First the good news: many companies are hiring again. Now the bad news: if your company is among them, you’re probably looking at too many requisitions and too few hands on deck to fill them. And, even if you’re not in that boat, you’re probably feeling the pressure to do more with less.

In either case, your team can benefit from persuading recruiters to eliminate the five time-wasters below. By streamlining their work, recruiters will have more time to focus on the most valuable aspects of the hiring process. The results will be:

• Better hiring decisions
• An improved candidate experience
• A more cost-effective approach to talent acquisition

Working Outside the ATS

Applicant tracking systems offer a robust way to manage applicant flow, communicate effectively with candidates, ensure compliance, and report analytics. But only if you use the system.

We all get accustomed to doing things a certain way, and for some recruiters, it’s just too cumbersome to use the ATS instead of their own spreadsheets, email templates, or reporting methods. If this is happening in your organization, make some changes right away. The time it takes to get recruiters ramped up in how to use an ATS pales in comparison to the hours wasted by working outside the system.

Recruiters bypassing the ATS also diminishes the value of the reports the tool can generate automatically. These reports provide real-time information about how efficient and effective the hiring process is at any given time. But without timely (or accurate) inputs from recruiters, the data is bad, the team’s credibility can be damaged, and the quality of the hiring process usually suffers.

Practice using your ATS on a real-time basis. This will help you do three things:

1. Learn the system better
2. Prevent the duplication of work, such as re-entering information into the system
3. Keep details like candidate correspondence from falling through the cracks.

Beginning a Search Without the Right Information

“Pay now or pay later” has never been more true than when dealing with the hiring process. When recruiters don’t get the right information upfront, it costs them time, energy, and even money, later. But it’s not usually the recruiters’ fault when the hiring manager doesn’t have time to answer questions or discuss the job in detail.

But it is the recruiter’s job to make the hiring manager understand the consequences of kicking off a search with nothing more than an old job description or the previous posting. What are the consequences?

• Days or weeks of back and forth questions, answers, and follow-up questions
• Sourcing candidates who aren’t a good match
• Frustrating candidates who are interviewed, but later considered “not right” for the job
• Costing the company by extending the time that positions (sometimes critical, revenue-generating positions) remain open

What should a recruiter do? When a job opens, the recruiter and hiring manager should meet live — either by phone, Webex, or in person — to discuss the position in depth. Key questions might include:

• What are the key responsibilities of this job?
• What kinds of decisions will this person make?
• What key accomplishments must be achieved in the first year?
• What’s the best thing about this job?
• What’s the most difficult part of this job?
• What experience and education is a must-have for candidates?
• What qualifications are nice-to-have?
• What companies do you feel hire well for this role?
• Who are direct reports to this role? Dotted-line reports? Supervisors? Key stakeholders?
• Who will interview the candidates?

If your company doesn’t already have a template for guiding the discussion during intake meetings, create one — and adapt it over time — so recruiters can drive consistent conversations with hiring managers.

Not Using Questionnaire Functionality in the Applicant Tracking System

Recruiters often spend hours doing something the applicant tracking system is equipped to do in a matter of seconds.

Recruiters can be much more efficient — and improve their results — by taking the time up front to create job-specific questionnaires in the ATS prior to beginning a search. With good questionnaires in place, the ATS is able to automatically screen and sort candidates as they complete the online application process.

When job-specific questionnaires aren’t used, recruiters have no choice but to review each candidate’s background, one by one. And if there are more than a few candidates on a req, it simply might not be possible to review each one — so recruiters might review only those who most recently applied.

Again, you can invoke the “pay now or pay later” mantra. Taking the time to create a job-specific questionnaire based on the outcome of the intake meeting will result in the most qualified candidates showing at the top of the list — in real time.

Taking a Passive Approach to Scheduling Interviews

Identifying who will be on the interviewing team — and when interviews will likely take place — should be agreed upon during the intake meeting between the recruiter and hiring manager.

