HR/Staffing News

Looking for a job as a chef in the Antarctic? Try looking here. Or if you’re a recruiter looking for an experienced vuvuzela sales person, then this South African job site is one place to start.

Talk about global recruiting. In the last couple days, both Indeed and SiumplyHired have announced country-specific (or, in the case of Antarctica, continent-specific) job search sites.

SimplyHired added South Africa and Argentina to its roster. Indeed added 24 countries.

In five years the two job search engines have gone from start-up to grown-up, indexing millions of jobs a year. They’ve built enough of a presence to land themselves among the top 10-most-trafficked career sites.

Indeed’s new sites now give it a presence in a remarkable 53 countries. It offers its listings in 24 different languages, among them Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, and Russian.

SimplyHired, based in Silicon Valley, across the continent from its Connecticut rival, is now in 21 countries, providing its listings in 10 languages that include Chinese, Korean, German, and Spanish.

The two search engines now have a presence in more countries than CareerBuilder and just behind Monster. And Indeed may have the only job board devoted to Antarctica, which is almost certainly more for fun and marketing than anything else.

What’s particularly surprising about the two search engines is that after five years their business model is almost unchanged. Jobs are free to post and free to search. They don’t collect resumes and don’t require registration. You won’t find a single credit card come-on or vocational school ad. (At least, none I’ve ever seen.)

The two search engines survive on revenue from premium listings and  Google AdSense, which might bring in enough in a year to pay for outings like SimplyHired’s staff winery visit.

The fact that both companies have survived, and even grown through this global jobs drought, is evidence of the strength of the appeal of the pay-per-click model. Borrowing from the success of Google’s keyword ad program, the two sites allow employers to set a budget and pay only when a potential candidate clicks into the ad.

They’ve also been particularly clever in how they built networks. Where CareerBuilder and Monster pay for the traffic partnerships they have (the HotJobs acquisition is a traffic play), Indeed and SimplyHired offer tools that enable bloggers, niche sites, and in fact almost anyone, to offer jobs on their site. The publisher customizes the job feed to target jobs to the audience and they get to share in any revenue that is generated through their site.

In the early years, when both sites were scraping listings off other sites, including most of the major job boards, a concern was what would happen if the pay boards decided, as Craigslist did, to cut them off. Today, every job distribution service and most (if not all) ATS vendors send jobs directly to Indeed and SimplyHired.

With their traffic continuing to grow and their global footprint expanding, both sites are regularly included by employers as job posting destinations. It would almost unthinkable for a job board to turn off the feeds to either site. What would be the point? So many employers are sending their jobs directly to the search engines, that it would be a loss only to those who don’t.

What will be interesting to see is how the services evolve. While they’ve resisted collecting resumes up to now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change in the next five years. That they haven’t yet is partly technical and mostly practical. Resumes would have changed the competitive dynamic. Without resumes they are a distribution network. Collecting and selling resumes makes them a direct job board competitor, which might have choked them off at the starting gate.

If you haven’t checked into either site in a while, you might be surprised at the tools and utilities they offer, including integrations with Facebook and LinkedIn. Even if you don’t need to post a job, use the sites for business intelligence. Running searches is a good way to keep up with the local economy and to track what the competition is doing.

I recently had a great conversation with Barry Nixon, Chief Operating Officer of the PreemploymentDirectory.com about the prevalence of infinity screening; the concept of performing background checks on existing employees at scheduled intervals throughout their employment.

While attending the Social Recruiting Summit in Minneapolis back in May, I made specific note of a common sentiment expressed by recruiting representatives of two social recruiting powerhouses – Best Buy and Facebook: They don’t have any trouble attracting people, but they do have a tough time attracting the right people.

Recruiters in attendance scoffed at the thought that these two great companies with fantastic brands would have problems attracting talent.

However, I wasn’t surprised – not in the least. And I’ll tell you why.

Talent Attraction Offers Very Little Control

Talent attraction efforts, social media-based or otherwise, offer a near-total lack of control over precisely who gets attracted.

Having a great corporate brand coupled with a great employer brand will draw strong interest and response, but it doesn’t give you the ability to choose who you attract, whether they come in the form of referrals, ad responses, or resume submissions.

Talent Attraction Efforts are Passive and Non-Selective

Talent attraction is an intrinsically passive and non-selective strategy. Even if you use a state of the art interactive recruiting solution that pushes your content all over the Internet in a highly targeted manner (inasmuch as such efforts are limited to surface-level targeting), you have no control over who actually sees, perceives, or acts upon your content (jobs, tweets, Facebook/YouTube videos, etc.).

That’s right – even if you can be guaranteed to get your content in front of precisely the right people (and you can’t), it doesn’t mean they will actually “see” your content, even if their look directly at it, let alone take action.

Why?

Passive and Non-Job Seekers Don’t “See” Employer / Employment Content

The majority of people – approximately 66% – aren’t really looking for a job, or even thinking about making a change.

People who are not really looking to make a change in their employment tend to not even perceive employment-related content.

If you just bought a vehicle, or perhaps if you just like your current vehicle – do you notice car ads? Sure – if you’re into cars. But to someone who isn’t specifically interested in cars, they will not even register a car advertisement, no matter how interesting or compelling. Even if they were to “see” a car advertisement for a vehicle that they found highly appealing – how often do you think they would take a decisive action to buy that specific vehicle if they didn’t actually need a new one?

Changing jobs is a stressful event – supposedly one of the most stressful events that can occur in your life, along with getting married, moving your home, getting divorced, and coping with the death of a loved one.

