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In a surprising move, it was announced on Friday that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has mandated a telecommuting ban for all employees, which will go into effect this July.

As a female professional and career coach, I am shocked by this turn of events. Mayer has been an icon for millions of working women who are constantly striving to strike the right balance between their responsibilities in the home and at the office. In fact, there have been numerous articles written about Mayer’s strategy to avoid employee burnout, such as letting employees like “soccer mom Katie” leave early on certain days to attend her kids’ soccer games, and then jump back online after the kids are in bed. By the looks of this decision, it sounds like Mayer has changed her tune.

Telecommuting is not a realistic option for all employees, but when used appropriately for the right people, it can be a win-win for both employers and employees. Catering to more than 33,000 employers, TheLadders works with an array of companies that offer flexible and remote work schedules to select employees, and judging from their results, I think it would be wise for more companies to follow suit. Here are five ways companies can benefit from offering telecommuting and other work-flexibility options to their teams. (more…)

I have taken notice of something over the past year. I am struggling with communications and interactions with my HR vendor partners who supply my clients with services and products. This struggle, for me, is in how to deal with a full-court press with these vendors who are super-imposing themselves and their wares on me, and not in a helpful way. I will explain. (more…)

Information security professionals are among the most stable of tech workers. They are paid well, the majority got raises last year — 20% of them of more than 5%. Plus the demand for security specialists will grow 11% annually for the next five years.

Those are findings from the most recent survey of IT security professionals conducted by (ISC)2, the world’s largest not-for-profit information security professional organization. More than 12,000 members and non-members took part in the biennial Global Information Security Workforce Study, reporting on matters ranging from salaries and workload to their views on the current state of information security and protection. (more…)

Google has the only HR function on the planet that is managed based on “people analytics”

Larry Page — the CEO

If you haven’t seen it in the news, after its stock price broke the $800 barrier, Google moved into the No. 3 position among the most valuable firms in the world. Google is clearly the youngest firm among the leaders; it has surprisingly been less than a decade since Google’s IPO.

Most on the top 20 market cap list could be accurately described as “old school,” because most can attribute their success to being nearly half a century old, having a long established product brand, or through great acquisitions. Google’s market success can instead be attributed to what can only be labeled as extraordinary people management practices that result from its use of “people analytics.”

The extraordinary marketplace success of Google (and Apple, which is No. 1 on the list) is beginning to force many business leaders to take notice and to come to the realization that there is now a new path to corporate greatness. (more…)

Even as the number of tech jobs in the U.S. was steadily climbing in 2012, hitting an all-time high last month, workers were feeling just a bit less confident in their ability to find a new job.

In the last few days, several reports and forecasts have come online, all of them showing that tech workers, despite their own confidence issues, will be hard to recruit.

TechServe Alliance declared that the number of tech workers in the U.S. grew in 2012 by 4.14% to an estimated 4,339,800 workers. That’s more than two-and-a-half times the national rate of job growth (1.52%) exceeds even the growth in the health sector, which increased by 2.26% between January 2012 and last month.

Yet a Randstad Technologies poll conducted in the fourth quarter of last year found 44% of the participating IT workers confident of their ability to find a new job. In the third quarter, 55% were confident. Workers’ confidence could have been shaken by the showdown over the fiscal cliff issues. Another possibility is that with only 275 IT workers in the survey, a few real worriers could have skewed the results.

In any case, employers aren’t buying into that fear. CareerBuilder’s 2013 job forecast says 27% of hiring managers plan to hire permanent, full-time IT workers this year. That’s also what TechServe Alliance expects. (more…)

Bank auditor Dedan Kimenyi is irritated by “opinionated and bossy” co-workers.

Jidia Gasana, an engineer, says strong perfume in the office is her pet peeve. “It is like people douse themselves with perfume overnight,” she says.

These folks work in Kigali, Rwanda, proving that no matter where you are or what you do, there’s always some annoying co-worker around.

