large number of employers who don’t know what they’ll be doing next quarter. The 7 percent uncertain employers i  the highest since 2005 and the jump between the current fourth quarter, where 3 percent of employers were unsure, to next quarter is the largest since 1977.

“This uptick is encouraging,” Prising, said, “but the historically high proportion of employers that are unsure of their hiring plans indicates continued uncertainty about the future and ongoing caution when it comes to staffing plans.”

Adding to the uncertainty is the continuing debate in the U.S. Congress about extending a payroll tax cut, which expires in less than three weeks, as well as the European bailout and the future of the Euro.

As if to underscore the uncertainty, a survey by Dice Holdings, owner of eFinancialCareers and the IT specialty job board Dice.com, found 47 percent of hiring managers and recruiters saying they expected to increase hiring in the first half of 2012 compared to their hiring in the second half of 2011.

While the Dice results are more optimistic than what Manpower found, both surveys found a majority of companies plan no additional hiring. Dice said 53 percent of the respondents expect no new hiring in the first half of next year; Manpower put the number at 70 percent for the first three months.

Manpower’s survey also found that the most robust hiring will be in the mining sector (which include oil and gas), which is projected to see a seasonally adjusted 16 percent hiring boost. Leisure and hospitality is just behind with a 14 percent net employment outlook. Only construction is expected to see a net jobs decrease. It’s employment outlook is -7 percent.

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

The jobs report we wrote about today was more of the so-so stuff, with fears of a recession decreasing but life still tough for job-seekers in many fields. Here’s what Johnson and I talked about today as we thought more about the numbers:

We needn’t wait for a magic bullet. You may have read that for unemployment to go down to 7 or 8 percent, we need to grow the economy by some ungodly number that’ll never happen unless we find a way to invent another Internet, make milk chocolate out of solar power, and so on. Johnson’s not sure it’s all that bad. Sure, he says, we’ve lost maybe 8 million jobs and gained only a quarter of those back. So at this rate, depending on who you ask, it’ll be until 2018 or 2020 or 20-something-crazy until life returns to normal. But Johnson says it needn’t take a miracle, or a decade. For one, he says, there are jobs, of course, and some people will go back to school to prepare for them. Also, he says, some things will just improve, like the next bullet point here, construction.

More houses need to be built. Johnson says the country needs somewhere between a million and a million and a half homes to be built each year — but only a half or a third of that is being built now. More housing construction, he says, needs to happen, and eventually will happen, sharply increasing employment in the construction industry. “We aren’t all going to move in with our parents.”

Meanwhile, cheaper housing is making life cheaper for some. Although it may seem like few people are buying and selling houses, Johnson notes that maybe 5 million houses are being sold annually, or about 20 million over the last four years. This, he says, is an economic silver lining because this was “pretty cheap housing,” he says, houses bought somewhere around a third cheaper than before, perhaps enabling some couples to more easily forgo one income for a while, or for one spouse to cut back on hours.

It’s still tough for college grads. I told Bob Johnson that although the unemployment rate is floating around in the 4% range for college graduates, it sure doesn’t feel like it when I know people applying for jobs with 300 other candidates competing. He agrees, saying that the unemployment rate for graduates is in the 2% range in a stronger economy, so indeed, “it’s not as strong as it usually is.”

He also notes that the figure includes anyone who has ever graduated. In other words, to take an extreme case to make the point here — every graduating senior could have trouble getting a job, and it would still not increase the unemployment all that much, since there are tens of millions of Americans who’ve graduated college, and maybe less than a million graduating annually looking for jobs (since some go to graduate school). Johnson notes that his daughter, a Dartmouth senior, knew of an informal survey done at Dartmouth showing that only about 27% of the senior class had a job a month before graduation.

Stores and shopping are changing. I told Johnson it sometimes feels like a deep recession here in Los Angeles, with stores going out of business and the (not atypical) sign on a restaurant door I saw last week saying, “after 16 years, we just couldn’t pay our lease.” I also told him that I thought Amazon and other, more-or-less sales-tax-free shopping options like Diapers.com, are hurting in-person retail. He said that “retail numbers are pretty good,” but that “stores don’t want to compete on price, they want to compete on hours.” Target is finally opening up at midnight, Thanksgiving night. He also notes that self-checkouts at stores, like the groceries he visits in Chicago, are resulting in fewer jobs. Anyhow, he says, “retail employment hasn’t been as robust, but it isn’t fall-of-the-cliff awful.”

Fear of the unemployed lives on. Of course, people’ve talked about this on ERE like Ron Katz, and he’ll get into it more in San Diego next spring. Johnson says “people don’t want to hire someone who doesn’t have a job,” and that they think, “there must be something wrong with this guy.” A big contrast, he says, to engineers, and many accountants, he notes, who, as ERE regulars are experiencing, can choose between multiple offers.

So says Mid-Market Perspectives: America‘s Economic Engine – Competing in Uncertain Times, a Deloitte survey of almost 700 executives at companies with revenue of $50 million to $1 billion.

A majority of the executives expect both revenue (61.2 percent) and profitability (52.6 percent) to increase next year, despite limited faith in any significant improvement in the national economy. What drives their optimism is a continued focus on cost controls and increased productivity.

Of the 70 percent of executives reporting an increase in productivity, the average saw a 6.1 percent improvement since the beginning of the recession. The majority of executives credit the rise to improvements in business processes (62.2 percent) and technology (50.3 percent), especially the automation of business operations and increased use of data analytics for business intelligence.

Less than 30 percent of the respondents attributed improved productivity to making better hires (29.7 percent) or better workforce training (28.6 percent). As the report declares, “if a job can be automated — if it can be reduced to an algorithm, an application, or a set of instructions — it probably will be.”

While 44 percent of the respondents expect to increase headcount of full-time employees next year, hiring is being restrained, 45 percent say, by the need to wring more productivity out of the company. Labor, say 49.3 percent, is the cost the company is most focused on controlling.

Another problem, survey respondents identified, was the challenge in finding new workers who can hit the ground running. The Deloitte report says 47 percent of mid-market business leaders report difficulty finding employees with the skills and education to become productive immediately.

This is becoming a hotly argued issue at ERE’s sister site, TLNT. A post by editor John Hollon asks, “Are We Short of Skilled Workers, or Is it Just a Training Problem?” The post amplifies the discussion that began here with a reference to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Peter Capelli.

He argued that employers are wrongly blaming schools for failing to train workers. “The real culprits,” Capelli says,” are the employers themselves.”

What’s interesting to note in the Deloitte survey are the responses to the question, “What organizational changes, if any, has your company attempted to implement since the onset of the U.S. recession?” Of the eight options, 60.8 percent chose “Improved business processes.” That would be where streamlining workflow and automation fit in — essentially the tech over talent decision.

“Improving training” was selected by 37.8 percent. “Higher standards, in terms of skills or education, for hiring new employees” was the choice of 35.2 percent.

Nerds in Paradise

Well, if that story seems quaint, your next tech hire may be demanding she bring her pet to work too. Think that’s unlikely? Well think again.

Unemployment among many categories of workers tech is at or lower than 1998. The Boston Globe reports that in Massachusetts recruiters are seeing 3-5 jobs for every software worker. Workers with the right skills are being snatched up in as little as 24 hours. Contract developers are turning down offers of $130 per hour.

And the Bay State is no isolated example. The New York Times reports that while the rest of the city anxiously watches unemployment hover just below a demoralizing 9 percent and Wall Street braces for more layoffs, developers are complaining about being called with too many job offers. The shortage is causing salaries to skyrocket across all levels of jobs. Nationwide salaries for software engineers rose 20 to 30 percent in the past year and a half.

Employers are resorting to all sorts of creative strategies to attract and keep talent. Netlix offers employees unlimited time off under a program called “freedom and responsibility.”

