Author: John Zappe

Google is hardly a brand in search of recognition. The company reportedly gets thousands of résumés a month, but that didn’t stop it from taking out a full-page help-wanted ad in The New York Times on Halloween. The “scary smart” ad, as it has come to be known, is only one of the dozens of ways that Google brands itself as a great place to work.

    Anastasia Pucci, president and founding partner of search firm Carlyle & Conlan, knows firsthand the power of the Google brand, as well as one of its most popular lures for candidates: Google lets its professional staff members devote 20 percent of their workweek to whatever projects interest them. “We talk to a lot of people, and every one of them has heard of Google and the 20 percent time. We have a hard time competing for the younger tech people because of that,” says Pucci, whose firm is based at North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

    As the war for talent intensifies, companies are looking for every edge they can get, and branding yourself as a great place to work is a strategy that makes a difference.

    “It isn’t about buying Super Bowl ads,” says Elliot Clark, COO of Kenexa, a recruitment software vendor and talent acquisition and management firm. “It isn’t that you have to have everyone know your brand. It’s that your targets have to know you.”

    It starts with such simple things as responding to applicants who submit résumés. Developing a dialogue with those who show promise, even if a job for them isn’t available now, Clark says, makes a big difference in whether they choose you or your competitor when a position opens up. Call it customer relationship management for job applicants. “The quality of the relationship management has to be planned and executed well,” he adds.

“It isn’t that you have to have everyone know your brand. It’s that your targets have to know you.” –Elliot Clark, COO of Kenexa

    But surprisingly, there are companies that don’t even acknowledge the résumé, let alone keep the candidate informed about where he or she stands, says Gerry Cris­pin, recruitment consultant and co-founder of CareerXroads.

    Even with 11,500 employees, insurer UnumProvident is barely known outside its headquarters city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a few other locations where it has satellite offices. That creates a challenge for recruiters, says Tim O’Connor, senior staffing research specialist.

    Lately, the company has begun experimenting with radio and news­paper ads to drive traffic to its career site. “That’s where people can find out about us,” O’Connor explains. “We’ve made the career site really informative. The idea is to give them a sense of what a great place this is to work.”

    One look at UnumProvident online, and you know it’s not your typical corporate career site. There’s extensive information about the company’s three major corporate centers that includes the climate, cultural activities and ambience. You can meet some of the people who work for UnumProvident and see and hear them talk about their jobs.

    Even without advertising blitzes, there are ways a company can build a brand and identify talent. Jim Williams, vice president of human resources for Dublin, Ohio-based Commercial Vehicle Group, says the company began a mentoring program six years ago with area colleges.

    “They (engineering students) get to see what a manufacturing en­vironment is like, and we get to involve students who get a feel for us,” Williams says. “We’re able to show them that manufacturing is very different from what they might have thought.”

Workforce Management, February 27, 2006, p. 31 — Subscribe Now!

Todd Davis recruited for a needle in a haystack. As senior clinician recruitment consultant with California’s largest physician group, Davis sought out doctors and professional staff. He was accustomed to finding nurses with unique specialties and doctors in high-demand fields. But in January he was looking for a computer specialist with a medical degree to fill the job of director of medical informatics with 3,500-employee Health­Care Partners Medical Group.

    “I’m not going to fill this job by posting to a (job) board. I don’t know that you ever could, but not now–not with the competition such as it is,” says Davis, who left the company this month. He found his candidates through the network built by going to two or three events a month, working the phones and tapping employees for their contacts.

    “Unless you are actively working every minute, as a recruiter you’re going to be in trouble,” he says. “Recruiters who wait for the candidates to come in to them aren’t doing their job. In 2006, they aren’t going to be successful.”

    After four years of economic slowdown in the United States, recruiters last year began to feel the pinch for talent as hiring accelerated and the unemployment rate edged down. Last month, the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent.

    Though the rate is still well above the all-time low of 3.8 percent in April 2000, talent shortages are apparent in select skill areas and professions, rather than across the board. At the same time, the oldest of the baby boomers are beginning to retire. While there is still some debate about the predicted labor shortage, no one doubts the need to be competitive and creative in order to find quality candidates.