When recruiters know the days and time slots the interviewing team has available, candidates can be scheduled on the spot. This type of proactive planning improves the candidate experience, speeds the hiring decision, and helps ensure that the best candidates stay in the process.

Producing Manual or Customized Reports

We all know people who are energized by running reports and reviewing data. And by its nature, talent acquisition is a target-rich environment for data-hungry people. But if we objectively assess the standard reports that most applicant tracking systems offer, we’ll find that — more often than not — 80% of what we need to assess the effectiveness of talent acquisition is there.

Would more reports — or different reports —  be interesting to see? Undoubtedly. Would they help us drive better results? Arguably no.

Talent acquisition leaders should strive to build a set of standardized reports that meet the most critical reporting needs of the function. This will also allow everyone, but particularly recruiters, to focus more time and energy on sourcing and selecting candidates, instead of tracking numbers.

When managing requests for additional data from senior leaders or other stakeholders, talent acquisition leaders should ask: “What will be done with the information once we get it?” and “How will this new data help us achieve our goals of faster, better, and more cost-effective talent acquisition?”

Taking steps to address these five areas can drive significant improvements, quickly, for your talent acquisition team.

Here is the original post: ERE Articles

A preliminary report on the ICANN board meeting earlier this month shows that the decision to expand the use of .jobs Internet addresses had at least one opponent.

Of the 15 voting members of the board of the Internet addressing authority (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), 14 participated in the Aug. 5 closed, teleconference. When it came time to vote, one board member opposed the expansion, two abstained, leaving 11 in favor.

The report, which appears to have been posted Monday, doesn’t detail who abstained and who cast the “No” vote. That will have to await the official minutes, which won’t be publicly available until after the next board meeting on Oct. 28th.

The report also says little about the nature of the discussion about the request by Employ Media to issue .jobs addresses using geographic, occupational, professional, or other words (i.e. Boston.jobs, javaengineers.jobs, etc.). All it says is, ”The Board discussed with staff the process taken for the proposed amendment in the .JOBS sTLD, and raised questions regarding the scope of change this amendment would have on the charter of the sTLD.”

It’s not unusual for the ICANN board to split votes or for some board members to abstain. At the same meeting it approved the .jobs expansion and the plan for making available the new names, the board split a vote over creating native language-based Internet domain extensions for Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and Tunisia. That vote was nine in favor, two opposed, and three abstentions. Another split vote occurred over paying the board chairman $75,000 a year.

Go here to see the original: ERE Articles

A fellow resume writer told me “I never put my best samples online because someone might steal my designs.”

And a web designer once suggested to me that we only show partial sample resumes on our site “to stop people copying your work.”

Think about that for a moment … the client would be prepared to lose out on job opportunities because her resume wasn’t accessible online. The resume writer is willing to have people make buying decisions based on work that isn’t the best she can do. And if the web designer had his way, potential Blue Sky clients would have to try and judge our work based only on snippets.

And all for what? To stop someone copying a resume?

Look, there are no new ideas under the sun. That great idea for a resume layout you had? Someone else has had it too. You’re just not that special.

Also, no one can copy what you do although they may try. Every now and then potential clients send us resumes that they clearly copied from this website. But their attempt never comes close to the original, and that’s is why they eventually get in touch and ask for help.

And by the way, if the worst that happens is that an unemployed person with very little money is able to take some of my ideas and use them to get a new job and put food on the table – well, that’s not such a bad outcome.

Whether you are selling a service, or whether you are selling yourself for potential employment opportunities, showing anything less than your best is nuts. Put your best resume online in all formats. Show your best work samples when you go for interviews. If you have a design portfolio, upload your most creative work. If you’re a writer, share your top articles.

Hoarding knowledge is for little kids taking tests. The rest of us should stop being so precious and share the best we can do.

View original here: Blue Sky Resumes Blog

My younger brother Barak got married August 12, 2010. When we were growing up, the thing I knew for sure was that I hated him. It was the “hard fact.” There was no way around it. I hated him. Every time he said something I wanted to kill him (and obviously the other way around is true), and this picture is one of the few that I found when we were smiling and hugging. Later I seem to have managed to always have someone stand between us (quite like I see with my own kids these days).

