Personal Branding in Recruitment (and why it matters)

The time has long gone when a recruiter of dubious moral and ethical standing can hide behind the glossy corporate image of their particular employer of choice.  In the age of advanced recruitment technology, social media, digital content sharing and mobilised networks, a recruiter’s own personal brand has taken on far greater importance and prominence. For

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Personal Branding in Recruitment (and why it matters)

Tags: choice, content, corporate, digital, employer, image, Industry Chat, media, recruiter, result, technology

Paul Hebert on Incentives May Not Trump Culture

Why did your incentive program fail?  Maybe because you focused the program on “sacred values.” Company/corporate culture is a hot discussion these days.  From @zappos (everyone take a drink) and Netflix – every company wants to be the “it” girl of corporate culture.  Culture drives engagement they say.  Much corporate treasure is spent to reward behaviors that drive the culture the company has, or hopes to have. Read the whole post at Paul Hebert’s  I-2-I   (an FOT Contributor Blog)

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Tags: Contributor, corporate, featured, Industry Chat, program, result, sacred, values, worldwide fot

Recruitment agencies: Where the bloody hell are you?

My experience of attending both the ATC Social Media in Recruitment event last Thursday and TRU Australia last Friday (both held in Melbourne), left me scratching my head as to what might be going on inside the heads of leaders in our sector. Here are two events where a majority of the attendees are corporate recruitment managers looking for solutions to their problems. What a perfect opportunity

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Recruitment agencies: Where the bloody hell are you?

Tags: atc, australia, corporate, friday, future of recruitment, result, social media, thursday, tru

The FOT Interview: RIM/Blackberry’s Kat Drum

FOT founder Kris Dunn recently sat down with Kat Drum , Head of Global Employment Brand and Social Media Strategies at Research In Motion , which most of you know as “RIM”, the maker of the Blackberry. We wanted to do this interview because in connecting with Kat, we were intrigued by the passion Kat has for RIM, especially in the face of all the media focus on the RIM product line, the attack on RIM market share by the iPhone and Android product line and all the naysayers who claim no corporate drones will be holstering a Blackberry in two years due to the aforementioned competitive forces.  Additionally, it's always interesting to see kids with blackberry's and wonder what's up with that. We didn't have to ask Kat to defend the brand.  She did that from the jump, which made us believe in RIM.  Passionate employees and leaders within a company have a way of doing that.  Let's roll the tape : 1. Kat Drum, aka “KD”.  Why is it that all the great ones have the initials “KD” (Kevin Durant, Kelly Dingee, and of course… um… Kris Dunn)?  Even better Kris, why do two cool people change the traditional spelling of their name and use a K vs C?  2. How has all the press about RIM impacted you on the recruiting trail?  What are candidates saying?  What are candidates asking in regarding to the ongoing business prospects of the company? The press immensely impacts candidate's confidence in Research In Motion as employer of choice.  Candidates want to know what we’re doing next to be innovative and stay competitive. Quite frankly, there is a lot that Research in Motion is doing great. We shipped 10.6 million BlackBerry devices in Q2 FY12. Service revenue surpassed $1 billion for the first time in Research In Motion’s history reflecting the over 40% growth in our subscriber base over the past year.  The company is going through a transition but is still providing our 70 million customers globally and recently launched 7 new products in 36 days. BB7 marks our largest and most successful global launch of BlackBerry smartphones in our history. We are continuing to innovate with BBX as our future OS and for app non-believers over 1 billion apps downloaded to date and over 4 million daily downloads. There is a huge story to share.  We tell our candidates, if you want to help build and shape the future of the global smartphone industry, Research In Motion is where you need to be. Research In Motion is here to stay this is a young and changing market and there is tremendous opportunity in it. 3. You’re so well regarded in the recruiting industry that everyone assumes if you wanted to flee RIM based on the recent press, you could do that at the drop of a hat.  But when we finally had the chance to talk, I was awestruck regarding how personally you take your role at RIM and how much “fight” instead of “flight” instinct you have.  What’s up with that?  Why are you so ready to lay it on the line for RIM?  Kris, for those that know me, I’m a loyal and dedicated being, I seize opportunities and I don’t go home without a fight, Go Big or Go Home is a favorite mantra of mine. I love working at Research In Motion.  I work with some of the nicest, collaborative and smartest people in the world. Research In Motion knows what true collaboration means. No ego. No hidden agendas. Have an idea? Implement it. Not many companies can stand behind that.  Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up close to the Canadian border that my values match those of Research In Motion. Whatever the reason, it works for me and I think Research In Motion’s company culture is one of North America’s best kept secrets.  I get the privilege of building a world-class employment branding program and sharing that secret with the world.  4. You keep mentioning a new term that I like a lot – “Candidate Confidence”.  What does that mean and what considerations do companies have to make to grow “candidate confidence” over time?  What special considerations and action do struggling companies have to take to combat neutral or negative candidate confidence? I’ve been in the employment branding space for over 12 years.  So much time is spent on maximizing the hot new channels. First it was the print movement to job boards in the 90s, the continued social media movement and now recruiting in the mobile space. Everyone wants to make the most of the upcoming new channels.  What people don’t spend enough time is nailing the right message for candidates to believe in a company. I’ve been through 5 layoffs in 4 years during my time in Seattle.  I started thinking differently about the power of employment branding when Starbucks reputation took a hit and Starbucks gossip blog was killing it even more, the stock was down to $8.00 a share. Every company has ups and downs.  The fun part of a true employment branding professional is to turn around a company’s’ image to candidates through global PR initiatives.  Rebuild candidate confidence first. Then play with the new shiny objects in our space. 5. What’s interesting to you in the recruiting and employment branding world these days?   What’s played out?  What’s the recruiting brand equivalent of a pair of stone-washed jeans from the 80’s?   Segmented messaging is important to me.  Targeted value propositions to candidates. People have different motivations to work for a company. There is no one size fits all message anymore. I personally think Facebook recruitment is played out. Richard Cho of Facebook recently shared with an audience at Mrec2011 that more people are accessing Facebook via their smartphone versus a desktop, which to me, means candidates aren’t seeing your ads and they aren’t wasting their time on a company’s Facebook page. They are in and out to check out photos and correspond with their friends, not to find a job.  I also think mobile apps are where it’s at.  Apps are stickier than a mobile web experience and can provide job updates at a candidate's fingertips. Fast, targeted and convenient.  Of course, what better comparison to the 80’s than a huge Sunday print ad.  Editor's note – The chart below is the global downloads split of the new RIM app JobsInMotion , which underscores the global diversity of RIM, and some of the mobile themes Kat refers to in #5. Thanks to Kat for her time and to RIM for allowing a internal leader to speak openly and honestly.  We'll be watching the smartphone/device wars and as a result of hearing from Kat, rooting for RIM more than we were before.

