Author: Jonathan Pont

I n recent months, the number of new job listings appearing on the Internet’s most heavily trafficked job boards–CareerBuilder, Monster and Yahoo HotJobs–eased just a bit from recent 18-month highs. But for the companies, collectively known as the Big Three among recruiters, news indicated they were hardly slumbering.

    Each announced changes in operations that hint at the direction of the Web’s top employment sites, whose collective revenue zoomed past $1.2 billion in the last year. And without saying as much, the changes may be responses to issues that recruiters deal with on a daily basis. Among them: globalization of the workforce, the dilemma of postings that yield too many responses–including applications from people who clearly aren’t qualified–and the seemingly endless number of Internet sites where recruiters can list jobs.

    The shifts come at a time of sustained growth for the companies. In the second quarter of 2005, CareerBuilder and its online partners at newspapers took in $121 million. Monster reported revenue of $198 million in the second quarter, up 40 percent from a year earlier. In July, the number of paid job listings on HotJobs rose 58 percent from the same month in 2004, to 152,415, according to Web tracking firm Corzen. (HotJobs does not disclose revenue.)

    The figures underscore just how much recruiters continue to rely on the Big Three.

    “We need to be on the boards,” says Greg McElroy, director of staffing for defense contractor Northrop Grumman in Herndon, Virginia. The company, with $5 billion in annual revenue, employs 22,000 people and will fill 5,700 positions this year. “It’s a branding issue,” McElroy says. “The candidate pool needs to see that we’re active in the job market.”

    Critics say job boards impede recruiters’ efficiency and don’t necessarily help companies find the best talent. “There was a promise that the Internet would be a panacea for recruiters,” says Lou Adler, president of the Adler Group, a hiring company in Irvine, California. Rather, “it has dramatically increased the number of candidates coming in.”

    So while Northrop Grumman feels the need to have a presence on the boards, McElroy acknowledges that the company doesn’t have the resources to answer all the responses a major job board listing generates.

    That type of complaint might not elicit sympathy from executives at CareerBuilder, where, as CEO Matt Ferguson explains, “We provide eyeballs. Those eyeballs translate into applications and hires, and that’s what companies pay us for.”

    But as recruiters gain familiarity with startup companies like Jobster, mkt10 and H3, which offer Web-based solutions that mimic the very effective employee referral programs that companies love, a clear response was in order. In their own ways, the Big Three boards are answering their markets’ calls for change and innovation.

Matchmaker
    One response is technology, and Ferguson is passionate when he talks about CareerBuilder’s commitment to it. The company’s site features a bevy of new functions that are consistent with current Internet usability trends. It has added RSS technology, which replaces e-mail alerts and lets users receive news of job listings through a customized feed. The company is putting the finishing touches on an application designed for cell phones and other wireless devices. It intends to introduce that feature this fall.

    Over the summer, CareerBuilder announced a significant tweak to its core job listings function. The new capability allows job seekers to see openings that a computer algorithm recommends, based on information contained in their résumés. Users can still launch a search by keywords for a job in a particular location or industry, but the new matching function capitalizes on developments in search technology that will shape the way job seekers utilize all of the Big Three job sites in the years to come.

    In theory, the matching capability could deter job seekers from applying for jobs for which they may not be qualified. By showing listings most relevant to job seekers’ skills, experience and location, the new technology is ostensibly a step toward unclogging recruiters’ inboxes.

    Richard Castellini, CareerBuilder’s vice president of consumer marketing, says initial figures show that job seekers who use the new feature, which the company announced on July 25, are applying for jobs at a higher rate.

    Delivering more of the right candidates may not ease recruiters’ headaches with résumé volume in the short term, but Castellini says that the company has an easy fix for that: technology that companies can request to block candidates. If deployed, the mechanism would turn the résumé torrent into a trickle.

    “Clients have said they get an abundance of responses,” Castellini says. “But when you talk to them about turning off those responses, they never want you to turn them off.” He says customers have used the issue as a negotiating ploy to get a better price for the company’s services.

Search party
    Yahoo HotJobs might have a smaller audience than its Big Three competitors, but it is part of one of the most well-known consumer brands and the top destination on the Internet. The relationship allows it to make use of proprietary research about how people use the Web and to incorporate it into the HotJobs business.