This Time Is Different

Back in the 90s the talent shortage seemed to be a smaller problem — something that would not last, and was mainly in tech. This time the problem is more deep-seated and enduring. A recent survey by Manpower of employers found that just 27% believe their business has the talent it needs. Underscoring that gloomy assessment is a report from the World Economic forum that estimates significant shortages of talent in most major categories of professional jobs — tech, healthcare, education, biotech, etc. — through 2020.

A key reason the problem is bigger is because the supply of talent is just not there. Less than 1% of college students in the U.S. pick computer science as a major. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing estimates that the combined output of all nursing programs in America is 30% less than the demand. Shortfalls in talent that were made up by immigrants are no longer possible because the number of H-1B visas available has been stuck at 65,000 since 2007, and in the current political climate no politician on either side has the courage to push for an increase.

Weird and Weirder

Employers are getting increasingly desperate in their attempts to recruit talent. Among the more unusual approaches include having a wine bar at DPR Construction. All 17 of the company’s offices offer employees the option to open a bottle to toast accomplishments and at the Texas branch they have a full saloon. Chesapeake Energy offers employees botox injections and tanning beds. Taking a cue from Roberto Ziche, Kimpton hotels allows employees to bring pets to work and offers veterinary health benefits. But the prize for most unusual recruitment idea goes to Hipster, a San Francisco startup that gives each new employee a year’s supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon. There’s no accounting for taste.

The 14.7 point drop in The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index is the largest since October 2008, at the very beginning of the recession when banks and investment houses were failing. The Index now stands at 44.5, its lowest level since April 2009.

Among the components that make up the Consumer Confidence Index is the jobs picture. There, 49.1 percent of consumers said jobs are “hard to get,” an increase from July’s 44.8 percent. The percent saying jobs are plentiful declined to 4.7 percent from 5.1 percent.

Asked about job growth, consumers were even more pessimistic. Almost a third of consumers (31.5 percent) expect there to be fewer jobs available in the next few months. Just last month, 22.2 percent expected fewer jobs. Employment optimists — those expecting more jobs in the months ahead — declined to 11.4 from 16.9 percent.

Pessimism is pervasive, The Conference Board found, with 24.6 percent of consumers expecting business conditions to worsen in the next six months, an 8.5 point increase from the July survey. Those expecting business conditions to improve — the glass-half-full group — decreased to 11.8 from 17.9 percent in July.

The Consumer Confidence Index changes monthly, as consumers react to fluctuating economic news and conditions. So it can be a volatile measure of current sentiment. The Board’s Employment Trends Index, which attempts to smooth out spikes, has been declining in the last several months. In July, it stood at 100.6, up 4 percent over July 2010, but down from the post-recession high of 101.8 in March.

Predictions of August’s job growth are also showing a lack of confidence. Bloomberg’s survey of economists says they expect, on average, that the U.S. economy added just 75,000 jobs during the month, with the private sector growing by 105,000. Government job cuts account for the difference. Unemployment held steady at 9.1 percent.

The official Labor Department report for the month will be released early Friday. A preview will be offered tomorrow by payroll processor ADP and its partner Macroeconomic Research. The National Employment Report only sometimes conforms with the government’s report, but it is still closely watched by economists and the investment community. Bloomberg’s survey says the average of economists’ estimates are for the report to show 100,000 private sector new jobs.

Those jobs are among the 10 toughest jobs to fill in the U.S., says Manpower’s annual Talent Shortage Survey, which also reports that 52 percent of the employers in the survey are having trouble filling jobs.  Only in Japan and India do more companies report talent hard to find.

Globally, a third of all employers say they have difficulty filling jobs.  Lack of experienced workers is the most frequently cited reason,  globally, as well as in every region in the survey. In the Americas, lack of experience was followed by a lack of skills.

Particularly surprising was the the rise in U.S. companies reporting hiring difficulty. In the 2010 survey, only 14 percent of companies reported problems filling jobs. Now the percentage has nearly quadrupled.

If it seems unlikely the hiring situation could have worsened so much so fast, part of the disconnect may have to do with when the survey was conducted – months ago, long before the current round of gloomy economic reports started coming out.

However, SHRM’s LINE report has been chronicling a similar, if less dramatic, rise in recruiting difficulty. The most recent LINE report says recruiting difficulty in the manufacturing area is up 11.2 points over a year ago. In the service sector, recruiting difficulty rose a more modest 2.7 points.

The LINE report authors attempt to make sense of the situation writing:

Considering that millions of people are actively seeking work and still cannot obtain employment in their industries, the rise in recruiting difficulty may be attributed to new or enhanced skill requirements for newly created high-level jobs.

Some jobs on the list, like sales jobs and engineers,  have historically been tough to fill. IT, though the jobs didn’t make Manpower’s list for the last couple of years, was sixth on this one, a consequence of employers upgrading systems and adding staff that needs to be supported.

The August IT jobs report from Dice shows the number of openings increasing by double-digits from a year ago in the top U.S. tech markets. In Boston, the number of tech openings jumped by 42 percent, eclipsing the rest of the country, including Silicon Valley.

However, even in tech’s holy land, companies are having trouble attracting workers. So acute is the situation in Silicon Valley, that some startups are unable to launch or attract investors, even when the concept has appeal. According to CNNMoney today: “Skilled developers are Silicon Valley’s scarcest resource.”

A Kelly Services survey says  economic necessity, the desire for more freedom and flexibility, and age have driven up the number of workers not tied to a single company for their livelihood. It’s a dramatic change from 2008, when Kelly’s survey found 26 percent of workers describing themselves as free agents.

Also fueling the rise is the increasing reliance of American business on contingent and contract labor, say the authors of a whitepaper detailing the results. Companies, note Jocelyn Lincoln and Megan M. Raftery, “can scale up and down faster and easier by adopting more flexible workforce strategies.”

A significant driver is the economy. Respondents to the 2011 survey were twice as likely as their counterparts in 2008 to say they became free agents because they were laid off or couldn’t find another job.

That suggests, the authors say, that as recovery occurs, some of the newly minted free agents will return to a traditional employee role. However, “the trend toward more free agents is still very strong and is increasing worldwide. Accounting for differences in legislative frameworks and social and cultural norms, we estimate that the global free agent population is at
least 20 – 30% of the entire workforce, and growing.”

Recently, USA Today wrote about the phenomenon of well-established professionals abandoning comfortable jobs to pursue their own interests.  “Employees bid goodbye to corporate America” chronicled several workers, including two recruiters, who quit to follow their own path.

As the Kelly Services report makes clear, the move by knowledge workers to freelancer, contractor, consultant, entrepreneur or other type of free agency is not a generational issue. Gen X workers saw the biggest increase in self-described free agency. In the 2008 survey, 18 percent of the Gen X workforce so described its status. Now, 38 percent do. That’s a 111 percent increase in just three years, far ahead of the 81 percent rise among Baby Boomers and the 74 percent increase for the Silent Generation, all of whom have now reached retirement age.

Numerically, the Boomers and older workers account for the lion’s share of the free agent population. Together, they comprise two-thirds of all free agents, making the free agent group highly experienced and well educated, the authors write, noting:

More than one-third of all free agents have earned a master’s degree or higher, and compared with traditional employees, more free agents (77% compared to 62% for traditional employees) possess technical or professional skill set.

What does this trend mean for American business?

It means there’s a huge pool of available talent in nearly every discipline and industry for employers to tap. But it’s not automatic. Besides knowing how to reach these free agents, businesses need to understand what it is they want. For some, that demands a change in traditional practices.

Write Lincoln and Rafferty, “Organizations have to first learn how to adapt and integrate this flexible workstyle into their business processes and current company culture. This means forgoing traditional perceptions of employment.”

For the workers, money is only part of the equation. The Kelly survey found it’s the type of project and quality of work that most interests free agents, especially those with more experience and maturity. The third factor, after the nature of the job and the money, is the reputation of the company.

For companies wanting to  take advantage of the free agency trend, the authors make these recommendations:

1. Ensure that free agents are included in your overall workforce strategy;
2. Know how you are currently using free agents.
3. Evaluate departments, positions, and projects to see how they would benefit from free agent talent.
4. Understand the importance of your employer brand.
5. Develop options for current employees.
6. Understand the importance of properly classifying free agent workers.
7. Evaluate your workforce solutions partner.

Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to be flexible enough to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not.

Here are some of the issues, paradoxes, and changes that employers, candidates, recruiters, and human resources are faced with.

These have already complicated the employment market and created confusion as work itself is being redefined and re-calibrated.

Flexible Working Times

Everyone wants to work when they want to, whether that is at night, weekends, or during what we call a “normal” working day. Mothers want time with their children and would like to work when the kids are sleeping or in school. Others are more productive in the wee hours and want to sleep in the daytime. And still others want to vary their schedules depending on their mood or family needs.

Individual contributors who can work alone are most likely to be able to find work with flexible schedules. People who might enjoy such flexibility include data-input people, researchers, web developers, programmers, and others whose work spans time and is done individually.

Some organizations allow flexibility within defined parameters or with prior approval. Only a few are truly open to a varied, unpredictable schedule even if work is done in a timely way and all deadlines are met. My own website is coded and maintained by a person who has a full-time job that gives her flexibility and control over her time and allows her to take on additional work.

More firms are offering flexible working times and slowly are focusing on results rather than time as the measures of performance.

It will be tough to convince very good people to work for organizations that do not allow flexible work. Employment branding and messaging should be clear about the time requirements, and you should target an audience where flexibility might not be a critical consideration, such as younger men and single folks who do not have children or other responsibilities. You can also target baby boomers who have grown up in a business world without flexibility and are comfortable with that.

Multiple Jobs

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines multiple jobholders as people who are either hourly or salary workers who hold two or more jobs; self-employed workers who also hold an hourly or salary job; or unpaid family workers who hold an hourly or salary job as well. Currently official figures indicate that about 5% of Americans fit this category.

Organizations still expect and seek loyalty, even though they have shown their employees little of that when times get tough. Young workers, especially Gen Ys, often do have more than one source of income. They rarely make that public. They know it would be frowned on or even be the reason for getting them fired. There is very little a recruiter can do about this, but if you reject those who you suspect of having multiple jobs, you will significantly reduce your candidate pool and the quality of that pool.

Virtual Work

Having employees working from home or from remote work centers is common, and more employers are allowing this due to a variety of converging reasons, including the desire to save energy, increased travel times, skill shortages, and a global workforce.

Over the past decade so many companies have encouraged virtual work that it is almost expected. People are comfortable working with their laptops and smart phones, and have access to Skype accounts and collaborative workspaces. All of these tools make working away from a physical place practical, convenient, and cheap.

There is no doubt that this form of employment will grow rapidly and, in my opinion, may make up as much as half the U.S. workforce within a decade as most employers recognize the benefit of allowing workers to be located remotely.

Temporary Work

More employers are looking for temporary employees. This used to signal the beginning of a recovery as employers hired temps and then converted them to regular employment as the economy improved. We have seen a significant surge in temporary hiring, but very few are likely to be converted to regular employees.

Both sides are wary of commitment. Employers are not convinced that the economic recovery is sustainable and are reluctant to take on labor that may not be needed. Potential employees are not sure they will have a job that lasts and may be happier with one or two temporary jobs that spread out their risk. This article in the Huffington Post seems to bear this out and is only one of many similar ones.

Generational Mindset

As many have written, there are large differences in attitudes about work and time, between the three major generations in the workplace. Baby Boomers (those over 45) are generally traditional and are comfortable with being physically at work, in an organization, and working an 8-hour or longer day.

Gen X (those between 30-45) is also comfortable working in traditional ways, but they are more open to virtual work, and demand flexibility for their family.

But Gen Ys (those under 30) are the change agents. They do not really want to work for any organization, but especially don’t want to work for those with layers of hierarchy and reams of policies and procedures. They want flexible, virtual work, and are more likely to have multiple jobs. They are the hardest to recruit and the hardest to retain. Yet, finding ways to attract and accommodate them will be crucial because they are the future of most organizations as Baby Boomers age and move out.

Long-term unemployment will likely be the new normal, and employers, recruiters, and candidates will find a host of ways to engage people outside of “regular” employment. In fact, the term “regular employment” is becoming meaningless.

As the recession continues, many people will find ways to earn a living without relying on traditional jobs. Many of the best will find greater satisfaction in working as consultants or contractors and, while they may technically be unemployed, they may actually live and feel better while earning less. This will be a challenge to our consumer society and its associated economy.

Recruiting in this morphing environment will likewise be more and more challenging and require adaptation to recruiting people with different work and pay patterns. Recruiting the regular employee will become a smaller segment of hiring and be more of a challenge than ever before.

“Millennials are, in fact, much like their older counterparts,” says the study authors, who compared the results of current surveys and historic surveys of Boomers and Gen Xers.

What they found is that contrary to the stereotype of being a malcontented, coddled, naive lot, Millennials, the Gen Y generation, are in many ways more satisfied than their older counterparts.

“The data refutes the ‘millennial malcontent’ stereotype,”  write authors Brenda Kowske and Rena Rasch. As part of Kenexa’s WorkTrends survey of some 30,000 workers in 28 countries, they asked a series of attitude questions, finding that 60 percent of Millennials are “extremely satisfied” with where they work. That’s well above the 54 percent of Boomers and Gen Xers who said that.

Millennials were also more satisfied with the recognition they receive, more satisfied with their opportunities for growth and development, and as excited about their work and their pay as Boomers and Gen Yers.

The prevailing wisdom that Millennials hired today probably won’t stay for long does turn out to be true. But not because they are Millennials, say the authors. In the 2011 survey, a third of Millennials reported planning to leave their job in the next 12 months. Only 19 percent of Boomers are considering a change, while 27 percent of Gen Xers are.

Looking back to survey results from 1990, the authors found that 31 percent of the 27-year-olds were headed out, exactly the same percentage as this year’s 27-year-olds.

So why the disconnect, ask the authors, between the prevailing wisdom that Millennials are so very different from you and I, and what they found, which is “when it comes to the workplace, the differences are shockingly slight?”

“It’s possible that HR professionals and managers are adapting to their new charges, and creating programs that incorporate Millennials’ views into the workplace,” suggest Kowske and Rasch.

I suggest there’s more to it than that. The Pew Research Center painted a portrait of American Millennials last year, showing them to be better educated, more ethnically and racially diverse, and with higher incomes than previous generations at the same age.

They are also the first generation to grow up with computers, were the first to embrace social networking, and are still more likely to have online profiles than any other group. They also are the first generation to come of age in the midst of a recession since the Great Depression, perhaps explaining why 37 percent of Millennials were out of work or out of the workforce last year when Pew did its survey.

All these factors have an influence on Millennials, perhaps none as profoundly, though, as the recession. At the Brazen Careerist, a career site for young professionals, some of the most popular and active groups are those dealing with job and career issues. Professional affinity groups are almost as active.

Started by Penelope Trunk, the blunt-talking, irreverent career adviser, Brazen Careerist today has 120,000 members who flock to the online networking events where they connect with other young professionals, and seasoned veterans. These events are networking’s equivalent of speed dating, with a new conversation every few minutes.

The virtual career fairs are equally unique. They, too, have time limits on conversation between job seeker and recruiters. As Ryan Healy, co-founder and COO of Brazen Careerist told me, “we’re not trying to do what everyone else is doing. (Millennials) have a different approach.”

Consequently, the encounters at a Brazen Careerist job fair are conversations, not interviews. “The best part about our online recruiting events is that they offer direct contact to qualified applicants,” Brazen Careerist Marketing and Communications Director Ashley Hoffman wrote me in an email. Recruiters  get resumes, even though the site encourages profiles. It’s a nod to tradition and ATS data fields.

As an aside, a survey by freelance job site Elance found 56 percent of its Millennials declaring digital portfolios and online resumes are more effective than traditional resumes in landing a job.

There are other Gen Y job sites — AfterCollege.com and CollegeRecruiter.com are two of the larger ones. And more, like Confidently.co, a Ladders copycat for entry-level jobs and internships, pop up regularly.

