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5 Things Employers Can Do To Simplify (and Improve) Recruiting

With the national unemployment rate hovering around 9 percent, so many people are looking for work that a resu-mess has been created that floods inboxes and cripples applicant processing timelines. It takes so much time to screen applicants that top candidates give up and go undiscovered entirely.

What can a company do to simplify its recruiting practices and yet still end up with the candidate(s) best-suited for the job? 

Social Media Summit 2011Click here or on the image to watch video about how social media is changing job search and recruitment.

Although statistics vary, it has been reported that 80% of companies use or intend to use social media to find candidate to fill available positions.  It is estimated that, of those, 95% use LinkedIn, 59% use Facebook and 42% use Twitter.   LinkedIn has an estimated 120 million users; Facebook 800 million.  Given those numbers, using social media to source and recruit candidates makes excellent business sense.  To maximize the effectiveness of using social media, there are five things a company should remember. 

  1. Careful consideration and planning must go into how the company is branded online.   The entire reason a company has (or should have) a web presence is to disseminate information to the largest audience possible, an audience that includes not only prospective clients/customers but potential employees as well.
  2. To reach the intended audience, job ads and job descriptions must be search engine optimized (SEO).  To be an effective recruiting tool and reach the target labor audience, careers sites and job postings must use language consistent with the language used in the company’s industry. Recruiters must be well versed in “how” to search resumes and social networking sites for passive candidates, too.
  3. Establish and maintain full integration across all social media platforms. The LinkedIn page should include links to Facebook and Twitter, for example, and vice verse.  The website should include links to all the social networking sites. YouTube is also becoming an increasingly important tool for recruiters and jobseekers. Employers can use video to describe the job and the company.  Employee testimonials are very effective. Jobseekers are also getting very adept at preparing video resumes.
  4. Set up links to groups and online communities with similar interests. This reinforces branding.  When a job seeker arrives at a site, she wants to know why she should apply to that company.  What does the site tell her about this employer?  What do they do?  What do they consider important?  Are there any Fact Sheets or Question and Answer pages that describe the employer, the job environment, why it’s fun to work there?  Is the applicant processing process user friendly?
  5. Beware of the current legal landscape.  The use of social media in employment is relatively new and the law around proscribed conduct is evolving and changing almost daily. An employer seeking to fill a specific need using social media must ensure it does so in a manner not deemed discriminatory or otherwise unlawful.   

It appears clear that social media as a hiring tool is here to stay.  Wise use of this tool should serve a company well in its recruiting and hiring processes and, by extension, help bolster its bottom line. 

 

Oct 08, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

New Video: How To Use Social Media for Job Search and Recruitment

For the second straight year, I had the privilege and pleasure of being a panelist at the Harrisburg University Social Media Summit (September 14, 2011). Like last year, the event brought together a group of world-class speakers from across the country to address a diverse group of topics that examined the far-reaching impact of social networks on politics, parenting, entrepreneurship, training and education, world affairs, and the local news. My focus along with Dr. Sherrie A. Madia,   author of the bestselling book, The Online Job Search Survival Guide, and Director of Communications at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, was social media and the job search.

Our presentation was recorded and here is a link to the video.

Social Media, Job Search, and Recruitment

Click on the image to view the video.

Lasting a little over an hour, you’ll find tips and recommendations that can help jobseekers find a job as well as employers find qualified workers. Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll be posting highlights and expanded comments gleaned from the summit including my own presentation.

A few topics we discussed are:

  • How the definition of jobs and work have changed
  • The increasing importance of personal branding
  • The role of search engine optimization in recruiting and job search
  • How social media and technology is disrupting recruitment

And I’m just getting started! Watch for highlights about social media and employment law,  parenting the Facebook generation, intellectual property, and the future of social networking.

Oct 02, 2011 | 1 comment | View Post

Is Your Email Address Sabotaging Your Career?

When it comes to hiring, employers and candidates insist that first impressions still matter.  But apparently the brain hasn’t gotten the message when the lips are moving and fingers are typing.  Quite a few candidates are doing some pretty stupid things these days regarding finding a job.