    One recent conclusion was drawn from its ongoing observation of how people use the Web, says Dan Finnigan, HotJobs’ executive vice president and general manager. Users want more results from a search, whether for a digital camera or a job. “The expectation of the Yahoo user” is that the service will “search everything that’s out there,” Finnigan says.

    In July, HotJobs began to show job listings from all over the Web, in addition to the ones it lists for a fee. This introduced the notion that perhaps the paid job listing was no match for the proliferation of corporate recruiting sites and niche sites, and some observers predicted that paid job listings might be on their way to the desktop trash bin.

    “We are a vertical search engine for jobs,” Finnigan says. “It seemed like a natural extension for us to use that database of Web sites we crawl all the time, and re-crawl them for whether they have jobs or not and make that available for the user.”

    That includes job listings from a growing number of corporate Web sites and niche sites, which total about 100,000. When Yahoo formed in 1995, there were about 100.

    The long-term impact on HotJobs or its larger competitors isn’t known. Bruce Murray, president of Corzen, a market research firm in New York, says paid listings may have more credibility with job seekers simply because the results from a search may show results that have expired or lack the formatting and appearance of a paid HotJobs listing.

    HotJobs is not the only company betting on this all-in-one model. SimplyHired and Indeed are new services that essentially act as search engines for job listings. They collect postings from as many as 1,000 Web sites and place them, free of charge, in one place for job seekers to peruse.

    The New York Times recently invested $5 million in vertical search company Indeed and incorporated it into its own site to help power its job pages. Listing search results from Indeed greatly increases the number of jobs Times users will see on the site, from 5,000 to about 110,000.

    The concept isn’t new. Monster bought Flipdog, an early aggregator, in 2001. But having the biggest and most comprehensive job search engine on the block could drain job seekers from the major boards.

Going the distance
    Though Monster generates more revenue than its competitors in part because of services like the applicant tracking system it sells to small and medium-size companies, its core business remains job listings. These days, that business is growing fastest overseas.

    In the second quarter, the company’s international revenue grew at twice the rate of its domestic revenue. International revenue constitutes 23 percent of Monster’s gross. With purchases during the past year in India, South Korea and France and a minority interest in ChinaHR.com, Monster now has a presence in more than 25 countries.

    The biggest users of services like the one in China are U.S.-based multinational businesses looking to recruit local workers, says Steve Pogorzelski, group president, international, for Monster.

    Typically, companies buy licenses from Monster that allow them to search résumé databases on a country-by-country basis.

    Kent Kirch, director of global staffing for financial advisory firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, which employs 115,000 people in 148 countries, says the firm’s recruiters use the service to search for expatriates who may be willing to come back to the U.S. for the right opportunity.

    The firm, which ranks among companies that post the most job openings on the Internet, will make about 500 hires this year in 12 foreign countries, he says.

    Though Monster’s brand is practically unparalleled with American companies, it does not enjoy the same recognition in Europe or Asia. Analyst Mark Marcon says the company faces challenges in Europe. The newspaper industry there is better prepared for a Monster attack, having watched Internet recruiting play out over the past decade. Job turnover rates tend to be lower than in the U.S. And, finally, free job boards enjoy government sponsorship.

    “A lot of our businesses in other countries have been in startup mode over the past five years,” Pogorzelski says. That’s allowed them to develop what he characterizes as “guerrilla” marketing techniques, and to maintain close relations with customers.

    Pogorzelski says that transporting the company’s technology and sales force overseas is one of his primary tasks. But he also expects the North American division to learn what works best overseas, and incorporate those lessons.

Workforce Management, November 7, 2005, pp. 49-51 — Subscribe Now!

Employers and recruiters have wondered about the impact Google might have if the company enters the job listings business. A formal entry would get the attention of recruiters, but the tech giant actually established its presence in the Internet recruiting segment a long time ago, with “pay-per-click.”

    Despite its close association with blue-chip search companies like Google, Yahoo and MSN, the advertising technique has yet to become widely known among recruiters. In pay-per-click, text ads appear next to results that a search engine generates. Each time a Web user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays the Web site a fee.

