Jobs Numbers Improve, Even As Unemployment Rate Edges Up

The unemployment rate rose for the first time in four months in August, while private sector employers added 67,000 jobs. Overall, the U.S. economy lost 54,000 non-farm jobs during the month, almost all of it attributable to the continuing layoff of temporary census workers.

The numbers released by the U.S. Labor Department this morning continue a pattern seen for months. The unemployment rate has moved in a range from 9.7 percent in January to the 9.5 percent it has been at since June. The private sector, meanwhile, has been steadily, if slowly adding jobs.  Government, is cutting workers.

So while the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report is essentially more of the same, Wall Street is reacting positively. Stocks opened strong with the Dow zooming 100 points in the early trading. Investors appear to be looking at the half-full side of the glass.

Economists were expecting a gloomier report. Estimates varied, as they do each month, depending on what analysts and economists are surveyed; however, the job loss was anticipated to be north of 100,000.

One particularly positive sign is that the private sector number was about twice what was forecast. Following Thursday’s report of fewer new claims for unemployment benefits, the second consecutive drop after weeks of gains, the improvement is at least that, an improvement.

Additionally, the BLS revised the June and July numbers downward. They now show the economy lost 175,000 jobs rather than 221,000 in June (due almost entirely to the census layoffs) and 54,000 in July, instead of the previously reported 131,000.

Private sector numbers also improved. Rather than the 71,000 initially reported for July,  107,000 jobs were added. And in June, the private sector added 61,000 jobs, versus the initial 31,000.

One reason for August’s increase in the unemployment rate is the increase in people looking for work. The participation rate rose one-tenth of a percent to 64.7 percent. In August 2009 it was 65.4 percent. Workers who had quit looking for a job, and are therefore not counted as being in the labor force, are returning. The rate of increase is slow, but edging up.

Translating the percentages into numbers, the BLS said there were 14.86 million unemployed people in August. In July the number was 14.59 million. Unemployment numbers, however, tell only part of the story. In addition to those out of work, another 8.9 million in August — an increase of 331,000 over July — were working part-time because they had no other option. Another 2.4 million workers are considered marginally attached to the work force. They didn’t look for work during the four weeks preceding the BLS survey period, but they wanted a job and had job hunted during the previous 12 months.

Add up those numbers and they show the depth and breadth of the recession.

RecruitingBlogs Founder in New Venture

The company behind recruiter blogging site RecruitingBlogs.com has joined forces with the owner of Recruiter.com to launch a new company and eventually turn the long-dormant site into a multi-featured portal.

The announcement was made today via press release and — appropriately — blog posts.

Jason Davis, the founder of RecruitingBlogs, has also relinquished his CEO title, promoting Miles Jennings to the job, while taking the job of EVP of Strategic Development. Ashley Saddul, a domain name trader who owned the Recruiter.com name, joins the new company as CTO.

“This is a big move,” Davis told me in a conversation this afternoon. “We’re going to be building out a network. Everything is going to be tied together under Recruiter.com.”

Work is already afoot on pulling together elements from the flagship RecruitingBlogs site, as well as from other sites owned by Davis. Among these are RecruitingTools.com, PunkRockHR.com, Hashlove.com, StartupJobs.com, and DirectorJobs.com. Davis, who lives in Toronto, previously owned a search firm there.

Besides developing Recruiter.com into a portal for the various sites, Davis and his associates plan to also build out HR.net, yet another site he owns. Right now, the site has only a splash page describing its future this way: “we will cover topics and best practices in HR technology, emerging trends in workforce management, personal development, and career management.”

Davis told me that HR.net (not to be confused with the membership site HR.com) is where the heavy lifting is right now. “Behind the scenes we are building HR.net. We’ve been talking to writers, lining up people for content,” he says. First out, though, will be a newsletter.

Plans, of course, are just that. However, Davis has a successful track record. He built Recruiting.com into a recruiter blogging aggregation site before selling it to Jobster in 2006. Later, he launched RecruitingBlogs. He also hinted that something would be out soon, saying the new company, Recruiter.com, LLC, would be making an announcement in “two or three weeks.”

“There’s a lot of exciting things going on.”

So why would Davis surrender the CEO job at just this point?

“It just comes from knowing my strengths,” says Davis, who is proudly, if ironically, nicknamed Slouch. “Miles (the new CEO) is excellent at getting things done. He has that skill to keep focused and grow it, to build it.”

“I’ve taken it (the RecruitingBlogs network) as far as I can with me as the head of it all,” Davis add.  ”I’m moving into a position where I can think.”

“I can work through the ideas and the pieces,” he adds, “and make introductions.”

For Recruiting, the Use of the Cloud, and the Crowd, Are Growing

It’s not a new phenomenon, but watch for the use of the cloud, and also the crowd, to grow in the coming months as more vendors vie for your cloud/crowd-recruiting business.

Hajo Engelke is trying it out. Engelke has started up an unusual company in Durham, North Carolina. It’s a website where you build your own cereal, clicking on cranberries, dried apples, pears, pineapples, and so on, add them to either granola or corn flakes, and voila, place your order.

A novel idea for a company, originating out of UNC’s business school, but you haven’t heard of it until now. So Engelke’s looking for someone to market it using a viral campaign. This weekend he plans on posting the project on a website called 31Projects. With that site, top, pre-screened students will have about three to five weeks to submit their suggestions for the build-your-own-cereal campaign, and Engelke will pick a winner. He’ll pay the winner in the neighborhood of $25/hour for implementing the campaign, and if all goes well, may end up hiring them.

