CareerXroads®Update - August 2010

By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com

Since 1996 our Update has been published 10-12 times each year and aims to share commentary, observations, perspectives and data we come across during our staffing adventures. We hope you continue to enjoy it and pass it on to friends. All are invited to register for the Update for free. Coupled with our Bellwether, a provocative monthly look at trends we share with CareerXroads Colloquium members, we are always willing to challenge the accepted wisdom or poke a little fun at the staffing industry and ourselves in the process.
We invite you to keep in touch and join us during the year at the various conferences where we speak or simply attend.

Fall Conference Calendar is Chock Full: Make Your Choices Now.

Late summer and fall events in 2010 have enough traditional and non-traditional venues for networking, learning and development to satisfy anyone's taste. Hopefully your budget will bring you to a few where Mark and I are having interesting conversations. We keep our schedule updated to help you find us. This year the more unusual discussions include:

  • At Human Resource Executive's HR Technology Conference & Exposition held annually in Chicago (9/29-10/01), Elaine Orler and Gerry will formally debate the topic "Is the Candidate Experience Worth It?" For the first time he is taking the 'con' position and will argue that no one really cares or will notice so don't waste your time. (Gerry hopes to lose the debate but we have every confidence he will win.)
  • CareerXroads is also moderating a panel at the HR Technology Conference on the "future of job boards - or not" with Ray Shreyer (IBM), Aaron Matos (Jobing), Doug Berg (Jobs2Web) and Peter Weddle (International Association of Job Boards). This will be a lively discussion!
  • Onrec's (9/14-16) lineup this year in Chicago will include our panel on Military Hiring. Several incredibly knowledgeable individuals who are extraordinarily passionate about this subject (as most have military connections themselves). Chad Sowash (Direct Employers), Angela Guidroz (Geaux Veterans), RJ Naugle (Microsoft) and Chris Murdock (IQuent Talent Partners) are front and center in this conversation about a truly underutilized pool of talent. Facilitating this discussion will be a pleasure.
  • The Learning Conference in Chicago (9/27-29) is a small and intimate setting for getting into the 'How to' on dozens of staffing subjects. It is probably the best venue for our fairly serious (but nevertheless tongue-in-cheek) "How to Improve Source of Hire Data Collection from a 1 Sigma Error Report to a Strategic Staffing Tool" (and we still disagree with more than half the blogs on this subject).
  • Boston is the site of this year's RecruitFest (10/7-8) - our favorite UN-conference. Unwind. Let it hang out. Engage in a more direct, interactive and in your face discussion about the Candidate Experience and much more.
  • At the ERE Expo in late October we will moderate an unusual panel of undergrads and recent grads. One panelist is an author and creator of the MBA Oath and another, now at Pepsi, was featured on April's Fortune Magazine cover story about companies hiring military leaders. A recent Lockheed engineer and a top undergraduate EE Senior round out our effort to find young folks with first-hand experience and opinions that are hard to ignore. (We may briefly get a chance to fly in to ERE's Seattle summit at Microsoft on Social Recruiting [9/13] despite a conflict we have with our own Colloquium the following day.)
  • Don't forget to check our local conferences for great opportunities that draw recruiting professionals together at a regional or state level. Check out the Staffing Management chapters in Chicago, Dallas, Florida, Phoenix, Seattle, New Jersey and more here. This fall you'll find us at Colorado's Power Boost and the New Jersey Garden State Conference.
  • Your vendors and employer associations are also putting on impressive shows with memorable keynotes and concurrent sessions. We plan to participate in PeopleClick (10/11-14) and DirectEmployer (10/6-8) user/member conferences.
  • Finally, our own CareerXroads Colloquium peer-to-peer discussions in August, September and October continue to support members who want to go out and share their practices at public conferences. More than two dozen members have given talks as practitioners in 2010 at many of the events mentioned above and others.
Speaking at any of the above venues as well as many others taking place is a great way to make a difference beyond your company (it won't hurt your career either) and we encourage anyone with a solid case (challenge, plan, execution and results) to consider sharing with colleagues.

Welcome to the next level of personalized engagement

The truth in this quote from Dr. Michael Kannisto, BASF's head of staffing, about a viral Old Spice commercial may not be immediately apparent but, no matter, the results from this campaign - increased sales - speak louder than anything.