    A major reason the technique isn’t known is lack of education, says Joel Cheesman, founder of HRSEO, a consulting firm in Cleveland that advises employers on how to use search technology. He says that few companies are learning how to leverage pay-per-click as a recruiting tool, and that the major job boards aren’t likely to change their own pricing models. In the hands of companies that currently use job boards, pay-per-click is another competitive threat.

    For employers, it’s a low-cost way to gain visibility with job seekers. Cheesman says the technique has the potential to help employers reach a wider audience on the Web and could give them an advantage over a competitor who doesn’t use the technique.

    Internet search works for jobs the way it works for any other “vertical”–or category–like travel or retail. Typing the words “New York” and “jobs” into the Google search engine, for example, yields two sets of results. On the left side of the page is a list of so-called “organic” results. These are the most popular sites containing those words. On the right side, companies bid for the right to have their matching results appear in the top position.

    These companies, known as “sponsors” in Web parlance, bid whenever they want superior positioning on the right side of the page. In early September, the high bid per click for “New York jobs” was $3.27 and belonged to CareerBuilder. All three job boards use the technique to drive traffic to their sites. But enterprising employers also could decide that the technique is cheap enough to learn about, and bid on combinations of words that drive traffic to their corporate recruiting pages. That’s a nightmare scenario for the job boards, where ads cost hundreds of dollars.

    Steve Pogorzelski, group president, international, for Monster, says online keyword buying is another way for the company to drive traffic to its site. “We use a variety of different media to get our message across,” he says, including radio, television and print ads.

    A user arriving at any of the “Big Three” job sites through a sponsored link does not see a particular job category or skill set. Rather, the link takes the user to the job board’s front page. Pogorzelski says the intention is to have the searcher register and leave a résumé.

    SimplyHired recently bid on placement for the word “jobs” and the names of 12 cities on Yahoo. Though the company didn’t bid for top placement on the right-hand side of the page, it spent enough to ensure that its listing would appear in a shaded box above the organic search results.

    Cheesman notes that the job aggregator would most likely not appear to a job seeker on the first Yahoo results page if it hadn’t paid for space on Yahoo. “Invisible is not an option for most sites,” he says.

Workforce Management, November 7, 2005, p. 50 — Subscribe Now!

Although Labor Secretary Elaine Chao is the public face of the department she has led since 2001, making her tenure the longest in four decades, she has surrounded herself with experienced professionals whom she entrusts with managing the department’s two dozen bureaus.

    Within those bureaus, 17,000 full-time employees perform a range of duties, from compiling statistics to working with business to ensuring better compliance with labor laws.

    Two of Chao’s top aides at the department, Assistant Secretary Ann Combs, who leads the Employee Benefits Security Administration, and Deputy Secretary Steven Law, her chief deputy, talked to Workforce Management staff writer Jonathan Pont about what makes Chao an effective leader, and how the department is getting results.

    Workforce Management: You’ve worked closely with five labor secretaries. How do you characterize Secretary Chao’s strengths?

    Ann Combs: They’ve all got their strengths. She has a real interest and a natural affinity for issues this agency deals with. These are somewhat esoteric issues. We have to be able to communicate to people who may not have a background in these issues. Her background, with an MBA and work in banking–she really likes these issues. She likes talking about pensions and health care and the numbers–the quantitative aspect. She often says that “personnel is policy.” She has spent a lot of time thinking about people on her team and the people in senior positions. She trusts you to run your agency, and wants to hear from her senior managers and issue experts.

    WM: How would you characterize her management style?

    Combs: I remember when I interviewed with her the types of questions she asked. She got right to the heart of things. And she listens. She asked a lot of background questions: what was going on in the field, how we could make the department more responsive to peoples’ needs, how we could deliver benefits with more efficiency.

    WM: You lead the Employee Benefits Security Administration, which oversees pensions for the American worker. What types of results are you seeing there?

    Combs: We recovered $3.1 billion in pension assets last year. That’s an increase of 120 percent over the previous year. We find assets that have been misused or taken out, like improper loans that are reversed and restored to the plans. In bankruptcies, we protect the plan to make sure that the money owed to the plan is kept out of the bankruptcy estate and given to the workers.

    WM: What type of program is helping achieve that kind of result?

