CareerXroads recently announced 25 corporations as having the best corporate staffing pages. Drawn from the Fortune list of 500 large and mostly public corporations published each April, the firms were named at the NACE and SHRM national conferences in May and June respectively. We liberally offered examples of how these firms' staffing pages offered outstanding support for recruiting quality candidates.
The CareerXroads 2008 Best of the Best list is a great start for any company looking to benchmark new ideas to improve their website's job pages. We hope to have a detailed analysis prepared to share by the end of the summer.
We realize that using a restricted set of companies means that some firms are overlooked- like EY, Enterprise-Rent-a-Car and even the US Army whose job pages are also outstanding - - - just not listed among the Fortune 500.
Also worthy of note: Rapid growth of video, simulations, interactive content and cross links to social networks such as Facebook are major shifts in the last year. Emphasis on "sustainability" and "community investment" have increased substantially in both quantity and quality.
We've been following the efforts of several companies to build customized micro-career sites to better target groups of prospects. Microsoft stands out with more than a half-dozen specialized sites - all with unique content and different value propositions. Absolutely brilliant.
This concept started a couple years ago with separate landing pages and has rapidly progressed to full blown sites. The Microsoft Careers Newsletter helps the firm link these disparate sites together. Innovative and cutting edge, we believe this trend will be a hallmark of top firms and differentiate highly competitive companies. (see more in our most recent Update)
Imagine you are a qualified candidate for a position in a great company. You don't get the job and receive a turndown email that not only gives you the bad news but offers you a consolation - an invitation to share your resume/profile with other great companies.
We've seen versions of this concept attempted by vendors and company consortiums in the past. The idea resonates because if you can't use the candidate maybe someone else can - and, in return, maybe someone who was a finalist in a similar firm or a great company near our location might be accessible and interested before we have to spend money on ads or additional sourcing.
The challenges, however are significant. AllianceQ, recently launched, might just have a chance at overcoming the obstacles by setting up a true consortium without vendor interference. We believe it will depend on the quality of the companies who participate.
Phil Haynes (who recently left Wachovia) is working the initial startup for QuietAgent who came up with the current version. We can see dozens of possibilities if they limit themselves to great brands but there are at least as many landmines to navigate. Collaborative trends however are inevitable and they will move the game to a new level.
After an initial 4-week onboarding, Tony Hsieh, Zappos' president, offers each new hire in their Las Vegas headquarters a $1,500 bonus - if they'll quit - and 2-3% of their new hires actually take the offer and leave. The idea is if the new employee realizes they made a mistake, they can get some coverage while they look for that new job. Employees that stay - actively choose to. Zappos does about $1 billion in online shoe sales and has 1,600 employees.
Timing and innovation afforded Jobing.com more press in the past two months than the largest job boards combined. The upstart firm (with a huge presence at the 2008 SHRM conference) was founded by Aaron Matos and gives new employees (after an initial period) a free car and free gas. The cars are wrapped with Jobing's logo and are essentially mobile bulletin boards. The cost of the benefit is expensive - until you think about the millions of dollars in free PR they received during the recent gas hike extolling the company's foresight.
We applaud these two innovative retention concepts.
We enjoy and value John Sullivan because he always challenges normative thinking - and his article last month extolling the virtues of Speed Interviewing is no exception. As John correctly points out "interviewing hasn't changed much in the last century." Left unsaid is the reason - both the reliability and validity of interviews (even behavioral based interviews) as a selection tool is extraordinarily poor. You are better off flipping coins to select your hire from the finalists than relying on interviews alone.
Initially we thought John had gone around the bend here but, on further thought, there is something to be said for spending less time interviewing. You may end up weighting other (better) selection factors more reliably in your final decision. Unfortunately, we will never get rid of the anachronistic live interview - we just can't handle it psychologically.
This Fast Company article about how Jeff Immelt engages up and coming leaders at GE's management development center doesn't even scratch the surface about the world-class practices this firm is pioneering. Concerned about the future of Talent Acquisition, Immelt authorized a series of teams made up entirely of operations leaders (VPs of finance, supply-chain, operations, etc.) and sent them all over the world last month to learn what the problems were in staffing and to develop solutions that could be implemented globally. The teams met, collected data, interviewed thought leaders, competitors and partners, benchmarked best practices, digested what they heard then reported out recommendations - - - all in the space of 30-45 days.
Kudos. Talk about aligning staffing to the business! Just get the business to attend to staffing as a priority.