Engelke heard about 31Projects through the Triangle area of North Carolina, where he says “everybody knows everybody through one or two connections.” 31Projects will launch next week. It has several hundred MBA and grad students signed up in its network, and has tested it with employers, including a non-profit research institute. Later, it hopes to expand, using undergraduate students as well.

Getting people who don’t work for you, or who at least don’t yet work for you, to do work, isn’t new. Raghav Singh mentioned in an email that “Brassring was doing something like this back in 2000,” using a big virtual network of people to clean up resumes.

But getting the masses to help you out is getting easier.

Another company in this genre, called CloudCrowd, is getting lots of press. It calls what it does “labor as a service,” touting its ability to “break large client projects into discrete tasks, and distribute them through Facebook to its workers.” It did a project for AlumWire where workers went through thousands of digital resumes to capture names, phone numbers, email addresses, employers, and education. CloudCrowd built an interface for the workers to highlight certain information in the resumes, which caused that information to automatically populate the proper field. About 35,000 workers have registered on CloudCrowd’s site.

Navigating the Fast-moving Credit-check Laws

In the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I take a four-part look at credit checks in the employment process. I outline the current federal limitations on an employers’ ability to obtain and use information regarding an applicant’s or employee’s credit history. I delineate the current proposed amendments to federal statutes. I look at recently enacted state legislation bearing on an employer’s use of credit reports. Finally, I suggest possible options for employers in dealing with this fast-changing legal landscape.

For these purposes online, I’m just going to tackle the fourth part — your options for handling federal and state legislation in flux.

Well, not just in flux but, it appears that both state and federal law is trending toward less access to consumer reports. Taking these changes into account, what can employers do to minimize their liability while still gaining access to credit information regarding current or prospective employees when necessary? The answer most likely involves the state and federal statutory definitions of “consumer reports” and “consumer reporting agency.”

The proposed federal changes, as well as proposed Oregon and Washington statutes, are only triggered when an employer obtains a report from a consumer reporting agency, generally defined as an entity that compiles consumer credit or other background information and provides consumer reports to third parties. If the employer itself obtains information regarding an individual’s credit history, these statutes are not triggered.

Although not as detailed as the information that a consumer reporting agency provides, an employer could still search for and obtain public court records for judgments entered against an individual.

While not as comprehensive, if not downright clunky, this is information that could provide similar information to a credit report. It would show, for example, whether any judgments have been entered against the individual for outstanding debts. An individual with a poor credit history may very likely have judgments against them in favor of one or more creditors. To the extent an individual’s failure to pay his or her debts is important to the employer, taking the time to search for judgments against a particular individual may provide the necessary information without running afoul of credit-check regulations.

Employers conducting their own searches must be careful, however, of the restrictions of the Bankruptcy Code, which prohibit an employer from terminating or otherwise discriminating against an employee solely on the basis of a bankruptcy filing. For this reason, employers seeking to avoid the pitfalls of the proposed FCRA amendments and state statutes restricting the use of credit information with respect to certain positions should also avoid making any decision based on public bankruptcy filings. It is worth noting, however, that a recent case from the Western District of Pennsylvania held that the Bankruptcy Code’s discrimination provision does not apply to decisions made regarding prospective, not current, employees.

Start planning for your Summer 2011 Internship Now

Even though summer 2010 is coming to an ending,  it's never to early to start planning for next year!

MBA 1st year students : It's never to early to plan for your Summer Internship.
Start looking fall semester to line up that important summer 2011 internship.  Some companies seek commitments from interns months in advance.
In fact, MBACareers.com is featuring an Internship Opportunity with Nestles Purina PetCare - and they are seeking to line up commitments by Decemeber 2010. To see the job opportunity, click here:
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For additional career and employment information as well view & apply to jobs with some of the best employers,  visit MBACareers.com

Wall Street Discounts ADP Job Loss Report

The U.S. lost 10,000 private sector jobs in August, according to the ADP National Employment Report.

Released this morning, the report says the loss came from small and medium sized employers (those with up to 499 employees). Large employers added 1,000 workers.

Adding to the bad news, the report also adjusted the July numbers down. ADP now says the private sector added 37,000 jobs in July, 5,000 less than the preliminary number released early last month.

However, Wall Street much preferred the report from the Institute for Supply Management, which showed a sharp and unexpected rise in manufacturing production.  The purchasing managers’ index rose to 56.3 in August, from 55.5 in July. Economists had expected it to fall to 52.5.

Market traders were buoyed by that improvement, and, according to TheStreet, weren’t overly dismayed by the ADP numbers. At midday, the market was up more than 200 points on the news as well as on a positive report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas that said “planned job cuts announced by employers in August fell to 34,768, the lowest monthly total in over a decade.”

Although the ADP report rarely matches the numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which will be released Friday, it does foreshadow the government’s Labor Situation Summary. The BLS covers all jobs, while the ADP report deals only with the private sector.

For that reason, the best comparison is of the private employer job numbers in both reports. Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires expect — on average — the BLS report will show a gain of 28,000 private sector jobs. With the continuing layoff of Census workers and state and local government job losses, the economy is expected to have shed about 110,000 jobs in August.

The economic doldrums are only highlighted by the job advertising report also issued this morning. The Conference Board’s monthly Help-Wanted Online Data Series says employers posted 57,100 fewer jobs in August than they did the month before.

In a press release announcing the August numbers, The Conference Board notes: “The gap between the number of unemployed and advertised vacancies (supply/demand rate) stood at 3.40 unemployed for every advertised vacancy in July (the last available unemployment data) but is down from its peak of 4.73 in October 2009.”

More Consolidation in the HR Space: Kenexa Deals for Salary.com

HR software maker Kenexa will have a lot to talk about at its annual Kenexa World Conference later this month in Philadelphia.

