Monkeys, shirtless men, and come-hither women. What’s HR coming to?

CareerBuilder’s monkeys have the animal rights people in a tizzy, while the latter (from The Ladders) has the (oh, dear. Whatever adjective-noun combination I use will offend someone so let me just say) some people waving the employee handbook, aghast at the overtly provocative nature of the company’s latest TV commercial.

The Ladders’ “More Attractive” spot began airing shortly after the New Year. But the buzz seems to have grown noticeable last week. Set to the song “Desire” by Vassy, the commercial features several provocatively posed and dancing members of The Ladders job seeker community. The tagline is “Be more attractive to $100k+ employers.”

Karla Porter, one of the earliest of the recruitment bloggers to comment, titled her post “WTF are they smoking over at The Ladders?” In case you are in doubt, she didn’t think it appropriate. Nor did those who commented on her post. Among them Laurie Ruettimann of Punk Rock HR fame, and Nick Corcodillos from Ask the Headhunter.

About the same reaction,  if a few degrees down the thermometer,  from Kelly Dingee at Fistful of Talent.

The YouTube community has a way broader range of views, most centered around the overtly provocative nature of the commercial. However, one post caught what I’m told was The Ladders intent: “all this is about is a parody of high-fashion photo shoots but with normal people who are clients of the company instead of super-models.”

Says Alex Douzet, president and co-founder of the company, “We took average people instead of fashion models because we wanted to demonstrate that you can be attractive. Attractive to employers.”

The actors in the ad are all Ladders members who found their current job through the career site. They were chosen from some 700+ volunteers who responded to an email sent by CEO Marc Cenedella last fall. The field was narrowed down to a dozen by the agency, Fallon Minneapolis, who developed the concept and the ad.

Not so much a parody of fashion advertising, as a metaphorical reference, Douzet said the imagery is straight out of Vanity Fair. Indeed, many of the stylists and fashion advisers for the shoot all worked for the magazine at one time or another.

“Yes. Absolutely,” Douzet knew the ad would be provocative and even controversial when the agency proposed it. His first thought, he said, was, “This is different.”

Targeted at job seekers, not recruiters or employers, the ad needed to cut through the clutter to get attention. “You always have to push the envelope,” he says. “We needed to tell a story that is different. The Ladders is different from other places to find jobs.”

While job listings are everywhere on the Internet, the message The Ladders wanted to tell was that its services help make a job seeker more attractive to employers. Simultaneously with the ad launch, paid Ladders members were assigned a Search Advisor. Members can call their advisor for job search help ranging from the general — how to set an automated search — to the specific — resume feedback and help. For detailed assistance, the search advisor may refer the member to a specialist.

Douzet says the agency is monitoring the comments on the social networks and finds them running 3-1 in favor.

CareerBuilder, however, doesn’t need to use any monitoring tools to know there’s a group of activists out there unhappy that it again used chimpanzees in its Super Bowl commercial. A quick look at the company’s Facebook page makes that clear.

And just in case the media hadn’t noticed, the radical animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals issued an advisory calling attention to the Facebook campaign. It also encouraged its members and supporters to post messages to the CareerBuilder page.

For the record: PETA may not have liked the ad, but USA Today‘s Ad Meter panelists did. It ranked it 6th out of the 61 ads aired during Sunday’s game.

It may be the Year of the Rabbit in China, but in the U.S. today, it’s the year of the dog. And the monkey, too.

Two dog-themed commercials are emerging as the most popular of the Super Bowl commercials. Bud Light’s “Dog Sitting” spot tied with the teased pug going for the Doritos in the venerable USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter. The two spots earned an 8.35 score from panelists assembled by the newspaper who voted as the ads were being shown during the game.

In 6th place is CareerBuilder’s “Parking Lot” ad. The USA Today panel scored the ad featuring chimps in the office parking lot a 7.54. That’s just  a hair behind Pepsi’s 5th place Love Hurts ad and just ahead of another Pepsi ad “First Date.”

Over at the The The Wall Street Journal, which assembled a panel of chief marketing and creative executives and others experts, they also liked the CareerBuilder ad. Lars Bastholm, Chief Creative Officer, Ogilvy New York & Chief Digital Creative Officer Ogilvy North America, offered this opinion: “Monkeys are always a winner. Careerbuilder would always have a hard time topping last year’s amazing spot, so monkeys are a good, safe choice.”

Differing mightily with Bastholm was last year’s ad panel and PETA.

CareerBuilder’s “amazing” spot during last year’s Super Bowl got panned by the USA Today panel, which ranked it 51 out of the 63 spots. The ad was called “Casual Fridays,” and was built around an office of nearly naked people.

This year’s “Parking Lot” ad brought a complaint from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and actress Angelica Huston, opposing the use of monkeys in advertising.

The monkey theme is a reachback to CareerBuilder’s famous 2005 Super Bowl debut. In its first Super Bowl ads, CareerBuilder scored big, placing all three of its ads in the top 10. Its creative agency won all sorts of awards for the ad, but got ousted from the account two years later in a very public divorce.

Bringing back the monkeys may have scored with the experts and with the newspaper ad panel, but in Facebook voting its 68 Likes (as of the time this is written) puts it pretty far down the list. The Doritos “Pug” ad got 580 Likes.

