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 You can be proud to work here.

That is one of THE most important messages your new employee orientation program should communicate.

This is so crucial because people of the caliber you want to attract and retain place a high value in working for an employer of whom they can feel proud.

So, make sure you communicate to your new employees — both explicitly and implicitly – that they can be proud to work at your organization.

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” implicitly by conducting a well-designed, well-organized, effective onboarding program. They see by the way you deliver the onboarding experience that your organization does things right. Conducting a high quality onboarding program engenders both pride — “I’m part of a great organization” –and respect for management — “They know what they’re doing here.”

You communicate the message “You can be proud to work here” explicitly by sharing stories that demonstrate why your organization is worthy of pride.

“Pride Story” Themes You Can Draw From

These include stories with the following themes:

1. What makes your product or service great.
2. How your product or service has made a difference in the lives or businesses of your customers.
3. The good things your organization does in your local community, or for the world community.
4. Examples of employees performing at elite levels, such as providing over-the-top customer service that blows your customers away.
5. How your organization is run with integrity, respect for its people, and competence.

A Story About Integrity

I recently heard a great example of a story demonstrating the last theme on the above list from the Director of Claims at a property and casualty insurance company. While her story was part of an interview I did prior to a leadership retreat, it is a perfect example of the kind of story you want your leaders to share with your new hires during orientation.

You also want to put brief video clips of such stories such as this on your recruiting website.

When I asked this director, Barbara, what she liked about working at the insurance company, one of the things she mentioned was their high level of integrity:

“It’s not one of those companies that does things you feel uncomfortable about. I can sleep well at night working here.”

She went on to give an example. Whenever an official hurricane warning or watch is announced, the company reimburses their marine clients for the cost of removing their boats from the water. It’s in both their customers and the insurance company’s best interest that customers don’t gamble with this, whether it’s worth the cost to pull their boats out of the water versus risk the potential damage caused by a hurricane. Thus, the insurance company reimburses them to do that, if it’s an official hurricane warning or watch.

During last fall’s Hurricane Irene, the storm gradually faded as it reached New England, losing its status as an official hurricane. However, given the vagaries of weather, it could have easily ramped back up to hurricane status when it reached Maine.

The leadership team found themselves facing a decision that would affect both their customers and themselves.

“Technically we didn’t have to pay for boat owners to pull out their boats, because Irene was downgraded. But … what was the right thing to do? If we waited until it reached Maine to decide, they never would have gotten their boats out on time. We talked about what was the right thing to do. We decided it was to fund it. That’s one of the things about this company that I love, the high integrity.”

As she told this story, her expression and voice tone beamed with pride.

This is a perfect example of the type of story you want to collect, catalog, and share at your new employee orientation programs. You also want to use these on your recruiting website, at job fairs, and in your interviews. Not only does it communicate “You can be proud to work here,” but it also communicates your organization’s core values, an important role of your employee orientation program.

Sharing stories that inspire pride as part of your new employee orientation program not only will make your program more inspiring, it will also help “seal the deal” in your new employees’ minds that they made the right choice. So start collecting and using stories that communicate “You can be proud to work here.”

So How Can You Put This Into Action?

1. Collect stories from employees at all levels, about Moments of Truth that illustrate why they are proud to work in your organization.
2. Collect and catalog these stories in a database. Note what message they communicate, what value they personify, and use these as searchable keywords in your database. That way, you can easily locate what stories communicate the specific message you want to communicate.
3. Start including these stories in your new employee orientation program, but don’t stop there. Include them also on your recruiting site, have your recruiters share them at job fairs, and include them in your hiring interviews.

Facebook, and potentially other social media as well, can be used to assess a person’s potential for job success.

That not-so-surprising conclusion is reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and comes out of two studies — one dealing with academic performance, the other with job performance — conducted on college campuses in Indiana, Illinois, and at Auburn University.

What is surprising about the study is that a group of modestly trained evaluators could better predict success after spending a few minutes on a Facebook profile than could a self-assessment of personality traits often used by industry.

“SNW (social networking websites) ratings correlated with job performance, hirability, and academic performance criteria,” the researchers concluded, “and the magnitude of these correlations was generally larger than for self-ratings.”

Prof. Peter A. Rosen, one of the three authors of the published report, said, “Our research provides evidence from two studies that Facebook can be used by trained evaluators to reliably assess various personality traits, traits shown in existing literature to predict academic and job success and to be legally defensible for selection purposes.”

In one of the studies, a trained evaluation team studied the Facebook profiles of 274 volunteers assessing them on the so-called Big Five personality traits (conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability, and openness) often used in pre-employment assessments. Those 274 volunteers did their own self-assessment, just as they might in an employment situation.

Six months later, the two sets of assessments were compared to the performance evaluation given by the volunteers’ supervisors.

Even though only 56 of the students were employed and had supervisors willing to participate, the evaluators’ rating of those students was closer to what the supervisors said than was the students’ scores on their self-assessments.

The second study, conducted in much the same way, looked at academic performance. The final sample size in this study was significantly larger.

The researchers found that the few minutes the evaluators spent studying each person’s Facebook data produced a correlation to job and academic performance that was consistently better than the standardized self-assessment tests.

“Whereas interview-based personality assessments are time-consuming, the average assessment of a social networking profile took 5 to 10 min and did not require a respondent’s presence. Evaluating personality via SNWs may be more cost-effective than more traditional methods,” write the study’s authors.

They caution, however, that before recruiters turn to Facebook or other social network to assess candidate potential, there are legal and ethical issues to consider, not the least of which are potential EEOC problems.

“The potential for legal liability is great, considering the dearth of research regarding whether SNW-derived information validly predicts job performance. Until this is established, employers should use caution when using websites such as Facebook to make hiring-related decisions,” the authors write.

They conclude with this additional caution: “We suggest that SNW-based personality assessment may provide a useful tool for organizational research, but only if further validation research is conducted and consideration of legal risks fully considered.”

Ask the next hire you onboard to describe everything, every step they took on their way to becoming a candidate, and you may be in for a surprise.

If you track your source of hire, chances are excellent that what your numbers tell you is only a part of the story — the most recent part. What all that data is telling you may be not more than from where your new hire submitted their application.

With two-thirds of the companies participating in CareerXroads’ source of hire survey relying on the hires to say how they learned of the job, “What that’s telling us is what the candidate remembers, which is going to be from where they applied. You might get them to tell you where they first heard about the job,” says Gerry Crispin, one of the survey authors. “But we’ve suspected that more goes into this than is being captured (by source of hire reporting).”

So for the first time in the 11 years CareerXroads has surveyed America’s largest employers on how and from where they make hires, this year’s report includes the best thinking of recruiting leaders about what influenced their new hires to apply.

The just released report, 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire: Channels that Influence, not only offers a look at what recruiting leaders believe about the pathways in talent acquisition, but it also provides a data-rich look at where the 36 responding companies attribute the hires they make. The sources of hire were detailed on ERE yesterday. Today’s post looks at the social media influencers of that hiring.

It turns out that although social media accounted for a mere 3.5 percent of the 213,375 hires the 36 responding companies made last year, the leaders believe it plays a consistent and influential role in acquiring talent.

“It’s all speculation why they said that,” explains Crispin, “because we have no data.” However, he hastens to add, “They may not know, but they are good guessers.”

Referrals, which accounted for 28 percent of last year’s external hires, has five main channels influencing candidates. The company career site is believed by 76.7 percent of the leaders to be one. Social media, say 40 percent, plays a role, too.

Likewise, when the company career site is listed as the official source of hire, 62.5 percent of the survey respondents believe social media was among the influencers. Only job boards ae believed by more leaders (75 percent) to play a role in influencing candidates.

Other channels certainly play a role.  Recruiting leaders, sometimes by significant percentages, cited job boards, referrals, and the company site itself at least as often as social media.

Thus social media, like the role referrals plays in influencing hiring pathways, offers greater value to a corporate talent strategy than the number of hires would suggest. And that may well be why recruiting leaders mentioned improvements to their social media programs among their planned changes this year.

“Social media has much more value than we can see just from the numbers,” says Crispin. “It may not yet be leading directly to hires, but like referrals, it has a strong influence.”

Some social media tools are better for the job than others. Besides asking leaders their opinion of the multiple channels that influence the various hiring source, Crispin and his partner Mark Mehler asked them to rate the impact of certain sites and techniques.

By far LinkedIn has a greater impact than either of the two other leading social sites, Facebook and Twitter. Despite the presence of two job-focused apps — BranchOut and Monster’s BeKnown — the recruiters said Facebook generally had no or very limited impact on their talent acquisition efforts. Facebook’s company pages were given credit for having at least some limited and targeted impacts by about half the respondents. Otherwise, though, three-quarters or more of the recruiting leaders felt it had no impact.