That’s because Kenexa announced today that it has agreed to acquire compensation specialist Salary.com in an all cash offer for $80 million, or $4.07 per share.

According to a press release from Kenexa, “The agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of both companies, and Salary.com’s board intends to recommend that the Salary.com stockholders tender their shares in the offer.”

Salary.com, based in Massachusetts, makes software that helps businesses and individuals manage pay and performance, and, is very well-known in the HR space. Kenexa says that it expects to close the transaction for Salary.com in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Analyst Kris Tuttle at Seeking Alpha lists three things that “investors may or may not like” about this deal:

The price at just under 2x sales is reasonable. However Salary.com hasn’t grown much in the past two years, thanks in part to the weak employment market. Worse still, the company has done little to control spending and has been losing money at an $18M annual rate.

Due diligence has been limited and Kenexa participated in an auction process, which means that they are likely to discover far more information once the deal closes and there are bound to be some negative surprises.

Current customers of both companies may demand price concessions before any benefits of “cross-selling” can materialize. Most of the management commentary has been focused on opportunity but we know corporate customers are also interested in leveraging consolidation to get better “bundled” pricing.”

Tuttle added: “At the functional level the acquisition makes plenty of sense given that Kenexa has been focused on “talent management” and Salary.com has been in “compensation management” and on-demand HR solutions. Both companies have the same business model which is the classic on-demand/SaaS model we have all grown so accustomed to…. (But) as with most acquisitions, the value is going to be in how Kenexa can aggregate an excellent combined customer set with a rich set of data for better decision making and more efficient businesses processes.”

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan said of the deal, “We believe there is a tremendous opportunity to take Salary.com’s best-in-class compensation management solutions to Kenexa’s customer base, which includes some of the largest corporations in the world. In addition, Salary.com has several thousand customers that provide a fertile opportunity for Kenexa to deliver our suite of software, services and content. We believe Salary.com’s acquisition by Kenexa is a major positive for both of our respective companies, employees, partners, customers and prospects.”

The acquisition of Salary.com by Kenexa is part of an ongoing consolidation in the human resources space. Although it is small potatoes compared to something like the Aon-Hewitt deal earlier this summer, it does show that larger players in the HR space are looking to make deals that help to round out their product offerings so they can offer a wider array of services and software for end-to-end customer solutions.

This doesn’t suggest that the “best of breed” product approach is dead, just that companies like Kenexa see an opportunity to leverage and perhaps up sell their customer base if they can offer a wider variety of software and services across the board.

So, don’t be surprised if you see more of these kinds of deals in the months to come.

(This story was originally published on TLNT.)

Beyond.com Becomes Network Partner

With the acquisition of HotJobs by Monster, Beyond.com now becomes the U.S. affiliate of The Network, a worldwide group of job boards that distributes employer ads globally.

Beyond, itself a network of some 15,000 employment sites, replaces HotJobs. The former Yahoo job board joined The Network in 2004 as the affiliate for the US and Canada.

The Network itself was founded in 2002 by two United Kingdom job boards — StepStone and TotalJobs. They brought in the Swiss board, Jobs.ch, and Irishjobs. Today, The Network claims a presence in 121 countries. It has 36 members, with multiple local job boards, and an especially strong presence in Europe.

Recruiters work through the local affiliates to post individual jobs to the network. With increased volume, direct access is provided.

Beyond.com, based in Pennsylvania, operates niche and regional job boards under a variety of names. Its national site is Beyond.com.

Consumer Confidence Improves, But Jobs Numbers Hard to Predict

It’s numbers week in the U.S. again. The time of the month when the official government employment data makes its appearance, influencing stock markets worldwide, and corporate hiring decisions nationally.

Predictions of what Friday’s labor report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will show are already beginning to appear. A Dow Jones Newswire survey of economists says that on average they expect the U.S. to have lost 110,000 jobs during August. That’s mostly due to the continuing layoff of temporary Census workers.

Because of the massive Census hiring, analysts have been paying closer attention to developments in private sector hiring. In July, the BLS said 71,000 non-government jobs were created, though the Census layoffs resulted in a total loss of 141,000 jobs. (Both those numbers are likely to be adjusted in the Friday release.)

Tomorrow, we get a preview of what may be in store when ADP releases its National Employment Report. The payroll processor uses its data to estimate the monthly change in private sector employment. While the numbers are usually lower than the government’s, they tend to accurately predict whether jobs were added or lost.

There’s not much consensus among the market blogs and advisory services that try to crystal-ball the report. Zacks Investment Research says the ADP report will show 15,000 jobs lost in August. MF Global UK Limited, meanwhile, is looking for a gain of 13,000.

Once the report is released, which is usually just before the business day starts on the East Coast, we’ll see new predictions of what Friday’s BLS report will contain.

Also out in the morning will be  The Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online Data Series. It counts the number of online job postings in total, and the number of new listings.

The Help Wanted series, and Monster’s Employment Index (out Thursday) help show the national hiring trend. The Monster Index has been moving up slowly, but consistently, since the beginning of the year. The Help Wanted numbers are more erratic, though the total number of job ads online has risen by almost 260,00 since January.

As always, surprises are not unusual. For instance, The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, released this morning, improved to 53.5 from a revised 51 in July. That was a little better than what some economists were expecting.