    Combs: There have been a number of things. We have expanded our compliance assistance efforts under direction of the secretary. The Voluntary Fiduciary Correction Program, where companies perform self-audits and agree to make a (pension) program whole in instances where there are late or missing payments. To qualify, they have to come to the department before we’ve opened a case. They have to make the steps to make sure the plan is whole. It’s not a substitute for enforcement. The department has also helped by streamlining paperwork and adding online tools like a model application form and a calculator to help calculate the interest. This program was designed in the late ’90s, and the department has expanded it, and there are proposals to expand it more.

    WM: How does compliance work with in conjunction with enforcement with regard to worker health and safety?

    Steven Law: We take the view that compliance assistance is complementary to enforcement. If you do both, workers are safer. The results bear that out. Fatalities, injuries and lost days have gone down since we’ve been here. That’s a long-term trend. And we have said consistently that compliance should never be viewed as a replacement for enforcement. Our philosophy is that most employers want to do the right thing and protect their employees. Compliance is the means by which we give them the tools to do it.

    WM: How does the department’s agenda change from one term to the next?

    Law: When we got here in 2001, we talked to people who followed the department, people who had worked here, and practitioners and asked them what the things are that the Department of Labor should be doing. Changing the overtime rules was a common response. We built our list from people mostly outside government. In the new term, the White House has taken a lead on pension security, the Workforce Investment Act and immigration.

    WM: I read something recently that referred to you as the department’s chief operating officer. That might lead one to believe that the department is functioning more like a business these days. Is that on the mark?

    Law: It wouldn’t be quite correct to say we run it like a business, because government isn’t a business. It’s more that we’re trying to manage it better, trying to make sure that the career professionals who are here that their performance is rated according to results that we expect and that they agreed to, making sure we’re using technology more efficiently to communicate to customers, making sure that budget decisions we make reflect how programs are performing. All those things are good management disciplines. Businesses may do these things more than government, but I don’t think it would be true to say that stylistically (the department is) like a business structure.

S ecretary of labor Elaine Chao recalls arriving in Los Angeles by freighter from Taiwan in 1961 with her mother and two of her sisters. She was 8 years old, and she spoke no English.

    As a new immigrant, she was struck by the way Americans smiled and greeted one another. “It was frightening to someone from a culture that doesn’t have a tradition of strangers coming up and talking to you,” Chao says.

    Her father, James Chao, had come three years earlier to work and study and, she says, because “he knew it was a land of opportunity.” The young family settled in a Queens neighborhood in New York not far from Kennedy Airport. She says she sat through the entire third grade not understanding a word of what was going on in the classroom.

    And there were other difficulties. Chao says her father occasionally was the target of ridicule because of his ethnic background, but that he continuously set high standards for his daughters–there eventually were six–and encouraged them to seek opportunities outside the immigrant community.

    Chao says one of the happiest times in the family’s initial years in America was the day in 1964 when her father graduated from St. John’s University in Queens. The family borrowed a car to get to the ceremony, and the commencement speaker was Sargent Shriver, then-director of the Peace Corps.

    Chao herself would be named director of the Peace Corps in 1991.

    After her father started a shipping business, he moved the family to suburban Westchester County. Chao and her five younger sisters all attended Ivy League schools and now work in politics, law, social work or the family shipping business.

    Chao earned a degree in economics at Mount Holyoke in 1975 and an MBA at the Harvard Business School four years later. She had two jobs in banking before becoming a White House fellow in 1983. It was that experience that crystallized her interest in politics.

    She says that while she is proud of becoming the first Asian-American woman to serve at the Cabinet level, her path to public service is more rooted in her curiosity about how the federal system functions and its overlap with nonprofit groups and business.

    “I think I’m a much better leader now than I ever was before,” Chao says. “You work, you live and you learn. My early life experiences have been pressed upon me very deeply. The suffering people go through, the sacrifices and the fear that newcomers face when they come to this country.”

    She and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, were married in 1993. The couple has no children; McConnell has three daughters from a previous marriage. On weekends, Chao says she and her husband like to go home to their townhouse in Louisville, Kentucky. She says she and McConnell particularly enjoy ordinary activities like tailgate parties and college football games, as well as attending the Kentucky Derby.

    Chao and her father recently were honored together at Ellis Island for outstanding contributions to American society, with the elder Chao celebrated for his volunteer work with immigrants and service to St. John’s University.

