According to the survey conducted by Monster and Human Capital Institute, 84 percent of employers indicated they thought their were workers content because they were working. However, only 58 percent of workers said that.

For workers, the disconnect extends to their feelings about their workload, the longer hours required of them, and their willingness to give their employer the benefit of the doubt for layoffs.

“Today’s employers feel that employees are loyal due to the economic times, but the reality is they are not,” said Katherine Jones, HCI Research Fellow. “Because of this, there is a strong likelihood that when the economy turns for the better, employers could find themselves with valued employees jumping ship. This places pressure on them to put retention measures in place now.”

Monster and HCI conducted the survey in May and June to assess the impact of the recession on workers and companies. More than 700 companies and almost 5,000 passive and active job seekers participated, responding to questions about their attitudes to work, employees, their post-recession expectations, and purchasing plans.

The three-part report examines the recession’s impact from the worker’s and employer’s perspective and how the government’s stimulus program may change the workplace.

While the survey showed employers understood their workforce morale has slipped and stress is up because of the recession, it also shows that employees believe their bosses are taking advantage of the situation. Among the findings:

• 57  percent of workers believe employers are exploiting the recession to drive longer hours and lower pay from their workforces;
• Only 26 percent excuse their employers for requiring layoffs and longer hours because they believe their employer’s hands were forced by the recession;
• 58 percent believe employers are less concerned about employee retention, and 50 percent of workers are more concerned about top performers leaving than before the recession;
• 53 percent have a decreased company loyalty;
• 79 percent are more likely to be seeking jobs elsewhere.

Each of the three parts offers insights and conclusions drawn from the survey results. Equally as important is the glimpse the overall report offers of the future: Boomers won’t be retiring in the numbers once thought, thus offsetting, at least partially, the worker shortage; younger people are likely to be more inclined to seek recession-proof or at least recession-resistant jobs or self-employment, and; the general skepticism of Gen Y toward corporate America may be passed down to the following generation.

Perhaps most immediately, there may be a mass turnover of employees, especially of top performers, once companies begin hiring again.

JIGSAW

The business intelligence and sourcing site has upgraded its community forum, giving it a cleaner look and implementing such to-be-expected features as tagging and contributor ratings. Tags are especially welcome, given that forum posts aren’t easily searched.

No one is going to mistake the new community platform as avant garde; think of it as functional, especially so if it adopts the name “The Corner,” which is beating out “Puzzleville” in the name voting.

The company also has an iPhone app that’s going into beta. Jigsaw is looking for iPhone users willing to provide feedback to the team in exchange for being the first to use the new app to “search, download and export contacts directly.”

CEO LONGEVITY

Challenger, Gray & Christmas say CEO turnover has slowed since the dark days of September 2008 when the outplacement firm recorded 140 CEO departures. Last month, the firm counted only 105 departures.

Since the beginning of the year, 939 CEOs have left their posts, a 17 percent decline from the 1,132 departures announced through September last year.

Health care CEOs have the biggest worries when it comes to job security; 151 have left their job so far this year, the most of any sector. Government/non-profits are next with 116 departures.

RISESMART

This Silicon Valley HR startup is rightfully boasting about the latest member of its board of advisers. Pat Pittard, the former chairman, president, and CEO of Heidrick & Struggles, signed on to RiseSmart’s board, saying, “I believe in what the company is doing, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

RiseSmart has been getting noticed for its imaginative blending of traditional outplacement services with 21st century technology. The company stripped outplacement of the group coaching, counseling, and consulting to focus on the job getting. Services are delivered online and by phone, keeping overhead to a minimum.

Considering the cost and the focus of the program, it’s not surprising that Pittard called RiseSmart’s business model “disruptive.” He said it is “transforming how corporate outplacement works – leveraging technology, along with a laser-like focus on results, to squeeze out the inefficiencies of traditional outplacement services.”

There’s the report from Monster this week that says vast numbers of workers are ready to switch careers for a new job. Another survey, this one from SearchPath International and Antal International, give us a global view of hiring — and firing — trends.

The Global Snapshot offers clues to where the hottest markets in the world are for managers and professionals. (Hint: Think Russia, China, India, Egypt, and Eastern Europe.)

That report dovetails with last week’s USA Today report about an emerging brain drain of managers and professionals from the U.S. to China and India.

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at Duke University and a senior research associate at Harvard University, surveyed some 1,200 immigrants who returned to their native country. He reports that improved opportunities at home, coupled with U.S. visa policies, makes it likely that up to 200,000 white collar migrants will return to China and India in the next five years.

A UPI version of the story includes this comment from Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington: “China needs a lot of well-trained personnel.”

No surprise there, especially no surprise after you peek at The Global Snapshot report that says 74 percent of the surveyed companies in China report they are hiring skilled managers and other white collar professionals now. Also not surprisingly, the report commentary notes that there has been a better than 10 percent rise in the companies shedding workers, which the report notes, suggests “that employers are taking advantage of current conditions to ‘weed out’ less productive members of staff.”

Other hot Asian markets for these same workers: Singapore, Pakistan and Hong Kong. India is bit less robust with 51 percent of the surveyed companies hiring now. But give it a quarter and 66 percent say they’ll be looking for managers and professionals.

In the U.S., 55 percent of respondents report hiring, with the same percentage planning to hire next quarter.

The recession has also got workers thinking that it may be wise to find a new career.

Monster released a poll of workers in North America and Europe showing 89 percent of them would consider or would make a career change if it meant finding a new job. While only 11 percent of the 22,444 visitors to Monster’s sites in Europe, Canada, or the U.S. said they wouldn’t change careers — at least not now — 49 percent said they’ve been wanting to change careers and are ready now.

In Spain, 92 percent of the visitors to the Monster site who took the poll said they were ready to make a career change. They’re feeling the pressure; 44 percent said they feel they must take the first job that comes along. That percentage contrasts sharply with respondents elsewhere, only 23 percent of whom felt they needed to pretty much take anything.

No doubt those who visit Monster sites are motivated job seekers, and probably more willing to switch industries than those who aren’t looking. But when half of those taking the poll answer the question, “Would you consider a job in another industry?” with a “Yes, I’ve been wanting to make a career change,” you can figure that change is underway.

That may not seem like much until you consider that employers reduced this year’s college grad hiring by 21 percent. That seven percent is on top of this year’s cuts, meaning that there will be almost 30 26.53 percent fewer jobs being offered to the current crop of seniors than their counterparts had in 2008.

For comparison, each NACE Job Outlook from 2004 to the spring of 2008 predicted double-digit increases in college senior hiring. The spring 2008 hiring preview predict 8.1 percent growth.

Besides cutting back on their hiring, NACE’s Job Outlook 2010 Fall Preview says employers are shifting their recruiting to the spring. Not in big numbers; only about a 5 percent change from the 2008 survey when the split was 63 percent planned to hire in the fall, while the rest were looking to the spring.

The only region of the U.S. that expects to increase college hiring is the northeast, though only by about 5 percent, which, if you are following the numbers here, will still be below the 2007 hiring level.

“Traditionally, employers tend to be conservative about their college hiring when the economy is in flux,” says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. “Although employers anticipate doing most of their recruiting in the fall, we are seeing some movement to recruit in the spring. This is likely due to anticipation that the economic recovery will be underway by then.”

What this means for college seniors should be self-evident: Get a resume, portfolio, or profile together now; network with alums, professors, your parents friends, and your friends’ parents; go to the on-campus job fairs; talk to the careers office, even if you think it’s lame. If you’ve been thinking of grad school, apply and at least keep the  option open.

For recruiters, the survey suggests opportunities to hire top seniors who might have had their sights set on bigger fish. With fewer jobs and fewer employers pursuing them, even the kids at the top of the class are likely to be more willing to consider smaller firms who aggressively recruit now, instead of next spring.