(Demonstrating the fickle, even totally inexplicable, nature of all this, the Bud Light ad has 70 Likes. And if you go over to Hulu, there’s a completely different set of results that bears almost no relationship to the USA Today poll.)

Just to be thorough, Monster did not run an ad this year. Last year, it’s “Fiddlin Beaver” ranked 10th in the USA Today voting. A Monster executive said the company views the Super Bowl as brand advertising and believes the Monster brand is sufficiently strong in the North American market that it didn’t need to spend $3 million for a 30-second spot, plus whatever the production costs would be.

A pair of surveys about the use of social media for recruiting shows that while the waters are promising, navigating them is trickier than it might seem.

One of the reports, done by Universum, which surveyed U.S. college students on social media, as well as on other means of employer communication, found the company website to be the place where more than half of them look for information. Professional and social networks were not considered as useful, and, in fact ranked behind on-campus career fairs and even job boards.

In fact, Universum says that by a large percentage, college students would rather not be receiving employer information via social networks like Facebook. According to the report, 59 percent consider it “unattractive” to receive information through that site. Business networks, LinedIn for example, are a different story. Ninety-three percent of the students say it’s ‘attractive” to get employer information there.

Does that mean employers can skip Facebook and concentrate just on professional and business sites? No, says the second report by the Bernard Hodes Group. It found that 52 percent had some sort of employment-related discussion on a social networking site. By far the biggest percentage of them (68 percent) mentioned new job opportunities, while 42 percent had discussed the job search experience or were involved in a discussion about a company’s work environment. Almost 25 percent checked out a potential employer’s social networking site.

The Universum report doesn’t explain what it means by “receiving employer information,” but it seems reasonable that few would object to the information being there if they were to go look for it. Which probably explains why Hodes found that 37 percent of its survey respondents used Facebook to research prospective employers. (The most commonly used site for research — by 71 percent — was, as might be expected, Google.)

However, having a presence on social networking sites isn’t a particularly strong influencer for the Hodes respondents. They disagreed with the statement that “I tend to be attracted to work for employers that have a presence on social-networking sites.” On a five-point scale with a “5″ meaning “strongly agree,” the statement managed only a 2.8.

Curiously, the statement “Social-networking sites provide a great opportunity for networking with others to find new employment” was only somewhat more favorably viewed. It averaged a 3.33.

Because the reports surveyed different groups and asked different questions, it’s not possible to draw too fine a comparison. Universum surveyed college students to help employers find the most effective means of communicating with them. Hodes looked exclusively at social media for employment sourcing, surveying a wide swath of workers from college students with part-time jobs to Boomers and some retired.  However, it is instructive that both surveys found personal contacts who work at a target employer to be the most reliable source for  learning about the company.

Universum found that college students consider people they know who work at a company to be the most reliable source of information, followed by other employees, such as those who may be posting to the company site. Hodes says that 46 percent of its respondents consider the information posted by people in their network to be reliable versus 34 percent of those who say the same of employer information.

The Hodes report — as does the Universum — talks about a number of other issues, including that 92 percent of the survey respondents say one or more pieces of information that they consider important is missing from employer career sites. Topping the list: a full description of job responsibilities, followed by career advancement opportunities.

Though I’ve drawn some comparisons between the two reports, keep in mind they were done for different purposes and surveyed very different groups. Still, there are some takeaways that can be generalized from the two reports:

• It’s useful for a company to have a social media presence. Being there lets people find you and decide whether to interact;
• You won’t be judged harshly by most for not having a social media presence, but you will miss opportunities;
• Site appropriateness is important to weigh when deciding how aggressively to source and promote;
• Employee comments and posts are considered credible and if the writer happens to be in the job seeker’s network or there is otherwise a personal connection, the trustworthiness rises. This suggests that companies might encourage employee posts, and, as the following data point from the Hodes report implies, to keep it honest;
• Negative information about a company is not as damaging to recruiting efforts as you might think. Most information turned up during a search was either neutral or favorable and it had either a positive impact or none at all.

The structure of the talent economy has shifted, and talent leaders will need to respond with changes in strategy in order to successfully compete in the New Talent Economy.

One of the key structural changes in the talent economy is directly tied one of the key structural changes in the American economy: the mobility of candidates, which has been encumbered in two ways.

One, the most obvious, is that with more than 11 million homeowners in America owing more than their home is worth, that portion of the workforce is simply not mobile. When combined with homeowners who have near zero equity, that equates to roughly 29% of all mortgage debt being underwater; in rough numbers, 29% of potential candidates will find it very difficult to move in order to change jobs.

Remember, selling a house costs nearly 10% of its value, when you add tax, real estate fees, and other related expenses. Owning with no equity is like renting with no mobility. This drag on candidate mobility up to now has been at least partially masked by continued elevated unemployment and low demand for talent, but the issue is in large part structural until the housing market works through what will prove to be a long recovery process. Importantly, long before housing prices recover, companies will be hiring again, yet nearly a third of the talent pool will be mired with a home they are unable to sell without substantial financial assistance. As a result, candidate relocations are at an all-time low.

The second key issue is that many potential passive candidates (gainfully employed, but potentially “recruitable”) have been abnormally sticky to their existing employers.

