There’s more to look forward to this summer than just beach trips, baseball games and US Weekly’s annual “Best and Worst Celebrity Beach Bods” issue…

In a positive sign for the economy, seasonal hiring is expected to increase over the summer months, according to CareerBuilder’s annual Summer Job Forecast.

Of the more than 2,000 hiring managers and human resource professionals who participated in the survey, three in ten (29 percent) plan to hire workers for the summer, up from 21 percent in 2011 and an average of 22 percent over the past four years.

The busier summer hiring season is likely due to a combination of stronger-than-expected growth in the manufacturing sector and increased consumer confidence. Employers in the following industries are expected to lead seasonal hiring:

• Manufacturing: 45 percent [plan to add summer workers]
• Hospitality: 44 percent
• Retail: 34 percent
• Finance: 31 percent

Beyond these industries, customer service, office support, information technology, research, engineering and sales will also be hiring hotspots.

“Confidence is up among the employers we most closely associate with summer hiring,” said Brent Rasmussen, president of CareerBuilder North America, in a statement for the press release. “The forecast is a strong indicator that the job market will continue to strengthen as we come closer to the second half of 2012.”

What’s Hot This Summer: Three Workforce Trends
The survey also indicated the following trends among employer behavior this summer.

• Full-time work potential: 71 percent of employers hiring this summer said they’ll be considering some hires for permanent positions. In fact, 39 percent of employers said they’re less likely to hire someone who isn’t interested in working beyond summer.
• Increased pay: A majority (64 percent) of employers will pay their summer hires $10 or more per hour – up from 58 percent last year.
• Late-in-season hiring: While 42 percent of employers report that they typically complete their summer hiring by April, 38 percent complete it in May and 19 percent will hire in June and beyond.

Tell us: How do your hiring and compensation plans compare to the above findings?

As one of today’s fastest-growing companies, Coinstar, Inc. is in the unique position to hire workers across multiple functions and contribute to economic growth. Learn more about how Coinstar is empowering employment in the following video, or read the Q&A below with Coinstar’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Raquel Karls.

What does Coinstar do to ensure employees perform to their highest potential?
Coinstar has a clear mission to reimagine the possibilities as we pride ourselves on finding new and better ways of doing things. We’re focused on making products and services more accessible to consumers than ever before.  The same holds true for our workplace.  Coinstar employees are encouraged to leverage their skills and are supported in their development as they focus on achieving individual and team goals.  For example, through our learning management system, Learning Central, employees have access to self-directed training materials, and we have tools to support individual development planning throughout the organization.

How does your growth make an impact on the local communities you serve? Coinstar’s growth has enabled us to be a strong employer across the U.S., with growth in jobs, opportunities and new communities every day. In 2011, Coinstar filled over 600 roles nationwide, with very little turnover, and 2012 is trending even higher.

How do Coinstar employees contribute to this impact?
Coinstar employees are working in our retail partners’ businesses each and every day- so they’re making an employment contribution and providing a great service in those communities all of the time. As well, our employees are paid for time spent participating in company sponsored volunteer service events in addition to matching funds for giving by employees.

What advice would you pass on to your peers?
Finding the right talent is an investment that has massively exponential returns- you have to know what you’re looking for not just for today, but for the longer term, be diligent in finding it,  and then proactively develop it within the workplace.

How is Coinstar, Inc. empowering employment?
Coinstar provides employees great, independent roles in a growing, thriving business. It’s the right balance of having the freedom to create and innovate with the resources to make those ideas come to life.  Not many companies in the US could come close to matching what Coinstar is doing, and it’s an exciting place to work as a result!

Want to learn more about how other companies like Coinstar are working with CareerBuilder to empower employment? Visit www.empoweringemployment.com

“If a candidate comes into your organization and asks three different people, ‘What is your employee value proposition?’ every one of those people should be able to provide a similar answer,” says Rosemary Haefner, on what it means to have a clearly defined employment brand.

As vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, Haefner recently spearheaded the initiative to define CareerBuilder’s own employment brand.

“Your brand is basically your commercial,” Haefner explains. “It’s what should come to people’s mind when they hear your company’s name.”  While CareerBuilder has always enjoyed a reputation as a great place to work, Haefner wanted to clearly define what CareerBuilder stood for as an employer and what the company offers its employees.

“If you’re not specific about who you are as an employer, you can’t as easily determine which candidates will be successful in your organization or if employees are fulfilling their potential, and you won’t know what investments you need to be making in your organization.”

The problem some companies encounter, however, is that who they think they are as an employer and how others actually perceive them don’t always align. “You might think your brand is one thing, but then your employees might have an entirely different opinion. It’s almost as if you need a mirror to tell you who you are,” Haefner says.

Not wanting to fall into this trap, Haefner and her team sought objective feedback from current employees and prospective candidates. “We interviewed people both in and outside the organization, basically just asking them, ‘When you think about CareerBuilder, what rises to top?’” Haefner says. After a while, a similar theme began to surface from the survey results: “The answers were all about different ways to learn – both personally and professionally.” The surveys provided a foundation on which CareerBuilder could then build its employment brand strategy.

Finally, after an intense several months of interviews, surveys and discussion around “where we want to be as an organization and what we have to do to get there,” CareerBuilder was ready to begin promoting its new “Growth through Learning” employment brand.  “This brand captures the idea that, if you’re open to learning, and if you’re game to be challenged, this is the place for you,” Haefner says.

Looking back now, “Growth through Learning” seems like an obvious description of CareerBuilder’s employment brand. After all, education and learning have always been integral to the culture at CareerBuilder. In addition to the company’s generous tuition reimbursement program, employees have access to a wealth of free career-related courses through CBLearn, its internal training portal, and in 2006, CareerBuilder launched the Leadership Development Series. The invitation-only, MBA-style program is taught by business school professors and designed to prepare high potential employees for higher levels of responsibility.

But educational opportunities go beyond classes and coursework at CareerBuilder. “We believe that learning isn’t just about sitting in a classroom. We’re always looking for ways to expose employees to new opportunities to learn,” Haefner says. Those opportunities come in nearly any form conceivable – from exposure to the influential leaders who come to speak at the company’s annual kickoff event (past speakers have included Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Jack Welch) to work exchange programs with the company’s international offices, to community outreach and company-administered volunteer events.  Understanding that competition and innovation are also key to learning, CareerBuilder encourages employees to come up with business plans for its annual Ideas from Everywhere contest and holds regular Hack Days.

While these initiatives would likely exist in some form or another without having gone through the exercise of creating a defined employment brand, chances are they would have taken much longer to execute. With “Growth through Learning” as the framework on which all company initiatives are based, Haefner says, “It’s easier to make decisions now on where to invest our time, effort and money, because we already know that, in the end, everything should come back to growth through learning.”

Stars: they’re just like us! They buy their own groceries, they pump their own gas, and they even cut their maternity leaves short and struggle with work-life balance!

According to CareerBuilder’s annual Mother’s Day survey, one in four (26 percent) working moms who have had a child in the last three years reported they did not take the full maternity leave allowed by their company, and one in ten took two weeks or less.

But while celebrity moms are more likely to take shorter maternity leaves because they need to fly to Germany to film a shampoo commercial, the mothers in CareerBuilder’s survey had arguably less glamorous reasons for doing so: Competitive work environments, demanding positions and financial pressures played key roles in respondents’ decisions to go back to work early.

According to the survey, 39 percent of working moms are the sole financial provider in their household, compared with 43 percent of working dads.  Working dads who are the sole breadwinner were almost twice as likely to earn $50,000 or more and were approximately three times as likely to earn six figures as working moms.  Women were much more likely to earn less than $35,000 compared to men.

How much time do working moms get to spend with their families?
Unsurprisingly, with so much pressure to be in the office, women also reported feeling a struggle to find a healthy balance between work and family life. One in four (25 percent) working moms feel they have to choose between their children and being successful at their jobs, and 24 percent say work obligations caused them to miss significant events in their children’s lives.

When asked how much time they’re able to spend with their children during the work week, half of working moms said they average around four hours of quality time each day, while nearly 30 percent spend two hours.

What can working moms do to find a better work/life balance?
Looking for a way to balance your work and family life, but lacking the help of a live-in nanny, personal assistant and bodyguards? Hope Gurion, Chief Development Officer at CareerBuilder (and mother of two), offers the following tips for working moms to better manage work and family.

• Go in with a game plan – The vast majority of working moms who have taken advantage of flexible work arrangements said it hasn’t negatively impacted their careers, so talk to your supervisor or HR department and explore options. Make sure to come to that conversation with a game plan on how you can manage workload, cover responsibilities, etc.
• Keep an “I’m Fabulous” file – Keep track of all of your accomplishments within the organization, quantifying results whenever possible, and list out the additional responsibilities you have taken on in the last year. It helps you to build your case when negotiating for a better salary or consideration for promotion with your employer.
• Get organized – Structure in your life will save you time, stress and mental energy. Keep one calendar for business and family commitments to avoid double-booking. Set up a schedule for chores, homework, family activities and playtime.
• Remember quality over quantity – Make the most of your personal time. When you’re home, it’s all about them. Wait until after the children go to bed before checking email or finishing up that presentation.
• Schedule “me time” – Working moms need to take care of themselves too. Put actual time on the calendar for an hour or more of doing something you enjoy such as going to the gym, taking a walk, reading, etc.

Tell us: How do you balance work and family life?

Diversity is important in today’s business world. At least that’s the claim many employers make, despite not having sufficient diversity initiatives. Why the contradiction?

Perhaps in an effort to attract candidates, some organizations are only saying what they think candidates want to hear. They might be surprised, then, to see new research from CareerBuilder indicating that diversity isn’t the number one (or even two or three or…) factor diverse candidates want from their employers.

According to a recent survey of 4,000 workers nationwide:

• African Americans rank diversity seventh their list of most important employer attributes. Diversity follows compensation and benefits; advancement; training; work-life balance; interesting assignments; and appreciation by management, in order of importance.
• For Hispanics and Asians, diversity falls even lower on the list. It ranks below (in order) compensation; benefits; training; advancement opportunities; work-life balance; interesting assignments; good reputation; financially strong; high quality; good culture; and personal impact.

Given these findings, is it even worth it for employers to invest in diversity initiatives? Absolutely, says Andrea Briggs, Project Manager of Talent Intelligence and Consulting for Personified. Because while diversity might not rank as highly as one might expect among diverse candidates, it ranks much higher among diverse candidates than white candidates: It’s among the top 10 for 37.5 percent of diverse candidates overall, compared to only 29.5 percent of white candidates. This disparity, Briggs says, is significant.

“For organizations trying to recruit more diverse candidates and diversify their workforces, this should definitely be a part of their message in their employment brand,” she says. “Diversity resonates much more with diverse candidates, and even though they consider other factors more important, when an organization wants to differentiate themselves in the minds of diverse candidates, diversity in an organization is one way to do that.”

If these results surprise you, you may need to re-evaluate what you know about the candidates you hope to attract to your organization. These findings further underscore the need for employers to research their target talent – whoever they are – to ensure they’re sending the right message to the right candidates.

What are your thoughts? Do these findings surprise you? How do you ensure you’re sending the right message to the candidates you want for your organization?

According to one CareerBuilder survey, 38 percent of employees have embellished their job responsibilities at some point, while 18 percent have lied about their skill sets. Other common lies surrounded information about employees’ start and end dates of employment, academic degrees, previous employers and job titles. 

6 Ways to Keep Candidates Legit
Use the following tips as you evaluate candidate resumes moving forward:

1. Perform a standard background check on things like work history, residences, dates of employment, etc. Look for discrepancies between what the candidate submitted and what the reports reveal.
2. Check for red flags: Unexplained gaps in employment, a reluctance to explain the reason for leaving, and unusual periods of self-employment can be a tip off to false employment history. Always check references, including clients, for self-employed work history. Because even references can be fake, check the web sites of previous employers and use the phone numbers found online for employment verification.  (Can’t find a previous employer’s web site, even after you’ve “Googled” it? The Better Business Bureau or the local Chamber of Commerce are good resources to check, too.)
3. Utilize social networking sites. Social networking profiles contain public information that may help you verify certain information such as a candidate’s work history or education credentials.  (Just be aware of the possible legal ramifications of using social media to screen applicants. It’s probably best not to ask candidates for their Facebook passwords, either.)
4. Test their skills. Knowing that employers use keyword searching to find and qualify their resumes, applicants may include keywords for all skills required for the job – regardless of whether they have them or not. Find out if they’re embellishing by asking specific technical questions about the skills they claim to have and actually test their computer skills.
5. Be fair. Remember that mistakes and misunderstandings do happen. If you find a discrepancy, give the candidate an opportunity to explain.
6. Use common sense. Trust your intuition and experience. If something doesn’t seem right, follow up on it.

Do you have an experience with a candidate or employee who lied on his or her resume? Share with us in the comments below.

Editor’s note: This post was adapted from an earlier post about resume lies, which includes true life stories from readers sharing their own ‘fake resume’ experiences.

Call it the business world’s version of a “wardrobe malfunction”…an “inadvertent error” may be the undoing of Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson, who was recently outed for claiming to have a degree in computer science, when in fact he graduated with a bachelor’s in accounting.

The real issue at hand, however, is not so much what he lied about – after all, it doesn’t take a degree to learn how to code – but the fact that he lied. Sadly, Thompson is far from the only person who’s ever taken creative license with a resume. According to one CareerBuilder survey, 38 percent of employees have embellished their job responsibilities at some point, while 18 percent have lied about their skill sets. Other common lies surrounded information about employees’ start and end dates of employment, academic degrees, previous employers and job titles. 

6 Ways to Keep Candidates Legit
Regardless of Thompson’s fate, his story is a good reminder that no one is immune to being the victim of a fake resume. Use the following tips as you evaluate candidate resumes moving forward:

1. Perform a standard background check on things like work history, residences, dates of employment, etc. Look for discrepancies between what the candidate submitted and what the reports reveal.
2. Check for red flags: Unexplained gaps in employment, a reluctance to explain the reason for leaving, and unusual periods of self-employment can be a tip off to false employment history. Always check references, including clients, for self-employed work history. Because even references can be fake, check the web sites of previous employers and use the phone numbers found online for employment verification.  (Can’t find a previous employer’s web site, even after you’ve “Googled” it? The Better Business Bureau or the local Chamber of Commerce are good resources to check, too.)
3. Utilize social networking sites. Social networking profiles contain public information that may help you verify certain information such as a candidate’s work history or education credentials.  (Just be aware of the possible legal ramifications of using social media to screen applicants. It’s probably best not to ask candidates for their Facebook passwords, either.)
4. Test their skills. Knowing that employers use keyword searching to find and qualify their resumes, applicants may include keywords for all skills required for the job – regardless of whether they have them or not. Find out if they’re embellishing by asking specific technical questions about the skills they claim to have and actually test their computer skills.
5. Be fair. Remember that mistakes and misunderstandings do happen. If you find a discrepancy, give the candidate an opportunity to explain.
6. Use common sense. Trust your intuition and experience. If something doesn’t seem right, follow up on it.