Twitter fared somewhat better, with about half the respondents saying it had some value as a job posting and communication medium. About 40 percent think it of limited value as a direct sourcing tool.

LinkedIn, however, was the clear choice of the leaders. Nearly all of them thought posting jobs on LinkedIn had an impact; with almost 40 percent saying it had a targeted impact. It has even greater impact, said some three-quarters of the respondents, when it comes to searching profiles and sourcing candidates; a quarter reported LinkedIn profile searches had a broad or even extensive impact.

The CareerXroads Sources of Hire survey confirms a Bullhorn report, which, among its conclusions, found LinkedIn to be more effective a candidate source than either Facebook or Twitter.

Bullhorn didn’t report on hires. But on driving views of job postings and applications, it said “LinkedIn is the most productive network overall for driving job views,” and that “LinkedIn drives almost nine times more applications than Facebook and three times more applications than Twitter.”

What I learned recently is that colonoscopies and pre-employment testing have a lot in common. First of all, managers and employees dislike, maybe even detest, the seemingly invasive nature of both evaluations. Second, you can’t fake out the results — what physicians see and personality tests reveal is simply “what it is.” Both assessments, when properly administered, are objective and neutral. Finally, both the colonoscopy and personality tests are critical for detecting or preventing “cancers” from spreading in your body and organization respectively.

How did I come up with this crazy comparison? I’m not sure. Let’s just say the analogy just appeared — one of those “aha” moments — during a conversation with a client. She had just completed an evaluation of several employee assessments for her company.

Here’s a little background that prompted her search.

Several managers, responsible for transportation logistics and safety for a major metropolitan area, are tasked with finding an assessment solution to identify the best job fit for a control operator — the “brains” of their network. A solution must be implemented immediately since human resources is recruiting, operators are retiring, and the pipeline of qualified candidates is nearly dry.

Compounding the problem was an expectation by long-term employees that promotion was near-automatic. In other words, these employees were entitled to the promotion based on tenure. The client astutely recognized that the quality of the talent in the pipeline could not meet the requirements of the job today and the future. As one manager said, “if this was 10 years ago, we’d fill the positions with mediocre candidates who could meet the minimum requirements. Today, the average employee in line to be promoted isn’t prepared or capable of meeting even our lowest expectations.”

According to the client, the performance of recent promotions has been lackluster at best, especially in terms of safety and customer service. The organization needed a better employee screening process and a fair process to justify hiring qualified candidates from outside the organization.

A committee of 10 managers agreed to a core list of essential job skills: critical thinking, crisis management, customer service, and safety focus. Their task? How to assess these skills. I recommended two assessments to start: a 5-factor personality assessment, and general mental abilities test. Two of the managers agreed to be the “guinea pigs” to experience the process through a candidate’s eyes.

Comments during the debrief of these assessments revealed some of the lamest, although common, excuses I’ve heard about why “these assessments won’t work.” This is where the colonoscopy and pre-employment testing comparison comes in.

Most of the attention was focused on the general mental ability test. One manager said, “it was really hard — too hard for our managers.” Similarly the second manager commented, “I felt really dumb after taking it.”

Both comments are ironically interesting: the reading and math component is validated at a ninth to tenth grade level. Were they telling me that a ninth and tentth grade logic and comprehension level was too high a requirement for workers responsible for the safety of thousands of people? Or were they admitting that their talent pool and maybe even the incumbent workforce were not smart enough to do the job? The mental ability test was the right choice but it was going to make their task of finding qualified people even more difficult. But any employer who believes that finding qualified workers for skilled jobs is going to be easy going forward is living in la-la land.

Just for the record: general mental ability tests, often called cognitive or general reasoning tests, aren’t skill tests for math and reading. These tests assess how quickly and accurately people can apply very basic skills when timed. Considering that the task was to assess candidates for the ability to respond safely, accurately, and quickly during a crisis, testing for general mental ability tests was the right choice. Whether the participants find the assessment hard or not and/or make the participant feel “dumb” is irrelevant.

(The same faulty reasoning is offered for avoidance of the colonoscopy. It is really a relatively simple, although highly effective, procedure that saves lives but people avoid it for countless reasons. Denial, however, does not reduce its effectiveness at detecting and preventing cancer.)

Now back to pre-employment assessments … if the results accurately paint a portrait of how the candidate will respond on the job, it’s the right assessment to use and the right thing to do, especially when other people’s lives are at stake.

The concern for safety elicited the second lamest excuse: “our legal department forbids us to use personality testing.” I’m not questioning the attorneys’ concerns with personality testing as a hiring criterion. There is ample reason for them to be cautious. Unfortunately many employers use personality testing inappropriately and for the wrong reasons, giving all types of employee screening a bad rap. But blanket statements about pre-employment personality tests just reveal naiveté or arrogance. Because the risk of using properly selected tools to screen out unsafe or poor fit employees is far smaller than the risk of hiring an unsafe employee who puts the lives of other people in jeopardy.

As the popular saying goes, denial is not a river in Egypt. Denial does not negate the accuracy and reliability of pre-employment assessments (or colonoscopies). Denial does not prevent mistakes and accidents. Mental discomfort, inconvenience, or unexpected results should not preclude hiring managers from using pre-employment testing if the employee assessments reveal the information they need to make the right hiring decisions.

After two years of looking internally to fill vacancies, companies in 2011 again began to hire new workers, relying on referrals and job boards for nearly 50 percent of their external hires.

Social media, though it accounted for only 3.5 percent of those external hires, evidences a much greater impact on hiring than the numbers would suggest, influencing candidates whose hiring ends up being attributed to other sources.

These are but a few of the findings in the just released 2012 CareerXroads Sources of Hire survey. Conducted now for a decade by the talent consultancy of Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, the annual survey queries the recruiting leaders of America’s largest companies about where they source the hires they make. Additional questions touch on emerging trends.

While Crispin and Mehler caution that the results reflect only the hiring practices of the participating companies, the survey has come to be an industry standard, occupying the top Google results for “source of hire,” and is one of the tools recruiters use in developing their own recruiting strategy.

This year’s survey found that in 2011 the 36 participating companies, which collectively have 1.2 million employees, filled 59 percent of their 213,375 openings externally. It’s a dramatic change from the last two years when half the openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

The 18.5 percent drop from 2010, says Crispin, “helps to confirm we are coming out of a recession. It confirms the data we’ve seen this last year.” Still far below 2007 when 72 percent of hires came from outside — “a very hot year,” he notes — it now “looks like we’re getting back to the historic balance.”

Where companies find their new workers hasn’t been changed by either the recession or the recent economic improvement. Referrals accounted for 28 percent of the external hires last year, a percentage largely unchanged over the years. As big a number as that is, it’s probably an undercount, says Crispin.

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Somewhat more volatile — the likely result of more sophisticated tracking — is the percentage of hires coming from job boards. Last year, workers who first applied via a job board were 20.1 percent of the external hires.

Like the referral count, job boards almost certainly should be credited with a larger role in hiring.

“In many, maybe most, hiring, there are multiple influencers,” says Crispin. “The companies are getting better at tracking, but there are more things going on than are trackable.”

A few weeks ago, CareerXroads published a survey on employee referral practices, which suggested that referrals have a much greater impact than the direct counts suggest.

In the source of hire survey, Crispin and Mehler asked recruiting leaders their opinion on the influence of some recruiting channels. As they anticipated, referrals, social media, company career sites, and job boards (among other channels) are believed by the responding leaders to play reciprocal and influencing roles in the recruiting process.

“These are all underlying influencers. They don’t necessarily funnel candidates, but they help lead them to next steps,” says Cripsin, offering this scenario:

A job seeker goes to a job board and sees a job at a company where they previous worked. Now the job board has alerted somebody who used to work there. They go to the company site, because that’s where the posting sends them. But they call a friend who still works there, and the friend makes a referral, because the company pays a bonus.

The source of hire gets listed as ‘referral.’

A job board, says Crispin, “is really a lead; an alert. What do you do with an alert? You go back to the career (center) board.” So, he adds, even though the survey attributes 9.8 percent of the hires to company career sites, “most of them got there some other way. That’s why we asked about the influencers.”

Recruiting leaders told Crispin and Mehler that they believe social media, like job boards, plays a role in many of the sources of hire. For instance, 75 percent of the respondents say job boards influence the hires attributed to company career sites. Social media also exerts an influence on the career sites, say 62.5 percents of the respondents. And, as in Crispin’s scenario, career sites, social media, and job boards influence referrals.

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Of the job boards the survey asked about, Indeed and CareerBuilder turned out to be the most effective. A third of the respondents said CareerBuilder yields between 25 and 50 percent of their job board hires; 9.1 percent said they get as many as 75 percent of their job board hires there.