But that’s brothers/sisters for you.

Today he’s my best friend; we consult with each other on every new direction or thought, from big to small. We support each other on a daily basis.

I thought of him this morning, about our relationship, and the fact that in the distant past I was so confident that I’ll never want to help him, thinking that I hated him — for me was at the time, a “hard fact.” Something no one could argue with.

This morning, thinking of him and how things have changed during the past approximately 20 years, connected me to my conversations with many recruiters in Israel about their relationship with their corporate partners — usually from the U.S.

“They Would Never Agree to this”

I’ve been training thousands of HR recruiters and managers during the past four years regarding online recruiting. When I ask local recruiters about their progress in implementing social media tools and online recruiting in their company, I usually hear the same sentence: “We’re in a unique position, representing a U.S. corporation in Israel, and they would never agree to that…”

“They” is the U.S. based corporation. ”That” is usually one of a few things that “they” usually don’t agree to:

• Enabling the local international site to open a local website, in the local language, even in a different “look and feel,” adapted to local expectations and habits.
• Enter the social media independently, not only under the “umbrella” of the U.S. corporation.
• Give publications, articles, and blogs a independent online presence, focused on the potential local candidates.
• Have U.S. corporate people train local international professional recruiters on using the different tools.

What’s the Impact?

I’ll share with you the latest in Israel, following our HRD March 2010 sourcing survey of corporate recruiting departments, and some of the results that I see following the fact that companies representing U.S. corporations are not receiving support:

• Higher cost of hire. Placement agencies and job boards are one of the three top sources of hire.
• Lack of use of online tools. Only 5% of the organizations use their corporate website as a main source of hire; only 45% use online social media tools for recruiting.

How can you improve your work with international sites?

My top five recommendations for U.S. corporations on how to support their International sites are:

• Teach new technology as soon as you learn it
• Allow them to act local
• Trust the local sites; delegate
• Learn from them (maybe they’ll bring new ideas that you can use)
• Benchmark for a worldwide set of best-known-methods, and share them

The value that these changes will bring your company:

• Save money and shorten time to hire in the company
• Build a stronger worldwide brand
• Align corporate recruiting processes
• Enable diversity and new ideas generated by worldwide sites
• Let worldwide sites feel more connected to the corporate

What needs to change? You can help!

The reason why I thought about my brother and me in relation to this conversation is the way we saw it at the time as the “hard fact.” Something that we just couldn’t imagine that would change in our lifetime.

For a few years now I’ve been telling recruiters in Israel that all they need to do is start the dialogue with their corporate partners, and maybe things will change in the future. This year I decided to try and make a bigger difference, and I’ll be presenting my thoughts on this delicate partnership between U.S. corporations and local international sites at the coming ERE Expo.

As part of my preparations for it I need your help:

I’ve prepared a very short survey that will take not more than five minutes of your time to answer. It is intended for HR and recruiting teams of both U.S. corporates and their local international sites. Please help me with filling it out and forwarding the link to your partners around the world in the different local sites.

I’ll be more than happy to share with anyone who fills the survey its results.

To answer the survey please click here.

Original post here: ERE Articles

Jonathan’s post gave me a chance to come up with some practical tips for doing just that. So here’s how you can turn your resume into a powerful marketing document using his time-tested sales principles.

Actual Proof/Track Record

The best assurance that you’ll add value in the future is showing that you have added value in the past. So emphasize results all the way through your resume. Don’t just say you have “an excellent track record of revenue and profit growth” – Prove it! Provide specifics. Pepper your resume with numbers. (And if the actual numbers are confidential, use percentages).

Here is an example of a resume that demonstrates an excellent track record and does it in a way that draws attention to the results. The key is in pulling out the results and bolding them. Note: this strategy only works if you have excellent results in every position.