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Tags: blackberry, corporate, drones, employment, focus, global, iphone, market, motion, Naysayers, research, result, strategies

A Double Dare to Poach Employees…

As hiring has increased over the last year, we saw the articles about how hard it was going to be to keep employees. All of a sudden, companies had to remember what retention meant. I can guarantee that during that time, some talent pros in corporate America sat around and talked about developing a “blocking strategy” for people raiding their talent. Do companies still waste their time on this? Do you sign up a bunch of contingency recruiters so you can hold the non-solicitation of your employees clause over their heads? Limit phone list distribution or prevent the downloading of org charts? Block certain third party recruiters from your phone system? You probably spend time training your receptionists how to screen out blind cold calls so no one gets to find who the Director of Technical Services is, don’t you? Sucker. Many recruiting and HR leaders will tell you that any retention plan in a tight labor market needs to include a blocking strategy. I, however, think it is the most paternalistic, ridiculous, old school HR activity out there. Ten years ago, I guess this might have made some bit of sense. Information distribution was narrow, and you did not want to provide low hanging fruit to your competitors or recruiters. Those days are gone. The “strategy” of blocking will fail, for many reasons: If you have good talent, the market will find it. It’s not a secret, competitors are motivated and markets are efficient.  There’s this thing called the internet. People, like FOT’s own Kelly Dingee or Glen Cathey , are pretty darn good at using it to find people. Kelly only hears, “How did you find me?” about 900 times a week. Employees who are thinking about leaving will. Your lame blocking strategy won’t fix it. If they are not 100% satisfied, limiting distribution of your org charts is probably not the cure. Want to see the opposite approach? Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com, posted on his blog, Recruit away our team. I dare you. Heck, I encourage you . As Fab.com has been growing like crazy, recruiters have invariably come calling trying to recruit away key team members. Thanks for the flattery. I encourage anyone and everyone to please come and try to recruit away our Fab.com team members. I dare you. Heck, I encourage you. A roster of our team members can be found here . We update that list twice per month with new members of the team. Most of our team is also on LinkedIn . Need their phone numbers? Just email me at Jason at fab dot com and I’ll gladly get you in touch with them… everyone has a choice as to where they want to work. … We’re confident about our ability to attract and retain the best. I love this guy. It only would have been better if he double dared you, a la Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. The moral of his story: Add up the time you are spending on blocking strategies, stop doing that, and spend that time on making your company a good place to work. Don't work to prevent them from leaving; work to make the good employees want to stay. Understand that you don’t get to decide when people leave and where they work—they do. Editor's Note –  R.J. Morris is a staffing/talent acquisition director for McCarthy Building Companies based out of STL. Like many others in the FOT clan, he's a sports nut who can endlessly draw the parallels between athletes, sports and the talent management game. I know, I know, as if we needed more of that. That aside, he's got two master's degrees and more than a dozen years under his belt as an HR practitioner including as an HRD focused on staffing for McCarthy Building Companies, Inc.