Indeed, which aggregates jobs from tens of thousands of sites, was every bit as strong a source of job board hires; 32.2 percent of the recruiting leaders reported the site yielded 25-50 percent of their job board hires. Cumulatively, just under 84 percent of the respondents said they got from 1-50 percent of their job board hires from Indeed.

Dice, a niche site specializing in IT positions, was also a strong source of hires, with 58.6 percent of the companies filling up to 10 percent of their positions from Dice. Even Craigslist, a highly local listings site, was cited as a source of hire by nearly 50 percent of the respondents.

Many, perhaps even most, of the hires coming from job boards are the result of job seekers applying to ads. More than two-thirds of the respondents (68.6 percent) said more hires are made from postings than from resume searching. Only 5.7 percent said they make more hires by searching the resume database than by posting jobs.

That’s a significant difference from how recruiters use LinkedIn. There, searching profiles to source candidates has a greater impact than posting jobs, conducting marketing campaigns or company pages.

Tomorrow, part two of this report will focus on social media, intern hiring, and other recruiting influencers.

An IT staffing company you probably haven’t heard of is quickly hiring employees and recruiters after it won some new business that it probably hadn’t dreamed it would.

XpertTech has already grown about 400% in six months money-wise, and in terms of employee size, from 12 employees to 61 employees in six months. Now it’s hiring 30 people in 30 days in the San Francisco Bay area for a mobile phone application project. It’s looking for designers, coders, and others. Joe Budzienski, the company’s executive vice president, is telling candidates, “Whether you have just graduated college and have been developing in your dorm room between classes, or have worked as a senior engineer who realized app development was your true calling, we want to speak with you. The only thing we ask is you live, breathe, and eat APPS!”

“To be trusted with this project is an honor,” says Budzienski. “It’s a very very prominent company, global.” One job listing on LinkedIn suggests the client is a banking company, as do some other posts.

The 30-day hiring blitz started Monday, and XpertTech has hired 12 of the 30 already.

It has received 13 calls today about the job. Though he says “passive recruiting” is on odd phrase and an oxymoron, Budzienski says that’s the route they’re taking. It has 245 open jobs and 38 recruiters who are mainly talking to employed people — not for any reason other than that most mobile-app types are employed.

Budzienski says his firm wants to “take everything we’ve seen wrong with the industry” and not do it. XpertTech is light on salespeople, and heavy on what he calls “relationship people, partner people.”

Though it’s hiring faster than planned, to some degree the firm has been preparing for all this. It had been building up a pipeline of candidates using a system called MaxHire, one that Budzienski gives a “ringing endorsement” and was selected in a process involving 10 original proposals, winnowed down to four, and then two finalists. XpertTech’s careers site will be upgraded soon; the company is working not just on the look and feel, but on integrating job listings with the back end (the API with the CRM, for acronym-ophiles).

Regarding the company’s quick growth and success, Budzienski says “this was never supposed to happen in the business plan, Todd. It’s a little overwhelming but we’re ready for the challenge.”

In today’s roundup we’re going to give you the secret to a more productive workforce. This isn’t one of those five-tip lists that tell you to start by raising the level of engagement.

Nope. The secret we’re going to share is something every company can do and costs nothing, unless you want it to. Even then, it will cost around $5 a year, but give you an ROI of about 50 to 1.

First, Todd insists on sharing about a new recruiting site. Here he is to tell you about it himself.

I was awfully skeptical about JobsMiner when my friend, syndicated columnist Joyce Lain Kennedy, told me about it. Perhaps it’s a numbness to the daily barrage of new recruiting job sites, all claiming to revolutionize job-seeking, save time, money, are gluten free, and so on. I was even less enthused after watching this Miner video, which doesn’t say a whole lot of anything.

That all changed after trying a few searches. Put in a job title and a location, and the site searches social recruiting networks — people’s tweets, for example. Check out the graphic here to see what I’m talking about, and try your own searches on JobsMiner, because they seem to work pretty well.

More Sun=More Productivity

Vitamin D. That’s the secret to improved worker productivity.

“Vitamin D is something you can replenish and have a return on investment in a couple of months,” says Dr. Greg Plotnikoff who is a medical director at the Institute for Health and Healing at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.

In a study published this month in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Plotnikoff and his co-authors conclude: “Low vitamin D status is associated with reduced employee work productivity.”

The impact, in dollars and cents, Plotnikoff insists, ranges from $112 to $370 per employee per year in preventable illness and improved productivity. Boost the vitamin D levels of your employees and depending on how bad off they were before, that can be your savings.

The simplest and cheapest way to do that boosting? Have them get out in the sun every day and show some skin. Suddenly, you now have the kind of ammunition for promoting the company softball team that even a CFO can love.

Speaking of Vitamin D…

We’re going to really force this segue and tell you that Vitamin D is found in eel, salmon, and tuna, which brings us to Intern Sushi. This new site from a team of Hollywood types allows potential interns to make a one-minute video, and to manage the process of finding an internship. Employers view, track, and hire applicants, and can use the back end once the intern is hired to communicate with them.

For $8.99/month, intern-seekers can get premium features such as 48 hours’ advance notice of internship listings. “That’s the price of two lattes a month,” Intern Sushi tells prospects. We’re thinking those are some awfully pricey lattes.

No Jive. Jibe Goes Enterprise

When we saw the email about Jibe launching some new tools, our first thought was, “You mean this is new?” Our ignorance is forgivable since it has been two years when last we wrote about the social recruiting company. And that was just when it launched.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since then. The social recruiting scene has become a crowded place, with sites and services like BranchOut and BeKnown jumping in. Early movers like Jobvite keep improving.

What we liked about Jibe back in the day still makes it attractive, only more so now that those clever folks have (finally) made it possible for all the social activity to take place elsewhere, other than on Jibe.com.

Now, instead of making job seekers come to Jibe, when a Jibe job interests them they can find out who they know at the company right then and there, by clicking the “Get Referred” button.

The other two products are more functional than social. Jibe Apply is a mobile optimization tool for employers whose ATS is too lame to accept applications from a tablet or smartphone. (More than a few you are in that boat.) Jibe Post is a job posting distribution tool, also for those ATSs that struggle with getting your posting to just a few sites.

Jibe also named three new Monster ex-pats to senior jobs.

Short Takes

Indeed, the job listings aggregator, launched Company Pages in the last week. They’re a mashup of Facebook’s company profiles and a Glassdoor page.

theFIT is another of the social sites that takes at least some of its cues from Yelp and Quora. Bullhorn, which launched it a week or two ago, describes it as “a career site that finally fulfills the needs of job seekers and the 80 percent of people who are not looking for a new job …. helps you get inside the heads of current or prospective co-workers by asking burning questions that reveal the true story of a workplace.”

I continue to be impressed by the evolution of pre-employment assessment tools. This evolution is being driven by the continued growth of the value proposition assessment provides. As a result, an increasing number of new product include embedded assessments designed to help predict which applicants have the best chance of success.

This past year has brought a proliferation of firms that are using assessments to provide a new twist on matching online job applicants with job openings (and conversely allowing firms to match their job openings to candidate data residing in a database).

To understand the origin of Internet based matching, one has to turn the clock back about 15 years to the dawn of the job board. Job boards provided arguably the biggest overall change to the status quo for the way — both in the way people are hired because of the increased ability for individuals to find out about job opportunities, as well as for those hiring, to locate viable candidates.

Things have not changed much as even in the present day. The basic Internet job search equation involves a matching process in which each party provides information about who they are and what they are looking for. Behind-the-scenes algorithms living on servers evaluate the data provided by each party and calculate a match.

Although the job boards would argue otherwise, my basic description of the matching process used by most of them can be summed up with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.”

I believe this is because most job boards do not really approach the matching process in a manner that uses what we I/O psychologists know about predictive science. The result is that while there are pockets of effectiveness, big job boards continue to be a source of noise for hiring personnel because they tend to deliver quantity over quality. This noise requires organizations to have strong capabilities for screening candidates at volume. Unfortunately, few companies have this capability, and even for those that do, the statistical chances of making a good hire go down each time an unqualified applicant enters into the hiring process.

I have ranted about the ineffectiveness of the matching process used by job boards again and again over the years and it seems that others are starting to agree with me. The difference between me and them is that they have begun to put their money where their (and my) mouths are by investing heavily in the creation of new businesses devoted to delivering candidate quality through matching that uses predictive assessments.

How Do These Sites Work?

An important difference between these companies and other assessment firms is that, for the most part, these companies provide matching that is part of the search process (as opposed to part of the application process). Their goal is to help companies stack the odds in their favor through a matching process that supplies candidates who have the best chance of being a good hire for a specific position.

There are a few variations on the basic theme, but these sites are all based on the concept of providing accurate matching using various pieces of information that help users to predict which persons are a match for a given situation, or vice versa.

One excellent analogy for the way these sites work is online dating sites. Back in 2005 I wrote about the parallel between online job matching and online dating and this analogy continues to work.