Though Brazen Careerist has job listings, collects resumes for the job fairs, and welcomes recruiters, Healy says it is not a job board, nor a Millennial LinkedIn. “There are plenty of social networks out there,” he says. “There are lots of places to go look for jobs … we are more a collection of products and services for your career.”

Adds Hoffman, “At Brazen, you are surrounded by peers. It’s a little more Gen Y friendly.”

We’re only just digesting 3.0. But what direction are we heading in? Is it a coherent journey? Is there a clear destination/end goal?

4.0. What on earth could that include? How’s this?

• Recruitment transitions from being a “cost center” into a “profit center”’!
• The collapse and insolvency of many recruitment agencies.
• Job boards stuttering and collapsing … and repurposing themselves
• Companies hiring “through the sky” through external referrals and crowdsourcing
• Exclusive/VIP/premium paid in-community content and paid mobile apps
• Gamification shapes recruiting strategies and generates stickiness and virality
• Companies rated globally by crowd opinions

Before anyone screams “unrealistic” or “utter fantasy” or cries B.S., let’s be clear that Recruitment 4.0 moves into the territory of vision. This is some years off. But by calculated hypotheses it is clear there will be a 4.0 and that it is a natural progression of 3.0 and builds sensibly on its foundations.

Let’s recap the different versions of recruiting.

Recruitment 1.0 encompasses traditional recruiting over a huge timeline, including good old-fashioned fax machines, print advertising, (post, spray ,and pray), and Rolodexes moving into traditional ATSs. Recruiters more focused on processes than end results. The basic any-bum-on-any-seat philosophy.

Recruitment 2.0 saw the move onto online and using technology for recruitment purposes, including the advent of online job boards & online CV searches. While the technology moved forward, the traditional methodology of 1.0 was prevalent, including online post, spray, and pray candidate attraction (aka the recruitment lottery of let’s hope the right-ish person looks at the online advertisement, at the right time and feels willing to go to the effort to apply).

Both Recruitment 1.0 and 2.0 were/are fundamentally focused on the active job seekers, (applying to vacancies, on agency books, and those watching job boards like a possessed predator).

Recruitment 3.0 is a huge leap as it moves recruitment out of its comfort zone. The beating heart of 3.0 is the non-active/passive individual and a focus on “best talent” and building predictable talent pipelines. In addition, the philosophy of “everyone is a potential candidate so engage them” is central. 3.0 takes us into building engaged, two-way, free-conversation based, transparent communities. This is anchored by things like employment branding, marketing, and PR. 3.0 is not only concerned with building communities but mapping key competitors and seducing cream-of-the-crop talent with your brand and in-house opportunities.

What is Recruitment 4.0?

Recruitment 3.0 is all consumed and focused on building communities. 4.0 is all about the value of those communities, both real and perceived.

Recruitment has traditionally been a cost center. It sucks money from the profit line like Count Dracula on a feeding frenzy in Transylvania, especially if agency fees are involved, coupled with advertising/job board fees etc. Add this up and it can be an overwhelming drain on resources.

Remember that many of the Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies are addicted to agency hiring and mass job board advertising like an alcoholic drawn to drink. Why highlight the Fortune and FTSE companies? Primarily they should have the advantage and resources to wean off agency addiction, source passive candidates far more easily than small to medium companies, (but funnily enough it is the small- and medium-sized companies who are far more fleet of foot and innovative).

Recruitment 4.0 sees recruiting move from being a cost center (a loss-making division) to being a profit center.

Reflect on that statement.

It’s huge and revolutionary.

Recruitment being a profit center.

“Impossible,” you cry.

Perhaps not if you reflect and apply some visionary foresight.

Recruitment 4.0 is some years off. But not as far as some may think.

Consider the world we live in. Value is defined differently. Companies like Zynga, Facebook, and LinkedIn have massive valuations, well above their profitability margins. Their reach and potential reach and the size of their mass following — an engaged following.

Our generation is living in the information age. The power lies in networks. Networks are data. Data is power. And data is money.

We all want data. Especially recruiters and marketers/salespeople.

So how does a community, (or let’s crudely call it data) = value = monetization = recruitment becoming a profit center?

There are several facets to recruitment moving to a profit center.

1. Reduction of recruiting costs to a minimum, (agency usage close to zero, less need for mass job board advertising, reduction in number of in-house recruiters employed).
2. This depends on building and nurturing a “qualitative” community, a strong employment brand, vibrant social networks, mapped competitors, and putting in place a predictable talent pipeline for key hiring channels.
3. The community itself evolves into a self-service community, where recruitment can be executed by crowdsourcing, and by hiring managers becoming more engaged into pipeline generation and hiring. Everyone can use LinkedIn. Why not hiring managers?
4. Value in the community is identified by both internal and external advertisers/marketers that allows for revenue for recruitment.
5. A sense of increased value is attached to belonging/being part of that community, hence VIP/exclusive areas/content that people are happy to pay for.
6. Gamification principles create more engagement and sense of belonging and stickiness to sites, hence driving potential of more opportunities for monetization.
7. Actual games/cartoons/content that people subscribe to have repeat value.

Let’s look at some of those in a little more depth.

Traditional advertising is failing. The days of successful, targeted TV and print advertising are long behind us.

Ways to communicate, once limited and restricted, are now numerous and disperse.

Looking at TV, the former medium of choice for mass communication, now diminished, as people are now hungry for choice and happily spread their viewing over a diverse and numerous multitude of TV channels. If an advertiser manages to define a great TV slot to advertise to reach their target audience they are thwarted by the fact that people can now record and Tivo, hence skipping ads. TV advertising then is a busted flush.

Print advertising? Again, some national newspapers and magazines are spiraling downward from their heyday readerships. People tend toward reading the latest news online 24/7 or from niche web sites. They don’t want to wait the next day for old news. Print has had to be more salacious and do what it can to get the best scoops to get whatever sales possible. Online, people not only digest news, but have the benefit of posting comments and engaging in discussions.

So traditional messaging vehicles are struggling.

This coincides with a time when recruiter networks are expanding. Combine a recruitment database (with some companies having in excess of ½ million – million names), with social media networks, a targeted mass of names, email addresses, with perceived affinity to a business or product, and a growing realization awakens that this has a marketable value.

A marketing department does not have this scale, (or quality), of information on its database.

Recruiting does.

Now the first step is for recruiting to cross charge its marketing division to advertise to its database and community. Why not? Many marketing departments don’t see or understand the value of recruiting databases. They’re a potential goldmine of information and data … and potential business opportunities.

Taking this a step further, why not allow specific external companies the opportunity to advertise to your community? (Mindful of data protection and ensuring a community buys into contact by third-party advertisers). You remain in charge of the names and not divulging data, but certain advertising is safe to your community and could be revenue-generating for recruiting.

As this thought sinks in, revenue potential opens up.

The Death of Recruitment Agencies

At the same time, savvy companies will be seeing their recruiting costs decreasing.

As companies build their databases of talent, via sourcing, identification through LinkedIn, talent mapping, and coupled with their valued online communities, the need and reliance on recruiting agencies, both contingent and retained, will dramatically lessen.

This will also coincide with less of a need for corporate in-house recruiters. Hiring managers are more than adept at searching on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is greatly expanding its offering and making recruiting easier for everyone. Initiatives like ‘Genome’ from LinkedIn will radically lesson the need for dedicated in-house recruiters in the future. Coupled with your community recruiting on your company’s behalf (crowdsourcing of talent), the need for recruiters will lessen and hence accelerate cost reduction.

The very future of recruitment agencies depends on their ability to adapt to the new realities that companies are waking up to the need to break out of the active candidate pool and identify and attract passive candidates. If we take as an approximation that of the 100% of candidates qualified for your job, only 10% are active with agencies and job boards, then it’s the 90% who are more attractive to companies, and the agencies need to identify, attract, and present those candidates.