A U.K. food company commissioned a study of office workers in the nation of stiff upper lips finding (a coincidence you suppose?) 57% of them agreeing noisy eating to be the most offensive trait of their co-workers. (The company, Ainsley Harriott Cup Soup, makes, yes indeed, soup, which can be noisily slurped.)

Next most annoying was messiness, followed by a failure to wash up. Ughhh. (more…)

I’m very pleased to announce that we have opened registration for our annual Recruiting Innovation Summit. The summit will be taking place on May 14-15, 2013, in San Francisco.

During the full two-day event, we will be revealing at least 16 game changers — from recruiting startups and in-house recruiting departments to innovative new products and recruiting prognosticators. All of it is designed so that you can take in as much as possible over the entire two days with shorter, bite-sized sessions.

We’re looking for bold, unconventional ideas, too new to be proven, to fill out the agenda from all areas of recruiting. And yes, we’re bringing back the startup competition along with more than a few new things where you will pick the winner. But you can only be a part of it if you’re there.

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In a recent study, only 14% of customer tweets sent to a brand received a response. That is like not picking up the phone when a customer calls, or worse, hanging up on them.

Brands everywhere are missing an opportunity to use the power of social in the way it was intended. This reality is underscored by another study that showed 50% of people would no longer consider buying a brand that didn’t respond to their feedback on social media. However, in a study published in 2011, 83% of people who did get a response from a brand after a complaint said they loved that the company responded.

What a missed opportunity. If you simply respond, you are likely to get a brand advocate. Not responding will cost you customers.

Knowing how to respond to a complaint is a challenge that most brands are not even addressing. They are using social media as they use all other media: as a megaphone, or as I referenced recently, one-to-many marketing. This is challenging to brands because they are very comfortable in one-to-many land. They understand it and know how to do it and know what result to expect. Except with social media, the audience has a megaphone too. In fact, each member of the audience (or the “many”) has a megaphone and when used, it can scare the daylights out of a brand.

It is very easy to come back from a stumble because the premise of social media is to have a dialogue. And the challenge with this is that the thought of having a dialogue with a brand is awkward. You tend to feel like you are talking to a bar of soap, and that’s weird. But this isn’t the case with an employer brand, because an employer brand should be about the people. Employer brands are all about the people who develop, make, design, and package a bar of soap. It should feel more personal and human. This is where employer brand has a big leg up on consumer brands in the social sphere. Yet, in many cases, employers are not taking advantage of this at all.

Today, employers are far too frequently using social media as another avenue to post jobs and perpetuate the post-and-pray mentality. (more…)

2013 is going to present the start of a major tipping point in the way people find and are evaluated for jobs (and vice versa), and a blend of technology and assessment content will play a big role in these ongoing changes.

This opinion is not founded on trends within the pre-hire assessment industry, but rather on the bigger picture of emerging trends in internet technology. I’m talking about major changes in the way humans use information and connectivity to support business and social interactions.

The following are key technology trends that are bigger than any individual industry but are already impacting products being offered in the pre-hire assessment market.  I know about many of these companies because I’ve worked with many of them over the past year. In many cases their products are still not fully completed (and some have even asked not to be mentioned due to this), but 2013 will be a year that sees a ton of new companies live and open for business. (more…)

What makes a person an outstanding talent leader? Is it the ability to set a vision, develop a strategy, or manage a budget? Or is it something much less visible and subtler?

Leadership is not something we are born with, although we may have a general aptitude. It takes insight into what leadership is all about and the desire to practice it in a deliberate, thoughtful, and consistent way to become good.

The points below amplify what I have learned from many successful leaders over the years.

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Adidas — officially adidas, actually, with the lower case “a” — is out with a new site meant to attract employees to its hard-to-pronounce headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany.

The company has 250 jobs open at the headquarters. A company blog post describes a bit about the making of the site, which features accounts of employees who’ve moved to “Herzo.”

Here’s the site.

In the comedy movie “Identity Thief,” mild-mannered businessman Sandy Patterson (played by Jason Bateman) travels from Denver to Miami to confront the deceptively harmless-looking woman (played by Melissa McCarthy) who has been living it up after stealing Sandy’s identity. It’s a funny movie and in its first weekend it grossed over $34 million dollars at the box office.