Don’t make the mistake, though, that it will be a cakewalk to get the best. I got an unusual press release pitching the benefits of an internship with SRC (formerly Syracuse Research Corporation) in Syracuse, NY. It’s unusual in that it is the first internship sales pitch in a press release we can recall receiving at ERE.

The first line of the release says SRC is sweetening its internship benefits “specifically to increase the number of top applicants and retain the best talent for full-time positions.” By the way, “sweet” is the right adjective to apply to the internship benefits. The company is offering to pay for the temporary relocation costs of interns, a housing stipend, referral bonus to former interns, paying positions after the internship as campus ambassadors for SRC, tuition assistance, and more.

What’s more, the research and development firm makes a point of telling interns that they’ll be involved in important and valuable work almost from the moment they arrive. “SRC interns are involved in the same activities as full time employees, including research, design and development, customer interaction and occasional business travel,” the press release says.

Rather than a focus on rapid growth, companies will look for sustainable growth. To achieve this, many more workers will be contractors, consultants, or work as temporaries or part-time. The average age of the workforce is going to get older as Baby Boomers stay longer and fewer young people seek regular corporate jobs. Learning to re-use and find new positions for internal talent will be important.

Many economists are worrying that we may have a jobless recovery, which means that rather than hire lots of people, companies will not seek to fill the jobs eliminated in this recession. They will try hard to maintain a small, highly productive workforce. Today’s BLS figures indicate that productivity is at an all-time high, despite the layoffs and slower economy. That means we are all working harder (and maybe also smarter). So CEOs may be asking: why do we need to add more people and lower our productivity?

What Does This Mean for Recruiting?

Recruiting is full of managers. These are the people who run their recruiting organizations efficiently and effectively. They implement processes, cautiously install technology, focus on customer satisfaction, and stay within their budgets. As long as the world doesn’t change too much, they thrive.

For many organizations, this can be outsourced. A solid, well-chosen RPO can take over the transactional side of recruiting and provide the people you need. It may cost a bit more than the internal recruiter and may not always be as tuned-in to the environment, but they will be capable and offer flexibility in times when hiring is slow.

As I have written many times before, internal recruiters will have to become competent in thinking more broadly about talent. Here are five things you can do.

Step #1: Realize what is happening and accept it

It is highly unlikely that recruiting will return to its pre-recession state within the next two to three years; it probably never will.

Learn as much as you can about the labor market, productivity, and the economy. Understand where your organization is compared to its competition. Realize that recruiters will still exist and even prosper, but when working for a recruiting agency or an RPO and not when working for a corporation. Inside corporations there will be jobs for talent leaders and strategic recruiting people, but not for very many regular recruiters.

Step #2: Assess your organization’s talent

What capabilities and skills do you (or the management team) think will be needed to remain competitive? Does your firm have a labor force capable of thriving in the markets you engage in? What would make it more competitive?

You can form focus groups, talk to hiring managers, meet with your organization’s strategic planning team, and understand where the firm is headed. The more you can speak intelligently and in an informed way about business issues, the better you will accepted and the more influence you can command.

Step #3: Focus on building capability, internally and externally

Develop systems and methods to find the internal talent that will most likely be able to meet the longer-term needs of your organization. Perhaps set up internal talent task forces to begin suggesting what new capabilities and skills should be hired. Ask managers who their stars are and why they are stars. Involve line management but, in subtle ways, begin to demonstrate an ability to do things more strategically and to think on a broader scale than simply filling positions.

Step #4: Communicate and educate

Spread the word about the changes in the labor market and suggest new ways to look at talent. Use the resources you have such as ERE or any of the think-tanks such as my own Future of Talent Institute to get informed and able to explain what is happening to your management.

Write an internal blog, create a talent newsletter, or just send periodic emails about the labor market. The important thing is to keep the issues of people and talent at the forefront of any discussion about business development or growth.

Step #5: Focus on leadership issues, not tactics

What really separates a winner is the focus on longer-term strategic issues and not on day-to-day activities. As I said above, outsource or automate those tactical issues so that you have time to focus on the bigger ones.

By setting up task forces and by focusing on a few critical areas, you can broaden the focus of the recruiting department and make it more integral and important to the success of the firm.

This is what leadership is all about: educating and setting expectations, engaging people to achieve goals and then getting out of the way.

The future is fine for all of us in the talent arena, but it will require a different set of skills and a new mindset.

Organizations worry about being perceived as offering a good balance between work and personal time.

Many career sites and recruiters stress the ways the organization addresses this through flexible work policies, family-friendly HR polices, child care, and so on. And, for many job seekers, finding a company that offers this magic blend is the Holy Grail.

While Jack was addressing women specifically and speaking about their opportunities for promotion and growth within traditional corporate America, he was reinforcing this assumption. He was heavily criticized for talking to women in this way, even though it is an accurate reflection of the thinking in most of traditional corporate America.

My problem is not with Jack as much as it is with the assumptions that work/life balance is based on.

We assume that work and family should be separated and that there should somehow be an equal division between the two, which is implied in the word “balance.”

The concept of work and life being somehow distinct from each other is a recent construct. There was no work/life balance in the 17th, 18th, 19th, or for most of the 20th centuries. Work and life were integrated and no one would have even thought to separate out what portion of farm life, for example, was “life” and what portion was “work.” Wives and husbands and children worked together as family units, producing food, clothing, or operating a small family business. Roles were assumed and cast off as needed and whoever had the ability or skill needed at a particular time did what was needed to be done.

In most of the world this is still the case. It is only in developed nations that these artificial distinctions arose to meet the needs of factories where everyone had to be in a physical place for certain time frames in order for things to be made. It took England and the United States decades to get people accustomed to going to work at a particular time and staying for a fixed amount of time. The way we work today has never been an organic or natural way, and our fixation recently on work/life balance is only the latest manifestation of an old issue.

Where I think Jack was misguided was in not recognizing how rapidly the traditional corporate world is crumbling. Organizations like Facebook, Mozilla, and hundreds of other emerging firms are organizing in radically different ways. They are focusing on interdependence, on building networks and fostering relations between workers, vendors, and customers. Innovative firms realize that flat structures and open communication improve creativity.

So the good news is that many organizations are moving back into the world where work and life are integrated and where entire families may be part of the “team.” Technology makes this possible, and as high definition video, faster connections, and touch capabilities improve it will be easier and easier. At the most exciting startups, people are already seamlessly integrated into projects where roles frequently change as needs change and leadership rotates as project requirements evolve. Workers are able to be at home with their kids or spouse. They can be outdoors or indoors. And very often they can be physically far removed from the “office” whatever that is coming to mean. The emerging concept is that being in a certain place for a specific time is less important than achieving results and accomplishing goals.

While Baby Boomer managers are locked into the concept of physical space and time as keys to assessing contribution, younger workers have a different view. They realize that for personal as well as environmental and energy reasons, working from home is going to become the norm.

I am not downplaying how difficult it is to change the Baby Boomer attitude, but I am optimistic that as younger managers appear, as environmental pressures increase, and as younger organizations begin to generate significant revenue and employ more people, attitudes about work will change rapidly.

There will always remain work that requires physical presence — whether it is making something, caring for an ill person, or fixing your drainpipe. But less and less work requires a physical presence, and what remains may be done with greater flexibility and personalization than it is today. Our entire world rotates around an 80+ year-old concept that work is something done away from home, for a set amount of time, and should not be fun. Work is assumed to be only the means to have another life and as little of it as possible is good. The flip side to that is an assumption that work is what makes life meaningful and to do it with your partner, friends, or family is good. How many hours it takes to do it or where it gets done are far less important than the engagement and accomplishment.

Jack Welch was absolutely right if we are thinking about 20th century corporate life. However, Gen Y and those who follow are forging new territory and reinventing work — making it the engaging experience it should be where friends and families interact together all the time, teach each other, share workloads, and find emotional connections that have been purged from corporate life as we have known it.

But none of this means that a recovery is in the making. All it means is that the pace of decline is slowing. The good news is that there’s less bad news, but the bad news is that there’s still plenty of bad news.