No matter how compelling the employer branding content/message, as a passive strategy, a recruiter/employer is leaving the decision to act or not to act in the hands of the potential candidate.

If changing jobs is a highly stressful event, even for active job seekers, imagine how difficult is actually is to not only get someone who really isn’t looking to make a change in their employment to #1 actually perceive employer branding/job content, and #2 take specific action on it.

It’s a shame that too few sourcers and recruiters take the time to think about what the world looks like through the eyes of a passive or non-job seeking “A” player.

Don’t Just Set Traps – Go Hunting!

Relying heavily on pushing content and hoping that the right people see it and actually take action upon it will leave you constantly struggling to attract enough of the right people. Companies need to put just as much, if not more energy and effort into taking an active role in seeking out and identifying, contacting, engaging, and recruiting the right people – whether they’re looking for a new job or not.

Searching for people is an active strategy that is a selective process which affords you the ability to precisely control who you find, engage and recruit. Directly messaging and calling the right people who you’ve specifically searched for and identified puts the power of action in the hands of the sourcer/recruiter.

Well over half of the people I’ve recruited were “not looking” when I found them and made contact. Those are hires that would never have happened had I waited for them to notice my content and take action (or not!) or be referred to me.

Final Thoughts

While the “war for talent” would be a whole lot easier if simply placing employer branding content and jobs in front of people via social media and traditional channels would net you large quantities of the right talent, it simply doesn’t work that way, nor will it ever.

It can’t.

Talent attraction strategies and tactics, regardless of the medium utilized, are passive and non-selective strategies and afford no control over who is attracted.

Of course, every employer should post jobs and publish employer branding content via social media to attract talent – it works, especially for people who are actively and casually looking for new employment opportunities.

But if you’re having trouble attracting enough of the right people, don’t just sit back and hope for them to notice and take action in response to your posting or your Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook content, or to be referred to you – take initiative and control and go find and engage them.

Because the majority of the right people won’t come to you, and they’re certainly not seriously thinking of taking action to make a change in employment.

Games, case-study quizzes, and simulations online aren’t new: the Army poured millions into a game, and the not-for-profit MITRE built one, too. But what is new is the venue for at least one game aimed at potential employees: not a corporate career site, but Facebook.

The UK company Reckitt Benckiser has launched, in beta, a Facebook game called poweRBrands, for students who might be interested in its marketing jobs.

Reckitt who?

I thought the same thing, but you know at least some of this company’s products, which include Woolite, Lysol, Clearisil, French’s, and Calgon.

Anyhow, with the poweRBrands game, so far available in English, German, Italian, and Portuguese, players make decisions on such things as what to do if a sickness breaks out, increasing demand for Clearisil while you’re short-staffed. Or, you’re presented with a scenario where the VP of sales is impressed with your work and is looking for ideas for the next annual sales plan; should you approach him on your own, or with the brand manager? (I chose to include the brand manager, but the game told me “this was your chance to go for it on your own, and you blew it.”)

A bit harsh, but this is an impressive game.

Reckitt Benckiser doesn’t do a hard sell for its jobs while you’re playing the game. The game does include, though not terribly prominently, links to the company’s pages: its blog, its careers page, Twitter account, YouTube, and more. Players are often asked to invite a friend to play, an invite which easily allows you to shoot a note to people you’re connected with on Facebook. On a Facebook fan page, developed with the recruitment ad agency Euro RSCG Riley, players can discuss the game, provide feedback, and learn more about the company.

This effort started last Fall, when the Reckitt Benckiser PR and HR departments, as well as the CEO, realized just how little-known the company was, despite the familiarity of the company’s products. Work began on the game in March, and cost in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It got help from a fellow named Drew Spencer, then at Euro RSCG Riley (and who’s now at Blackbridge), as well as the social media agency Nudge to build the game, with UbaGLU helping as a sort of interactive integrator. Among the metrics Reckitt Benckiser will use to measure success of the game will be whether job candidates become more aware of the company.

Reckitt Benckiser is advertising the game through banner ads, videos, and MPUs using Facebook, Adknowledge, LinkedIn, and Techlightenment. Interestingly, the Reckitt Benckiser home page (not its careers page) plays up its jobs far more than most company home pages, which often include a mere link to a careers site.

As a recruiter, how would you describe the culture at Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, or at your own organization? Being able to distill the essence of an organization’s culture into a few well-thought-out adjectives is worth a lot. Sometimes I ask a wide variety of people to come up with a few adjectives that describe a company and then use a tag cloud technology such as Wordle or TagCloud to generate a tag cloud map. This will give you a pretty good idea of how people feel about an organization’s culture.

For example, Apple might be described as perfectionist, controlling, modern, and demanding, while Microsoft might be described as Yuppie, Gen X, brash, or arrogant. IBM as stuffy, old school, traditional.

Customers form opinions about an organization from its brand image, its presentation and packaging of products and services, but most of all from their contact with employees.

We often call the collective personality of an organization its organizational culture.

Many recruiters recognize the value of understanding the organizational culture and finding people who are good fits for it. However, until the specific traits that make up this culture are articulated clearly, it is very hard to know who the right people are.

Taking the time to define and understand the talent philosophy of your organization will enhance your success and improve the productivity and retention of the people you hire.

While you and hiring managers may instinctively tend to hire people who act or think in ways that are compatible with your organization’s culture, we often make mistakes and even misjudge what the culture really demands. And hiring managers often hire people who reflect their own style rather than that of the organization. We all know how disruptive it can be to hire someone whose personal style is at odds with that of the rest of the team.