Do you have an experience with a candidate or employee who lied on his or her resume? Share with us in the comments below.

Editor’s note: This post was adapted from an earlier post about resume lies, which includes true life stories from readers sharing their own ‘fake resume’ experiences.

I was going to talk about all the great giveaways and exclusive events going on at CareerBuilder booth #602 during SHRM 2012 in Atlanta this year, but then I decided to re-watch the ‘The Bachelorette’ on Hulu instead realized you could hear about it from celebrity chef Kevin Gillespie of the renowned Woodfire Grill and ‘Top Chef’ fame.

In case you didn’t view the video, here’s the gist of everything we’re cooking up – literally and figuratively – at booth #602:

• Special event: Cooking demo with celebrity chef Kevin Gillespie
• Enter now: You could win big during SHRM 2012
• While you’re at the booth…food, drinks, giveaways and more
• Presentations you won’t see anywhere else

Cooking demonstration with celebrity chef Kevin Gillespie:

Don’t miss the chance to watch the former ‘Top Chef’ contestant cook dishes from his renowned Woodfire Grill restaurant in Atlanta – all while enjoying complimentary food and beverages!

When: Sunday, June 25 from 5-6pm at the CareerBuilder booth

Want to meet Kevin in person? Fill out the form below to win a photo with Kevin Gillespie and VIP seats to his cooking demo.

Three ways to win at booth #602:

Be the first to learn about prizes and giveaways and enter for the chance to meet a Top Chef, receive VIP access and take home a Calphalon cookware set.

• On your phone: Text SHRM to 88769 to get updates about exclusive prizes and events.
• In person: Bring the cover band (from your SHRM Magazine pre-show Daily in your registration packet) to the CareerBuilder booth to enter for the chance to win a 10-Piece Calphalon cookware set worth $340. If, by chance, you don’t get the pre-show magazine, simply print this copy of the cover band.
• Right here: Fill out the form above for a chance to win a photo with Kevin Gillespie and VIP seats to our ‘Top Chef’ cooking demo.

While you’re at the CareerBuilder booth…

Don’t forget about the many activities going on during showroom hours at our booth:

Enjoy complimentary Southern-style food and beverages including mac ‘n’ cheese bites, peach cobbler, mini BBQ pulled pork sandwiches, Arnold Palmers and a Bloody Mary bar

Collect, Play and Win: Collect the recipe cards found at the booth to play CB Plinko for the chance to win great prizes, including Converse All-Star Athletic Shoes.

Check out the featured presentations you won’t see anywhere else:

Presentations for Monday, June 25^th

• 10 – 10:15 am: The Talent Mismatch
  Presented by: Jamie Womack, Vice President, Corporate Marketing & Branding, CareerBuilder
• 1:30 – 1:45pm: Hire Intelligence: Using Data to Recruit Smarter
  Presented by: Abdel Tefridj, Vice President, Workforce Analytics, CareerBuilder
• 3:30 – 3:45pm: Mind the Gap: Conquering the Divide Between Recruiters and Job Seekers
  Presented by: Bryan Johanson, Chief Operating Officer, The Adler Group, and Jennifer Seith, Managing Director, Business Development, CareerBuilder

Presentation for Tuesday, June 26^th

• 10 – 10:15am: Mind the Gap: Conquering the Divide Between Recruiters and Job Seekers
  Presented by: Bryan Johanson, Chief Operating Officer, The Adler Group and Jennifer Seith, Managing Director, Business Development, CareerBuilder

Stay updated! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or text SHRM to 88769 to make sure you don’t miss out on all the excitement CareerBuilder has to offer during SHRM 2012!

“Every day, I hear stories from new hires about how happy they are to have found their home at Concentra.”

Tara Petty is the Assistant Vice President of Recruiting at Concentra, a national health care company where, she says, “employees are the company, and the ones who make a difference in the lives of our patients.” In the following Q&A, Petty details what it means to empower employees at Concentra, and how her team finds the talented individuals on whom Concentra’s success ultimately depends.

How do you describe the culture at Concentra? There’s a feeling that’s palpable when you walk through the doors at a Concentra clinic or at our corporate office. You can tell the people here genuinely care about each other and about our patients and clients. We’re a family, and we support one another in our cause of “improving America’s healthcare, one patient at a time.”

Does the culture influence the way you recruit? Absolutely. Technical expertise is obviously important and critical in hiring, but finding someone who is also welcoming, respectful and skillful is equally as important.

How does Concentra work to make an impact on the communities you serve? Giving back to the community is an integral part of Concentra’s culture. A strong community relationship between citizens and the local center team is essential to the success of our business. Our colleagues regularly participate in fundraising events, volunteer efforts and donation collections to support locally-based organizations.

How does Concentra empower employees to make a difference in people’s lives? At Concentra, we believe that who we are as a company is made up of the things we do as individuals. Our Orange Book is a collection of letters and testimonials from patients who’ve highlighted some of the ways Concentra colleagues have made a difference in their lives. We encourage people to give perfect service, from the inside out, and the Orange Book is our guide on how to provide perfect service. It is part of the fiber of our company, and we regularly highlight and recognize people who are living ‘Orange Book values.’

How did the idea for the Orange Book come about? The concept began after seeing how other service industry leaders equipped their employees with the right tools and messages to empower each person to deliver great service. Because the work environments can vary significantly at Concentra, our marketing department developed the book to give colleagues a way to keep those messages close and put the keys to great service in their hands.

What’s the most challenging aspect of your job? Recruiting clinicians. There is a shortage of physicians in America, and we are competing against a lot of companies vying for this small talent pool.

How has this shortage changed the way you recruit? Our primary recruiting goal for 2012 is to position our openings and company benefits in front of the right physicians. We are working with Personified to create a diverse recruitment advertising program, which includes using niche job boards, search engine marketing and optimization, as well as traditional recruiting techniques like e-mail and direct mail campaigns. We also have a physician referral program that pays $7,500 to any full-time colleague who refers someone we hire, and we’re attending more than 20 health care conferences this year to get the word out that we’re hiring.

What specific qualities do you look for when hiring? That’s simple – it’s our values: A healing focus, a selfless heart and a tireless resolve.

What is the most rewarding aspect of your job? I’ve been given an opportunity to revamp the way Concentra goes to market with its recruitment initiatives. Every day, I hear stories from new hires about how happy they are to have found their home at Concentra. Without the enhancements we’ve made and the way we recruit, these colleagues might not have found us, and that’s what’s most rewarding.

What do you wish people knew about what goes into recruiting for Concentra?
At Concentra, we know the right people in the right position create the perfect experience. Our talented recruiters work very hard to ensure we find the right fit for our open positions. There are plenty of people who could “do the job” but we search to find the person who embodies our values and demonstrates the exceptional technical abilities to make the position and the person most successful.

It sounds simple enough: company meets potential employee, company gets employee, employee leaves company, so company starts looking for new employee. Unfortunately, the classic hiring strategy is no longer sufficient in today’s job market, where competition for top talent is higher than ever. According to Keith Hadley, Director of Employment Branding at CareerBuilder, small businesses need to be more proactive in their approach to hiring.

With that in mind, CareerBuilder created Small Business Seeks Big Talent: CareerBuilder’s Small Business Hiring Guide, a modern twist on a classic recruitment strategy.  Learn what things like continuous recruiting, talent pipelining, onboarding and compensation strategies have to do with your small business – and how you can implement them into your hiring process today.

Whatever your hiring and recruiting needs, let Small Business Seeks Big Talent serve as a guide to attracting and retaining your company’s number one asset, your employees.

Small Business Seeks Big Talent provides comprehensive strategies and tips to help you:

• Bring in a better quality of applicants
• Put an end to hiring mistakes
• Save time and money associated with hiring
• Save costs associated with turnover
• Get more mileage out of job postings
• Conduct more effective interviews
• Leverage your position as a small business to recruit top talent

Planning to hire new college graduates this year? You’re not alone. See where you fall among your competitors – and get tips for hiring college graduates.

College grads have it sooo easy these days. Or at least, they have it easier than alumni of the previous three years, according to a new joint survey from CareerBuilder and CareerRookie.

Among the more than 2,000 hiring managers who participated in the national survey, more than half (54 percent) plan to hire recent college graduates this year, an increase from 46 percent last year, 44 percent in 2010 and 43 percent in 2009.

The increased hiring plans are a promising sign for the state of the economy. “This is the first time since the recession that we’re seeing a majority of employers planning to add recent college graduates to their employee roster,” said Brent Rasmussen, President of CareerBuilder North America, in a press release.

How does your compensation package compare?
Of the employers who plan to hire recent college graduates, 29 percent expect to offer higher starting salaries than they did in 2011. Here’s a breakdown of the expected salary offers. Where does your organization fall?

• Less than $30,000 – 20 percent
• $30,000 to less than $40,000 – 30 percent
• $40,000 to less than $50,000 – 21 percent
• $50,000 and higher – 28 percent

Which college majors are competing for most?
Business tops the list of most in-demand majors, with technical majors following closely behind.

• Business – 39 percent
• Computer and Information Sciences – 24 percent
• Engineering – 23 percent
• Math and Statistics – 13 percent
• Health Professions and Related Clinical Sciences – 13 percent
• Communications Technologies – 12 percent
• Liberal Arts and Sciences – 9 percent

What jobs are employers targeting college grads to fill?
Companies continue to recruit recent college graduates for roles that drive innovation, sales and new market opportunities.

• Information Technology – 25 percent
• Customer Service – 23 percent
• Sales – 21 percent
• Finance/Accounting – 18 percent
• Marketing – 17 percent
• Business Development – 17 percent

Four Tips for Hiring Recent Graduates
The tricky thing about hiring recent college graduates is that they have little to no work experience, so it becomes hard to predict how they’ll be as employees. Here are a few things to consider:

1. Look beyond internships and part-time jobs: Ask college graduates about their volunteer work, class work, managing activities for sororities or fraternities, and sports, all of which can indicate leadership capabilities, collaboration activities, time management, communications skills and work ethic.
2. Hire for culture, train for skills: What college graduates lack in experience, they may make up for in enthusiasm and work ethic. Before you even begin hiring, determine the skills you absolutely need coming in, and which ones you’re willing to train for. Focus on finding employees who fit the culture and show potential.
3. Recruit on campus: Visiting campuses enables you to speak with soon-to-be graduates one-on-one and get to know them before they even apply. On the flip side, they get to learn about your company and ask questions, so they go into the application process already excited about the opportunity and familiar with your company’s culture.
4. Ask for employee referrals – Not only is it the number one way employers recruit recent college grads, but hires made through employee referrals have been shown to increase retention and keep hiring-related costs down.

For more insight and resources about recruiting this demographic, check out the recent white paper on millennial job seeker behaviors from CareerRookie.com, a site that matches employers with new or recent college graduates.

Ah, the awkward conversation. Much like death and taxes, the awkward conversation is something people will do anything to avoid.

…which is perhaps why so many managers are so poor at giving feedback: rather than have a potentially uncomfortable conversation about what their employee needs to improve upon, they avoid it completely. But giving feedback is a crucial skill that every manager needs to practice (in order to get better at giving it). After all, the only way you can expect your employees to get better at what they do is to give them constructive, candid and timely feedback. But, again, giving feedback is a skill that requires practice…and carefully chosen words.

Five Tips for What to Say (and What Not to Say) When Giving Feedback:

1. Say This: “I noticed that you’ve missed a few deadlines lately.” Not That: “You seem disinterested in your work lately.” When giving feedback, it’s important to focus on an employee’s specific behavior, not the impression you had of it. Telling an employee that he or she “seems disinterested”  or “appears disengaged” is actually a comment about your perception or impression of the employee – which comes across as a judgment - when in reality, the employee’s perceived disinterest could be the result of something completely unrelated to work. Focusing on the specific behavior that led to that impression opens up the door to have a clear discussion about the reasons why, rather than making the employee feel judged, alienated or confused.
2. Say This: “You were effective when you…” or “You could’ve been more effective when you…” Not That: “Good job.”  In other words, feedback that is generic and vague is also useless. Focusing on specific actions has two major benefits: It prevents employees from taking the feedback personally, and it also helps them understand what they should do (or not do) in the future.
3. Say This: “I’d like to offer you some feedback on this report, is that okay with you?” Not That: “Your report was…” Whenever possible, request to give feedback. Not only will your employees appreciate the gesture, but they’ll be more likely to take the feedback into consideration and apply it to try to improve.
4. Say This: “Your presentation was extremely well-researched. Here’s where it could’ve been stronger…”  Not That: “The research you used in your presentation was a little weak in some areas.” Preface with the positive.  Point out what the employee is doing well before delving into areas for improvement. When employees feel like their work is appreciated, they are much more likely to implement the constructive criticism – and to come to you for feedback in the future.
5. Say This: “Tell me, what was your understanding of what I asked you to do?” Not That: “You seem to have misunderstood what I asked you to do.” There’s that assumption creeping back in again, which does little to open up an honest, productive conversation.  Try to really look at your employees’ work through their eyes – and make the effort to understand their approach to their work. It will help you analyze the situation in a way that helps them reach their goals….And, perhaps most importantly, this approach will help you see how you can communicate with your employees more effectively.  

Thoughts? Feedback? Anything you would add?

“Flexibility doesn’t mean, ‘My personal life takes precedence over my work.’  It means, ‘I have the ability to make both work, but I’m going to make sacrifices in both arenas at times,’” says Delta Emerson, executive  vice president and chief of staff at Ryan, LLC.

If anyone can speak to the true meaning of workforce flexibility, it’s Emerson. At Ryan, a Dallas-based tax services firm with 900 employees worldwide, workforce flexibility is engrained in the culture, something she couldn’t say about the firm four years ago.

In 2007, voluntary turnover at Ryan had spiked and was hovering around 20 percent, and it didn’t take long for Emerson to figure out why: “The balance word kept coming up over and over again,” Emerson recalls from her conversations with employees both in the office and during exit interviews. “People would say, ‘This company expects me to give my entire self. I have no balance in my life.’”  But Emerson knew employee survey feedback and exit interview anecdotes wouldn’t be enough to convince CEO G. Brint Ryan (pictured above) that the company needed “a major paradigm shift.” She needed to talk money.