Stimulus

The last 18 months have resulted in job losses equal to job gains of the previous 42 months. A recovery will require job creation of 200,000 or more per month. Right now there’s nothing to show this will occur anytime soon, despite any claims to the contrary.

Lately the President has talking about how many jobs are being “created or saved” by stimulus funds. That’s an interesting way to put it. The New York Times has diplomatically described these claims as being “unverifiable.” Considering what a big deal the administration has made about the need for transparency let’s be undiplomatic and call them what they are: BS. There is no way to measure if a job has been “saved,” and such talk only underscores the fact that the Administration lacks confidence in the ability of $787 billion stimulus package to do much. It was supposed to prevent unemployment from exceeding 8%. Well, so much for that. So far the money has largely gone into infrastructure projects, most of which do not result in permanent jobs.

The massive increases in public debt, in America and other countries, while necessary to stabilize economies, will result in sluggish growth for years. The IMF estimates that public debt in the world’s leading economies will rise to 100% of GDP by 2010 and to 140% by 2014. To put it in perspective: by 2014 the United States and other members of the OECD will owe, on average, $50,000 for each one of their citizens. No country has ever managed to spend its way to prosperity, and the massive amounts of borrowing by governments will reduce funds available to private industry and consequently limit growth. This means that the economies of most countries will struggle to realize their potential — dragged down by such large debt burdens.

What this all means is that in most of the world’s economies, the government will be the dominant source of growth — and jobs. And governments are not good at that. Recent policy actions don’t suggest otherwise. The Speaker of the House — the Honorable Nancy Pelosi — made the statement that the cap-and-trade bill could be described by four words: jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. If government programs were so good at creating jobs and managing growth, the Soviet Union would have been the biggest economy in the world. And considering the track record of the Speaker’s home state of California in that respect, it might help to know what exactly the lady bases her claims on.

Whatever your opinion on climate change, this bill is a bad idea and incredibly ill-timed. The bill imposes more tax burdens at a time of economic decline, while expecting growth in employment from development of green technologies that are in their infancy at best. Most are years away from reaching the point where they will go mainstream enough to generate sizable numbers of jobs. There just aren’t enough jobs that will be created in the next few years making windmills and solar panels to make a sizable dent in the unemployment picture. Add to that the possibility of healthcare reform with a potential tab of $1.6 trillion, and increases in minimum wage, and one has to wonder: What exactly are policy-makers thinking?

Where the Jobs Are

Since 2008 employers in America have eliminated thousands of recruiting jobs. A lot of these are not coming back anytime soon. Perhaps the President can find a way to save some, but assuming he may not find time in his agenda to do so, recruiters looking for work should consider working for the Federal Government and employers that provide services to the government. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is designed to fund the creation (or saving?) of 3.5 million jobs over the next two years. Funding for government projects that will create these jobs is now starting to flow. Federal agencies that will directly create new jobs list their positions here.

To get some leads on what projects are being funded, and therefore the providers that may need recruiters, look for RFPs put out by Federal Agencies. These are all published in the Federal Register and on the individual agency websites, along with details on those being awarded these contracts.

Looking wider, companies that deal with growing economies — specifically China, India, Australia, and Singapore — will also be hiring. The World Bank forecasts that the Chinese and Indian economies are expected to grow by about 7% this year. Certain Middle Eastern countries, particularly some in the Gulf States, like Qatar, will also see growth rates of 5%. The International Labor Organization projects employment growth will be positive in South Asia and parts of the Pacific. Businesses based in these regions and doing business here are hiring. Even in Western Europe, several countries — like Switzerland — are experiencing chronic shortages of talent.

Regionally, of 381 metropolitan areas in the U.S., the 15 that are still growing are mostly in oil and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas. The energy industry, in these areas and elsewhere, is also seeing a resurgence — oil-rig operators are bringing more rigs on-stream, up 25% in the last month.

This Too Shall Pass
It ain’t over till the plus-sized woman sings, and by most accounts right now she’s not even on the stage. Recruiting as a profession has been around for over 2,000 and it will survive the current crisis. The road ahead is bumpy and uncertain. There’s little to be optimistic about. Welcome to an era of lowered expectations. But recruiting is still a business-critical function.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, what are the takeaways from the CareerBuilder survey?

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

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

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

Yet, as the United States and other countries struggle to keep people employed, they often forget that the solution is not always about preserving the jobs that already exist. The solution to unemployment is to create jobs — lots of them in new and emerging areas.

Most recessions lead to the destruction of jobs in industries and areas that have been automated or made obsolete by newer technologies and methodologies. And at the same time, new jobs are created in emerging business areas. This has happened here in Silicon Valley many times. As semiconductor production was sent to Asia, software and biotech firms began to emerge, and picked up many of the unemployed workers. Venture capital fueled the growth of Yahoo, Google, and hundreds of other firms. And these firms employed thousands and attracted some of the world’s most talented and educated people to the United States.

Innovation and creativity are employment engines, but at the moment they are idling when they should be at full power. Even the U.S. Patent office is slowing down as innovative dries up.

Yet in this recession we have seen venture capital investment fall to record lows and, after a peak of 22 companies filed for an initial public offering in 2007, only two have done so since. New companies are not being created with the zest of the past, and lack of money keeps many innovative firms small and less able to make an impact on the marketplace or to employ many people.

As a nation we face several conundrums: As Richard Florida points out in The Atlantic, unemployment is highest where there are the least educated and skilled people and where the likelihood of new companies investing is low. Fewer private companies are going public, venture capitalists are investing less money, and the education of technical and scientific talent is at a low.

We are not going to come out of this recession just by employing people in massive public works projects or by propping up failing companies with obsolete and non-competitive products and services. Even if these measures work at all, their impact will be small and short.

Our stimulus money should go to entrepreneurs, inventors, and creative people who will dream up the new services and the new tools and products that will fuel growth and employment. We need to incentivize investment in high unemployment areas and provide education and training at no cost to those who need it.

We should be investing in education of all types, but especially in non-traditional areas that hold the potential to help people learn faster, cheaper, and with more enjoyment. Education is partly to blame for the uneducated and unskilled workforce we have. It did little to make learning fun, challenging, or useful. It still relies on pain as the main indicator of learning quality; if a course is fun or easy, then the student must have not learned very much.

The online universities, video learning, podcasts, virtual tutors, and other non-traditional tools may be the game-changers education needs. It will take government investment to make this mainstream. Pouring tax dollars into yesterday’s industries is not only wasteful but very dangerous.

I realize that recruiters have little to do with job creation or loss. We are primarily the ones who find the people to fill these new jobs. But here are two ideas about how we can make a significant difference.

Idea #1: Find a job in an emerging industry or service area
Green energy, robotics, and biotech are all job creation industries. U.S. News & World Report each year publishes a list of those jobs they see as “ahead of the curve.” This past December, for example, a couple of their emerging jobs were data miner and healthcare informatics specialists.

By focusing on finding people for these industries, you can enhance your own career and help thousands of people find employment.

Idea #2: Help your organization use different people
Very often people with obsolete skills can adapt to new industries and learn new skills quickly. What recruiters need to do is to be aware of what skills translate well and of which types of people can make these transitions the fastest. As the semiconductor industry emerged in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, there were no fabrication workers and no equipment repair technicians who had experience with the equipment used. Recruiters were then forced to find existing workers who could learn fast. By taking workers from the fruit and vegetable canning industries and mechanical technicians from the Army, they staffed an entire industry. Our challenge today is to find the emerging jobs and the existing workers who can fill them. This is how we can contribute to the “new” world that is emerging from this recession.

Recruiters can influence, drive change, and educate their organizations. The great recruiters are already doing this and making a big difference in the lives of thousands of unemployed and underemployed people.

I was recently reading an article in which many of the members of the mission control team were interviewed about the mission and the various roles and tasks they performed. One of the most interesting things was a discussion about the fact that almost all of the mission control team members were very young.