Apparently Old Spice had such a great online response to a series of commercials, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" that they filmed and posted individual replies online to dozens of celebrities and ordinary people alike.

It made us think about creating video replies to individual career site visitors as part of an FAQ section or, publishing customized video messages to samples of applicants or silver medalists who weren't hired - perhaps encouraging more selectivity or additional experience - rather than a cold email and then getting some of them to opt in to have the video published for all to see.

Does Your Staffing Process Engage People with Disabilities Or Not?

This April we created a survey asking employers (in a pretty in-your-face-manner) "How prepared is your recruiting process to handle job seekers with disabilities?"

We tried to drive a broad sample of employers to respond to the survey through an ERE blog on the subject as well as emails to CareerXroads colloquium members and requests for help from folks with large databases like David Mendoza who prompted the idea for the survey in the first place.

Actually a large numbers of folks did read the questions. Few answered them. (Many told us later that so little was being done they were embarrassed to say "no" to everything.) That said about 40, mostly large firms, did complete it. We hope to have a more in-depth public discussion of results with those who responded at the end of August. In the meantime, one question focused on employer Career Site pages really stood out - and we thought it worth reporting here.

Percentages in brackets are "Yes" responses. Does your site:

  • have at least one photo of a visibly disabled employee?" [8.1%]
  • have at least one video of a visibly disabled person? [5.4%]
  • allow for navigation with a screen reader? [40.5%]
  • allow [disabled] visitors to request more time before a page times out? [21.6%]
  • sometimes require color differentiation to see content? [26.3%]
  • allow [disabled] visitors to skip past repetitive navigation links? [22.9%]
  • provide captioning for ALL audio and video content? [18.9%]
  • allow access without a mouse? [43.2%]
  • offer functional online forms, PDFs and PPTs for screen readers? [24.3%]
We can do better.

Job Hoppers Make the Best Employees. Well, Maybe Not

Penelope Trunk is an unabashed fan of Millennials - a prolific speaker and author who describes the needs, wants and requirements of young grads. Her blog about why job hopping is a good thing has just enough going for it to grab your attention but not enough to prove the point.

  1. Job hoppers have more intellectually rewarding careers.
  2. Job hoppers have more stable careers.
  3. Job hoppers are higher performers.
  4. Job hoppers are more loyal.
  5. Job hoppers are more emotionally mature.

Penelope's comments are well worth contrasting with this article by an investment manager, Mark Suster, in Business Insider claiming you should "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"

We think the truth is somewhere in between but well worth a discussion between recruiters and their internal clients who are often acting on their own bias. Just how many jobs does it take to make a job hopper anyway?

Your tweets have crossed the line: You are Fired

This YouTube video is going to be very funny if you are a millennial and very awkward for almost everyone else. Partly because of the language that starts about two minutes into it and partly because this scenario between a boss and subordinate shows how the two are totally disconnected in their thinking (the video portrays the subordinate as totally innocent).

The video reminds us why policies that describe proper conduct are more valuable than those that focus on what not to do. (Thanks to Jason Davis of Recruitingblogs.com for finding this gem)

Lots of Talk: No Jobs (especially) in Small Businesses

The recovery will be much slower than expected if the charts from the July Small Business Foundation Research survey shown here are to be believed.

Taking Family Friendly to a New Level

Here's an interesting statistic: Women's income increases 7% for every month their male partner takes parental leave!

Incentive enough to want your partner to participate in child rearing? In Sweden 85% of the men take parental leave. OK, it's Sweden but, hey!

Transitioning Veterans: Untapped Pools of Talent

In Washington DC this month (8/20) two dozen of the country's largest firms with military hiring initiatives/aspirations will quietly share their hiring practices, challenges and needs at an informal, impromptu meeting hosted by GE.

No vendors, no contractors, no press, no suppliers and no third party will be in attendance. No fees are being charged with GE offering to handle the facility and CareerXroads volunteering to facilitate the conversation. Several observers representing the US Department of Labor that is responsible for helping the hundreds of thousands of veterans in transition annually and a representative from SHRM will participate.

This unprecedented 1-day invitation-only meeting is an outgrowth of a conversation at SHRM's national conference in San Diego just last month when it became clear that a series of new initiatives to support returning troops in transition were in the pipeline for Fall deployment and that the government was reaching out to corporations to better understand the priorities. Learn more about this special event.

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CareerXroads
The Staffing Strategy Connection
By Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com - 732-821-6652