Employee Treatment Reflects Your Philosophy

One of the surest ways to begin defining your talent philosophy is to ask how employees are treated. Many organizations have evolved philosophies that are easy to understand. IBM had a philosophy of hiring young people, usually right after college, and promoting them internally after a rigorous internal development process. They hired for certain traits: people who wanted to have a career, who were eager to learn and continue studying, who were open to new opportunities, who were willing to wait for promotion, and who were going to play by the “rules” of IBM. Whether or not IBM hired deliberately for these traits I do not know, but they were certainly reflected in the kinds of people who stayed and who thrived there.

Other organizations have philosophies that are much more difficult to decipher either because they have not really defined a common philosophy or because they have many sub-cultures within the organization. This is particularly true of newer firms who have not yet had the time to evolve a distinct personality. But, even in these firms it is possible to see some basic traits that are emerging.

What Is Real and What is Wish?

Frequently I work with organizations that have developed a talent philosophy that is attractive to candidates but not reflective or what they really do. It is often more a statement of what they want the philosophy to be rather than what it really is.

It may state how the organization is committed to employee development and internal promotion, yet they almost always hire new people from the outside. Or it may contain statements about work/life balance when in reality everyone works 60 hours a week.

A talent philosophy is very hard to create. It is generally an outcome of who has been hired over time and what those folks, collectively, believe, and how they act. It is very hard to change without the highest level of internal support.

Talent philosophies are complicated things. They are a mix of individual traits and a set of overarching beliefs and practices that usually have evolved over time. They are based on assumptions about how people behave or about what they want from the workplace. For example, it is typical to assume that everyone wants a long-term career when, increasingly, today’s young people want opportunities for advancement and learning and don’t care too much about a career in a single firm. Knowing what your assumptions are is essential for successfully defining your talent philosophy, yet it is very hard for those in an organization to determine those assumptions.

Very often it is necessary to bring in an outside consultant to help, but here are a few questions that you can use to help in the unraveling process. By setting up groups of people, maybe incorporating customers or others from outside the organization to help, and by trying to answer these questions in an unbiased way, you can make a good start at clearly defining what assumptions you are making and what critical traits new employees should have.

Ten Tough Questions to Answer

1. What single characteristic is considered most important by hiring managers in a potential candidate?
2. If there are two equally well-qualified candidates for a job, what determines the final choice?
3. What are the personality styles, traits, and habits of those who get promoted or seem to be the most highly regarded in your organization?
4. If an employee were asked what adjective most accurately described the best employees’ personalities, what word would they choose?
5. If a customer were asked to describe the culture of your organization, what would they say?
6. How do you deal with poor-performing employees?
7. Who is considered the most valuable employee in your organization? What distinctive traits or characteristics does s/he have?
8. How do major decisions get made? Are they made by consensus, a majority viewpoint, or a single person?
9. What do you expect a good employee to have as general career aspirations?
10. What does an employee have to do/demonstrate in order to be considered for a promotion?

A truly honest understanding of your assumptions about people and their careers and a solid analysis of what common traits employees should have will go miles in improving the quality of the candidates you bring to the table.

I believe sourcing for candidates is like fishing.

When people go fishing, they are aware of the fish they can actually see in the water and of course the fish they catch. However, most people who go fishing don’t spend any time wondering about all of the fish in the pond, lake, or ocean they are fishing in that they have access to, but never catch.

Similarly, when most people source for candidates – they are only aware of the candidates they find. They don’t give much thought to all of the great candidates they actually have access to, but fail to find, review, or even recognize as a potential match. 

I recently spoke at a Technology Association of Georgia’s (TAG) Recruiting Society event about this very concept. Below is a modified version of the presentation, edited to make more sense given that you don’t have the benefit of seeing/hearing me address the slides.

Enjoy!

TAG Recruiting Presentation: Hidden Talent View more presentations from Glen Cathey.

“Give me a job, give me security, give me a chance to survive. I’m just a poor soul in the unemployment line. My God I’m hardly alive.”

When Styx first sang that 32 years ago, the Netherlands went to the World Cup finals, Iran was killing 122 protesters, Afghanistan was in turmoil, unemployment was spiking in Cleveland, and a fleeing filmmaker was in the news — by the name of Roman Polanski.

Sound familiar? After decades of sophisticated, expensive corporate campaigns to tell employees about their missions and brands and purposes, old standbys like money and security still top employees’ wish lists.

Here’s what employees value most, according to a new Robert Half study of 1,453 working adults:

(1 is less important, 10 is most important)

Working for a stable company: 8.8

Having a strong sense of job security: 8.8

Work/life balance: 8.7

Working with people I enjoy: 8.6

Working with a manager I can respect and learn from: 8.6

Having a short commute: 7.5

Working with state-of-the-art technology: 7.1

Working for a socially responsible company: 7.1

Having a nice office space: 6.7

Employees were also asked what’s most important when evaluating a job offer (1 less important, 10 more)

Salary: 9.0

Benefits: 8.9

Company stability: 8.9

Opportunities for professional growth/advancement: 8.6

Company location: 8.4

Company leadership: 8.0

Company reputation/brand recognition: 7.8

In-house training programs: 7.2

Job title: 6.7

Diversity of company’s staff: 6.1

Tuition reimbursement: 6.1

Company’s charity/philanthropic efforts: 5.8

We all agree that there is a difference between great recruiters and good recruiters. Many of us agree that great recruiters are great networkers and relationship builders. A trend I am seeing is one where organizations are becoming better at networking at the executive and mid manager levels.