The mission required extensive use of computers and the ability to use computers to do things that had never been done before. Computer science was such a young field, and the moon mission so unique, that there were no persons with any experience doing what needed to be done. In order to accomplish the mission, NASA hired a group of people who had the ability required to work with computers and experience working with computers, no matter what the application. The article did not say what methods were used to determine how hiring decisions were made, but clearly a non-traditional approach was required. We all know the result of the decisions NASA made and we all know that the combination of workers, equipment, and planning resulted in a resounding success — the kind of win any corporation would be proud of!

Even though the Apollo 11 mission happened 40 years ago, it’s ripe with lessons for those of us in the hiring profession. This is especially true when it comes to creating strategies to use assessment in the future of the hiring and the workforce. My thoughts:

• As has always been the case, the bottom line is that understanding the traits valued for getting the job done and including the scientifically based assessments required to measure them in your hiring process will help ensure you achieve successful performance of your mission.
• Creating the future may often require taking a leap of faith in someone’s abilities to make a contribution. Testing can help make this leap easier by helping to identify those individuals who possess the raw abilities and characteristics required. A caveat here is that — as with any employment testing situation — time must be taken to identify abilities and characteristics critical to desired outcomes as a first step in the development of the testing program.
• Training and experience are an excellent way to help mold the raw material that brought to the table. When seeking to do something that has not yet been done using new technologies, training is essential, as is the ability for hands-on learning in which team members can educate one another.
• Ideas are and will continue to be the currency required for successful progress. Identifying applicants who are creative and possess the proper thinking styles will become increasingly important.
• Bringing together persons with backgrounds in different areas and asking them to function together as a team will be essential to success. New innovations and progress are increasingly requiring input from those with vastly different backgrounds.
• Given the above point, it seems logical that an increasing amount of attention be paid to ensuring a harmonious cultural fit between the members of the team. It is often mismatches in work styles and values that cause problems within a team dynamic. There are an increasing number of applications which allow organizations to measure, model, and optimize fit when creating and aligning work teams.

Technology is continuing to make the above points easier for those folks with out a background in testing and assessment. As with almost every other area in our lives, technology is radically changing the landscape. When is the last time you sent a fax? Could you be as efficient without email? We are entering an age of unprecedented accelerated technological advancement. The time horizon for quantum leaps in technology has been shortened to milliseconds when one considers the grand scheme of things. The computing power and things needed to put a man on the moon 40 years ago can probably be duplicated by several laptops now.

The things we are going to see in our lifetime are going to blow our minds. This statement will be true for those of us in the general business of hiring, and those of us who specifically concentrate on assessment. Virtual simulations of entire jobs, human interactions, and interactions between humans and machines are going to be the future of hiring. I have just started to see some of the first steps in this direction. What I have seen and learned so far is that it is going to require a diverse set of perspectives to create the hiring tools of the future. Folks in the testing and recruitment industries are going to need to team up with persons in other, seemingly unrelated industries in order to make it happen.

I am currently working on putting together a consortium that represents key stakeholders from the assessment and gaming industries as well as persons from other areas yet to be defined. I am just at the concepting stages at this point, so I encourage interested parties to post here if you want to talk about this idea.

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

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

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

So if they’re anywhere close to the industry average, executives are spending about a third of the time they’re with a company searching for a new company to join.

The executive summary of the report itself doesn’t speak to that situation, though it does show that 73 percent of the executives are finding networking the most effective way of finding their next job. For another 10 percent, responding to job postings produced results, though the report suggests that fewer and fewer of these executive-level jobs find their way online.

“The sheer volume of résumés -– both qualified and unqualified –- that recruiters get from public postings, particularly as more candidates compete for fewer jobs, is staggering, and they find it prohibitive to post those jobs out in the open,” says ExecuNet President and Chief Economist Mark Anderson. “Recruiters tell us they don’t want cold calls or emails; they want someone to refer you to them.”

While recruiters can be choosier than ever right now, they expect to see an executive hiring boomlet in the second half of the year — big enough that they expect searches to be down only 4 percent for all of 2009. That prediction is consistent with what happened in the search industry in 2003, at the end of that recession. The optimism is also reflected in the latest ExecuNet’s Recruiter Confidence Index. In decline since the beginning of 2007, the index rebounded from a low of 26 percent to 38 percent between February and March.

“We’ve been tracking their confidence level since the last recession, and their confidence has always been a leading indicator of the economy and executive employment,” Anderson explains. “During the last recession, we saw recruiter confidence quickly strengthen six months ahead of the recovery.”

As you put the list together, consider these assumptions:

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

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

1. You’ve developed and implemented a sourcing strategy that emphasizes how top talent looks for new career opportunities, rather than how average people look for new jobs. This is a huge shift in thinking that required some understand and significant selling to your executive and entire hiring manager team.
2. As part of your shift to a top talent hiring strategy, you’ve created a decision matrix based on how these top people compare and select job opportunities and have built this into your sourcing and recruiting process.
3. You developed a rolling workforce planning system highlighting your hiring needs for all critical positions, including a tracking system to identify potential turnover problems.
4. You’ve developed a multi-pronged sourcing strategy, including increased reliance on your employee referral program, more Web 2.0 channels, the grouping of similar jobs into talent hubs, and the use of niche boards instead of major boards coupled with an emphasis on search engine marketing and consumer marketing concepts. Part of this is the wholesale elimination of using traditional job descriptions as the basis for advertising purposes and incorporating messaging that ties directly to what top people are looking for.
5. You’ve put together a succession planning process to tap into some upcoming stars to deal with the anticipated turnover or whenever unexpected promotional opportunities arise.
6. You developed a means to tap into employee satisfaction to ensure you’re not caught unaware by an upsurge in turnover. As part of this, you created a new retention program to minimize the possibility of any business disruption.
7. You’ve started training and rebuilding your existing recruiting team including lining up enough contractors and full-time recruiters to handle the hiring increase. You’ve even developed a short list of retained and contingency recruiters to handle some of your real critical positions and given them some insight on possible positions that will need filling.
8. You’ve set up programs with your hiring managers to fast-track any top performers you identify before reqs have been formally approved. As part of this, and the expected hiring increase, your managers are now trained in using tools like the two-question performance-based interview to assess and recruit top performers.
9. New analytics program have been installed to track in real time recruiter productivity and effectiveness, sourcing channel effectiveness, candidate quality, quality vs. cost, and hiring manager recruiting performance.
10. Not only have you now using the LinkedIn and ZoomInfo premium packages, but your recruiters know how to call everyone they find and get at least two to three top referrals on every call. After just a few months, you’ve fully realized that these tools offer connections to the best people on the planet, not just sources of names.
11. You’ve assessed your technology and have started a major upgrading effort to ensure that you can track quickly prospects, you’ve installed a robust CRM system, you have everyone using the new analytics program, hiring managers are fully versed on using the process, and you can create new talent hubs in days. Bottom line: you’ve used the slowdown to convert your technology from just a data management and reporting tool into a full-fledged productivity improvement system.
12. You’re now building a huge pre-qualified prospect database with a drip marketing program already in operation. You know this is working since it’s growing in size by 5%-10% per month. Much of this build-up is driven by new employee referrals, Twitter feeds, pushed advertising to appropriate blogs and social networks, and an increased focus on getting prospects for future openings rather than finding candidates for current openings. This is another huge strategic shift in thinking for you and your company.

If you’ve done your job as a recruiting leader, the hiring challenges you’re facing in January 2010 are significant but manageable. In the past six months, you’ve probably done everything listed, and more. Here’s a reasonable recovery checklist to get started, but feel free to email me if you’d like the latest version.

Now back to today. If you want this story to be yours, you need to start this stuff right away. And if you haven’t yet started implementing most of the things listed, there’s not enough time to make it.