Contingent recruitment agencies, especially the large ones, are in the business of competing to be the first to present the CV of that 10% active pool, all trying to Bolt out the blocks. Unless they start to adapt by attracting and mapping out the 90% non-active and building their own communities, their model will face extinction. Now is not the time to rush and buy shares in traditional contingent operators as a long-term investment.

Even worse, the business model of traditional retained search and selection companies, as we reflect on it in this modern age, is founded on the delusions of lunacy. A client pays a 30% fee for first-year guaranteed compensation (or even just basic salary only), split into thirds, a third for commencement of the project and a third for presentation of a shortlist — the risk all loaded on the fee-paying client. Certainly, cost models will change toward loaded placement fees.

The irony is that search firm marketing is based on its peerless reputation as the ultimate Rolodex of all the golden names in the industry. Their network is the goldmine that we are seduced to unlock. If their databases are that peerless and they have done hundreds of similar searches, why then does it take four to five weeks for a shortlist? Perhaps that question is not raised enough.

The zealots will cry that the search agency is peerless in assessment and interviewing. But is that not we do in house? Why am I paying two-thirds of a fee without a placement? It’s even more laughable when the shortlist of contacts is most likely generated by a fresh graduate on $40,000 a year in the back room of the search agency, who then passes all their lead generation to the search consultant.

Alternatively, a growing trend is using a new breed of company that is engaged in market mapping, talent pooling, and recruitment research solutions — hence providing a company with a mapped market of qualified talent, with contact details and candidate profiles that the recruiter then follows up on. Not every company can afford internal sourcers, and this is the next best thing, and significantly cheaper/more cost effective than a full search.

However you cut it, the future is not bright for contingent and retained search and selection unless they adapt to changing new business realities. Not many currently have that foresight as they focus on short-termism. Hopefully agency CEOs have strong managers in their crow’s nest who are prepared to shout “iceberg ahead” before disaster strikes.

Job Boards Faltering

Coupled with the death/decline of agencies will be the faltering and restructuring of the large job boards.

As companies build their own recruitment databases and even more importantly their own communities, they can use creative ways to source talent.

Communities themselves will evolve around certain disciplines/careers/industries and hence negate the use for paid job boards. Why pay for a large job board in the active pool when we can reach passive candidates in a free community?

Job boards will have to look at community-building themselves and earn their revenue through product placement advertising rather than paid-for job advertisements.

Companies have always embraced the concept of internal referrals. Why not the reverse? External referrals — even better through crowdsourcing using their communities.

Naysayers will point to the rewards attributed to internal referrals, generally through monetary bonuses, and hence the difficulty of applying this externally as companies don’t want to pay for talent they would have got anyway.

But recent times have showed the power of recognition and “public reward” through games like Foursquare. People love the status of being the Mayor of a local curry house.

Why not take this principle into recruiting and reward referrals from crowdsourcing: Public recognition and rewards in the community, (badges, leaderboards), on a sliding scale to reach actualization of  ”real” rewards, be it monetary bonus, vacation, or a PC or iPad?

External Referrals through Crowdsourcing

Recruitment can learn a lot from crowdsourcing.

This term was arguably defined by Jeff Howe in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine.

Howe states:

Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.

Howe further drives this home by stating that “it’s only crowdsourcing once a company takes that design, fabricates [it] in mass quantity and sell[s] it.”

In laymen’s language, a company posts a problem online; a vast number of individuals offer their opinions and ideas as to how to solve it; the winning idea is rewarded in some form; and the end result is the company adopting the idea for its own benefit.

Some great examples of the power of crowdsourcing exist on Wikipedia: (the following are all directly quoted from Wikipedia).

• In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks”) can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed “Artificial Intelligence,” it was named after The Turk, an 18th century chess-playing “machine.”
• Cisco Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The winners in 2008 were a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother, Sergey Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than 2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won $250,000.
• The Democratic National Committee launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they choose — whether for a blog post, to create a YouTube video, etc.
• Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures.
• General Electric organized a multimillion dollar challenge to find new, breakthrough ideas to create cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid technologies, and to accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2020.
• The Vancouver Police Department has put up a website entitled Hockey Riot 2011, informing people about the VPD′s investigations into the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. It also asks people to contribute any pictures or video that they may have taken during the riot, with the goal of identifying people who may have participated in the rioting. The site also reminds people to not use social media to take justice into their own hands, instead leaving it to the police. As of July 1, 2011, 101 arrests have been made.
• IBM collected more than  37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees, and their family members in 2006.
• L’Oreal used viewer-created advertising messages of Current TV to pool new and fresh advertising ideas.
• Pepsi launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners would receive a $10,000 prize, and their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans around the United States.
• Unilever has recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and has turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign. Unilever has worked with Lowe on the snack-food brand Peperami since 1993, but has decided to submit its brief out to the public, rather than a small team of creatives.

Ironically, Wikipedia is itself a successful example of crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, as a concept, lends itself perfectly to recruiting.

Posing the question to your community, “We are looking for a dynamic Product Manager, with x/y/z experience … any ideas/recommendations?” will soon become a normal sourcing/name generating activity for recruiters.

The key is how to incentivize/inspire/motivate the crowd to do your recruiting.

LinkedIn gets it. It’s already making headway toward this goal, aiding a company’s ability to use employee networks and matching up people who are connected to our employees who closely match our job specifications.

But what about the wider crowd? That’s where attention will turn next.

Premium Paid Content

Recruitment 3.0 recognized that recruitment is fundamentally boring. People tend to only visit corporate careers pages when they are looking for work. There is no engaging “repeat visit” content that drags them back for more. Many companies are using social media as a replacement job board and listing jobs with hyperlinks back to the job site. It’s hardly the most engaging content.

Recruitment 3.0 involves building “engaged” communities. The key is compelling, rich content, creating a destination that people want to go to on a frequent basis. That is not a list of jobs.

Remember again that recruiting is not about “bums on seats”; it also encompasses nurturing a strong employment brand proposition, attracting and seducing those not familiar with your brand, and taking them on a journey to either apply to work for your company or be an active brand ambassador in your community.

As communities build up in 3.0, underpinned by engaging content, and when those communities reach a critical mass, the next step is starting to grant VIP access and exclusive content to community members. If communities are engaged, they will be, by definition, happy to pay to be part of the VIP area, and we will see the monetization of these communities and a potential revenue stream for recruiters.

Aggregating all your social media feeds — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube content, and your blog — is the first step. This could and should be aggregated both on your corporate careers site and your mobile phone app (for those who want to be part of the community on the move). A one-stop shop for people to engage and follow your company encourages repeat visitors.

This content on the social media sites needs to feel personalized and humanized, giving exclusive access behind the scenes of your company and the individuals behind it.

But what else?

Understand the public pulse. There is no better place than the Apple Store. This shows what content keeps people coming back and is most popular to download. And guess what that is:

• News & Information (knowledge and exclusive access news)
• Games (fun games but also including quizzes)
• Comics & books (The appeal of an ongoing story that people want to follow)
• Photography/photos/videos (uploading and sharing)

This content often focuses on getting people involved, something to do with your friends, and brings that “global community” together.

Each of these is “sticky” and keeps people coming back.

Why can’t recruiters use these same concepts as part of their community building but adapt them for their own companies?

Recruitment Embraces Concepts of Gamification

Gamification is the latest buzzword. What’s funny is that some well-known commentators are rushing to speak about this subject but end up mirroring granddad at the disco trying to throw “cool” shapes to the latest bangin’ tune but instead look rather doddery and completely out of touch.

People love to be entertained. Gaming is huge. Not just “serious” video console games like the Call of Duty’s, FIFAs, and Battlefields, or the PC games like World of Warcraft, but the spread of casual gaming whether on Facebook or on mobile shows the power of people of all ages wanting interactive entertainment.

Gaming educates us about the dynamics of engagement. (Some would take this further to addiction.) What a great game does is ingrain itself into the conscious and subconscious of the player. You think about it and love the roller coaster of emotions that the game takes you through. You may pull an all-nighter, or get up extra early to get in an hour or so before having to venture off to deal with humdrum reality. Escapism is the new drug of the austere Tens.