I was cleaning out my office the other day at home and my AIRS manuals from 1999 fell out onto the ground. I stared at the faded covers and then picked them up and flipped through the pages. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then and I thought of all I have done, should have done, failed miserably at, and where I am now as a sourcer and recruiter. Too often, we read about theory in regards to sourcing and recruiting, and I can count on one hand the times that it has been tied to tangible results or someone has said, “You know what? That sucked and really didn’t impact our hiring!”

You won’t get a lot of theory or a deep-thinking kind of article out of me — it’s not who I am. I’m what they call in football “three yards and a cloud of dust.” I slog it out daily and I would say that the success I have had can be attributed to sweat equity and applying what I have learned from 1999 until now.

So what’s on my radar right now? I started at Cobalt last fall after consulting with Wetpaint.com, a UGC (user generated content) startup in Seattle. Cobalt is a 1,000-strong (and then some) digital marketing company focused on the automotive industry at the dealer and OEM level. Our technology stack is Java, J2EE, Oracle Weblogic, and so forth. One of the questions I asked myself coming into Cobalt, and one that was asked of me, was, “how do we attract the top development talent, not only in Seattle, but also beyond that?” Seems like a reasonable ‘ask’ right? Who wouldn’t want (or need) to do that? My question back then was: Why would a top Java developer come to Cobalt? I can source the candidates but why would they return my call or answer my email? So many times we as sourcers are more thrilled with the chase and not the capture. It does an organization a disservice to source qualified, top-tier candidates and be unable to move them forward in the process.

Typically, sourcer apologetics start with, “I just find the talent…” but I tell you as sourcers we have an obligation to the company brand to market the company we work for. I had, and still have, an obligation to branding Cobalt as a place that Java Developers want to work — a place they should leave Amazon and other local companies to come to. Some things are beyond my control. I think of the power I hold when I can develop a call list/sourcing sheet or a data pipeline/CRM and then share that these people will most likely not return our calls or emails unless we give them a compelling reason. If we can’t articulate the company’s value in a 5- to 10-minute conversation regarding being a developer at Cobalt, then all the sourcing is for naught.

I hope the first thing you do when selecting your next role is to determine the potential of the company, even if it is established. Cobalt, while maybe not the sexiest business around, offered me an underrated hipness factor and platform to grow into something special. Cobalt operates like a startup with the stability of a 15-year-old company. It was coming out of some rough years and working to repair a reputation in a damaged industry. It’s a great place to work; it made the right changes and additions. But how would Java developers know all this? How would they become aware of what had happened? Cobalt is on Inc.’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list and just came in second in the larger company category in Seattle Business magazine’s Best Companies to Work for competition. And we are profitable. That’s a compelling story.

We as sourcers, whether we realize it or not, are involved in branding the company. I’m sure most of us have been a part of developing email templates or the intro or closing pieces of job descriptions. I know a lot of my colleagues at one time or another offered, as part of their training, email templates that get responses. Or maybe you have been a part of developing cold-calling scripts. These are all examples of sourcers impacting a company’s brand perception.

What we did at Cobalt was first to overhaul the social media activities for our staffing efforts. I firmly believe social media is a sourcing tool. I kept it simple and focused on our YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter involvement and tied YouTube and Twitter back into Facebook. We overhauled our company page on LinkedIn as well. I recommend finding a strategic creative media resource to back you up, and I’m lucky to have one myself. Together we’ve crafted great videos where we tried to avoid the cliché. We didn’t want to be the Google knock-off; we really wanted to convey what it is like to work here as a developer. Rich’s knowledge (Rich Stoehr, HR community manager, is the go-to guy for all things “media” for HR/recruiting) knocked it out of the park on capturing that. We worked on adding compelling but fun content to our “Cobalt Talent” Facebook page as well. We started off with a Cobalt car theme and posted a picture of my slick ride, a Subaru Forester with 170,000 miles on it. Cobalt employees were so inspired they posted pictures of their rides. We post pictures of Cobalt parties and feature Cobalt employees who do exciting things both in and out of work. This helped us grow our Facebook page to where it is today at over 300 people. Of course we want more and are working on the next phase to push that number higher.

Additionally, we developed an advertising campaign on Facebook targeting specific companies which contain talent we’re interested in. The search targeted people between the ages of 20 to 50 who graduated from college and who are not connected to Cobalt. We ended up targeting 34,400 potential candidates. The next step is to upgrade the ad copy and the branding. We will also look at increasing the spend on advertising.

Once we started to grow our social media presence, we needed to find a way to take advantage of our employee base and their social networks. I brought in Jobvite as way to do that and for us to create a talent pipeline using its CRM solution. Jobvite empowers us to touch not only first connections of the engineers at Cobalt, but also to go beyond that to third and fourth tiers and beyond. We also brand Cobalt in the Jobvites we send by crafting a compelling message. Using Jobvite also shows that we are a company embracing and using technology.

Finally, we had to get out there with the people we want to hire. We identified two engineers to take with us to the TheServerSide Java Symposium, which was held March 17-19, 2010 in Las Vegas. We had one of our advisory engineers craft the first Cobalt technical White Paper and had the other developer deliver a short, effective presentation to the conference on Cobalt and our technology. We had a table set up and were handing out everything from water bottles to pens and had the developers answering questions about Cobalt. We gathered over 100 Java developer contacts as well, all of whom we added to Jobvite to work on an ongoing basis. We are now preparing for the JavaOne conference in the fall in San Francisco.