“We put a great deal of money into hiring the right people and training them.  If somebody leaves after only two or three years, it’s a huge cost to us,” Emerson says.  Add to that the costs associated with lost production from trying to replace and train new consultants, and the loss was even greater. “When Ryan started looking at metrics, those were numbers that spoke to him.”

The Tipping Point
Ultimately, however, it wasn’t Emerson who convinced Ryan to create more flexibility, but one of the company’s employees. “She said, ‘Brint, I love this job, but here’s my resignation.  I’m leaving,’” Emerson recalls. The manager was leaving for a job that offered flexibility – which just happened to be at a competitor.

That was the “tipping point” for Ryan, who finally realized everything he stood to lose. Not only did Ryan decide then and there to invest in a flexible work program, he even convinced the employee to stay and work with the committee in charge of creating it. Ryan tasked the workplace design team with creating an infrastructure focused on measuring individual and team results, as opposed to where, when and how long employees worked.

Ryan gave Emerson and her team six months to launch the program – an incredibly tight turnaround for the amount of details involved in the project. “We had to figure out how you make this happen to be compliant with State and Federal laws for benefits and employees who are exempt and nonexempt, and all that.   Let alone the training to get it rolled out,” Emerson says.

Despite the amount of work to be done, myRyan made its debut on August 1, 2008, right on schedule.

myRyan Reaps Rewards
Now, four years later, Emerson credits myRyan with helping the company “do a complete 180,” in terms of employee morale.  “People love the flexibility myRyan affords, and they’re not hesitant to say that,” Emerson says.  The positive response has had a domino effect on all aspects of the business. Not only has voluntary dropped by half, but company profits, client satisfaction scores and net promoter ratings are at an all-time high.

The program has also become the company’s “most powerful recruiting tool,” according to Emerson. She estimates that myRyan plays a role in about 85 percent of new hires’ decisions to accept an offer there. The program is even drawing former employees back to the company, as well as earning Ryan local and national recognition. The company has collected numerous  “best places to work” awards in recent years, and last year, Brint Ryan had the distinction of speaking  at a press conference on Capitol Hill, alongside Admiral Mike Mullen, on the value of workplace flexibility.

A Continuous Learning Process
While myRyan has been an enormous success, Emerson says the program is still a work in progress. Some people have a harder time getting used to the flexibility than others, creating the need to continuously re-evaluate the program. “You have to keep looking at it and figuring out what’s working, what’s not working.  Work with individuals who are struggling with it, but make sure you equip them with the knowledge and tools so that they can be ready.”

Implementing Change: Three Things to Know
For anyone hoping to implement a “major paradigm shift” at their own organizations, Emerson offers the following advice:

1. Find what works for you: “What worked for us won’t work for everyone. We’re happy to tell people our story and what we learned, but we can’t say, ‘Do exactly like we did, and you’ll be fine.’”
2. Involve your employees. “You have to have everybody involved so they have a piece of it. That way, when you encounter a pothole, they’re more likely to work with you than point at you and say, ‘Hey, you screwed up.’”
3. Anticipate growing pains. “Not everybody’s going to be thrilled with the concept of flexibility, and you’re going to have to manage to that and anticipate it.”
   

In an exclusive Q&A, the co-founders of the American Freedom Foundation discuss the mutual benefits of veteran hiring initiatives.

If Robin himself – Chris O’Donnell – can’t convince you of the benefits of hiring military veterans, take it from those who’ve experienced it firsthand: CareerBuilder’s Director of Federal Civilian Solutions, Jen Fritz, recently sat down with SMA Jack Tilly (far right in the above photo from the 2011 American Freedom Festival) and Ted Hacker, co-founders of the American Freedom Foundation, to discuss everything from the unique value in hiring veterans to helping veterans make an easier transition to the civilian workforce.

Listen to the recorded interview with AFF’s co-founders here or read highlights in the Q&A below.

Jen Fritz: What inspired you to start the American Freedom Foundation?
Ted Hacker: When sergeant major Tilley was on active duty, he conducted what we call ‘The Hope and Freedom Tours’ of Iraq and Afghanistan, taking entertainers from all genres of music to perform for our troops. I was fortunate enough to go along once, and it changed my life. When we came back, sergeant major Tilley was looking for something to do to carry on the work he’d been doing in the army, so together we came up with an idea to continue to do concerts and shows for our military to support them, their families, our veterans and our wounded warriors.
SMA Tilley: Yes, I remember the conversation. I called Ted up on the phone and said, “I want to help our veterans,” and Ted jumped right in. We’ve been doing it now for eight years.

What do you hope people in the Foundation take away?
Tilley: I hope they take away the fact that veterans bring so much to the job market. I hope they understand the loyalty of veterans, and the commitment they have for our country. Right now, more than probably at any other time in our country’s history, our veterans and their families need help.

I think that’s a really good point. Could you talk more about the benefits organizations get from hiring veterans?
Tilley: Just think about it: people spend so much money training someone on leadership, but when you get a veteran, [you already get] the leadership they have, the commitment, the loyalty they have to the organization, the work ethic. And they’re all team players. You don’t have to train them as far as taking responsibility or completing the task. They’ve already been trained well in the military. Those are the kind of skills that are going to make your organization that much better.
Hacker: There are so many qualities and traits veterans have from their service in the military that are very attractive to a potential employer.

Yes, they’ve got focus, discipline and leadership, and they’re clearly capable of making quick decisions, all of which help organizations move quickly.
Hacker: Exactly.
Tilley: One of the neatest things I’ve ever observed was once when a unit in Iraq was having a riot, and there was a unit of infantry men in front of them, and the sergeant in charge there had the presence of mind to tell them to sling their weapons and kneel on one leg, and they stopped the rioting. They probably saved a lot of people from getting hurt. This sergeant was only 22 years old, and yet he had the presence of mind to take control of the situation and do the right thing.  When you look at the army and all the services combined, the number of techniques and tactics they can bring into the civilian workforce are just unbelievable.

That’s along the lines of what you were saying earlier about the amount of money corporations put into employee training and development. Think about the amount of money that has already been invested in these veterans before they even show up at the company’s door.
Tilley: The other thing to think about is how veterans can help you develop other employees within your organization. I’ve had employers ask veterans to come in and give leadership, communication or counseling classes. It’s really a win-win situation for any employer.
Hacker: I want to emphasize the earlier point about acting cool under pressure and being able to handle crisis management. These are very strong characteristics veterans can offer potential employers. Veterans are ready to go: They’re ready to act under pressure, and they’re ready to lead. I’ve witnessed it over my years of working here with veterans on multiple levels.

I agree 100 percent. The veterans in this office certainly make everyone take it up a notch. Switching gears, what are some of the challenges veterans face upon re-entering the civilian workforce?
Tilley: One of the biggest problems veterans have is just trying to fit in – that transition. There’ve been 6,000 veterans killed in this war, 41,000 wounded, 1200 amputees, and one in five have some form of PTSD or PTI, so the problem normally is, how do they adjust into the civilian sector? The other problem is that sometimes they wait just a little too long to make that transition into that civilian sector. So we need to educate corporate America on how they help veterans adjust to the civilian sector as well as what they should be aware of. One thing we point out is they have to adjust their workplaces to accommodate veterans who are wounded or have special needs. If they can do that, they’ll see the value of hiring a vet even more.

What are some other ways private employers can make that transition easier?
Tilley: Private employers should take it upon themselves to introduce themselves to the local military installation and educate themselves and find out what goes on at that military installation. They could also contact the Department of Defense or the National Guard and ask how they can assist in helping people make that transition.

A lot of companies have voiced an interest in hiring veterans, but they’re not quite sure how to get off the ground. Are there particular areas or industries that speak better to veterans’ skills?
Tilley: I think veterans who move into smaller businesses have a little bit of an easier transition. Also, I think the IT industry is good, as well as health care and operational things like management engineering.
Hacker: Here’s something else to keep in mind: 86 percent of the force is enlisted for all services, and 14 percent is comprised of officers and warrant officers. Sometimes the focus is more on officers’ employment, but the enlisted force has changed a lot over the years as far as education and development. Many of our non-commissioned officers and soldiers have bachelor’s and master’s degrees and, in some cases, doctorates. Education-wise, there’s a lot of opportunity for enlisted soldiers as far as any position you need filled in your organization.

That’s a good point. It’s important for employers to understand that “enlisted” has a different connotation now than it had in the past.
Tilley: Exactly. For the last 10 or 15 years, there’s been a tremendous focus on education in all services.

Any final thoughts?
Tilley: If you haven’t talked to a veteran, it’s so important to reach out and find out how veterans can make your organization that much better and that much more efficient.
Hacker: Veteran hiring has become such a big issue. I think the more it comes out how much hiring veterans benefits the company, the more we’re going to see companies taking action. Corporate America is stepping up. I think we’re in a groundswell of activity right now that we can take advantage of to really vet out veterans and help them find jobs.

Listen to the complete CareerBuilder interview with AFF’s Tilley and Hacker here.

Do you have an experience with hiring veterans that you’d like to share? Tell us how military veterans benefit your organization in the comments below.

Last month, I discussed a recent CareerBuilder survey of workers nationwide, which asked them which factors they consider most important when evaluating employers. Below are their answers, in order of importance, and what employers can take away from these findings.

• Compensation: It should come as no surprise that workers prioritize compensation when considering new opportunities and potential employers. This finding underscores the fact that employers need to create a compensation strategy in order to ensure you’re doing right by both your company and your employees when it comes to fair – and competitive – pay.
• Benefits: One way to ensure you’re providing optimal employee benefits is to start with the question, “Are employees using the benefits we offer?” Before you invest in new benefits, survey your employees to see what they’re actually taking advantage of, and if there are some opportunities to replace current benefits with new, desirable ones.
• Advancement: While you might not be able to offer every employee a promotion, you can probably find a way to empower them with the resources to learn new skills and take on bigger responsibilities or more diverse projects. The effort demonstrates your faith in their abilities and your concern for their professional success and career development, which can go a long way in promoting employee productivity and increasing retention.
• Work-Life Balance: “A lot of company cultures are passive aggressive, saying, ‘We care about our people, and we want them to have a work-life balance,’ but there’s an underlying pressure to work a 60- to 70-hour week,” says Matthew Kelly, author of ‘The Myth of the Work-Life Balance’. If this sounds familiar, consider taking stock of your employees’ satisfaction levels and work with them to find where there might be opportunities to provide more flexible work arrangements that work for both them and the company.
• Appreciation by Management: This finding supports the argument that companies that make an effort to recognize their employees have a competitive advantage today, according to Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine, authors of Winning with a Culture of Recognition. “Strategic recognition does not have to be costly,” they told me in an interview last year. “Though it does require investment. By consolidating multiple tactical programs, [companies] can fund a strategic recognition investment.”

While these findings give an overall view of what job seekers want, it’s still important to do further research into the wants and needs of the candidates you’re trying to pull in, which will guide your recruitment strategy, and help you stay competitive in the long run.

Most companies would agree – it is their people who differentiate them from the competition. Thus, attracting and retaining great people is critical.

CareerBuilder’s Senior Director of Talent Intelligence, Sanja Licina, and Director of Employment Branding, Keith Hadley, recently led the webinar, The 5 Step Approach to Identifying and Attracting the Right Employees. In it, they provided a practical five-step plan you, as a small- or medium-sized employer can use to  identify and attract the engaged, passionate employees who care as much about your organization’s success as you do. Check out some of the highlights below.

• Employee surveys can unlock the secret to attraction and retention. There’s a huge disconnect between what executives believe their employees want and what workers actually want. In order to understand what compels employees to work for you – and stay with you – it is crucial that you administer employee feedback regularly through companywide surveys.
• Surveys are only as good as your follow-through. Follow-through is critical. Once you’ve surveyed your employees, be sure to tell them how and when you’re going to take action on their feedback. Provide regular updates on the progress you’re making.
• Stop talking about your company first. All too often, companies begin their story by talking about their company, when they need to start by talking about their employee value proposition. You only have 10 to 15 seconds to capture job seekers’ attention and compel them to dig deeper. Talk about what’s in it for them first, then get into the details about your company later.
• Job boards open doors for companies, but social media takes job seekers inside. The majority (68 percent) of job seekers use job boards to search for jobs, creating a way for smaller companies to get in front of job seekers. Ninety-two percent will of job seekers will then visit the career site of a company in which they’re interested, and 70 percent will go on to use social media to verify the claims companies make on those sites. Social media, therefore, is less of a place to advertise jobs and more of a way to build your company’s reputation.
• Mobile isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity. Anywhere from 13 to 20 percent of job seekers are conducting searches on mobile devices – and these numbers are rapidly increasing. Employers need to recognize the increasing importance of mobile technology and structure their recruitment strategy accordingly. By next year, mobile may very well be the main way people search for jobs.
• Embrace your unique employee value proposition. Small companies can and should leverage the benefits of working at a smaller organization to appeal to job seekers who desire more ownership of their work or the chance to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
• It’s not enough to look like a good employer. You have to actually be a good employer. Getting talent into your company is only the first step. To retain the talent you bring in, you have to make good on the promises you make during the recruitment process.

Want to learn more? Download the complete webinar for free here.

Hiring plans in the U.S. are getting back to pre-recession levels, according to CareerBuilder’s latest nationwide survey. 

One-third of employers added full-time, permanent employees in the first quarter of this year, on par with 2007 and the highest increase reported since the recession began.  The momentum is expected to continue with 30 percent of employers planning to add new full-time, permanent staff in April through June. More than 2,000 hiring managers and human resource professionals across industries and company sizes participated in the latest survey.

Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, offers his take on the results:

We have moved from an anemic job market to one that is stable and growing. While still cautious, employers are feeling better about the state of the U.S. economy and the debt situation in Europe.  Forty-one percent of companies reported their sales have increased over the last six months, which is helping to fuel greater confidence in hiring.  The amount of job listings we’re seeing for key categories on CareerBuilder.com are similar to that of 2007.  All indicators point to steady improvement in the job market in the second quarter and beyond.

Here are some takeaways from the forecast:

• One third (33 percent) of employers added full-time, permanent staff in the first quarter of 2012
• Nine percent decreased headcount in the first quarter 2012, a slight improvement from 10 percent last year.
• Looking ahead, 30 percent of employers plan to increase their full-time, permanent headcount in the second quarter.
• Thirty-seven percent of employers hired contract or temporary workers in the first quarter, up from 29 percent last year.
• Hiring in companies of all sizes is showing signs of improvement.  The percentage of employers planning to recruit in the next few months increased by two to three percentage points over last year for different segments.