    Heather Tinguely, recruiting manager for fast-growing software company Inovis, says she just had the busiest December of her eight-year career. “If I waited one or two weeks, the candidate was gone.” Based in Atlanta, Inovis has a large office in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Right now, that is the hardest place to recruit for IT,” she says. “But it’s not that much easier here in Georgia. Companies are recruiting from everywhere.”

    Get used to it, recruitment consultants say. “2006 is the year when it is really going to hit home,” says Gerry Crispin, recruitment consultant and co-founder of CareerXroads. “This isn’t anything new this year–just that some companies are suddenly going to discover there’s a talent shortage when they can’t find the people they need.”

    Employee referral programs, the No. 1 source of hires according to a Society for Human Resource Management poll in November, are getting more attention than ever. Davis says he actively courted the doctors in the company looking for referrals. “Peer referrals are the most powerful recruiting tool,” he says. “When I get a referral in-house I know the candidate is going to have the skills and the interest, because a colleague has already made the contact.”

    Temp-to-hire, already a tool being used by the biggest companies, will gain in popularity as a form of outsourced recruiting.

    Crispin, whose firm recently completed its annual “Source of Hire” report, says the survey’s results show an increase in the number of contingent workers hired as permanent employees. “Temp-to-hire is hot, and continues to be so,” he says.

    That is part of a broader trend toward unbundling outsourced HR services, according to Elliot Clark, COO of Kenexa, an HR software and talent acquisition company. Outsourcing recruiting in particular will be popular with the smaller companies that don’t have the resources to hire specialists, he says. “The war for talent in certain areas is going to be hot,” Clark says. “That will lead more companies to outsource that function.”

    Larger companies will boost their recruiting staff, drawing from the headhunting ranks.

    “I believe that by the end of 2006 you will see a major shift toward hiring more third-party recruiters into corporate recruiting,” says Michael Homula, director of talent acquisition at Quicken Loans. His reasoning is that not many corporate recruiters have experience sourcing in a tight labor market. He and other HR professionals explain that as the economy went south beginning in late 2000, recruiters moved into other HR jobs or were downsized. Those filling the vacancies–entry-level HR jobs at many companies–didn’t so much recruit as sift through the résumés that came in by the hundreds from job board postings.

“2006 is the year when it is really going to hit home. This isn’t anything new this year–just that some companies are suddenly going to discover there’s a talent shortage when they can’t find the people they need.” –-Gerry Crispin, recruitment consultant and co-founder of CareerXroads.

    The aggressive style of third-party recruiters will take some getting used to, Homula says. “The biggest challenge with this trend,” he notes, “is that corporate HR leaders are not often able to stomach the behaviors and tactics that actually get results, and don’t want to compensate recruiters for what they produce like the third-party world does. … The trend will start in 2006, but most corporations will not figure out how to work with the third-party mind-set until the labor pool shortage causes them pain.”

    Increasingly, companies are recognizing that the quality of hires has a direct bearing on their success, and are beginning to evaluate recruiters on the performance of their hires.

    “Accountability is the major trend I see emerging in 2006,” says Master Burnett, managing director of Dr. John Sullivan & Associates, an HR recruiting consulting firm. For many companies that will mean objectively assessing employee performance, then using that to measure the quality of a recruiter’s hiring.

    How will recruiters find top talent in 2006? By pursuing the passive job seeker.

    “People in staffing are going to have to think like marketing people,” Kenexa’s Clark says. That will mean branding the company, making better use of corporate job sites, networking and trying some of the newer tools, like Jobster and LinkedIn.

    Data mining–not searching résumé databases, but combing through public and private databases–will help build candidate lists and identify those who are most likely to be receptive to a call. Burnett says the best companies use multiple databases to identify and qualify leads.

    “You find someone in Boston who owns a boat, and you’ve got a job where it is possible to go boating all year. That person becomes a potential candidate,” Burnett says.

    Microsoft recruiter Shally Steckerl says recruiters will have two choices: become a sourcer, or become obsolete. “If sales waited around for customers to come in the door, they would starve,” Steckerl says.