Both job matching sites and online dating sites work via the following process:

• Users are looking for a new situation of some sort
• Users define who they are (and what they are looking for in some cases) based on the information requested by the system. This is usually based on a profile creation process
• Users search for matches to their needs via the comparison of their profiles to those of others stored in the database.
• Results are returned electronically with some basic information about why the match was suggested (alignment in key areas indicated to be of a high level of importance).

In online dating all the matching process does is narrow down the database from millions to a few. Once this initial match is made, it is still up to the individual to communicate and evaluate the effectiveness of the match (usually by flirting and then going on some dates).

Hiring is no different. After the match is returned, the actual hiring process is used to evaluate mutual compatibility and to make important decisions about entering into a relationship.

The main way that online job matching sites are differentiated is by the information they use as inputs to their matching equations. Some use information that is provided by assessment tools that were developed using an accepted scientific process. Others do not, favoring the use of a variety of other types of information that may be relevant (past job experience, salary requirements, geographic location, favorite color, hobbies, etc.).

A thorough review of all the specific models being tried (some of which I’ve advised or consulted for) is beyond the scope of this article, as my focus is specifically on those models that use some form of assessment tool to help with the matching process. In these models, part of the profile creation process involves the individual completing assessment tools that provide a way to measure them on key attributes (personality, intelligence, skills, etc) to understand who they are and what they bring to the table. These sites may also use assessments to profile job seekers using a set of work-related values or preferences (autonomy, social responsibility, innovation, etc.) to determine what is most important to them in a job. Employers provide the other side of the matching data by indicating which attributes they feel are most important for performing a specific job or by profiling the values that the organization supposedly holds.

Are These Sites Really Effective?

I think that the jury is still out on the effectiveness of these sites. I am going to guess that as the data rolls in, some will be much more effective than others. Overall, many of these sites will eventually demonstrate a level of impact that is greater than that of sites using coarse keyword searches.

However, users of these sites should have realistic expectations. We have to take these sites for what they are: a relatively coarse matching tool that can be implemented quickly with a low cost. When it comes to assessments, you get what you pay for, and quick and easy matching is not going to tell you everything you need to know or ensure you make a good hire. Effective prediction requires precision; precision requires detailed effort. The more corners you cut, the less effective the results.

You still have to flirt and go on dates to figure out who you want to marry! The best value from these sites is allowing you to narrow down the pool from all the fish in the sea to those fish who have potential to thrive in your pond.

Here are a few factors that will impact the success of matches made using these sites:

1. Quality of the assessment tool included: The better constructed the tool and the more research behind its effectiveness, the better the matching will be.
2. Thoroughness of the definition process used by the company side: One potential shortcoming of this method is that the company-side profiles jobs based on the input of one or a few individuals. If these individuals are off base with their data, the accuracy of the whole process is compromised.
3. Niche focus on one job or industry: Focusing on a niche allows for a deeper level of knowledge about what it takes to perform a specific job well and what predicts specific traits lead to success.
4. Additional data collected: The quality, thoroughness, and relevance of the non-assessment related data used as part of the matching process will also impact the accuracy of matches.
5. Ability to demonstrate that those hired using their system are “quality hires”? The more evidence that shows that matching impacts outcomes, the more effective the system at achieving its goals.

What You Need to Know

For job seekers: Go ahead and try. It can’t hurt. These sites all have some specific twist on the matching process, and there is value in interfacing with all of them as a learning experience. One of the big draws for job seekers is that these sites will give you information back to help compel you to make an investment in creating a profile. This information is usually in the form of a developmental report that is based on the assessment. This is valuable information for job seekers to help you understand themselves. It is unheard of for companies to share the results of assessments used in the hiring process with applicants, so as an applicant this may be your only shot at seeing your assessment results. Also, these sites can help you find jobs for which you are actually qualified — so it’s worth the time, but be ready for imperfect matches. Expect some error, albeit less than that of the big job boards. Don’t spend a dime to use these systems. They should be free.

Employers: Go ahead and try it. It can’t hurt. But remember that these sites will likely reduce your hiring error rate but they will not erase it. These sites are an excellent way to feed a more developed and focused assessment program that resides within your actual hiring process. Also be very aware of the importance of the accuracy of the profile parameters that you set. If this process is off base, the results will suffer. A few of matching companies help with this issue by using databases of information about the competencies that are critical for specific jobs based on information collected over the years by various sources. This removes the profile definition process from the employer, which can be helpful in some situations. If you are in a small- to medium-sized business, these sites can be an inexpensive way to find talent.

These sites will matter in the future, and make money, but it will take some time. When you boil it down, these sites create value in two ways. The first is in their candidate database. No companies will invest money to access an empty database. The big guys (Monster) can attest to the fact that the value of the business is in the size of the candidate database. The second way these firms generate value is via their impact on quality of hire. Unfortunately, most firms don’t measure quality of hire or trace it far enough back to understand the impact of their sourcing methods on it. So the real winners will be the ones who are able to figure out how to go viral so that they fill their database with candidate information, allowing them some bait to lure in companies who will pay for access. Unfortunately, quality of hire, while quite important, will likely always take a back seat to database size mostly because of how much harder it is to quantify.

Sit back and enjoy the coming onslaught of these companies. Look for one whose business model makes sense to you and give it a try. You have almost nothing to lose and some good employees to gain.

Having worked with and trained many recruiters and owner/ managers all over the world, it is clear to me that almost universally, the first improvement that can be made is in actually measuring performance. It probably won’t surprise most people that with rare exception, in the recruitment industry globally appraisals are at best a “congratulations you’ve hit your target for the quarter, let’s increase by 10% next quarter and good luck,” and at worst non-existent.

Somewhere in the middle is an appraisal that only gets pulled out of the drawer when someone is not hitting their targets. Often called a “performance improvement plan,” or cynically a “you’ll be fired if you don’t achieve this” plan, it usually only monitors quantitative measures, and is rarely supported by adequate training. It could be argued that the managers and owners themselves need to go on a performance improvement plan at the same time to observe and improve upon their influence over their underperforming team member.

It surprises me further how managers expect their teams to perform when they themselves are too busy hitting their own revenue targets. There’s a clue in the title given to those responsible for a team of performers: manager. You have to manage their performance and every aspect of it.

To do that, like with the athletes, we need to know and be able to measure the inputs.

Quantitative Measures

The ultimate quantitative measure is of course revenue. How each individual recruiter achieves that end goal can be very different. Take the IT sector. Someone placing help desk analysts is going to have to place a lot more in volume than a recruiter placing IT directors. Other quantitative elements can be anything in numbers that leads to this revenue. What’s important here though is the quality. If we break down the recruitment process we can form a neat reverse chronological list of steps taken and ultimately inputs to measure. Client offers, client interviews (with your candidates), candidates submitted to the client, your candidate interviews, business development calls, marketed candidates, number of detailed reference checks. Some would even argue that the number of calls or time on the phone are good measures.

These numbers and measures in themselves are less relevant than what the ratios between the numbers actually mean. For example, what percentage of your candidates are being called for interviews? What percentage of your offers are being accepted? When we know these ratios, we can begin to understand where improvements can be made.

Qualitative Measures

These measures are much more subjective, but that should not prevent you from trying to measure them. As a recruiter you need to be honest with yourself here and as a manager you need to invest time with your team to be able to make an informed judgement on these qualitative measures.

One simple way to approach it is to break it down into Client Development, Candidate Development, Administration and Work Ethic. For each of the four headings, break down and list the elements of the role. For example, with clients you can break it down into 12 elements:

Client Identification, Client Planning and Strategy, Name Gathering, Client Knowledge, Call Objectives, Call Execution, Closing, Meeting Planning, Meeting Control, Listening Skills, Fee Discussion, Follow Up.

Work Ethic for example may be broken down into:

Urgency, Focus, Time Management, Role Prioritisation, Planning, Attitude, Team Player.

What is important is that for each element, there is a 1-10 scale for recruiters and managers to mark. This can be achieved for taking two extremes for each part. Its very simple. Some examples are provided in the graphic (click to enlarge):

Clearly these are subjective, but conducting this appraisal on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis in itself helps to refocus a recruiter on all elements of the job.

In Practice

Who likes to be micro-managed by their boss? Nobody, I’m guessing (there may be exceptions). It’s human nature to want to feel in control and dislike someone watching over you the whole time. We all want to be in charge of our own destiny and have autonomy in our decision making.

The beauty of a well-put-together appraisal system is that as recruiters, you’re micro managing yourself so your boss doesn’t have to, and then everyone’s a winner. Why would you not want to know every single piece of data that could possibly help you increase your performance? You get the vital data you need to know where you’re falling short and where to make improvements, and also your manager gets the same information so they can help you devise a training plan to improve on your shortcomings.