Workforce Management, August 2005, p. 44 —Subscribe Now!

Employees of capital one have a good excuse for listening to an iPod at work. The McLean, Virginia-based financial services company has launched a training program using podcasts, digital recordings that users download and play back at their leisure.

    Using a customized Web portal from a home computer, workers can download more than a dozen lessons on topics ranging from diversity to the elements that constitute the company’s quarterly earnings call. One goal is to present information about topics that affect the entire company. “The more people understand the business model, the more value they add,” says Ted Forbes, the company’s director of learning services. To help, the company bought 3,000 iPods–complete with an engraved company logo. Employees keep them as long as they remain with the company.

    The company expects podcasts to reduce the time employees spend learning in a classroom, as well as costs it incurs when bringing groups to Virginia for training. Initial results are promising: 65 percent of audio learners reported saving time over traditional learning methods. Dollar figures aren’t yet available. Forbes says that more podcast content is on the way, and will include speeches and even suggested listening from the company’s executives.

Workforce Management, August 2005, p. 18 —Subscribe Now!

Background checks are an accepted part of the hiring process. But as the American workplace expands to include offices, service centers and computer networks in foreign countries, U.S. companies conduct such searches across borders and oceans with greater frequency.

    Almost four years ago, language in the Patriot Act required U.S. corporations to apply “reasonable” due diligence to foreign applicants. But experts say fear of common threats to business, not terrorism, has driven the demand for international checking in the past year.

    Traci Canning, director of international operations for HireRight, a background check firm in Irvine, California, says corporate needs vary, but the intention generally is to thwart “nefarious behavior around intellectual property, facilities or applications.” Hiring the wrong individual or business partner can lead to embarrassing headlines, or worse. That’s something Citibank discovered recently after three thieves posing as customer service agents at a third-party call center in India smooth-talked bank customers in New York out of $350,000.

    Now, due diligence requires companies to get acquainted with the cultural and legal differences between a background search commonly performed in the U.S. and a more complex one overseas.

    Terrance Corley, president of Global Screening Solutions in Kennesaw, Georgia, says that the first thing companies should budget for is that searches in foreign countries take longer than in the U.S., potentially lengthening time to hire by as much as a month. One reason is the absence of standards in how nations store citizens’ education, criminal and credit records. Moreover, tighter standards may make getting them more difficult. Hong Kong and Singapore have restricted access for years. Authorities in countries that are still developing information systems may opt for tighter controls at the outset.

    Even when geography and computerized files make retrieval easy, data privacy laws may prevent them from being disclosed to a third party or sent out of the candidate’s home country. That poses a particular challenge in Europe, where a search must abide by a country’s laws and by regulations established by the European Union in 1998. And when results come back, more work can ensue to determine, for example, whether a candidate’s legal violation overseas is the equivalent of a misdemeanor or a felony in the U.S.

    Though the field is attracting new search businesses, a client company may never actually contact one directly. That’s because human resource management software vendors are integrating international search capability into their products and are partnering with firms with established networks of searchers in foreign countries. Corley says the convergence is promising, but that clients still need to ask detailed questions of a search partner to ensure that they comply with the laws of the country in which the search will take place.

A war for talent and increased turnover make for good buzz, but a stronger economy makes for good news. And it’s particularly welcome for a company that brings together employers and job seekers.

    Major players in this arena are experiencing sustained booms. Job site CareerBuilder.com, whose technology powers online classifieds for newspapers owned by Knight Ridder, Gannett and the Tribune Co., reported a record number of unique visitors to its Web site in January.

    Executive recruiting firm Korn/Ferry saw its domestic revenues rise by 31 percent for the 12 months ending January 31. Its success generally coincides with a rebound in that specialty after a three-year slump. Businesses adjusting their mix of human resources-related services help the bottom line of companies like Recruitmax, whose software helps attract and acquire talent.

    Temporary workers, who typically constitute about 2 percent of the workforce in times of economic growth, are finding that companies are eager to convert them to permanent status. That generates additional fee revenue for providers of temporary help like Kelly Services.

    Companies that enjoyed having their pick of workers in 2002 now find themselves having to scramble for talent. Not only are frustrated workers looking around more, but they also have more means than ever to find their next gig.

