Rolling the Dice

Let's say you were,  after a lengthy tenure as a professional with one organization, suddenly and without time to prepare found yourself downsized, right-sized, or otherwise-sized and found yourself in the unenviable position of being out of work.

What are the first five things you would do?

And for now, let's eliminate from consideration any Johnny Paycheck - Steven Slater dramatic exits involving cursing out the customer or boss or flaming out on Facebook or YouTube.  Face it, you are probably not that creative or interesting.

1. Call your spouse/significant other/drinking buddies.

2. Process the key question of 'When was the last time I did a resume?'

3. Do an amazingly fast mental calculation estimating the length of time certain prized luxury items (boat/Harley/comic book collection) may be at risk, and what you could get for them on Craigslist.

4. Call drinking buddies again.

5. Look online for potential openings. 

I'd be willing to bet in those first five things you'd do immediately after being thrust into the role of job-seeker that you would likely hit up one of the major job boards and run a search for postings in your locality/industry/area of expertise.  In the USA that means Monster.com, Careerbuilder, Indeed, etc.  

But if you are in the broad category of IT professional, you'd certainly be all over Dice.com.  Dice has been the leading job site for IT professionals in the US for what seems like forever.  I personally found the most lucrative and long lasting IT contract I ever had on Dice.

A quick search of companies listing positions on Dice reads like page one of the list of the Fortune 500.

As a major job board in the IT industry, Dice enjoys top of mind status.  But we all know the world of recruiting and job advertising has changed dramatically.  The dawn of social and online professional networking, (essentially LinkedIn), has certainly affected how organizations and recruiters seek talent, and how individuals can find opportunities, connect with employers, and advance their careers.

Major boards like Dice are not immune to these changes, while seeking an opening on Dice or Monster might possibly be in the 'first five' things a job seeker would do, it seems more and more likely that actually making the needed connection to stand out in this incredibly tough job market can't really happen via the old-school job board.  Following, friending, liking, connecting - whatever you call it, to many these are the new paradigms in the job search.  

And the folks that run the big job boards understand this.  They're not stupid. They know the world is changing, and that their services have to change as well.  

Tonight at 8PM EDT on the HR Happy Hour Show we will talk with one of these leaders, Tom Silver, SVP of Dice.com to get a better perspective on how leaders of big boards assess the recruiting landscape, how they are meeting the new challenges, and how the overall market for IT work and workers is faring.

You can listen to the show on the show home page - here, or via the widget below:

You can call in to listen and participate - 646-378-1086.

I hope you can join us for what should be an interesting and informative look behind the scenes at Dice.com. 

TalentVine - Combining Old and New

Quick - what source has consistently been demonstrated to be most organization's best source of good, qualified candidates?

No, it is not Craigslist.

Of course it is employee referrals. But you knew that.  Everyone knows that, right? 

Here is another question - what has been for the last two or so years been the most talked about, dissected, and analyzed development in corporate recruiting?

No, it is still not Craigslist.

It's 'Social Recruiting'.  Broadly defined as leveraging the wide variety of social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (as well as others), to advertise jobs, define and communicate the employer brand, to develop communities of potential candidates, and to help build a robust pipeline of talent.

But unlike employee referrals that have a track record of delivering good candidates and high performing employees, in many respects the jury is still out on social recruiting. Just as many well-made arguments can be made advocating its adoption as a necessity for the modern recruiter as can be made that is not much more than a fad, and the buzz will eventually wear off, and recruiters will return their focus to strategies that have previously been shown to work effectively.

Like employee referral programs.

What I like about TalentVine, a new product from SelectMinds, is that it builds upon and improves a traditional employee referral program by introducing highly configurable and powerful integration with social networks.  

Essentially here is how the solution works:

1. Available positions are scraped from the company website (or other sources) into TalentVine.

2. Automated and ad-hoc email notifications are sent to current employees informing them of specific jobs that they may want to refer to their friends and business contacts. For example recruiters can forward engineering jobs to all or some of the company's engineers, or send an email with links and information about a particularly important or 'hard to fill' job to the entire organization.

3. Simple, yet powerful integration with the three big social networks, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter enables employees to share job opportunities to some or even all of their contacts. TalentVine possesses internal logic to help an employee try and find the 'best fit' for the position from among the employee's social network contacts.

4. Candidate details are captured in TalentVine - contacts that see the referral can click the unique, trackable link, see the job details in TalentVine, and either choose to apply, or even forward to some of their contacts. Recruiters can see the history of a referral as it progresses from and through social networking chains.