Internship Advice from recent Interns

 
"Definitely do it! In today's job market, it's not enough to just have a degree. Most employers are looking for people with a degree and relevant experience."
(MBA male respondent)
 
"Do it. Starting pay is generally higher after graduation because of the applicable work experience."
(MBA male respondent)
 
"I would highly recommend interning with a government agency. The flexibility and learning potential is so great and the benefits are well worth the experience. They are applicable to both the public and private sector."
(MBA female respondent)
 
"It was an invaluable experience. I was offered a job, but I declined the offer. The company I interned with had a very strong reputation in the industry and, on paper, it seemed like a "dream job," but I learned that I didn't like the corporate culture. I went with a smaller company and I like it much better. I did get some good experience and good references out of the internship." (MBA female respondent)
 

For additional career and employment information as well as job and candidate search strategies, visit MBACareers.com.

--- Source:  MBACareers.com  /  The Career Exposure Network™

Top Internship Benefits….

    * Earn salary to offset educational expenses
    * Opportunity to earn academic credit
    * Participate in meaningful work assignments relative to their academic area
    * Opportunities to apply business school concepts to work assignments
    * Exposure to public service careers
    * Develop a network of professional contacts for future opportunities


 --Source: U.S. Department of Labor, MBA Internship Program

Coalition Asks Internet Board to Reconsider Its .Jobs Vote

A group calling itself the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition is asking the Internet addressing authority to reconsider its decision to allow the use of almost any name in conjunction with a .jobs extension.

Composed of several high-profile organizations and companies, the Coalition claims the .jobs expansion and the plan for allocating the new names violates the charter from the Internet Association for Assigned Names and Numbers, which spells out some of the terms for issuing a .jobs address.

The charter gives Employ Media, the domain registrar, the right to issue addresses, and gives the Society for Human Resource Management policy authority. It also sets the conditions for issuing addresses with a .jobs extension.

The Coalition says Employ Media’s plan, detailed in its RFP instructions,  to allow third parties to use .jobs addresses for purposes that might including running a job board is inconsistent with the charter and exceeds the approval it won from SHRM in June.

It also argues its members and their businesses — and others globally — will be hurt by the expansion because there are no procedures or rules to protect them against ”abusive and infringing registrations.” And because they had no “voice in the policies that will govern their registrations in .JOBS.”

In a brief comment from Ray Fassett, EVP, Employ Media said it was aware of the reconsideration request, adding, “We believe the ICANN Board made the correct decision, and we trust ICANN’s Accountability and Review processes.”

Among the members of the coalition are the world’s two largest job boards — Monster and CareerBuilder — as well as the job board trade group, International Association of Employment Web Sites. The Newspaper Association of America, representing most daily newspapers in the U.S., the American Hospital Association, the American Staffing Association, and Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications are also among the listed coalition members.

The 25-page filing says these organizations and others like them were disenfranchised by the process followed by Employ Media and SHRM in considering the changes to the .jobs registration program:

“Members of the Coalition and the businesses they represent will be directly and adversely affected by the fact that, as non-members of the .JOBS Sponsored Community (HR professionals), they must bear the costs of, but will have no meaningful voice in the development of, .JOBS policies and procedure.”

While the filing raises a number of fairly technical issues regarding the protection of tradenames and marks, it also challenges the way ICANN and its staff handled the program changes.

It calls the staff summary of the 274 letters and emails received during ICANN’s public comment period “clearly rushed. It failed to adequately account for either the breadth or depth of comments and boils down complex argument to a form that loses most if not all of its meaning.”

An analysis of the comments and the subsequent staff report by British journalist and Internet domain blogger Kieren McCarthy is pointedly critical of the handling of the comments. “Important questions raised during the comment period were overlooked,” he writes, adding, “Board approval of the proposal was at best premature.”

The ICANN board voted 11-1 with two abstentions on Aug. 5th to approve the Employ Media Phased Allocation Plan. The vote came two months after SHRM’s advisory council endorsed the plan and three weeks after the close of the public comment period.

McCarthy also questions whether Employ Media and SHRM allowed for “meaningful input.” “According to a number of respondents (and external voices) the process used by the dot-jobs sponsoring organization to consider the proposal was purposefully skewed in order to achieve the desired result,” McCarthy writes. Whether or not true, it should have been investigated, he says.

SHRM did not respond to an email regarding McCarthy’s report.

There is no indication when ICANN’s Board Governance committee will decide on the reconsideration request.

Employment Branding: Satisfy the Psychological Contract

In the September Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I write about branding in a way that, hopefully, you haven’t thought about before.

There has been a lot of talk about employment branding recently and how organizations are dedicating more and more of their resources toward their branding intitiatives. In all the noise and in the race to create the best brand something essential not just to recruiting but for the entire entry-to-exit HR process was lost. Keeping promises! That’s right — keeping promises. It’s not as boring a subject as it might seem, and I make no ethical/soft arguments toward that end in my article. Simply put, I provide evidence and a discussion that supports either promising only what you deliver, or using your employment brand as a driver to deliver more than what you promise. It’s all there in the literature. It’s even very intuitive to see, yet time and time again we see that this advice is ignored in the branding efforts of even some of the most visible organizations.

What I say in the Journal is that branding isn’t a matter of good and bad, but about how much you promise, what you promise, and what you can deliver. If you raise people’s expectations too high, and under-deliver, that’s when you’ll have a problem.

And if you under-promise and over-deliver (like the famous motto of some of the major organizations goes) you risk not attracting the volume and the high quality talent that you’re seeking.

For example, let us consider Un-diverse Inc, a fictitious company based on a real example. Un-diverse is considered to have one of the most attractive employment brands for young aggressive professionals. However, we questioned its generational diversity efforts from the images displayed on its careers website, as well as when questioning its associates about their internal status. Although it is not explicit in its attraction for young professionals (that would be illegal in the United States, according to Title VII and other federal and state laws), the culture created from their particular employment brand is one which is attractive to young professionals, especially male professionals.