Challenges Ahead for Employers

Results from the survey indicate what employers can expect in the coming months.

Increased Competition for Talent: Of employers who recruited for positions in the last year, more than half (56 percent) reported that a candidate rejected a job offer from their organization.  Forty-one percent of those attributed the rejection to their inability to provide the candidate’s desired salary while 22 percent said they didn’t offer the position quickly enough and the candidate was already hired somewhere else.

Growing Skills Shortage: Despite the high unemployment rate, many employers struggle to find the talent they need, and the challenge is only growing. Thirty-one percent of employers currently have jobs for which they can’t find qualified employees, up from 24 percent last year, and 15 percent of employers reported that, because they can’t fill high-skill positions within their organizations, they’re not able to create lower-skilled positions that are tied to these roles. The findings indicate a need for employers to recognize the need to plan ahead and recognize how the growing gap between high-skill job openings and available talent has a larger impact on overall employment.

For complete survey results, download the full Q2 Hiring Forecast here.

Workforce gender differences has always been a hot topic of conversation – from speculation over why women still earn less than men, to the debate over which gender makes better leaders, to inherent differences over workplace personas, and even down to how their networking habits differ.

But when it comes to what they’re looking for in a potential employer, are men and women really all that different?

Not really, according to a recent CareerBuilder study on what job seekers value most in their current and potential employers. According to the survey, men and women showed little variation in what they prioritize when it comes to factors like compensation, benefits, training and development and culture.

The only areas that showed any difference at all were advancement opportunities, work/life balance and appreciation by management:

• Males are 25 percent more likely than females to value advancement in potential employers.
• Females are 20 percent more likely than men to focus on work/life Balance and 15 percent more likely to focus on appreciation by their manager.

“The findings indicate that employers who promote career advancement as part of their brand message may have a slightly more masculine appeal, while brands built around the relationships and connections of the organization may have a slightly more feminine appeal, which can be differentiators if you’re working to better diversify your organization” says Keith Hadley, Director of Employment Branding at CareerBuilder.

Yet, while these findings show that differences between what men and women want exist in some areas, they may not be as significant as people might expect. Thus, employers might be better off targeting their message by profession. Consider the following findings:

• Nurses (a female-dominated field) are more likely than all women to prioritize work/life balance
• Engineers (a male-dominated field) are less likely than all men or women to prioritize advancement

“Your brand will most likely play well with both genders, provided you are emphasizing attributes valued by your ideal candidates in terms of role or profession,” says Hadley. “Target by the kinds of roles and personalities that are going to drive your business in the future.”

All in all, the findings further underscore the need for employers to define their audiences, understand what their audiences wants and create specific messages that speak to those wants.  “Be intentional about defining your audience and about how well your message connects,” advises Hadley, adding, “and use data to confirm your hunches.”

Do these findings surprise you?

In the following Q&A, CareerBuilder’s CEO, Matt Ferguson, discusses the company’s new Empowering Employment initiative, an effort to empower both businesses and job seekers alike to fuel job growth and bridge the skills gap.

Can you tell me, in your own words, what it means to empower employment? How do you see that unfolding at CareerBuilder?
To me, Empowering Employment means, “How do we help our customers and the companies we service hire really talented people to drive their business?”  For every company in the United States, their most important asset walks in and out of their building every day. CareerBuilder can help those companies understand who they should be hiring and how they can retain those people; and provide services to help make them smarter about that whole process.

On a larger scale, I think empowering employment is important for the entire United States, because we’re dealing with an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent, and we have to get people back to work. CareerBuilder can be an important part of helping job seekers find the jobs of the future, get the training they need and help drive down the unemployment rate.

You’ve mentioned before that companies need to take the initiative to retrain workers if the right candidates aren’t applying. Could you talk a little bit about CareerBuilder’s initiative to reskill IT workers and your goals around that?
The goals of that initiative are just to get people back to work. There are a lot of really ambitious, talented people who’ve been unemployed in this country over 12 months, and they’re unfortunately not getting an opportunity to even interview for jobs. So all we were trying to do was find those really ambitious, talented people who wanted a new chance, a new opportunity, and give them the chance to develop technology skills they can use either here at CareerBuilder or somewhere else.  Almost every company out there of a certain size has an information technology group, and the thing about information technology is, you know for the next 50 years and beyond, if you have skills in that area, you’re going to have plenty of career opportunities.

You recently wrote about ways in which companies can navigate the skills gap, one of which is offering more competitive compensation. What do you say to employers who simply don’t think they can afford to offer higher pay?
I think every company is resistant to say, “I want to raise wages for everybody a certain amount,” but what you have to look at is, “What is the market for that kind of position? What’s going on there?” There are a lot of ways we can get our people to be more productive, which allows us to have more profits and pay our people more. We have to figure out the productivity part. Then we can afford to pay people more and make more money, which is in the best interests of everyone – the employees, the shareholders and the customers. Every company should be doing that. In some cases, however, if they’re trying to recruit for a particular position, the market may dictate that they have to offer a bit more in order to bring in the best people. Everybody wants talented people. Talented people come at a certain cost.

What other strategies can companies implement to bring in better talent? 
Pay is just one thing people are looking for today. A lot of very talented workers out there want the entire package. They’re looking for things like work/life balance, a company that has a social mission, the ability to give back, et cetera. If you can incorporate those other elements into the whole package, then pay just becomes one component of that.  For example, a lot of people want to work from home part-time or spend less time at the office. If you can provide balance in different kinds of ways to people, it may not be necessary to pay that much more, because you have a more robust offering across the entire employment scape.

Are there any industry leaders whom you admire or think are doing a particularly good job of empowering employment and driving economic growth?
There are so many companies that are doing it so successfully. When I look at the American economy as a whole, I think almost every company is trying to do things differently. They have really stretched themselves and their people to go to new heights and do different things. I see that across the board. We’re not the same economy that we were at the beginning of 2008. Obviously, it’s been a hard four years, but almost every company in the U.S. I interact with is doing things differently now, and in a good way. These companies are a lot smarter about their business, and they’re putting themselves in a position to compete globally in the next five years.

See the video: Watch as CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson answer the question, “What does ‘Empowering Employment’ mean to you?”

A new CareerBuilder survey indicates that some American workers have about as much chance of properly identifying their CEO in a lineup as they do of winning the Hunger Games…but does it matter?

CareerBuilder recently surveyed more than 7,000 full-time workers to find out how well American workers know senior leadership at their organizations. Results indicate that while most workers have met their CEO, many don’t even know what he or she looks like. Below are highlights from the survey.   

• 40 percent of American workers say they’ve never met their CEO in person.
• 21 percent don’t even know what their CEO looks like.
• Only 35 percent of workers can name all of the C-level officers at their organization, while an additional 21 percent can only name some C-level officers.
• 68 percent of workers don’t know how much their company generates in revenue each year

What your employees don’t know (about the CEO)…Can it hurt?
According to Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, visibility is key to employee engagement. “Employees realize their top leaders can’t know everyone on a first name basis, but they do expect their leaders to be a public symbol that embodies the organization’s values,” she says.

And while it might not be feasible to give one-on-one time to every employee, finding a way to connect is an important part of the leadership puzzle.

“Leadership from the C-suite can be a difficult balance. The CEO and, in some cases, other senior leaders are the face of the company both internally and externally. Meaning, they need to find a level of accessibility that allows them to connect with employees, while on the other hand, dedicate the necessary time for building relationships with outside stakeholders,” Haefner says.

“How I stay connected” | Insights from the CareerBuilder Leadership Series
We gathered thoughts from various industry leaders on how they connect with employees at every level – and why establishing such a connection matters. Here’s what they said.

“It is difficult in a large company to have one-on-one relationships with all employees, but I find doing brown bag lunches and skip level meetings pay back immensely. It is great to know the people who are working hard every day for your success and let them know who you are as a person, not just a figurehead.” – Gregg Kaplan, President and COO of Coinstar

“Whether it be through pre-shift meetings, individual one-on-one meetings, sharing individual guest experiences, or technological communication, our managers live ‘The Message’ and do what they can to ensure our employees have a great experience. When the employees feel valued and respected it rolls right to our guests.” –Rick Frederico, Chairman and Co-CEO of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc.

“I encourage Sabre employees to follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my blog so they are informed regarding the direction of – and what’s going on within – the company.” –Philip P. Jaurigue, President and CEO of Sabre Systems, Inc.

“One thing I enjoy is the lunch and learn sessions we host. We go out into the field, give short sound bites of what’s going on the in company, then go around the room to hear from employees. It’s a great way to get a pulse of the organization.” –Maritza Poza-Grise, vice president of DuPont Human Resources

“In the first two years in my role, I visited over 200 facilities to allow me the most informal way to actually meet our caregiver teams. I met with as many people as I could, and I tried to get them to tell me what was on their minds. It was extremely valuable for me; and I felt that I really developed a special relationship with the employees I talked to.” – George V. Hager, Jr., CEO of Genesis HealthCare

“Senior management travels a lot to our regional and local offices; we’re very active in the business and strive to understand what our team faces every day in providing services to our customers. We’re always out there, kicking up dirt and turning over rocks to help uncover opportunities with our employees.” – Jeff Pederson, President of CORT Business Services

How does senior leadership stay connected with employees at your organization?

It’s official: job boards are still among the top resources for job seekers. According to the companies surveyed in the latest Career Xroads study, 20.1 percent of their external new hires credited the job boards with their finding the job posting.

While that’s good news for recruiters and hiring managers who are posting jobs on the more popular job boards, this isn’t necessarily an ‘if you build it, they will come’ situation. The truth is, some job postings just perform better than others, and it doesn’t always have to do with the job itself, but how you present it.

Job seekers spend an average of three seconds scanning a job posting, leaving you very little time to grab their attention. And that first impression counts: in a recent CareerBuilder survey, 75 percent of job seekers reported that the look and feel of a posting influences their decision to apply.

Keeping that in mind, here are a few things – must haves, if you will – to make your job postings stand out and bring in more applicants.

1. Specific job titles. Unless you’re hiring someone for your Bon Jovi cover band, do not advertise that you’re looking for a “rock star” for your next hire. In fact, there’s nothing rock star about putting it in your job posting title. Not only is the term cliché, but I don’t know any job seeker who would search for a job using the term ‘rock star’ (unless maybe they were doing it ironically). The same applies for ‘rainmaker’ or ‘visionary’.  In fact, if you want to be seen my more job seekers and come up in search results, the more you need to think like a job seeker and utilize terms they would be searching for.
2. A ‘Must haves’ category. Often short on time (and attention), job seekers are likely skimming your job posting for relevant information and missing key essentials in the process. Create a short, three- to five-item list of essential qualifications (such as years of experience, educational degree, etc.) so job seekers can quickly and easily assess whether or not they’re truly qualified for the job.
3. Bullets. Utilize bullets wherever possible to list things like required skills, the roles of the job, and company benefits. Don’t go overboard, however: a long list of bullets is just as ineffective and daze-inducing as a continuous block of text.
4. Compensation. It may be a controversial subject, but including salary information in your job posting increases performance and ultimately saves time. If you don’t want to include a definite number or range, consider including a benefit statement such as: “Great pay—higher than industry average, commensurate upon experience, bonuses paid each quarter, opportunities for additional commissions.”
5. Graphics. Wherever possible, include company logos or slogans in the job posting, which can increase applications by 13 to 21 percent, as well as icons linking to any recruitment videos you might have.  According to CareerBuilder internal data, job postings with video icons are viewed 12 percent more than postings without video, and CareerBuilder clients receive a 34 percent greater application rate when they add video to their job postings.
6. Keywords. The more keywords you include in your job posting contains that are relevant to the position, the higher it will appear in job seekers’ search results. Look at your job posting and consider where you can substitute key words that a job seeker might use to search for the position. (Instead of saying, “The person in this position will be required to…” for example, say, “The Marketing Manager will be required to…”) Again, think like a job seeker to include words they might use when searching for jobs.
7. An answer to the question, “What’s in it for me?” Why would someone want to work for your company? Whether you choose to communicate that message through employee testimonials, a listing of the best places to work awards you’ve won, or as the opening statement to your job posting, a truly effective job posting tells job seekers why they should apply to work for your company.

Understandably, taking the time to create a job posting is a luxury many recruiters and hiring managers don’t have these days. If that’s the case, you might want to look into CareerBuilder’s Job Enhancement feature, which takes your existing Job Posting and gives it somewhat of a facelift to increase visibility, click through rates and job applications. Check out the video below.

In the world of professional sports, cross-training is an essential practice in order for athletes to maintain high levels of performance, avoid injuries associated with overuse and prepare their bodies for the challenges ahead.

In the world of workforce management, the same rules apply. Cross-training employees means teaching them the skills required to perform job functions outside of their main roles and responsibilities. As a result, companies reap the benefits of enhanced employee performance, better teamwork and a stronger organization overall.

Consider the following benefits of cross-training your employees:

• Reduce the risk of injury: Cross-training employees helps ensure business runs smoothly even when there’s a shortage of staff due to illness or vacation. Giving employees the skills needed to fill in for absent employees not only helps maintain productivity throughout the organization, but it also sets the groundwork for a faster, smoother transition should the opportunity arise to be promoted or transfer to another role within the company.
• Avoid burnout: Doing the same thing over and over isn’t only boring, it’s a recipe for worker burnout. Teaching employees new skills re-engages their interest in their jobs by giving them a break from their normal routine and enticing them new and interesting challenges.
• Enhance teamwork: Cross-training enables your employees see the work that goes into other roles within the organization, As a result, they will have a better appreciation and understanding of the work their colleagues do and ultimately be able to collaborate better across teams and departments.
• Promote loyalty: Research indicates that what today’s workers want most are recognition and career advancement opportunities from their employers. With cross-training, they get both. Giving your employees the resources to learn new skills and take on bigger responsibilities demonstrates your faith in their abilities and your concern for their professional success and career development.