A well-written appraisal should be laid out with the following elements:

Quantitative results from previous period (goal versus actual), e.g:

Revenue, placements, offers, second/final stage interviews, first interviews, candidates submitted, candidates interviewed (by consultant), client meetings, reference checks completed.

Qualitative results from previous period

See some of the examples above provided in the graphic for client development, candidate development, administration, and work ethic (lots more are listed in a full appraisal)

• Revision of action points from previous appraisal

• Proposal for action points for following period based on results – commitments

• Key areas of focus for next period

This document should also be revised as part of a monthly one-to-one, so it’s not a surprise every three or six months when you dust off the old appraisal document.

Key tips for successful appraisals

• Break it down to include both quantitative and qualitative measures along with commitments for the coming period

• Conduct a full appraisal on a bi-yearly basis with shorter ones quarterly and use the document as a tool for ongoing monthly one to ones.

As a recruiter

• Manage yourself before you get managed — embrace appraisals to help guide your success

• If there’s not an adequate quarterly or bi-yearly appraisal system in place, take the initiative to make it happen

• Ask for your managers’ time and use it wisely. If you’re not being trained adequately, ask. Managers should be supporting, guiding, and training you.

As a manager

• Dedicate time to conducting the appraisal and follow up with training, you will have better results and better staff retention

• Keep the inputs being measured the same for everyone but treat the results as unique to individuals

Above all else, remember this not just about performance. It’s about providing a great quality of service to your clients and candidates and playing your part in continuing to improve the perception of our industry through better quality in everything we do as recruiters.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Law schools across the country are being sued by graduates who claim they were misled into believing that a law degree would be their ticket to a well-paying career.

The 73 plaintiffs, many of who say they’ve been unable to find a job in their field or have had to settle for poorly paying legal work, allege the schools fudged their employment stats in order to attract applicants. The suits claim schools relied on self-reported income by small numbers of alums and counted as employed any graduate doing any kind of work.

“It’s a failure to disclose that the majority of their students fail to obtain jobs for which their degree is required or preferred,” says New York attorney David Anziska, who organized the nationwide legal campaign. “Students wound up paying inflated tuitions based on what we believe are overly broad — or in many cases downright false –placement statistics.”

In the suit against Brooklyn Law School, the four grads charge the school advertised that more than 88 percent of its alums had jobs within nine months of graduation. The lawsuit charges the school included in its count every student working in any kind of job, including part-time and temporary work outside the field.

One of the four, Adam Bevelacqua, said he racked up tens of thousands of dollars of debt to attend the school, but has yet to find a job in the profession. In the court papers he said he “specifically relied on Brooklyn Law’s representation that, depending on the year, well over 90 percent of Brooklyn Law graduates secured employment within nine months of graduation.”

Twelve suits filed this month join three filed last year. More should be expected, Anziska told The National Law Journal. “Our goal is that every few months we will file between 20 and 25 lawsuits. The key, right now, is to bring as many law schools as possible into the fray.”

Connie Mayer, interim president and dean of Albany Law School, one of those sued this month, said the school followed the reporting requirements set by the American Bar Association. “We have documentation that supports the accuracy of our data,” she said.

Her comments were echoed by representatives of several of the other schools being sued. Leslie Steinberg, associate dean for public affairs at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said, “We’ve always provided accurate data … we gather as much information as comprehensively as possible. We update our Web site when more information becomes available.”

Accurate reporting and adherence to ABA requirements has so far been the main defense of all 15 schools. If the historical data is generally correct, even if recent data differs, the schools could be off the hook, say experts versed in insurance and education issues.

“The economy turned so quickly that, as long as these schools didn’t inflate their numbers for the class of 2011 when these students entered in 2009, I would expect that to be a defense,” said J.C. Wileman, a Los Angeles-based senior VP with Lockton Cos. LLC’s higher education practice. “I would predict that if schools are still accurate within reason on their statistics, they’ll probably get off on the bad economy defense.”

The schools sued to date are: Albany Law School; Brooklyn Law School; California Western School of Law; Chicago-Kent College of Law; Thomas M. Cooley School of Law; DePaul University College of Law; Florida Coastal School of Law; Golden Gate University School of Law; Hofstra University School of Law; Thomas Jefferson School of Law; The John Marshall Law School; New York Law School; University of San Francisco School of Law; Southwestern Law School; and Widener University School of Law.

Marine Drive - Mumbai

After declining for about three years, India’s popularity as an outsourcing hotspot for tech companies has increased sharply.

That’s according to BDO USA, an accounting/consulting organization, in a poll of 100 U.S. technology CFOs.

Current outsourcing destinations 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 Canada 11% 9% 11% 4% 17% China 39% 35% 44% 19% 46% Eastern Europe 14% 9% 17% 12% 19% India 62% 29% 36% 50% 60% Latin America 6% 9% 22% 8% 19% Southeast Asia 23% 24% 36% 31% 50% U.S. 5% 6% 11% 8% N/A Western Europe 29% 24% 22% 19% 21%

BDO also found that:

• Overseas tech outsourcing in general is way down. Thirty-two percent of respondents say they currently outsource services or manufacturing outside of the U.S., compared to 62 percent in 2009.
• IT, not manufacturing, is more often the outsourced task of choice. Manufacturing “went from being the most commonly outsourced function in 2011 (53 percent), 2010 (51 percent), and 2009 (54 percent), to the least cited outsourced function in 2012 (33 percent),” BDO says. This may be tied to the natural disasters in Thailand and Japan in 2011.
• Latin American and Western Europe outsourcing could grow. Of the 32 percent of CFOs currently outsourcing, Latin America is the one country or region most being considered for future outsourcing. A year ago, nine percent saw Latin America as a top future destination, and now 23% do. It’s a similar, even more dramatic story, with Western Europe: 3% projected it as a top future spot a year ago, and 20% do now.

That famous “what’s your biggest weakness?” question may be more ubiquitous than a Grande Frappucino, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good at determining whether someone’s a good candidate or not.

Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ and author of a book called Hiring for Attitude, says this question and many others used every day should be placed in the dustbin of history. It’s about a 7-minute video, below.

During the six years I led talent acquisition for Deloitte New Zealand, much of our employment brand strategy revolved around humanizing our brand and creating an engaged talent community. We aimed to do this through allowing people to experience our culture and what it was really like to work at Deloitte NZ. We did this through social media initiatives and other means. Our culture and value proposition appealed to some and not to others — this was our aim and I believe it was successful.

So we had this engaged talent community — that’s great, what’s next?

Recruiting Needs to Look Outside of Recruitment

Fellow Kiwi Paul Jacobs (@pauljacobs4real) has often said to me that corporate recruiting needs to look outside of its own field for real opportunities, ideas, and inspiration to innovate and add value.

2011 was the final year of my MBA study; one of the real benefits of this time was that I read daily about new thinking coming out of other business disciplines and sectors. A trending topic that resonated with me was how thinking and practice around corporate social responsibility is evolving.

I was hooked on this topic after reading the article Creating Shared Value by Harvard Professor Michael Porter and Managing Director of FSG (Foundation Strategy Group) Mark Kramer. They describe the shared value approach as different from more traditional corporate social responsibility as its emphasis is on delivering an economic return to the company while it delivers a positive social impact.

Put at the core of business strategy, rather than the periphery, shared value has the potential to drive value for business and society. In this respect, business should view social responsibility as an opportunity to increase economic return rather than an obligation or an expense aimed at creating a better brand image.

Shared Value Recruiting

I am certain there is an opportunity for recruiting as an industry to spearhead this new approach through innovation and collaboration. The focus must be commercial, and there are sound reasons for recruiting leaders to consider this approach:

• Employees and job seekers want employers to be doing meaningful work in this space
• Create brand influence and job seeker engagement through allowing an opportunity for talent communities to be involved in your socially responsible initiatives
• Engage job seekers who have a greater alignment to your companies values and culture
• Ultimately the aim is to create a deeper engagement with your brand and drive better quality of hire

This is not a fad; some of the world’s largest household names are adopting this approach. Companies are increasingly placing social responsibility at the core of their business strategies and they require aligned talent who can drive these strategies and maintain their competitive advantage. Surely this is where we as recruiters come in!

Just prior to me leaving Deloitte NZ in October 2011 we developed and initiated a collaborative project with shared value thinking as a foundation of our talent attraction strategy. The aims are simple:

• Create brand influence, drive deeper levels of engagement, find more suitable candidates, have better offer to acceptance ratios and drive increased quality of hire
• Provide increased value to our talent community
• Provide increased value to society

I’ll be discussing the Deloitte NZ journey and this model in more detail during my session at the ERE Spring Conference. The aim of this initiative is to shift the Deloitte NZ talent community to a talent movement — an engaged and energised community that has a purpose.