But what else can we learn? Casual games are the key to the door of mass/mainstream and that elusive community engagement via compelling content that we all seek.

Casual games are those that embrace all demographics, are simple, fun, accessible, and from which users get an instant form of gratification. This is different than “serious games” that are deeper experiences and are perhaps less accessible due to the time invested and the barrier of controllers/complexity of purpose.

Farmville on Facebook is a classic example of community-building and demonstrates some key buttons in engagement theory (in a social context). Farmvile has been such a success for a number of reasons. First, it recognized the unbridled thrill of “gifting.” When you first visit your farm, you don’t go straight to it but to a page with a list of gifts. Many games ask you to spam mail your buddies to play the game. Farmville cleverly goes further by allowing you to send a gift of an animal or plant/crop to your friends. Of course, when we receive gifts, we also like to give them back, starting the spiral of interaction.

Part of this psychology also encourages you to help your friends by reminding them to harvest their fields and to weed their farms. It’s very community-friendly stuff.

These gifts also have a perceived value. The whole point of Farmville is to build a busy and profitable farm and maintain it. But to do this, you need to build and grow the farm, which is time-consuming and takes a while to buy plants, crops, and trees, etc.  But luckily your saving grace is your friends as they help out by sending all these valuable items for your farm. Hence my farm looks better with more content so I will invite more of my friends to play, give them gifts, and expect/request gifts in return.  It’s a clever use of personal psychology and satisfaction of wants.

Farmville also gets that the game has to be accessible and simple. There are no extra levels; you just keep on growing the size and scope of your own farm. The only limitation is money. But having lots of friends gets around that.

Now the clever part kicks in. The game keeps you coming back. Certain crops you plant require harvesting at certain times. Some crops will die if you don’t come back. Strawberries mean you come back every four hours. That locks in an engagement and repeat visit. “I must log back in at 2 p.m. or my crops will die!”

Farmville also cleverly gets the whole concept of one-up-manship and competing to have the bigger farm, the more money, the latest gadgets 00 and that’s where monetization kicks in. Someone can pay to get ahead of their friends, and for many that is a key driver. “I must have the biggest farm and the latest items and be ahead of my mates!”

Hence Farmville teaches us there are three things to making social games huge viral successes: getting users to invite their friends (virality); getting users to return frequently (stickiness); and people competing to win/be ahead of their friends (showing off).

Interestingly, one of the first to understand these dynamics was the Hotel chain Marriott, which has released a Facebook game designed with the goal of introducing potential employees to life in the hospitality industry. MyMarriottHotel gives players the opportunity to “work” in various hotel roles, including hospitality manager. You can start by working in the hotel kitchens and gain points for excellent customer service and profitability. The game is geared to raising awareness among millennials to job opportunities around the world (cleverly available in five languages).

Critically for recruiting, the MyMarriottHotel Facebook game includes at the top of the game a banner shouting “Do It For Real” that hyperlinks to Marriott’s jobs site. Marriott’s goal is to fill 50,000 positions at its hotels around the world, helped by this game raising awareness, (predominantly outside the U.S.).

So what is gamification, and how can it be applied to recruiting?

Gamification is using game mechanics/methodology to inspire engagement in activities that otherwise would be considered boring or routine. Recruitment certainly sits within that definition.

Key concepts of gamification that recruiters can learn from when developing communities and building compelling, repeat visit content, include:

• The key word when engaging in social media and community-building is remembering the key element, often-forgotten, is social
• Keeping activities/content simple, fun, and interactive. When people read your blog/social media, is it light, carries pictures, short, informative, stimulating, or even entertaining to read?
• People want to know what other people are doing, especially their friends. Can people see what their friends have been doing? People love engagement and giving their opinion, be it by rate-this-page, commenting, oropinion polls. These are all interactive elements that engage.
• As people interact, degrees of personalization and humanization help, such as the uploading of avatars and/or people’s pictures. People prefer engaging with “perceptibly real” other people. Avatars aid that.
• Are you encouraging sharing content/activities with your community? Are people rewarded or recognized for sharing content?
• Inspiring members of your community’s “friends” to get involved and get their friends engaged, i.e. virality, sending community growth viral.
• “Gifting.” Can content be shared amongst friends/can someone get something in return?
• Keeps em coming back for more. Certain times of the day/week that the community has to be there. Prizes/giveaways ingrain this activity. Some companies do specific content “reveals” at certain times of the week. Live webcasts also encourage set-time attendance.
• Competition against friends/leader boards. It could be quiz-questions about your company, the most referrals of job seekers, or the most comments made in your blog/social community. Leader boards keep people coming back to chart their progress and see who is on top, and if they are ahead of their friends.
• “Easter Eggs” — those intentionally hidden features that people can’t find. Especially cool for college sections and can be used to encourage people to find about more about your company and unlock exclusive content.
• Enabling unique experiences/personalization. Can people create their own unique user account, personalize their landing pages, and personalize their experiences?
• Progress bars. People are addicted to completion, and progress bars are often used in online shopping as you are guided to place things in the shopping cart and progress to the checkout. Progress bars fit nicely with job application processes of a series of tasks that people will want to complete. “Completism” is a natural human psychological compulsion.
• User-generated content, and games like LittleBigPlanet have showed us that people love creating their own content and sharing that content with the community. Can your community do the same, involving uploads to your blog/corporate careers site?

These concepts can all be applied to corporate career sites, which are purely a repository of information overload and fundamentally dull, and of course to mobile apps. People, bored sitting on the train, plane, and bus, want content to engage them.

Some corporate sites already include games and other challenges — almost always in the Careers section — and some companies have added game elements to the recruitment process.

Some are asking, “Is this expensive? How can a recruiting department make games? But at minimal cost there is a thriving development community and graduates studying at colleges who would love the opportunity and exposure that creating and publishing a game on a corporate site brings them. Development time on games for mobile is minimal but the key is fun (look at games like Doodle Jump and Flick Football, massively popular but simple to develop).

Many recruiters are currently using Empire Avenue as a way of engaging with communities and making new contacts. Some are even using it as a sourcing tool to recruit from. For those who don’t know, Empire Avenue is fundamentally a stock market simulation social network game that encourages users to buy and sell shares of people and websites. Players have their own portfolio in a virtual economy and earn money, called Eaves, by investing in other people. This sees your own net worth rise by encouraging friends and community members to invest in you. What is cool is that when all accounts are linked together, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and blogs, your net worth rises based on the content you either create or share. What’s cool about this approach is that it combines simplicity with what we do on the web every day: creating and sharing content. Interestingly, Empire Avenue mimics the other sites as it’s also a social network itself. It’s allows opportunities to connect and debate with others by finding affinity groups (“Communities”) within Empire Avenue. Clever engagement mechanisms at play.

Concurrently, Google is also on the move with its Google News Badges. We all read the news, and applying the above theory — let’s call it gamification methodology — Google has created “Google Badges.” Google News users in the U.S. can earn different pins for reading the news, starting with bronze and moving up to Ultimate. There are more than 500 badges available to suit all types of interests, such as “stock market,” “Harry Potter,” and U.S. elections. These “Google Badges” follow closely on the heels of Google launching its own social network, Google+, and is increasingly trying to get people to share content via its network of services in a similar fashion to Facebook.

This will sound very similar to users of Foursquare. Foursquare is a location-based social networking website based on mobile phones. Users “check-in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application, and select from a list of venues that the application locates nearby, e.g. restaurant, library, pub, house, etc. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes “badges.”

The first time a badge is unlocked on Foursquare, be it an easy achievement (like the “Superstar” badge for 50 check-ins), or one that comes as a surprise (“Douchebag Badge,” which is unlocked after checking into venues tagged with “douchebag,” or the “Don’t Stop Believing Badge,” awarded for checking in to three venues tagged “karaoke” in a month), the game keeps people engaged with rewards that makes members want to use the system even more and compete with friends. Especially those who live or work in close vicinity of each other as they compete to be the Mayor of a location.