Employed workers have avoided the LIFO risk of employment: being last in often means greater risk of layoff should the company need to cut its workforce. So the order of the day has been “it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil that you don’t” as employees have hunkered down to ride out the storm. Turnover has remained low due to uncertainty that prevails in the marketplace.

But employee stickiness is beginning to decline as the “New Talent Economy” normalizes to a “New Normal.” And this will exacerbate the problem related to lack of candidate mobility. Regretted attrition will increase as employees begin to feel more comfortable about leaving their existing employer and as a result recruiters will get pressured to back-fill departed employees. By now, inventories at companies have been worked through, revenues have stabilized, and there are substantial signs that companies are beginning to hire again … so disenfranchised employees now have greater options.

One of the non-scientific gauges I monitor in terms of economic recovery is recruiting activity. When companies start hiring recruiting staff, it almost always means the economy is several innings into a recovery. In Seattle, where I live, there are a host of senior-level talent acquisition jobs available: Starbucks, Microsoft, Expedia, Intellectual Ventures, and Amazon.com all have director-level or above recruiting jobs available as of this post. This is more than I ever recall seeing at one time. The same is true in other markets like Silicon Valley. And nearly every company I speak with is hiring recruiters again.

It is telling that a colleague of mine who is a senior-level business development executive at one of the world’s largest contingent staffing firms recently remarked that his firm recently pulled all of its sales teams out of the field in order to stop selling and focus on filling job orders. Think about that for a moment. The executive team told the sales team to ‘stop selling’ because it had too much business and couldn’t meet demand and needed the sales team to help recruit for the job orders. He also remarked that his division is having its best quarter ever; even better than 2006 or 2007, before the wheels came off the economy.

So things in the talent economy are starting to move again, and for a lot of reasons many companies are not prepared to meet the new staffing challenges: Recruiting departments have been whittled down in ways I have not seen in previous recessions (including the dot-com bust, when I was leading recruiting teams in Seattle). Many of the junior-level recruiters have left the industry through the downturn, so the recruiting workforce is smaller than it has been in the past. And cost-consciousness is still the order of the day at many companies, so relocation programs and other related recruiting investments are not being improved to account for the new mobility issue related to underwater homeowners.

I was having breakfast this week with my friend Roy Notowitz, who is a long-time executive staffing leader in Portland, Oregon, and one of the smartest guys I know in the search business. He shared that many of his clients are asking for local talent as a result of the dynamics described above. “Go Local” has become the strategy du jour.

Here are a several key changes that talent leaders should consider to make this “Go Local” strategy requirement work:

1. Eliminate Past Biases: Roy and I were talking over coffee that so many companies don’t consider candidates who they have interviewed but declined previously. There is often a strong bias against them, as in, “We interviewed that guy in January, and he wasn’t any good …” Given that most companies don’t have highly refined selection processes, this is an error in strategy. For companies to win, they will need to revisit local talent who they may have interviewed previously for other roles.
2. Don’t Overweight Experience and Technical Skills: It has been proven that experience and technical skills are relatively poor as predictors of success in candidate assessment. Yet most companies I work with (and have worked for) routinely overweight years of experience and technical skills through the interview process. Simply review a typical job description and it’s clear this is a common selection and assessment error at many companies. A thoughtful question recruiters or recruiting leaders might ask their hiring managers is, “Is it possible for someone with five years of experience to outperform someone with ten years of experience? How is that possible?” Smart recruiting organizations will help their companies select on the portfolio of attributes that drive success in a job, being careful to not overweight less-predictive candidate attributes such as years of experience. Doing so will increase the candidate pool that is available locally.
3. Refine the Strategy by Job Type: Map your talent strategy to the “go local” requirement. Now more than ever, developing internal talent is a smart strategy, as it also correlates to reduced attrition. So for those jobs that can be sourced internally, organizations will be well served by doing so, provided it supports the local search strategy. For example, perhaps some jobs are easily filled with local talent, while others are nearly impossible. Consider combinations of rotation programs and internal development strategies to mitigate the risk of not being able to find the talent that you need in the local market.
4. Measure the Opportunity Cost of Key Vacancies: Although it may seem crazy to pay an extra $100,000 to help a candidate sell their home and relocate, for some jobs the ROI on doing so is well worth it. Understanding the business argument for what jobs might warrant a rich pot of relocation dollars will put you ahead of the game.
5. Adjust Your Marketing Channels to Focus on Local: Now would be a good time to evaluate recruitment marketing spend by media type and channel, keeping in mind that many candidates will have difficulty relocating.
6. Outsmart Your Competitors: Smart companies will quickly recognize that improving the value package offered to employees to attract more local talent carries far greater ROI than buying someone out of their underwater mortgage, or letting a key role in the organization sit vacant. Most companies only respond to post data to improve salaries, bonuses, and related components of the employee value proposition – waiting until attrition spikes to take action, or completing a compensation survey which typically shows data that is 8-12 months old and then taking action. In essence, waiting until the economy is in full swing before increasing salaries or benefits to compete – but that’s too late! Smart companies are responding now to improve their positions in the marketplace before things get hyper-competitive.
7. Keep Your Best: As always, the best local talent to attract and recruit are the strong performers who are already working for your company. But most companies have cut bonuses, reduced merit increases, and kept job promotions to a minimum in order to control costs during recent challenging economic times. I was recently talking with colleagues at the Recruiting Roundtable (now CLC Recruiting), and according to a recent study, only 25% of high potential employees say they are likely to stay at their current employer. Now is a good time to rethink strategy, and if you haven’t, identify the talent you can’t afford to lose, and make sure they are happy and engaged. This is also true for recruiting leaders, incidentally. Recruiters now have options, so don’t miss an opportunity to retain key staff.