However, in real life identity theft is no laughing matter. Ask anyone who has had to put their lives and their credit scores back together after it has happened. Companies can be the victim of identity thieves, too. Examples of the detrimental effects of “brandjacking” include cancer patients duped by fake Avastin, construction workers jeopardized by counterfeit equipment and safety products, and in general, the World Health Organization says online sale of counterfeit medicine is a public health risk that could result in deaths due to hazardous chemicals and improper handling of drugs.

Lately with the great increase of jobseekers using search engine aggregators and search engine marketing to search for jobs to advance their careers, many companies’ employer brands are now also the victims of identity thieves. (more…)

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, is out with a new book saying that women “leave before they leave,” self-selecting out of certain jobs, careers, or specialties that they feel will hurt their ability to have a balanced life at some point in the future.

Is she right? Or is the larger problem stubborn, inflexible employer policies that make it hard for people to leave and reenter the workforce?

Dr. Cassi Fields, an I/O psychologist, and I talk about this in the video below. (more…)

Hard on the heels of the release of the Candidate Experience Awards Report comes word from CareerBuilder that the vast majority of candidates who apply for a job never hear a word after submitting their resume.

Surveying 3,991 employed, full-time workers, CareerBuilder found 75% of those who applied for a job never heard from the company. So common is that silence that only 82% of the candidates actually expect to hear something, even just a perfunctory, “Got your application.”

Contrast that with the experience of the thousands of candidates surveyed as part of the CandE awards research. Almost 78% reported getting an acknowledgement after submitting an application. And more than half of the applicants to the 90 companies taking part in the evaluation said they got a note describing the next steps in the process.

While even among the 37 winning companies the process wasn’t without its issues, overall 53% of the candidates would apply again. A majority are willing to tell their friends about their experience; some are willing to post about it on Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or elsewhere. (more…)

Aurecon has C-suite buy-in

The term “employer brand” has been around for a while, but the branding game has changed radically in recent years.

It has been said many times on ERE that in days past, employer brand meant one-way messaging pushed out to the marketplace, while now it’s the highly social, public reverberation of what people think, feel, and share about a company as a place to work.

So who’s minding the “talent brand” store? (more…)

You may remember my post just last November about a company called The Nerdery.

The Minnesota company was trying to “drive 100 programmers to their rightful home.”

A quick update on that 100-nerds-in-100 days hiring spree: (more…)

Like you, I started seeing the posts and pics last week on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (yes, Instagram) from friends who were receiving the “You have one of the top X% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012” email from LinkedIn.

First it was 10% then 5% and later in the week 1%.

And I started thinking, “am I really not that cool to have ranked in the top 1%? How can that be?” (more…)

Many recruiters have experienced the knock-down drag-out fighting of going through many rounds of in-person interviews. The main problem with having rounds upon rounds of these interviews is that new information about the candidate is rarely uncovered. Plus, the individuals involved in the interview process are taken away from their jobs to conduct these time-consuming interviews.

To get a better picture of the time taken away from a resource use perspective, think about having four people on the interview team. Each in-person interview lasts two hours and there are five candidates.

The top 30 boldest actions for recruiting individual innovators

I just returned from the always-powerful CoDev conference, where a prime focus was on the difficulty of hiring and retaining innovators. Almost everyone agrees on the value of innovators, but unfortunately, because of their design and their lack of boldness, most corporate recruiting processes simply cannot successfully hire a highly desirable innovator.

In case you have been unable to get innovators to complete your interview process or to accept your offers, I’ve put together a list of bold but effective approaches that can make it possible to sell and land even the most fought-over innovators. (more…)

In every recruiting process, metrics are key. And the most measured are time and cost. But have you considered the most important business metric of all, top-line revenue? You only need to evaluate some of these critical stats to understand why accelerating top-line revenue is one of the only metrics with which senior executives are concerned. (more…)