Why is gamification so important?

Interestingly, to give more credence to this area, Gartner, in research published in April 2011 stated: By 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay, or Amazon, and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organisations will have at least one gamified application.

That’s a big statement. 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.

Many commentators see that naturally fitting in the corporate careers site.

Perhaps gamification will be taken more seriously among current recruitment leaders moving forward.

Global Community Rating of Companies

People trust each other and members of their community far more than they do advertising or company communications. Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers, talked about the impact of social media. One of his key points was that 78% of consumers trust each other more than they trust advertising — which is why they read blogs and go to chat rooms.

There are many examples to back this up, particularly when we go on vacation. The holiday industry has had to get far more authentic and responsible in its communications. No more fantastic ratings of restaurant food when it is tripe; no more “the beach is in walkable distance” … but only for those who are happy to walk for two hours; and no more “great local entertainment” when it is two people playing spoons. Why is that?

Many people now check out Trip Advisor and read how people have voted/rated their vacation/hotel en masse and then read through some of the commentary. Real. Authentic. Trustworthy. No hidden agendas, just shared experiences.

Companies value their placing on “best companies to work for” and “great places to work” lists. And these are a mix of internal questionnaires of employees’ experience and then a specialist evaluation of policies and internal structures by a panel of experts.

Glassdoor is the closest to a trip advisor for recruitment. Its bias is more U.S.-focused and needs to hit that critical mass to be held in the same esteem.

As we head to 4.0, those principles behind Glassdoor will see job seekers trust the crowd, and companies will value that authenticity far more than traditional manufactured best-places-to-work lists.

Size Doesn’t Matter

Some reading this will rightly raise the question of whether this is all this scalable. Cynics will openly proclaim there will always be a need for local agencies to hire receptionists, builders, joiners, hairdressers, admin assistants, and hosts of other roles. Screams will be heard:

Job boards will never die!

This was all predicted 10 years back and it never happened!

How can a small company generate its own community?

Many criticisms/protection of vested interests will emerge in this debate.

They’re fair points to discuss. Interestingly, when Hard Rock Café wanted to open a new venue in Florence, perhaps the initial reaction of many recruiters was to advise them to go to local “high street” agencies, or place an ad in the local press, even on a job board. The Hard Rock took a different approach and used Facebook to reach out and recruit. It built a community around the new venue opening. Hard Rock needed to hire 120 staff across eight categories from waiting staff, barmen/women, to accounting. It was inundated with responses and was able to interview 600 candidates for the roles and whittle down to the 120 needed for opening.

Whatever the size of a company, all the concepts here are relevant. It may be that a company does not have the time to build its own community but will be able to access other communities and groups, be they local or discipline-specific, such as hairdressers, and crowdsource their vacancies.

Technological, access to information, and communities know no boundaries. That’s the difference the past 10 years have made and why jobs boards and agencies have to adapt, or else.

Conclusion

Recruitment 4.0 is a long way off; yet, many of its concepts are resonating today and being built upon and planned. Some early adopters are even implementing some of the component parts. 4.0 is a natural progression from 3.0. It takes the community concept to the next level.

While some will be initially shocked at the radicalism involved at suggestions of recruitment transitioning into a profit center, crowdsourcing talent, and entertaining/gamification, with a period of reflection it makes sense as a natural strap-on to 3.0 communities.

Many of the recruitment leaders in place today are not ready for 3.0, let alone 4.0. They have been schooled in traditional recruiting techniques that will soon be outdated and detrimental to their business. Many more are worried about process than end results. Where does your leader stand?

Imagine those recruiting leaders who can go to their CEO and demonstrate that they have been able to map out competitors, and identify and build relationships with cream-of-the-crop talent. Leaders who have helped shape and who have put in place engaged communities with positive two-way communication social media channels, thus enhancing employment brand attractiveness, (with a positive spinoff for the consumer/product/service brand), and have hence been able to slash expenditures on recruitment and are now coming up with proposals of how to turn recruitment into a profit center.

Compare that to your current recruiting leader. Are they shaping your future in this direction?

Who do you think your CEO would prefer as a recruiting leader? The one described above or your current one?

There is plenty above to chew on and debate. Agree or disagree, what is certain is that exciting times lie ahead for recruitment.

And before someone asks, will we see an article on Recruitment 5.0 anytime soon? Not from Autodesk. We’ve got to focus on delivering 3.0 and 4.0 with the great team at Autodesk. There’s lots to do and achieve.

The 100.6 the Index registered in July is off from June’s revised 100.9, so the drop isn’t substantial. It’s also up 4 percent over July of 2010. However, says  Conference Board economist and associate director of research, Gad Levanon:

The Employment Trends Index declined in three of the past four months, and is signaling employment growth of less than 100,000 per month through the end of 2011. Despite weak employment growth in recent months, GDP has been growing even slower in the first half of 2011. There is simply not enough growth in production to warrant stronger hiring.

While there’s been plenty of bad economic news in the last two weeks to support his conclusion, there a few glimmers to suggest job growth might be just a bit better.

Both of the leading job aggregators report that listings in July were up over the previous month. SimplyHired says job postings increased by 6.5 percent over June, and 17 percent over July of last year. Indeed doesn’t offer an overall percentage, but its trends report shows 12 of the 13 industries it tracks had more jobs in July than in June. All were ahead of July 2010 by double-digits.

Human resources, a category we’re particularly partial to, had 4 percent more advertised jobs in July than in June. For the year, HR job postings rose by 34 percent. The actual numbers are low — Indeed counted 68,894 jobs online — but the upward trend is meaningful for more reasons than just our audience. Filling HR jobs is not a company’s first priority when it decides to resume hiring. So I read the upward trend as evidence that companies have loosened up hiring.

Recruiting jobs in particular seem to be improving. Right now, Indeed lists almost 150,000 recruiting and recruiting-related jobs. (The numbers are different from the overall HR jobs counted by Indeed because some persist online for weeks, and also because I’m doing a keyword search on the title, which will produce results that may not all be in HR.)

By far, the most numerous jobs were in healthcare, which was up 8 percent over June.

Looking ahead, a CareerBuilder survey says small businesses expect they will hire more employees through the end of the year than they did last year. The improvement in outlook is not great, but it is there; up six percent over last year.

Says Careerbuilder:

• Companies with 50 or fewer employees – 20 percent hiring full-time, permanent employees, up from 14 percent last year.
• 500 or fewer employees – 27 percent hiring full-time, permanent employees, up from 21 percent last year.
• More than 500 employees – 46 percent hiring full-time, permanent employees, up from 38 percent last year.

Part time hiring will be about the same as last year, according to the CareerBuilder survey:

• 50 or fewer employees – 6 percent hiring contract or temporary employees, up from 4 percent last year.
• 500 or fewer employees – 8 percent hiring contract or temporary employees, up from 6 percent last year.
• More than 500 employees – 16 percent hiring contract or temporary employees, up from 13 percent last year.

1. 

   It’s somewhat controversial, but by the end you’ll agree (if you get that far).

2. If you’re a corporate recruiter or HR leader, put your confirmation bias in the parking lot before reading this article.
3. You might want to listen to this YouTube video of a webcast (Future of Recruiting Circa 2020) we recently held. It will give you a sense what’s happening now and what will happen soon.

