Category: Recruitment

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Recruiters May Not Get What They Seek When Screening Candidates

Joey Price thought he’d found the perfect job candidate to fill the conference planner position at BL Seamon Corp. Fresh out of college, Price’s top candidate nailed the interview and application process.


The Washington-based human resources assistant director was about to make an offer—until he reviewed the applicant’s credit report.


“There were car repossessions, extremely high credit card bills and collections,” says Price who no longer works for BL Seamon. “When we asked her about it, she avoided the subject and was hard to reach. We were able to see that a lot of the information on her résumé didn’t match up with dates in her credit report.”


Price passed on the candidate in favor of an applicant who was less qualified but still competent with a cleaner credit report.


“It’s easy to put on a façade, but a credit report doesn’t lie. It’s a credible source to use to get to know an individual,” says Price who is now a human resources specialist with TW & Co., a security firm.


Employers use credit reports to screen workers because they say they believe it allows them to predict future behavior based on their financial history. A 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 60 percent of employers used credit reports for some or all of their background checks.


Of those who ran credit checks on only some candidates, 91 percent screened those who would have financial responsibilities. The primary reasons for credit background checks: to prevent theft, to reduce legal liability for negligent hiring and to assess the trustworthiness of applicants.


However, the Catch-22 about checking credit: An applicant who has been unemployed for months may have no choice but to rack up debt and fall behind in paying bills.


“If someone is out of work, they are likely to have a lower credit rating. That doesn’t necessarily mean they should be disqualified for employment,” says Rick Thompson, director of talent management for Rising Medical Solutions, a Chicago-based medical cost-containment and care-management company.


A low credit score also may not indicate anything about job performance if debt problems resulted from a major event such as a divorce or expensive medical procedure.


Moreover, the relevance of a credit report depends on the job in question. For an employee who is not handling money, “you don’t need a credit report,” says Robert Faerber, chief operating officer at Aurico Reports Inc., a background screening firm in Arlington Heights, Illinois.


Sodexo Inc., for instance, rarely does credit checks on potential employees.


“We don’t do credit checks except in extraordinary cases. In the last year, we haven’t done any,” says Arie Ball, vice president of sourcing and talent acquisition at the food and facilities management services company based in Gaithersburg, Maryland.


On the other hand, TW & Co.’s Price sees about 15 credit reports a week. The reports cost $59.99 per applicant as part of a general background check that also includes federal and state criminal records and driver’s license records.


“For our contracts with the United States Air Force, they require us to be particularly mindful of credit reports because applicants need security clearance and a part of that clearance is a credit report to make sure that applicants are leading honest lives,” Price says.


But employers thinking about using credit checks as part of the background-screening process need to proceed with caution. Four states ban the practice—Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Illinois (effective Jan. 1, 2011)—and 15 other states have proposed similar legislation.


Some studies claim that 70 percent of credit reports contain errors that might cause consumers to be denied credit cards, car loans and even mortgages. But experts contend that the risk of a major error is minimal.


“Unless it’s the wrong Social Security number, the errors are usually minute,” says Dan Chaney, director of HR advisory services at Employers Resources Association, which provides training, legal updates and other HR services to about 1,400 Midwest organizations. “If a credit check comes back poor, the potential employee has a week to dispute and correct the errors.”


Workforce Management, November 2010, p. 7, 9 — Subscribe Now!

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Dear Workforce How Do We Convince College Grads to Consider Shift Work?

Dear Cautious Recruiter:

I can understand why the recruiting of shift work candidates can be very challenging. Without knowing what current methods and strategies that your company is using, here are some thoughts:

• Use real-life case studies to highlight current employees who were hired for shift work and then have progressed upwardly in the company. Candidates will be willing to put up with the difficulties of shift work if they know that the company has a defined, upwardly mobile career path in mind. Putting together real-life case studies of shift-work employees who progressed upwardly in the company would be a very powerful tool in your recruiting.

• Focus recruiting on candidates whose lifestyle fits with shift work. Some candidates may want shift work given their lifestyle. For example, it would be beneficial for two-income families to work shifts to be able to raise their children without the cost of day care. Also, some candidates may not be good early risers and would prefer working a later shift. Therefore, your company needs to focus its efforts on those candidates who truly look at shift work as a plus.