Pedigree

Jonathan says “If you have any specialized training, degree, certification, license or other accreditation or qualification, share that pedigree as another touch point that demonstrates you know what you’re doing.” This applies to your resume just as much as to selling a product and it’s important to stress that pedigree upfront and not wait until the end of the resume for people to figure it out. This next resume is a perfect example. Because of the nature of my client’s profession, he wasn’t able to provide revenue or sales growth numbers. But he had an excellent pedigree and so we focused on that in his resume introduction. (This resume secured him his dream job and the secret is in that pedigree.)

Authority Endorsement

If you have worked with influential people whose names are well-known in your industry, ask them for a reference. Don’t be shy about this! A recent client who worked in the video game industry provided me with a glowing reference from the guy who designed one of the world’s best-selling video games. We used that reference prominently in his resume and cover letter by quoting the best few lines from it.

Another way to use authority endorsement on your resume is to highlight awards you have won (for recent graduates, scholarships or school honors work just as well). Awards are solid evidence that someone in authority liked your work. Here is an example of a resume that uses awards as a primary sales pitch for the client.

Celebrity Endorsement

This is Jonathan’s fourth point and when it comes to product marketing, we all know its true. It’s unlikely that you can get Tiger Woods or Bruce Springsteen to endorse your candidacy for that accounting job – and also unlikely that their recommendation would hold much sway! That said, I often use a version of this tactic when working with people in entertainment-related fields. if you can drop the fact that you have worked with names like Jay-Z, Lady Gaga or Oprah Winfrey into your resume, you probably will get more interviews. Partly because the fact you have worked at such a high-level suggests you are good at what you do, and partly because some people will just want to know what their favorite singer is like. (Hey, you use what you can!)

If you actually know a celebrity whose testimonial would add value, then go ahead and use them. Here is an example, where we used a testimonial from a US senator on the resume of a political cartoonist.

Another version of the celebrity endorsement is to drop the names of major companies or products . If you worked for top fortune 500 companies, or on several very successful products, name-drop those right at the start of your resume.

Social Proof

When selling a product, marketers often use testimonials from other users to convince you that the product is worth buying. You can do the same on your resume. Pull quotes from performance reviews, reference letters or LinkedIn testimonials and use them on your resume. One piece of advice though – choose testimonials that sound personal, believable and that are specific to skills needed in your target positions. Don’t choose generic or bland quotes. If it’s important to be highly organized in your next job, then choose a quote that speaks to that. And if it does it in a funny or interesting way, even better!

I recently had a client whose manager said “I continue to be disappointed with Sarah’s inability to clone herself.” I loved that! We used it right upfront in her resume and I bet it has been a big talking point in her interviews.

Here’s a resume that uses one quote prominently – a quote that focuses on exactly the skills needed for success as a video game producer.

Theoretical /Logical Proof

In some cases, you are the logical fit for the position but don’t have awards or numbers or degrees or quotes to prove it. In that case, just lay out the case for yourself in simple, clear and straightforward terms. For example, if a company is looking for a Project Manager to develop embedded software, you could just headline your resume “Senior project manager with 12 years of experience developing embedded software.” Simple but effective!

Metaphorical Proof

Jonathan describes metaphorical proof this way:

Here, you create an anecdote in the style of a metaphor where a person in a story endures a struggle or experiences a need or pain very similar to what your typical prospective buyer would experience. You set-up the problem and demonstrate the pain, then show how that person resolved their pain and solved their problem using your product, service or solution.

But how do you tell stories like this on a resume? Simple … just develop action-packed bullet points that demonstrate how you have solved problems/capitalized on opportunities for other employers. Check out this resume to see an example. Notice how we set up the situation for her first position (niche site with no room for growth) and then use the bullet points to tell stories about how she solved those problems.

When employers read stories like these, they can start to imagine how you would make an impact on their company, solve their problems, capitalize on their opportunities.

In Summary

Use as many of these different strategies as you can on your resume and you will immediately see a difference in the response rate. What works for selling toothpaste works equally well for selling you!