    In December, HotJobs held a recruitment round table attended by such leading recruitment professionals as Lou Ad­ler, John Sullivan, Jac Fitz-enz and Peter Weddle. It was titled “The Era of the Active Recruiter.”

    “Good recruiters have known that all along,” Crispin says. “Lazy re­cruiters could get by going through the résumés that came in from Monster or wherever. No more. Do that now and you’ve lost.”

Workforce Management, February 27, 2006, pp. 29-31 — Subscribe Now!

Recruitment technology suppliers see 2006 as the year of the better mousetrap.

    “What you’ll see this year is, for the most part, evolutionary,” says Kevin Marasco, vice president of marketing with Recruitmax. Applicant tracking systems will be enhanced to make recruiters more efficient, extend sourcing into the global market, improve record keeping to comply with new federal regulations and provide better analytical tools to help senior managers track the impact that good hiring has on the company’s bottom line.

    The two most important developments in recruiting technology this year, Marasco predicts, will be compliance with the record-keeping requirements and integration with enterprise human capital systems.

    “There will be more and more innovations in integration,” Marasco says. “Our goal as a tech vendor is to provide a technical platform that can work with all the other systems out there to deliver the performance analytics that companies need to manage the business.”

    His predictions are echoed by Kathy Barton, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Peopleclick. She has declared integration to be the “single greatest trend this year.”

    A major factor driving that is a new rule issued February 6 by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The rule defines an Internet applicant for the purpose of compliance with equal employment opportunity rules, and while the regulations apply only to federal contractors, many HR professionals expect them to be extended to all employers before the end of the year.

    “We think this is going to drive a specialization among recruiters,” Barton says. She believes it will create a corps of candidate-sourcing experts who are highly trained in both the federal regulations and in building candidate pools. “This is going to mean better candidate management and better integration with performance management tools,” she says.

    “For every job you hire, there are always two or three people almost as good,” Barton says. “You’ll want them.”

    Top people help improve corporate performance, and how a company sources and hires makes a difference. That’s why Taleo is hearing the call for more analytical data to improve the quality of hires and to prepare for workforce changes.

    “Performance evaluation is a matter of bringing in data from throughout the enterprise,” says David Michaud, vice president of product marketing. For now, Taleo is enhancing its ability to link into other corporate systems, but in time, performance evaluation is “a business we are going to want to get into,” Michaud says.

    iCIMS, meanwhile, is automating the onboarding process and electronically managing what used to be called paperwork, says Adam Feingenbaum, director of marketing and sales. He says all the re­cruitment technology companies are striving to make clients more efficient “so they can spend more time working on what’s going to be the harder and harder job of finding and keeping talent.”

Workforce Management, February 27, 2006, p. 32 — Subscribe Now!

Last fall, when T-Mobile needed hundreds of engineers and technicians for the new cell system it acquired from a competitor, the company went straight to its staffing vendors. Other than perhaps for the numbers, it was a routine procurement. There was one exception, however: T-Mobile took the opportunity to include a temp-to-hire clause in the contract.

    “It’s not been a regular course of business in the past,” says John Sullivan, T-Mobile area director of engineering and operations for Northern California. He supervises some 250 employees, of whom about 110 are contingent workers. Of the company’s 22,000 employees nationwide, 20 percent to 30 percent are contingent.

    “Many of them are not necessarily interested in full-time work,” he says. “But for those who are, it’s a chance for us to see who’s a fit and it gives them the chance to see this is a pretty good place.”

    T-Mobile didn’t set out to use the temporary engagements as a tryout period; it didn’t intend to use the staffing vendors as a sort of outsourced recruiter. But when the opportunity arose, the company figured, “Why not?” Sullivan says.

    “Why not?” increasingly appears to be a question being asked by companies already comfortable with hiring temporary workers. Whether they turned to contingent workers because of a sudden upturn in business and then developed a strategy around the need or they strategically decided to build a flexible workforce before hiring their first temp, these companies are finding hidden values in what was once regarded as second-class staff.

    It’s a hiring tactic and not a workforce strategy, says Simon Billsberry, CEO of Kineticom, a staffing contractor in San Diego. But “as a tactic it’s very beneficial. We’re seeing it more. There is significant growth in the temp-to-perm area.”