5. Referral program management is supported.  Companies can configure the referral bonus amounts and ensure that top referrers and sources are identified.

6. Tracking - TalentVine keeps track of the referrals sent, referrals forwarded, links clicked, and applications received.  Insights can be gleaned as to the most effective referrers and the networks likely to produce the best candidates.

Throughout the solution, the navigation links and visual cues are interesting and well-designed.  Large and attractive design elements add to an easy and almost fun user experience.  In fact, of the numerous enterprise and corporate systems I have seen lately, TalentVine looks and feels the least 'enterprisey'. That is a strength. 

Organizations that are looking for methods to strengthen their existing referral programs, or seeking ways to empower more of the organization's employees to tap into their personal and professional networks would be advised to take a look at TalentVine. Combining a classic and successful recruiting approach with the latest capabilities and potential of leveraging social networks for recruiting is an innovative and interesting combination.

Strange Creatures with Amusing Names

In the 1930s a British tobacco company, the W.D. and H.O. Willis Company issues a series of illustrated animal cards, that comprised a kind of matching game.  Each card contained a portion of an illustration of an animal, a rhino, leopard, or platypus, etc.  The cards could be 'matched' to assemble the correct entire animal, or, more interestingly, be combined to discover new creations like in the image at right.

From the official instructions on the cards:

The complete series comprises 16 animals, each in three sections, and by mixing the sections you can produce a large number of strange creatures with amusing names.

It is natural when playing this kind of game to want to build the 'correct' creature, to align the front, middle, and back of the armadillo or the alligator - to get the 'right' answer. 

But it is much more interesting to mix up the cards to build something new and unique and totally original. And likely much more exciting and scary than the 'right' animal. 

I think that analogy carries over to what can happen in the organization as well.  We create, as a matter of tradition and I suppose necessity, roles and job descriptions like 'programmer', 'analyst', 'recruiter', that are the functional equivalent of the 'right' animal in the card game.  But the problem is that most people, likely the most talented and interesting people, don't really fit those roles and descriptions, at least not totally.  Like in the card game, they are maybe one third a 'programmer' and one third an artist, and maybe one third a community leader. Or a combination of accountant, bowler, and glee club singer.  

While I don't think organizations can or should attempt to create that try to formalize these odd combinations of traits or characteristics, at least perhaps some more awareness of and recognition of the diversity, complexity, and 'interestingness' of the people that comprise the organization's talent pool would be beneficial.

What could some of the benefits be?  Perhaps to better tap internal talent for new ideas and innovations, to gain increased knowledge of some of the drivers effecting workplace health and wellness, to find or discover ideas and opportunities for enhanced community outreach and volunteerism, and even possibly to unearth new marketing and business development opportunities in underserved market segments. Heck, maybe just to make the office a little more 'fun'.

The truth is all organizations are made up of 'strange creatures with amusing names', and mostly we try to fit them into classifications and roles that are better described as 'mundane creatures with common names'.

What seems more interesting to you?

You can 'play' the animal matching game online - here.

Sex, Religion, and a Colossally Bad Hiring Process

Let's say you have an important, executive level role to fill in your organization.  It is the kind of job that does not come open all that often in your organization, or even among your competitors.  Legendary Marquette coach Al McGuire

It is a really attractive position - internally and externally prestigious, well-compensated, remarkably stable and secure, and offers the right candidate room and opportunity to materially influence outcomes at the organization and quite possibly in the industry at large.

The type of position that you have to hire for very carefully, since it is in the kind of field that while there may not be hundreds of qualified candidates, there will be quite a few, and all of them will bring long histories of achievement and success with them, and many if not most will also possess reams of background material for potential review.

You quickly realize the the complexity, importance, and visibility of this hire requires you to take some 'extra' precautions - you engage an external search firm to assist in the identification and screening of potential candidates, you enlist a large internal hiring committee to gather input and advice from a wide set of perspectives,  and at one point, after the search was about one year underway, essentially scrap everything and started all over, having determined that the 'perfect' candidate had not been identified.

So finally after about a two-year vetting process, you finally find the 'right' candidate.  A candidate that brings the background, experience, and (hopefully) the right blend of 'soft' skills, you know that intangible but essential blend of attitude, initiative, and collaborative spirit that would make him or her absolutely the best possible choice. The candidate passes the external screening process, gains the support and recommendation of the internal hiring committee, and ultimately is blessed by the highest leaders of the organization and receives and accepts an employment offer.

What could possibly go wrong at this point, with all the time, effort, smart people involved in the process, and 'public' nature of the position and search?