As sourcers, we are part of how our company connects with the world outside the walls. Whether that’s in our social media, our emails, our phone calls, or face to face, we are part of how others see the company brand. Commit to being involved in the company brand as part of your sourcing activities, and it will pay dividends!

I have read a lot of articles regarding motivating your employees during crisis period. Articles about how to motivate without investing a lot of your budget and without offering financial bonuses. During my school years when I have learnt some psychology, it was said that internal motivation is mo...

By now, everyone knows the LeBron James has decided to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. As a lifelong Cavs’ fan, I am stunned, disappointed and even a bit angry.

Sourcers and recruiters are often tasked with finding candidates that have experience in a specific industry. I’m sure that such a thing seems easy to the hiring managers and clients making the request, but it’s actually not an easily accomplished feat to perform exhaustively.

Sure, finding some people who work in a specific industry is easy – simply target one or a few major companies/competitors and you’re off to the races, right?

Not so fast, unless you’re happy only finding some people and you’re not really concerned with finding the best.

Most industries are comprised of many companies, and some have several hundred to over 1000! How can anyone say for sure that if they targeted 10 or fewer companies in an industry that they were exposing themselves to the best talent available?

Some people (and companies) think that the best talent can only come from a short list of companies they’ve identified, which seems both absurd and short-sighted in my opinion. The most talented “game changers” don’t always come from a blue chip Fortune 500 company.

However, even if a sourcer/recruiter wanted to identify people who worked at any one of a large number of companies in a particular industry, they are stuck to only searching for a few companies at a time because most search engines/interfaces have limits to the length of the search string that can be run. This can make for an extremely tedious and laborious search process, which explains why most sourcers and recruiters only search for a handful of companies or make use of built-in industry search functionality.

Industry Search Limitations

One way to search for people who have experience in a specific industry is to use an industry filter/selection, such as LinkedIn’s:

However, a while back I wrote about the intrinsic challenges and limitations of searching for people based on an industry selection which can actually prevent you from finding the people you’re looking for.

A large part of the problem lies in the fact that many people have experience working in more than one industry, yet they can only select one on their LinkedIn profile. The other issue at hand comes from the fact that people can and will identify themselves in any way they want to – which may have nothing to do with the way YOU would identify or label them. 

For example, a marketing professional working for a pharmaceutical company can just as easily think of themselves as working in the “Consumer Goods” or “Marketing and Advertising” industry when making the selection on their LinkedIn profile rather than “Pharmaceuticals.”

Of course this challenge isn’t limited to LinkedIn or social media in general – this phenomenon also occurs in job board resume databases and corporate ATS/CRM systems with similar functionality.

Is There a Better Way to Search for Industry-Specific Experience?

Let’s say you are in need of finding people with SAP experience who have worked in the Food Production industry. If this were something you were asked to do on a regular basis, you’d probably have a list of companies that you typically target for these folks. However, even if you didn’t you can easily create one.

Using LinkedIn’s company search functionality, you can browse for your industry and make appropriate selections amongst the various search options to end up with a list of companies that fit your criteria.

In the example, I refined the search down to 116 companies. Most sourcers and recruiters only search for a handful of companies at a time (or at all), typically due to the limitations of most search interfaces/engines.

However, because a basic LinkedIn account has for all intents and purposes “bottomless” search fields, we can take those 116 companies and, through some creative use of Excel, Word and find and replace, create a 350 word OR statement that we can put in the Company field:

Try doing that with a job board database, an Internet search engine, or your ATS/CRM.

If you take a look at all of the industries in the search results, you’ll see that most of the people who have worked for one of the 116 Food Production companies we searched for did not choose “Food Production” – only about 18% of the results from the top 10 industries represented in the results come from “Food Production” (572 out of 3,181).

If someone was searching for people who mention SAP on their LinkedIn profile and who selected the Food Production industry, they would only be finding a small fraction of the total available and relevant results!

Thank You LinkedIn!

The ability to search for large volumes of companies in a particular industry (I’ve had no issues with 300+!) gives you a more exhaustive and complete method of identifying potential talent with specific industry experience, regardless of which industry the potential candidates selected when creating/updating their profile. 

Of course, when crafting company searches, you’ll have to keep in mind that there are often many ways that people will write company names – you can only find exactly what you search for in most cases.

Happy hunting!

We’re always on the lookout for great new technologies in the HR space and while we typically focus on those dealing with employment screening, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn more about GreenJobInterview.com.

How much should we let chance and circumstances define who we hire, rather than continue to invest time in tough screening and many interviews?

In the simplest terms, should (and maybe even does?) randomness play a large role in selection? Is it better to have a loose, easy-in and easy-out hiring practice than a much tighter and thorough upfront screening process?

Many of us have read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell where he postulates that chance and “gut feel” may play a bigger role in our decision-making than we imagine. Another book, older and more rigorously researched, entitled Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb also takes a similar position.

It may be that candidates who meet certain basic criteria for a job are potentially able to perform that job equally well and, once those basic skills are determined, the only remaining need is to determine how well the candidate fits in with the hiring manager and, to a lesser degree, with the organization.

What would happen if an organization made a lot of hires quickly and then let on-the-job performance determine who should be kept and who should not?