    “Try before you buy” is becoming quite popular in some areas, Billsberry adds–so much so that the largest of the companies with flexible workforces have been pushing staffing contractors to cut or even eliminate the conversion fees they have to pay when hiring a contingent worker.

    Losing an office temp to a client has long been a fact of life for companies like Kelly, Manpower and AppleOne. They and other staffing contractors try to limit the practice by assessing fees sometimes exceeding 30 percent of a year’s salary to the hiring company. But finding office workers is a snap compared to hiring an engineer with specialized skills in a growth area. To staffing companies, such employees are a revenue-making asset that they don’t want to have to keep replacing if they can avoid it. Increasingly, though, they can’t.

    Gary Noke, president of Decision Logic, a division of TAC Worldwide Cos., says that after one of his company’s workers has been on a client job for six months, the client can hire the worker without a fee. “The larger companies are forcing that on the contractors,” Noke says. With larger companies, that fee-free conversion provision is always required, he says.

Contractor as recruiter
    With the iffy economic recovery, companies that in another time would have ramped up their full-time staff are hiring contingent workers with a conversion right. Once they become convinced that the business uptick isn’t just a temporary spike, they’ll look first to the temporary workers to fill vacancies.

    “Your contractor,” Noke says, “becomes your recruiter.”

    Staffing companies uniformly grumble about that: They do the recruiting, while the client gets to pick over the staff and hire away the best of the workers.

    “There is a war for talent,” says Billsberry, whose company–like all the staffing contractors–recruits year round. “We compete for the best people with everyone else. It’s in my best interest to keep them working because they’ll go somewhere else.” It’s a competition among two or three other staffing companies to find talent and keep them working with Kineticom’s clients, he says.

    The only ace for the contractors is that many of the most in-demand workers prefer short-term assignments and would rather not work for a single company.

“The companies that get it are moving to have a permanent flexible workforce. And most of the bigger companies get it.” –Gary Noke, president of Decision Logic

    That’s long been the case for IT workers and certain types of engineers who naturally fit into project work. When the project ends, they move on to another–sometimes with the same company, but often not. At the end of the 20th century, with the specter of wholesale computer failures looming, thousands of programmers came out of retirement and academia and even left regular jobs to take on high-paying Y2K projects. In January 2001, they retired again or signed on with staffing contractors for project work rather than go back to full-time cubicle life.

    T-Mobile’s Sullivan says that even though he has a fee-free conversion right, he believes that most of his contingent workers aren’t interested in becoming employees. There are cultural issues–many of his techs are noncitizens–that might prevent it. The pay differential is higher for a temp and, Sullivan says, “some people just like to be able to do something different.”

    Hiring contingent workers was once a matter of necessity to help a company get through a busy cycle. And working as a temp was a matter of survival, a way to earn some money until the next “real” job came along.

    That’s still the case and, say recruiters and staffing contractors, likely always will be.

    Mellon Bank, for instance, was ramping up for a special credit card offer and needed hundreds of short-term workers at its call center in New Jersey. Greg Antonelle, recruiting director for AimHire Associates, helped fill the bank’s need. As the campaign winds down, the temp staff will too.

    But with the changing nature of the economy and with highly skilled IT workers blazing the trail over the past two decades, building a flexible workforce has become a strategy and not just a tactic. Adding contingent workers to the workforce mix is an accepted way of doing business not only at the Fortune 500 level, but increasingly for medium-sized businesses as well.

    A strategically hired contingent workforce can be even more productive than full-time staff, says Chris Hagler, national director of strategic services for Resources Global Professional. “They don’t get involved in company politics,” Hagler says. “They are not wrapped up in all the things you find staff talking about at the water cooler. They come in and do their job.”

Hiring to fit unique needs
    Companies make a strategic workforce decision by sizing up their cyclical needs, workforce costs, time to hire, core functions and even image. Looking at each of these components and deciding both their value and how they can best be managed will lead to developing a workforce strategy that might include a mix of full- and part-time employees, contingent workers and outsourced work.

