For one thing the idea proposed is far from radical. There have been many other books over the past 10-15 years including the Amazon best-sellers Hire With Your Head (for full disclosure — this is mine) and Top Grading that espouse similar themes. For another, and far more important reason, he mistook cause for effect.

I absolutely agree that a bad attitude is an extremely common hiring problem, but the bad attitude was caused by a lack of job fit, not the other way around. Bad fit is a multi-headed monster, including a bad fit with the manager, the team, the job itself, the company’s culture, the company’s growth rate, and the underlying business environment. There are probably a few more “lack of …” factors that could have been cited, but these represent the 80/20 rule and the primary cause of a bad attitude.

Consider this: even highly motivated people with a track record of success can develop bad attitudes and become disruptive workers when they don’t work well with their boss, when the job promised is different than the one taken, or the resources needed to do the job right are not provided. In most cases, the person got the bad attitude as a result of these underlying root cause issues. So to solve this problem make sure the person you hire fits the situation from top to bottom. Now that’s radical.

The graphic provides a means to visualize this job fit problem. (Here’s a link to a short video for a more detailed explanation.) The key point: for every hire, you need to ensure alignment top to bottom with the company, the job, the hiring manager, and the person’s ability, motivation, personality, and management needs. Due to rapidly changing business conditions getting this vertical alignment correct is nearly impossible, so you need to select people who also have the ability to move laterally in a variety of different environments. It’s this lack of lateral ability that cause the fit problem and results in a bad attitude. Here’s why:

Company Culture and Rate of Change: This factor is largely dependent on the company’s rate of growth and where it is on the corporate life cycle, somewhere between a resource poor startup to a rule-bound bureaucracy, and both moving toward the center. Obviously few people can thrive in all of these types of environments; that’s why the person has to be assessed on this environmental and cultural measure.

Job Type and Degree of Structure: Jobs have a pace of their own that often collides with the needs of the company’s culture and pace. For example, creative jobs tend to be loose and free flowing, whereas operations and accounting tend to be highly structured. Marketing, sales, and design positions tend to fall somewhere between these extremes. Irrespective of the person in the role, there’s often a natural conflict between the company pace and culture and the job type itself. Adding the wrong person into the fray complicates matters even further. For examples, accountants don’t do too well in startups and independent salespeople fight process and detailed reporting.

Manager Style and Personality: While we’re at it, let’s throw the hiring manager’s style into the job fit mix. The graph shows the manager style extremes from controlling to hands-off and the in-betweens: supervising, training, delegating, and coaching. The best managers have the ability to flex across most of the styles based on the circumstances and the type of people they’re managing. Unfortunately, most managers have a narrower range of ability and get frustrated and prickly when dealing with staff members and issues that conflict with their natural style. Most people would agree that the manager-new hire relationship is the primary cause of employee dissatisfaction. That’s why getting this part of the fit equation right is essential.

Subordinate Style and Personality: Fitting the employee to the job, the manager, and the company is no easy matter, but it’s made worse when generic competency models and behavioral interviewing are used without considering these fit issues. The fit with the hiring manager can be determined by finding out what types of managers the person has worked best with to see if the person can work equally well with all types of managers or if the range is narrower. The best hires are those who can work in all types of environments and with all styles of managers. Few meet this standard, but you should know ahead of time where lack of job fit will become unmanageable. (Watch the video to see a great example of how to address this.)

Since many people, me included, have been writing about this problem for years, including a Fortune cover story in the ’90s on the “bad attitude” problem, “radical” is too strong a term for the importance of assessing it. Essential is a better name for the need to access job and cultural fit before you hire the person. Regardless of what you call it, measuring fit across all job dimensions needs to part of any assessment process. Of course, don’t be surprised when ensuring that you directly assess job satisfaction and employee performance, that most of your bad attitude problems disappear. This is what always happens when you solve root causes rather than their effects. Some might call this concept radical. I call it commonsense.

Yes dear reader, just in time for Valentine’s Day CareerBuilder tells us what you’ve been suspecting all along: your office mates are mating up. If the survey is to be believed — and why not?; they surveyed 7,780 people who all can’t be pranking us — then almost 4 in 10 workers have dated someone they met on the job.

Awkward, if one of them thinks it’s going places and the other one … you get the idea. Fortunately, 31 percent of those relationships lead to marriage. (Which is no guarantee things won’t get even more awkward a little down the road. But this is the season for love, so ignore our dose of ugly reality. Or read on to the part where we tell you how Challenger, Gray, & Christmas snuck in a warning about office violence.)

HR people out there, this stat’s for you: CareerBuilder says 18 percent of office dating is between boss and their report. Women were more likely to date up than men, 35 percent to 23 percent respectively.

Of the industries reported, you just had to know that hospitality by far (47 percent) has the most co-dating co-workers. Healthcare also made the top five list, which, considering how many parents hoped their offspring would marry a doctor, is no surprise. But financial services (40 percent)? And transportation and utilities (43 percent)? And IT (40 percent)? These also made the top five? Really?

Now moving on to that warning about workers pulling a Valentine’s Day Massacre  from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (hereinafter CG&C). “Some companies are facing an entirely different problem: their workers have lost that loving feeling and the consequences can be dire,” reads the press release we got from the global outplacement firm.

“Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.  This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” says CGC CEO John Challenger.

The press release offers a whole bunch of ideas to increase civility and reduce animosity. Missing from the list, and very conspicuously considering Valentine’s Day started this whole thing, is the free supply of large amounts of chocolate.

A Vowel Please

From the “Can I buy a vowel?” department comes Goood Job, the latest in a long line of companies entering the employee-referral-social media business we’ve talked a lot about (and includes socialcruiter, socialreferral, and many others). In short, here’s how Goood Job works: Employees can opt-in to have their company’s job postings automatically show up on their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages. Friends can express an interest, filling in short information about themselves on a landing page, and the employee can add a comment (like “Goood guy, worked with him for three years”).

The system tracks employees’ referrals through the hiring process. The employees build up points, like a loyalty program, however you want to set it up — x number of points for referring someone who sends in a resume, y number if it resulted in a hire, etc. — and earn dinners, movie tickets, trips to Paris, the spa, or perhaps even to a spa in Paris. HP and Microsoft in Israel are using the Tel Aviv company for referrals, and Goood Job says both are considering expanding their use globally. The sweetspot, though — or shall we say sweeet spot — are companies in the few-hundred to a few-thousand-employee range, who pay around $1,000-2,500 a month, depending on company size. One client has tripled its number of referrals since using the system. As we began an early-morning demo of the product, one company rep IM’d us to say “Goood Morning.” Cute.

Short Takes

BeKnown as you with a URL all your own. Just go claim your Beknown.com/your-name-here address. Yeah, yeah, we know there are a ton of places to get a vanity addy, but as our best friend’s mother used to say, “What can it hurt?”

Remember the SHRM Members for Transparency? That’s the group that’s taken issue with some of the goings-on at the top levels of the HR professional association. We were starting to unremember them ourselves until up pops an email from the group the other day saying they’re still trying to get a second meeting going with representatives of the big group’s board of directors. The first meeting took 102 days to schedule. The second took a little longer than that. It’s now scheduled for March 4. (Go here and read all about the last meeting.)

LinkedIn closed Thursday at $76.39, down 15 cents. But after investors got a look at the report, the stock climbed up, and within two hours was trading at $83.25, up 9 percent.

The company reported fourth quarter revenue of $167.7 million, more than double its fourth quarter last year. Analysts, who had been expecting the company to finish strong, predicted revenues of $159.7 million. They also expected a 7 cent per share profit. LinkedIn reported earning an adjusted 12 cents per share.

Calling 2011 “A landmark year for LinkedIn,” CEO Jeff Weiner said the company would continue to grow this year, putting an emphasis on expanded mobile capabilities, the international market, and plans to “refresh a number of our pillar products.” Many of those are recruiting related.

Before today’s financial report and an after-market conference call, analysts projected LinkedIn would earn 57 cents a share on revenue of $828.2 million. Now, the company says it expects revenue in a range of $840-$860 million. For 2011, LinkedIn’s revenue totaled $522.1 million.

Recruitment provided half the revenue for 2011 and just over half in the last quarter of the year. The relative percentages that LinkedIn’s three product lines — recruitment, marketing, and subscriptions — contribute to the total revenue haven’t changed much since the company went public last May.

During the question and answer with analysts, Steve Sardello, LinkedIn’s CFO, said there won’t be “a lot of change” in recruitment pricing this year. Instead, the company will focus on expanding its client base and improving the penetration of the service. He said the renewal rate and add-ons grew by 171 percent, and said most customers now hold between three and four recruiter seats.

LinkedIn has been focusing increasing attention on the international market, and growth there has been slowly edging up. By the end of 2011 it accounted for a third of LinkedIn’s quarterly revenue. During the quarter the company opened offices in Brazil, India, and Japan, and translated the service into five additional languages.

LinkedIn’s optimistic outlook for this year is in marked contrast to at least two of its competitors. In the last two weeks both Monster and Dice Holdings offered financial guidance that was more conservative than what Wall Street wanted to hear. As a result, the stock of both companies saw a sharp decline.

CareerBuilder, privately held by three media companies and Microsoft, said it had North American revenue of $157 million in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to $627 million. The company publicly releases only revenue for North America. It does not release international earnings or expenses or profit.

However, Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martore told investors and analysts that CareerBuilder accounted for 82 percent of the company’s digital revenues. That revenue, the company said, was $181.5 million in the 4th quarter. She also said international revenue was up 40 percent for the job board.