Tips for implementing a cross-training program

• Do it early, and do it often. Don’t wait until there’s a need to cross-train employees. Start cross-training now so you have the flexibility to move staff around and cover extra duties at a moment’s notice.
• Set a goal. For any business initiative to be successful, you have to start with a goal. Ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish with cross-training?” and be specific. Make sure everyone involved in the program understands the goals of the program and how you plan to measure success.
• Find what works for you. When it comes to how you administer the training, there’s no one way to do it. Consider what will work best for your organization and your employees. Training can take place through an on-the-job buddy system, a mentoring program or, if employees are comfortable with it, from supervisors. Another option is having employees take classes through a pre-existing internal training and development program.
• Provide balance. Your employees will get the most benefit from cross-training if they aren’t distracted with the notion that they’re neglecting their primary responsibilities. You may need to scale back some of your employees’ projects during training so they don’t get burned out trying to take on training in addition to their full-time workload.

Do practice cross-training at your organization? What methods have worked for you?

A new research study from CareerBuilder finds that money rules when it comes to appealing to the average job seeker.  Overall, compensation topped the list of things that matter to employees the most, followed by benefits, advancement opportunities, work/life balance and appreciation from management.

Yet, when broken down by various elements, the results show that there’s hardly such a thing as the ‘average’ when it comes to what job seekers want. The way job seekers evaluate prospective employers and opportunities vary according to several factors – including job seeker education level, industry, gender, age and ethnicity. Take a look at some of the findings from CareerBuilder’s survey:

• Job seekers with a master’s degree are more likely look at whether a company offers a good work/life balance and interesting assignments before they look at compensation.
• The more education you have, the less important opportunities for advancement becomes in job selection. For example, only 12.6 percent of job seekers with master’s degree t rate advancement opportunities as number one on their ‘most wanted’ list, compared with 23.2 percent of those with a high school diploma.
• IT professions are more likely to focus on Advancement, but not Engineers.  Instead, Engineers are 50 percent more drawn to Interesting Assignments than IT professionals (20 percent versus 6.3 percent overall).
• Nurses are 31 percent more likely to prioritize high pay and work-life balance than professionals in other fields.
• Compensation is more important to Baby Boomers (workers born between 1946 and 1964) than it is to Millennials (workers born between 1981 to 2000) by almost 5 percent. Millennials, however, are 47 percent more likely to value advancement opportunities than Baby Boomers.

If these results tell us anything, it’s the importance of understanding your audience when trying to recruit a certain segment of the workforce. If, for example, you’re trying to pull in applicants with master’s degrees, advertising that your company offers a good work/life balance and that the job will include interesting assignments will help your value proposition. The same ‘benefits’ may not be as compelling, however, to another segment of the workforce, such as IT professionals, who favor advancement opportunities.

Of course these results are just a snapshot of the available research out there on job seeker behavior, attitudes and perceptions.  The more research you do on the talent you hope to recruit, however, the smarter you’ll be about where to allocate your recruitment advertising dollars, and the more time and money you’ll save in the long run.

When it comes to filling open positions, recruiting from within your own employee base might just be your best bet.

Remember how, in Some Kind of Wonderful, Eric Stoltz’s Keith relentlessly pursues the attractive, but ever elusive Amanda, played by Lea Thompson, only to discover that (spoiler alert!) his true love was actually Mary Stewart Masterson’s Watts, who’d been by his side all along?

There’s actually a lesson there for recruiters and hiring managers: sometimes the very thing you’re looking for in terms of new hires is actually right in front of you. In other words, next time you’re searching for candidates to fill an open position, don’t overlook the perfectly good candidates who may just be right in front of you: your current employees.  You might not immediately consider your current employees – the Watts’ of the candidate world, if you will – when considering who your next hire is going to be, but if you look at the benefits of recruiting from your current employee base, you might find that they’re ultimately your perfect match.

Internal recruiting: Driving down costs while increasing productivity
Consider the time you invest when you bring in new hires, onboarding them and familiarizing them with the organizational culture. Current employees are already familiar with the culture of the organization and daily business operations. While that employee might need some training to supplement the skills needed for his or her new role, the costs of bringing in a new employee will likely still outweigh the costs of training a current one for a new role. Newly promoted employees can also assist in training their replacements while transitioning to their new role within a company, further driving onboarding and training costs for other hires.

Another beneficial side effect of internal recruiting is the potential to positively affect morale and productivity. Hiring from within your own company proves to other employees that you recognize their hard work, trust them to take on other responsibilities, and are truly providing the career advancement opportunities workers value so much. As a result, they’ll be driven to work that much harder to take advantage of those opportunities themselves.

As the labor market gets more competitive and candidates with the specialized skills you need become harder to find, employers are placing higher importance on the practice of hiring employees based on cultural fit and then, once they’re on board, providing them with the skills they need for the role. After all, you can teach a smart, eager employee certain technical skills in a relatively short amount of time, but you can’t necessarily teach values, work ethic and other soft skills that are just as crucial to the growth of the organization.

Prepare your company – and your employees – for future growth
Whether you currently have an open position or not, and regardless of whether you plan to hire internally when you do, it’s always a good idea to set the groundwork for the possibility of promoting from within in the future.

By investing in training and educational opportunities for employees, you not only make them more productive in their current roles, but you’re providing a foundation that enables them to move up and take on bigger challenges in the future. Take a cue from employers like AT&T, Esurance and 24 Hour Fitness, all of whom discuss how and why the prioritize employee training their companies in the video below.

Ahead of their upcoming webinar, The 5 Step Approach to Identifying and Attracting the Right Employees, CareerBuilder’s Senior Director of Talent Intelligence, Sanja Licina, and Director of Employment Branding, Keith Hadley, recently sat down for a Q&A to discuss some of the content of the webinar, as well as offer hiring advice small business owners and hiring managers can apply today.

What’s the biggest obstacle that businesses face today in terms of recruiting the right people?
Keith Hadley: I think small business are too reactive. They don’t typically have large numbers of vacant positions, so they go from requisition to requisition. And because they are so reactive, they don’t set down some of the basics you need to have in place to attract top talent.
Sanja Licina: I agree. I’d also add that sometimes the biggest challenges for small businesses are the obstacles they create for themselves, such as the perception that they’re always going to lose out to bigger businesses. Or the thought that they can only recruit in their location or that there’s something inherently about them that makes them inferior to other companies; however, our research has shown that that’s just not the case. I think it’s really important for them to not use that as a deterrent to reach out to the people they think would be the best fit for their organization.

Because in many ways people are attracted to small businesses precisely because they are small, yet small businesses don’t necessarily see that as being an asset, right?
KH: Yes, I know a lot of people who would love to find a lower-pressure job closer to home at a smaller company, where you can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

In your upcoming webinar, you talk about the need for small businesses to “tell their story” to appeal to job seekers. What exactly do you mean by that?
SL: Telling your story is about understanding what makes working for your company better than working somewhere else, and then saying it aloud, and saying it with confidence. The medium could be everything from word of mouth to social media – there’s really no limit.
KH: One mistake businesses make is talking about your company from the perspective of your products, your services, your industry, et cetera. That’s the most boring story.  Small businesses need to sit back and say, “How are we approaching talent? What is it that talent is looking for?”  A good story answers the question, “What’s in for me?” because it engages job seekers and makes them want to learn more.

Aside from the chance to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, as Keith mentioned, what are some other assets small business can leverage when telling their stories?
KH: I think one thing that makes small- and medium-sized businesses unique is they really are like families.  Because they’re small, everybody knows everybody else.  People are very connected, and there tends to be more loyalty in a small business because people are still very much people. And that’s a real strength.
SL: There’s more upward mobility in small business. Smaller organizations can often offer people much higher levels of responsibility much more quickly than bigger businesses.
KH: Another thing is that small businesses are more agile. Right now, I’m working with a big company that is just bogged down in multiple layers of decisions. Our point person on the project keeps giving us “yesses” and then coming back later with a change, because somebody above them in that hierarchy we don’t even know keeps changing things. There are so many layers of bureaucracy to navigate in bigger businesses that you don’t have to deal with in smaller companies.
Sanja: Yes, and that agility also makes it easier for them to adopt trends a lot faster than other organizations, because they can implement them a lot quicker. That’s a huge strength.

Could you speak a little bit about the importance of recruiting even when there aren’t positions open currently?
KH: Everybody gets that product marketing is an ongoing thing, and they proactively make a plan to put together a marketing presence. Small businesses need to do the same for their recruiting presence and really think of it as an ongoing thing they need to invest money in and focus on. 
SL: Yes, I think sometimes people look at the cost of doing something, but they don’t think about the cost of not doing something. Ongoing recruitment gets more people to know about your organization. When you realize you need to hire somebody it’s almost too late, because if nobody knows who you are and what you’re doing, the time it takes to get someone good is going to be that much longer. But if you’ve already talked with people about the benefits of working for your organization, you already have a lot of warm candidates you can bring on board a lot faster.

Do you believe it’s better to leave an open position unfilled or to hire someone who’s not qualified and hope it works out?
SL: I think it depends on the supply and demand, and understanding how difficult it is going to be to find these people. There’s data out there to show you whether the talent is out there or not, and if you see that there are a good number of people out there who you’re looking for, you need to get smarter about how to get in front of them and how to tell your story better. So in that case, my recommendation would be to wait and hire. Now, if it’s a position that’s extremely difficult to hire for, then you probably need to look at your requirements and determine what it is you’re willing to train for.
KH: But you definitely minimize the likelihood of hiring the wrong person by being proactive and increasing the pool of people you have exposure to, which feeds back into everything we’ve talked about.

Want to hear more? Join Sanja and Keith on Wednesday, March 28 for The 5 Step Approach to Identifying and Attracting the Right Employees. They’ll discuss more best practices for identifying and attracting the engaged, passionate employees who will help your small business grow. Registration is free. You can also follow the conversation on Twitter at #cb5steps

Much like online dating sites, temporary workers can’t seem to shake being the target of unflattering stereotypes. But if you know anyone who’s ever found their true heart’s desire through (or at least gotten a few decent dinners out of) online dating, you know better than to let negative stereotypes get in the way of what for many is a great experience.

Companies are often hesitant to hire temporary workers for fear these workers will turn out to be lazy, unproductive, and unqualified or unskilled. And while these fears are oftentimes unfounded, it creates a challenge for recruiters trying to sell their clients on the benefits of hiring temporary workers.

What employers need to realize is that today’s temporary workers are actually highly qualified, skilled individuals who have a strong work ethic and take pride in their work.

Oftentimes, they’re specialists in their fields who choose temporary work because they enjoy the flexibility and autonomy of it. Because they understand that their reputations follow them where they go, they produce high quality work for their employers in efforts to build their personal brands, resumes and portfolios.

In other instances, they may be stay-at-home parents, recent retirees, college students or other qualified individuals whose current schedules or situations do not allow for a full-time position; however, that doesn’t mean they’re any less capable than turning out consistent, high quality work.

In addition to providing high quality work and diverse skills, temporary workers offer other major benefits recruiters should emphasize when talking to clients.

Money-saving benefits
Hiring temporary workers saves companies from having to throw a larger than usual amount of money at candidates before knowing their level of performance. Temporary workers do not require incentive-laden benefit packages or costly insurance coverage. Temporary workers are paid only for hours worked, so companies get exactly what they pay for without having to offer a large salary.

Time-saving benefits
Temporary workers offer companies the flexibility to cover long absences and seasonal demands without adding an additional salary. When it comes to covering for employee who is out for an indefinite amount of time – due to something like maternity or medical leave, military duty or a sabbatical – a client may need to fill a position but not necessarily want to hire a full- or part-time candidate to cover this period. Temporary workers offer a convenient solution to this problem.

“Try before you buy” benefits
Temporary workers provide companies the luxury of getting to “test drive” employees before offering them a full-time position. Say, for instance, a company wants to expand its marketing efforts and see if there’s enough work to keep a full-time copywriter busy. Hiring a temporary copywriter would allow a company to see first-hand whether the position is warranted. If they like the copywriter’s style and think having one on staff full-time is beneficial, they can offer the temp first shot to come aboard full-time; otherwise, the company can cut the temporary copywriter loose with no strings attached.

Right now, it is more important than ever for businesses to hire temporary workers in order to save money. The competitive job market has forced many companies to increase salaries in order to fill open positions. According to CareerBuilder’s most recent Annual Job Forecast, employers expect compensation levels to increase for both current staff and prospective employees as recruiting for skilled talent becomes more competitive. Sixty-two percent of employers plan to increase compensation for their existing employee base while 32 percent will offer higher starting salaries for new employees.

A recruiter’s role is to provide clients with the best fits for their needs, but convincing clients of the benefits of hiring temporary employees is often half the battle – especially if those clients are already skeptical.

Temporary workers are not the answer for every client and every situation, of course, but understanding when temporary workers are the ideal option – and being able to effectively communicate these benefits to clients – is how successful recruiters earn clients’ trust and confidence.

Roll out the red carpet and call Joan Rivers: awards season isn’t over yet!

CareerBuilder just announced the launch of its Big Strides in Small Business Award contest – an effort to recognize the small businesses that have done a particularly spectacular job of fueling job growth and fostering economic recovery this year…and we’re asking YOU to nominate your small business today.

Think your small business is a big deal?

The contest is open to small businesses with 250 employees or less located in the fifty (50) United States plus the District of Columbia.  In order to be eligible, the small business must have added a minimum of 10 employees to its company in 2011 and must plan to add a minimum of 10 jobs to its company in 2012. As always, some restrictions may apply, but you can get all those details – and fill out an application form – by going to the contest page now.

Did we mention there are prizes?

(Not that there needs to be, right? Because really, isn’t it an honor just to be eligible for nomination?) Okay, but for realz, the prize package is pretty sweet: the winner of the Big Strides in Small Business Award (see how the selection process works here) will receive a grand prize worth $12,000, including a complimentary pass to CareerBuilder’s upcoming User Conference in Chicago in October, and a slew of free CareerBuilder services. (I hear there was talk about throwing in a date with Nick Lachey, too, but apparently that’s been done.)

Did we mention you only have until April 15? So get on it! Nominate your small business today.

Taking its own advice to “Start Building,” CareerBuilder sets out on a mission to build something bigger: the economy.

What began two years ago as a branding campaign to prove itself as a strategic business partner to clients has morphed today into a much larger initiative. With the launch of Empowering Employment, CareerBuilder hopes to communicate the company’s mission to create a stronger job market and fuel economic growth.

The idea for the new campaign generated from talks between CareerBuilder’s Jamie Womack, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Branding, and other company executives. “We felt the time had come to move beyond ‘Start Building’ [our employer-focused slogan since 2008],” says Womack. “We started asking ourselves, ‘What do we want to be known for? How did we become who we are today?’ We wanted to tell the whole story about the value we bring to our clients.”