No surprise here, but the answer to the headline’s question is an unequivocal yes. Here’s why the current version of the corporate recruiting department is heading toward extinction:

1. History repeats itself. The current version of the corporate recruiting department and recruiter came into existence in the 1995-2000 time frame due to technology changes. These same technological forces will fundamentally change the nature of the job in the next few years. In the mid- to late 90s with the growth of job boards, companies realized they didn’t have to pay contingency fees to third-party recruiters for candidates they could find on their own. As a result they began to hire contract recruiters at a pretty stiff hourly rate to reduce costs and increase control. This model proved successful and soon contract recruiters become full-time employees at more reasonable rates. Since cost and efficiency were the drivers behind many of these initiatives, there were never enough recruiters on the staff to handle all of the requisitions properly. In many cases this model is more transactional and administrative, focusing on filling jobs with the best person applying, rather than reaching out and finding the best available person. This strategic error, in my mind, will be the root cause of the corporate recruiting department’s ultimate demise.
2. The active-to-passive shift is accelerating. According to a massive joint study we conducted with LinkedIn, only 18% of the fully-employed pool of prospects were looking for new jobs using traditional techniques. The 82% who describe themselves as passive need to be engaged with in a totally different manner from the 18%. They are looking for better jobs and career opportunities, they take longer to decide, they won’t apply, they don’t have resumes, they are in higher demand, and they are far more choosey. Most corporate recruiting processes are ill-equipped to handle these differences. Without a major overhaul in processes, tactics, resources, and how job descriptions are written, the biggest pool of the best prospects will go untouched.
3. Interconnected networks will replace sourcing. Soon, if not sooner, everyone will be connected with everyone else by only one degree of separation. As a result, proprietary talent communities will become unimportant since everyone will have access to the same people. These will soon be overshadowed and ultimately be replaced by 360° talent networks. As a result, those with the deepest and broadest talent networks will win. While developing these networks will be a critical job of the recruiting department of the future, it’s unclear that managing and working the network will require the current set of recruiter skills and competencies. Since the auto-matching of jobs with prospects in these extended networks will soon become the norm, the end-game (reeling in and closing) will become the critical differentiator of success.
4. The rise of the hiring manager self-serve model is accelerating. Just as corporate recruiters replaced TPRs, hiring managers will soon be taking over much of the work now performed by corporate recruiters. Consider this likely scenario: a hiring manager creates a quick video describing the job. Moments later it’s distributed throughout the talent network to just the right people. Available prospects will be notified moments later on their smartphones, and since everything will be known about everyone, the most qualified people will be automatically matched with the best opportunities. The best matches will be to sorted to the top with instant video exploratory meetings set up at the push of a button. I don’t know what happens next, but it will be a heck of lot different than what happens now, with hiring managers driving the process.
5. Quality of hire has not improved under the current model. Let’s be honest on this point: there is no evidence that quality of hire improved as a result of moving the recruiting function in-house. While cost per hire and time to fill have improved, there has been no corresponding improvement in the overall talent level of a company. Improvements on this score, if any, can largely be attributed to employer branding, supply vs. demand issues, hiring manager insistence, or some executive-level strategy change. If some other corporate recruiting model can demonstrate better quality of hire at the same cost and efficiency, there’s no reason to maintain the corporate recruiting function in its current form. The one envisioned certainly meets this benchmark.
6. The decline and fall of the FTE and the requisition. The full-time equivalent worker is becoming less relevant, replaced by contingent, contract, consultants, outsourced and project workers. This parallels demographic changes, with an aging workforce considering more part-time work, and a large portion of those just entering the market not sold on the corporate career lifestyle. Much of the mixing and matching associated with this project-based work environment can be automated, further lessening the role of the corporate recruiting function. On top of this is the idea now gaining traction of crafting the job around a great person who is a rough match on skills, rather than finding a person who closely meets the skill set on the job description. Talent networks like LinkedIn and Facebook coupled with emerging career management apps are both forcing and enabling this type of paradigm shift in approach and thinking.

While the trends themselves are quite apparent, one could effectively argue the specific outcomes and conclusions drawn. The lack of technology advances — especially on the ATS front — would be the big reason a new, more efficient corporate recruiting model does not emerge as quickly as possible. The fact that these systems are built on a work process that is requisition-based also prevents much of the changes proposed from being implemented as efficiently as possible.

While change might be slowed by the lack of an effective ATS, recruiting leaders must create the future, rather than react to it. On one level 100% visibility to everyone and every job is not necessarily a good thing. Some negatives include increased workforce turnover, waged-based inflation as companies compete for the best or to retain them, wider swings in company performance as weaker performance accelerates people leaving for greener pastures, and productivity declines caused by the need to increase training.

Whether you agree or not with the specifics here, change of some significant type is inevitable. On the tech front things are changing more rapidly than ever, and as a result, the corporate recruiter of the future will look little like his or her counterpart of today. Those who take advantage of these changes will have a field day. Those who don’t won’t be around to worry about it.

Boehner is not alone. A lot of people of all political, economic, and social persuasions seem to be asking the same question. But because many of us have been exhorting for years that such a scenario was inevitable, the current job crisis should be no surprise. More importantly, it should be more than obvious that strategies that worked in the past would not work in the future. As Peter Drucker once said, “the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

A new report released by McKinsey Global Institute seems to confirm that political rhetoric and populist driven strategies won’t be enough to see the United States return to full employment before 2020.

The report includes quite a few compelling statistics that I hadn’t seen before, at least not in these terms:

• 7 million: decline in the number of U.S. jobs since December 2007
• 21 million: jobs needed by 2020 to return to full employment
• 40%: proportion of companies planning to hire that have had openings for six months
• 1.5 million: estimated shortage of college graduates in the workforce in 2020.
• 23%: drop in rate of new business creation since 2007, resulting in as many as 1.8 million fewer jobs; the number of employees per new business has been falling, from eight in the 1990s to fewer than six in recent years.
• 20%: proportion of men in the population, not working today; up from 7% in 1970.
• 1 in 10: the number of Americans who move annually, down from 1 in 5 in 1985.

All told, between 2000 and 2007, the United States posted a weaker record of job creation than during any decade since the Great Depression. Total employment from 2000 to 2007 increased by 9.2 million — and 1.2 of those jobs were in sectors directly fueled by the credit bubble. The current job crisis didn’t start with the recession. The recession only accelerated and exacerbated it.

Under several job-creation scenarios, McKinsey estimates that as few as 9.3 million jobs could be created to as many as 22.5 million. Unfortunately the low-job-growth creation scenario is too familiar and will be the result of continued contraction in manufacturing employment, continued automation and offshoring in administrative and back-office positions, and new automation in retail (such as more opportunities for self-checkout.)

To achieve a high-job-growth scenario, our economy will have to rely on the healthcare sector. If this scenario comes to fruition, another 5 million jobs might be created thanks to rising demand from an aging population and the addition of millions of newly insured Americans to the healthcare system. If this scenario is accurate, politicians and citizen movements calling for an end to the proposed healthcare plan could win one battle (health care) but lose another (new job creation). In addition to healthcare, continued growth in business services might add another 6 million jobs. A housing recovery could create another 3 million jobs.

To reemploy the millions of unemployed with less than a college degree, the high-job-growth scenario must become a reality. The catch-22 is that to fill many of the jobs in the high-job-creation scenario, candidates with college degrees will be required. McKinsey projects that by 2020, 56.5 million members of the workforce will have college or graduate degrees. But to fill all the jobs created, an additional 1.5 million workers with college degrees would be needed. On the other hand, 64 million workers will have a high school degree or less, leaving 5.9 million more high school dropouts than jobs available.

But job creation alone won’t solve the problem. Those job creation-job filling scenarios assume that the fields of study pursued by the workers matches the needs of the employer and economy. Unfortunately that’s a faulty assumption.

Based on current trends, t0o few Americans who attend college and vocational schools choose fields of study that will give them the specific skills that employers are seeking. Twice as many students in the U.S. will graduate with degrees in social sciences and business rather than the much-needed skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Potential shortages loom large for nutritionists, welders, nurse’s aides, computer specialists, and engineers.

This skill gap is no longer pending as 64 percent of companies interviewed for the McKinsey study reported they cannot find qualified applicants, with management, scientists, and computer engineers topping the list.

The report offers three recommendations to achieve full employment: (1) sustained demand growth; (2) rising U.S. competitiveness, and (3) better matching of U.S. workers to jobs. Two of the three strategies seem to be out of the control for all but maybe the large multinational organizations. Better matching of workers to jobs offers the single best solution — and maybe the only one — for businesses committed to hiring and retaining a skilled, competitive workforce.