Consider, while the unemployment rate won’t start declining until late 2010, the demand for the best talent will start increasing three to four months earlier, driven by both business needs coupled with a modest increase in turnover. This means you’ll start feeling the heat by late summer 2009. Anecdotally, we’re already hearing the best third-party recruiters are now – in May — getting more assignments. This is clear evidence that the market for top people is starting to recover a bit right now.

The key to being ready is being more strategic than tactical. The strategic issues involved include a shift to thinking about how the best search for new opportunities, the conversion of technology into a business system, and the idea that building a top prospect database driven will replace posting requisitions as the primary means to fill positions.

If you’re ready for it, January 2010 will be an exciting time.

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

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

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

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

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

–Yogi Berra

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

The famous Yogi Berra quotation above actually contains a nugget of perspicacity: the “nobody” Yogi was referring to were people like him (e.g., ballplayers and other celebrities) who began avoiding a popular restaurant because it was too crowded. Probably one of the reasons so many diners flocked to the place was to see the celebrities who put it on the map. As soon as it became a destination for the tourists, the celebrities had gone on to more exclusive destinations.

Twitter grew at 33% in January; 55% in February; and 131% in March. And that was before Oprah logged on. With such a hockey stick growth trajectory, every person on the planet will have a Twitter account by the end of this year.

We know, of course, that this won’t happen. First, there is also a well-documented tendency for people to abandon Twitter accounts within a couple of months. Oprah has already gone relatively silent, for example.

More importantly, however, is the fact that the noise level on Twitter is becoming deafening. Getting back to Yogi, many who were early adopters of Twitter are getting tired of phantom spam followers, and are “un-following” people to adjust the volume down. The utility of Twitter — its ability to connect you immediately with dozens or hundreds of like-minded souls — is being usurped by spammers and corporations who use it as an instant messaging broadcast medium.

Employers are posting tweets with brief job titles and compressed URLs linking to job postings. But it is rare to respond to one of these tweets and have a live human reply in kind. Or even an automated reply (à la @DonDraper of the “Mad Men” show). The spirit of Twitter — an ongoing conversation answering the question, “What are you doing?” — is violated. Soon, such tweets will be seen as so much spam (”twam”?) and ignored.

Alternative Paths

Institutions have a visceral mistrust of social media for the simple reason that they cannot control it. The ubiquity of social media via mobile handsets has made trying to block employees from using online networks futile.

But canny corporations have begun to embrace alternative platforms to provide “safe” space for people to communicate with a modicum of control. Yammer, for example, allows organizations to establish an internal Twitter-like platform open only to people who share the organization’s e-mail domain.

Others are establishing internal sites that operate like Facebook, the most notable being the IBM Blue Pages, recently evolved into the BeeHive. Employees create profiles of themselves, their backgrounds, and qualifications, which managers use when staffing a project team. The portal also has employee blogs and wikis where teams can congregate online to brainstorm and discuss technical issues.

Lotus and Microsoft both offer software to allow Notes and Outlook enterprises to create closed communities of interest and collaborate internally.

In short, employers are offering workers alternatives to Twitter and Facebook for self-expression and connection with others. True, your family and friends outside of work cannot access them, so you may continue to use the public platforms for personal interactions. But I submit that people will want to focus on that aspect of the interaction and tune out work-related messaging that may come their way while they are chatting with Mom or old high school chums on Facebook.

By the Time U C it It’s Gone

The precise end of Twitter will probably occur much like the death of distant stars. We see a glow in the night sky that comes from a star that is no longer there, the star having been obliterated thousands of years ago. It simply takes millions of years for the light to reach us, so the light we see started its journey when there was a star to shine.

For me, the telltale wavelength shift occurred when politicians started tweeting after the last presidential election. Everyone saw how President Obama exploited social media successfully during his campaign, and jumped on their Blackberries. The fact that many of them didn’t realize how Twitter is public was the tipoff that they didn’t know what they were doing. When Oprah announced — with Oprahesque fanfare — that she was on Twitter, a shudder was felt through the Force.

The end won’t come next week, next month, or even next year (perhaps). But the seeds of its destruction have been sown and are beginning to sprout. Rumors abound that Twitter is about to release a premium version to address this problem. There is also a lot of speculation that Twitter will be gobbled up by Google, Microsoft, or even Apple, despite denials from Biz Stone, one of the founders. To date, however, it’s all just conjecture. So you still need to understand Twitter (and its various spinoffs such as TwitPic, TweetDeck, HootSuite, etc., etc.) and other social media.

There are many opportunities to exploit the intimacy and immediacy of Twitter that most employers haven’t yet explored. You need to monitor the state of social media, and how the various channels are being used and misused. Be aware of what is being said about your organization on blogs, forums, on search engines and job boards, as well as platforms such as Twitter. Ignoring the conversation won’t make it go away; people will simply talk about you behind your back.

“If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You Might Wind Up Some Place Else.”

Another gem from the Yogi applies to the evolving field of social media recruiting. The real point is that it is a mistake to focus on one platform or tool. Appreciate each for its capabilities and unique characteristics, but view them in the context of your overall communications plan. Decide what it is you want to accomplish, and then select the tools that will help you achieve your objectives. In other words, don’t start tweeting jobs because “all the other kids are doing it.” If your organization is unwilling or unable to be social with social media, perhaps you should forego tweeting your jobs until you can establish the infrastructure to support a true two-way conversation (at 140 characters per tweet, of course).

Conversely, if you can devote the time and energy to engaging people using social media — whichever platform you choose — you will find the richness of the relationship will enhance not only your success in recruiting, but the quality of people you recruit as well. Do that and whether Twitter lives or dies won’t matter as much as the connections you create and nurture.

I tweet as waqueau1. Follow me at your peril.

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

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

(Click here to read part one.)

Category V: Best College Recruiting Program – Ernst & Young

In a conservative industry and in a segment of recruiting that offers little innovation, Ernst & Young has led the way for several years in a row. It has been ranked #1 on the BusinessWeek “Best Places to Launch a Career” list and has an astonishing 90% conversion rate for interns.

Some best practices include:

• Executive involvement. It convinced over 1,500 client-serving partners to take time away from their busy schedules to service selected schools, just as it services clients. Even Board members visit a select number of assigned schools each year. Each business unit has specific goals and is held accountable for successful college recruiting.
• A pipeline approach. It provides leadership development programs for freshmen and sophomore students, both to increase the supply talent later on and enable early identification of potential candidates.
• Resources. Ernst & Young maintained a staff of 75 dedicated college recruiters, and holds an annual 1,800 person, 4-day leadership conference to develop its interns.
• Competition. Sponsors “Your World, Your Vision,” a student competition where students design an initiative that benefits their local community. Winning schools were awarded funding to make their initiative a reality.
• Technology. Uses nearly every technology approach to recruiting and employer branding, including the use of a dedicated Facebook page to service students and to build its brand.

Notable college recruiting features at other companies:

• Qualcomm. Funds labs and faculty research projects on targeted campuses. Also has an on-campus ambassador program.
• Genentech. Uses a Customer Relationship Management system to capture information on targeted candidates early in their campus career in order to enable relationship-building throughout their college lifecycle.
• Microsoft. Uses a five-year quality-of-hire study to make the business case and to prove the positive ROI of college recruiting. This research justified maintaining budget allocation levels, regardless of the state of the economy.
• Aricent. Focuses efforts on specific student streams (versus on entire campuses). In addition, hiring managers and the employment brand manager conduct postmortems in order to troubleshoot failures.
• MillerCoors. Uses real-world management projects sponsored by individual managers as the primary focus for its summer internship programs (i.e., project-based consulting).

Category VI: The Best Corporate Careers Website – Yahoo

As we all know, Yahoo has been undergoing turmoil in recent years, so it’s particularly amazing that despite the turmoil, coupled with the economic downturn, its HR team put together an amazing Web 2.0 rebuilding effort. The result of this transformation? A career site that went from being ranked as one of the worst sites (on the prestigious CareerXroads ranking) to one of the best sites, all in a short period. The redesign tripled the amount of content consumed by its visitors, which led to increased conversion rates.