Of course, the company states that it is just a good place for anyone to “start a new career,” but the effect itself is one of attraction of young males.

As a thought experiment, let us consider this particular case:

You are a female in her mid career and you are dissatisfied with current opportunities in your field. You decide to apply and consequentially are accepted as an underwriter at a local Un-diverse location. During your research of the organization, your screening calls, your interviews, and subsequent parts of the recruitment process, your psychological contract is developing toward the idea that this is a diverse place suitable for all ages, sexes, and career points. After all, this is what Un-diverse claims in its branding messages!

Once you begin your new assignment, filled with enthusiasm and excitement, you find that 98% of your peers are under the age of 25 and male, and thus a culture inevitably develops that reflects this.

How would you feel? Most employees in this position would feel that Un-diverse is not a place for all generations and career points, regardless of Un-diverse’s efforts to 1) make it so and 2) say that it is so.

In this case, you, the female professional, came into the organization with expectations that were not met, regardless of the effort (real or not) that was undertaken to meet them. On the other hand, Un-diverse claims that its workplace is a great place for anyone to work, yet its brand attracts young male professionals in large doses, which effectively limits the flexibility of the culture and dooms it to be young and male-dominated. Regardless of effort, the psychological contract of this female professional has not been met, and it had no relationship to HR practices, the recruiting process, or any of the typical drivers of employment branding. What it was based on, however, was a very strong brand that was geared in a particular direction.

Although unproven and potentially controversial, one can make an argument that Un-diverse seeks young male candidates for its branch positions, but due to government laws and regulations they cannot explicitly say so. Instead they create a brand which is attractive to young male candidates, and explicitly declare that it is simply a great place to start a career regardless of your current career progression or diversity category.

More on this in the Journal, but for now let’s just say that if an employer chooses to brand itself as a company that “does xyz,” it should consider the ramifications to its promise in the forming of a psychological contract between it and its new employee. Another conclusion of this is that talent acquisition can never be thought of as an independent process from internal human resource and talent management practices.

Real Time Location Recruiting: Using Emerging Technology to Meet Prospects

Dr John Sullivan and Master Burnett

The smart phone and the applications associated with it are radically changing the game for advanced, technically savvy recruiters (others need not read on unless you like shaking your head in disbelief). For those not afraid of evolution and innovation, an emerging class of “location aware” social networking applications can and are enabling recruiters to facilitate impromptu face-to-face meetings with top talent outside the structured assessment process.

Originally intended to help friends with time to kill coordinate impromptu meetings with other friends physically located nearby, services like foursquare, Facebook Places, loopt, and countless others provide savvy recruiters with an opportunity to engage face-to-face with elusive top talent often difficult to convert to an applicant or the offer-stage candidate sitting on the fence.

The scenario goes like this: while on your way to grab lunch you check out one or more of the location-based social networking apps (a.k.a. prospect locator apps) to see if any of the top talent you have been courting happens to be in the area. Within seconds, you have identified that a candidate you have been talking to for nearly a year recently checked in at a Starbucks just three blocks away. You make a beeline for that Starbucks, scanning the candidate’s recent wall posts and shooting him/her a quick instant message or text message in route. Upon arrival, you make contact, reinforcing the electronic relationship with a physical one even if the meeting lasts only minutes. You have successfully used GPS technology and social networks to provide you with an informal opportunity to recruit.

The scenario above may seem outrageous to the average recruiter, but it is clear that social networking has become an integral part of the daily lives of millions of professionals and that location-based services which extend the functionality of social networks are a welcomed innovation (as evidenced by their adoption growth rate). When added to the toolkit of a savvy recruiter, these tools can influence the outcome of hard-to-hire recruiting attempts.

Is this stalking? Yes! The idea of cyberstalking may repulse conservative recruiters, but not everyone views taking advantage of technology to facilitate conversion of online relationships to real-world relationships a bad thing. Most social networks provide tools to help users establish privacy boundaries, so using the information when visible to you to facilitate a meeting is within the expectations of the prospect.

We’re not dismissing the idea of privacy. We’re simply arguing that how people define and approach the concept of privacy has changed. Avid social network users and college students in particular often share highly personal information online including addresses, phone numbers, risqué photos, and their present location. While these users may adopt privacy settings that restrict access, they do have an expectation of total privacy. Obviously, recruiters using location-based social networking need to employ good judgment when approaching potential prospects, but that is true of making contact via any channel.

Real-time Meet-up Scenarios

Real-time meet-ups can occur under a wide variety of situations, including:

• Coordinated — an impromptu plan to meet is confirmed by phone or text/IM upon learning of a prospect’s proximity.
• Directed — no advance plan is communicated, but your actions are directed to ensure a face-to-face encounter.
• Coincidence — no advance plan is communicated and no directed actions are taken; you simply take advantage of proximity as it happens.

Each of these scenarios can play out in a 1:1 or 1:many environment.

Michael McNeal, while at Cisco in the late 1990s, pioneered using social gatherings such as wine, art, and beer festivals as recruiting events. He targeted such events because attendee demographic data demonstrated that engineers were frequently in attendance. Real-time location recruiting is really an evolution of that practice, allowing recruiters to target events and location based on real-time intelligence of a prospect;s whereabouts.

The Location Recruiting Toolkit

Hundreds of online services and smartphone apps can be used by tech savvy recruiters to facilitate real-time recruiting. While no means an exhaustive list, the following are a few to consider. (Got your own favorites? Share with others, post them in the comments sections!)