More than a job board
While CareerBuilder enjoys the distinction of being the world’s largest online job board, consistently beating its competitors in both revenue and online traffic, Womack and others felt a need to spread the message that CareerBuilder’s impact goes beyond that. “We take pride in being a great company, but what does that really mean to the community?” Womack recalls thinking. “What’s the deeper meaning for CareerBuilder’s existence, and how can we rally our customers and employees around that?”

Taking all of the above into consideration, CareerBuilder chose the term Empowering Employment as a way to instill in both businesses and individuals the knowledge that they have the power to contribute to a better economy. “In the simplest terms, Empowering Employment means doing your part to increase employment in the United States – whether it’s what you’re doing to bring jobs back as an individual or whether you’re a business who’s hiring,” says Jamie Womack, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Branding. “It’s about making the effort to really impact the economy.”

Empowering Employment also alludes to CareerBuilder’s own efforts to empower both businesses and individuals with the resources they need for success in a competitive labor market.

For businesses, CareerBuilder has been leveraging its technology to help clients make more strategic decisions about where they allocate their recruitment funds. “We’re using our talent intelligence portals to gather data about job seekers and the job market, which we can use to educate our customers, make them more efficient, and help them hire better people,” Womack says.

For individuals, CareerBuilder continues to offer the most jobs in the U.S., as well as a host of online courses job seekers can take to supplement their skills and make them more attractive to prospective employers. Companies can take advantage of these offerings as well, as they look to train and develop their current workers and bridge the skills gaps in their own organization.

On a larger scale, CareerBuilder is also stepping up its role as a thought leader. Last September, CareerBuilder announced a major commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an annual meeting that convenes leaders from all over the world to collaborate on innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. More recently, CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson sat down with renowned business leader Warren Buffett to discuss the obstacles to economic growth and what is needed to overcome these obstacles. The company has also been making strides to help bring military veterans back to work, and it recently embarked on an initiative to help aspiring IT workers learn the valuable skills for which companies are hiring but can’t find in the current labor market.

Creating jobs is business as usual for some
CareerBuilder is just one of many companies taking the initiative to foster job growth and fuel the economy right now. Chase, for example, recently made a pledge to employ 100,000 military veterans, while Amazon and Starbucks have stepped up their hiring practices and found ways to create jobs that will serve their businesses in the long term.

Among the businesses taking a proactive approach to create jobs and retrain workers are CareerBuilder’s own clients, several of whom will be featured in the company’s soon-to-be-launched marketing campaign – spanning both print and online media. Not only does CareerBuilder want to recognize those clients who embody the Empowering Employment mission, but the company also hopes that driving awareness of companies doing their part will inspire other businesses – clients or not – to do the same.

Says Womack, “We want to create a message that compels people to wake up and say, ‘I’m serving this bigger purpose.’”  Empowering Employment, therefore, is less of a branding play for CareerBuilder, and more a call to action for all Americans.

Among today’s most baffling unexplained mysteries – the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, who killed Kennedy, the ongoing success of ‘Two and a Half Men’ – there’s one that is dominating the news lately: Despite the fact that more than 14 million people are unemployed, there remain 3.2 million job openings in America.

The reason for this discrepancy, many experts believe, is that today’s workers simply don’t have the skills employers need to fill these positions – and it’s leading to what’s commonly referred to as a skills gap.

While many workers have taken it upon themselves to go back to school and learn the in-demand skills employers are hiring for, many believe the burden shouldn’t fall on workers alone. “Corporate America needs to spend to train the workers it needs,” CNBC’s Brian Sullivan recently said. He’s not the only one who believes it’s up to businesses to do their part to reskill workers. CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson recently wrote an editorial for Harvard Business Review suggesting ways American businesses can navigate the skills gap, one of which would be to invest in employee training and development.

Training workers may not prove to be the final answer to the unemployment problem, but it may be one answer, and that’s exactly the theory CareerBuilder is testing out now with the launch of a new job skills project.

“The focus for the project was ‘What can we do to bridge the skills gap?’” says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, of what sparked the idea for the recent initiative to provide free training for those hoping to switch careers or re-enter the workforce.

Not knowing exactly where to start, Haefner and other executives sought feedback from CareerBuilder employees, asking them to submit ideas for ways the company could contribute to job growth. After evaluating the responses, the company’s leadership team ultimately decided to concentrate its efforts on two different areas: reskilling workers for the industries most in need of help right now, and helping former military personnel make the transition to the civilian workforce.

“There’s a high demand for people with high skill sets, so we thought if we could take a group of individuals and give them concentrated skills, they would have what they need to at least get an entry-level position,” Haefner says.

Today, CareerBuilder is three months in to a six month commitment to provide currently unemployed workers –including former military personnel – basic skills that might help them find jobs in that field at the end of the program. While the premise may sound like that of an early-90s MTV reality show (this is the true story, of 10 workers, picked to learn IT skills, to find out what happens…), the hope is ultimately to create a model businesses can replicate to bridge the skills gap at their own organizations and across the country.

“Our initial goal was simply to test out the concept that, in fields within the U.S. that have a shortage now, it’s not unattainable for individuals looking for work right now to get the skills employers need. We wanted to provide training to help them get employed. Now, the objective is, is this model something that can be replicated? Companies are already calling us to find out how we’re doing it.”

After generating responses from an advertisement on CareerBuilder.com, conducting screenings and interviews, Haefner and others chose a class of 10 individuals – half of whom were in the military trying to find new position, and many of whom were on long-term unemployment but who possessed basic skill sets – to participate in the project.

They modeled the program to resemble something like a paid internship, comprised of a combination of classroom education and on-the-job training. Technology employees based in CareerBuilder’s Norcross office work alongside the individuals to provide hands-on training, but employees also attend classes led by a third-party company. Participants are learning technical skills as well as the business intelligence skills and career placement advice that will support their efforts to find employment down the road.

A Worthwhile Investment
While Haefner contends that the initiative requires an investment up front, she believes that it’s one that will pay off down the road. “There’s always a cost to hiring. And there’s always a cost to training,” she says. “With this program, you’re molding clay right from the beginning, plus, you’re getting some value back, particularly in terms of labor costs. When you break it down, in six months you’re getting fully functioning employees who have the skills you need and are versed in your culture.”

While companies might be hesitant to pay more up front than what they normally are used to paying for training, Haefner argues that they’re also getting labor out of it, too.  Another argument Haefner is quick to address is the fear companies have that these workers will still end up leaving them in the end.

“There’s never any guarantee that a new hire will work out,” she says. In fact, if anything, these types of programs might actually increase retention. “What usually doesn’t work out with new hires is the cultural fit, and with this type of program, the chances are even better it WILL work out because you’re training them within your culture.”

While the program has three months to go before completion, Haefner is confident that, if nothing else, this program will prove to be a valuable learning experience – as much for CareerBuilder as for the workers participating in the program.

“So far, we’ve learned it’s really important to be transparent about your goals. We tell the participants, ‘We can’t guarantee you’re going to have a job when this is over, but you’ll have these skills that are in demand right now, and that will increase your chances of finding a job elsewhere.’”

Employers discuss how job seekers can meet them halfway
CareerBuilder recently asked various hiring managers to offer their advice on how job seekers can increase their chances of getting hired by learning the skills employers need most right now. See their responses below. What advice would you add? 

More than a third of workers discuss politics at work, according to a new CareerBuilder survey – and the exchanges aren’t always so diplomatic.

Clearly, not everyone is heeding Linus van Pelt’s timeless advice to avoid discussing religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin in mixed company…

Thirty-six percent of workers discuss politics at work, according to a new CareerBuilder survey of more than 7,000 full-time workers nationwide. That number will likely increase in the coming months, as 43 percent expect they will be talking about this year’s presidential election with co-workers.

While most conversations around politics were good-natured or even-tempered, 23 percent of workers who have discussed politics at work reported they had a heated discussion or fight with a co-worker, boss or someone else higher up in the organization. (Awkward!) And one in ten workers even said their opinion about a co-worker changed – most often for the negative – after they discovered that person’s political affiliation.

Look Who’s Talking Politics | Breakdowns by Age and Gender
When it comes to gender, men are more likely to talk politics at work than women (44 percent of men versus 28 percent of women) as well as more likely to report an altercation with a co-worker over opposing political views (25 percent compared to 19 percent).

According to the survey results, the older the worker, the more likely he or she is to discuss politics at work. Among workers 55 and older, 43 percent say they discuss politics at work, whereas only 25 percent of 18- to 24-year-old workers say the same. The next age group most likely to discuss politics was workers aged 45 to 54 at 40 percent, followed by workers 35 to 44 (34 percent) and workers 25 to 24 (30 percent).

Office Politics vs. Government Politics: What’s worse?
The survey also found that, for 46 percent of workers, the competitive nature of government politics mirrors that of office politics. Another 19 percent of workers say office politics don’t hold a candle to national politics in its viciousness.

While most workers choose to keep political debates outside of the workplace, those who like a little healthy debate should keep at that – healthy. After all, work is stressful enough without adding politics into the mix.  To avoid letting political talk turn sour, keep in mind that everyone is entitled to their opinion.

“It’s important to always be respectful of your colleagues’ opinions and avoid emotionally-charged exchanges,” says Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder, adding that that advice applies at for any time you’re dealing with subject matter that is sensitive or potentially inflammatory.

(Including, perhaps, the Great Pumpkin.)

Do you talk politics at work? How do you keep it civil?

A new survey sheds light on how employers can overcome their top staffing challenges.

Forty-three percent of hiring managers and human resource professionals are concerned top workers will leave their organizations this year, according to a new CareerBuilder survey.

The survey of over 3,000 hiring managers and human resources professionals nationwide also revealed that 34 percent of human resource managers saw an increase in voluntary turnover (workers leaving organizations for other opportunities) last year. Given these findings, it’s no wonder retention is a concern for so many organizations right now

Moreover, hiring managers in the information technology, financial services, manufacturing and health care fields – industries that rely on high-skilled workers – expressed the most concern about a potential talent exodus.

In addition to retention worries, the inability to fill open positions presents a whole other worry for hiring managers: 26 percent say they currently have open positions for which they cannot find qualified candidates.

Retention, compensation among employers’ biggest challenges
When asked to name their biggest staffing challenges this year, survey participants gave the following answers:

• Being able to retain top talent (35 percent)
• Being able to provide competitive compensation (35 percent)
• Worker burnout  (32 percent)
• Maintaining productivity levels (29 percent)
• Being able to provide upward mobility (26 percent)
• Can’t find high-skilled applicants (24 percent)
• Don’t have the budget to recruit (13 percent)

Beyond salary increases, organizations can offer a broader range of perks and benefits to meet these challenges, according to Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder’s vice president of human resources.

Overcoming staffing challenges | Workers weigh in
In addition to hiring managers and human resource professionals participated, more than 7,700 workers nationwide also participated in the survey, revealing insight that could help employers meet these challenges. When asked what they consider most when evaluating a potential employer, workers who participated in the survey gave the following answers:

• Longevity/stability
• Good work culture
• Career advancement opportunities
• Flexible schedules

Note that even if your organization provides employees some or all of the above perks, you might not be communicating it to current and potential employees as clearly or as frequently as you think you are: a 2011 MetLife study found that 55 percent of employees feel their communication regarding benefits is either unclear or too infrequent.

Do these results surprise you? What staffing challenges concern you most?

Whether the term ‘hacker’ brings to mind images of someone stealing your credit card information or of Angelina Jolie unleashing computer viruses on the federal government, chances are the last thing you want to associate with the term is your own staff.

And yet, several companies today are doing just that, launching what have become known as ‘hack days’ at their organizations. While the specifics differ for every company, generally, a hack day is one day set aside to let employees (primarily engineers and information technology workers) work on anything they want outside of the scope of their regular responsibilities and everyday tasks.

For companies like Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook and the Federal Communications Commission, hack days not only successfully generate new business ideas, but also (and perhaps more importantly) boost employee morale, promote collaboration across teams and departments, and enhance the customer experience.

CareerBuilder can certainly attest to the benefits of hack days. CareerBuilder launched its first Hack Day in August of last year, followed by another one in November, and kicks off its third Hack Day today, taking place in offices across the world.

“You’re starting to see companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, where they utilize technology to drive innovation, and that sparked conversation about, ‘What can we be doing?’” says Roger Fugett, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at CareerBuilder, about what inspired the idea.

With the company’s long history of using technology and innovation to help companies source and retain employees – as well as a desire to “give people an entire day where they can explore their passion”- hosting a hack day at CareerBuilder just seemed to make sense.

Encouraging employees to pursue their passions is part of the culture at CareerBuilder. Every year, every employee has the opportunity to pitch a new business venture for the Ideas from Everywhere contest, and compete to receive the financial backing and resources to run the new business line. The addition of Hack Day, Fugett says, offers employees “just another–slightly less formal – path to innovation.” And just like with Ideas from Everywhere, participants can enter the projects generated from Hack Day into a contest for the chance to see their idea fully realized.

CareerBuilder’s Hack Day isn’t exclusive to its technology workers, either. Every employee in the company is invited to participate as a business partner in the process if he or she has an idea or simply wants to get involved. The business partner is then paired up with a member of the technology team prior to Hack Day to create a plan of action. Not only does this exercise generate a broader range of ideas, but it also promotes collaboration among teams that might not normally work together.

Going into Hack Day, Fugett explains, the goals were simple: “It was really to spark creativity and get people thinking about bringing new ideas to the table – whether that meant addressing market needs or what they’ve talked to sales reps about.” So it was a pleasant surprise to see just how passionately employees took to Hack Day. Over 300 employees actively participated in the first two Hack Days, resulting in a total of 75 new business ideas.

“The volume of participants exceeded our expectations, as did the ideas that generated from it. We started out thinking we’d probably pick just one idea from the first set of submissions, but we ended up picking fourteen – the quality of ideas was just that good,” says Fugett.

As for advice he would offer other companies that want to implement their own hack day, Fugett says, “You have to have a tolerance for failure. If you project manage stuff to death and need everything to have an ROI, pulling this off is going to be tough. If you’re going to be innovative, you have to anticipate some failures.”

He also adds that communicating the idea that failure is crucial when encouraging employees to participate. “You want all the ideas. You don’t want people to keep ideas to themselves in fear of being chastised for failing.”

Want to build a better relationship with job candidates? All it takes is one thing.

For the New York Giants, it’s Eli Manning. For Rachel Ray, it’s EVOO. And for recruiting and staffing industry professionals, your most valuable resource is your talent pool.