When I think back much of the 20th century, recruiting was fairly straightforward. Most jobs were filled quickly from a large pool. The demand for credentials and specific experience were closely correlated with the type of work, and it was not hard to see why a specific skill or experience level was needed. Most jobs were filled after a brief interview with a hiring manager, who made his decision based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics. Most jobs could be learned quickly, and it was quite easy to see whether a job was being done well or not. It was easy to get rid of poor performers and plenty got fired right away. However, a lot didn’t.

There were many things wrong with this approach, but the most obvious was that it blatantly discriminated against anyone who did not fit the stereotype of the hiring manager. Greater awareness of discrimination and new legislation drove the growth of the recruiting profession and removed much of the potential injustice this system perpetuated.

But the recruiting practices had one virtue — they were simple and were built on a belief that attitude and performance were what really counted. Many engineers, doctors, and lawyers were trained in what amounts to an apprentice system right up until World War II. Formal skills training only gradually gained acceptance after the war, when thousands of GIs went back to school on the GI bill.

As we moved into the 1950s and 1960s, these more casual hiring practices were replaced by the development of job requirements: things like minimum levels of education or years of experience before a person would be considered for a position. This was seen as fairer and served as a screen against hundreds of people potentially applying for the same job.

The problem with this approach is that it is very hard to see how the defined requirements connect to actual performance. There was a presumption of fairness because the new requirements eliminated or reduced the ability to screen people out arbitrarily because of race or sex. However, we have learned over the past 40 years that people who qualify for jobs based on their education or experience alone are not necessarily good performers.

We now know that simply selecting people by generic measures like education and experience don’t work very well and discriminate against those with the real skills who do not have the required credentials. How many good performers are being denied jobs today because they lack a college degree, for example?

In a world with high unemployment and yet with a need for skilled talent, managers and recruiters are confused as to what is essential in a candidate. Is it better to go with a person who lacks a specific credential or skill, but has the right attitude? Is it best to have broad-based recruiting criteria or more and more specific ones?

So, what will we do?

Three rules seem to be forming around defining new positions as well as for redefining the more traditional ones.

Rule #1: Keep criteria simple

How much do you want to invest in perfection? Define a basic level of competence that most positions require, add on whatever minimum specific skills, experience, or education are really necessary to perform the job, and then decide based on attitude or cultural fit.

Design screening processes to be simple and flexible. Listen to your gut.

Rule #2: Be competency-flexible and teach hiring managers that development is part of recruiting.

Managers will be forced to accept that they will not be able to find candidates with 100% of what they want. Managers and HR will learn that development is a core function of the firm in the 21st century. IBM put in place a development-centered in the 1960s when they began hiring and developing new college grads because there were no people with the skills they needed. Remember there were no programmers when the first mainframes were produced, and so IBM had to develop them. Many companies have used development as a strategic edge; when you have people with skills and others don’t, you tend to win. Finding and developing current employees who have some, but perhaps not all, of the skills needed for a job will also become more common.

Rule #3: Have robust performance management systems in place.

By hiring people using broad competency descriptions, as I am advocating, you may hire some poor performers. And that’s okay. What is not okay is ignoring that and allowing them to stay in your organization. A good performance management system, based on whether people achieve realistic goals and meet the requirements of their position, is essential to success.

The hallmark of the best 21st-century organizations will be their approach to defining the people they need. Traditional measures of education, experience, attitude, and cultural fit may play a small part, but what will be significantly different is a quick, flexible approach to defining competencies combined with efficient performance management systems. This will result in more fluid and less well-defined jobs, but broader and more multi-skilled employees.

Hire My Friend to Work For Us.

Sorry if that sounds like a weird request, but I just couldn’t resist the verbal mashup of two, sort of new Facebook apps.

The apps address employment from opposite sides, and in that sense, they are sides of the same coin. Hire My Friend helps your Facebook friends spread the word about their job hunt. Work For Us lets employers post their jobs to their Facebook pages.

Now if only there was an app that matched the Work For Us jobs to the friends who want to be hired. Oh wait. There is. Jobvite Source does that for jobs, matching the opportunity to employees and friends and tracking these posts (Jobvites) as they get passed along.

Work For Us is different only in that it doesn’t do any matching or tracking. What it does, and does very well, is to post job openings to a company Facebook page, producing a job list that bears a striking resemblance to a bland job board post.

For that you’ll pay $9 a month for five job posts or a few hundred a month for unlimited posts. There’s a free version that lets you post one job at a time.

TechCrunch, which wrote about this last week, says the Work4Labs, the startup that built the app, has already got 2,000 companies to download the app.

It works this way: You sign-up either as the friend in need or the friend who helps out. Answer a few questions about the job seeker to create a mini-profile, provide a LinkedIn address, and connect it up to your Facebook page (or ask your friend to do so). It creates a status post that notifies your network.

It’s a clever idea, though it will be interesting to see if it gains much traction. I’m thinking there might one or two good friends for whom I might do this, but I sure wouldn’t want my Facebook wall to become a repository of job hunt requests. Of course, if other people take the same kind of care, then Hire My Friend as well as my friend in need benefit from this self-screening. In that way, it’s got the same sort of quality assurance going for it as a traditional employee referral program.

The stock market is worried. The Conference Board says a rise in its Employment Trends Index is a sign of loss of optimism. The CareerBuilder / USA Today survey says 41 percent of employers plan to hire in the coming months, which means 59 percent don’t.

Welcome to the second half of 2010.

From all indications, it promises to be just like the first half; uncertain recovery, tentative signs of a hiring pick-up; teases that job growth is accelerating.