If you were looking for an SEO manager, where would you advertise?

Even if you follow all the rules Lou Adler laid out, it would be hard to top what the Daily Mail in the UK did.

The newspaper embedded an ad in its robots.txt file, a place there is no reason for any human to look. This is a file strictly to be read by the crawlers from search engines. It tells them what pages to index and what not to. For normal humans, there’s nothing of interest there, as you have may already have discovered if you clicked the link.

True SEO geeks, though, check those files. Sometimes the instructions to the crawlers contain interesting tidbits, such as the location where dummy editions might be found. A blogger in 2007 posted about what he found in some UK newspaper files.

Someone else tweeted about this little bit of robots.txt humor. (Do I need to explain the joke?)

In the case of the Daily Mail, its robots.txt file contained these lines:

“# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!

# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline dot co dot uk”

It’s certainly an odd place to run an ad. But talk about targeting! Who but a die-hard SEO fanatic would spend the time poking about such files? At least until blogger Malcolm Coles came across the ad, it was a genius way to filter out the hoi polloi.

But then it got picked up by Paid Content, and then by TechCrunch. And now by us.

I wish I could tell you a brilliant UK recruiter came up with the idea. Instead, it was James Bromley, who runs MailOnline.com. He claims the credit in a tweet today.

Recruiting history was made this month. You may not be aware that last week marked the culmination of the most sophisticated recruiting effort executed in this century, one that will go down in history as a case study on how to recruit “game-changers.” The approaches used and the lessons to be learned are almost without comparison. If you want to recruit the best to your organization, don’t miss this opportunity to learn how “game changer” recruiting differs dramatically from typical recruiting.

“Game Changer Recruiting” Is Needed in All Organizations

You do not have to be a sports nut to realize that for the last two months numerous NBA teams have been pulling out all the stops and spending unlimited amounts of money to recruit basketball star LeBron James to their team. Simultaneously, almost-as-intensive recruiting efforts have targeted other game-changing stars including Dwyane Wade, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Chris Bosh.

Sports teams and corporations alike need all the game-changers (individuals who can change the entire direction of an organization) they can get. While you might think that sports recruiting is not comparable to corporate recruiting, that notion would be erroneous. This sports-superstar recruiting effort is ultimately an illustration of world-class “game-changer recruiting.”

If like most organizations, yours could use a few more “game-changers,” innovators, or exceptional performers, consider the lessons that can be gleaned from the events of the past eight weeks.

Lesson #1 — Calculate the Economic Value of a Game-changer

The first lesson to be learned is to calculate the dollar impact a game-changer can have on revenue. Most recruiting managers focus on the cost of recruiting individuals (i.e. cost per hire), ignoring the potential return or the economic impacts that recruiting a game-changer will have. The LeBron case study illustrates a superior approach, one focused on return on investment.

Historically the largest economic game-changing recruit was Michael Jordan. One study conducted by Fortune estimated that Michael Jordan had a $10 billion dollar impact on the NBA. LeBron will have a similar impact, not just on team revenues, but also on complimentary businesses in the greater metropolitan area. One economist recently estimated that impact could be as large as $3 billion.

Unfortunately, few corporations invest in calculating the dollar impact of recruiting a game-changer on their organization. Those that do, often find that focusing solely on cost to recruit is silly. Google for example has estimated that a top performer generates three hundred times more revenue than an average performer. What would be the dollar impact if Warren Buffett joined your investment firm or Steve Jobs joined your technology firm? On a less-grandiose scale, can you imagine the impact on your organization if the inventor of the iPod or the iPhone were to join the organization?

When doing calculations, remember that the economic impacts of acquiring a game-changer are not limited to their direct contributions, but also include the attraction of investors and other high-caliber recruits that will also impact the performance of the organization. In addition, recruiting a game-changer from a direct competitor may significantly impact their ability to compete. Once your executives understand the startling economic value, they will support the use of a game-changing recruiting approach.

Lesson #2 — Realize That Game-changers Are Different

The second lesson to learn from the LeBron case is that game-changers, innovators, and top performers truly are different and must be recruited in a unique manner. The traditional corporate recruiting and executive search models will not work when recruiting most game-changers because those models do not accommodate superstar personalities, unusual expectations, and an unbelievable array of decision-influencers. To get the attention of a game-changer, you must understand exactly how they are different. While game-changers are not all alike, in general, they exhibit the following characteristics.