If the four owners of CareerBuilder share its income in proportion to their ownership percentage of its stock, then CareerBuilder contributed $148.8 million to Gannett. (The company owns 50.8 percent of CareerBuilder.) From that figure, it’s possible to conjecture CareerBuilder had a $293 million quarter, putting it ahead of Monster. Company officials declined to comment on the figures.

It’s the second major acquisition of an HR firm in three months, and continues an Oracle buying spree that’s so far added some 70 companies at a cost of about $40 billion, according to Bloomberg.com. Last fall, Oracle bought RightNow Technologies, a cloud-based CRM provider.

The Taleo deal, however, falls far short of what SAP is paying for SuccessFactors. The German tech firm announced in December it would pay $3.4 billion for the HR vendor. The acquisition is key to “accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure,” the company said in making the announcement.

SAP has run into delays completing its acquisition. The deadline for the deal has now been extended for a third time to Feb. 15th while regulators, principally the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., investigates the transaction. SAP said today it was waiving the requirement the investigation first be complete before the expiration of its tender offer. The company said it already has been tendered 86 percent of the SuccessFactors, enough to close the deal.

Although the Committee on Foreign Investment could squelch the deal, it’s unlikely. Delays due to investigations such as the one encountered by SAP are typical. No deals, however, have been blocked as a result, says IDG News.

The Taleo acquisition isn’t subject to those procedures, since Oracle is a U.S. firm.

Like other major software providers, Oracle is struggling to gain inroads into the fast-growing SaaS market. With companies turning to cloud services because of their efficiency and significant cost savings over buying and installing software on in-house equipment, tech firms like Oracle have been developing their own SaaS programs. Acquiring companies with SaaS products accelerates the process.

Oracle said as much in this morning’s announcement. “Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organizations,” said Thomas Kurian, EVP, Oracle Development. “Taleo’s industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Taleo offers both SaaS provisoned HR software, as well as on-premises systems. The company has about 5,000 customers and 2011 revenue of $308.9 million.

Unlike SuccessFactors, which isn’t profitable, Taleo has had two winning years in the last four. The company released its fourth-quarter and full year financials this morning, following the acquisition announcement. The numbers show the company lost 35 cents a share for the year. In 2010, it earned a penny a share. With adjustments for one-time expenses, including the costs of acquisitions Taleo itself has previously made — it bought Cytiva last spring — the company earned $1.06 a share versus 2010′s 78 cents a share.

In both years Taleo posted a fourth-quarter loss of 2 cents a share. After accounting for one time expenses, the company earned 26 cents a share, beating analysts’ 23 cent a share expectations. Its $84.8 million 4th quarter revenue was short of Wall Street’s $86.8 million estimate.

The Oracle offer sent Taleo’s stock up 17.23 percent, to $45.65 a share by early afternoon in New York. Oracle’s $46 a share offer is 18 percent above Taleo’s Wednesday closing price. SAP’s $40 a share offer for SuccessFactors was a 52 percent premium over the stock’s previous price. That differential in just two months lead TheStreet.com to suggest that the premium companies are willing to pay to get into cloud computing is falling.

“Cloud-based deal premiums are falling as investors and analysts correctly anticipate consolidation between technology giants and specialized cloud players,” says TheStreet in an analysis of today’s Taleo deal. TheStreet notes that the acquisition announcement is also lifting the stock of HR software vendors Saba, Kenexa, and Cornerstone OnDemand.

The price difference may have influenced three law firms to announce they are investigating Taleo’s acceptance of the Oracle offer. The firms are soliciting shareholders as clients. Taleo has been sued in the past by shareholders.

We were talking about their need to upgrade their onboarding, and she was describing her concerns about the effects of a poorly executed process.

While she listed the typically cited negative costs of sloppy onboarding — increased turnover, longer time to productivity, etc. — she hit on one of the biggest prices employers pay for a shoddy, sink or swim, unwelcoming onboarding process:

You take someone who is initially excited and even starry-eyed about working for you, and rapidly turn them into a cynical, skeptical, eye-roller, who does not respect or trust management and their employer.

I experienced this harsh reality with the one and only corporate employer I worked for. I remember wondering why my new co-workers would roll their eyes whenever we got a directive from management and say “That’s insert name of insurance company here for yah.”

It didn’t take me too many weeks to realize where this cynical attitude came from.

I can still remember like it was yesterday — sitting in on the employee orientation program I was hired to overhaul. I watched with dismay as new call center reps were driven into a coma by an unrelenting data dump with not a single inspirational component that signaled:

“You just joined a great company and will be doing important work. Welcome aboard!”

The only respite came in the form of someone from human resources, safety, or some other department barging in unannounced to have the new hires fill out paperwork.

Then there was my own orientation, which included the obligatory sexual harassment video, along with the obligatory scenario of the HR person discovering that someone had taken the video player, making calls to track it down, while we waited … and waited.

I probably wasn’t the only one who wondered “Is this the norm for how this place runs? Is this what it’s going to be like working here?”

You’ve had your own version of this, I’m sure.

First Impressions Last

Remember the old saying “You don’t get a second chance at a first impression?”

Just as job applicants are admonished to remember this for good reason, so should employers.

First impressions matter because they shape how everything that you say or do after that impression is perceived. One of the many experiments showing how an initial impressions can color future impressions involved two speakers, both confederates of the experimenter.

Speaker A fumbled the beginning of his presentation, but finished off strong, while Speaker B demonstrated the reverse trajectory. His opening was fantastic, but the rest of his speech was downhill from there. The one who started out clumsily was judged worse than the one who started out great and got worse as his speech continued. No matter how good the rest of his presentation, the negative initial impression of Speaker A colored the respondent’s impression of everything that followed.

What Perception Will They Take Away From the Experience?

When it comes to your new hires, impressions made by their early onboarding experiences will create a mindset that will shape how they perceive future experiences. That’s why you need to pay close attention to what impressions you create with each onboarding moment of truth.

You do that by asking this question:

What perceptual takeaway are we creating in this moment of truth … and is it a good one?”

So for instance, when our call center reps spent their first day in a disorganized data dump that was techno-centric and administrivia-intensive, new employees probably took away from the experience these perceptions:

“That was boring … I wonder if my job is going to be this boring?”

“That was bogus. Are they this clueless in general?”

“If my job is going to be like this, this isn’t going to be a very fun ride.”

In New Situations People Tend to Leap to Conclusions and Overgeneralize

When we enter new territory, we look for clues that might give us greater understanding of what we’re dealing with.

Think of when you have been a new employee. Weren’t you on the lookout for clues about these things?

1. Organizational norms — codes of behaviors, how things are done, how to dress, etc.
2. Where on the mediocrity/excellence continuum employee performance was expected to be.
3. What your new boss was like.
4. Whether leadership valued and respected employees.
5. Whether this was going to be “just a job” or an exciting adventure.

Humans are hardwired with the need to make the unknown known. It makes us feel more secure, more in control. This need translates into a natural tendency to look for patterns — even when they’re not there. It also translates into the human tendency to jump to conclusions and overgeneralize when given even the smallest scrap of information in a new situation.

“The brain is incredibly adept at picking up subtle cues,” says Daryl Travis, Founder and CEO of Brandtrust, a firm that helps companies communicate their brand promise.

Because the human brain is a “pattern making machine,” notes Travis: “That first exposure (to a new employer) is huge, that’s when the first mental models (about one’s new employer) are created.”

Seemingly Little Things Take On Exaggerated Importance In New—and Important—Situations

For an example of a new employee’s pattern-making brain and meaning-making mind in action, consider the following commentary of a new manager, describing his first day working for his Fortune 500 employer. His comment describes his reaction to discovering on Day 1 that the event, which was supposed to be the highlight of his first day, wasn’t going to happen:

What did it mean to me? It meant they were unprepared; and if they’re not ready for me to come in on my first day, what else are they not ready for? This is something they knew about eight weeks in advance. I committed a career shift and went to a company that isn’t even sure about this minor detail? If that was uncertain on my first day, what else am I going to deal with here?

He then went on to say that his department had two welcome lunches for new team members, one for him and one for another team member.

He remembered wondering why they didn’t coordinate the two lunches and have one welcome lunch, rather than create this weird “Which new teammate do I welcome?” situation.

You have to look at it through the new hire’s eyes. They’re thinking: ‘I’m seeing inconsistency and confusion, here.’ One of my future direct reports didn’t sit at my table. That sends a signal. Why would they have created that environment? That doesn’t make sense …. As a new employee, you’re trying to piece things together and figure out the norm. You (the employer) have to pay attention to the signals you’re sending.

As he reflected on the various Day 1 experiences that created confusion, disappointment, and awkwardness, he captures perfectly why it’s important to design a great first impression:

It’s not that these are major things, but when you’re new, your senses are peaked. You are searching all these clues to define the norm. So negatives take on bigger weight.

Notice that “little things” made a huge difference. That speaks to the importance of putting your onboarding process under a microscope, and applying greater mindfulness to the new employee experiences you create. You want to develop greater mindfulness for the perceptual takeaway each onboarding moment of truth creates in your new employees. Doing so will prevent the common decline in morale and motivation new employees often experience when the reality of their new workplace sets in. Consciously creating positive perceptual takeaways will also increase the respect and trust your employees have in management and the decisions management makes… resulting in a workforce that is far more enjoyable to lead, and far more capable of greatness.

So Now What?

Show this article to the new employees you have hired in the last 6-9 months and ask them for feedback about your onboarding process.