Let’s start with what is the possibly the very first point of contact between a candidate and a company – the email address. The just released HR Magazine (May 2011) included an interesting article about how a cutesy, clever, or freaky email address might create a bad first impression with the employer.  For example, a few of my favorite inappropriate email addresses submitted by candidates applying for jobs at my clients included “sexylady@XXX.com, Joelovessex@XXX.com, hitemhardordie@XXX.com, partygirl1267@XXX.com, moneymotivatesme@XXX.com … and that’s just scratching the surface.  With high unemployment and employers practicing very selective hiring practices, turning an employer off with a provocative email address might not be the best way to get the hiring manager’s attention.

A recent study took this one step further.  Researchers rated the email addresses of30,000  job seekers applying for entry-level, non management jobs in the U.S. What they found was a potential link between crazy sounding email addresses and low scores on pre-employment tests.

For example:

  • Cutesy and inspirational addresses and those with a money them scored slightly lower on pre employments assessment tests.
  • Candidates whose addresses were rated inappropriate  scored lower.
  • Candidates with appropriate email addresses scored higher in conscientiousness, professionalism, and work-rated experience.

I’m not suggesting – nor did the article – that employers should use email addresses as a screening tool.  But when combined with a pre-employment test assessing a candidate’s honesty, integrity, and work attitudes, the email might trigger greater scrutiny during the interview and subsequent background checks.

The study should prompt candidates to think twice about the email address they attach to the resume  they attach to the job application.

May 07, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

Is Poor Job Retraining Responsible for High Unemployment?

It's a difficult concept to grasp — that at a time of massive unemployment, good paying jobs remain unfilled.

And yet despite unemployment in nearly 30 states running 8 percent or higher, nearly 2 million jobs remain vacant because employers can't find enough qualified workers.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece of the Business2Business Magazine about the growing gap between the skills of the unemployed and the skill requirements of the jobs. These issues were also discussed in a recent article in theNew York Times on job retraining and another article in USA Today.

What’s the basic problem?  A Washington Post article suggests that maybe it’s job retraining that needs to be retooled.

Some high unemployment America faces today is cyclical, meaning that hard times wiped out jobs that will be restored when conditions improve. But many of the job losses this time were structural – we just don’t need them anymore or other countries can do them better or cheaper or both.  So the difference between this economic recovery and those in the past is that this time there is a dramatic mismatch between the kinds of jobs that millions of Americans have historically held and the kinds of jobs that we will generate moving forward.

Traditionally we addressed this problem by advocating worker retraining. No unexpectedly t is a cornerstone of the Obama administration's jobs policy. In 2009, the Department of Labor spent a little more than $4 billion on adult workplace training; about one-fifth of that came from the stimulus package. Millions of Americans are undergoing such training every year in an effort for them to go back to work.

And what are workers being retrained to do? It seems that a significant portion of the money is focused on "green jobs" and health-care industry jobs. But the Times article makes clear that current job retraining is inadequate, and hints that it may never really work.

So why doesn't the training produce its intended results? The Times grabbed the easy answer: "Because there are no jobs." That might, indeed, be the major reason, but before endorsing it, the Washington Post article offers several other theories:

The shortages aren't real. When medical organizations speak of shortages, they are measuring current workforce levels against a theoretical number per capita. Just because health professionals say they need more employees doesn't mean that the market has the capacity to support them.

There’s a personality gap. The unemployed generally have overbearing and unpleasant personalities.  That’s at least a reason offered by actor-comedian-economist Ben Stein, “The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities.” Stein suggests, “that high schools and colleges should have a course on "how to get along" and "how to do a day’s work." (That might help with future Gen Y joblessness but what about the 7 million unemployed workers 35 years and over.)

There's a geography gap. Economists have noted that while capital and physical goods are easily moved from stagnant to productive places, people are much less so. In the short term, it's not easy for unemployed people to move to where jobs might be, especially when many of their mortgages and home values are upside down.