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Tags: america, calls, charts, corporate, fruit, goldberg, recruiting, retention

Kooky = The New HR Awesome > Ask Herman Cain (smoking allowed)…

I have died and gone to heaven.  For those of you who have not seen the kooky Herman Cain campaign video, immediately stop what you are doing now.  Stop now!  And click this video link here . This is the greatest campaign video ever.  It could also be one of the death nails in Herman Cain’s campaign as well, especially since it is his Chief-of-Staff featured in the video.  However, there are many, many fabulous HR take-aways.   NO publicity is bad publicity (You just have to define what bad is before you push the “send” button).  I CANNOT get this video out of my head.   Video rules! This Herman Cain video rules. Period. Remember peeps, multi-media (video/pics, etc) is an integral part of social media.  Use it to your advantage for branding and recruiting your company and jobs.  I may even say, in most corporate cultures, the kookier the better.  And no matter what you think, this media even works for banks and hospitals. Last I heard, even highly regulated companies need to connect with their recruits and team members in “real” ways.     Need an example:  check out this video about the Daxko Nation currently on Daxko’s recruiting site (www.daxkonation.com)  http://vimeo.com/16003797 . #awesomeness Authenticity is always better than fakey-ness.   You can’t get more authentic than this Herman Cain campaign video.  I mean who makes this up?  And compared to virtually every other Republican candidate— this is the most authentic showing yet; which I love.  At least I can make a real judgment about what I like and don’t. Now, since I take at face-value that this is the true Cain, I may make the decision NOT to vote for him for President (who knows).  But there may be just as many who totally “get” this.   Like- attracts-like .  And likely the ones who “get” this will be long time supporters.    Big recruiting take away which is a no-brainer :   Always represent your company in an authentic way.  There may be many who don’t get it…but the ones who do will be long time supporters (aka will stay a long time; aka will lower your turnover; aka will make your customers happy….) And when all else fails, ending every piece of collateral with an 8-second smile will put your brand over the top!  Don’t believe me, checkout this Colbert Report on the subject.  Be forewarned, this may be the single greatest Colbert Report ever. Editor's Note –  Dawn Hrdlica (PHR) is VP of People at DAXKO. That's right – the very DAXKO that our very own KD is an alum of because there are only so many people (okay, just one) in the big B'ham who are worthy of that VP of People title. Dawn would be it. Former actor/singer/retail guru, her HR career has spanned the last decade. She's based in the good 'ole blogging capitol of the south, Birmingham, Alabama, where you can frequently find her and KD hollering… Roll Tide (although her heart belongs to Southern Miss!)

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Tags: corporate, current affairs, dawn hrdlica, Heaven, herman, hospitals, Judgment, Members, Publicity, supporters, time, video

Ambitious? Well maybe your Klout score does matter.

Over the last few months there have been a few posts and discussions about the value of your social media profile from a recruitment perspective. Most suggested it didn’t matter how well you connected you were. I disagree. If you are highly ambitious you will want to work for a company with ambitions. Companies such as Ford and Dell are very much focused on weaving social into their corporate DNA. Salesforce.com talk about the social enterprise and how the companies of tomorrow will be led by the young people of today who have grown up with the Internet and social. These companies will be connected to everything and everyone and they are very ambitious; they want to be market leaders. Their employees, at every level, will be connected. No questions about it. So if you are a social laggard, which is absolutely fine, just don’t expect to have the edge at an interview for your dream job with that dream company.

Tags: corporate, dream, Followers, ford, Generation Y, Industry Chat, laggard, linkedin, perspective, result, Score, social, social recruiting, young