Ask them about what perceptions your onboarding process created for them — and why. Ask specifically about impressions they had about:

1. How well your organization is run.
2. How competent management is.
3. How much management cares about employees.
4. Whether employees get the chance to do great things, a chance to matter.
5. How high your standards are.

Make sure you interview new hires from different timeframes, as it is easy for someone who has been on the job for nine months to forget important details that could help you upgrade the “First Day On The Job Experience,” the “First Week on The Job Experience,” etc.

As you redesign each step of each process in the onboarding experience, ask:

1. “What’s the perceptual takeaway here?”
2. “What perception would this leave the new employee with?”
3. “What perceptions would I live to create?”
4. “How could we create such a perceptual takeaway?”

In a future article, we will explore a powerful tool for answering these and other onboarding redesign questions with even greater precision.

The Internet makes talent communities inevitable

In recent weeks we’ve seen a lot of outpouring of grief over the now dead SOPA legislation. The law’s critics claim that, if passed, the law would end the Internet as we know it, threaten our way of life, and confirm the Mayans were right. We periodically experience this type of mass hysteria, whenever something seems to threaten the “promise of the Internet” — the last time was over net neutrality. That so-called promise has to do with the perceived “free” flow of information: articles, stories, videos, songs, or content. What’s gotten lost in this noise is that that nothing is free. The current business model of the Internet has simply shifted dollars from content creators to content aggregators. Advertisers sponsor content so users can pretend it is “free.”

A long time ago, about the time the last ice age ended, there was something called AOL. It seems like eons have passed, but those who remember that era may recall that after we returned from foraging for food we would turn on our dial-up modems and connect to AOL, having paid a monthly fee for access to all the content that was available, the forums, the news, etc. Connection speeds were 1,200 bits per minute — you could almost count those bits coming in. Now we do the same with Facebook and Google, which we experience as free. Perceptually, we ignore the ads — targeted ads based on all the information collected by the sites — ads tailored to our habits, our behavior, and interactions. AOL charged a fee and had no ads; Facebook doesn’t charge a fee but has ads. There is no free lunch.

So now we have a business model on the Internet favoring networks that can attract members and keep them there. That requires having content that attracts users, however it may be generated. Initially, sites like YouTube and Facebook, with their user-generated content, left us wondering why they existed. But, they have been enormously successful and it is clear that communities naturally form where content gets developed and shared. The better the content a community brings to its members, the more of them it gets and the more engaged they are.

Big Brother is Watching You — and That’s OK

What we know now is that people prefer content they don’t have to pay for directly. We’re apparently willing to share substantial personal information with advertisers in exchange for “free” content. Just how much intrusiveness we’re willing to enable remains to be seen, but the boundaries are constantly being pushed — Google’s new privacy policy being only the latest example. The company will now offer a new “benefit” for users — it will track you across multiple services including Google+, YouTube, Gmail, and any other property they own, including Android phones. I wrote this on Google Docs, so what I wrote was likely being indexed as it was written. Big Brother was an amateur.

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

While users are opposed to paying for content (whether it is legally or illegally obtained), there’s an opportunity for employers. Any employer can create forums where content is produced targeting interests that are relevant to specific groups of people –- creating talent communities — thereby aggregating candidates they may eventually want to hire. This is the only way to create talent communities, built around a topic that candidates (or people that might become candidates) are passionate about: chemical engineering, pediatrics, Java, nursing, recruiting, etc. A place online where people congregate to share their interests and interact with each other. Anything else is not a community.

But this opportunity comes at a cost. Relying on Facebook or Google+ to create talent communities means accepting their terms of doing business. That is, giving them access to data that can be analyzed and sold to third-parties. That’s the price of “free” content. There’s really no getting away from it — the money to support Facebook has to come from somewhere. Although this model prevails today, there are other forces at work that will change the game. The exchange of personal information is at odds with our natural desire for privacy. So, as we continue to explore how much privacy we’re willing to exchange for “free” content on sites like Facebook, a desire for alternative models will grow. Other forms of sponsorship, where advertising is less apparent, will naturally appeal to those concerned with privacy, and may even serve to encourage community members to share more in a community with restricted membership.

Communities don’t have to be built entirely on Facebook’s terms. It is possible to create somewhat private communities. In fact, it is prudent to create communities on one’s own terms, rather than be at the mercy of a third party whose interests diverge from ours.

Employer-sponsored talent communities should be private domains for members that represent a group desired by the employer as employees. The basic formula for success is simple: develop or support the creation of content and make it available for free and accessible, and drive people to it. However, putting this into practice is a lot of work.

First, it requires having interesting content, which means that it needs to be material that is original, relevant to a particular group, and prompts controversy. Then there needs to be a critical mass of members in the community that gets engaged in robust discussion. That is what creates a community, it’s not just a repository of content. A community is one where people congregate to share their views and learn from each other. That’s the “social” part of social media, a fact that often gets forgotten in the zeal to build a lot of communities which are nothing more than databases.

This is what employers need to be doing today. There is no other way to create talent communities. But do it now, because who knows what’s coming that may make it difficult to create communities.

For being so out of fashion, so yesterday, job boards manage to come out on top or top-adjacent on nearly every source of hire study. In a Bersin & Associates survey this fall job boards tied for first with internal transfers as the leading source of all hires. CareerXroads says job boards produced 24.9 percent of all external hires in 2010, second only to employee referrals (27.5 percent).

The latest survey comes from tech vendor Talent Technology, which reports that job boards are the leading source of candidates, according to the 1,100 North American HR professionals who participated. Job boards account for 17 percent of the candidates, followed by employee referrals, which provide 15.8 percent.

What’s remarkable about the evidence is how few accept it. Even after reporting that “job boards remain popular and are used to fill 19 percent of open positions – making job boards the No. 1 source for candidates,” Bersin titled that section of the report “Job Boards: Not Dead, but Dying.”

Even more remarkable is how little the job board industry has done to promote itself. The major boards have their own, proprietary data, guarded more carefully than the U.S. does its diplomatic messages. Second tier and certainly mom-and-pop operations have little data beyond gross traffic counts. So for all practical purposes employers do their own market surveillance.

Now, finally, seven years after it’s founding by Peter Weddle, the International Association of Employment Web Sites has bestirred itself to do some serious research about the industry.

Financed by Jobg8, the job board industry’s candidate marketplace, 100 sites participated last summer in the first benchmarking survey of commercial employment sites. Before you get too hopeful about the prospects, know that none of the biggest job boards participated, the survey was designed for the benefit of the industry, and most of the results aren’t being shared publicly. Those that are may be helpful to some buyers; they’re certainly interesting. More important is that it gives individual sites a yardstick against which to measure their own results.

“It was,” confessed Matt Hoffner, president of Jobg8′s Americas operation (the company is HQd in the UK), “a lot harder than we thought … Just getting all the terms right was quite a challenge.”

Still, after struggling through some 65 questions and their accompanying 22 footnotes, the industry found:

• Three-quarters of a job board’s visitors are “window shoppers” who neither apply for a job nor register. That suggests there’s a high degree of self-selection that occurs, as the next point demonstrates.
• Job postings that direct to a company’s ATS get five applicants on average. Those with only an email address get 3.3 applications. Niche sites and those in business more than three years have slightly higher apply rates.
• Job aggregators (the Indeeds and SimplyHireds) provide about 22.8 percent of a U.S. site’s traffic and only 11.6 percent in Canada. Depending on the region, sizable percentages also came from the job board’s own search optimization efforts and their pay-per-click campaigns.
• The average site has 3.5 employees; 22 percent have one or less; 9 percent have 30 or more.
• Individual marketing expenses varied widely, ranging from 1 to 14 percent. The average is 6.7 percent of revenues spent marketing the site.

Hoffner observed that the industry is increasingly aware it needs to do a better job telling its story. From the survey discussions that took place at meetings in Ft. Lauderdale, during the IAEWS Congress in September, and in London, Hoffner said there was a “clear understanding that we can’t sit still.” The public part of the report says, “Job board owners are looking for new sales and marketing models and resources but expect that promotion and sales efforts will increase in 2012 and beyond.”

One powerful motivator for putting more effort into promotion, besides simply to stand out from the huge number of job boards in the world, is that organic traffic produces better results than that from aggregators. Says the published report: “Many participants stated that aggregator traffic was expensive and may not yield the same rate of applications or registered users as traffic from other sources.”

Board operators are also looking at a changing pricing model. Most sites still charge a fee to post a job; a few charge employers for each click. Hoffner says a “pay per applicant model came in for discussion. It’s an evolving pricing model that has the operator share risk with the customer. That’s a direction they seem to be heading toward.”

As fun as it is to judge, it was taken seriously. Some applicants used every hour of their midnight, January 6 deadline (we know — we were on the phone answering their questions) and judges used every minute of theirs (we know for the same reason). Judges wrote lengthy explanations of their choices, and some created algorithms to rank each applicant, and sent us the spreadsheets they created as living proof.