• Emphasize the valuable training and experience offered by shift work. It is important to de-emphasize the shift-work aspect of the positions and emphasize to the candidates the valuable training and experience they will be gaining. Candidates, especially new college grads, are just looking for a start. If the positions allow them to gain great training and experience, they are more likely to focus on the long-term gain than the short-term pain.

SOURCE: Mike Sweeny, principal, MAS Recruiting, Cherry Hill, New Jersey

LEARN MORE: Some companies with nonstandard work shifts are trying to help employees cope with challenges such as juggling job and family obligations.

Workforce Management Online, October 2010 — Register Now!

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.

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Inside Heartland Payment Systems’ Successful Sales Recruiting Machine

With new growth initiatives now on the table for many industries, Heartland Payment Systems Inc. is doubling the size of its sales force.


The Princeton, New Jersey-based payments processor announced in early 2010 that it will hire 1,299 new sales professionals by the end of 2011. Eight hundred positions are still open.


To fill the jobs, Heartland is relying on an approach to recruiting, assessment and incentives that it has refined over the past decade. That formula has helped Heartland capture the No. 1 spot the past two years on Selling Power magazine’s 50 Best Companies To Sell For Now list for sales professionals. The list is based on the compensation, training and career mobility.


While many employers are meeting new demands with temporary workers or independent contractors, Heartland’s belief is to hire full-time payroll employees.


“It would be less expensive for us to use independent contractors, and that’s certainly common in our industry, but we don’t believe in that and never have,” says Sanford Brown, Heartland’s chief sales officer. “We have a brand to protect.”


Heartland, the fifth largest payments processor in the United States, delivers credit, debit and prepaid card processing and payment services to more than 250,000 business locations nationwide. The company reported revenue of $1.7 billion for 2009 and employs 3,400 workers nationwide.


Recruiting more than 1,000 employees for specialized selling positions requires a mix of strategies that fit with the philosophy of hiring full-time workers. Heartland relies on a six-person in-house recruiting team supported by several recruitment process outsourcing, or RPO, providers that specialize in certain industries and local markets. The internal recruiting team works across most geographies and job titles.


“We run a grass-roots recruiting organization consisting of sales professionals and managers,” Brown says. “But as we grow, we know we need to remove some of the administrative functions from the sales managers, so we are using a variety of methods for sourcing, including social media and job boards, and we outsource some portions of recruiting. But at the end of the day, it always comes down to the sales managers.”


The internal recruiting team and two RPO providers are handling the new sales positions. The jobs do not require a college degree, but candidates must have prior success in selling business products or services.


All candidates take an assessment test. “We looked at standard tests but couldn’t find one that fit,” Brown says. To develop a customized test, the company studied its top 100 and bottom 100 sales professionals and isolated the traits for both.


“We found that sales skills are the least important characteristic for success,” Brown says. “The most important are behavioral traits related to values and motivation.”


The company bases about one-third of the hiring decisions on the assessment test score; one-third on the candidate’s work history, the interview and references; and one-third on the intuition of the sales manager. Brown believes this mix produces solid hiring decisions.


“When we’ve failed, it’s because there was an emotional factor—a marriage breakup or a personal problem, for example—that we didn’t uncover and that created an obstacle to the person’s success,” he says.


Several identifiable groups account for most of the company’s new hires. Twenty percent are first-generation immigrants.


“They are attracted by the huge upside potential and by the fact that this job is more than just a job,” Brown says.


Another key group is former small-business owners. “If you run a small business, you have to be proficient in selling yourself to some extent,” he notes.


Other new hires have been sourced from industries that laid off large numbers of employees during the recession.


“We recruit a lot of business-to-business sales professionals from the insurance and mortgage industries,” Brown says. “And recently we’ve hired salespeople from the pharmaceutical industry, which is in a very sharp downturn. These are highly trained people who simply need a product to sell.”


The new hires span several age groups.


“The first consists of young people with two to four years in the workforce who have seen the good and the bad of sales work and want something better,” Brown says.


The second group consists of people with substantial work experience who want to take a new direction in a second or third career.


“A candidate may be someone who has owned their own business for 10 to 15 years and wants to break from those demands,” Brown says.