• Not looking for a job — they are probably currently employed and they are almost always well treated where they currently work. As a result, they are not actively looking for a new job and if they did hear about an ordinary opportunity, they would not pursue it.
• Power — they fully understand their value and their importance and as a result, they expect to be treated differently than the average applicant. They know that they hold the power in any potential new relationship or recruiting opportunity, so they expect to be courted.
• Difficult to approach — they are incredibly busy and there is a constant demand on their time. As a result, most erupt numerous barriers that would prevent strangers from even approaching them with opportunities. In order to make an initial recruiting contact, you will probably need direct assistance from someone who influences them.
• Trust is required — experience has taught them to be cynical of strangers and promises. As a result, you will need a strong relationship built on trust before they will seriously consider any offer from you.
• A triggering event required — because they are successful and well treated at their current position, they are generally satisfied with their current situation. As a result, it will likely take a major negative career-impacting event at their current firm to shift them into job search mode. In the absence of a negative event, it will take a major “WOW” jaw-dropping positive opportunity before they would even look at a job opening.
• A game-changer recruiting approach is required — the final thing to understand about recruiting any individual who is in high demand is that they almost always have an intense dislike for standard recruiting processes. Instead, they expect and require a “tailored” or personalized recruiting process that requires little of their time, that meets all of their expectations, and that contains not a single turnoff or “dealbreaker” element.

Lesson #3 — Shift to a “Game-changing Recruiting Approach”

The primary differentiator between a game-changing recruiting process and all other recruiting processes is the level of effort that is put into truly understanding the candidate and their needs. Most recruiters would argue that they already understand the needs of their candidates; however, heavy workloads force most recruiters to generalize and make numerous assumptions about what candidates need and expect.

In direct contrast, the game-changer recruiting approach is tailored to the individual who is being targeted. It is a market research/sales-driven approach that puts together a sophisticated candidate profile that covers the candidate’s job search process, how best to contact them, and their job acceptance decision criteria. This in-depth profile takes a significant amount of time and resources but is necessary if you want to have a realistic chance of success. There are 10 activities involved in developing a deep understanding of your target and creating a candidate profile. They include:

1. Identify factors that trigger a job search — a job opportunity by itself will not be enough to trigger a game-changer into job search mode. Instead, a combination of a positive job opportunity and the simultaneous occurrence of a negative factor that makes the target uncomfortable in their current situation is needed. To time your recruiting effort precisely, you need to be aware of what negative triggering events could arise and when they are most likely to occur. You must conduct research and interviews with those who know your recruiting target extremely well in order to compile a list of the specific events likely to trigger a desired change. Such events might include a corporate merger, management turnover, corporate scandal, or a significant cut to their budget.
2. Map their job search process — whenever a game-changer does begin to consider change, you need to understand and map out the process they will use. If you fish using bait, you understand that to catch a trophy fish you need to understand how a trophy fish searches for food. Likewise, recruiters must find out how their target found opportunities in the past, how and where they research opportunities, and what factors get an opportunity on their “short list” of opportunities to consider. Once you fully understand how, when, and where they find opportunities, you need to customize your approach to mirror their activities. Additionally, there must be a process to reevaluate the quality of your recruiting process against world-class standards, because a game-changer will likely judge your entire organization based on the experience they receive. It is quite common for recruits to assume that their candidate experience is a direct reflection on how they will be treated when they become an employee.
3. Determine who must do the recruiting — in many cases, game-changers expect to bypass traditional recruiters and instead be contacted and recruited by professionals of similar stature (or even by senior executives). As a result, you must identify their expectations and shift the initial contact and much of the recruiting to individuals who they respect and trust. Leading off with the wrong person can result in your opportunity being filtered.
4. Identify the best way to communicate and to reach them — if you want prospects to respond to your messages, you need to understand their communication preferences. That means you must research their most-favored way to communicate (i.e. in person, telephone calls, text messages, e-mail, on Facebook, etc.) and what must be in a message for them to respond to it. You must also identify other opportunities to communicate with them, including events they attend, publications they read, and websites and blogs regularly visited. If you do not know precisely where they “lurk,” you dramatically reduce the chances on reaching them. It is also important to note that the sites game-changers frequently are likely to be learning on content sites related to their professional growth, rather than job or career-oriented sites.
5. Identify the factors that will grab their initial attention — due to the volume and level of competition for their attention, if you expect to get on their short list, you need to identify the factors that would cause them to initially consider your opportunity. Once you identify the factors that will get their initial attention, you must make sure that compelling information on those factors is clearly visible on the sites they routinely visit. You may also have to educate their friends and colleagues about your organization, so that they will know about you and as a result, may speak highly of your organization during their interactions with your recruiting target. If you are an unknown organization or if you have a weak employer brand image, this step is even more important in order to prevent them from immediately ignoring your opportunity.
6. Identify the decision criteria they will use to accept an interview — game-changers routinely turn down opportunities to interview for new positions, so understanding what it takes to excite them about a particular interview invitation is a critical factor in the game-changer recruiting process. Identifying interview acceptance criteria requires extensive research and benchmarking and some guesswork. In the end, you must develop a ranked list of the criteria that they will use when deciding whether to accept an invitation and make sure that you convincingly communicate each of them in all of your initial recruiting and interview-related communications.
7. Identify “deal breaker” or knockout factors — in addition to positive criteria that game-changers will use to filter opportunities, there are also negative factors that will influence their decisions. Your research must identify each of these “deal breakers” (i.e. a weak boss, no budget, restricted decision-making, a lack of control, etc.,) and ensure that there is not even a hint of one of them present within the organization.
8. Identify their decision criteria and the information they need to accept a job offer — this is without a doubt the most critical step in the overall process. Consider the recruiting process similar to the sales process for big-ticket item. In both cases, successfully making a sale requires understanding a customer’s buying criteria and a product that meets that criteria as closely as possible. Some identify a candidate’s job acceptance decision criteria by asking them directly at the beginning of the interview process, or by interviewing friends and colleagues. Typical decision criteria include their degree of independence, the extent of their authority, their ability to build their own team, their ability to select projects, and the availability of ample resources. The entire interview process must be geared toward convincing them that this job meets every one of their acceptance criteria. It is also important to periodically ask them during critical points in the interview process if you are successfully meeting their criteria.To ensure that the target candidate remains engaged in the process, give them some input into it, so that they do not view it as inflexible. Ask them what specific information they need and what questions they need answered before they can make an affirmative decision. You should also ask them who they must meet and talk with before they can make a final decision on your offer. The overall interview process should provide them with an excellent candidate experience and you should use it not just as an assessment tool but also as an opportunity to provide a comprehensive sales pitch.
9. Identify who will influence their decision — game-changers are much more apt to consult with and seek the advice of friends and colleagues than the average candidate. As a result, make an attempt to identify and then proactively “sell” those individuals who will influence the candidate’s final decision. Incidentally, the process of identifying and educating “influencers” on the powerful selling points of your firm needs to start at the very beginning of the interview process.
10. Develop a counteroffer strategy — it would be highly unusual for a game-changer not to get a compelling counteroffer from their current organization. Because the normal reaction of a game-changer is to “stay put in a known environment,” you need to proactively research what that counteroffer is likely to be and to prepare a compelling strategy to overcome it. In addition, you should anticipate that the game-changer will get several external offers, so you need to do your research and benchmarking to ensure that your initial offer is clearly superior and most closely aligns with your candidate’s dream job.