Today’s Conference Board announcement was in line with the pattern set in the first half of the year. The Employment Trends Index rose .6, from 96.1 in May to 96.7 in June. It’s up almost 10 percent in a year.

Alas, the last two months have seen the ETI decelerate its rate of improvement, leading The Conference Board to suspect it means “that many employers are now concerned that the recovery is losing momentum.”

The Employment Trends Index is a sort of index of indices. It takes into account eight employment factors, including unemployment claims, job growth numbers from the Labor Department, and other data points. One of the latter is the response to a question about how hard jobs are to find from The Conference Board’s own Consumer Confidence Survey.

The number of consumers saying jobs were hard to find increased — one of the factors in the slowing of the ETI.

Whether that is objectively true doesn’t matter, since consumer confidence is a matter of perception. And perception is reality. Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggests that perception has enough of a grounding in reality that it lowered the unemployment rate to 9.5 percent.

That should be good news, but the BLS numbers suggest it was caused by the hundreds of thousands of Americans who simply gave up looking for work. Even the news that 83,000 private sector jobs were created in June was offset by the loss of  200,000+ temporary census jobs.

In case you left early for the long weekend, the stock markets reacted predictably to the news, closing out a losing week in which it lost 4.5 percent.

After a weekend of rest, traders returned to work this morning ready for some bargain shopping. Within minutes of the opening, the Dow was up, rising 172 points before sliding back. The day at least ended on a positive note, up about 57 points.

I would say it has been like this since the beginning of the year, but the reality is that the stock market, which hit a high of 11,205 in April, is off 13.6 percent since.

For recruiters, especially corporate recruiters, a declining stock market makes it more likely that even the tepid hiring that has been underway may become even slower.

The CareerBuilder / USA Today survey of 2,500 hiring managers and HR professionals says hiring in the second half of the year will mirror the first. It will be slow, but jobs will be added. Twenty-one percent of employers plan on hiring permanent, full-time employees in the current quarter. However, 65 percent expect no change in the quarter.

“Employers began recruiting at a moderate but consistent pace in the first half of 2010 as confidence levels inched upward amidst a better global financial picture,” said Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder. “The economic recovery has broadened, but employers remain guarded.  The survey indicates that we’ll see sustainable new job growth through the remainder of the year, but it will be absent of any dramatic shifts.”

Our first podcast was with Bernie Dyme, President and CEO of Perspective’s Ltd. You might recall that Bernie was one of our expert panelists on the webinar we conducted earlier this year on workplace violence.

I feel a moral obligation to weigh in on “social recruiting” again.

I’m not trying to be a buzzkill – but with the continuing swell of momentum and hype that social recruiting is building up, someone has to play the devil’s advocate, refuse to become a victim of BSO (Bright Shiny Object) syndrome, and jump off of the bandwagon to be the voice of objective reason amidst the din of social recruiting cheerleading.

From the many blog posts I am seeing on the subject to the webinars I see popping up frequently, it’s clear that many people see social recruiting as a branding and/or money making opportunity for them.

On the flip side of the coin, there are many people who seem ready to view social recruiting as “the next big thing” and are eager to absorb (and pay for) the message that if you’re not performing “social recruiting” you’re behind the curve, you’ll be left behind, your competitors will laugh at your antiquated recruiting methods, and you’ll never make another hire.

Okay, maybe I’m getting a little dramatic with the last part(s).

But you get the point.

While social media/networking has undeniably added a new dimension to recruiting, it’s important to know that the emergence and evolution of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other sites have not changed many fundamental aspects of recruiting.

First, You Should Know That…

I use social media – I blog, use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and I’ve made and facilitated hires using them. I train recruiters on how to successfully recruit using every tool and resource available to them – including social media. I work with many recruiters who regularly use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to identify, engage, and recruit candidates – and yes…get results. One recruiter recently made 3 placements in a month using Facebook. 

So I am no stranger to “social recruiting.” I just don’t like to call it that.

What Social Networks HAVE Changed In Recruiting

Access and Engagement

It’s never been easier in the history of recruiting to find and communicate with potential candidates and we’ve never had such easy access to them. The “Big 3″ social networks afford recruiters with unfettered access to 10’s to 100’s of millions of people that they can find, communicate with, engage, and build relationships with. 

For free. That’s a BIG deal.

Listening

Social media allows recruiters the unprecedented ability to listen to/observe their target talent pool prior to making contact or engaging them.

Marketing

While social networks give companies fantastic new opportunities and mediums for employer branding – that’s social media marketing - NOT social recruiting, as far as I am concerned. Although marketing and recruiting often go hand in hand, they are two very separate and distinct concepts.

Talent Communities

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other online social networks can easily and effectively be used to create and/or tap into talent communities of like-skilled/minded professionals.

However, one could easily argue that this isn’t a new concept at all (let’s not forget about BBS’s) – but social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others definitely put a sexier spin on it along with more functionality. 

What Social Networks Have NOT Changed In Recruiting

Job Posting

Yes – you have many options for posting jobs today aside from the job boards (which are supposed to be dying or dead, just as job boards were supposed to have killed recruiting agencies and executive search 10+ years ago).

You can post jobs on Facebook (manually, through services, and apps), on LinkedIn (paid or free in groups and status updates), and Twitter (manually, automatically through feeds, and through services).

So who cares?

Yes – you should be posting your jobs wherever they can be potentially seen by your target talent population.

However, posting jobs is posting jobs, regardless of where or how they are posted.