In addition to meeting the hiring goals for new growth, Heartland must engage in heavy ongoing recruiting to cope with high turnover. Among the company’s sales professionals, turnover is 50 percent in the first year.


“This is higher than we would like to see,” Brown says. “Our goal is to reach a retention rate of two out of three in the first year.”


After the first year, turnover drops to 12 percent, and after the third year it falls to 5 percent.


“In other words, if they stay for three years, we have them for life,” Brown says.


The company offers new hires a choice of two compensation plans. One pays employees on a commission-only basis from the first day on the job.


“This is our most aggressive compensation structure, and 75 percent of new hires choose it because of the high potential upside,” Brown notes.


The other is a hybrid that pays employees for completing each of four levels in the sales process regardless of whether a sale is made. Employees who select this plan typically migrate to the more aggressive commission-only plan after three to six months on the job, Brown says.


“Sales is all about confidence, and once they gain some confidence, they want to change to the more aggressive plan,” Brown says.


The company’s pay target for new hires at the end of their first year is $70,000 to $75,000 in cash compensation. By the third year, successful sales professionals earn $110,000 to $120,000, Brown says.


Heartland’s sales professionals earn a signing bonus and commission on every sale they make, plus a monthly residual percentage as long as they retain the customer. When sales professionals reach a pre-defined level of success, they can earn stock options through promotions and incentive programs.


“Historically, every year we have more than a dozen sales professionals who out-earn the CEO,” Brown says.


Workforce Management Online, October 2010 — Register Now!

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Recruiting Film Aimed at Boosting Diversity Unveiled by Ad Industry Firms

I had no clue about advertising growing up, didn’t think about it much … didn’t think of it as a profession.”


That’s Frank Cooper, chief marketing officer of PepsiCo Inc., speaking in a new recruitment film designed to address one of the many issues contributing to the lack of diversity in the advertising and marketing industries.


Titled “Pursuit of Passion: Diversity in Advertising,” the movie is a joint project put out by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Virginia Commonwealth University’s graduate program at VCU Brandcenter. It was screened in late September for New York City public high school students during a presentation by VCU Brandcenter’s Rick Boyko, while its public premiere was held last month during New York Advertising Week.


Boyko says “Pursuit of Passion” is aimed “at exposing, educating and exciting minority high school and community-college students, as well as their counselors and parents, to the opportunities available in a career in the advertising and marketing industries.”


Boyko, along with Cecilia Gorman, vice president and director of creative services at Young & Rubicam/Wunderman in Irvine, California, served as managing director and producer on the film. It also included a who’s who of marketing and ad people, including: Alejandro Ruelas, co-founder and managing partner, LatinWorks; Andrew Hsu, a junior copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather; Kenji Summers, strategist, BBH; Rey Peralta, a creative technologist at Mother New York; Shameka Brown Barbosa, associate creative director, Young & Rubicam; Tiffany Edwards, education director, One Club; Emanuel Basnight of Translation; Stanley Lumax, account director, Anomaly; and many others.


4A’s CEO Nancy Hill said that when word got out that the film was being made, “people were lining up to be included. Once we started the sentence, ‘We’re putting together a video of positive role models currently succeeding in the advertising business … ’ we were barely able to finish before they said, ‘Yes.’ ”


The film is not likely to silence critics who claim that the so-called pipeline problem—a lack of students and young professionals coming into the industry—is simply a distraction from bigger issues having to do with lack of opportunity and innate prejudice and racism. And it’s certainly not a documentary about advertising’s woeful past and present diversity figures.


“If we are truly going to make change, we have to manage diversity on a variety of levels, youth being just one,” Hill says. “Attracting multicultural kids and ensuring diversity in the candidate pool for the future of advertising is just one pillar in the strategy. … We aren’t missing or ignoring the perspective that’s out there, but the subject of whether there is real prejudice is a more complex issue that will take much longer to tackle.”


And the movie doesn’t set out to address that issue. It nods toward the need for diversity in the industry and its not-so-stellar past.


“There has been historical … lack of representation in all industries rather than just advertising, but particularly in advertising it’s important because what we’re trying to do is communicate with people,” says Faris Yakob, chief innovations officer at MDC Partners.