The New Normal

The world is changing, society is changing and business is changing. Recruitment leaders shouldn’t be responding to this business change. We should be leading it. The opportunity is there for corporate recruiting to innovate and act commercially and strategically — for the good of the businesses we serve, the markets we operate in and the society we live in.

Mobile technology especially the apps that go hand-in-hand with portable devices, is fueling tech hiring this year, as companies scramble to build out their mobile capability.

Just over half (54 percent) of IT leaders surveyed for the quarterly TEKsystems’ Executive Outlook Survey will implement some mobile initiative during the year, with more healthcare leaders (76 percent) planning projects than those in any other sector.

Mobile apps are among the leading projects, according to CIOs polled by Robert Half Technology. Twenty-two percent of them say they’ll be developing a mobile application for their company before the end of the year. Besides getting their development teams, the biggest challenge, say 28 percent of the CIOs, is finding and hiring IT staff with the necessary skills.

“Building mobile applications requires intense collaboration between numerous groups within the organization, including marketing, IT, operations and sales,” said John Reed, executive director of Robert Half Technology. “It’s important for mobile application developers to have strong soft skills, in addition to the ability to write code and test and debug software applications.”

The TEKsystems survey reported a similar result. More than half — 53 percent — of the 1,500+ IT managers and directors and some CTOs and CIOs in the survey ranked finding mobile app developers as a 7 or higher on a 1 to 10 scale. Only a handful of skill sets got a similar ranking, and these included such specialties as enterprise, data, and cloud architects and security professionals.

Ever since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, mobile applications have moved front and center. A TechNet research paper by Dr. Michael Mandel, senior Fellow, Mack Center for Technological Innovation at The Wharton School, says that in less than five years the mobile software industry has added 466,000 jobs, 311,000 of them at companies developing apps, with the balance considered “spillover” jobs. Of all those jobs, about 155,000 are purely technical staff.

No wonder then that TEKsystems found 76 percent of IT leaders say the widespread use of smart devices and tablets is having a “high impact” or an “extremely high impact” on their organization. Cloud computing, the other hot IT area, was a distant second, with 58 percent of leaders expecting it to have those kinds of impacts.

While mobile projects may be at the top of IT project lists overall, the TEKsystems outlook reports 44 percent of IT leaders say they’ll spend more on infrastructure and 40 percent say they’ll be spending on application services. Budgets for 53 percent of them will be higher. Only 21 percent expect theirs to shrink.

The biggest challenge to success, say 56 percent of the IT leaders, is having the necessary staff. More than a third of the leaders in the survey say they’ll be adding headcount by the end of March. Thirty-five percent expect to make permanent hires; 34 percent say they’ll bring in temps.

Everyone knows what it means to reboot your computer, but what does it mean when you reboot your entire workforce?

It’s no secret that the speed of change in business is incredibly fast. And as a result products, operational processes, customer expectations, and even business models are constantly changing. Every time one of these business factors is upgraded, it simultaneously requires the raising of the needed skills and the expected performance levels of the employees. Whenever skill requirements and performance levels are raised, the normal practice is to expect your current workforce to adapt and to meet those higher expectations through additional training.

But what would you do in a business situation where instead of the occasional need for incremental change, you were faced with a business environment that demanded both continuous and rapid change. You could call it chaotic change: a situation where products, customers, competitors, operational processes, and performance expectations needed to be constantly improved to the point where even with training, most of your current employees simply couldn’t handle it. When corporate leadership insists that in order to be successful “everything must change,” should “everything” include changing or “rebooting” the entire workforce?

What Does Rebooting Your Workforce Mean?

There are two categories of rebooting the workforce. The first is a situation where the current workforce has simply failed in its performance.

For example, this month, the school superintendent removed and then replaced the entire 150-person teaching and administrative staff at the Miramonte School in LA because of their failure to effectively handle student abuse issues. Similar rebooting has occurred within failed sports teams and at Cabela’s sporting-goods. The second category of rebooting may also involve performance issues, but the primary driver is the fact that the organization is faced with a completely new business environment. And in order to succeed, it needs a level of performance and skills that most of the current workforce simply cannot provide.

The Case of Wendy’s Rebooting its Workforce

The Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain is a bottom performer in its industry. It has more than 64,000 employees and its revenue per employee is $45,590 (compared to 400,000 employees and a markedly higher revenue per employee of $65,900 at McDonald’s). The industry itself is facing dramatic challenges from previously unheard of areas including new competitors for ready-prepared foods like Starbucks, Fresh & Easy, and even Costco. Customer expectations for food have also expanded dramatically to the point where the range of products as expanded to a wide range including breakfast, luxury products, healthy and sustainable products, and high-end coffee products. In order to be competitive, stores must be dramatically remodeled and marketing has to be improved and expanded so it goes beyond traditional advertising outlets (including social media).

In late January, the CEO, Emil Brolick announced a plan that requires literally everything to improve dramatically. All employees must be capable of providing dramatically increased levels of customer service, they must be able to continually learn new processes, and how to handle and sell completely new products. As a result, the CEO has declared that only “five-star athletes” are capable of handling these complex and ever-changing set of new requirements. To meet the changing needs, a key part of his plan is “rebooting” the workforce. Which to him means it will be necessary to re-interview every employee and manager and then only retaining those few individuals who meet the new “five-star athletes” standard.

15 Reasons Why Rebooting Your Workforce May Be Necessary and Beneficial

Cleaning house and starting fresh is certainly not a new concept. It is, however, certainly unusual to “clean out” your entire workforce. Some of the reasons that support this dramatic move include:

Reasons You May Need Completely Different Workers

1. As competitors change, the type of employees need to change also — if your organization is now competing against completely new competitors or even firms in different industries, it will require employees with a broader range of skills and the ability to compete. Hiring employees away from these competitors may be a more effective approach than trying to retrain your current employees.
2. An increased need for innovators — if your organization’s new goal is to dominate your industry like Apple does, you will need to dramatically ramp up your innovation rates. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that you have innovators in your current workforce (they simply weren’t needed) and developing innovators is problematic. As a result, external recruiting may be the only option for dramatically increasing the percentage of innovators in your workforce.
3. New technology, products, and processes may require agile employees — an environment that includes constantly changing technology, processes, and a continual stream of new products may require a different kind of employee: one who is agile. Some individuals are just fast learners with the agility and speed to rapidly accept and perform after major changes, while other employees simply can’t handle a fast paced environment. Because the previous business model didn’t require agility, it is unlikely that many of your current workers will have the new required agility level.
4. Current employee burnout may not be fixable — in some jobs (i.e. french fry cook), job burnout or extreme boredom may be unavoidable. As a result, many of your long-term employees may be burned out. Once they reach that stage, they may not be fixable and under the new expectations, you have no choice but to replace them. Fortunately, the fast pace of change in the new work environment may help to reduce burn out.

Reasons You May Need Completely Different Skill Sets, Attitudes, and Performance Levels

1. Current employees may not be able to meet your expected performance levels – if you expect a significant (i.e. 20% or more) improvement in organizational performance, improving employee performance by at least that amount must be part of the plan. If your previous hiring and retention practices resulted in a workforce comprised of average performers (three star performers), it may be too expensive and time consuming to raise their performance level. And there is another possibility, and that is that these average performers have no interest in ramping up their performance. Or even worse, the individual simply might not be capable of dramatically raising their performance. For example if no one on your basketball team is taller than six feet but new competition requires that you have seven-foot players, no amount of training, incentives, or coaching will turn a six-foot player into a seven-foot one. Your only real option is recruiting a group of seven-foot players.
2. Current employees may be unable to ramp up their skill levels — the continuous introduction of new products, processes, and technology will require completely different and often higher levels of skills. Current employees might not have the capacity to raise their skills to the needed levels.
3. Retraining may not work — although retraining is a traditional solution to upgrading your workforce, raising the skills of current employees may be expensive compared to hiring during a time when there is an abundance of highly skilled talent in the workforce due to the weak economy. Retraining is also time-consuming and it may not meet the timetable set for the overall corporate transformation. One final problem is that the retraining might not work, so you will end up hiring replacements anyway.
4. Employees may be unable to change their attitudes — employee attitudes will also have to improve dramatically. After years of being allowed to work “with a bit of an attitude,” your current employees may be unwilling or unable to change their work attitude and commitment.