    Hagler, who helps companies work through these issues, offers an example. For Coca-Cola, marketing is a core function, but accounts receivable is not, she says. And so the company keeps its marketing operation in-house, with full-time staff, and outsources the accounting function. For a bottler, the decision might be to have only a minimum number of line workers and supplement them with temps to handle sudden demand.

    “If you have a really strategic HR person, they will look at what is core and what is not. They’ll work with the other divisions to assess demand and need and develop an overall strategy that creates a flexible workforce,” Hagler says.

    Her company, like many of its rivals, specializes in placing professional talent including accountants, chief information officers, supply-chain specialists and HR experts. Resources Global Professional recently began to provide lawyers on a temporary basis.

    American Staffing Association data attest to the strength of the temp market. The ASA reported that last year nearly 2.5 million people on average were working as contract and temporary employees every day, the highest level since the go-go days of 2000. That was almost 2 percent of the nation’s total nonfarm workforce. To keep that many people working, staffing firms had to recruit and hire 11.7 million employees during the year.

    The ASA estimates that 8 million of them transitioned to full-time work during the year, but not necessarily with their client’s company. However, an ASA survey found that conversion fees paid to staffing companies for hiring away their workers came to $7.3 billion last year, which represents almost 10 percent of total revenue for the staffing industry.

    Analysts project that the staffing industry will see even greater growth this year, not only because of organic economic growth but because large companies are embracing the concept.

    “The companies that get it are moving to have a permanent flexible workforce,” Noke says. “And most of the bigger companies get it.”

    One of those companies is Johnson & Johnson.

    Olivia Baumgartner, a recruiter with Johnson & Johnson Professional Recruiting, the company’s internal hiring arm, says contingent workers are a key part of the company’s workforce. Indeed, about half the 90 employees in her office are temporary consultants. “We just grew so fast,” she says.

    Baumgartner has worked in human resources for several companies, including a recent stint as a manager at Hewlett-Packard, and says she has seen contingent staffing become a way of life.

    “It’s cost-effective and it gives a company a chance to look over the workers and try and buy,” she says. Workers like it too, Baumgartner adds. “They get a chance to learn about a company and get a broad exposure to the different ways companies do things.”

    She should know. At HP and now at Johnson & Johnson, Baumgartner is part of the contingent staff.

Workforce Management, June 2005, pp. 82-85 —Subscribe Now!

Cell phone company T-Mobile has undertaken an ambitious program to measure the effectiveness of several hundred new contingent workers as it struggles with the issue of determining the ROI of a flexible workforce.

    Since January, T-Mobile has been measuring the efficiency of the 600 to 700 technical temps it brought in to manage the wireless network in California and Nevada it acquired from Cingular. Using a variety of standard metrics including time-to-repair and help calls, the company will compare the contingent workers to comparable full-time workers.

    “It’s a question of a return on the investment,” says Jim Sullivan, area director of engineering and operations for Northern California for T-Mobile. Data for the first three months of the year was discarded because so many of the hires were new to the area that drive time to repair field equipment skewed some of the metrics.

    That preliminary data showed the use of contingents was more expensive, Sullivan says, “primarily because they were still learning their way around the area and there were some cultural or communication issues. Q2 is when we’ll really be focusing on this.”

    Companies regularly want to know how cost-effective it is to hire temporary workers compared to adding full-timers. Bringing in contingent staff may be the only alterative when a company gets an unexpected order or is faced with a sudden big project, as T-Mobile did last fall when it acquired a new wireless network. Then it becomes a matter of procurement–hiring staffing contractors to bring in the workers as fast as possible. But sooner or later, someone asks the inevitable question: “What’s the ROI?”

    “That’s a question clients want to answer,” says Michael Cruz, managing director of Taleo Contingent. “But not too many are really equipped to know.” Taleo sells software to procure, manage and track a contingent workforce. Its customers are Fortune 500 companies that employ thousands of temporary staff, yet even they find it a challenge to know what the return on their investment is for their contingent workers.

    For T-Mobile, the staffing procurement became an opportunity to see what the company could learn about workforce ROI.