TBWA/Chiat/Day chief creative officer Rob Schwartz opens the film with the point that the first creative ad revolution—the one that’s about to interrupt Don Draper’s world on “Mad Men”—didn’t happen until the industry was flooded by non-WASP forces made of Jews, Greeks and Italians.


Schwartz later adds that “there’s work that we never would have done two years ago that we’re doing today because we have people from diverse backgrounds.”


Overly optimistic maybe, but ultimately this is a recruitment film aimed at students, making the industry seem—there’s no other way to say it—like a pretty cool and inspirational place to work. In other words, it’s the ad industry doing a good job of advertising itself—which isn’t always the case.


There are plenty of award-winning ads dispersed throughout the film, a good soundtrack, stories about stumbling into the business, about not fitting in and about the creative urge.


At one point Jimmy Smith, group creative director at TBWA/Chiat/Day, sporting his trademark dreadlocks, Air Jordans and a “Sucka Free” T-shirt says, “I hate ties and I hate suits. Can’t do it. So if you can come in the office and wear a ‘Sucka Free’ T-shirt, that’s fun. … And get paid doing it? … You can’t beat that.” He also stokes the younger generation’s imagination when he talks about calling in Lil Wayne to cut tracks for ad efforts.


“High school is the point in which many kids have the serious conversations about their future career plan,” Hill says. “Advertising hasn’t even been a consideration, so this is what we are trying to change.”


Now that the film is finished, getting out to an audience beyond the ad industry will be the next challenge.


Initial plans for distribution, according to Wunderman, include public and online channels such as industry websites, YouTube and blogs. After that, they will make the video available through digital and DVD copies, sending it to art programs, high school counselors, art teachers and students as well as having more screenings in major U.S. metro areas.


Workforce Management Online, October 2010 — Register Now!

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Tips for Fast Hiring Turnaround

• Ask for help. Find an eligible colleague to assist with paperwork and correspondence. Fewer calls will be missed and materials will remain organized.


• Leave no stone unturned. Go out in the community, hang fliers and request referrals.


• Don’t overlook social networking sites. They aren’t just for screening, and can be an effective recruiting tool when used correctly.


• Stay calm. Speak with your supervisors regarding the support you need, remain organized and keep your goals in mind without stressing.


Workforce Management Online, September 2010 — Register Now!

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Government Hiring May Be Moving to the Fast Lane

Budget deficits notwithstanding, expect as many as 300,000 to 400,000 new federal hires in the next few years. That’s according to Allan Schweyer, a principal for the Center for Human Capital Innovation, which is one of the members of the Portal for Talent Management in Government.


Fiscal year 2011’s budget reflects the intent to hire more federal employees as soon as possible.


“The money spent on salary and wages for government employees is increasing and the money for contractors is decreasing,” says Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer of FedSources, a consulting firm in Washington that specializes in the contracting activities of the federal government. Bjorklund performed an extensive analysis of next year’s budget and reported his findings in the FedSources document “Federal Budget Analysis 2011.”


The hiring shift represents a change from the “contractors can do everything better” philosophy of the Bush administration, which Bjorklund says didn’t work well. The policy shift was formally announced in a March 2009 memorandum from President Barack Obama stating that “contractors may be performing inherently governmental functions. Agencies and departments must operate under clear rules prescribing when outsourcing is and is not appropriate.”


Aside from the problem of defining “inherently governmental functions,” the difficulty with returning jobs to civil servants is a lack of manpower.


“There are about 2 million civil servants and about 6 million contractors,” says Schweyer of the Washington-based Center for Human Capital Innovation. “That’s a big ratio, and Obama wants to swing it back.”


To achieve its goal, the government must hire more federal employees—and more quickly than usual. “The current hiring process is overly complex and takes too long,” wrote Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a May 11 blog post. “On average, it takes 140 days to make a new hire, and in some cases, it can take nearly 200 days. Often, by the time a federal agency is ready to make an offer, the best candidates have taken a position elsewhere.”


To speed hiring, the federal government is planning dramatic changes in recruiting practices. For one, defense and intelligence agencies now have the power to hire from their contractor workforce.


Such hiring hasn’t been “uncommon in science-related agencies,” Bjorklund says. “It has been unusual in intelligence and the Department of Defense because the agencies never had the hiring authority to cherry-pick the best candidates.”