Original post: Blue Sky Resumes Blog

If job descriptions aren’t illegal, they should be.

Let’s hold a mock trial. You’re one of the jurors. We don’t need unanimity here, a mere super majority will do. Here’s a link to the public survey so you can be involved and register your verdict, and see the results. But before you vote, you must hear all of the evidence.

Let me first state my rather obvious bias and claims in my opening statement: there is no doubt in my mind that skills-infested job descriptions prevent companies from hiring top performers and limit their ability to hire diversity candidates. Furthermore, managers and recruiters who rely on these are doing their companies a great disservice. I will prove this during this trial by providing convincing evidence to the following:

1. Job descriptions define average people, not the best performers.
2. Diversity candidates often have non-traditional experiences and, as a result, are wrongfully excluded from consideration.
3. It’s what people do with their skills and abilities that should be used to judge their performance, not the amount of skills and experiences they possess.
4. Job descriptions don’t define the actual job. They define the person in the job, and the criteria used is suspect at best, since there are a great many people who can excel in the job with a different mix of skills and experiences.
5. There is no law that says you must post boring job descriptions.
6. Job descriptions violate the Uniform Guidelines.
7. If job descriptions aren’t used for internal promotions, why should they be used for external screening and selection?
8. There is no scientific basis for the creation of the these job descriptions.
9. Competency models are only slightly better than job descriptions in minimizing the core problems involved in using job descriptions.

If you’re not seeing or hiring enough top performers or highly-qualified diverse candidates, the root cause of the problem can be attributed to the use of skills-infested job descriptions. Following is a quick summary of the proof to be presented during this trial. Witnesses will be called for each phase.

1. Top performers tend to get promoted more rapidly than under-performers. As a result, after a few years, they have less overall experience than the average person in the same job. If average years of experience and skills is used as the cut-off for screening when hiring from the outside, then the best people — those in the top-half — will automatically be excluded.
2. Diverse candidates tend to have non-traditional experiences, yet can still be top performers. Traditional job descriptions don’t account for this type of equivalent or comparable experience. On this point alone, job descriptions are discriminatory and should be banned, unless it can be proven that the absolute values defined for the KSAs are essential.
3. In cases where adverse impact has occurred, the Uniform Guidelines requires that the job selection process to be validated. Part of this includes a job analysis and proof that the assessment process accurately predicts on-the-job performance. A job analysis is a formal study of what the actual job entails and what it takes to successfully perform the job. A job description is not a description of the job; it’s a description of the person in the job, and therefore not acceptable proof.
4. The Knowledge, Skills and Abilities required for job success are derived from the job analysis. Three points will be made during the trial itself to demonstrate how KSAs are misused. First, most people who write job descriptions, including a listing of the KSAs, don’t conduct a proper job analysis first. Second, while KSAs are needed to perform the job, these are dependent variables, and having these KSAs doesn’t mean a person can do the work successfully. This is a form of the logical argument “asserting the consequent: just because A requires B, doesn’t mean having B determines A.” Third, the Obama administration is now formally undergoing a “Hiring Reform” reform initiative questioning the value of KSAs and how they’re assessed for these same reasons.
5. Competency models are weak substitutes for KSAs and job descriptions for similar “asserting the consequent” logic flaws. For example, just because someone has the important competency labeled “drive, self-motivation, or initiative,” doesn’t mean it can be universally applied in all situations. Being driven could be a result of the manager, the culture, or the actual work itself. It will be proven in trial that unless a competency can be directly tied to the job analysis, measuring it generically has no validity from an assessment standpoint.
6. A job analysis that lists a series of performance objectives required for job success eliminates the need for traditional job descriptions and the use of absolute KSAs for assessment purposes. Candidates can then be evaluated by obtaining a comparable accomplishment for each required performance objective required.
7. There is no legal requirement to post boring job descriptions or use a one-step hiring process to advertise job openings. For example, the OFCCP would not find fault with the following two-step hiring process. Step one: a creative posting highlighting just the challenges and opportunities, listing few, if any, requirements. Step two: everyone who applies gets an email describing the job challenges and requiring the person to submit a one-page write-up summarizing their most comparable accomplishments.
8. The rules have changed. There are few traditional job experiences anymore, so why continue to look for a declining population of people with traditional experiences. The economic bust, generational differences, the globalization of the workforce and the relationship between the employee and the employer have undergone such massive changes, that relying on the relic of the past — job descriptions — is comparable to using the telegraph to send text messages.
9. Top people, including diverse candidates, don’t decide to apply for a job, or compare multiple offers, based on the job description. They are more interested in the challenges and growth opportunities, the leadership qualities of the hiring manager, the company culture, and overall impact they can make. For this reason alone job descriptions should not be used for advertising purposes. Job descriptions are the lazy way out. Managers use them to replace thinking and job boards use them since they’re formulaic and easy to scale. Unfortunately they cause more harm than good.