There's a gender gap. Rationally, any well-paying job should be attractive to any needy worker. But the nation has suffered from a shortage of nurses for decades. Today more young men are willing to enter nursing as a career. But what about out-of-work males in their 40s and 50s who worked in male-dominated industries like manufacturing, construction, IT, and engineering?

Our training is really lousy. Governments and business leaders want unemployment to go down; community colleges want federal grants to provide workplace training; companies want skilled employees; and unemployed workers want jobs that pay well. So what’s the problem?  Maybe – just maybe – we need to stop training skills that businesses past their prime and out-of-work adults want and start training the skills that will produce the growth the economy needs.

And maybe we need to take a serious look at retooling job retraining before we can re-equip unemployed workers with the skills they need to get good paying, stable jobs.

Aug 01, 2010 | 8 comments | View Post

Advice for CEOs: Work Your Strengths, Know Your Weakness

Working your strengths might be a good strategy for finding the right career, but ignoring your executive skill weakness can humble and tumble giants.  As many leaders have come to learn recently, a single weakness blown off as irrelevant can negate the strengths of even the mightiest of top performer CEOs.

 

Tony Hayward's fate as CEO of troubled BP was likely sealed weeks before the Deep Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico stopped gushing millions of gallons of oil. His story serves as a cautionary tale to CEOs everywhere of how a single mishandled crisis can eclipse an entire career. In three short months, Hayward learned what it meant to become the face of disaster. What he didn’t learn was how to keep his mouth shut.

 

Chief executives must placate a wider variety of constituencies than ever before, making the job's symbolism nearly as important as its substance. Mr. Hayward's various gaffes—saying he wanted his "life back"—and sour appearance before legislators showed a degree of tone deafness that is no longer acceptable for corporate leaders, management experts say.  Hayward also initially described the spill as "oil [only] on the surface. There aren’t any plumes," a gaffe he never lived down.

 

This incident should also serve as a warning to hiring managers and boards of directors who focus too much on executive strengths and pay too little attention to executive weaknesses.

 

Executive skills have little to do with the job position as much as they describe innate cognitive functions that all people, not just corporate executives, “execute” in a work environment.  Chuck Martin, author of “Work Your Strengths” and CEO of NFI Research, identified 12 executive skills.  Certain ones are prevalent in high performing individuals.  Specifically, Martin’s group found three executive skills shared by nearly all high performing CEOs:  Goal-Directed Persistence, Planning/Priortization, and Working Memory.  Goal-Directed Persistence was the most dominant skill in 43 percent of the CEOs surveyed.  As significant, only 6 percent of top performing CEOs had Goal-Directed Persistence as a weakness.

 

The executive skill that helps an individual think before you act (and talk) is called Response Inhibition. It is the ability to resist the urge to say or do something to allow time to evaluate the situation and how a behavior might affect it (Source: Work Your Strengths). If you tend to say the first thing that pops into your head and later regret it, you’re likely weak in Response Inhibition.

 

Hayward’s repeated gaffes over the past three months demonstrate clearly how a single weakness can turn a respected leader into everyone’s favorite punching bag. Even under normal conditions, the data deluge is beginning to stretch people beyond their information capacity. During a crisis, all bets are off. That’s when stress and fatigue degrades executive skills and the weakest skills fail first.  In the case of Hayward – not to mention Vice President Biden, Former President George W. Bush, and Britney Spears to name a few – a lack of Response Inhibition likely led to his demise. 

 

Maybe a better title for Martin’s book would be “Work Your Strengths, Know Your Weakness.”

 

Listen to my interview with Chuck Martin on Workforce Trends Blog Talk Radio.

 

What CEO or other famous people gaffes stick in your mind that eventually brought the speaker down?

Jul 26, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Only 20 Percent of Workers Qualify for High Demand Jobs

Despite prolonged high unemployment, employers are struggling to find qualified skilled workers? How is this possible?

 

 

“Everyone has been caught flatfooted,” according to author/human capital expert Edward Gordon.  During a recent interview on my radio show Workforce Trends, Gordon said, “we only have 20% to 25% of the current workforce that fits into jobs that are in high demand right now….where we are creating jobs, not where we are abandoning and consolidating jobs.”