The current hiring process starts with the posting of a densely written job description on USAjobs.gov that may be 20 pages long. Job seekers apply by writing “knowledge, skills and abilities” essays of 10 to 20 pages. Hiring managers must come up with their own criteria for grading the essays, which is done by a panel of at least three people. The hiring manager provides guidance to the panel, but doesn’t sit on in it.


Once the panelists have evaluated all the essays—not a quick task—they meet to compare results. “If there are significant anomalies, the panel must resolve them,” says Owen Jones, a senior director with FedSources. “Then they develop a numerical ‘certificate’ of ranking—a numerical listing of the names—which is given to the hiring manager. There is a ‘rule of three,’ which means the hiring managers must pick from the top three unless some of them have dropped out.”


The three top candidates must be interviewed. But if a veteran applies and ranks in the top three, that person must be selected unless the hiring manager applies for a waiver—another lengthy process.


The new recruiting and hiring process will eliminate essays at the point of job application. Instead, assessments will be made of candidates’ knowledge, skills and abilities. “This will help to eliminate a lot of candidates,” says Anne Kelly, a principal with the Center for Human Capital Innovation. The assumption is that it will also be a lot faster than the essay method.


Candidate assessments will be scored by a method not yet worked out. Jones says the rule of three also will be abandoned. Instead, hiring managers will be able to choose from a larger group of top-ranked individuals. Whether the group is five, 15 or more will depend on the position and possibly on the agency and the hiring manager. Jones says finalists may be asked to write essays to assist hiring managers with their selections. Veteran preference will still apply, and waivers will still take a lot of work.


Workforce Management Online, August 2010 — Register Now!

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For Startups, Often the Only Option in a Recession Is to Keep on Hiring

For plenty of entrepreneurs, surviving the recession is accomplishment enough. But those who launched startups shortly before or during the recession can’t be content merely to struggle through. They have to grow, often quickly.


Hiring a team can be a perilous process for these startups because they don’t have a track record to rely on in projecting either the revenue needed to pay new employees or the business demand that the additional hires would help meet.


Those factors are always important considerations for new companies, but the soft economy and dearth of investment capital have trimmed the margin of error even more.


“We’ve rolled the dice,” says Bryan Johnson, CEO of Braintree Payment Solutions, a Bartlett, Illinois-based credit card processing firm launched in 2007. “We hired knowing that we were vulnerable, that if we were to lose customers, [the added expense] would really hurt.”


Braintree hasn’t received any external funding, so even though the company turned profitable in 2008 and has remained so through the recession, each new hire has given Johnson pause. At the same time, business has been growing. Revenue climbed 420 percent last year (Braintree declines to disclose dollar amounts), and the company has had to add employees—in now has a staff of 20—to keep up.


“The hiring pace has been pretty aggressive because we’ve had to keep up with demand,” Johnson says. “So far that’s paid off, and we’ve been able to pay people with the cash flow we have and also to deliver what we need to deliver.”


Even well-capitalized startups are more cautious about hiring during a recession because they are wary of demand. Matt Moog raised $5 million to launch Viewpoints Networks in 2006 but limited staff to a dozen until the company, which builds consumer review Web sites, turned profitable in 2009.


“We were growing incredibly rapidly [in 2009] but still took a conservative approach initially because we wanted to make sure that this new business was really there. We wanted to allow demand to build before we hired people to meet it,” Moog says.


He added 40 employees last year, accelerating that pace when Viewpoints began licensing its service to create proprietary consumer networking sites for companies including Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based Sears Holdings Corp. He has added 20 more people so far this year, bringing total headcount to about 60, and has subcontracted for offshore software development.


“This year we’re taking a more proactive approach, hiring ahead of the curve in anticipation of more demand. We’re still doing that while making sure that we are profitable and growing, but it’s more aggressive.”


The cautious approach is wise, at least for now, according to Miles Kierson, president of Kierson Consulting, a management consulting firm based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Two of his clients recently considered making significant hires or purchases in anticipation of increased demand, and in both cases the prospective business didn’t materialize.