    For now, the economy appears sufficiently strong to keep vendors in nearly every segment busy well into the second half of this year. One reason is that getting a better job requires sophistication.

    “Job seekers need to use up to six different online resources to maximize their reach,” says Peter Weddle, author, consultant and CEO of Weddle’s Publications, based in Stamford, Connecticut. That includes two general-purpose job sites and at least three niche boards–one that is germane to their profession, another to their industry and a third based on geography.

    Businesses, of course, rely on similarly diverse channels. When Jill Pfefferbaum has to fill openings at travel Web site Priceline.com, she starts by posting the job internally and also on Monster, then peppers her network with a description of the job.

    “Anything I can think of,” says Pfefferbaum, the company’s director of compensation. “Friends, family and the ‘Big Red Bulletin Board,’ ” an electronic exchange for her fellow graduates of Cornell University.

    Lately she has experimented with LinkedIn, a growing professional networking site. Finding candidates there, she says, shows that they’re “innovative in ways of developing their own networks,” which is particularly useful for business development. Pfefferbaum relies on free services to conserve her budget.

    Companies still seek human assistance in hiring effectively, and the popularity of employee referral programs is proof of that. A CareerXroads survey on hiring shows that employee referrals in 2004 accounted for nearly 32 percent of hiring sources, compared with 28.5 percent in 2003.

    “Employee referral programs are cheap and proven,” says Deborah Besemer, CEO of BrassRing in Waltham, Massachusetts. The elements are a company intranet that is well-designed and well-publicized and a workforce that is open to telling people about the company.

    “If you have loyal and engaged employees, there is a natural pride in making referrals,” says Joe Hammill, director of talent acquisition for office and printing services provider Xerox in Rochester, New York.

    While companies turn to employees to help build culture, they use another resource to help build expertise–the Internet’s niche boards, which allow greater depth and specialized searching than the mainstream boards. There is certainly no shortage of them.

    Weddle estimates that there are about 30,000 niche boards on the Web. And recruiters find them extremely useful. In a recent survey, 84 percent of recruiters said that niche sites provide access to the best talent. Only 11 percent said that about general-purpose recruiting sites.

    Nevertheless, Weddle predicts that the niche boards will soon have to act more as full-service career destinations, complete with elements such as an advice columnist and content that helps a user manage a career, like ways to acquire new skills. That could drive some users away from the sites, which currently rely on a sense of professional kinship as their primary attraction. “The best talent likes to hang out with peers,” Weddle says.

    Monster, meanwhile, is changing the way it intends to grow. It recently hired 100 people to pursue new customer acquisitions, focusing on prospects in small and medium-sized company markets, where employers had not previously advertised jobs online.

Workforce Management, May 2005, pp. 51-52 — Subscribe Now!

Yahoo HotJobs is a bit of an anomaly: It has deep ties to one of the best-known sites on the Web but still trails competitors Monster and CareerBuilder in terms of revenue and traffic.

    In fact, Piper Jaffray & Co’s Brett Manderfeld says he expects Monster’s 2005 market share advantage to be “roughly two times CareerBuilder and five times HotJobs.”

    In an interview with Workforce Management, HotJobs executive vice president and general manager Dan Finnigan says his site nevertheless offers advantages over the two industry leaders.

    Workforce Management: Are customers’ budgets rising to reflect the uptick in hiring?

    Dan Finnigan: People’s budgets are still aligned with the downturn of the economy even though they have aggressive hiring objectives. There’s migration from traditional recruiting media or services to more cost-effective, Internet-based services.

    WM: Do recruiters and workforce management professionals have different demands than they did a couple of years ago?

    DF: During the downturn, many companies became concerned that through layoffs the image they had in the job market may not be as positive as they’d like. Now they are interested in opportunities to buy a bundle that allows them to target people who may not necessarily be going to a job board right now.

    Recruiters want to be smart: They want to have their dollar do more. They don’t want to just post their job on a job board and hope someone finds them. They don’t want to just look through the résumé database. They want to target the passive job seekers. And they want to build their brand as a great place to work and have the effort be cost-effective.

    WM: And I imagine this emphasis on passive job seekers has changed the products you offer.