Since we haven’t gone to trial yet, and this list is only a summary of what we’re going to prove during the actual trial, let’s stop for a moment and get your initial reaction.

Based on the above, do you think I would lose at trial or could a make a convincing case that traditional job descriptions, if they’re not outright illegal, should be banned? The third option is even if they are not illegal, traditional job descriptions do prevent companies from hiring people in the top half and minimize their ability to build a diverse workforce. Here’s a link to cast your verdict, and here’s a link to the results. As far as I’m concerned it’s an open and shut case, but don’t hesitate to add your jury room comments.

The original is here: ERE Articles

Data, data everywhere,

But what of it to think?

Data, data everywhere,

It makes the markets shrink.

My apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but the unemployment claims numbers out today and Wall Street’s reaction made me think of that great sea tale that starts out promisingly, then takes a turn into the terrifying.

Initial claims for unemployment took a small, but unexpected jump last week. After trending more or less down for several weeks, claims have been going back up. Last week, unemployment claims rose by 2,000 to 484,000. Economists had been expecting a decline.

An increase of 2,000 might not seem like much, but it’s now higher than at any time this year since February. For the week ending July 24, the U.S. Department of Labor reported 460,000 jobless claims were filed. By itself, those increases wouldn’t set off the kind of alarms that caused the Dow to plummet 100 points at the opening today. But with yesterday’s plunge on discouraging news from the Federal Reserve and this morning’s unexpected negative financial report from Cisco Systems, traders were especially sensitive to the news.

If you watch the markets at all, you may remember that big rally in the late spring. It abruptly ended in May, when the Dow reversed itself hitting a low of 9868 last month.

It doesn’t take an MBA to see the connection here to hiring. Revenue changes are particularly important to economists and forecasters, but CEOs live and die on earnings. Revenue growth is important to them, too, because, as any CFO knows, you can’t save your way to prosperity. However, there are only so many ways to keep earnings positive with flat revenue and the easiest is not to hire people.

Uncertainty, even with revenue growth, is also a powerful disincentive to add staff. And that’s just what we’ve been seeing for the last two quarters. Corporate financials are improving year-over-year — not a time to party exactly, considering how poor last year was — however, everywhere there are questions about the sustainability of this improvement.

Terms like double-dip recession, a “W” recovery, are part of water cooler, lunch-time conversations.

No wonder there’s uncertainty. There’s data everywhere that can support almost any view. Consumer confidence on the rise for most of the year, headed down these last two months. Help-wanted ads are increasing, and SHRM is saying hiring will be up in August. But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports show job growth is anemic. Private sector hiring has been barely perceptible.

Zoom back for a moment to a high-altitude view and the numbers and the data point the same way: 2010 is an improvement over 2009. Admittedly, it’s a bit like the view an earthworm has: everything looks up from its perspective.

Nevertheless, since the beginning of 2010, more than 650,000 jobs have been added and the economic trends, as reported by no less than The Conference Board, are improving. SHRM’s LINE report for August says “Job growth will make small strides in August and layoff rates will approach three-year lows.”