Social Networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, etc.) — Today’s leading social networks offer up a plethora of ways to garner intelligence around a prospect’s whereabouts. The leading sources include:

1. Status updates — One of the most common things people post about is what they are up to and where they are doing it. Scanning a prospect’s wall or profile can lead to location trends; for example, every morning the prospect grabs coffee at Starbucks on Third. If the prospect uses geolocation apps, status updates can also be used to identify when the prospect “checks in” at a local restaurant, pub, airport, etc.
2. Groups (location, local association, special interest) — LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks are home to numerous online groups that share discussions, and often meet in the real-world based on either a regular schedule or planned meeting. Such online groups are a phenomenal way to identify people who live in a specific area and that share an interest in a topic. For example, a pediatric nurse might join a group for PedNurses of Silicon Valley.
3. Public Events Calendar (Persons Attending) — Public calendars on the major social networks are a great way to find local talent and to coordinate a face-to-face with talent you already know will be in attendance. You might be surprised how many corporate events are listed. Scanning the attendance and invite lists shows you who is local.

Public Event Calendars (meetup, zEvents, upcoming, eventful) — If you haven’t explored services such as Meetup, you really should. Some provide more user profile data than others, but almost all provide some information about the people who will be gathering. Search for domain-relevant events or people in the area with domain knowledge. Master recently joined a meetup for adult kickballers because a majority of those playing on one team were from digital media start-ups in San Francisco. Once the season started, he realized that most of the teams had numerous players from individual companies.

Online Rating Services (Yelp.com, etc.) — You might have missed it if you have been a long-time user, but many of the online rating sites have improved their social networking functionality. Yelp, for instance, now let’s reviewers “check in” and build profiles that include information on what they do for a living. While not a deep source of information, profiles can be used to identify where known prospects frequent, be alerted when they check-in, and to find possible talent.

Location Aware Mobile Applications — the newest tools to cyberstalk someone! There are literally hundreds of location-aware applications for people to find other people like them in a local area.

1. Location broadcasters (foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Lattitude, etc.) —  This category of tools broadcasts a user’s location to those who follow them usually via one of the larger social networks or through the service itself. The most popular is foursquare, but Facebook also recently entered the game with its Places functionality. You can’t search for strangers using either one, but if you had pre-identified people, friended them (or they had a public profile), you could then monitor their location routines and conveniently bump into them!
2. FriendFinders (loopt, whrrl, face2face, etc.) — This category picks up where the previous one left off. While many of these applications aim at helping singles find more “adult” encounters, a few are intended to truly promote social networking. Most require that users opt-in to share location data with others, but loopt recently launched looptmix (4+ million users) which lets you search for other people (strangers) near you based on interest tags and chat message based bios.

Final Thoughts

It’s unfortunately true that many recruiters are risk-averse and slow to adapt to new approaches, tools, and technologies. If you look beyond recruiting, you will find that many of the approaches outlined above are already use by marketers to reach consumers. You can dismiss it as too intrusive or an invasion of privacy but be careful that you’re not using an outdated definition of privacy or an exaggerated fear of legal issues to cause you to miss out on a powerful recruiting tool.

Career Advice: What do you Know Now that you Wish you had Known when you chose your Career Path?

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What do you know now that you wish you had known when you chose your career/profession?  
We ask the viewers of The Career Exposure Network to let us know and our QuickPoll respondents gave some great career advice.
Here's what they said:

•    Formal business acumen is important

•    Have excellent financial management skills, as your backbone. Critical thinking is essential. Also, get your MBA.

•    Learn to lead, and observe and absorb the professional skill that aren't taught in college.

•    Develop a network of professionals in all fields. Recognize the skills you have are transferable.

•    Education is very important. Society seems to be very informal these day and the anything goes attitude is pervasive in the college culture, but strong business skills are a must for achieving future success.

•    Learn that you aren't selling out if you work hard and act/dress/conduct yourself professionally.

•    I was naive and thought that once I chose a career that was it. My advice--be flexible, look out for opportunity, even change leading to new work. Change is a constant in the workplace. You have to constantly be broadening your horizons. If you want to succeed, you have to look for opportunities; they won't just fall in you lap.

•    Importance of Strong communication skills -- I know how to speak with a purpose. I have learned the importance of formulating my thoughts before letting them go, even in a hurried moment, I take the time to think about my comments and what they could imply if spoken in the wrong tone.

•    Smaller office environments enable greater learning potential on the job. You tend to do more than just your designated assignment, which quickly builds you a diverse and strong skill set for future endeavors.


For additional career and employment information as well as job and candidate search strategies, visit CareerWomen.com, DiversitySearch.com, MBACareers.com, and CareerExposure.com.




--- Source: The Career Exposure Network™

Prepping Candidates and Taming Hiring Managers

Most candidates — even high-level executives — need to be prepped before the interview. The reason for this is obvious: they all think they’re great interviewees. Most aren’t. Making matters worse, the hiring managers they’ll be meeting think they’re endowed with some special instinct that allows them to accurately assess candidate competency. Most aren’t.

Since I don’t like to present great candidates who get inadvertently excluded for dumb reasons, I need to prep both my hiring manager clients and my candidates to increase the likelihood the candidates are appropriately and accurately evaluated. This way I don’t have to do searches over again and rely on luck to make placements.

To be taken seriously on this point I had to write a book: Hire With Your Head. Basically it describes a process on how to get hiring managers and candidates on the same page. From the hiring manager’s perspective, it’s describing the work as a series of performance objectives required for on-the-job success. (I refer to these as performance profiles.) From the candidate’s perspective, it’s having them describe a comparable accomplishment for each performance objective. For example, let’s assume the job required the new product marketing manager to develop and launch 25 new iPad apps over the course of the next year. During the interview you’d ask the candidate to describe in detail some comparable product-marketing-related accomplishment. I suggest spending 10-15 minutes getting lots of details for each accomplishment. (Here’s my one-question interview article I wrote for ERE in 2001 on how to do this.) These performance objectives can be split among the hiring team; then, during the collective debrief, the team can rank the candidate on how well the accomplishments compare.

