CareerXroads Colloquium™ Bellwether - May 07

More than 85 Broads http://85broads.spaces.live.com/

After working at Goldman Sachs for 14 years, Janet Hanson founded More than 85 Broads (a nod to Goldman's Manhattan address). Her book of the same name, describes how it grew to a network of 17,000 women around the globe. Broad Impact is her new consulting firm.

We recommend Janet's views on how to find and keep great female employees.

Video Resumes vs Video Screening (Interviews) http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2007-04-24-video-resumes_N.htm

Video resumes have been a flash in the pan for 30 years and never gotten much traction (possibly because the notion of plodding through candidate videos - digital or otherwise - is about the most unappealing thing a recruiter can do). Now however, the video horizon has tilted with all the attention on v- blogs, YouTube and the like. Two of the latest efforts Hirevue and Interviewstudio are interesting and potentially efficient alternative solutions for phone screens once the initial sourcing and database searches sort out the most likely applicants.

Someday (but not today) recruiters will be able to search a video database of applicants' answers to questions posed in a job descriptions and tee-up a paired comparison of the best responses to select the finalists. Interviews, whether live and in-person or remotely and digitally taped, have much in common. In either case you would be hard pressed to prove that one is significantly more likely to lead to better selection decisions than another.

Got Any Hot Technology Tools for Recruiters? http://www.hrtechnologyconference.com/

Gerry is moderating a panel at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago later this year (October) which will showcase 4-5 cool tools for recruiters. He's tapped several well-regarded, hands-on folks to assist him on the panel and they plan to put a dozen or more of the best tools that surface through their paces this summer.

What is your team in love with? Let us know.

A Blog by Any Other Name Might Just Not Be  www.ere.net/

Best advice we heard at a recent conference (ERE) was blog panelist Joe Grimm's comment that "if your leadership is nervous about using a blog in recruiting then call it something else."
We're convinced that "Interactive Staffing FAQs" would be a great way for firms to take their candidate experience up a notch.

Characteristics of Winning Staffing Models www.ere.net

Michael McNeal of Intuit was an ERE keynoter who resonated with us when he opined that we've entered an evolutionary phase where successful staffing models are no longer differentiated by their ability to "source" people because sourcing skills and tools are increasingly cheap and easily available - access to everyone is nearly a fact. Instead, Michael stressed, "the most competitive staffing models will, in the future, be differentiated by their ability to offer a good fit" (specifically he was speaking to the development of validated assessments for critical job families).

We would add (and we're sure Michael would agree) that the "good fit" is a two-way choice and the results of the assessments need to be as accessible to the job seeker as the employer.

Innovation: Pablo Picasso vs Paul Cezanne  www.shrm.org/conferences

Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Tipping Point) opened SHRM's Staffing Management Conference in New Orleans last week by speaking about two distinctly different types of innovative people. (Gladwell's comments were from a chapter in a new untitled book that is two years from publication.) One type is, according to Gladwell, represented by Picasso who stood the art world on its head from the very beginning of his career. Early flashes of brilliance and an ability to articulate what he was doing characterized much of Picasso's best work while he was still in his twenties. The second path to innovation was characterized by Cezanne. His best work is considered to have developed late in life.

Gladwell's very entertaining talk was interspersed with musings that we may be overemphasizing the sourcing, identification and selection of Picassos while overlooking and failing to support the Cezannes in our workforce. His other comparisons (especially the Eagles versus Fleetwood Mac) were stimulating and, for many, a compelling argument.

Candidate Experience: What You Deliver Will be Remembered  www.shrm.org/conferences

Gerry moderated a panel on the candidate experience during the Staffing Management Conference. Starbucks (Carmen Hudson), Whirlpool (Kristin Weirick), Electronic Arts (Jeff Hunter) and Annie Jiang (Lenovo) were the panelists and engaged the audience with a broad ranging discussion about their respective approaches to defining the candidate and crafting an experience that engages them. All agreed that the devil is in the details and that knowing what you are delivering is best determined by studying how the candidates themselves make choices, and then asking them if they got it. Kristin's statement that, "Anything transactional is expected, but the experience is remembered," was one of several excellent takeaways.

While all the panelists were passionate about the subject, we note that Annie Jiang had flown in from Beijing to take part. We also wish we could add that the "promise" a company (explicitly or implicitly) makes to the prospect about the experience they will deliver will be crucial to a candidate's choice. Unfortunately, no one is ready for that....

Bellwether of the Year: Immigration

A month ago on Monday, April, 2, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services began accepting requests for 2008 H-1B visas. On Tuesday, April 3, the cap was reached for skilled-worker visa petitions...no more will be accepted. The immigration/guest worker system is clearly broken in the US and we see almost no debate or energy in this country to demand that needed, qualified and talented workers be accepted to our shores. We will sorely regret these missed opportunities in the next decade. Our companies will adapt by shifting growth globally (duh).

The day that the center of recruiting activity shifts offshore is fast approaching. Strategic leadership for global staffing is also likely to shift elsewhere.

Google is Putting Feet on the Street www.classifiedintelligence.com

Google quietly launched a classifieds deal with PennySaver's small local shoppers printed in 400 communities around the country last month. "Now PennySaverUSA.com, a division of Harte Hanks Inc. (NYSE: HHS), has disclosed a wide-ranging deal with Google that could potentially launch thousands of sales reps from up to 5,000 "shopper" publications in the U.S., as local sales agents for Google AdWords and other products," according to Classified Intelligence. A feed of the 1.3 million classified listings in the PennySaverUSA database to Google Base is already happening. All of the ads are then searchable by Google users; traffic is directed to the site of the newspaper where the ad was originally posted.

We believe that the word classifieds goes well beyond used clothing, appliances and bric-a-brac. Companies with thousands of retail stores throughout the USA might have a new source of hire channel before too long.