Synergies: Just Another Word For My HR Is Better Than Your HR

Mergers, buyouts, hostile takeovers – whatever the specific scenario, it is always high drama in the halls when Company A is about to absorb Company B . As a Human Resources or talent pro, if you find yourself on ‘acquiring’ side, once you get over your often undeserved feeling of smugness and superiority, (if you ever do), straight away you’ll find yourself knee-deep in what is most often called ‘synergy’ planning and modeling. ‘Synergies’ are a nicer way of referring to the almost inevitable cuts and consolidations of functions, locations, processes, systems, and of course people that the acquiring company (and typically the ongoing concern), expects and is pretty much required to realize with the execution of the merger and the subsequent reductions and cuts. ‘Synergies’, when looked at as a stand alone term, sounds kind of cool – dynamic, exciting, and even intriguing. But in the practice and execution of corporate consolidations, particularly if you are on the side that is getting acquired, synergy is just a boardroom word for ‘The amount we will save in labor costs after the layoffs .’ This is altogether natural and expected – obviously when two organizations are combined, there is almost never a call for continued duplication of many corporate support functions like finance, marketing, usually at least some of IT, and yes, Human Resources. In fact, these kinds of synergies are so apparent and expected by the business leaders planning and executing the merger or acquisition, that they are almost never held up for serious debate or consideration as the total amounts to be realized in synergies are being tallied. It is a given – once the consolidation is complete, and perhaps with some extra time added in for some IT-led systems migration, the people practices from large Company A are imposed on all the survivors from Company B.  HR systems, benefit programs, policies, methods to manage some of the more mundane but important workforce management practices like overtime pay and shift differential – if your job was to maintain, manage, or administer any of these from Company B – well, you may as well quickly sort out which company severance policy will be in effect when you are let go. These processes – pushing Company B employee HRIS records to Company A’s system, ending Company B’s benefit plans, sorting out the ‘crazy’ perks that some of the Company B executives were getting that (shockingly) went undiscovered during due diligence, are largely mechanical, and for many companies that are in serial acquisition mode, they can be executed quickly, efficiently, and kind of ruthlessly. As the HR or Talent pro, if you are lucky enough to be on the ‘winning’ team in all this, it can be really easy to convince yourself that since ‘we’ acquired ‘them’ that somehow we are smarter, more savvy, more successful, better looking, and possessing some kind of innate and obvious superiority over the talent pros on the other side of the transaction. And sure, it could be that as talent pros, your contribution to Company A’s planning, recruiting, development, succession planning, and effective and strategic administration of compensation programs all contributed significantly to your company’s success and consequently its position of relative financial and market strength that allowed it to acquire Company B. But it also could be, and I have a feeling often is the case, that as the HR and Talent pro on the winning team, you kind of got lucky, and happened to be fortunate enough to grab a seat when the music stopped. Which certainly is not your fault either, that’s the breaks. Stuff happens. I think, at least from what I have seen, that HR and talent pros on the acquiring side, while helping to plan and recommend the number and timing of the workforce ‘synergies’, can often wield the sharpest and most unkind axe on their HR colleagues (or more correctly their ‘never going to have a chance to be colleagues’), on the other team. Maybe it is a natural protection and self-preservation mechanism setting in, but when it comes to the HR people and policies that are unearthed in Company B, well the HR and talent pros are uninformed and unskilled, and the people practices they’ve dreamed up over there are a collection of the nuttiest, most ill-advised ideas they’ve ever seen. But here’s the thing – once the acquisition and synergy finding process is fully underway, it is typically much less about who has the better ideas and more about whose side has the better parking spaces and whose name is on the new letterhead. If you as an HR pro find yourself on the winning side, please at least consider, even for a brief moment or two, that the HR pro on the other side of the table might just have some great ideas of their own. They might have actually implemented some programs and policies that made perfect sense for their company and their employees. They might just have something to teach you , despite the fact that you won and they lost . Editor's Note  -   Steve Boese is fondly known to many as the  HR Technology  blogger. By day, he is an HR Technology Consultant and part-time instructor at the  Rochester Institute of Technology .  That's right, he's educating some of HR's future, folks. How's that for literally shaping the future of HR? Steve can also be found hosting the  HR Happy Hour on Thursdays at 8PM ET  … you know, where a bunch of HR pros get together and call in to talk about HR stuff. Sounds like a real happy time… 

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Tags: Boardroom, buyouts, consolidations, corporate, execution, hostile, leaders, management, mergers, result, smugness, Superiority, support, synergies, synergy

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Was the Recruiter Dirty or Just Uninformed?