    DF: Yahoo is rolling out Yahoo360, our own thing, that some people call a social networking site. People can save profiles of themselves, meet others and share photos and keep closer ties with friends and family members. It’s clear to us that as (online social networking) grows, the sharing of work experiences will become part of that.

    WM: Are you trying to find some sort “killer app” or revolutionary killer application of technology? Or is there just a natural progression of adding features in time?

    DF: I think it’s more the latter. When a critical mass is reached, people will say, “Can you imagine looking for a job in print?” It takes too much time. You talk to people who rely on Yahoo for news or sports scores, or what happened last night. No one said that on its own that this (type of service) was a killer app, but people make products like Yahoo a part of their life. I think that is going to happen on the job-seeking side. For the job seeker, a convergence is taking place that will allow a number of things to happen together.

    There’s more innovation that hasn’t taken place, but is going to. If you look back four years, the Web sites people turned to for, say, music, have evolved. It’s the same for retail and travel. New players emerge and take advantage of new technology. That’s going to continue in the job marketplace. Job seekers will use sites that are comprehensive and allow personalization.

    WM: Do you think the type of job seeker HotJobs attracts differs from those who use Monster or CareerBuilder?

    DF: I don’t think there’s a dramatic difference in the quality of the audience.

    There is a difference when someone types in one of those sites versus everyday using Yahoo and seeing a link for HotJobs and deciding to look, or use their Yahoo module to link to a job.

    There are perhaps more of the passive job seekers who check to see what’s available on HotJobs even though they didn’t wake up that morning with the intention of going to HotJobs.

    WM: One trend is the rise of the consolidator sites like Indeed and Workzoo that sweep the Internet for jobs and deliver “metasearch” results for a job candidate using a variety of job boards. Are they a friend or foe of HotJobs?

    DF: I don’t see them as a foe. We believe we need to be the first and only place people think about when they search for something online. That is the core of our mission. There are always going to be startups in search products in any number of categories.

    WM: HotJobs is distributing two games, one where the worker has to sneak over to a printer, and another where he has to cover up art depicting the boss. How important is viral marketing in your sector? How effective is it in attracting people?

    DF: Our own research shows that people are spending several minutes playing these branded games, and in the case of this Spring Break campaign, there is an intuitive connection: If you’re constantly playing games at work, you should probably be looking for a new job. This campaign helps drive traffic to HotJobs and engages both active and passive job seekers with our brand.

    We believe viral marketing will continue to play an important role in our industry, but we’ve found it’s most effective when part of a more comprehensive, integrated communications plan.

Running a bankrupt airline is difficult; running one poorly, more so. But management at US Airways, the Arlington, Virginia-based carrier with more than 25,000 employees, appears to have had a moment of clarity in its struggle to transform itself from a cash sieve to a viable competitor with the likes of Southwest Airlines.

    In part, management was chastened by what CEO Bruce Lakefield called an “operational meltdown” in Philadelphia over the course of several days in December. Normal operations ceased when the numbers of working baggage handlers and flight attendants dipped below what was necessary to keep the airline running. Among the results: 405 canceled flights, more than 560,000 passengers disrupted, 72,000 claims for lost bags, and an answer rate of less than 50 percent at its customer call centers.

    Although initial reports from the carrier hinted not so subtly at organized “sickouts” on the part of aggrieved employees, an inquiry by the Department of Transportation’s inspector general found that airline management hadn’t planned its holiday staffing schedule with enough care. The fact that the 2004 holiday travel period was the busiest in five years didn’t help. The airline itself increased its scheduled departures by 12 percent compared with 2003, but the number of flight attendants dipped by 5 percent over the same period. “We let our customers down,” airline spokes-man David Castelveter says.

    To avoid a recurrence, the airline is hiring new workers and regularly hosting job fairs in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, North Carolina, to attract baggage handlers and customer service agents. Thus far, the company has made offers for more than 1,000 positions, not only to replace positions left open by attrition but also to gear up for better times.

    “The threat of liquidation is gone,” Castelveter says. “Our employees feel like we’re on the comeback trail.”

    It may be that customers share that sentiment. Company figures indicate improved performance. For the first two months of the year, revenue passenger miles, a key industry measure of the number of miles traveled by a paying passenger, rose by 5 percent over the previous year. Investors stepped up in February as the company landed $125 million in funding, and in March the carrier reached a conditional deal for the same amount–notable because the financiers are other airlines. Other figures, though equally important to the airline’s destiny, tell a different story.