The website has some notable features, including:

• Technology everywhere. Not all career websites at technology firms use the wide range of technologies available from the Yahoo site. It offers numerous interesting videos, including “a day in Yahoo life” and “the spirit of Yahoo.” It also provides access to what your employees are saying on Twitter, a company blog, and employee profiles. It also enables visitors to other websites like Twitter and Facebook to post Yahoo’s jobs that might be of interest to their network.
• Awards. Visiting this site makes the viewer immediately aware that Yahoo is an award-winning company. The site highlights Yahoo’s outstanding record of appearing on Fortune’s Best Place to Work List.
• Integrating products. Many career websites seem to operate independently of the firm they represent. Yahoo has made a concerted effort to integrate its wide range of products into the career site and vice versa. This includes providing numerous pictures highlighting the Yahoo experience on its photo and video sharing website, Flickr, and the opportunity to join “Yahoo! Groups” related to recruiting. Other integrated features include maps, my Yahoo personalization, and Del.icio.us. (social bookmarking).
• A combined approach. In addition to its use of the Web, Yahoo also uses other effective recruiting media, including radio and billboards, to push traffic to the new site.

Notable features on other corporate careers websites:

• Microsoft. An award-winner in several other categories, it developed several websites that enable the company to microbrand to smaller, more defined candidate populations. Sites include view, the genius lounge, and youatmicrosoft.com.
• DaVita. Provides a narrated video tour of a DaVita facility.
• IBM. Has extensive ecofriendly messaging, extremely interactive use of multimedia, and very simple navigation. The site is one of the few that can realistically be classified as “global.” It contains “day in the life” videos, Digg, live chat, business-unit specific information, and flash video.

In the remaining two categories, the winners are next-practice innovators; someday, everyone will seek to emulate these practices.

Category VII: Most Strategic Use of Technology – Microsoft

Each year, technology becomes a more impactful part of recruiting. No one seems to realize that fact more than the talent management team at Microsoft. Its website, and the numerous innovative things they’re doing with technology, can only be classified as amazing (especially the talent community work pioneered by Marvin Smith).

To the uninitiated, the power of these tools might take some time to appreciate, but I assure you, they are on the leading edge, even ahead of famous competitors like Google:

• Micro-segmentation of talent communities. This represents the future of recruiting, and no one else even comes close to what Microsoft is currently doing, no less what it is planning. Micro-segmentation is a powerful concept borrowed from advertising and marketing. Micro-segmentation means that instead of treating every potential customer or candidate exactly the same, you tailor messaging and the candidate experience to meet the unique needs of a more defined market segment. Firms currently make elementary attempts to segment in college recruiting, but this new approach breaks candidates into smaller segments known as “talent communities.” Microsoft defines talent communities as “targeted, qualified, active & passive prospects that Microsoft… staffing can develop into a self-sustaining source of engaged talent that will be harvested for years to come.” The information needed to make a job decision for an electrical engineer would be different from a software engineer; both would differ significantly from the needs and interests of a sales professional. Delivering messaging unique to the population you are going after and tailoring the experience they get is microbranding. While some companies may segment by function or region, Microsoft’s new approach enables segmentation on steroids, producing hundreds of segments that could be as narrowly defined as a job family or as wide as a certain diversity classification in a certain demographic region. The talent communities are enabled by software that includes CRM, content management, talent profiling, and job-matching components. The concept and its execution were so compelling that the initial pilot program for a Microsoft hardware engineering unit was paid for by hiring managers.
• Knowledge sharing. The Microsoft talent community approach is broader than just filling jobs. It includes finding ways to bring value to your prospect community even if they don’t take your job. It moves away from the more traditional transactional recruiting and into relationship recruiting with networking and knowledge sharing components. The design is based on the Chinese principle of Guanxi, which is a connectivity or relationship-building concept. Over time, it is assumed that the talent communities will become working professionals “virtual 3rd place” to hang out. Over time, they will become self-maintaining. Despite this multi-purpose, employment opportunities are always only one click away thanks to widgets running on both their LinkedIn and Facebook pages.
• Real messages. One of the most common errors in recruiting is “perfect messaging.” Most websites and employer branding messages are so “flawless” and generic that they are simply dismissed by candidates as propaganda. Microsoft is one of the leaders in providing “real messages,” or messages that agree that everything isn’t perfect and counter why that is a bad thing. Such messaging is considered significantly more credible.
• Shareability. Most of the website content blocks are shareable, meaning that visitors can share content they find of value with a broader audience through the use of popular social networking tools like Facebook and Digg.
• Compelling website. The award-winning View concept www.viewmyworld.com is not one website, but rather a network of sites that enable unique messaging to micro-candidate segments. The average visit on the website is 26 minutes, an astonishing amount of time. Its messages and videos are some of the most exciting and compelling online. They make it easy to “feel the passion” and the excitement of those working at Microsoft. Diverse candidates can also explore their likely experience via www.YouAtMicrosoft.com.
• Many options. All sites leverage the latest in social networking, RSS feeds, Multi-media (video) and employee blogs (Microsoft was one of the first innovators in recruiting blogs). Even Microsoft’s talent communities will include both virtual and live events.
• Connected. The sites contain links to non-Microsoft-owned pages that talk about Microsoft. (Microsoft censors this content, so it is perceived as being much more credible.)
• Quality-of-hire metrics. Microsoft is beginning to use quality-of-hire metrics to assess the effectiveness of its recruiting programs.

Notable features at other companies using technology:

• Dun & Bradstreet. Uses workflow modeling software to identify delays in recruiting cycle/process.
• Firstsource Solutions. Uses short message service (SMS) to support candidates throughout the hiring process.
• Fluor. Uses live webcasts featuring executives to attract talent. They also offer in another feature that is becoming more common, live chat sessions with recruiters.
• Foster’s Group. Made its process paperless. Candidates get offer electronically via a secured website. Candidates are informed of their status following each stage of the process via SMS text messaging.

Category VIII. Recruiting Department of the Year — DaVita

This final category covers overall excellence by the recruiting department. After judging its application, I can only classify it as a “WOW.” Not only were DaVita’s actions amazing, when you consider that it is a leading kidney dialysis provider and part of the ultraconservative healthcare industry, you can’t help but be blown away. The DaVita story is one that truly demonstrates what focusing on talent can do for an organization.

Just nine years ago, DaVita was on the verge of bankruptcy. At that time, its CEO focused on refining the talent in the organization, not just at the leadership level but throughout the enterprise. Despite tough times and hardship, it took aggressive actions that characterize a true “war for talent,” and turned the organization into a wildly successful enterprise. The work of Tony Blake and his team can only be classified as spectacular.