Anyhow, it sounds trite, but great work’s being done, in many cases under challenging circumstances. Some of the companies that didn’t win were so good that we hope they apply again, or share their stories on ERE.net webinars or at future conferences. As for next spring’s conference in San Diego, that’s where the winners will be announced, and that’s where they’ll take questions from you as to how they succeeded, overcame hurdles, and what’s in store next. Without further ado, here are the finalists in alphabetical order within the categories:

Best College Recruiting Program

If you’re looking for good economic/job market news, there’s this: Ernst & Young’s campus hiring is back to pre-recession levels. Already no stranger to these awards, its 200-plus-member campus recruiting team has stepped it up yet another notch. For instance, the firm:

• Launched a new campus recruiting advertising campaign in September 2011, using the tagline “See More” to encourage students to visit the career website for further information. It advertised on wsj.com, businessweek.com, Pandora, CollegeRecruiter.com, Yahoo.com, and Experience.com.
• Teamed with Millennial Media to deliver ads on smart phones to students at select schools.
• Now has more than 78,500 fans on the Ernst & Young Careers page on Facebook.
• Is on the new site CampusLive, which uses scavenger hunts, team events, prize offerings, and more.
• Is using Flexspace, a virtual reality tool, where students can see what it’s like to have a job at Ernst & Young and a life outside of work.
• Held its first Emerging Leaders Summit with about 250 students. This two-and-a-half day pre-internship program is filled with workshops on subjects like ethics in business.
• Added a Global Student Exchange Program for interns to work abroad for four weeks, in Australia, Canada, China, and the UK.

The other finalist is the U.S. Navy, and it’s actually doing the kind of “go beyond the campus career center” campus recruiting we all talk about so much. In 2011, it implemented two new recruiting strategies that significantly improved the NUPOC program. NUPOC — the Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate program — involves recruiting college students and graduates with science and engineering backgrounds for five-year positions to work on nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, become instructors at the Navy Nuclear Power School, or engineers at Naval Reactors Headquarters.

With the first program, the Navy funded trips for 121 educators to experience a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or submarine, visit a submarine learning facility, and interact with sailors. The goal is for faculty to then tell their students, and other professors, about these opportunities.

Also, the Navy Recruiting Command partnered with a group called the University Engineering Alliance — formerly the Big 12 Engineering Consortium — allowing the Navy to provide keynote speakers for engineering summits, nuclear experts for classroom presentations, and otherwise work with faculty to present material in classrooms.

In the end, 242 students were hired through NUPOC program last year, and the accepted applicant’s average GPA was up 5% to 3.43.

Best Corporate Careers Website

You may not have heard of RMS, but one judge says that its website is “hands down, one of the best sites I’ve seen. Graphically and emotionally intelligent, not too heavy on graphic elements. Tells the story. Interaction. Heads and shoulders above all of the other sites.”

The organization has more than 950 people and is in the field of catastrophe risk modeling. It overhauled the career site to make it clearer to people what the company does. Equally important, it wants others to self-select out if they don’t fit.

Its Live Chat allows people to interact in real-time with someone on the talent acquisition team. It released the new site on May 8, 2011. In the 12 months prior, it averaged 12 hires per month. For the six months after, it averaged 20 hires per month.

This category has, appropriately, shifted over the years; for instance, this year’s applicants, in many cases talked about their mobile initiatives. UnitedHealth Group, one of this year’s finalists, is no exception.

It built its mobile site with similar goals as others like Matt Jeffery talked about: engage candidates, don’t just let them search. Using GPS technology, the site can find candidates local events (and directions to those events) or jobs near where they live. Candidates get Twitter feeds during career fairs and recruiting events.

In year one of the mobile site, UnitedHealth had 213,000 unique mobile visitors on the site. The healthcare company also says that “read rates” are much higher for mobile phone users than for candidates it sends emails to.

Back to engagement: it measures that a number of ways, including pages per visit and whether people return — and about 35% of all traffic (whether mobile or to the normal corporate careers site) comes from return visitors.

It has been particularly happy about using smart phone recruiting to find people globally, such as in India and the Philippines. By using mobile technology to simplify (and personalize) its workflow surrounding recruiting events, the company has saved more than 200 recruiter hours, and more than tripled the hiring rate of new candidates from these events.

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture again is a finalist, after winning last year. One of its recruiting leaders spoke at last fall’s Expo (see video below). Since winning last year, it focused on:

1. Strengthening its global employee referral platform, which has an interface with Taleo, and allows employees to search for open jobs, share them through social media, track the status of their referrals, and more.
2. Increasing the number of quality referrals, through LinkedIn’s Referral Engine.
3. Creating an “employee referral concierge service for senior executives” — including a dedicated team that looks after senior exec referrals and provides extra service.
4. Creating a dedicated global team to pull daily “pipeline reports” and monitor referrals. Local recruitment leads receive weekly updates about the referral candidates in their pipeline.
5. Improving the referral experience; for example, employees receive a thank-you email from senior leaders for their referral contribution to Accenture.

It received more than 200,000 referrals in 2011 and hired just under 20,000 people through the program. Said one judge: “Its referral mobile app shows that it is two steps ahead of its competitors when it comes to technology.”

Improving Enterprises is what we March Madness fans would call this year’s “Cinderella Story” in the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. Even after its recent growth, it has only 148 employees.

Briefly, the way its referral program works is this: if employees refer someone, they get a point. Points add up and are paid on a quarterly basis. Points are considered when the software-developer distributes its profit share. Top performers are recognized at Town Hall meetings.

It has a ‘Two by Tuesday” program designed, the company says, to mitigate “extremes in the ebbs and flows of recruiting.” On Tuesday, it spreads the word of the most important company openings. People have a week to submit referrals. There’s a race to be the one who refers the most, with daily updates provided.

The company might get 100 referrals in five days, with two or more hires made.

There’s a lot more: open houses, pizza parties, several mini-conferences on the weekends, Monday Night Football and Movie Nights, all aimed at having referred candidates show up.

It also works a lot on having a really good workplace, and has won a number of awards for that. In 2011, it hired 54 top-level technology consultants from referrals, with a team of three technology recruiters. Around 90% of hires come from referrals and the related marketing programs mentioned above. Interestingly — very interestingly — it believes that people who were referred, but who didn’t join the company, have resulted in more than $3 million in additional revenue in the last two years. This calculation includes such things as whether the candidate ended up referring business to Improved Experience even though they weren’t hired.

Best Employer Brand

“This year marked the most dramatic employer brand shift our company has ever seen.”

Hotels planned for Russia

That’s what Marriott says about its global brand launch, done mainly by a team of three for under $200,000. It’s aligned with the company’s consumer brand, which is about “opening doors to a world of opportunity.” The “Find Your World” employment value proposition is similar.

In fact, though developed for job candidates, the tagline is being used by Marriott’s consumer marketing a bit, too.

The brand was launched with a video contest among employees, which attracted 200 submissions in 11 languages. And, it’s localized. So the China careers blog, for example, communicates the message in a different way than in other countries.

As you may have read, Marriott launched a Facebook game, now being played in 128 countries, to showcase work at the company and the “find your world” message.

Sodexo is moving from more of a foodservice company to a solutions/partner sort of company. A great example is its energy management services business, which involves energy audits and consulting for clients. It’s new for Sodexo, and competitive.

Sodexo quickly launched an enhanced employer brand aimed to be compatible with the new, consultative/solutions consumer brand. In the 2011 fiscal year, it hired about 50 specialized and tough-to-recruit professionals within a few months. Doing that involved positioning itself as an expert in the energy field, which involved such things as guest blog posts on websites for the energy industry and having people speak at industry conferences.

Hiring manager satisfaction at Sodexo went up from 4.49 on a 5-point scale in 2009 to 4.56 in 2011 (recently rising to 4.63). Its quality of hire increased from 4.37 on a 5-point scale in 2008 to 4.53 in 2011 (recently hitting 4.56).

For years a leader in social media recruiting, it is relying less on job boards and paid ads, which has saved it money. Traffic to its career site is up nearly 325% since 2008. Employment engagement is up and company finances are strong.

Best Retention Program/Practices

Broward Health, a healthcare system based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, faces what many medical facilities have been contending with: a shortage of nurses and allied health professionals. It’s putting part-timers, working as few as 21 hours a week, on its health plan and paying 65% of their premiums.

In a nutshell, its other retention programs include:

• A competitive and comprehensive total rewards program.
• Identity theft protection.
• Employee discounts for massage therapy.
• Up to 10% provided to employees with five or more years of service who have reached the maximum of their salary range.
• Overtime pay and bonuses for eligible RNs, allied health and other clinical positions to work additional shifts.
• Continuing education courses regarding leadership and staff development; E-learning courses for clinical, computer applications, compliance, safety education and mandatory licensure.

Its 2011 turnover rate was 9.2%.

The Support Equipment & Aircraft Launch & Recovery Equipment Department — part of the Research & Engineering department of the Naval Air Systems Command — began hiring again after many years of limited entry-level engineer and scientist hiring. There were what it calls “delays, confusion, and lost opportunities in the hiring process, and success was dependent upon an individual supervisor’s knowledge of the hiring process and determination.”

A Workforce Development Team was established to overhaul the antiquated recruiting process. Now, candidates at career fairs are screened based on qualification requirements — GPA, communication, prior technical experience, professionalism, career compatibility — and interviewed. The new workforce team notifies candidates of continued interest, and schedules an on-site visit within two weeks. It keeps in touch with them throughout the process, offering a personal touch onsite and even after the decline of an offer, trying to see what went wrong.

The 10-member team’s focus is expanding into mentoring, internships, and more, helping to hire 50-100 engineers and scientists annually. It’s prescreening more than 2,000 candidates and interviewing more than 200. What it calls hiring “cycle time” – the time from the initial meeting of the candidate at the career fair to the offer of employment — is down 80%, diversity is up, and more than 400 new engineers and scientists have been hired since 2006, with a 80% acceptance rate and 95% retention rate.

Best Military Talent Program

AT&T provides localized job notifications to the Transition Family/Support Centers of all branches of the military. In 2011, it participated in more than 50 traditional and virtual military career fairs.

Its recruiters reach out to military transition offices, Army alumni programs, and elsewhere. It created a program where veterans working at AT&T provide job search assistance to veterans applying for AT&T jobs.