Many, many things make me a geek, but the one that applies today is that I am a bit of a spy novel geek. Mysterious, nuanced, complex, maybe even a little dangerous, right? “Espionage”…the word itself just sounds cool. I like the intricacy of the battle, the subtlety of interplay and using influence to help one side and maybe hurt another. Sounds a bit like recruiting, doesn’t it? Recruiting a key player requires gathering intelligence, knowing what’s going on inside your competitors, identifying key players and working with your exec team to close a nuanced deal. But while espionage and the idea of a recruiter as a type of market spy sounds cool, corporate espionage is not, especially when a recruiter might be part of the shadiness. Here’s the story: Two appliance parts manufacturers are fighting it out in court, and it might cost one of the companies its livelihood. And yep, it all stemmed from a high level recruiting deal. From Canada Newswire : Marcone charges competitor Servall with a scheme to set up a Northeast distribution network virtually overnight by hiring away several Marcone employees who left the company armed with critical customer and financial data. The misappropriated information included not only a list of 3,300 AP Wagner customers, but also all of the confidential and proprietary records concerning sales to date information, receivables and account aging, pricing, credit limits, account numbers and margin (profit) information on each customer. This isn’t sour grapes…this is real deal illegal trade secret stuff. The story says that Marcone lost 640 customers, and two different courts ruled that Servall clearly stole from them. The courts strictly limited Servall client pursuits, and now they might have to go out of business. So, some recruiter lifted two senior guys from Marcone with the promise of running a start up division. Along the way, though, somebody decided to take more than some extra binder clips on their way out the door. When you drop thousands of pages of pricing, margins and credit limit info in your bag, it’s not a mistake; it’s shady. We know the execs were dirty, because they actually took the stuff, but what do you think about the recruiter? Did he play a role before or after the hire and does he carry some of the blame? There are basically two arguments: Not the recruiter’s fault—he was just doing his job; it’s not his problem the candidates went dirty on him. You can't hang the sins of the candidate on the recruiter.  The recruiter’s dirty—he either knew or should have known. To extract two senior folks out of a competitor takes months of effort, and at some point, the execs would have talked about the “value” they would bring. Tough call, but I lean more towards hitting the recruiter, because it’s all related. If he did his job right, he would have been heavily involved from first contact to onboarding, and it’s hard to believe the idea of these jokers lifting thousands of pages of info from their previous employer did not come up. What do you think? Recruiter as co-conspirator or clueless lackey?  Neither choice is attractive, and it's a terrible shame a bunch of innocent people are getting caught in the fallout.  Editor's Note –  R.J. Morris is a staffing/talent acquisition director for McCarthy Building Companies based out of STL. Like many others in the FOT clan, he's a sports nut who can endlessly draw the parallels between athletes, sports and the talent management game. I know, I know, as if we needed more of that. That aside, he's got two master's degrees and more than a dozen years under his belt as an HR practitioner including as an HRD focused on staffing for McCarthy Building Companies, Inc.

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Tags: appliance, corporate, critical, current affairs, customer, Industry Chat, marcone, network, Newswire, recruiter, recruiting, result, secret, wagner

LinkedIN Corporate Recruiter

Hey !

We’ve been looking at purchasing the linkedin corporate recruiter solution but note the cost is the same as purchasing a linkedIN premium account – a little more actually. Is the investment worth it? From my perspective, I am easily able to pull out any contact I need by doing a couple of search strings from google. This site – http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/ is a great place for finding linkedin search strings.

Do you actually get any more contacts out of the LinkedIN corporate recruiter, or is it safe to say that it actually adds no value at all?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Tags: actually, corporate, finding, great, linkedin, place, purchasing, recruiter, search, strings

Like Water for Culture…

Think this through…  You’re hunting down the perfect hire.  You’ve outlined the specs for the job.  You’ve combed through all the job boards and check the passive (aggressive) candidates on LinkedIn.  You’ve identified two strong candidates and you bring them in for the interview.  They both do well. You stack up their resumes and they both look pretty similar on paper.  They’re both aggressive.  Know how to close.  Similar education.  Similar history of success.  One does seem to have a few more years under their belt.  A bit more seasoned and wily.   They’ve got swagger as my kid would say.  (For those without 17 year olds in the house, swagger is something you can’t define but you know it when you see it.  It’s kinda like being cool but with more of a 2011 spin.) Which one do you hire? Before you reach for the person with “swagger” consider this… Bull Sharks and White Sharks Bull sharks and white sharks are both apex predators.  Ain’t much they won’t attack and eat.  Both are aggressive.  Both grow to about the same size (some whites can be bigger – but overall about the same.)  Both have big, big teeth.  Both are pretty solitary hunters.  Both strike fear in the heart of their prey (meaning me). But there is a little known difference between the two (little known to the random sample of bar patrons last Saturday). Bull sharks tolerate (rather well) fresh water.  Yep.  Fresh water.  In fact, after Hurricane Katrina, many bull sharks were sighted in Lake Ponchartrain.  Bull sharks have occasionally gone up the Mississippi River as far upstream as Alton, Illinois.  They have also been found in the Potomac River in Maryland. Why is that an important fact?  The water these sharks live in – and can thrive in – is like your corporate culture.   I’ve heard people say culture doesn’t matter.  But that’s like saying the water doesn’t matter to these sharks.  The bull shark can thrive in fresh water and salt water.  The “great” white – not so much on the fresh water side.  You won’t find many great whites in Alton, Illiniois. On paper, the two sharks are similar if not almost identical. They have similar characteristics and I’d even argue that most HR folks couldn’t tell them apart from the pictures provided in this post (the bull shark is on the bottom BTW). Culture is the Water Employees Live In Your culture is the water your employees thrive (or die) in.  Just like the sharks, culture surrounds employees; they live in it, breathe it and when toxic – like fresh water to great whites – can die in it. Check your two candidates again.  Which one now looks better?  One with a history of success in similar cultures as yours – or even success in many different cultures?  Or the one who has a bit more swagger – but only in a specific culture?  I’d go with the bull shark. And you thought you were safe in Lake Erie this summer…look at that bottom picture – in fresh water! Ha! Editor's Note -  Paul Hebert is the Managing Director for  i2i  (an influence consultancy), the brain behind  Incentive Intelligence  and a recognized authority on incentives and performance motivation. Want to know what's going to motivate your people to perform at their best and impact the bottom line? Want to know whether your service award program really means anything at all? And are there psychological principles that drive your employees behavior? Paul's your guy… unless you fervently bow down to Maslow.