Highlights of DaVita’s accomplishments:

• Business case. The biggest difference between well-supported and underfunded recruiting functions is the ability to quantify in dollars the business impact of talent management. For example, DaVita demonstrated that by cutting vacancy time down from 63 to 45 days, it could save the organization over $5 million in contract labor and overtime costs. It also reduced costs by cutting external recruiting fees by 41%, saving another $3 million. It’s hard not to be a hero when you can demonstrate that you saved the firm over $8 million. Last year alone it filled over 3,200 nursing positions.
• Boldness. Few recruiters can be accurately classified as competitive and bold, but the DaVita team is an exception. The team labels its competitor-recruiting approach as a “targeted strike.” Last year, it executed a targeted strike on a competitor that resulted in 113 experienced clinical hires, $2.8M savings in training costs, and took 7% of its competitor’s workforce. Whether you agree with the approach or not, you have to give them credit for aggressiveness, and accept that its patients will always have access to the best care because little will stand in the way of acquiring top talent.
• Position prioritization. Another difference between great and good recruiting functions is having a formal process for identifying which jobs should get a disproportionate amount of recruiting resources. It realizes that not all jobs have an equal business impact, so it doesn’t recruit the same way with the same amount and quality of recruiting resources.
• Recruiter development. Of the 40 teammates in clinical recruiting roles, eight of them were promoted last year — demonstrating that it is constantly increasing bench strength and growing its our own recruiting talent. In addition, it keeps its requisition loads low. Field recruiters only carry about 25 openings at a time, on average, down from 60 in 2006.
• Vacancy rate. Its excellent recruiting strategy and approach has resulted in an amazingly low 3.8% vacancy rate among the nursing staff.
• Secret shoppers. It is one of only two firms that I have found with the courage to use secret shoppers to go through its recruiting process in order to find errors. The team secret shops its own process twice a year, evaluating the process at competitors at the same time.
• Satisfaction. Few have the courage to measure it, but DaVita measures hiring manager and new-hire satisfaction every quarter. Departmental satisfaction ratings by managers improved from the bottom five to the Top 25 (among 70 departments) within two years.
• Employer referrals. It operates an excellent employee referral program, which demonstrated that referrals have a 200% lower turnover rate than other new hires. It also donates a portion of the referral bonus to a local charity, which increases the number of motivators available to encourage employees to make referrals.
• Awards. DaVita won a Taleo innovation award for its automated survey process.
• Military recruiting. A dedicated military recruiter hired 27 diverse, retired leaders from the armed forces to assume director and manager positions within DaVita.
• Recruiter assessment. The formal process for assessing recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as dismal. In direct contrast, DaVita takes an aggressive approach in assessing and improving its recruiters. It uses a monthly scorecard that actually force-ranks recruiters, a one-in-a-million approach.
• A pipeline approach. It uses a continuous recruiting pipeline approach called “relentless recruiting.” It’s much superior to the “reactive” approach used by most firms.
• Boomerangs. DaVita targets former employees in order to get them to return later in their careers.

Notable features at other companies:

• GE Healthcare. Uses Six Sigma methodology to “model” its recruiting processes and identify breaking points; leveraged technology to automate sourcing (i.e., stored boolean strings); and conducts weekly process audits.
• Microsoft. In addition to the other things highlighted already, it is developing a sophisticated workforce-planning model.
• Seagate Technology. The company significantly shortened onboarding from three days to 2.5 hours. In addition, the team now measures quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

The award recipients highlighted in this article have clearly pushed the envelope in recruiting and talent management. Despite tough economic times, they have focused on the “big 6″ elements of strategic recruiting (technology-centered, a dollar-focused business case, an emphasis on referrals, prioritized recruiting, a focus on employer branding, and a continuous pipeline approach).

If you’re still focusing on transactions and cutting costs, you are way behind the curve. It is highly unlikely you will be adequately prepared to “explode out of the box” when the current economic downturn subsides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The applications this year were so powerful that choosing a winner in several categories was a challenge. This article will primarily highlight the practices of those organizations that won, but I simply can’t resist sharing some of the practices of other companies.

Category I: Most Innovative Employee Referral Program — Accenture

While employee referral programs have always been a top source for high-quality hires, during economic downturns, they can be adapted to become the most effective low-cost/high-quality source. Accenture’s latest employee referral program is unique because it began life as a pilot program in The Netherlands. Based on the program’s results, it now serves as a model for future rollouts around the globe. The new program radically simplifies the program’s terms and conditions and dedicates resources to marketing the program internally on a regular basis.

Since inception, just a year ago, the program has grown the percentage of hires attributed to employee referral from 14% to 32%. Employee awareness of the referral program has jumped from 20% to 99%, an astounding feat (do a quick survey in your organization — you might be surprised how few people know the details of your program and how to make a referral). The quality of referrals also improved significantly, reducing the number of referrals required to generate a hire from seven to five.

Consider some of their program’s highlights:

• Charity component. The critical component in any referral program is getting your employees to make high-quality referrals, not for the direct monetary benefit, but for the opportunity to provide their teammates with the very best coworkers. By allowing the employee to allocate a portion of the referral bonus to charity (i.e., KidsRights and local elementary schools), you have added another altruistic reason for making successful referrals.
• Focused referrals. Its referral application form makes it difficult for employees to make referrals of people they don’t really know. The process requires the individual to explain how they know the individual, that the individual’s skills are exceptional, and that the individual will “fit” within the organization. These types of features can help to limit the number of “casual” referrals that can clog the system.
• Exciting rewards. Employees receive a small reward for a successful referral and €500 is donated to charity. They also offer an opportunity for employees who make successful referrals to participate in a drawing for exciting world trips. In addition, employees also receive €100 whenever one of their referred candidates is invited in for an interview. Obviously, any candidate invited for an interview is of sufficient quality to merit at least some reward and recognition.
• Employee scorecard. Employees have their own individual online website that allows them to track the progress of their referred candidates throughout the hiring process (this increases employee involvement and transparency). It also covers the number of referrals and their accumulated bonuses both for themselves and for charity. The scorecard also lists the employee’s personal referral success rate. By allowing the employee to see how well they’re doing in their referrals, relative to others, you can motivate lower-performing employees to increase their referral effectiveness.
• Referrals are flagged. Employee referrals are flagged by the application process so that they can be prioritized and fast-tracked during the hiring process. Under their enhanced program, every referral is acted upon.
• Everyone is eligible. It’s fairly common for referral programs to exclude hiring managers and HR professionals, but this can be a mistake because among all employees, these are some of the most well-connected. Accenture’s program now covers all positions and its expanded eligibility now allows everyone, including managers, HR professionals, and recruiters to participate. Other firms that have adopted this practice simply encourage individuals to donate 100% of their bonus to charity when they see a potential conflict of interest.
• Referral cards. Referral cards can have a major impact on referral program success. Most referral cards are “paper” and are handed out individually. Accenture has taken the practice one step further, allowing employees to send electronic referral cards to people in their network. The e-cards contain a code that allows them to get credit if the individual submits an application.
• Courage. Even though it’s an intangible factor, it’s critical to referral program success. It’s easy for executives to discourage talk about hiring and winning awards during tough economic times, but the managers at Accenture had the courage to continue the development of this important program and to also follow through on the awards process. I salute them for their courage.

Other outstanding referral features from other companies:

• Acumen Solutions. Rather than the traditional passive approach, targeted referral percentage goals are set for each department in order to increase healthy internal competition. They provide a toolkit to educate their employees how to more effectively network. They celebrate referral successes publicly at all major company events.
• Microsoft. Microsoft raises the bar on employee referral related branding with their “Spreadthelove” website. This site allows Microsoft employees to “write up” their own individual story about their career with Microsoft (their story might include pictures, testimonials and video). Employees can then share the web link and “spread the love” with targeted friends, family and potential referrals. Microsoft has increased its process effectiveness by ensuring that every referral is contacted first by an employment specialist, which then introduces them to a recruiter that will manage their experience moving forward.
• Tata Consultancy. Adapted a marketing/CRM model for its referral program (i.e., the company offers a 24×7 referral help desk with a toll-free number). Another component allows newly hired candidates who have not yet joined the firm to refer their former colleagues (in order to capitalize on their “top of mind” knowledge of their networks in their previous organization). They also instituted a “Rapid Hire” process where resumes were collected at referral desks that provide “on the spot” screening followed by preliminary evaluation and instant feedback. They also offer early bird & spot prizes as well as contests between business units to foster a competitive mindset around referrals. The metrics demonstrated (as many other firms have) that referral turnover rates during the first year are significantly lower than traditional experienced hires (2.9% for referral hires versus 8%).
• CACI International. It sends targeted messages to employees for open “hot jobs” and has scaled its incentives and process referrals on a daily basis.

Category II: Best employer brand — Ernst & Young

Coupled with an effective employee referral program, a strong employer branding program can be the second component providing firms with a distinct competitive advantage in recruiting. An employer branding program is an image-building program that emphasizes the “viral” spreading of stories and information about the elements that make your organization a “well-managed” firm.