It’s working on a Marine Corps job-shadowing program with Camp Pendleton in southern California.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s educating hiring managers and recruiters on the value of veterans, how to make heads or tails out of military jargon on resumes, and on the myths about veterans’ ability to integrate into corporations.

AT&T has added a number of features to its http://att.jobs/military site. It worked with Direct Employers to pilot and offer a military skills translator on the site.

T-Mobile provides assistance on resume, interview, and job search skills at Army career centers, and at military events. Through the Army’s Partnership for Youth Success program it provided interviews to 42 transitioning soldiers and 10 career opportunities.

Online its T-Mobile Military Talent Network helps transitioning military receive communications from the company; the database includes more than 350 people.

The company also provides health benefits for people called to active duty beyond what’s required. It has received a number of awards, honors for helping wounded veterans, and for being a military-spouse-friendly employer.

Most Strategic Use of Technology

Last year’s winner in this category, Informatica, is back, and better. It uses a cloud-based format and user-friendly dashboard for viewing such things as the time it takes to fill a job.

It’s showing the company’s leadership that the talent acquisition department is doing what it needs to do within its budget, and meeting objectives like time to fill, costs, and who’s in the pipeline.

And — since it not only has a slick system but its metrics are strong — it’s making a case as to why the internal recruiting model and not outsourcing is the way to go.

Informatica has improved the candidate experience; improved its interview scheduling; and in its words, “dedicating ourselves as an organization to stop using archaic tools.”

UPS is one of the answers to the questions: is anyone actually hiring someone from Twitter? Does recruiting by text message work?

It found job boards, print, and radio to be working so-so. So it turned to new technologies. It launched an ad program for people to respond to job openings with text messages from mobile phones. And they did by the tens of thousands.

UPS has had success with Twitter pages and a mobile-friendly career website.

Everything integrates with its applicant tracking system, and, the company notes, “with trackable URLs only  … no candidate self-selection or recruiter bias.”

UPSjobs.mobi drove more than a half-million page views in its first four months and the average time spent on the mobile site was 1 minute and 34 seconds, with 2.74 average page-views. The Facebook page attracted 18,000 fans in two years and 36,600 by the end of 2011.

What’s different about UPS is not that it uses social media but the degree to which it uses so many technologies together, and does so much tracking — like with its packages. In 2010 a minimum of 955 hires that its ATS could track were delivered by UPS through social media and mobile marketing integration. In 2011, between text messaging, QR codes, Twitter, Facebook, mobile phone recruiting, and social media networks, almost 3,000 hires were made.

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

Last year’s winner CACI didn’t exactly rest. It worked on improvements in areas like employee mobility, alumni hiring, and college recruiting. It also experimented with new ideas like personalized coaching for hiring managers and recruiters, implementing “just in time” coaching for managers. Says CACI: “When a candidate reaches certain hiring milestones, an automated email is sent directly to the hiring manager containing links to ATS and interviewing training modules. This has enhanced manager knowledge throughout the hiring process, decreased recruiter time to train, and increased our quality of hire.”

It hired a Personal Recruiter Coach to develop and implement individual recruiter learning plans, like improving people’s LinkedIn skills. CACI reports that “over 50% of our recruiters have seen an increase in offer acceptances and hires due to their coaching.”

CACI added QR codes to its marketing materials; mobile visitors have doubled. It has worked on search engine optimization, increased marketing to its talent community, and improved its social media recruiting. Facebook followers increased 172%, LinkedIn followers increased 813%, and Twitter followers increased 2,600%.

It implemented software that matches candidates to positions by extracting relevant data from candidate profiles, such as skill set and clearance level. It saves recruiter times and lowered days to fill. Cost per hire is down to $2,863 — 13% down — and company revenue is up 14%. Said one judge: “They were able to show more meaningful results than others, with improvements in speed, cost, and revenue.”

Informatica enhanced how managers request requisitions, how candidate feedback is given, and how employment offers are generated; “all systematically and in complete contrast to the ‘paper and pencil’ which preceded in prior years,” according to the company. It developed a recruiting dashboard for the corporation’s executives, allowing leaders among the different company divisions to see how its talent acquisition organization is doing.

Like CACI, it has done a lot of SEO work. Its “resource scorecard” was created to evaluate recruiter effectiveness against set targets.

Managers have been trained better on interview skills. Recruiter training has increased, something the company believes has helped it win three recent awards for sourcing.

It has found ways to reduce administrative work in the requisition creation process and in scheduling interviews. It revised offer letters, and started a global background check process. Results include decreased time-to-fill from 114 to 68 days; increased hiring manager satisfaction; a 100% increase in career site traffic; and reduced time to fill by 70 percent.

Said one judge: “I’m impressed by the great work done at Informatica — their significant leap into technology, their cloud application, and their talent mapping tools.”

Dogs and babies came out on top. They were the stars of four of the top five favorite ads in the USA Today Super Bowl Admeter. The M&M commercial ranked 4th.

However, it was a such a mediocre crop of ads this year that more than a few newspapers used the word “Yawn” in their headline of the coverage. The Associated Press report said: “The Super Bowl may have been a nail biter, but the ads were a snooze.”

“What’s notable about this year versus others is that advertisers played it safe. As a result, we saw fewer standouts, but we also didn’t see as many costly mistakes,” said Tim Calkins. He’s clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University who each year leads the school’s Super Bowl Advertising Review.

The panel’s top pick was the M&M ad. CareerBuilder, which ignored criticism over its use of chimpanzees, got a “B” grade from the panel. The USA Today audience ranked it in the middle of the pack.

The company was blasted last year by animal rights activists who complained about the use of chimps, who, they said, are taken young from their mothers and are mistreated or abused as they’re trained for commercial work.

CareerBuilder, knowing it would face another round of negative publicity, opted to go ahead anyway.

“The chimpanzees were brought back by popular demand.  It’s been a very successful campaign that job seekers identify with and act upon,” said Jennifer Grasz, a spokesperson for CareerBuilder.

Last year, the chimp ad ranked sixth in the USA Today poll. This year’s version, in which a human is sent on a business trip with a team of prank-pulling chimps, ranks 26th.

And just in case you were wondering, The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 21-17. The game was a repeat matchup of 2008 when the Giants also beat the Patriots.

This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

If you haven’t seen it in the news lately, there has been an uproar over the practice of secret “no-recruit” agreements between major corporations. A significant number of notable firms including Google, Apple, Intel, and Pixar have been accused of restraining the movement of employees between firms. But don’t be misdirected by all of the legal issues.

The real damage that these agreements can have is on your firm’s business results, and at a large firm, these damages could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work in HR or recruiting, you need to be able to advise senior managers of the unintended consequences related to these agreements. If you currently use no-recruit agreements or you are considering one, this article covers the numerous potential business problems and impacts associated with them.

Potential Problems and Issues Related to Using “No-recruit” Agreements

The 25 problems are broken into two categories, 1) ways that these agreements can hurt your firm and 2) reasons why the agreement may not even work.

Note: I frequently call these agreements “secret” because that is a goal. But with the growth of social media, they are becoming a poorly kept secret.