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Tags: bull, corporate, Fit, hunters, illinois, Industry Chat, katrina, linkedin, mississippi, paul hebert, result, river, sample, strike, swagger

Logica

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Career site SEO: How Google changes will affect your jobs and career site

Google ultimately want to help users get to the right information in as few clicks as possible. Unfortunately, corporate recruiters do not help Google achieve this and are penalised in many ways. So are you going to change or carry on wasting money and losing out on the best candidates? The facts Most career sites are not optimised for organic search. They have pages that have nice content but is rarely written with search engines in mind and items such as page title tags are not thought about in any way to help search results. Jobs are hidden from search engines in an ATS so they never appear in search results. Recruiters put their jobs onto job boards so the candidate has to go through additional steps to apply (assuming they are not hijacked on the way) and job boards continue to hog the organic search listings thanks to all the jobs they have. Recruiters are sadly wasting money as they have no SEO strategy. What to do? Get your career site reviewed from an SEO stand point and make the relevant changes. Get your jobs optimised. Think about content e.g. blog, Facebook Page, Twitter etc. Think about useful, decent, relevant content! Why? The biggest beneficiaries seem to be originators of what Google calls “high-quality” content, which the company defines as ” information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on .”

Tags: analysis, attraction, Beneficiaries, content, corporate, engines, money, recruiters, result, search, thoughtful

Should a Job Seeker Ever Have to Pay… For Anything?

Here’s a question for you – is there anything that job seekers should ever have to pay for? Resume writing services. Okay. Career coaching. Sure. But anything else? Last week, I spent some time in NYC with the people of The Ladders for their first ever Position Accomplished Summit. First and foremost, know that I attended this little event from a skeptic’s perspective. I don’t know how I feel about their biz model and I’ve been plenty irritated by them in the past. I have not received positive outcomes from having my company’s jobs listed on their site. And, I’ve had non-$100K+ jobs pulled onto their site. But I do have respect for their marketing and technology chops. So after the event, I left wondering if I would even write about the experience and their services as I’m honestly still unsure of them and have more questions than answers. And question number one that I’m stuck on is simply this – is it culturally acceptable, today at least, to charge the job seeker for much of anything? One of the criticisms of The Ladders is simply that they charge job seekers for access to $100K+ jobs, not all of which are employer verified as truly being $100K+. Unless it’s a position that an employer has actually posted on the site, they don’t know for sure that the role pays $100K+. They do however assert that two sets of eyes at The Ladders review all scraped job postings on the site against specific criteria and benchmarked data to validate that they are likely $100K+ jobs. But again, there’s no way to know for sure whether any positions are $100K+ unless an employer actually is the one to post the job. That issue aside, the jobs being both scraped then posted by The Ladders and posted by employers on their site are not necessarily exclusive. They are likely advertised elsewhere – from corporate websites to other job boards or aggregators – so job seekers could conceivably access these opportunities elsewhere for free. But it does remain a single place where the $100K+ job seeker could go to, on a subscription basis, to see a collection of perceived and confirmed $100K+ jobs It’s a different business model. It’s something we’re not used to. Traditionally, anyone involved in the job search business has always charged the employer. Headhunters charge employers to surface them candidates. Job boards and newspapers charge employers to broadcast their job opportunities. So today, job seekers don’t pay for much of anything. It’s a buyer’s market even despite unemployment numbers. It’s also uncommon that for a marketplace of “goods” so to speak, both the buyer and seller are positioned as “consumers” of a shared service, with both charged a fee for service. In other words… it’s not as if eBay, another marketplace, charges both buyers and sellers fees. In the current eBay model, only the seller who presumably is the one making a profit off of the sale, pays any fees to eBay. The buyer doesn’t pay to get access to goods via eBay. Yet on The Ladders, the “buyer” and “seller” both pay. So I wonder… what do we make of a model where the job seeker also has to pay? Or is there a threshold on the dollar amount charged to job seekers for something like The Ladders? Or could it be that it’s perfectly fine for a job seeker to pay? So long as the job seeker, as the consumer, demands and receives a certain level of service or a guarantee of sorts? Or maybe Capitalism rules all and if The Ladders wants to charge employers and job seekers both because they can and because someone out there perceives a value for what they provide, they will continue to do so. And perhaps in the future, we’ll see others follow suit. I dunno. I’m thinking about this one though. And either way you come down on the discussion, it’s an interesting issue to deconstruct so at least we can thank The Ladders for disrupting things a bit… for a different business model, and for those crazy commercials too . Editor's Note – Jessica Lee is a Senior Employment Manager for APCO Worldwide, a global integrated communications consultancy in D.C. (Okay, you could call it a PR firm too.) Like most upscale HR pros, she spends half of her time on recruiting, the other half on ER, Training and OD. When she's not hammering a candidate to determine Motivational Fit, she's thinking about the future of HR and wondering how she can avoid using the job boards to fill the next spot in her organization…