Exhibit A - Marquette University (a Catholic, Jesuit university 'dedicated to serving God by serving our students and contributing to the advancement of knowledge' (from www.marquette.edu), and the search for a new Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences.

In this search, only after the offer was issued did things get interesting.

Here is the quick recap from what I could piece togther:

1. Marquette spends two years searching, screening, vetting, interviewing, and finally finding the 'right' candidate for the Dean position.  A long time for sure, but not completely out of the realm of possibility for these kinds of searches. 

2. The candidate, and now the prospective new Dean, is Seattle University Professor of Sociology Jodi O'Brien, a scholar whose research focuses on gender and sexuality issues. 

3. After some external pressure and influence (allegedly) - Marquette rescinds the job offer citing the sudden discovery of some candidate writings the are 'inconsistent' with the Marquette culture. So sudden in the fact that the expensive, two-year long search process either did not uncover the writings, or even more troubling that they were not actually considered prior to the offer being given.  

We are not talking about random Tweets or blog posts here, but published scholarship that is incredibly easy to find and in fact, are documented on Professor O'Brien's resume. Some Marquette students express their outrage.

4. Marquette now has entered what appear to be settlement talks with Professor O'Brien in hopes that the negotiations will (according to O'Brien), "take into account not only the harm done to me personally and professionally, but also acknowledges this situation as a learning opportunity for the Marquette community". 

And the cynic in me thinks the 'learning opportunity' may involve cutting a nice-sized 'we really messed this thing up, please now go away' check.

Forget if you can the sex and religion angle to this, and think about the more universal lesson from the Marquette debacle.  If you need two years, have to spend buckets of cash, and engage dozens of internal and external experts and you still can't figure out the candidate does not match your culture, then you either don't have any idea what you culture is (or want it to be), or you do know what it is and you just don't care. 

But being unable to accurately screen and hire for cultural fit will come back to get you, maybe not in as public and embarrassing a way as in the Marquette example, but perhaps at least in an embarrassing 70s leisure suit kind of way.

 

Jobvite Share

Today Jobvite released its latest offering in the increasingly important market for solutions that assist and enable more effective social recruiting.  

The new service, called Jobvite Share, provides corporate recruiters, third party staffing pros, or internal human resources professionals several new capabilities for more efficient sharing of advertised open positions on the popular social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The solution offers an easy way for anyone, from recruiters to hiring managers to CEOs, to distribute and target any job openings on social networks, increase employee referrals, and track in real-time the value of any job advertisement or placement on-line.  Jobvite Share makes it quick and easy for any employer to harness the power of the social web to find the right talent at no additional cost.

From the Jobvite press release:

With Jobvite Share, anyone with a position to fill can easily enter a job URL, and Jobvite will create a custom, trackable listing for that job, regardless of where distributed on the web. It can then automatically be sent to targeted contacts in email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and shared anywhere on the Web. Jobvite Share puts powerful, real-time metrics in the hands of employers of all sizes to see what works – and what doesn’t work – in their job marketing and distribution – all free of charge.

Users start on the Jobvite Share launch page, then enter the URL of the online job advertisement on their corporate job site, and quickly generate up to 5 unique trackable links that can be shared on the social web, via Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.  

From there, recruiters can track and label multiple links to see results for each source in real-time. Jobvite Share provides the metrics needed to see what works – and what does not – in job marketing and distribution, including views, clicks, forwards and clicks to apply; all metrics are tracked by individual channel (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email) and can follow referrals as they spread across the web

In addition to helping manage the promotion and facilitated sharing of job openings to recruiters and employees social networks, Jobvite Share also provides a matching algorithm between the job description content and the characteristics of one's social network contacts that can be applied to more closely and precisely identify the best potential referrals for the position.  Basically, you have 794 Facebook friends, but Jobvite Share is smart enough to suggest the three that are a close match to the job description.

And the best thing about Jobvite Share? , the cost - free.  Yes, you read that correctly, free.  Five trackable unique URLs, automated contact matching criteria, and simple yet informative metrics on your social sharing efforts, all for free?  Yep.  And that is pretty cool.

Look, it is dirt simple to post your open jobs on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.  But once you post the jobs out on the social networks you start to wonder about the effectiveness and the impact of those efforts. With this new offering from Jobvite, you can not only easily post your openings on the social web, but you can additionally monitor what channels are working and what ones are not.  And with metrics, contact matching capability, and visibility to which channels are working, Jobvite Share seems like a natural fit for both those organizations that are just starting out in social recruiting and those that have been experimenting for some time, but have not yet figured out the sweet spot.

For more information about Jobvite Share - check out their site - Jobvite Share.