“People are nervous, and they ought to be,” Kierson says. “Two years ago, you wouldn’t even think that it was risky to grow, at least a little bit. Now it’s risky, because nobody knows what’s going to happen. Every day there’s good news and bad news about the economy, and for the most part it doesn’t really look like there’s much change.”


He advises businesses to bet on new hires only if there’s enough cash on hand to bear the added expense and survive a surprising, immediate downturn in revenue.


Johnson, Braintree’s CEO, agrees—he’s just glad his hiring gamble paid off.


“We certainly could have gone a slower route, or raised capital or built a cushion in case something went wrong,” he says. “But we made good decisions that have worked out for us, and everything has gone our way.”


Workforce Management Online, August 2010 — Register Now!

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Company Believes It Has Cracked the Code on Millennials Job-Seeking Habits

If Millennials are different from the rest of the working class, should companies use different tactics to recruit them?


The founders of Koda think the answer is yes.


Koda is a year-old service pairing recent college graduates with companies of all sizes looking for entry-level help.


Part job board and part social network, Koda is built on the premise that Millennials are Internet-savvy social animals who’d rather bookmark one online destination for scanning open positions and swapping job-hunting stories than troll individual company career centers or, God forbid, use Facebook for anything but hanging out.


The need’s there, says Jeff Berger, who dreamed up the company in 2007 with his roommate while still at Tulane University in New Orleans. LinkedIn caters to people who are already working.


Like other social networks, it’s more focused on the conversation than on the jobs, Berger says. Job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder are so big they’re overwhelming, Berger says.


At Koda, “Our pool of jobs is very specific to the niche we’re focusing on,” he says. “We nail it down, have a platform so you can show yourself in the right professional format, and have a community to have that jobs discussion.”


Berger wouldn’t disclose how many Millennials have signed up for the service, which launched in May 2009. However, he says traffic to the San Francisco startup’s website has grown to 100,000 unique visitors a month. The company is doing more recruiting through university career centers, honor societies and alumni associations.


Partnerships include Starbucks, Hyatt Hotels
Koda has also partnered with 500 companies, including Starbucks, Hyatt Hotels Corp., Bechtel, Adidas and New York Life Insurance. Koda scrapes job-openings data from its partners’ online career sites to repost on its own, collecting an undisclosed finder’s fee whenever a member clicks through. The company recently hired a COO who previously worked at JobFox and CareerBuilder to provide the industry experience its young founders lack.


In addition to click-based revenue, Koda has raised $4.5 million in two rounds of angel financing to fund operations.


But industry experts say the enterprise has to yet to gain a substantial toehold. They question whether there’s room for niche communities such as Koda when many companies already rely on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for recruiting.


On top of that, established job boards such as Monster and job search engines such as SimplyHired are adding features to be more attractive to 18- to 25-year-olds who want a little community thrown in with their job hunt.


As for the its financial backers, although Berger would not confirm it, sources close to the company say Koda’s angel is company president and co-founder Tony York’s family—business tycoons who own the San Francisco 49ers.


Showing a warm body behind job listings
When it comes to their careers, Gen Y’ers are different from older generations, recruiting industry experts say. For one thing, they care about a company’s corporate culture and want to see evidence of it in recruiting efforts, says Andrew Chen, a senior product manager at SimplyHired.


“You have to reach out to them in ways that are meaningful to them, such as having a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and a blog that shows your company’s personality so they get the sense that there’s a warm body behind the listings,” Chen says.


Millennials also care about more than salary and benefits; they want to know about a company’s extracurricular activities and what community service programs they offer, Chen says. “The highest salary doesn’t always win,” he says.


To make its service attractive to Millennials, SimplyHired struck a deal to include Koda jobs in its search results. In April, SimplyHired also added a new-graduate filter to its jobs search engine so novice job seekers could weed out everything but entry-level positions. The initial reaction to the service has been strong, Chen says. “Usage numbers are pretty good,” he says.


Penelope Trunk, whose Brazen Careerist website and blog blazed the trail for Gen Y communities online, doesn’t see Koda as competition either. Koda’s focus is job listings, while Careerist’s is conversation, she says. Even so, Koda’s model has limitations, she says. Companies want to recruit top performers, but if someone is that good, the jobs will come to them and they don’t need a job board to find work, she says.