At least that’s the theory. In the field other things happen to mess up this plan.

Those on the interviewing team actually do a very good job as long as a performance profile has been developed, everyone on the hiring team agrees to it, and there is a formal debriefing to evaluate the candidate. The part that’s a bit out of control is the candidate, and the more senior the candidate the more difficult the control. The problem is that candidates have their own way of presenting things, and there are 4,262 books on Amazon on how to interview, most of them on “How to Ace the Behavioral Interview.” To get around this cornucopia of advice, I suggest another way: learn how to effectively answer the accomplishment-based question with insight and confidence. And if the interviewer doesn’t ask this question, make sure he or she does.

The reason the prep is needed is that candidates are not used to talking about a single accomplishment for 15-20 minutes. Instead, if you’re lucky, they’ve been trained to give a STAR answer to a behavioral question like, “give me an example of when you have to demonstrate drive or self-motivation.” Candidates then give a two-minute description of the situation (S), the task (T), the action (A) taken, and the result (R) achieved. Which isn’t bad, but it’s not deep enough to make an accurate assessment. Worse, most candidates have canned answers for all common behaviors and competencies.

While the question format I suggest interviewers use is similar, it requires a more substantive answer. Using the above product marketing example, the question form would be “tell me about your most significant comparable accomplishment related to launching 24 iPad apps over the next 12 months.” This is not easy to answer unless the candidate has thought about it ahead of time. This is even more challenging, since as part of the fact-finding I suggest interviewers ask STAR-like questions for all of the standard behaviors and competencies. This way the interviewer can obtain a more complete understanding of how the person’s behaviors, competencies, and skills relate to specific performance objectives.

To get candidates ready for this type of performance-based interview, I tell them to write down their biggest accomplishments for each job they’ve held. They can then mention these when going through their work history. I then have them prepare a two-paragraph write-up of their most significant team and individual accomplishment. As part of this I make sure they include dates, the people involved, results achieved, the role played, the challenges faced, and the impact made. If I want to really prep them I’ll have them prepare this type of write-up for each accomplishment listed on the performance profile. This is also a great way for me to determine if they’re worth presenting to my client, since I often have difficulty ferreting out all this info in my initial interview. This way I can determine if they’re qualified during the process of getting them to think about what they’ve accomplished at a much deeper level.

If the hiring manager has prepared a performance profile, this type of prep is very effective. However, many hiring managers don’t prepare performance profiles, and even those who have often get caught up in the moment and go off-script. This is where part two of the prep is so important — getting the candidate to have the hiring manager ask performance-based questions. In this case, I instruct candidates to be ready to ask this type of question early in the interview. It goes something like this:

The recruiter didn’t give me a great deal of insight into the performance requirements of the job, and this wasn’t clear from the posted job description, either. Would you mind giving me a quick overview of the open position and some of the performance expectations? This way I can give you examples of related accomplishments and projects I’ve handled.

This will get the manager’s attention, and a few critical performance objectives will be described. Candidates can then ask for some clarification, and smoothly provide overviews of their most comparable accomplishments.

The key to all of this is get the hiring manager to clarify the performance expectations upfront and in parallel have the candidate smoothly provide real examples and details about related accomplishments. Unfortunately most hiring managers “don’t have the time” to understand what the job really entails, and most candidates tend to talk in generalities, hoping their personality and enthusiasm carries the day. While taming hiring managers and prepping candidates takes some effort, the process suggested ensures the best person is hired for exactly the right job. (We’ve prepared a video for recruiters to send to candidates to get them ready for this type of interview. This preview has some good tips. Email me if you want to see the whole thing.

Global Recruiting in 2010: Trends and Best Practices

Kevin Wheeler joined us this week to discuss the global trends that have been reshaping the recruiting industry. In this webinar we covered how to effectively recruit across a variety of cultural barriers as well as how new technology and social media is affecting the global marketplace.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

.Jobs Opens RFP Process

The operator of the .jobs domain opened the competition today for the bulk assignment of new Internet addresses.

The RFP process announced by Employ Media solicits plans from third parties for the quantity use of addresses incorporating geographic, occupational, industry, dictionary, or combinations of these in conjunction with the .jobs suffix.

The 10-page RFP application notes that “A key goal of the .JOBS RFP is the enhancement of the .JOBS brand. Please include specific detail on how your proposal would help achieve that goal.”

This first round of the process — second round details will be announced later — costs $250 and closes on Sept. 24.

Besides the formal Request For Proposals application form, Employ Media also details the criteria by which submissions will be judged. Among the 15 listed points are: brand enhancement; quantity of the addresses to be used; “community value, impact and investment”; “quality, innovation, choice and differentiation”; the effect the proposal might have on SHRM, the sponsor of the domain; and typical criteria dealing with the financial stability of the proposer, and its ability to perform.

One criterion weighs the proposer’s “historical activities and actions” relating to the .jobs domain, Employ Media, SHRM, the HR community, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The number of potential proposers with the experience suggested here is likely to be small. One organization with a clear track record of involvement with all the groups is Employ Media’s beta partner DirectEmployers Association.

Last fall, the two organizations joined forces to launch several dozen job boards using geographic and occupation-specific names, such as Atlanta.jobs and Nursing.jobs. At the time, DirectEmployers boasted it would eventually launch hundreds of thousands of such sites.