Although the possibility of a double-dip can’t be discounted, the trend is decidedly up — slow, for sure, but steady. At some point, those 40 percent of workers who say they’re ready to change jobs, will become active. There’s plenty of pent-up worker frustration; just look at how the Internet is making a folk hero out of the JetBlue flight attendant.

So while today’s unemployment report is disappointing, keep watching the broader trends. Already recruiters are telling SHRM researchers that hiring top talent is getting harder. It makes sense and cents to refill pipelines, assess the most likely future needs, and identify candidates.

To end this post the way it began, recall that the  Rime of the Ancient Mariner concludes with a statement of its intended lesson.

Go here to see the original: ERE Articles

There’s an FAQ on the new site, Talentag, that asks the right question: “What is Talentag and why do you need it?”

Precisely what I was wondering after reading the TechCrunch Europe post about this site. The answer to the first half is straightforward enough. Talentag is the online equivalent of the afterwork social hour; think of it as what LinkedIn would be if it was more like Facebook and less like, well, less like LinkedIn.

Of course that’s not how the site explains it. The answer there is more of a description of what it does. For instance: “Your co-workers and friends can tag you with words or a badge and they can also vouch (for) a particular role you worked together.”

In other words, it’s a way to create a social CV. Talentag connects to your profiles on other social media and will import your work history and friends lists. Then you can connect to them on Talentag and ask them for feedback, get tagged, and, for grins, award and receive badges.

How useful is this to a recruiter? Probably not a whole lot. You can’t use it for sourcing, since searches are limited to your existing inventory of connections from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Your Talentag friends are pulled in from Facebook, which aren’t too useful for those of us who use Facebook strictly for fun. It’s a point TechCrunch makes, too.

Vouching might have some usefulness in keeping candidates honest. But the feedback and tags? Probably not even as useful as the list of references a candidate supplies.

That said, the site may well evolve into something recruiters might find helpful. For instance, corporate recruiters with a Facebook page could create a Talentag profile, import those Facebook friends, and invite them to create their own “social CVs,” as TechCrunch calls them.

That’s just one for instance. Right now, it’s a long way to go. Don’t count it out though. TechCrunch says the founders are building in more utility. They are the same folks, by the way, that launched Emp.ly, the social media job posting service.

Here is the original post: ERE Articles

John Sullivan wrote about the cost of a bad hire. Reading through the list, I thought it was extremely comprehensive … someone must have done their homework.

Sure, we should plan ahead, forecast hiring trends, and develop candidate pools. This is just good business sense. But, assuming hiring managers and staffing folks are doing the best they can, that is not enough. If we do not abandon old ways of thinking and adopt new tools, articles like this will continue into the future. Let me begin by restating a few obvious facts:

• Interviews range from highly structured to ROTFL. Although they get better with structure, interviews are still tests.
• Job requirements are almost always taken from an old position description. Questions are delivered orally and answers are delivered orally. Scores are almost always based on personal opinion.
• In the end, interviewers usually compare candidates with each other instead of to the job.
• No one intentionally hires someone who cannot do what was expected.
• People promoted based on performance as individual contributors seldom become good managers.
• A poor hiring program leads to a shallow promotion pool.

If sports franchises used organizational hiring practices to hire players, they would hire golfers, send them to soccer workshops, manage them as if they were fly fishermen, and reward them based on their ability to play badminton.

We can cite more facts, but the obvious question is not whether or not we should do a better job hiring and measuring candidates, but how can we start doing it?

Think Outside the Box

There is an old training problem where people are asked to connect 16 dots arranged 4X4. They are told to use only four straight lines and to keep the pencil on the paper at all times. The task is impossible without going outside the box; so is fixing the low-performer problem. Going outside the box with employment means: 1) doing a better job defining how a job is to be done; 2) using tests that measure “hows”; and, 3) following up on specifics. And, guess what? The good part is that’s what the Feds want you to do anyway!