Some of the key components of the Ernst & Young effort include:

• A targeted branding effort. The most effective organizations try to segment the brand to meet the targeted population. Because Ernst & Young hires a large number of college grads, it has developed an effective employer branding segment that has resulted in them being listed by BusinessWeek as the number one “best place to launch a career” beating out Google and other well-known college recruiting powerhouses.
• Brand pillars. They have four key brand pillars including Learning and development, Workplace flexibility, Inclusive community, and Opportunity. Brand messaging is embedded in every candidate facing communication.
• Web 2.0 channels. Even though they operate in a conservative industry, Ernst & Young has chosen to use the latest technology to engage their primarily Gen Y audience. They use modern electronic tools like video, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They offer “live” question-and-answer exchanges via Facebook where real questions are submitted and then answered online and shared with all. In the experienced hire category, Ernst & Young has been ranked on the Fortune 100 Best Place To Work List for 10 years in a row.

Other notable features of other companies:

• Microsoft. Adopted a micro-segmenting or micro-targeting approach to employee brand messaging. They used extensive market research to identify the appropriate brand messaging by segment and then the optimal brand messaging channels. Both View and “youatMicrosoft.com” enables a targeted storytelling approach to branding that can be targeted at specific population segments, large and small.
• Johnsonville Sausage. Surveyed employees to identify weaknesses in brand messaging, then created task forces to address the gap between the targeted employee experience and the actual employee experience so employees could become true brand ambassadors.

Category III: Best Retention Program/Practices — American Cancer Society

Retention is always a hot issue, but will become “red hot” when an economic turnaround begins and employees begin to think of “getting even” as a result of their treatment during budget cutbacks and layoffs. Most companies don’t even have a director of retention, nor do they offer formal companywide retention efforts, so invariably, there is a lot that can be learned from best practice organizations.

Some of the key features of the American Cancer Society’s retention program that you should consider adopting include:

• Significant results. The most important feature of any retention program is the results that it produces. As a not-for-profit organization, the American Cancer Society is limited in its ability to offer significant pay and benefits to retain workers. However, even under those constraints, this program produced breathtaking results, namely a 2% turnover rate among program participants compared to the organization’s 37% overall turnover rate.
• Business case. Even though they are not-for-profit, they use metrics to make the “business case,” demonstrating the dramatic impact that employee turnover has on organizational objectives. In particular, they showed a direct connection between high staff turnover and the ability to recruit volunteers in local communities. In addition, they put a dollar cost on employee turnover ($11 million per year) so that managers could better see the impact of losing talent.
• Program elements. The program is called the talent opportunity program. It is a three year, three phase development plan for developing early career professionals. It offers a 5-point support system (online community, a local buddy, a local mentor, a local manager, and a career coach). The program has an electronic component that meets virtually via web 2.0 tools including Facebook and Blogger (used to facilitate a weekly book club).

Category IV: Best Diversity Program — Microsoft

Microsoft has adopted a long-term perspective for diversity recruiting. Rather than just meeting recruiting targets and offering scholarships, they have attempted to actually increase the supply of qualified diverse candidates with technical skills.

Some of the best practices include:

• A pipeline approach. The recruiting begins early (high school) and contains elements that continually identify and build relationships with potential recruits. They sponsor DigiGirlz, a technology camp for young women in high school and they hosted an annual minority student day to get students excited about careers at Microsoft.
• Targeted website. They launched an extremely powerful and targeted website, www.youatmicrosoft.com, a micro-branded website offering diverse candidates an inside look at Microsoft from a several different diversity perspectives. This site spotlights the authentic, personal stories of diverse individuals at Microsoft who have forged successful careers in technology.
• Dedicated diversity recruiting team. Their team has full life-cycle recruiting responsibilities with a special emphasis on executive recruitment.
• Identified challenges. They convened a panel of engineering and diversity experts to help identify the problems and challenges involved in building a multicultural workforce.

The award recipients highlighted here deserve to be congratulated, and I thank them for pushing the envelope in recruiting and HR.

It should be obvious from both the attendance and the tone of this year’s Expo that the “war for talent” is still going strong.

The rate of innovation in recruiting is increasing. The one overriding trend is that recruiting is becoming more “business-like.”

Stay tuned for part two of this article, which will cover the four remaining awards:

Category V: the best college recruiting program – Ernst & Young
Category VI: the best corporate “careers” website – Yahoo!
Category VII: the best strategic use of technology – Microsoft
Category VIII: the recruiting department of the year — DaVita

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

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

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

Simplicity in Sourcing

The first of the emerging trends is a turn to simpler and more basic ways to find talent. With a rise in applicants, many organizations are finding it less necessary to deploy search specialists or engage in complex sourcing strategies. They can focus, instead, on building their employment brand, often by using Facebook or some other social networking tool. They are also screening existing candidates better and are more focused on building a talent pool or community that can be tapped into as needed. In addition, many are tapping their own workforce for internal redeployment and for referrals.

All of this has reduced the need for in-depth Internet search and it has also lowered the need to post to job boards. In organizations with proactive recruiting teams, internal placements may reach as high as 15% while over 30% may come from referrals. With another 20% being sourced by third-party recruiters for reasons of confidentially or because the particular job is very specialized, only a small percentage needs to be sourced in other ways. A good social network page linked to an interactive career site can probably close much of that gap, leaving a tiny fraction to Internet search or job boards.

As I wrote in my article last week, a comprehensive talent strategy combined with internal development can reduce recruiting requirements significantly. I see this as a continued and growing trend, which ultimately means organizations will employ fewer recruiters but highly skilled in networking, relationship building, and who deeply understand the business.

Social Networks

We are seeing the power of social networking in recruiting growing faster than any other segment. Candidates are able to substitute their social networking profile for a resume at some organizations. Jobvite, an emerging applicant tracking tool listed by Gartner as one of its “Cool Vendors for Human Capital Software 2009,” allows candidates to link to their LinkedIn profiles. No need for a resume or to fill out anything. Jobvite also provides an organization a button to place on their career site that lets prospective candidates see the people in their network who already work at that organization. This provides candidates with ready-made connections into the organization as well as a source of information.

Social networks will become the ultimate sourcing and screening tools. Recruiters and particularly hiring managers will be able to see a more 3-D version of a person and get a much better sense of their past accomplishments and capabilities. But there are negatives, and many recruiters are concerned about candidate privacy and discrimination. The truth is, discrimination can and does occur in face-to-face conversations, in interviews, and even over the phone because of accents and the way people phrase things. Every new technology and application has to pass through a maturity curve, which is happening rapidly for social networks. Laws will change and policies will adapt to accommodate them.

I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves than they can today. I think that as social networking matures, candidates will find themselves moving from a generic social network like Facebook to more specific ones aimed at an industry segment or a profession, and then perhaps to organizational-specific ones. We will have to wait a while to see what model eventually takes shape, but the roots are growing and resumes, traditional profiles, and static career sites will fade away.

Internal Redeployment

Smart organizations prevent the needless loss of talent by developing barrier-free internal transfer polices, by shifting talent and skills as jobs change, and by operating development and coaching programs to help employees successfully bridge skill and experience gaps.

They are also beginning to practice sustainable talent management — sizing the workforce for sustainability through good and bad times — and filling peak needs with temporary and contract staff. But sustainability is not just about numbers; it is also about having the right skills spread across all employees. This means development is continuous, internal movement common and often, and that a goal is for every employee to be able to function well in three or four different positions.

The natural result of this will be more focus on employee development, the rise of learning portals with relevant information and on-line training classes; the capturing of the knowledge of experienced employees on videos (using storytelling, talking about how projects were completed and barriers overcome, and by sharing technical knowledge that might be useful to those who follow); and connections to coaches and experts willing to answer questions or provide skill training.

We will see that more and more people will stay with a single employer for longer periods of time, as they find it easy to get refreshed and retrained.