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Tags: 100k, corporate, Industry Chat, job, job-boards, marketing, number, postings, question, result, services, Skeptic, Summit, writing

Impact Whacks Intent. Every. Single. Time.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  Every time I think that there is hope for corporate leaders treating their employees like true assets and investments, a CEO comes along and does a truly boneheaded thing. Like sending a layoff letter to almost half the workforce that contains the (run-on) sentence: ” Although we can't continue on this journey together–I hope you will all stay connected with ______ and know that your contribution to the business was a unique moment in time and that you participated in something that few have been part of in our industry .” The unfortunate sender of said letter was Mike Jones, the CEO of MySpace. The letter was sent to roughly 500 employees, or 47% of the company's workforce. I am willing to give Mr. Jones the benefit of the doubt here, and I will assume ( at the risk of all that word means) that his intentions were good – that he truly was regretful about having to pink slip half the same workforce that he had been exhorting and encouraging to reinvent MySpace over the prior months . Good intentions aside, it takes pretty disconnected leadership to even think that the workforce doesn't read the business and/or industry press basically trumpeting that the parent company is thoroughly dissatisfied with the unit's performance and is considering selling, merging or spinning off . And it takes pretty clueless leadership to think that exhorting and encouraging people to work on a relaunch, then laying them off, isn't going to incur anger and bitterness. I don't have a word for what kind of leadership rubs salt in the wound (albeit unintentionally, I hope) by expressing hope that those laid off will remain connected with the company after all that. There is no question that layoffs are hard – hard for those doing the laying off, harder for those being laid off. Sometimes I think corporate leadership (with the help of HR departments) worsen the impact of layoffs on the workforce (both those leaving and the survivors) by trying to “softball” the message, include too many lines about heavy hearts (doubtful anyone believes that stuff) and the need to “provide the company with a clear path to sustained growth and profitability.” Sometimes I think it would be better just to keep is short, simple, to the point: “The company cannot continue to keep you employed past XX date due to our business not performing as expected or needed. We thank you for your service. Next steps are as follows:  … severance… COBRA coverage… turn in equipment…” Just the facts, ma'am. And that's really all that should be included in a written notice. I know that the temptation for HR, corporate, division, department leadership is to include more, to explain and justify . But to my fellow business and HR leaders – before you go about writing and sending the long-winded layoff letter filled with explanations and justifications, ask yourselves this question: who are you trying to make feel better about the layoffs, really? Is it the laid off employees you hope to console? Or is the true intent to lessen your own discomfort with the decision, to somehow absolve yourself of any accountability in the running of the business that led to the need and decision to lay people off? Leadership is tough. It's difficult. Sometimes it Really. Just. Sucks. But one reason (some) good leaders (should) get paid the big bucks is because they are people to undertake the unpleasant aspects of leadership with the same grace, equanimity and authentic humility as they do the more pleasant aspects of leadership. And the really good leaders know that intent doesn't cut it; impact is the name of the game. Sadly for MySpace, the impact of the layoff letter likely didn't match the intent of it, and it is the impact that lasts. Editor's Note -  Suzanne Rumsey is  a  Senior Consultant & Director, Consulting Services with Knowledge Infusion. Suzanne isn't just any 'ole consultant though – she's a former HR pro turned consultant, who spent time with orgs like Boeing and Health Net where she shaped workforce planning and talent management initiatives… which means she really knows what she's talking about and has the actual experiences under her belt to back it up and give you advice. Now that's the kind of consultant we really like.