HR-related Reasons Why You May Need to Reboot Your Workforce

1. A superior workforce is hard copy — part of your overall corporate improvement plan would include gaining a competitive advantage in every area. In the case of restaurants and pre-prepared food providers, buildings, products, marketing, and equipment can be easily copied but a fast-learning agile top-performing workforce is hard to duplicate. This competitive “people advantage” is hard to duplicate even when other firms know how your HR operates. For example, even though books have been written on their people management practices, no competitor has been able to duplicate the innovative and productive workforces at Apple, Google, or Facebook.
2. Your employer branding may require a dramatic shock — after years of hiring average people, your employer brand image could be rock-bottom and as a result, recruiting top performers may not be possible. This is especially true in retail, where potential applicants have numerous chances to interact directly with your current workforce. Given this negative image, it may take a dramatic and public move like “rebooting your entire workforce” to send a message to top performers that things have changed and that if you work here, you will be working alongside the best.
3. With tenure, employee ROI may flatline – although it’s not true in every case, research has shown that it’s not uncommon for employee performance to level off after a few years of tenure in the job. This may be especially true for dull, routine, and low-paying jobs. With periodic raises over time, longer-tenured employees become more expensive, so you need to make sure that their performance and skill matches their higher pay level. With high unemployment rates, the ROI may be higher and it may be easy to increase employee productivity (i.e. costs versus the value of their output) by externally recruiting replacements with the appropriate skills, attitudes, and performance levels. Incidentally, even the “top graded” new-hires may reach this costs/output plateau, so the recruiting process will also have to be upgraded.
4. High-performers may not cost any more — in the quick service restaurant industry, paying the minimum wage is common. As a result, there may be little or no pay differential between average and top performers. If top performers cost no more, it makes economic sense to hire and retain only top performers.
5. Job security may be part of the problem — if you want continual improvement, offering too much job security may actually cause people to reduce their performance because there are no negative consequences from “staying the same.” If rebooting the workforce is a continuous process, this threat may increase the likelihood that your employees will maintain a high level of performance.
6. Homer Simpson may work here — under the old environment, there were certainly an absence of a performance culture. As a result, it was unlikely that poor performers were identified and released. Under the new performance culture, improved performance management processes may help you find slackers and individuals who are good at hiding their weak performance and their inappropriate skill set.
7. Keeping ahead of the competition when rebooting becomes common – although Wendy’s is currently taking the lead in rebooting its workforce, if it is successful, other firms will surely follow. If you expect to stay ahead of your competitors, now might be the appropriate time to begin planning at least a partial “reboot” of your workforce.

Final Thoughts

Historically, the typical HR response during a business downturn was to protect jobs and to “place people first.” Because we are all people, that may be a natural response. There is of course some logic in retaining the employees who you have invested so heavily in. However, if the issue was instead equipment like computers, it would not be unusual for executives to order the complete replacement of all obsolete computers.

So the question arises, “has the economic and business environment changed so dramatically that the time has come where rebooting the entire workforce should become a standard practice?” I have included the many negatives related to this practice in this article but it is clear to me that a trend has begun. If the practice’s proliferates, the remaining question is, “Are you bold enough and then do you have the courage and the ‘cojones’ to even raise the topic with your executives?”

Video didn’t kill the radio star and it hasn’t killed the job boards so far, but another new career site would like to take a chunk of their business. This startup hopes to marry video, screening, and job searching. Ring a bell? Well, we were talking about something a little similar two weeks ago.

That company, Get Hired, was really more of an applicant tracking system, with an emphasis on audio and video — and more. This one’s goals are less massive. It’s called Spark Hire, and it has received a million dollars in angel funding from private investors.

Like with other career sites, job seekers can search for jobs, of course. They can also record a 60-second video about themselves.

As for employers, they can do a number of things, some commonly found on other sites, some not.

They can set up a company page, post jobs, showcase their recruiters, do q-and-a sessions with candidates, add a company video, and talk amongst themselves about how the search is going. They can also look through those 60-second profiles I mentioned above. Or, they can send out a question to a bunch of candidates, and have them all respond with a video answer. The system also allows them to do live, split-screen video interviews.

Right now, on Spark Hire, you’ll be able to post, screen, and interview for free. Marketing Coordinator Adeel Alam tells me that Spark Hire wants to build up a good inventory of jobs, and job seekers, and later charge for postings, online interviews, and more, including online advertising on the site. It’s set to launch today.

Here’s a link to a Forbes magazine article that was pushed to me last month (January 27, 2012) by LinkedIn Today, highlighting why 46% of all new hires fail. The point of the article was to introduce a “radical” new approach to selection based on Mark Murphy’s new book Hiring for Attitude. The key point of the book and the article is that lack of proper attitude, not skills, is the primary contributor to weak performance. The author is only partially right.

For one thing the idea proposed is far from radical. There have been many other books over the past 10-15 years including the Amazon best-sellers Hire With Your Head (for full disclosure — this is mine) and Top Grading that espouse similar themes. For another, and far more important reason, he mistook cause for effect.

I absolutely agree that a bad attitude is an extremely common hiring problem, but the bad attitude was caused by a lack of job fit, not the other way around. Bad fit is a multi-headed monster, including a bad fit with the manager, the team, the job itself, the company’s culture, the company’s growth rate, and the underlying business environment. There are probably a few more “lack of …” factors that could have been cited, but these represent the 80/20 rule and the primary cause of a bad attitude.

Consider this: even highly motivated people with a track record of success can develop bad attitudes and become disruptive workers when they don’t work well with their boss, when the job promised is different than the one taken, or the resources needed to do the job right are not provided. In most cases, the person got the bad attitude as a result of these underlying root cause issues. So to solve this problem make sure the person you hire fits the situation from top to bottom. Now that’s radical.

The graphic provides a means to visualize this job fit problem. (Here’s a link to a short video for a more detailed explanation.) The key point: for every hire, you need to ensure alignment top to bottom with the company, the job, the hiring manager, and the person’s ability, motivation, personality, and management needs. Due to rapidly changing business conditions getting this vertical alignment correct is nearly impossible, so you need to select people who also have the ability to move laterally in a variety of different environments. It’s this lack of lateral ability that cause the fit problem and results in a bad attitude. Here’s why:

Company Culture and Rate of Change: This factor is largely dependent on the company’s rate of growth and where it is on the corporate life cycle, somewhere between a resource poor startup to a rule-bound bureaucracy, and both moving toward the center. Obviously few people can thrive in all of these types of environments; that’s why the person has to be assessed on this environmental and cultural measure.

Job Type and Degree of Structure: Jobs have a pace of their own that often collides with the needs of the company’s culture and pace. For example, creative jobs tend to be loose and free flowing, whereas operations and accounting tend to be highly structured. Marketing, sales, and design positions tend to fall somewhere between these extremes. Irrespective of the person in the role, there’s often a natural conflict between the company pace and culture and the job type itself. Adding the wrong person into the fray complicates matters even further. For examples, accountants don’t do too well in startups and independent salespeople fight process and detailed reporting.

Manager Style and Personality: While we’re at it, let’s throw the hiring manager’s style into the job fit mix. The graph shows the manager style extremes from controlling to hands-off and the in-betweens: supervising, training, delegating, and coaching. The best managers have the ability to flex across most of the styles based on the circumstances and the type of people they’re managing. Unfortunately, most managers have a narrower range of ability and get frustrated and prickly when dealing with staff members and issues that conflict with their natural style. Most people would agree that the manager-new hire relationship is the primary cause of employee dissatisfaction. That’s why getting this part of the fit equation right is essential.

Subordinate Style and Personality: Fitting the employee to the job, the manager, and the company is no easy matter, but it’s made worse when generic competency models and behavioral interviewing are used without considering these fit issues. The fit with the hiring manager can be determined by finding out what types of managers the person has worked best with to see if the person can work equally well with all types of managers or if the range is narrower. The best hires are those who can work in all types of environments and with all styles of managers. Few meet this standard, but you should know ahead of time where lack of job fit will become unmanageable. (Watch the video to see a great example of how to address this.)

Since many people, me included, have been writing about this problem for years, including a Fortune cover story in the ’90s on the “bad attitude” problem, “radical” is too strong a term for the importance of assessing it. Essential is a better name for the need to access job and cultural fit before you hire the person. Regardless of what you call it, measuring fit across all job dimensions needs to part of any assessment process. Of course, don’t be surprised when ensuring that you directly assess job satisfaction and employee performance, that most of your bad attitude problems disappear. This is what always happens when you solve root causes rather than their effects. Some might call this concept radical. I call it commonsense.

Walk into any workplace and what’s in the air? Besides the burnt popcorn. We mean that other thing. That sweet scent of romance.

Yes dear reader, just in time for Valentine’s Day CareerBuilder tells us what you’ve been suspecting all along: your office mates are mating up. If the survey is to be believed — and why not?; they surveyed 7,780 people who all can’t be pranking us — then almost 4 in 10 workers have dated someone they met on the job.

Awkward, if one of them thinks it’s going places and the other one … you get the idea. Fortunately, 31 percent of those relationships lead to marriage. (Which is no guarantee things won’t get even more awkward a little down the road. But this is the season for love, so ignore our dose of ugly reality. Or read on to the part where we tell you how Challenger, Gray, & Christmas snuck in a warning about office violence.)