 

 

Gordon has been warning about this talent meltdown since 1991, when he authored the first of 17 books.  “Across the United States refineries are breaking down with unusual frequency. Though BP and other refiners are making major safety changes, the breakdowns frequently stem from technician errors due to increasing shortages of trained workers,” wrote Gordon in the introduction if his newest book “Winning the Global Talent Showdown.” He wrote that statement nearly a year before the Deep Horizon well accident in the Gulf of Mexico this year.

 

 

The Wall Street Journal reported a story in mid-July that Congress was investigating if the accident was related to a lack of properly trained technicians on the rig.  Then just a few days later, the Journal reported that a critical alarm system had been disabled which would have warned workers of dangers.  The story line unraveling at the scene of the accident seems to confirm Gordon’s forecast – a shortage in the quantity and quality of personnel and decision making ability is imminent.  Gordon warns that if we don’t do something quickly about re-training and educating people differently, “the world will not end in a big bang but in a slow grinding halt.”

 

 

It’s not that mankind hasn’t seen shortages like these in the past.  When we entered the Industrial Age beginning somewhere around 1850, we needed people to design, manufacture, and repair things.  That need created a lot of blue collar, semi- skilled, and low- skilled jobs that paid enough money to workers so that that they could live a middle class lifestyle. While 84% of those workers graduated from high school by the 1950s, many of them were only reading at the 6th or 8th grade level. But that didn’t matter – there were still jobs for them.  They could make a good living and raise a family in comfortable surroundings.

 

 

But then technology began to change everything.  In the 1970s, the Industrial Era became history and the Computer Age began to change the nature of work. Jobs now required different skills at a higher education level.  We still needed people to design, manufacture, and repair things but the complexity of the work required better skills. We started shutting down and shedding many of those low- skill and semi- skill jobs. They started going elsewhere – to Japan and South Korea. At the time they were the skilled low-wage countries.  Now, it is India and China who are low-wage and Japan and South Korea are high- wage countries.  But that too is changing according to Gordon who says, “wage inflation is beginning to change the nature of work in India and China, too.”

 

 

Unfortunately the U.S. work mindset remained the same while the world changed.  Many leaders in business and government believed that only a certain proportion of our people needed to be really well- educated and the rest could get along pretty well with a mediocre education or no education at all. As a result, we now have more than 90 million US workers who lack the reading, writing, and math skills to do the jobs properly. Our education system is just so far behind resulting in 95 million adults are reading at or below the 8th grade reading level. That is just a staggering number. It is almost the third of our population.

 

 

Now we find ourselves exiting the Computer Era and entering the Cyber-Mental Age, where advanced technologies are embedded in everything.  “We need the people who have the necessary higher levels of literacy in math and reading, and special technical training in virtually every business sector you can think of from A to Z,” says Gordon. “Things are changing so fast in every industry that unless something is done, a lot of current workers, incumbent workers, will find themselves with skills that are out of date.

 

“The warning signs,” says Gordon, “started a long time ago.” He wrote a book on this called “Closing the Literacy Gap in American Business” nearly 20 years ago. Yet here we are living in a country with 30 states experiencing unemployment rates over 8% and 20 states with rates at or above 9%. And still many employers are complaining they can’t find enough skilled workers.

 

 

Today’s long-term jobs crisis is not about the current financial meltdown. It is about an accelerating talent showdown. The basic cause is that unprecedented technological advances are ever more rapidly transforming the world of work. This will continue to raise the U.S. talent ante for people seeking employment or for businesses that need to fill high-skill jobs. The U.S. Department of Labor finds that 62 percent of all U.S. jobs now require two-year or four-year degrees and higher, or special postsecondary occupation certificates or apprenticeships. By 2020 we can expect that these talent requirements will increase to include 75 percent of U.S. jobs.