Ways That These Agreements Can Hurt Your Firm

• A loss of trust among employees — because of the potential legal issues, almost every firm keeps these agreements secret. However, if your firm has corporate values that include honesty and transparency, when the fact that the company is keeping secrets from employees gets out, any built-up trust will be damaged or lost. Restricting an employee’s freedom without telling them can have many ugly repercussions.
• Poorer treatment of employees may lead to productivity/recruiting problems — if the goal of the pact is reached (dramatically reducing turnover), managers and HR professionals will not have to work as hard to keep the best. This may lead to degradation in the treatment of employees and the benefits offered to them. An unintended consequence of this poorer treatment may be a measurable decrease in employee productivity, engagement, and innovation. The resulting weakened and slower improving HR practices and benefits may also harm your employer brand image and whatever recruiting you do outside of the agreement.
• Limiting new ideas and best practices — “no-recruit” pacts restrict or prevent the hiring of new employees directly from your competitors. This can severely limit the infusion of new ideas and the best practices from your competitor’s employees. And if your firm is not  No. 1 in your industry, your chances of moving up may also be restricted.
• It may restrict rapid company growth — in order for a firm to grow rapidly, it may rapidly need a large amount of already trained talent to support new products or initiatives. Unfortunately, no-recruit agreements make it almost impossible to rapidly get large amounts of ready-to-go talent from the most logical sources: your competitors.
• You are forced to hire those who are less prepared — because most of the well-trained and experienced talent will be at large firms in your industry, the agreement may force your firm to hire employees from smaller firms, where the employees are likely to be less trained and prepared. Many firms are then forced to increase their percentage of college hires because most experienced talent is restricted.
• Fewer promotional opportunities may restrict leader development – if the goal of reduced turnover is reached, there will be fewer openings for your best employees to get promoted into. This stagnation will frustrate your best and brightest, and more importantly, it will slow their development. And because you can’t recruit fully developed leaders from your competitors, you may eventually face a leadership shortage. If you want to maintain an effective rate of employee and leadership development, you will have to devote extra resources to develop a powerful development function.
• Your bad employees will stay much longer — the agreement is designed to prevent the loss of your best employees but it will restrict your weak employees from leaving also. Instead of leaving, your weak employees will continue to generate lower productivity and frustrate your top performers. Unless you develop a “no-recruit-except-weak-performers” agreement, you may have inadvertently damaged your firm for years.
• Knowledge of your customers may also be reduced — one variation of these agreements narrows the recruiting restriction to a firm’s major industrial customers. Obviously regularly recruiting away a customer’s top employees won’t win you a popularity contest. Occasionally hiring a customer’s employees may strengthen bonds, communications, and it may help you better understand the customer’s needs.
• The realization among employees that they don’t come first — once the word gets out, employees will instantly realize that all the speeches about providing employees with freedom get neutralized, because in this case, clearly the company is consciously putting itself ahead of the needs of its employees.
• Employees feeling owned — preventing other firms from poaching “its” employees sends a clear message that the company feels that it “owns” its employees. No one likes feeling “owned” and diverse employees may have an even greater negative reaction.
• Damage to your external employer brand damage – once the word gets out to potential applicants and the public, the firm’s external brand image will tank. You may also permanently anger top applicants from restricted firms when they are rejected outright for no logical reason.
• Internal employer brand damage – once the word gets out among your own employees about this repugnant practice, your internal brand will be damaged, and that may negatively affect the way that your employees respond to your customers.
• Damage to employee referral programs — if you succeed in keeping the agreement secret, your employees will not know that they shouldn’t make referrals from competitor firms. Once high-quality employee referrals go nowhere, without explanation, employees will naturally slow down their referrals from all sources.
• The best recruiters won’t want to work for you – the very best recruiters know about these agreements and most of the best dislike the thought of recruiting with their “hands tied.” And with fewer top firms to target, you will likely need superior recruiters in order to bring in the best.
• Not being able to poach locally may increase relocation costs – another variation of these agreements restricts recruiting from major firms in the same community, even if they are in different industries. Obviously when “local poaching” is restricted, more often than not you will need to hire from outside the area. Requiring more candidates to relocate will make recruiting much more difficult and costly.
• Small firms may become more competitive in recruiting — employees may become frustrated when they find that they “can’t leave.” As result, they may jump at the first chance and go to a small or less desirable firm (that is not covered by an agreement). A firm that they normally would not have considered. And if they choose, they can later move directly to a formally restricted competitor of their former firm.
• It may negatively impact government contracts – should you be found to be breaking the law, it may impact your ability to get future government contracts.
• Enforcement can be time-consuming and expensive — some of the recruiters under the agreement may not “get the message” (which occurred in the Google-recruiting-from-Apple case). As a result, executives will be forced to spend the time and the expense of “lawyer letters” to fix the mistakes. And because the agreement itself is probably illegal, you likely can’t go to court to enforce it.
• It’s a contradiction — and finally, if you happen to be an advocate of free trade and open market capitalism, you will likely have difficulty explaining to your Republican friends the hypocrisy of your actions.

Reasons Why the Agreement May Not Even Work

• A cold-calling ban may be insufficient — some of the agreements only restrict “cold calling” or making the first contact (as opposed to an absolute no-hiring ban). And as a result, smart recruiters often find a way to ruse or convince employees at the target firm to make the first contact.
• Third-party recruiters can be used to go around it — most external third-party recruiters are not included in these corporate agreements, so competitors can still hire your employees; they just have to do it indirectly through a third-party. Some executive search firms have don’t-recruit agreements with customers, so finding a top firm to manage your go-around can be problematic.
• Employees will still find a way to work for your competitors, indirectly — rather than going directly to a competitor, your clever employees will find a way to get there indirectly. All they have to do is to make a short stop working at a consulting firm or they can simply take a long break and apply. Ex-employees are not normally covered by these agreements.
• Limited poaching will occur anyway — even though the agreement says no recruiting, in practice you can get away with hiring one to three people a year from a firm without getting a stop call or a “lawyer letter.” Recruiters love to stretch limits, and many managers will go along up until the point where someone complains.
• Even keeping the agreement secret is difficult – with the growth of social media, you can almost guarantee that your recruiters (especially contract recruiters) will informally spread the word about the restriction.
• Some competitor firms simply won’t go along – these agreements can only have their maximum impact if all of the major players in an industry or geographic region participate. With the recent U.S. Department of Justice and civil lawsuits and the publicity that surrounds them, fewer executives will even be willing to discuss these agreements. Already, most global firms simply refuse to participate.

Final Thoughts

I have written about this questionable practice on numerous occasions including my recent article called Recruiting’s Dirty Little Secrets. Although secret, this practice is quite common not just in high-tech but it is also not hard to find in healthcare, major accounting firms, and among consulting firms. There are arguably some potential benefits related to this practice. They include: it pleases your major customers; it may reduce salaries by restricting bidding on candidates; and you may have less turnover because fewer recruiters are targeting your very best. However, after extensive research on the potential problems, I have concluded that the ROI of these agreements is weak and it is getting lower by the day.

This morning’s monthly report from the U.S. Department of Labor blasted through even the most optimistic of expectations. The jobs gain would have been the largest since May 2010, except that the Labor Department’s data group adjusted 2011′s jobs numbers. Now, only March (+246,000) and April (+251,000) had stronger numbers.

January is the second consecutive month to beat estimates. Economists predicted anywhere from MarketWatch’s tepid 121,000 to the more optimistic 182,000 in the Bloomberg survey. None of the widely reported surveys saw a decline in the unemployment rate.

Indeed, the unemployment rate, which has been declining very slowly since hitting a peak of 10.1 percent in late 2009, is now at the lowest point since February 2009. The government report also put the number of unemployed at 12.8 million. A year ago it was at 13.9 million.

While governments continued to cut jobs — federal jobs were cut by 6,000 and local government cut 11,000 positions — the private sector added 257,000. This was more than 50 percent higher than the ADP estimate earlier in the week.

Most sectors added jobs. Manufacturing accounted for 50,000 new jobs. The services sector as a whole added 176,000 workers, with much of the gain coming in what the government calls “professional and business services.” This includes temp workers and employment services (+33,200) and accounting and bookkeeping services (+12,500), likely due to ramping up for tax season.

Healthcare, a consistent growth area, was up by 30,900 positions. Leisure and hospitality, another growth area for several months, was up by 44,000. Even the battered construction industry managed to add 21,000 jobs during the month.

Only finance (off by 5,000 jobs) and the Information sector (-13,000) lost workers. The latter sector includes far more worker categories than computer professionals and data processing, although these areas also lost workers. The bulk of the loss — 7,900 — came in the motion picture and recording industry.

On top of the strong January numbers, the revisions by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics resulted in improving the overall hiring numbers for 2011 and further. For November and December alone, the BLS revisions showed 60,000 more jobs than initially reported.

Finally, the government said average hourly wages for all non-farm workers rose 4 cents during the month to $23.29. While the average workweek for all workers was unchanged in January, the manufacturing workweek increased by .3 hours to 40.9 and overtime increased to 3.4 hours.

The overall report was so strongly welcomed it sent stock futures soaring before the market opening. The Dow Jones Industrial average futures jumped 95 points.

One cautionary note: The Monster Employment Index, which tracks jobs posted on career sites and job boards, including Monster, has been declining since October. For January, the Index stood at 133, down from October’s 151. The Conference Board, which also tracks online job postings, showed an increase in January, as it did in December. But the total online listings are still not as high as they were in April last year.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain.

Of course, the bright move (watch what we did there) is to keep up with your prospects. BrightMove, the talent acquisition and staffing software vendor, thinks so, too. So just this week the company added a “Social Bar” to its toolkit. With a click of the ‘sync” button, BrightMove will pull in your prospect’s updated info from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

Now you know without waiting for that callback that your prospect has a new job and a better title than what you’ve got to offer.

Sure, this is something you can do on your own. And, you will, the first time you pull up a resume. Once you tag it, the process is automatic. BrightMove’s COO Mike Brandt says everything could have been automated — no human touch required — but then no system is smart enough to know which of the hundreds of Michael Brandts on LinkedIn is the one in question.

It won’t make sense to make the effort for every resume you get. But for your hot, if not immediately placeable prospects, tagging them when you get them and letting BrightMove update them for you, is, well, a bright move.

Jobaline

Matching, as anyone who has ever dated or recruited can attest, is an imprecise art. Yet that doesn’t stop anyone from insisting there’s enough science about it to improve the odds.

For hiring, I won’t argue against it, which is why when I checked out Jobaline last year I admitted not knowing quite what to think. Besides the usual requirements matching and ranking, Jobaline introduced a “seriousness” quotient. On the theory that the more interested and committed a candidate is to a particular job, the more time they will spend filling in all the info the employer demands.

Whether there was any validity to a seriousness ranking, even the founder wasn’t prepared to say.

A year later and Jobaline, as they say, has gone in a different direction. Today’s Jobaline is a sort of job board servicer, where employers post jobs for free, then get to review the basic info about applying candidates. When you see what you like, you pay.

Founder and CEO Miki Mullor calls it “pay-to-pick.”

The Interviewer Who Fell Asleep

There’s nothing like explaining to an interviewer just what it is you can do for the company to make a difference — only to discover they’re sound asleep. That’s a pretty clear hint of what your job prospects are like.

Alas that happened to poor Irwin, who was on his first interview after graduating college. Turns out the interviewer was a narcoleptic who, after snoring away for a few minutes, awoke and resumed where he left off.

I don’t know if Irwin got the job, but he did win $100 from OneWire for telling the most memorable interview story in the firm’s contest. OneWire, as we noted in last week’s Roundup, is a sourcing, tracking and, most significantly, matching system for the financial industry.

Quick Hits

Unrabble, the un-resume, SaaS ATS for the SMB market (we are partial to acronyms here at ERE), has just introduced a free version. It doesn’t do a lot, but it will give you a taste of a world without resumes.