    Less than a month after the Philadelphia incident, management secured $353 million in concessions from its unionized workers, bringing the total value of those savings to just over $1 billion in the airline’s ongoing transformation plan. “I think it scared the hell out of their labor,” Aaron Gellman, professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, says of the possible outcome of the stoppage–namely liquidation. Mechanics and fleet service employees ratified the January round of cuts by margins of just over 60 percent.

    Flight attendants are not among new hires for the company. “All airlines downsized after 9/11,” says Mike Flores, local council president for US Airways flight attendants in Charlotte. “Now we take contractual concessions that allegedly make us more efficient: We have fewer heads and the number of flights is increasing.”

    Gellman says management would be wise to boost spending on things customers will notice. According to J.D. Power and Associates’ 2005 Airline Satisfaction Index, US Airways ranks eighth in a field of 11 carriers.

    If everything comes together, US Airways plans to emerge from bankruptcy this summer. One thing certain to be a drag on the carrier’s performance: rising fuel prices. In his weekly recorded message to the company March 11, Bruce Lakefield said that if oil prices remain around $54 per barrel, fuel will be the airline’s No. 1 cost in 2005, taking over the spot that labor holds.

Workforce Management, April 2005, p. 18 — Subscribe Now!

The trial of former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay is expected to begin early this year, and that’s sure to revive memories of the corporate wrongdoing that dominated business news over the past three years.

    Although the cause of bad behavior in some instances can be traced back to a small band of business rogues, companies are asking: Do our ethical practices keep us safe from such potentially fatal incidents?

    Starting that discussion is one goal behind the Integrity Measurement Program, a new 28-question survey designed by the Minneapolis-based Center for Ethical Business Cultures and Gantz Wiley, a research company. By assessing practices in five critical areas, including company alignment with its suppliers, business partners and community and internal processes from hiring to compensation, the survey informs executives about their current state of affairs.

    Experts say it is such leaders who invariably set the example for a company’s ethical well-being.

    “CEOs have to be clear and say, ‘That’s never what I want,’ and make sure people understand norms,” says Bob Shoemake, director of programs for the Center for Ethical Business Cultures. Trouble is, he says, even blemish-free companies experience communications difficulty among leadership, middle management and frontline workers.

    “That doesn’t mean a company is unethical,” center CEO Ron James says. “It just means information has gotten filtered.” But he says organizations are nonetheless “vulnerable when they say one thing and their activity demonstrates another.” To fix that, James says that a company should address questions about ethics from top to bottom.

    Although the 28-question survey is just reaching the center’s clients, Gantz Wiley has for the past two years included a condensed, five-question “Quick-Check” version as part of its annual WorkTrends study of businesses. Some answers from this year’s results show incongruity. For example, six in 10 respondents agreed with the statement that “My company’s senior management supports and practices high standards of ethical conduct.” But when faced with the statement “Where I work, people do not get ahead unless their behavior clearly demonstrates my company’s values,” only 36 percent agreed. The disconnect points to exceptions that companies sometimes make for the sake of profit.

    “There are always cases of people who are ‘gunners’ and focus on the numbers, and succeed because of it,” Gantz Wiley’s Scott Brooks says.

    A zero-tolerance policy may be the cure for wrongdoing, but a strong company culture is better prevention. Consider the Vanguard Group, the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based mutual fund company that is custodian to $800 billion in assets. Known for its low-cost funds, the company wasn’t touched by last year’s scandal involving late trading and market timing, which engulfed close to two dozen firms.

    “Part of it goes to our systems in place: compliance, legal and audit,” says Vanguard managing director Mike Miller. But first, he says company leaders consistently talk about the client-centric practices that precede those controls. “The culture of a company, if it has ingrained the commitment to ethics and excellence, will be fine.”

    Miller says Vanguard’s day-and-a-half orientation for new employees includes a history lesson, examples of its commitment to client service and an explicit warning: “Cross the line, and there’s no second chance,” he says. “It’s clear from Day One.”

Workforce Management, April 2005, p. 26 — Subscribe Now!