HR people out there, this stat’s for you: CareerBuilder says 18 percent of office dating is between boss and their report. Women were more likely to date up than men, 35 percent to 23 percent respectively.

Of the industries reported, you just had to know that hospitality by far (47 percent) has the most co-dating co-workers. Healthcare also made the top five list, which, considering how many parents hoped their offspring would marry a doctor, is no surprise. But financial services (40 percent)? And transportation and utilities (43 percent)? And IT (40 percent)? These also made the top five? Really?

Now moving on to that warning about workers pulling a Valentine’s Day Massacre  from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (hereinafter CG&C). “Some companies are facing an entirely different problem: their workers have lost that loving feeling and the consequences can be dire,” reads the press release we got from the global outplacement firm.

“Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.  This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” says CGC CEO John Challenger.

The press release offers a whole bunch of ideas to increase civility and reduce animosity. Missing from the list, and very conspicuously considering Valentine’s Day started this whole thing, is the free supply of large amounts of chocolate.

A Vowel Please

From the “Can I buy a vowel?” department comes Goood Job, the latest in a long line of companies entering the employee-referral-social media business we’ve talked a lot about (and includes socialcruiter, socialreferral, and many others). In short, here’s how Goood Job works: Employees can opt-in to have their company’s job postings automatically show up on their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. Friends can express an interest, filling in short information about themselves on a landing page, and the employee can add a comment (like “Goood guy, worked with him for three years”).

The system tracks employees’ referrals through the hiring process. The employees build up points, like a loyalty program, however you want to set it up — x number of points for referring someone who sends in a resume, y number if it resulted in a hire, etc. — and earn dinners, movie tickets, trips to Paris, the spa, or perhaps even to a spa in Paris. HP and Microsoft in Israel are using the Tel Aviv company for referrals, and Goood Job says both are considering expanding their use globally. The sweetspot, though — or shall we say sweeet spot — are companies in the few-hundred to a few-thousand-employee range, who pay around $1,000-2,500 a month, depending on company size. One client has tripled its number of referrals since using the system. As we began an early-morning demo of the product, one company rep IM’d us to say “Goood Morning.” Cute.

Short Takes

BeKnown as you with a URL all your own. Just go claim your Beknown.com/your-name-here address. Yeah, yeah, we know there are a ton of places to get a vanity addy, but as our best friend’s mother used to say, “What can it hurt?”

Remember the SHRM Members for Transparency? That’s the group that’s taken issue with some of the goings-on at the top levels of the HR professional association. We were starting to unremember them ourselves until up pops an email from the group the other day saying they’re still trying to get a second meeting going with representatives of the big group’s board of directors. The first meeting took 102 days to schedule. The second took a little longer than that. It’s now scheduled for March 4. (Go here and read all about the last meeting.)

LinkedIn’s financial report released after the New York markets closed this afternoon is sending its stock soaring in after-hours trading as investors reward the company for its galloping growth that the company predicts will continue this year, and at faster rate than Wall Street expects.

LinkedIn closed Thursday at $76.39, down 15 cents. But after investors got a look at the report, the stock climbed up, and within two hours was trading at $83.25, up 9 percent.

The company reported fourth quarter revenue of $167.7 million, more than double its fourth quarter last year. Analysts, who had been expecting the company to finish strong, predicted revenues of $159.7 million. They also expected a 7 cent per share profit. LinkedIn reported earning an adjusted 12 cents per share.

Calling 2011 “A landmark year for LinkedIn,” CEO Jeff Weiner said the company would continue to grow this year, putting an emphasis on expanded mobile capabilities, the international market, and plans to “refresh a number of our pillar products.” Many of those are recruiting related.

Before today’s financial report and an after-market conference call, analysts projected LinkedIn would earn 57 cents a share on revenue of $828.2 million. Now, the company says it expects revenue in a range of $840-$860 million. For 2011, LinkedIn’s revenue totaled $522.1 million.

Recruitment provided half the revenue for 2011 and just over half in the last quarter of the year. The relative percentages that LinkedIn’s three product lines — recruitment, marketing, and subscriptions — contribute to the total revenue haven’t changed much since the company went public last May.

During the question and answer with analysts, Steve Sardello, LinkedIn’s CFO, said there won’t be “a lot of change” in recruitment pricing this year. Instead, the company will focus on expanding its client base and improving the penetration of the service. He said the renewal rate and add-ons grew by 171 percent, and said most customers now hold between three and four recruiter seats.

LinkedIn has been focusing increasing attention on the international market, and growth there has been slowly edging up. By the end of 2011 it accounted for a third of LinkedIn’s quarterly revenue. During the quarter the company opened offices in Brazil, India, and Japan, and translated the service into five additional languages.

LinkedIn’s optimistic outlook for this year is in marked contrast to at least two of its competitors. In the last two weeks both Monster and Dice Holdings offered financial guidance that was more conservative than what Wall Street wanted to hear. As a result, the stock of both companies saw a sharp decline.

CareerBuilder, privately held by three media companies and Microsoft, said it had North American revenue of $157 million in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to $627 million. The company publicly releases only revenue for North America. It does not release international earnings or expenses or profit.

However, Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martore told investors and analysts that CareerBuilder accounted for 82 percent of the company’s digital revenues. That revenue, the company said, was $181.5 million in the 4th quarter. She also said international revenue was up 40 percent for the job board.

If the four owners of CareerBuilder share its income in proportion to their ownership percentage of its stock, then CareerBuilder contributed $148.8 million to Gannett. (The company owns 50.8 percent of CareerBuilder.) From that figure, it’s possible to conjecture CareerBuilder had a $293 million quarter, putting it ahead of Monster. Company officials declined to comment on the figures.

Oracle announced this morning it will buy HR software vendor Taleo for $46 a share, a deal worth about $1.9 billion.

It’s the second major acquisition of an HR firm in three months, and continues an Oracle buying spree that’s so far added some 70 companies at a cost of about $40 billion, according to Bloomberg.com. Last fall, Oracle bought RightNow Technologies, a cloud-based CRM provider.

The Taleo deal, however, falls far short of what SAP is paying for SuccessFactors. The German tech firm announced in December it would pay $3.4 billion for the HR vendor. The acquisition is key to “accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure,” the company said in making the announcement.

SAP has run into delays completing its acquisition. The deadline for the deal has now been extended for a third time to Feb. 15th while regulators, principally the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., investigates the transaction. SAP said today it was waiving the requirement the investigation first be complete before the expiration of its tender offer. The company said it already has been tendered 86 percent of the SuccessFactors, enough to close the deal.

Although the Committee on Foreign Investment could squelch the deal, it’s unlikely. Delays due to investigations such as the one encountered by SAP are typical. No deals, however, have been blocked as a result, says IDG News.

The Taleo acquisition isn’t subject to those procedures, since Oracle is a U.S. firm.

Like other major software providers, Oracle is struggling to gain inroads into the fast-growing SaaS market. With companies turning to cloud services because of their efficiency and significant cost savings over buying and installing software on in-house equipment, tech firms like Oracle have been developing their own SaaS programs. Acquiring companies with SaaS products accelerates the process.

Oracle said as much in this morning’s announcement. “Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Taleo offers both SaaS provisoned HR software, as well as on-premises systems. The company has about 5,000 customers and 2011 revenue of $308.9 million.

Unlike SuccessFactors, which isn’t profitable, Taleo has had two winning years in the last four. The company released its fourth-quarter and full year financials this morning, following the acquisition announcement. The numbers show the company lost 35 cents a share for the year. In 2010, it earned a penny a share. With adjustments for one-time expenses, including the costs of acquisitions Taleo itself has previously made — it bought Cytiva last spring — the company earned $1.06 a share versus 2010′s 78 cents a share.

In both years Taleo posted a fourth-quarter loss of 2 cents a share. After accounting for one time expenses, the company earned 26 cents a share, beating analysts’ 23 cent a share expectations. Its $84.8 million 4th quarter revenue was short of Wall Street’s $86.8 million estimate.

The Oracle offer sent Taleo’s stock up 17.23 percent, to $45.65 a share by early afternoon in New York. Oracle’s $46 a share offer is 18 percent above Taleo’s Wednesday closing price. SAP’s $40 a share offer for SuccessFactors was a 52 percent premium over the stock’s previous price. That differential in just two months lead TheStreet.com to suggest that the premium companies are willing to pay to get into cloud computing is falling.

“Cloud-based deal premiums are falling as investors and analysts correctly anticipate consolidation between technology giants and specialized cloud players,” says TheStreet in an analysis of today’s Taleo deal. TheStreet notes that the acquisition announcement is also lifting the stock of HR software vendors Saba, Kenexa, and Cornerstone OnDemand.

The price difference may have influenced three law firms to announce they are investigating Taleo’s acceptance of the Oracle offer. The firms are soliciting shareholders as clients. Taleo has been sued in the past by shareholders.