Looking for a way to measure your branding efforts, or the performance of your career sites (besides just counting apps), or your social media significance? Here’s a list of 20 free tools. The list is intended for marketers, but then, isn’t that what we’re all becoming?

SHRM’s latest ANSI standard proposal is available for comment. The draft proposal is on workforce planning.

Hours after the company reported it nearly doubled its fourth-quarter profit over the same quarter in 2010, meeting Wall Street’s expectations, its stock price took a 16 percent beating. In afternoon trading in New York, Dice Holdings was selling for $8.40 a share, down $1.59 on the day.

Last week Monster’s stock took a 20 percent hit after it missed analyst profit expectations and announced layoffs. The company earned 11 cents a share, rather than the 12 cents Wall Street expected. Yet, the company grew revenue for the year by about 14 percent and turned 2010′s loss into a 37 cents a share profit.

Dice, however, not only met the Street’s per share earnings prediction, but its $47.36 million in revenue was slightly ahead of what analysts expected. For the year, Dice reported revenue of $179.1 million versus $129 million in 2010. Profit for the full year was 49 cents a share. In 2010 it was 28 cents.

Those results did little to cushion the company’s 2012 prediction that revenues and earnings will come in below analyst expectations. For the current quarter, Dice says it expects revenue of $46 million and net income of $7.1 million. Analysts are looking for  $46.83 million in revenue and per share earnings of 13 cents.

For the year, Dice is looking at revenue of $197 million. Wall Street wants $201.1 million.

In the announcement of the company’s financial results, Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland called 2011 “a terrific year for the company.” Calling 2012 “a more uncertain recruiting environment,” Melland said he expects the company to grow.

“Our strategic priorities are unchanged: expand the number of customers using our services, capitalize on the global opportunity in our energy vertical and serve more markets around the world.”

On the Fresh & Easy home page — the company home page, not the careers home page — the words “A Great Place to Work” (as opposed to “jobs,” “employment,” or “careers”) take you to the carers page.

That’ll take you to the redesigned careers page, which includes videos, a q-and-a about the interview process, a blog, and more.

Fresh & Easy is recruiting employees and interns on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The company — which despite its growth is not without challenges — plays up its low energy use, and its food that avoids trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, and high-fructose corn syrup.

Yep, programmers are getting expensive. But my experience has been that most great programmers don’t really have salary as their No. 1 consideration when deciding where to work. They only worry about salary when the job is so awful that it has to pay well or they couldn’t imagine sticking around.

Here are 10 things that many programmers think about first, long before salary even comes into play:

1. How much do they believe in the company and identify with its goals? Are they excited about what the company makes? Do they love its products?
2. How do they feel about the team they work with? Are their coworkers the same people they would want to hang out with after work?
3. How cool is the technology that they’re using? Will they have a chance to learn powerful new programming languages and systems, or will they be using pedestrian, safe, corporate technologies?
4. How much of the work they’re doing is new code, and how much of it is bug-fixing and maintenance?
5. What is the work environment like? Are there plush private offices, nice espresso machines, and free gourmet lunches? Or does it look and feel exactly like a sitcom parody of a miserable office?
6. How smart is the team? Will they have a chance to learn and grow from their co-workers, or are they going to be carrying the load for a lot of deadweight?
7. How smart is the organization? Will the bureaucracy fight them every step of the way, or does it exist to enable brilliant work?
8. Where is the work? Is the commute convenient? Can their spouse find fulfilling work (probably in another field) nearby? Are the schools good?
9. How much control do they have over their work? Are they required to conform to obscure rules and capricious diktats or do they have the freedom to do great things?
10. What kind of computer hardware do they work? Are their systems upgraded every year with the latest and the greatest? Can they have three 30” monitors if they want?

You may think that some of these things are completely out of your control … and they may be. Sometimes people run job listings on Stack Overflow and get very few resumes. Then they ask me, “why didn’t we get any applicants for our job listing?” And I look at it and think, “baby Moses in a basket, why would anyone want to work there?”

I know, it’s hard to say, but it’s true: some jobs are just not that attractive, and it’s not a problem of “finding programmers,” it’s a problem of “making this a place where people want to work.”

The first thing to learn is that company founders and CEOs don’t care about the same things as programmers. Usually, if you’re doing what your founder/CEO thought would be nice, you’re not really optimizing for programmers. Founder/CEOs, for example, like to save money, and they like to know what’s going on, so they think having a big room where everyone can overhear everything is a terrific work environment. Programmers need to concentrate, so they would work in a brown cardboard box if it was quiet and free from interruptions.

If you’re scoring kind of low on the “desirable workplace” scale, all is not lost. There’s a lot you can do to fix these issues, even if you are a company that makes atom bombs run by a megalomaniac micromanager with an office on a platform in the Arctic Ocean.

Come to the ERE Expo in San Diego in March, and I’ll go into this in a lot more depth in my keynote. I’ll tell you what I know about how programmers work, what they like, what they care about, and I promise you’ll leave with a lot of ideas of how to make your workplace way more attractive and interesting to the average programmer.

Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in.

Branded “Inside Connections,” the new service adds networking to the Glassdoor features, making the site, as Tim Besse, co-founder and vice president of product and marketing, said, “The most complete listing of information about jobs.”

It’s that completeness, Besse argues, that gives Glassdoor the advantage over all other careers networking sites, including, he insists, LinkedIn. “The two most trusted ways to find out about a company,” says Besse, “People you know and, two, people who worked there.”

LinkedIn has both, but if you aren’t connected to one of them, that won’t be much help. At Glassdoor you could always see what people had to say about an employer. Now, you can also see who among your connections works there.

“We have all the tools,” Besse adds.

LinkedIn’s advantage is the completeness of its user profiles. Because it is oriented toward careers and business networking, LinkedIn users tend to be thorough in posting their professional information and prompt in keeping it current.

Facebook users tend to provide only limited employment information. While data is hard to come by, Glassdoor says a survey it commissioned shows 65-70 percent of Facebook users have entered at least some employment data. However, Besse points out that Facebook’s Timeline will prompt ever larger numbers of people to complete their profiles and provide more details.

(Timeline was announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in the fall. Its rollout has been slow, but its anticipated impacts are large and have been discussed in detail by marketers, researchers, and others.)

A post on the Harvard Business Review site about the impact of Timeline on careers notes, “If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it’s time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.”

If Facebook users do as the writer suggests, then sites like Glassdoor stand to benefit and it won’t matter that LinkedIn has locked out BeKnown, BranchOut, and others, refusing to share its data.

Besse, in that case, could realize his goal: “I am out there to build the world’s largest and most trusted” career site.

Its plans includes TV ads, movie ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertising, and of course the career site, featuring people lifting up their shirts to show military uniforms underneath.

The site plays up the potential for good benefits, travel, community involvement, and personal growth — the latter, for example, exemplified by the prominent quote from a reservist on the site saying: “I wanted an opportunity to step out, try new things, and push myself.”

The Australian Army hopes to use the campaign for at least three years.

In the paperwork submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it expects to raise $5 billion from the public sale of its stock. That’s based on the registration fee it paid. The New York Times says it could end up raising much more.

Facebook reported in its S-1 filing that it earned $1 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, most of it coming from advertising. It reported having 845 million monthly active users as of the end of the year, a 39 percent increase over the year before. In the U.S., Facebook saw a 16 percent bump over 2010, ending last year with 161 million monthly average users, or about half the country’s total population.

Its average daily user count is 483 million, meaning more than half those who visit the site in a month do so every day. The company also reported 425 million monthly mobile users, a number it expects will grow with some of it replacing PC access.

With numbers like these it’s not surprising that employers have been flocking to build Facebook profiles and encourage their workers, customers and others to “like” them.

Recruiters began embracing Facebook years ago, seeing it as a way to expand the reach of their employer branding. Many began by combing through Facebook profiles as part of candidate vetting.  Now, companies regularly see Facebook as both a branding tool and a way to develop prospect communities.

Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a sourcing tool. BranchOut, which launched on Facebook 18 months ago, enables users to create business-only networks that can be accessed by recruiters. BeKnown, launched by Monster last summer, is similar.

Both BranckOut and BeKnown also connected with LinkedIn. But not long after the BeKnown launch, LinkedIn shut off access. That hasn’t put much of a damper on either site. BranchOut has about 2.7 million monthly average users. BeKnown has 260,000.

A third site is poised to announce its own Facebook connection later tonight, Pacific time.

Indeed the January number came in below the average of 182,000, which is what economists in a Bloomberg survey were expecting. A Dow Jones Newswires survey however put the number right at 170,000.

The ADP report also adjusted down the December numbers from the initial 325,000 to 292,000.  Nearly all the January gain, says ADP, came from companies with fewer than 500 workers, and all but 18,000 of the new jobs were in the service sector. Manufacturing added 10,000 workers during the month.

A year ago, ADP said 190,000 private sector jobs were created in January.

This morning’s report, says Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, “compares to the 2011 monthly average of 160,000 and thus points to a continued recovery but the mediocre pace this far into a recovery still remains frustrating,” He estimates that Friday’s official report from the U.S. Department of Labor will show 165,000 non-farm jobs created in January.

The ADP National Employment Report, produced jointly with Macroeconomic Advisers, is closely watched by economists as an indication of what the official U.S. Labor Department jobs report will show. The government report is usually released on the first Friday of every month.

The two reports rarely match, largely due to differences in methodology. The government report also includes public sector employment. ADP’s report does not. However, as the Globe and Mail (Canada) said in reporting this morning’s report, “Take the number with a large pinch of salt, but pay attention to the trend.”