And much the way Ray devotees (yes, we exist) rely on the Food Network star to provide fresh, quality(ish) 30-minute meals on a regular basis, your clients consistently rely on you to provide quality candidates to fill positions.

The problem is, those qualified candidates aren’t always so easy to come by if you haven’t worked to build relationships with them through effective and frequent communication – even during those times your clients don’t have any openings for which they would be a match.

Communication: The Ultimate Candidate Relationship Builder
All you have to do is browse the self-help section of any Barnes & Noble for five minutes to understand that communication is key to building and sustaining long-term romantic relationships. The same is true of professional relationships – particularly those between you and your candidates. Consider the following (relatively painless) ways maintain frequent, effective communication with your candidate pool.

Newsletters: Simple, easy and effective, weekly or monthly email newsletters help keep you on your candidates’ radar without dumping too much information on them. Keep the content brief, but informative and relevant to their needs, such as information about upcoming training or certifications, candidate success stories (to keep them motivated), industry employment breakdowns and trends (to keep them informed), resume tips and career or job search advice. Over time, they will come to rely on these newsletters (and you) as a valuable source of information.

Contact people: Another popular method for communicating with candidates is assigning a “buddy” or contact person to a number of candidates in your pool. The role of the contact person is to call or email their assigned candidates – even the ones already placed by your firm – on a weekly or monthly basis. Not only will you maintain open communication with your candidates, but you will also be able to gauge your candidates’ needs and current career situation.

Emailed job recommendations: In addition to – or as part of – regular newsletters, send out daily or weekly (depending on their preferences) emails containing job opportunities that are relevant to candidates’ industries, experience, skill levels and interests. Segment candidates in a database by these qualifiers beforehand so you can quickly email those groups when new job opportunities become available.

Mobile devices: As an alternative to emails, let candidates opt-in to receive custom job opportunities via text message as well. Inavero research found that over 50 percent of smartphone users are interacting with staffing firms via text and email, as well as reviewing job opportunities – all from their mobile devices. The increased mobile activity underscores the opportunity for recruiters to connect with candidates anywhere, at any time.

Social media: It’s impossible to overemphasize the opportunities social media provides to keep candidates informed and engaged. There are a number of ways to utilize social media as a recruiting tool. For example, you could invite them to follow you on Twitter, become a fan of your Facebook page or connect with you on LinkedIn. Then use these platforms to do everything from push out helpful career information and advice to simply converse with candidates in real-time.

Yes, building relationships with candidates through consistent communication takes work, but working to foster loyalty with candidates will pay off in both the long-term (nearly 40 percent of staffing firm clients say they worked with a staffing firm before as part of their job search, according to CareerBuilder and Inavero’s Opportunities in Staffing guide) and in the short term (the same survey found that, on average, candidates tell eight people about their experiences – both good and bad – with their staffing firms).

When it comes to successful recruiting, what goes around comes around: take care of your candidates, and they’ll take care of you.

As your company grows, make sure it doesn’t leave behind the culture that makes it so great.

Organizational culture is one of those things that you don’t really notice – or appreciate – until it’s gone. Unfortunately, losing sight of one’s organizational culture is a common side effect of growth: You get so busy growing your business, you tend to forget about working to maintain the unique workplace culture you established as a smaller business.

Maintaining culture through growth is a difficult – but necessary – effort. Recognizing this, CareerBuilder and Inc. recently created “Geared to Growth: Building an Infrastructure for the Long Haul,” a new report designed to help companies deal with the common challenges that accompany organizational growth.

The following excerpt from “Geared to Growth” offers three tips to ensure that as your business grows, your culture doesn’t get left behind.

Dealing with the Cultural Issues Growth Brings
Although it’s nearly every company’s goal, growth doesn’t always bring with it positive change. Unless your company is prepared for the accompanying cultural shifts, growth can spark serious disruptions in your organization. Here are some tips for dealing with the changes growth can bring:

Account for emotion. Businesses often encounter particular emotional resistance to changes in the decision-making process, not only in the C-suite but throughout the organization. “In my experience, it hasn’t been as hard for the CEOs as it has been for the next level down,” says Barbara L. Davidson, Ph.D., a change management consultant and faculty member at Villanova University.

Prepare the entire organization for change. For that reason, it’s essential to prepare everyone in the organization for change and solicit staff input on growth plans before they’re put in motion. “It doesn’t guarantee failure, but it’s a set-up for failure if you don’t involve representatives from all functional areas and all levels of the organization in actually helping to design the change as well as execute it,” Davidson says.

Communicate the vision. Communicate the company’s organizational objectives and the impact those goals will have on employees’ responsibilities, job performance expectations, and prospects for advancement or new opportunities. Make sure they understand their roles in upcoming changes and are motivated to meet the challenges growth brings. That’s a critical strategy for maintaining their sense of investment in the company’s growth.

What does your organization do to foster culture?

Want to know more? View previous excerpts from “Geared to Growth” here, here and here, or simply download the entire report here.

Unless you’re Angela Martin from “The Office”, opening yourself up to criticism about your shortcomings probably falls somewhere between picking up your dry cleaning and getting a colonoscopy on your list of favorite things to do.

While administering employee feedback surveys can feel like you’re putting both your company and your performance as a leader and manager in front of the firing squad, it also happens to be one of the most efficient and effective ways to understand the internal workings of your organization. Consider the following benefits to employee surveys (and take the ‘evil’ out of ‘necessary evil’).

Five Benefits of Employee Feedback

1. Turning lemons into lemonade (or lemonade vodkas, if you prefer). Yes, the chances you’ll receive some negative feedback are about as good as the chances E! will soon create yet another Kardashian-focused reality show, but negative feedback provides the opportunity to change things at your organization for the better.
2. Winning over new fans. If your organization were a television network, employee feedback time would be sweeps week for you. Just by virtue of taking an interest in your employees, you’re likely to see an increase in morale and productivity; however, those effects may only be short-term. If you want to retain those new fans (i.e. foster long-term employee morale), you must continue to meet the expectations you’ve now set forth (see #5 from the checklist below).
3. Reigniting that old feeling. Instead of just asking employees what they would change about the company or their jobs, ask them to vocalize what they love about these things, as well. Chances are they don’t often stop to think about these things, and it serves as a good reminder as to why they come to work each day, again boosting morale. Bonus: You can use this feedback to enhance your current employer brand message.
4. Saving money. Employee feedback can also give you better insight into how to better allocate your resources and enhance your benefits package. Be sure to ask about the benefits or employee-focused programs they take advantage of, which ones they don’t (you might find you’re wasting money on programs employees don’t want) and which benefits you should consider implementing to make them happier and more productive (and more likely to recommend you to prospective candidates).
5. Bring out the Steve Jobs in everyone. In addition to the above, employee surveys can build your bottom line by generating business ideas. Because they work closely with customers, your employees have a much closer pulse on customer needs. Thus, they’re likely to have suggestions for how to improve certain aspects of the business, services or products to meet these needs.

Administering Employee Surveys | A Six-Step Checklist
In order to get the best return out of your employee survey, the following actions are a must:

1. Ensure anonymity. If your employees think there’s any chance their feedback will be held against them later on, they might not be completely honest in their answers. In the end, that won’t help anyone.
2. Clarify your goals. Explain your reasoning behind administering the survey, what you hope to get out of it, and why your employees’ participation is important. Be sure to emphasize how these surveys will benefit them.
3. Get buy-in from all levels of leadership. From the CEO to your employees’ direct managers, everyone should be encouraging participation in the survey to reiterate the importance of participation.
4. Make it easy. The easier you make it for employees to give feedback, the more likely they are to participate. Keep the survey brief (according to Inc.com, the ideal length of an employee survey is between 35 to 55 questions and takes only 15 to 25 minutes to complete), and easily accessible. If possible, create an online survey that can pre-populate data such as name, department and title to save your employees time filling out these fields. Also, be sure to include a direct link to the survey through email invitations and reminders, as well as the homepage of the company intranet.
5. Live up to your promises. The most important part of the employee feedback process is also, unfortunately, one of the most underutilized. Don’t let your time and efforts to gather feedback amount to nothing. Follow up with your employees to go over the results of the survey, reiterate your goals and outline the next steps. Not only does failing to follow up mean you’ve essentially wasted everybody’s time, it’s also huge blow to morale, because it sends the message that you really don’t care about your employees’ wants and needs.
6. End on a high note: Remember, employee surveys are also a chance for you to reaffirm what’s great about your organization.  Take this opportunity to recognize those things that make working for your organization great. Use the follow-up meetings as a chance to say, “This is what you said you love about working here, and we take pride in that. Let’s celebrate this.”

How do you solicit employee feedback? What methods do you recommend?

Creating a better benefits package isn’t just good for employees. It’s good for business, too.

Growing Pains: it’s not just a classic TV series desperately in need of a reunion show. While growth is a blessing for many companies, it also brings with it many challenges. With this in mind, CareerBuilder and Inc. have just released “Geared to Growth: Building an Infrastructure for the Long Haul,” a new report designed to help companies deal with the growing pains they may experience over both the short- and long-term.

The following excerpt from Part III of “Geared to Growth” (you can check out part I here and go here for part II) discusses how benefits are critical to attracting and retaining employees – and how you can deliver the benefits employees want (without breaking the bank).

Benchmarking Your Employee Benefits Package
Benefits play a crucial role in attracting and retaining productive employees. So how do you know if you’re offering a compelling benefits plan? Start with one question:  Are employees using it?

“One important factor is utilization,” says Professor Martocchio, who is author of Employee Benefits: A Primer for Human Resource Professionals. Take stock of which benefits employees are actually taking advantage of. Perhaps your company can replace some benefits employees don’t want or need with new benefits that they’ll appreciate more. “Before you invest in those benefits and spend the money, you need to do a needs test to find out what the employees will use.”

Don’t neglect non-traditional benefits like flex-time, telecommuting, and domestic partner coverage, which many employees today consider essentials, not extras. They expect employers to recognize and respect their personal and family obligations, even in the current economic environment.

It’s not just employees who get perks from these types of benefits, either. Offering those nonstandard benefits gives you a competitive edge in attracting highly in-demand workers – and in retaining your current employees.

Benefits don’t have to break the bank.
Some of the most valued employee benefits are also some of the most cost-effective to execute. Options include:

• Providing space for weekly weight-loss program meetings.
• Offering education on use of flexible spending plans.
• Bringing in counselors to help employees assess their financial planning and insurance positions.

“These are really critical issues,” Martocchio says. “Most of us do not know how to deal with long-term wealth building or long-term care, because it is so complicated.”

Be careful, however, not to endorse or sponsor financial or insurance advisors (which introduces the potential for liability) and make it clear that the company receives no commission on these referrals.

Staff members should have a voice in designing the plans. Several strategies can help you to gather and implement their input:

• Conduct periodic surveys of employee preferences.
• Invite feedback through use of a physical or virtual suggestion box.
• Create a representative employee advisory committee that reflects a broad cross-section of job titles and employee backgrounds, both personal and professional.

These strategies not only provide a simple, inexpensive way to gauge employee concerns—they also give executives and management a way to demonstrate that the company cares about and does its best to respond to employee concerns.

If you choose to launch an employee advisory committee, make sure you have a clearly defined purpose for it. Make sure the members understand the metrics the company will use to evaluate the committee’s effectiveness and contributions to corporate-wide productivity.

These metrics should measure concerns that “play to the success of the organization,” says human capital management consultant Paul Belliveau, SPHR, HRIP. These metrics should measure success “against the problems that need to be solved to achieve strategic goals and objectives from a corporate standpoint.”

For more information, download a complimentary copy of “Geared to Growth” – and check out the Infrastructure-Building Resources on page 15 for further assistance in evaluating and enhancing your existing benefits plan.

You don’t get it. You’re doing everything right: You’re offering a great job with a great company, you’ve ensured your job advertising placement is targeting the right group of candidates, and you’re positive you’re offering the most competitive salary. Even your job posting is flawless.

And yet, the job applications just aren’t flowing in the way they should. So what gives?

The truth is, while you might be doing everything right to attract the right job candidates and compel them to apply to your job opportunities, it might just be what happens after they hit “apply now” that’s the source of your troubles. 

Research shows that 34 percent of candidates who try to apply for jobs don’t complete the application process – simply because the application process is too much of a hassle.

(Think about it. Have you ever tried to enter a contest online only to find that the registration process is more trouble than the prize is worth? Applying to a job online can be just as frustrating. The more hoops you make candidates jump through just to apply, the less likely they are to complete the application process.)

According to CareerBuilder internal data, the top two reasons candidates gave for failing to complete the application process were due to usability issues and time constraints:

• 24 percent of candidates don’t apply to jobs because the “Apply Now” link is broken.
• 21 percent believe that the long application process isn’t worth their time.

The good news is that fixing your job application process to end candidate drop-off is a relatively easy fix. The hard part, however, comes with discerning exactly where and why candidates are dropping off in the first place – an effort that will inevitably require some data analysis.

While your current applicant tracking system might be able to offer some insight as to what you need to change or enhance about your application process, you might find you need the help of a third party that can offer objective analysis and insights.  CareerBuilder’s Applicant Experience offering, for example, gives insight into your application process by tracking candidates and surveying them within 24 hours of an interaction with your Job Posting, and then again a month later.

Not only will an external resource help you uncover holes your internal team is likely to overlook, but you’ll benefit from the expert solutions to create a better recruitment process overall.  It’s an investment up front, but one that will ultimately save you time and money (and frustration).

How often do you evaluate your organization’s application process?

Finding workers with the right skills can be a skill in itself.

If you find yourself complaining that you can’t find the qualified candidates you need for certain positions at your organization, the good news is you’re not alone – by a long shot.

According to a recent Manpower survey, 52 percent of U.S. employers can’t find the skilled workers they need to fill open positions.

Dire as these findings may seem, the situation isn’t hopeless. In a recent editorial for Harvard Business Review addressing how companies can navigate the growing skills gap, CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson mentioned that companies need to take the initiative to reskill workers themselves. After all, many out-of-work Americans have skills they could easily transfer to a new career “if given the opportunity to build them,” according to Ferguson.

The question then becomes, how can you provide that opportunity? Consider the following ways organizations can take it upon themselves to reskill workers – and help close that ever-widening skills gap.