    How useful will the results be? Sullivan called it a “good snapshot” and “another tool,” but at the end of the day, T-Mobile turned to staffing contractors because it couldn’t have filled the jobs fast enough itself. “We had to get people in here.”

Measuring contingent ROI
    How would staffing companies measure the return on investment of using contingent employees? Here are some possible metrics:

• Cost of having a position left open, such as paying overtime to other employees.

  
  

• Hiring expense that would have been associated with hiring a permanent employee.

  
  

• Economic impact of a layoff of permanent staff to a company’s reputation and brand. (With contingent staff, the contract is simply terminated.)

  
  

• Savings in case of termination (including severance, COBRA and accrued vacation that doesn’t have to be paid to a contingent).

  
  

• Avoidance of some legal and human resources issues.

  
  

• Lost-opportunity costs (in case of product nondelivery or not being able to accept an order).

  
  

• The savings that comes with using contingent employees because fewer middle managers are often required.

  
  

• The value for a company of getting to “try out” an employee without taking the risk of a permanent hire right off the bat.

  
  

If you’re not doing business in China, then Monster Worldwide’s acquisition last month of ChinaHR.com has about as much significance as the launch of yet another job board in the United States. Even those who do source employees in the world’s largest nation don’t expect to see many outward signs of Monster’s presence. Local management still holds a controlling interest.

    Nevertheless, the move may be a wake-up call for those who thought that perhaps Monster wasn’t going to make acquisitions for a while, says Joseph G. Shaker, CEO of Shaker Recruitment Advertising & Communications. “Most of the jobs on Monster are not jobs you are going to go overseas to fill. So, I would say there really is no immediate benefit in this for most of us (recruiters).”

    For recruiters who are now looking overseas for job candidates, Monster’s China play gives added credibility and strength to ChinaHR.com, a point the company’s president made when the acquisition was announced.

    “We are extremely pleased to partner with Monster, the global leader in online recruitment, and begin leveraging its proven methodologies to fully capitalize on the tremendous recruitment market opportunity in China,” says Kathy Xu, who heads ChinaHR.com Holdings Ltd.

    Monster was clearly eager to gain a foothold in a nation with 1.3 billion people given that the ChinaHR.com purchase was the first time the company bought anything less than a controlling interest. Monster paid $50 million for its 40 percent share, putting the valuation of ChinaHR.com at $125 million. It’s a steep premium for a company that had about $7 million in revenues for 2004. (Monster has the right to increase its ownership share to 51 percent after three years or in the event the company goes public, as did 51job, a Shanghai-based company that offers such services as online recruitment, training and other human resources necessities.

    If Monster wants to be a global player, “they obviously have to have a presence in China,” says Mark Mahaney, an analyst who follows Monster for American Technology Research. “They had to buy somebody. They probably couldn’t have built it organically.” For that reason, Mahaney says he’ll give Monster “the benefit of the doubt” about the deal’s value.

    As the world moves ever more rapidly toward a global economy, Monster’s multinational presence and what it learns in these early years of its expansion will make it a valuable, potentially exclusive one-stop shop for recruiting. This may not matter to the small or medium-sized businesses Monster is courting now, but to the Fortune 500 companies that have been the company’s bread and butter, the multinational recruiting expertise may be enough for them to stay with Monster. Monster further secured its international position when it acquired French online recruiter Emailjob.com for $26 million from a subsidiary of Dutch publishing group Reed Elsevier.

    It wasn’t that long ago that technology companies were dispatching recruiters to universities in India to hire graduates. Today, Monster owns the largest job board in that country.

    There are major differences between India and China, however, not the least of which is that most job postings and all résumés in India are in English. On ChinaHR.com, most of the jobs and résumés are in Chinese characters. That would make it impossible to integrate the postings into a global database, even if Monster were so inclined.

    So for now, recruiters sourcing job candidates in China, whether on ChinaHR.com or 51job, should take the advice of human resources consultant Denny S. Xu. On the Electronic Recruiting Exchange, he suggested using buttons and banners with a company logo–a device that transcends language–to attract attention. And keep in mind, “Most Chinese candidates don’t know how to write a good résumé in English,” he wrote.

Workforce Management, March 2005, pp. 22-23 — Subscribe Now!