Final Thoughts

Some people viewed the recruiting process used to attract LeBron James as a circus. However, on closer examination, it was unique, targeted, and comprehensive. There were numerous WOW factors, including the city of New York crafting a customized video including a message from the mayor, and several cities organizing mass public recruiting parties to show their commitment. Teams used high profile individuals including Jay Z and even the President of the United States to influence the process. Numerous websites were created, blogs were written, and literally millions of tweets were shared on the topic.

To further highlight the importance of this recruiting effort, Lebron’s offer acceptance was televised in an hour-long TV special (a first). During the special, his decision criteria were disclosed, including the probability of winning a championship, a new coach, a choice of teammates, team chemistry, supportive owners, a large fan base, broader media exposure, and lifestyle considerations including the interests of his entourage, and of course hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.

While millions were spent to recruit him and millions more will be spent to pay him, the economic return (likely to be in the billions) will far outweigh the costs. Believe it or not, the same dramatic results can be obtained by recruiting a single game-changer in the corporate world, although the fanfare would likely be less dramatic! If you are not landing your share of game-changers, the process that corporate executives must follow has been spelled out, all they need to add is … courage.

Hire My Friend to Work For Us.

Sorry if that sounds like a weird request, but I just couldn’t resist the verbal mashup of two, sort of new Facebook apps.

The apps address employment from opposite sides, and in that sense, they are sides of the same coin. Hire My Friend helps your Facebook friends spread the word about their job hunt. Work For Us lets employers post their jobs to their Facebook pages.

Now if only there was an app that matched the Work For Us jobs to the friends who want to be hired. Oh wait. There is. Jobvite Source does that for jobs, matching the opportunity to employees and friends and tracking these posts (Jobvites) as they get passed along.

Work For Us is different only in that it doesn’t do any matching or tracking. What it does, and does very well, is to post job openings to a company Facebook page, producing a job list that bears a striking resemblance to a bland job board post.

For that you’ll pay $9 a month for five job posts or a few hundred a month for unlimited posts. There’s a free version that lets you post one job at a time.

TechCrunch, which wrote about this last week, says the Work4Labs, the startup that built the app, has already got 2,000 companies to download the app.

It works this way: You sign-up either as the friend in need or the friend who helps out. Answer a few questions about the job seeker to create a mini-profile, provide a LinkedIn address, and connect it up to your Facebook page (or ask your friend to do so). It creates a status post that notifies your network.

It’s a clever idea, though it will be interesting to see if it gains much traction. I’m thinking there might one or two good friends for whom I might do this, but I sure wouldn’t want my Facebook wall to become a repository of job hunt requests. Of course, if other people take the same kind of care, then Hire My Friend as well as my friend in need benefit from this self-screening. In that way, it’s got the same sort of quality assurance going for it as a traditional employee referral program.

A report in The Huffington Post two days ago has sent the recruiting world into a paroxysm of self-examination.

Dozens of comments here at ERE and more at RecruitingBlogs and probably elsewhere too, are condemning the practice of excluding the unemployed from jobs.

The HuffPo article reported that some companies are specifically discouraging the unemployed from applying. It cites a few specific example, and says it’s not hard to find ads with wording such as this from Craigslist for a restaurant manager: “Must be currently employed.”