The World Future Society predicts that over the next decade the amount of new technology introduced into the U.S. economy will equal that of the last 50 years! While it took 120 years for the nature of work to change from the beginning to the end of the Industrial Era, it only took 40 years for the Computer Age to change work. We are already witnessing a major talent shift from low-skill jobs to more complex knowledge jobs across major world economies as we enter what Gordon calls the “Cyber-Mental Age” of ultra-high technology.

 

 

And that’s why today we are living in a world of high unemployment and skilled worker shortages, or as Gordon calls it: a world of “abundance and poverty.”

 

 

Listen to the full interview on Workforce Trends or request a transcript of the show.

 

Jul 25, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

What’s the “Next Big Thing” in the Job Market?

In 1999, 70% of workers considered it a good time to be looking for a quality job. Only 12% believed that in 2009.

Similarly, 64% were confident in 1999 that they could find a new job as good as or better than their previous job, while only 20% believe that today.

Adding to the stress of a painful recession, it also turns out that forecasting the fastest growing occupations over 10 years has proven to be an inexact science.  Many job seekers who took the advice of career planners have found  themselves stuck in jobs that have been stagnant if not significantly reduced in demand.  Unlike just a decade ago, job seekers are taking such projections with a grain of salt.

That’s because the projections released from 1998 through 2008 were mostly wrong. The data shows how difficult it is to predict which occupations will “boom” over the coming decade. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast in 1998 that 439,000 new jobs would be created for computer support specialist. In reality, only 10,000 jobs were created. While health care jobs were certainly that little engine that could during the first decade of the 21st century, personal care and home health aides didn’t fare so well.  While 433,000 new jobs were predicted, only 71,000 jobs were created. Being a systems analyst was possibly the worst place to be at least in the technology sector.  While the system analyst was projected to be the hot job of the 21st century, 85,000 jobs were cut instead of the 577,000 that were supposed to be created.

Those forecasts pale to the train-wreck in job creation for general manager and top executives jobs.  The BLS had projected an increase of 551,000 jobs between 1998 and 2008 when the actual economy had reduced the number of these positions by nearly 1.2 million.

The wrong projections aren’t necessarily always bad news. The BLS projected 323,000 new computer engineering jobs but missed the forecast by nearly 50% – over 611,000 new jobs were created. Medical assistants also experienced unanticipated growth when new jobs exceeded the projected number by 86,000 new jobs.

Predicting which occupations will experience the largest growth is very difficult. Job growth depends largely on macroeconomic trends and industry growth, which are difficult to forecast and can be derailed by an economic downturn.

For what it’s worth, the BLS did offer this job forecast in December 2009 for the years 2008-2018.  The following jobs are most likely to comprise a major source of employment and job growth over the next few years:

Registered nurses

  • Home health aides
  • Customer service representatives
  • Food preparation and serving workers
  • Personal and home care aides
  • Retail salespersons
  • Office clerks
  • Accountants and auditors
  • Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants
  • Postsecondary teachers

Most of the occupations predicted to experience the largest job growth are ones that cannot be outsourced to other countries.

Jun 03, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post

High Energy Employees: Prey for Poaching?

The recession led to a rather interesting differentiation between employees who change jobs voluntarily and those employees who are poached. It’s the poaching of employees that employers need to fear the most.

These workers are the high energy individuals, who helped their organizations during the recession, are very visible to peers due to their 'catchy' energy and successes and today are not being rewarded adequately. In fact, they are likely being counted on to take on more and more work due to the amount of work they do.

A recent study has called these at-risk employees the "neglected warriors." A recent article in the Automotive News offered an example what is happening: "GM poaches hot, high energy marketing whiz."  The people at most risk of being poached away are these neglected warriors who may be in line to become "heroes" in their next new company.

Going from warrior to hero status takes just one thing – recognition. Heroes are recognized for their deeds. They are not necessarily the best employees, but they are the people who courageously entered into the battle for their organizations’ wealth during the recession. The neglected warriors harnessed their internal energy to drive many initiatives forward; however, with all these good deeds came very little recognition from their current employer.