Clear the Competency Cobwebs

Start by tossing-out junk competency definitions. Unless the old job is exactly like the new one, the only competencies that reliably can be used to bridge skills from one job to the next are technical knowledge, cognitive abilities, planning skills, behaviors, and motivations. I’ll leave physical skills for another article. In short, you need to know if the employee is smart enough to solve problems in the new job, knows the right things, can effectively plan and organize work, has the right interpersonal skills, and wants to do what’s required. It’s really so basic that some people have trouble understanding it.

You see, asking about results is the part that gets our attention. Asking “what have you done” is much easier than asking “how did you do it?” And, asking “how did you do it?” is easier than knowing if the candidate is telling you the truth. And so it goes. Even while our human nature keeps telling us how important it is to get to know the candidate, our job responsibility is to get to know whether the person has the skills to do the job. I know I don’t have to cite examples. We all have an abundance of them.

Start by understanding how a job should be accomplished. That is the secret of what you are looking for. And, while you are at it, ask a few people who actually do the job. You would be surprised at what you can learn.

Master Your Tools

Interviews are quick, flexible, cheap … and inaccurate. If they are the only tools you use, abandon any idea that you can improve hiring quality. It will save a lot of frustration. Of course, adding structure to your questions without adding job analyses data or standardized scoring may make you sound more professional, but not knowing what to probe for or how to evaluate it will still fall short of your goals. Get to know as much as you can about hard-to-fake tests such as simulations and ability-type tests. If you don’t know how to use them, learn.

Avoid the Junk

I really feel sorry for someone who seriously attempts to navigate today’s test market. It is filled with so much junk and misleading information that it is almost impossible to make a well-informed decision. In general, avoid any test that claims it is approved by the EEOC, does not have adverse impact, states it can “help” you make the right hiring decision, has special occupational norms, and so forth. These are red flags. Even if you don’t get sued for hiring discrimination, you won’t be so lucky defending a wrongful termination charge or an internal discrimination challenge. Of course, there are all those bad-employee expenses that John Sullivan cited in his article.

Playing the Odds

Every hire is a gamble, and no system is perfect. Your only choice includes whether to continue using non-predictive interview techniques or learn better processes that screen out a greater percentage of unskilled employees. This is called validation. Nothing in the organization’s arsenal delivers the same ROI as a good hiring system. Just imagine instead of having a typical organization staffed with 20% top producers, 20% bottom, and the rest in the middle, what it would be like having 70-80% top producers.

Of course, you could always continue complaining about the high cost of low performance.

Original post: ERE Articles

Another sign of the weak U.S. recovery: The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index, released this morning, added three-tenths of a point in July, and now stands at 97.0.

To put this into perspective, the ETI stood at 100 in 1996, shortly after the economy began its Internet-fueled meteoric rise. By 2000 it was past 120 on its way (but not quite reaching) 130.

Though the ETI is now 9.8 percent higher than it was a year ago, its growth has slowed significantly in the last three months. In May, the index was 96.1. In April it was 95.2  and in March it was 93.9. June’s index was 96.7.

“The growth rate of the Employment Trends Index slowed sharply in the past three months, suggesting that employment growth will remain too weak to keep up with the increase in the working-age population,” said Gad Levanon, associate director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. “The disappointing employment numbers may indicate that the low levels of household spending and confidence are making businesses more cautious when it comes to hiring.”

Though there are several indices of economic health and trends compiled by The Conference Board, its Economic Trends Index is unique in that it is a composite of multiple measures. Among other things, it takes into account initial unemployment claims filed, the number of temp workers hired as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve’s Industrial Production Index, and the percentage reporting they find “Jobs Hard to Get” from The Conference Board’s own Consumer Confidence Survey.

According to The Conference Board, “The main benefit of looking at a composite index is that individual indicators sometimes show erratic movements from month to month that do not necessarily reflect underlying trends.”

The Economic Trends Index reinforces what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday: the unemployment rate was unchanged, while new, private sector jobs created in July was a mere 71,000, less than half what economists estimate is needed to keep pace with workforce growth.

Post written by: ERE Articles