As I have written before, posting jobs is a passive and reactive talent acquisition strategy, affords no control over candidate qualifications, attracts active and casual job seekers only (the minority of all people), and is ineffective at snagging passive and non-job seekers.

Plus, posting jobs to social networks via social media is not ”social recruiting,” it’s social job posting.

Would you even say that job posting is really “recruiting” anyway?

Engagement

While social media and social networks do give recruiters a new medium through which they can engage and interact with potential candidates, communicating electronically/digitally is not revolutionary and is definitely not limited to social networks. 

Is an InMail, Twitter DM, or Facebook message any more “social” and engaging than an email? And where do most of those social media messages end up? In the person’s email inbox.

Which would you say is more engaging – a Twitter conversation, or a phone conversation?

You Still Have to Talk to People

Social media gives recruiters and employers one more medium through which they can interact with potential candidates. However, social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are neither replacements nor prerequisites for telephonic or in-person communication.

Just because you can, is it really necessary to use a social network to message or interact with a potential candidate before speaking with them over the phone?

Social

Recruiting has always been social – social networks did NOT put the “social” into recruiting.

Which is more “social” – having an exchange via Facebook/LinkedIn group or Twitter chat, or talking to someone on the phone or in person?

Talent Identification

While LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking/media sites afford sourcers, recruiters and employers with unprecedented access to millions of potential candidates, some sites aren’t very searchable and most social profiles are very shallow sources of professional information.

Facebook is well-nigh unsearchable, for all practical intents and purposes (at least for anything more specific than a keyword or phrase), and very few people list employers, titles, and other information that would give you any sense of what a person does, how much experience they have, and what they are capable of doing.

Twitter has 160 character bios where some people will give away clues as to what they do professionally, but many don’t. Also, a great many people simply don’t tweet about what they do for a living. 

Categorized as the most “professional” social network, while some LinkedIn profiles are fleshed out nearly as well as a typical resume, most contain employers and titles and little-to-nothing else. While that level of information can certainly be used for some degree of talent identification, it’s not as effective, efficient, nor as accurate as using deeper sources of data such as resumes (like the ones in your ATS/CRM – you know, the ones from people who at some point expressed interest in your company?).

While social networks have given recruiters unprecedented access to more people than ever in the history of recruitment – simply having access does not grant the ability to find and identify the right (and best!) people easily, quickly, or at all. If anything, having more access to more potential candidates only stresses the importance of good search skills.

Point to ponder – just because a recruiter uses a social network to find a potential candidate, does that mean they are performing “social recruiting?” For example, if you search LinkedIn, find a potential candidate, join a group they are in and send them a message – is that any more “social recruiting” than searching your ATS/CRM or an online resume database and emailing the candidate? 

What if you find someone on LinkedIn and you research the main number for the company listed as their current employer and give them a call – is that any more “social recruiting” than searching your ATS/CRM or an online resume database and calling a candidate?

Is one of those methods more effective than the other?

Final Thoughts

Social media and social networks that enable and facilitate social interaction have unquestionably given recruiters unprecedented access to and the ability communicate with large populations of potential candidates where they live online, but social media is no more “social” than attending a user group/networking event or simply picking up the phone and speaking with a potential candidate.

The “human element” of recruiting – effectively communicating and building relationships with candidates, understanding candidate motivators, consultative selling, etc. – none of these have been changed or altered by the emergence of social media.

I fear that “Social Recruiting” has become it’s own box that recruiters and employers need to think outside of.

Hasn’t recruiting always been social?

Do you really need to use Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to be a “social recruiter?”

I say that recruiting is recruiting – by any means available, applicable, and necessary, no matter how it is accomplished (ethically, professionally, and respectably – of course) or through which tool/medium. I don’t see how anything is gained by slapping another label on it.

The suggestion has been made that recruiters or employers simply need to check one of the many business connection sites to verify candidates’ qualifications. That sounds very much like the way mortgages were handed out before the economic meltdown. Haven’t we learned from the recent past that “self stated” information is not always the best means for decision making?

The U.S. economy added 83,000 private sector jobs in June, on the low end of what economists had been expecting, but evidence, nonetheless, that payrolls are continuing to grow.

The news was tempered by the loss of 225,000 temporary census jobs, and continuing cuts to state and local government payrolls, which resulted in a net loss of 125,000 jobs in June.

Even the decline in the unemployment rate to 9.5 percent from May’s 9.7 percent was tempered. Ordinarily good news, much of the reason for the decline appears to come from the fact that some of the unemployed had simply given up looking for work. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released the June employment report this morning, counts only people actively seeking in the previous four weeks as being unemployed.

Against the context of other economic news, including Thursday’s higher-than-expected numbers for first time unemployment claims, the BLS report shows an economy struggling to gain traction.

Since the beginning of the year, the private sector has added almost 600,000 jobs. To reduce the national unemployment rate by any significant amount, economists say 150,000 jobs a month will need to be created. That pace of hiring hasn’t been seen since the fall of 2007.

Still, there were indications that even though employers weren’t willing to commit, they continued to date, hiring another 21,000 temporary workers. It’s a sign that business is improving, at least enough to bring in additional workers.

On the other hand, the workweek decreased slightly for all private, non-farm workers by .1 hours to 34.1 hours. The manufacturing workweek declined by .5 hours to 40 hours even. It had risen in May by .4 hours.  Hourly pay for private non-farm workers decreased by two cents to $22.53. It had been rising in all but one of the last 12 months.

The Dow Jones and other stock market indices seemed to have expected the news. Prices were flat to slightly up in the first minutes after trading began this morning.