The article doesn’t say whether this is a trend. However, one of the ERE posters commented that “This ‘practice’ been going on for almost as long as I can remember (30+ years of TPR) now everyone is upset because a company actually said it in a job post?”

ERE blogger Brenda Le triggered the discussion when she wrote about the HuffPo article and said: “IMHO — It is a disgrace in this country, given the current economy that companies are practicing this kind of behavior — it can’t possibly be the norm.”

The 31 comments (at the time I posted this article) mostly agree with her. A few suggest the practice may have some validity as a screening tool, but that it’s unwise from a PR standpoint.

Over at RecruitingBlogs the discussion is decidedly more shrill. Some of the comments to a blog post there draw comparisons to Hitler’s generals. Like ERE’s Le, IT recruiter and blogger Nikole Tutton took to task employers who don’t want the unemployed.

“Hey Recruiters! What gives?,” she scolded. “What ever happened to ‘Let’s help America by putting her back to work one job at a time.’? Isn’t this prolonging the job crisis and unemployment by further dividing the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’?”

Like the ERE discussion, most participants are taking great umbrage over the exclusion of the unemployed. One brave recruiter, however, commented, “I never signed up to ‘put America back to work’… My job is to recruit the profile of individual my client desires. If this profile is not discriminatory in nature I have no moral struggle with doing so.”

Discriminating against the unemployed, observes The HuffPo article, is not prohibited, though it could, potentially, have a disparate impact on minorities, especially black men who have an unemployment rate nationally in May of 17.1 percent.

In certain states and metro areas, that percentage is significantly higher. In Michigan, the unemployment rate for black men for 2009 was 26 percent.

While the HuffPo article limited itself to a handful of sites, I checked some of the biggest job boards for phrases such as “currently employed,” “must be currently employed,” and one cited in the article: “no unemployed will be considered.”

A few of these turn up on both CareerBuilder and Monster. Many are for restaurant management jobs. This one, which says, “Must be currently employed or no more than 3 months out of the restaurant business,” is typical. This one on CareerBuilder for a B2B software and services sales person, says “Must be Currently employed!”

Most of the ads I found appear placed by one or another agency, which may well be taking marching orders from the client. Thus, the general taking orders from Hitler reference at RecruitingBlogs.

Some of the more thoughtful posters make an interesting point about how recruiters covet, above all others, the passive candidate. That would imply an exclusion of the unemployed, who, if they are seeking work, are “active” candidates. Then again, recruiters posting on a job board, are implicitly soliciting active candidates who, for one reason or another, want out of the job they currently have.

To me, that’s a bit of dark irony, since the end result of that process is to welcome (even if unintentionally) those who can’t stand their job, their boss or may be one step ahead of being fired, while rejecting a group of people that includes top performers, team players, and other, similarly qualified persons.

Notwithstanding that logical oddity, there may be good reasons for excluding the unemployed. In the case of someone out of the job market for some time, their skills may have grown stale or, for a rainmaker type job, losing touch with key contacts may be an issue. I’m reaching here, I know, since there are more diplomatic and productive ways of addressing those concerns.

Whatever positive benefit there might be in limiting the applicant pool by excluding the unemployed, the downside seems much worse. At the very least, an employer may miss out on some highly qualified candidates. There’s also a hit to the employer brand. It may be small, but most brand damage is incremental, not monumental.

Where do you come down on this issue? What do you think of employers who exclude the unemployment? What are the pros and cons? Comment here or participate in the discussion at “Unemployed Will Not Be Considered” (Right or Wrong?).

A new report says Craigslist will bring in $65.3 million from job postings this year, an amount rivaled only by the $36.3 million take from its adult ad istings.

The report by classified advertising consultancy AIM Group says quirky Craigslist will have revenues of $122 million this year. Estimates of its costs last year, suggest that it could have a profit somewhere between $89 million and $99 million. (See note at end of article for full disclosure.)

The estimated $122 million in revenue for 201o represents a 22 percent jump over 2009. Though the bulk of the growth is expected to come from the adult ads on the site, recruitment revenue is projected to increase 10.2 percent over 2009’s $59 million in estimated recruitment revenue.

If that turns out to be the case, it would be a significant achievement considering Wall Street analysts don’t expect much improvement in recruitment advertising. Yahoo says analysts expect Monster revenues to be flat to even slightly down this year. Last year, Monster and CareerBuilder (North America only) — the two biggest job boards in the world – reported declines of 33 and 27 percent respectively. (CareerBuilder is a private company and reports only some numbers voluntarily.)

Some other job boards have told me they don’t expect to see any appreciable growth until late in the year and expect to be flat to slightly up in revenue.That makes the Craigslist projections from AIM Group all the more remarkable. The consultancy counted job postings in February, projecting them for a full year. The results suggest Craigslist is already experiencing a lift in its job postings. And since the AIM Group counts, President Obama has signed a jobs stimulus bill, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the first growth in new jobs in three years.

How we should interpret the Craigslist projections is not at all clear. On the one hand, it could be an early sign of a recovering economy. Many of the jobs on Craigslist are part-time or entry-level or temp positions. Typically, these are the harbingers of a recovery.