But after the Internet addressing authority, ICANN, questioned the use of such names, which were restricted in the original contract with Employ Media, the sites were taken down.

Subsequently, Employ Media petitioned for a change to the agreement, which then went through a process including a review by a SHRM council. The first iteration of that council was headed by Bill Warren, the executive director of DirectEmployers, and included members of the organization.

SHRM eventually dissolved that group and appointed its own Policy Development Process council. One member of the nine-person council was Rhonda Stickley, president of DirectEmployers.

DirectEmployers said it will participate in the RFP process, and published a whitepaper outlining its plan. Authored by Warren, the plan is essentially the same program that was launched last fall: multiple addresses serving up targeted jobs from a common platform.

“All employers worldwide, regardless of size or industry, should be allowed to list their jobs free of charge,” according to the whitepaper. Low‐cost recruitment advertising opportunities” are an objective.

Work/Life Balance and Labor Day

Labor Day in the U.S. is almost here. Many other countries also celebrate a labor day, which has always seemed an unusual event to me. We didn’t celebrate such a day at all until Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. Interestingly, this is a date that coincides well with the world’s entry into the impersonal and mechanistic 20th century.

I have been noodling for quite some time over the work/life balance movement. I call it a movement because it really came about unexpectedly around 15 years or so ago and has swept corporate America from coast to coast.

I can’t think of any organization that has not had to change policies or at least address its employees about the issue. The work/life balance movement is an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think there has been a previous era when there was such an emphasis on specifically setting aside time for non-work activities.

It is a logical outcome of decades of isolating work from other aspects of life. The idea of creating a balance is based on a set of assumptions that aren’t questioned, yet are very strange from the perspective of a Baby Boomer such as myself or from that of anyone who has studied the history of work.

Assumptions About Work

If I were to state the assumptions, they would go something like this: Work is something we do for money, is generally not very enjoyable and interferes with more important things like family.

We should be required to spend as little time as possible “at work” as it interferes with things we would rather be doing. It also subtly assumes that we all must be physically at some other place than home when we work.

The end result is a belief that work should be regulated and time with our families should be made mandatory. The work/life balance cause assumes a more or less digital world: work is on or off, family/life is on or off. For them it seems strange or impossible to have work you get paid for that is your life.

History of Work

Yet, for centuries work and life were co-joined. It is only in the past century that we have physically separated most paid work from the home.

Throughout all of history people have toiled in fields, worked in small shops, bazaars and at home without paychecks, labor laws, or a day off. Women and men shared skills and children were almost always part of the working and life equation as soon as they were old enough. Work might not have been fun in our modern sense, but it was a family activity and it was the fabric of life. Hobbies, travel, and other pleasurable activities were limited by the call of nature and the needs of the community.

Many people ended up doing things that were not of their choosing, but were inherited from fathers or were available at the time they were looking. The classic global example is that of the farmer. On every farm the entire family participated from an early age in the work. Even learning was a family activity, and fathers and sons often co-invented things or passed their knowledge to each succeeding generation.

The modern separation of work from family, learning, and pleasure was the result of the economic expediency found in isolating work in factories and offices. By overseeing the work, owners could ensure efficiency and focus and over the past century has led to increasing levels of work specialization. Often no one in a family understands what other members actually do.

A New Chapter

This is rapidly changing and the work/life movement will wither away over the next few years as people begin to find ways to develop their passion and dreams into paid work that they can do at home or near home when and as much as they want.

Young folks, the Gen Y or Millenniums, are rejecting the work/life notions, much to the chagrin of their elder Gen X colleagues. Gen Y tends to look for work they are passionate about and then they tend to work in ways foreign to Gen X. They take any sense of balance away and may work for days without a stop or not work much at all for some time. They try to choose meaningful and interesting work and embrace it with a passion only seen once in a while with Gen X or Baby Boomers.

Baby Boomer are finding ways to have second careers doing what they thought was a hobby for money. Consultants are more common than ever and offer a variety of services virtually as well as physically. The Internet and the slow withering of corporate life as we have known it for a half-century will radically alter how we think about recruitment and learning.

As work returns slowly to individuals, entrepreneurs, small shops, and small organizations, we will see more and more integration between work and life. More spouses will work together and more children will be part of that work. The days of specialization, physical separation, and mental isolation are ending, I think and hope. We have traversed across a century of change to return to where we started.

Let’s hope we won’t need legislated labor days anymore, as every day will be both one of family and work intertwined as it has been through most of history.

Networking Tips for Career Advancement…

Establish networks with professionals in your current or desired fields.
Search for and attend association events, cocktail receptions and critical seminars that will attract the people you should know.

Be prepared to talk with new people. 
Draft a few questions and statements that will help get the conversation going. Ask what inspired your new contact to join his/her company or what experience he/she brings to the job. Share your positive experiences, what you've learned and your intended career path. Get his/her contact information!!

Look for mutual opportunities.
Perhaps your new contact could benefit from your friend's business. Offer to make an introduction. Maybe your new contact knows someone working at your dream company. Ask if he/she would consider sharing your information with that person. Look for reasons to maintain contact and share resources. Be reliable! Don't promise something that you can't deliver.

Keep in touch!
Follow up every few months just to say hello, see how business is going, set a coffee date...anything that will keep you top of mind. Nearly all networked affiliates share job leads, business leads or tips that can help you achieve your goals.


For additional career and employment information as well as job and candidate search strategies, visit CareerWomen.com, DiversitySearch.com, MBACareers.com, and CareerExposure.com.




--- Source: The Career Exposure Network™

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