Neglected warriors have a high sense of urgency, are compelled to move forward, have supported their companies through the rocky changes of the recession, and who today find themselves unrecognized and unappreciated for their efforts. These neglected warriors are not at high risk of voluntary turnover, but they are at risk of being poached away by the companies who know how to find them and who appreciate the type of talent they possess.

The research conducted by Leadership Pulse™ found that employees fell into four groups with the percentage of employees in each group noted below:

Fully engaged

55%

Entitled

6%

High Opportunity

22%

Disengaged

17%

Most employers are tempted to focus most on the “disengaged” employee.   According to Leadership Pulse, this might be a mistake.  While these employees are at risk of voluntary turnover, they are often burned out.  They are less likely to be poached because of their disengaged state.

The neglected warriors are the employees who will be poached because they have no good reason to stay with their current organization. They are visible to others because they have a high sense of urgency; they have been on the front lines fighting to keep the organization moving forward in tough times. Heroes on the other hand  are the most important employees to keep.  But they are less at risk of being successfully poached because they feel valued. These individuals have a high sense of ownership in their job and company, and they say they are fairly rewarded. Smart recruiters will not go after these people, and their friends and co-workers will not recommend them to their headhunter colleagues.

The highest risk that employers face when it comes to their heroes is that these individuals, based on something that happens in the firm, no longer feel valued and move to the neglected warrior state. At that point, they too are at risk to be poached away.

Today, organizations have a choice. Leaders can sit by and watch as neglected warriors get poached away. Or they can be proactive. They can identify the Heroes and Neglected Warriors and give them their well-deserved recognition. Or they can take a wait-and-see attitude and wage the old war for talent, simply trying to find enough people or adequate supply to survive.

May 26, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Unemployment to Remain High: Abundance of Labor, Poverty of Talent

For the unemployed, the road back to employment seems to be getting longer and longer. Worse it seems to be filled with bumps that will never end.

 

The number of unemployed in March was unchanged at 15 million, but those now counted among the long-term unemployed, those working part time because they can’t find full time jobs, and those considered officially “discouraged” continues to grow. When you add together the unemployed, the discouraged workers, those working part time but want full time jobs and the group the BLS calls “marginally attached” the total is 26.4 million.

 

Even more indicative about the state of our economy is that the number of workers who have been without a job for 27 weeks or more increased by 414,000 over the month to 6.5 million. That’s 44 percent of the unemployed.

 

On a brighter note, the economy did add 162,000 jobs last month, the largest one-month increase in three years.  But that was partially fueled by 48,000 people hired by the U.S. Census Bureau.  Private sector job growth of 123,000 however  was better than expected, offering evidence and relief that government hiring was not the only cylinder firing in the sputtering  engine of growth.  Even the construction industry added 15,000 jobs, compared to the 142,000 jobs lost just 12 months ago. As recently as January and February, construction was throwing off jobs at the rate of 60,000 a month.

 

Welcome to the new economy – one where high unemployment and job creation co-exists. The cover story in this month's Business2Business Magazine addresses the workforce filled with an “abundance of labor and a poverty of talent.” Read the full article What Jobs Won’t Return at or download the pdf. 

 

It's also the topic of my Workforce Trends Radio Show this week.  My guest will be the editor/economist at Business2Business Magazine, Ted Byrne.

 

(Source: Workforce Trends)

Apr 05, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

Gray Ceiling Casts Shadow on Millennials

The unemployment rate for young adults has skyrocketed to over 16 percent.  For teens (ages 16 to 19) the rate exceeds 25 percent. Slow job growth and delayed Baby Boomer retirement is erecting what I’ve called the “gray ceiling,” the inability of the next generation of employees (Generation X) to move up and the inability of the youngest generation to enter into their first career jobs.  In addition, many Baby Boomers who retire from one job don’t stop working.  They “pick up” entry level jobs formerly reserved for young adults to keep busy or supplement their income.  This gray ceiling has huge implications for business, society, and long-term earning potential for our next generation of workers.  Watch my 3-minute video interview about the “gray ceiling” on Behind the Lines with host Diane Dayton.

Mar 31, 2010 | 1 comment | View Post
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