Dan Finnigan, a job board industry veteran who once ran Yahoo HotJobs, almost started a Gen Y job search service before becoming CEO of recruiting software maker Jobvite in 2008. The opportunity is there because the Facebook generation doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable in the same online space as the LinkedIn generation, he says.


In the end, Finnigan sees Facebook adding features to accommodate Millennials’ job searches.


“The job searches that matter, the ones based on who you know, that’s going to take place on the network where they have relationships—and that’s Facebook,” he says. “I guarantee you, the work and experience section of Facebook will become very important over time. Everyone will have access to your professional profile on Facebook. Facebook will evolve to be where that generation navigates their relationships and work.”


Workforce Management Online, July 2010 — Register Now!

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Dear Workforce What Should We Consider When Launching College Recruiting?

Dear Hungry for Talent:

The truth is, there has never been a better time than now to launch a college recruitment program. The current talent pool is rich with potential, and businesses that have struggled with successfully attracting top graduates in the past have a much better shot at landing exceptional new people. However, it can feel like a daunting task to structure an effective college recruiting program (and hire the right people) with such a competitive talent pool, and less time than ever. Here’s what you need to know about college recruiting in this post-recession era.

Determine a good hire–despite lack of experience
A large percentage of recent college grads simply don’t have the real-world experience most recruiters need to help make their selection decisions, so be prepared to assess college grads differently. Résumé reviews and reference checks are more difficult with limited information to go on, so structured assessments that measure competency potential, critical reasoning and essential knowledge/skills are critical, because they offer objective, job-relevant information to help ensure a more accurate selection.

Don’t fret about perceived hurdles
Although you may think college grads will be deterred by a selective screening process, don’t worry. Even during the “talent war” era, interview dropout rates were reasonable for most employers, ranging from 10 to 18 percent. The risks associated with making a wrong hiring decision are much higher and costlier than the risks associated with possibly turning off candidates from an application process that is considered too structured. The likelihood that you will lose out on top talent is more than offset by the potential gems you may find that could have been missed in a typical interview process.

Get going on social networking
Getting in on the latest activity when it comes to social networking is critical to the success of any college recruiting program. It’s essential to be where the action is for your audience, which means being active on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn—and at on-campus resources such as career service center job boards and alumni networks. Feel as if you can skip this step? It may mean missing out on a major top talent recruitment tool.

Fast communication is critical
Many college graduates have surprisingly high expectations when it comes to feedback and response from potential employers because they’re coming from a highly connected environment—one where they’re used to active online responses from friends, family, peers and professors. They are savvy customers who know the tools and technology that exist for quick interaction via the Web. In stark contrast, they usually aren’t savvy in the recruitment processes companies must follow. The key to hooking this audience is being ready to respond—good or bad—as quickly as possible. Even if you do have a good excuse for your two-week delay in responding to them, grads may have already moved on, so communication is important.

Build your brand
College recruiting can be a valuable tool for building your employer brand, simply because your target audience is more connected and Internet-savvy than most other groups. The more positive the interview process, the greater the chance they’ll spread the good word about your company to their peers, so getting it right is important. Employers that use structured and fair recruiting methods generally are perceived better by college graduates, so keep this in mind as you develop your college recruiting program.

Remember that when hiring, you’re looking for potential as much (or more so) than trained experience. Be ready to have a structured onboarding and training program to get the fastest and best productivity from new college hires. And remember: This group is far more willing to walk away from an employer if they are not engaged, so be ready to manage your new hires more aggressively in the short term to ensure they stay engaged for the long haul.

SOURCE: Nels Wroe, SHL Group, Denver, May 13, 2010

LEARN MORE: Please read how recruiters are using freshly minted college grads to replenish staffs.

Workforce Management Online, June 2010 — Register Now!

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.

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Survey 21 Percent of Job Seekers Dropped After Reference Checks

On average, 21 percent of job seekers are taken out of consideration by managers after a check of professional references, according to a survey released by OfficeTeam, a division of Robert Half International Inc.


The survey also found that 36 percent of managers, when contacting references, are most interested in a description of past job duties and experience of potential employees. An additional 31 percent seek a view into job seekers’ strengths and weaknesses.


OfficeTeam’s survey included telephone interviews with more than 1,000 senior managers at companies with 20 or more employees.  


Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.


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