Another possible conclusion is that acceptance of Craigslist continues to grow as a legitimate source of candidates. That acceptance likely has been nudged along by Craigslist’s attractive pricing. While recruitment is not especially price sensitive, a $75 job posting is pretty tempting compared to the $350-$400 the big boards charge for a single job posting.

Of course, it has to produce results. The evidence says Craigslist does; otherwise, it wouldn’t see the year-over-year growth it does. In past years, it has been able to increase the number of markets where it charges for job listings. Last year it added Austin, Texas to 17 others. Now, Craigslist charges in: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Orange County, California, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego,  Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

According to the report, some of these markets have surprisingly small counts, when their size is considered. The report says, “For its size, Houston — the fourth-largest city in the U.S. — recorded a mere 5,200 jobs, flat from a year ago. Chicago saw 9,900 jobs posted in February, slightly better than 2009’s 9,400 jobs. The fewest jobs in our survey were in Sacramento (3,700) and Austin (4,300).”

That tracks with the Monster Employment Index for those cities. In February, Houston’s index stood at 104 compared to the national index of 124. Chicago was at 66, and Sacramento stood at 62. Monster does not offer a local report for Austin.

Whether Craigslist is a bell cow for hiring trends this year will become a little clearer on Thursday, when Monster Worldwide reports its first quarter 2010 financial results. CareerBuilder, which typically releases its North American numbers about the same time, may also offer further clues. On May 7th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report on the jobs and unemployment picture for April.

Note: I participated in the AIM Group report. I did the analysis and writing of the section on Craigslist’s 2009 expenses.

Having trouble finding the right talent for your positions? Getting bombarded with the wrong types of candidates? I’ve consulted and worked with a number of clients over the past 10 years, and in that time have seen many good recruiting practices and programs, as well as my fair share of bad strategies and processes. I’ve come up with a short list of the most common barriers I’ve witnessed to recruit top talent. While this isn’t a complete list, these are the top few that most will be able to relate to.

Use of Social Media

Recruiting teams need access to all the popular online destinations, such as Twitter and Facebook. Give them the ability to comment, blog, share, and have real conversations with potential talent on the web. They’re grown-ups, aren’t they? You hired them because you trust they will represent your company well. Put a social media policy in place and get moving. Once up and running on social networks and in the blogosphere, learn to have more than just an account. Build a real presence. Build community. Build excitement and buzz that spreads and attracts talent. AT&T and Starbucks are examples of two companies using social media the right way to attract high-caliber talent. Check out Trust Agents and The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web to get a better picture of using social media the right way.

Push vs. Pull Marketing

Gone are the days of the post-and-pray mentalities for recruiting departments, dumping budgets into job boards and search firms. That is push marketing: pushing out job orders. Here now are thousands upon thousands of free resources, sites, and online communities at your disposal. Use them! Recruiters can go beyond job postings and place tailored PowerPoints on Slideshare, insightful pictures on Flickr, descriptive videos on YouTube, and select whitepapers on Scribd and Docstoc. Spread your content in key places online and make sure to provide good titles, tags, and keywords to be found. This is pull marketing, and will bring more traffic to your career site and ultimately produce a better applicant pool to work with.

Lack of a Sourcing Function

Recruiters are overworked today with paperwork, processes, and compliance laws, not to mention the fact that they need to find and source quality candidates for their positions. It’s nearly impossible without having a sourcing team or resources internally or externally. Outsourcing is an option. Training and shifting internal talent is an option too. Hewitt Associates is an example of a company that understands the importance of the sourcing function. It breaks its talent acquisition team into specific tasks, with dedicated sourcers being used on and offshore, finding and submitting talent to recruiters. Sourcers today need to be well-versed in the latest trends in social media and mobile recruiting, as well as a high proficiency in advanced Internet search techniques with Google. This will ensure the sourcing function covers good ground to find qualified talent.

The Application Process

Don’t make job seekers jump through hoops to apply to your positions. Some companies have more than 10 steps amounting to over 20 minutes to fill out. This is too long! Simplify the application process. Fewer steps equal more candidates, guaranteed! The best application processes require uploading your resume, verifying your information parsed by the ATS, and hitting the submit button. Done! Better yet: how about giving your email address and bypassing everything. For most, this just isn’t reality though. Recruiters need data to be successful, and an ATS helps to get this data in the form of extensive profiles and questionnaires. Recruiters also need to be more accessible, more visible during the application process. Think about providing a live person via instant message or video chat on your career site, or a dedicated job applicant support phone line to guide confused candidates and do light screening. Other options such as company Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn groups, and YouTube channels that tie-in are a must.

Job Descriptions

Most employment ads online either have too little information or way too much. The information that is available usually has too much corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo and uses company acronyms and internal program names. Ads like these can be confusing and misleading. Sit down with the hiring manager and get all the facts out on the table. Uncover every detail possible. Develop a job description that really sells the job! Make it relevant to the job seeker. Make it interesting. Show some excitement. Talk like a real person. Tell people what the job will really do and the importance it plays with your company or client. Strike a good balance of information with an enticing sales pitch. Make me want to apply!

Many more talent barriers exist today. I’m interested to hear about the makeup of your recruiting team, how you find talent today, and what unique challenges you face.