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Tags: assets, ceo, communication, corporate, employee communications, Industry Chat, letter, Organization Development, run, the hr profession

5 Things to Create a HR Fight Club Over

Piggybacking on the FOT blogpost from Steve Boese a few days back, “Top 5 HR Time Sucks”, I was inspired to create my own top 5 list. This is a list of things I think are worth taking it on the chin for in corporate HR. So many of us are trained to, heck even demanded to, “know our place”. I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it. And sometimes that is damn good advice. HOWEVER… sometimes you gotta fight… for your right… to be a damn good HR leader. Which is no easy task in a corporate world that still thinks “widget makers” rule the world. Oh and rule number one… what happens in HR Fight Club does NOT stay in HR fight club. That is the point… you gotta fight openly for these gems. 1) Fight for your team : Your team is your backbone, your weapon, your com-padres.  They are also the only ones you can share all the confidential burdens you have to hold everyday. They are your best friends, your counselors, your rocks. And they too are doing a whole lot o’ work behind the scenes that others may not see as “top line” contributors (so it’s not always sexy work). Damn it… fight for them when they aren’t being recognized or listened to.    2) Fight for your time : We are all busy. But if you don’t put the ki-bosh on all the unnecessary noise… you… will… drown. Many of us say, “But to be a good customer service agent I have to, always be available”. You also have to be PRESENT. If you are overwhelmed, interrupted or constantly jump when others say jump… you will not be present. Fight for you-time 'cause no one else will. 3) Fight for your budget . What gets cut first when things go bad? HR budgets. Then marketing. Then Accounting. Then nothing. Money makes the world go around. Quit being the peacekeeper for once and fight for your money. Don’t be stupid – back it up with metrics. BUT – we are so trained to be the humane department (which is a good thing) that we forget to be leaders. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. At least fight for the budget to stay in tact. You may not get it – but at least you can sleep at night knowing you're not a coward. 4) Fight for your resources . What do I mean? If you need 3 Generalists instead of 2, put up your dukes. Some lame brain put it in our heads the most devilish of formulas: the “HR rep to employee” ratio. This ridiculous ratio states that corporations should hire 1 HR rep for every 100 employees. I almost hate writing that for fear someone else will learn this stupid statistic. Maybe this formula works if you are running a… shoot I can’t even come up with an example this is so ridiculous.  Anyway – don’t be lazy or silly. If you need more help, prove why and fight for it. Last but not least: 5) Fight for your salary . Bottom line, your non-HR peers are making more than you. And not because your profession is less marketable. Why? Your non-HR peers are asking for more and getting it. Why? (And… this is important.) You are basing your salary requirement on true market data, because that is your area of expertise. Hate to break it to you… but your non-HR peers are not looking at data, nor are a lot of your bosses. They are asking for more and getting it. Even if your bosses are using market data (like mine)… you still are asking for the bottom end. Final work: pay peanuts… get monkeys. Don’t be a monkey.    Editor's Note –  Dawn Hrdlica (PHR) is VP of People at DAXKO. That's right – the very DAXKO that our very own KD is an alum of because there are only so many people (okay, just one) in the big B'ham who are worthy of that VP of People title. Dawn would be it. Former actor/singer/retail guru, her HR career has spanned the last decade. She's based in the good 'ole blogging capitol of the south, Birmingham, Alabama, where you can frequently find her and KD hollering… Roll Tide (although her heart belongs to Southern Miss!)

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Tags: agent, Backbone, burdens, corporate, counselors, dawn hrdlica, days, fight, friends, Industry Chat, noise, result, the hr profession, trench hr

Is corporate head hunting no better than agency cold calling?

I read the post “A cold calling masterclass – how not to do it” a few weeks ago and at the time thought maybe the corporate recruiter can also look in the mirror when the are head hunting which may be no different to cold calling? Of course being head hunted may be a nice for the ego but if you are a corporate recruiter, it is a bit like selling double glazing. “Ah yes, you do have windows but ours are so much better.” It is a basic Yes or No answer; either they like your brand or they…

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Tags: calling, cold, corporate, direct recruiting, ego, hunting, Industry Chat, Mirror, recruiter, result, social recruiting

My 2011 corporate direct social recruiting Linkedin Facebook Twitter predictions

So here we go for the 2011 predictions. Take note, they are all going to happen! I thought I’d go for 11 seeing as it is 2011 next year. There will be 46 social recruiting conferences. Yep, almost one every week. Search will consolidate under a uniformed system called m.BoogleHoo!! Every laptop will be traded in for free against an Android Notebook and Phone as we all become walking billboards. The Kindle will serve job ads so as to move from perfection. Corporate recruiters will all be made redundant as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin automate the entire process of finding,…

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Tags: Billboards, Conferences, corporate, hmmm, Industry Chat, job, laptop, Notebook, recruiters, result, twitter

Does your application process REALLY need to be like this?

Let’s be honest; the average job application process is a mess and it cannot stay like this much longer. With ALL the best people being on Linkedin why would you even need a careersite or an ATS. Super Linkedin are going to save the world of recruitment AND tidy up all those messy application processes. Or maybe not. So what to do? The thing is, in most search results your career site is not doing that well. One day when SEO is taken seriously by career site designers and corporate recruiters they may, but until that day only the big…

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Tags: application, career sites, corporate, Designers, job, linkedin, result