That trend, though, is hard to read. While there hasn’t been a negative month since September 2010 (when census layoffs influenced the numbers), job gains have hovered around 100,000 for most of last year. Only in four months did the official numbers break 200,000. In three months, they were well below 100,000.

Like the job numbers, other signs are positive, if tepid. The Conference Board last week said its Leading Economic Index improved slightly in December  to 94.3. It was the third consecutive monthly increase in the index. (The Board also announced changes in how the index is calculated.) This morning, the Board’s monthly count of jobs posted online showed 61,300 more jobs in January than the month before. It’s only the second increase in job postings in eight months.

Economists, now, are not expecting any surprises in Friday’s government report. The Wall Street Journal says economists are expecting it to show 125,000 new jobs and no change in the current 8.5 percent unemployment rate.  Reuters puts the number at 150,000. And Bloomberg, which wrote a long piece this morning about growing optimism in the financial markets and among economists, says the Friday jobs report will come in at 145,000.

Fake bird seed represents many vendors’ test claims … and, what users don’t know about birdseed and test validity can cost them a fortune. Test validity does not mean people like the test; or, the test has zero adverse impact; or, the EEOC approves; or, the test looks sexy. Validity means test scores consistently predict some specific aspect of job performance. For example, if high scores predict more mistakes, then low scores should predict fewer. Validity predicts on-the-job performance … both ways.

Reputable test vendors (i.e., those who follow professional test development standards) eagerly show controlled studies of test results … and, welcome questions about them. Bird seed vendors enthusiastically produce client testimonials … andget defensive when questioned. How can testimonials be unacceptable? For the same reason you cannot trust political ads. They have an agenda and are seldom supported by facts. Here is an example using a sales job:

Sales Manager Anecdote: We used XYZ test and our sales productivity increased.

OK. What is your definition of productivity? What else was happening at the time that could have affected the numbers? Did you land a big customer? Did the economy improve? Did lower and higher scores predict lower and higher sales? Are you using group results or individual data? Sales dollars are only one part of the job. What about satisfaction, service, returns, cross-selling? You see, anecdotes are rhetorical. They might sound good, but seldom tell the whole story. Anecdotes and validity are not equal. Birdseed vendors, because they don’t follow professional test-validation processes, don’t know they don’t know this.

Define Performance … or Else!

Let’s continue with our sales example. Nothing is more important than a highly productive sales staff. But wait. What does that mean? Are we discussing acquiring new customers? Farming or hunting? Cross-selling? Delivering great customer service? Customer retention? Solving service problems? Favorite golf buddies? Job turnover? Learning new products?

Get the picture? I have learned over time, especially with call centers, that many performance areas even conflict with one another. Problem Solving Quality and Calls Completed are often negatively related (i.e., it generally takes more time to better resolve problems). It drives employees crazy when an organization sets mutually conflicting objectives. So which one should they test for?

Performance is a loosey-goosey catch-all term that could actually mean something entirely different to different people. In my experience, few sales managers and even fewer HR departments ever take the time to think this through. So, before you decide on a test vendor, carefully define what you want to measure. If you think “performance” is a singular thing, then you are in a heap of trouble. If someone does not know what he/she wants to control, then any solution will be like bed wetting … warm and comfy at night, but cold and miserable in the morning.

Truth or Dare!

My bathroom scale is heartless. It tells me when I am overeating. It also tells me when I am at my healthy weight. Your hiring test should do the same thing. Good scores should have the same strong causal relationship with high performance; and, bad scores should have the same strong causal relationship with low performance. This is really important. Vendors who do not follow professional test development standards don’t seem to really understand that validation is a two-edged sword. Let’s look deeper a very common, and very wrong-headed practice.

Vendor A separates people into a good group and a bad group. The good group takes the test and the vendor averages their numbers. From that day forward, every applicant is benchmarked against the good-group average. Sound’s good? Sorry. It’s a clear sign the vendor is selling fake birdseed.

Let’s start by asking how the people were group-classified. What constitutes performance? Are good schmoozers in the same group as slow learners? How about group size? Are there enough people in a group (i.e., it takes at least 15 to 25 people before you can draw a decent conclusion). Is the bad group the same size as the good group? (Groups should always be about equal-sized.) Are the differences between groups strong or subtle? (If everyone is at least good enough to stay employed, you will probably be able to see only strong differences.)

What about the test itself? Can the vendor show proof every item in the test directly affects group performance? How strong is it? Research shows that virtually all self-reported motivation, personality, and attitude test scores have weak relationships with “hard” job skills like learning ability, problem solving, and so forth. If the test factor doesn’t strongly predict job performance, the test won’t make any difference in hiring quality … it will just make your job more difficult.

One more comment about group scores. They tell you about groups — nothing about individuals. Consider the following: people in the Top Group have scores of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 (average = 45). The Bottom Group scores are 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 (average = 35).

So the person doing this analysis figures that producers score an average of 45 — so let’s go test people and hire the ones who score 45 or more. Whoops! If we used top-group averages as our standard, we would eliminate three top producers and hire two bottom ones. Fake birdseed alert!

Separating Pros from Pretenders

Setting hiring-test standards is an all or nothing game. There are no shortcuts. In my personal experience, wrong-headed vendors are seldom intentionally deceitful. They enthusiastically believe in their fake birdseed; after all, people who make things with their own hands seldom welcome criticism. So, they rely on client anecdotes, claiming that is sufficient proof of validity. Some will even claim that the EEOC has validated their test. Sorry. This is completely wrong-headed and foolish thinking.

If they rely on vendor claims, users will never know how many good candidates they turn away, nor how many bad ones they will hire. They always pay the price for this mistake later. You see, legal challenges seldom happen in the hiring phase. They happen on the job. Challenges begin when incompetent employees challenge termination or being overlooked for promotion. Forget the short term and six-month guarantees. Bad hiring decisions start showing themselves about a year later.

So how do you identify a pretender? Anyone who is:

• Producing client testimonials (not tightly controlled studies) claiming their test is valid;
• Getting defensive when questioned;
• Claiming their test doesn’t actually predict performance, but can be helpful;
• Claiming the EEOC has approved their test;
• Setting standards based on group or job averages;
• Focused primarily on training, not professional test development;
• Giving everyone a broad-based test (i.e., not based on performance requirements) and then measuring averages;
• Giving everyone a broad-based test (i.e., not based on performance requirements) and then measuring differences;
• Believing a self-descriptive test strongly and accurately predicts job skills;
• Not able to produce a technical manual documenting what the test measures and why that factor leads to job performance;
• Not clear on the definition of what the test actually predicts;

There are others, but this is a good start. Here is a quickie birdseed question users should ask every vendor: “Was your test specifically developed to predict job performance? If so, what part?” Any answer other than “Yes” means the test probably won’t work.

Birdseed or Not Birdseed!

As you might imagine, birdseed vendors complain the loudest. That’s really shameful. Validation principles are taught in major universities throughout the western world and religiously followed by every professional test development house. Just because a vendor does not know what they are is no excuse. It reminds me of Gary Larsen’s little fat boy trying to enter the School for the Gifted and Talented by pushing hard against a door that clearly say “pull.”

Here are some believe-it-or-not examples:

V1: Vendor (who sells a self-reported personality test) … All you care is about assessment. Don’t you care about performance?

A: Hello! Assessment is anything used to evaluate a candidate and predict performance. Besides, there is abundant literature showing self-reported tests are miserable predictors of skills like problem solving ability, planning, and teamwork. You want accuracy? Start selling tests that measure hard-to-fake applicant skills.

V2: Vendor (who sells a post-WWII NAZI atrocity test). Our test is validated. See our report. Wanna be a distributor?

A: No, thank you. I am not in the market for a concentration camp commandant. Besides, a technical report filled with anecdotes from unqualified people venturing their unsupported personal opinions about your test does not meet professional test standards.

V3: Vendor (who does group-level averaging). Group averaging is just another form of validation.

A: No. It’s not. Your test has no clear performance criteria; no proof a specific factor causes performance; group data is being used to make individual conclusions; and, your groups are so small, the numbers are either nonsense or chance.

U4: User … If I use a test, I’ll never place a candidate!

A: If there was ever a statement concerning the sad state of applicant screening, this was it!

U5: User … We like the DISC/MBTI/ACL/CPI/16PF/MMPI/Caliper test so much, we decided to use it for hiring.

A: That’s interesting. As far as I know, none of these publishers claim their test predicts job performance. Some even strongly recommend against it. Perhaps, you know something the publishers do not? Think about it. Just because a test measures a difference between people, does that mean it also predicts someone’s job performance?

U6: User … We use tests to match candidate personalities to managers.

A: That might be a good idea, unless company culture never changed; managers never changed jobs; people never changed departments; or, cloned personalities never lead to group-think.

U7: User … We interview. We don’t use tests.

A: If you ask questions and make hiring decisions based on applicant answers, how is that not a test?

V8: Vendor (after learning what it takes to meet professional test requirements) … I can’t do that!

A: That said it all.

V9: Vendor … We keep adjusting top group scores until we get the maximum individuals in the group to pass. The results become our hiring standard.

A: Fine-tuning junk science yields finely-tuned junk science.

V10: Vendor … We compare every applicant against a country-wide manager/salesperson/driver/XZY job norm.

A: So, you are assuming all jobs/companies/industries with the same title are alike; everyone in the group norm performs just like your people are expected to perform; every individual in the group norm matches the group average; jobholder answers are identical to applicant answers; applicants never try to make themselves look good on tests; and, every factor in the norm affects performance? Sure.