5 Ways to Train Workers for the Skills Your Organization Needs

1. Set up an internal training and development program. It’s no accident that some of today’s most successful companies also happen to make leadership development a priority. General Electric, for example, invests roughly $1 billion annually on training and educational opportunities for employees, while both Intel and McDonald’s have company-specific ‘universities’ where employees to go to learn new skills and develop existing ones. Don’t have the means to create an internal training program? Look into using a third party resource, such as CareerBuilderInstitute, which enables businesses to train their employees through online courses that range from hard- and soft-skill development to professional certification.
2. Create a mentorship program within the organization. Mentorship programs are a great, cost-effective way to prepare employees for leadership and management positions. But the benefits don’t end there. Research suggests that mentorship programs have a positive effect on morale, boost productivity and increase retention rates, as well.
3. Partner with local colleges to offer training and recruit. In hopes to reverse the trend of an increasing skills gap and labor shortage, companies across all industries are partnering with local colleges and universities to offer programs that ensure workers get the specialized skills they need for various industries.
4. Promote current employees first. When looking to hire for a new position, don’t overlook your current employees. Chances are you’ll have to train whoever you hire to some extent anyway, so why not have one of those people be someone you know is already the right fit culturally? Promoting from within not only saves time and money bringing in someone new, but it can also improve morale and increase retention, as it sends the message that you value your employees and provide growth opportunities.
5. Consider rehiring former employees. This can be a tricky one, depending on the circumstances surrounding the employee’s original departure, but rehiring a former employee could be a viable option to fill certain open positions. After all, rehired employees understand the company culture, and you don’t have to retrain them.

What is your organization doing to reskill workers?

Related posts: Four Things Great Companies Do to Develop Their Leaders

They may love their Facebooks, their Twitters and their YouTubes, but the members of Gen Y may not be nearly as swayed by social media as you might think. New research around social media’s influence on consumer behavior  indicates that, while millennials might be “digital natives”, they are actually more influenced by word-of-mouth marketing than social media when it comes to making purchasing decisions.

The takeaway for hiring managers and recruiters? Given that employee recruitment is essentially just another form of marketing, focusing more on word-of-mouth marketing techniques could enhance your recruiting strategy. (This doesn’t just go for recruiting Gen Y, either: The study showed word-of-mouth also trumps social media when marketing to members of Gen X and Baby Boomers as well.)

The question now, of course, is how? Might I suggest starting with your current employees?

We’ve discussed before the importance of turning your employees as employer brand ambassadors, and this finding speaks to that. Job seekers want to feel a connection with potential employers. They want to know first-hand what they’re getting into before they buy in and accept an offer. They want to hear from real people – people they feel they can trust – why a certain workplace is the workplace they want to invest in. As the face of your company, your employees are the way to accomplish these things. Consider the following tactics:

5 Ways to Create Word of Mouth Recruiting Using Your Employee Network

1. Make the most of career fairs. Career fairs are perhaps the most obvious way to get employees in front of candidates to recommend your organization. Send your best employees to these events, where they can meet job seekers, answer questions about the work culture, exchange information with candidates, and let their personality and enthusiasm for their jobs and workplace do the selling for you.
2. Sponsor employee memberships in professional organizations. Encouraging your employees to join professional organizations specific to your industry enables them to expand their professional network – and pool of potential candidates they can refer to your company. You’re also investing in your employees’ learning and development, a much-valued benefit among today’s workers (and one more selling point they can bring up to potential candidates).
3. Mind your ERPs. Research shows that a well-structured employee referral program (ERP) is one of the best ways to generate new hires, but they’ve also been shown to increase retention, lower costs and boost morale among current employees.
4. Emphasize the “social” part of social media. While social media might not be as influential as word-of-mouth, but you can still use social media to mimic the feel of word-of-mouth. How? Take a cue from online retailer Zappos, where employees create “connection channels” via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs to connect with potential employees, freely answer questions about life at Zappos, and let their individual personalities shine through as they ‘live the brand’. Social media may never hold the weight of face-to-face conversations, but it does enable employees to speak – authentically and in their own words – on behalf of their employers. That’s not a bad consolation.
5. Create employee testimonial videos. Recruitment videos with employee testimonials are the next best thing to getting employees face-to-face with candidates (perhaps because it feels like face-to-face). See how companies like Noodles&Co and Madison Health Care Center utilize their recruitment videos to enable employees to tell their stories – literally in their own voices – about what makes working for these companies such a great experience.

Do you employ word-of-mouth marketing tactics in your recruiting efforts? How do employees at your organization help you recruit?

If you’ve ever known the pain of waiting for a certain phone call, email, text message or Tweet that just…never…comes (sad face emoticon), then you know the pain job candidates go through every time you go M.I.A. after the initial contact or interview.

Maybe you’re simply trying to avoid an awkward conversation, or perhaps you just haven’t made a decision yet – however innocent the reason, leaving job candidates hanging is wrong. And it isn’t just bad manners; it’s bad business. As evidenced by the bitter comments from a previous post asking why recruiters so frequently neglect to call candidates back, this behavior can not only damage your personal brand, but it puts you at risk of losing potentially great candidates down the line.

Even if a candidate you like isn’t the best fit for the position for which you’re hiring now, that doesn’t mean he or she won’t make an excellent hire for a future open position. Or what happens if the original person you hired doesn’t work out? Should either of those things occur, think of the time and money you’ll save recruiting if you already have a pool of engaged, qualified and interested candidates on reserve.

So how do you keep candidates engaged and interested (without feeling like you’re stringing them along)? Here are a few suggestions…

1. Keep the lines of communication open.  Again, be sure you follow up with your candidates to let them know where they stand in the consideration process. If applicable, explain to them that while you might not have any opportunities for them now, something might come up down the line. Invite them to opt in to receive custom job opportunities via email or text message. The keyword here is custom: Make sure you are only sending jobs that fit the skills and interests of the candidates. (Blindly sending out every open opportunity screams “spam” and is a huge turn off for job seekers.)
2. Show your personality. Engage candidates by showing the lighter side of your corporate culture. Post pictures to your social media sites from company events or use these sites as platforms to recognize employees. Better yet, create videos to give a more three-dimensional peek at what it’s like to work at your company. Keep the content fresh to keep potential employees coming back for more – and your company on their radar. This is also a great opportunity to engage your current employees by encouraging them to blog or Tweet about the exciting projects they’re working on.
3. Make it about them – not you. While you want to keep candidates informed of opportunities with your company, don’t make it all about you. It may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes the best way to market yourself and draw candidates in is to take the focus off your company – and put it on them. Take Spherion Staffing as an example: Rather than consistently pushing out information about their job opportunities (via social media), the national staffing agency provides links to industry news, information and advice job seekers can apply to their career searches. This kind of “soft sell” approach not only keeps job seekers engaged – on your turf – but it sends the message that you want to see potential candidates succeed and ultimately positions you as a desirable employer.

Bringing it all together.
While email and web-based tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube serve as excellent platforms for communicating with job seekers, keeping it all together can be an overwhelming – and time-consuming – task. For this reason, some companies utilize automated talent networks to help them manage interested candidates and potential employees. CareerBuilder’s Talent Network offering, for example, enables employers to integrate all the things they are doing to attract job seekers, engage interested candidates, and measure the success of their efforts.

Or there’s always the option to disregard your talent pipeline altogether and simply hope that the right candidates just happen to fall in your lap at the right time. (Happens all the time, right?)

If any of you recruiters out there, like me, obsessively watch have ever seen an episode of Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker, you may have noted the similarity between recruiting and matchmaking. Both jobs entail trying to deliver the best candidates possible to a customer in hopes to make the perfect match (and end up happily ever after).

The other similarity? “It’s a very crazy industry,” says Daniel Banfield, a former partnership director at a national staffing firm. Crazy, however, isn’t necessarily a bad thing: where some people burn out from the fast pace and high demands of the job, others thrive on these elements.

Whether you’re thinking of starting a career in recruiting and staffing industry, or you want to move up from your current position, Banfield and Erik Kelley, both account executives in CareerBuilder’s Staffing and Recruiting Group, offered up the following advice based of their own experiences.

Five Steps to Success in the Recruiting and Staffing Industry

1. Don’t expect success to come to you. The skills that it takes at one level of your career might not necessarily what gets you to the next point in your career. “Know what it takes to be successful, and be completely mindful of what it’s going to take to move up,” Banfield says. To do this, he suggests getting a mentor, who can help you set realistic expectations about your career path and what it takes to move up, including the challenges that come with the various roles. Make every effort to connect with others in the industry (which you can do through LinkedIn or joining a professional organization, such as SHRM or the ASA), who can guide you along in your career path.
2. Make yourself indispensable.  “You need to be looked to as leader, someone who’s putting people to work,” says Kelley, once an account executive at a national staffing firm, of how recruiters can set themselves apart and move up to senior recruiter and sales positions. How do you accomplish leadership cred? Again, it’s all about being proactive: join an organization that’s suited to your interests; attend recruiting conferences and events; sign up for free webinars online; follow industry experts on social media sites (such as Facebook.com/CareerBuilderforStaffing); and read up on industry reports to stay current on staffing and recruiting trends (such as checking out the recent Opportunities in Staffing guide), to name a few options. Become an expert in your field, and clients and colleagues will begin to see you as an indispensable resource.
3. Recognize that change is inevitable: Due to the dynamic, fast-paced nature of the recruiting and staffing industry, it requires a certain amount of agility and willingness to adapt to an ever-changing environment. “If you can’t deal with the element of change very well, then recruiting and staffing is not the career for you, because you will be on an emotional roller coaster with good days and bad,” says Kelley.  While Kelley loved “the satisfaction of putting people to work who deserved it,” there were definite downsides to the role as well, such as the disappointment of seeing a candidate ultimately not work out for reasons beyond his control – and the toll it would then take on his (compensation-based) paycheck.
4. Beware of burnout. “There’s a huge burnout factor,” says Banfield of the nature of the job. Yet there are ways to combat this, such as finding multiple projects to work on, joining a professional organization specific to your niche. Keeping up on the industry and continuously educating yourself are critical to staying ahead. Most importantly, find an organization to work for that encourages growth. “A lot of success is organization-driven. You have to foster that environment [as an organization].”
5. Do it because you love it. To paraphrase what Amber Naslund says about social media, If you don’t love it, you’ll suck at it. The same might be said about recruiting. (Okay, you might not suck at it, but passion to succeed definitely works for you in this industry.) “I think people go into recruiting by accident because they need a job, and they find out later that they either hate it or love it,” says Kelley. And it is those who love it, Banfield believes, who will find the most success in this industry: “If someone’s just out for the number, it’s not going to work out.”

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned by working in the recruiting and staffing industry? Do you think the pros of the job outweigh the cons?

Should companies invest in executive coaching? If a recent survey on executive coaching by AMA Enterprise, a division of the American Management Association, is any indication, the answer is no. Dig a little deeper, however, and coaching might just be worth reconsidering.

According to the AMA’s recent survey of senior managers and executives at 230 organizations nationwide, only 26 percent of respondents believe executive coaching at their organizations to be effective. And only 35 percent say coaching delivers a measurable impact more often than other business tools (e.g., on-the-job training, workshops, formal courses, etc.).

Yet these findings do not necessarily tell the whole story, according to Sandi Edwards, Senior Vice President for AMA Enterprise. She believes the results indicate not necessarily the need for better coaching within organizations, but the need for a better definition of effective coaching. “If you aren’t transparent in your organization about what you’re doing and what’s expected of it, people really can’t give a fair and honest opinion of effectiveness,” Edwards says.

For these reasons, Edwards maintains that organizations shouldn’t give up on coaching as a development tool just yet. In fact, coaching offers benefits that other types of training and development techniques simply don’t. “Training is great, but it doesn’t focus just on you, whereas with coaching, you’re doing it one-on-one. It’s very specific and targeted toward the individual.”

Edwards says that executive coaching is also more “action oriented,” in that people get assignments and exercises to try out in real life leadership situations. More importantly, they’re held accountable to these assignments, because they have coaches checking in on them and offering continuous reinforcement throughout the engagement.

Four Ways to Increase Coaching’s Effectiveness:

While the survey focused specifically with executive coaching – that is, coaching for leaders at or on the cusp of the executive level, the takeaways Edwards mentioned from the survey apply to coaching at almost any level of any organization. If you’re considering coaching in your own organization, consider the following tips to get the most out of it.

Be transparent: As mentioned earlier, it is crucial the organizations clarify – from the onset – what they want to get out of coaching on both the individual and organization levels. “If it isn’t really clear and laid out what’s expected as an end result of the coaching, even there is a decent end result, some people will still think it’s ineffective.”

Rally the troops: “To me, the lesson learned of all attempts to develop people inside organizations and the rating of whether it works or not, is the need of a publicity campaign,” Edwards says. “There needs to be clear communication of why coaching is happening inside your organization and when coaching assignments take place.” The fact that survey respondents cited lack of sponsor/manager support and involvement as one of the top obstacles to effective coaching indicates the importance of having buy-in at all levels of the organization.

Practice reinforcement: Once you’ve clarified your goals, create an action plan to review regularly. At AMA Enterprise, for example, a coach might assign the person being coached different techniques to try to resolve various conflicts. Later, the coach will check in to discuss the results of those techniques, and from there can make a recommendation for next steps. “That’s the value of coaching – the constant reinforcement,” says Edwards. “You have to try things a bunch of times before you can get comfortable with them. That’s not what you can get in training.”

Enlist third-party support: At least when it comes specifically to executive-level positions, Sandi believes external coaches are crucial to effectiveness. “In order to get that different perspective, have the ability to really talk about your organization freely and get insights that might not be resident inside your organization, it would be very important to have an external coach for that.”

Does your company use employee coaching?

What’s the old adage? “A new year, a new resume database update”…? (Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure that’s a thing.) Anyway, it’s true: On Monday, January 9, CareerBuilder introduces a whole new resume database (RDB) experience.

Why the change? Trust us, we’re not trying to pull a Qwikster on you. After getting feedback from both recruiters and job seekers about their Resume Database experiences, CareerBuilder created these updates to best accommodate both sides and create a more effective and efficient recruitment experience.

“Recruiters showed us the need to be able to quickly and efficiently view and then communicate with the best candidates to meet their needs; and candidates showed us they wanted recruiters and hiring authorities to become more selective and targeted in their communication efforts,” says Greg Brass, Director of Product Marketing and Site Usability at CareerBuilder.

So how drastic are these changes?
Not drastic at all! (Unless by drastic you mean awesome, am I right?) Here’s what you need to know:

• New Default View:  Beginning Monday, when RDB users log into the resume database, there will be a new default view:  ResumeFlip, which is the recent addition to RDB that enables users to quickly and easily flip through full-screen resumes views.
• Freedom to Choose: Attached to the old resume database? That’s okay: you can easily opt-out of the new Resume Flip view and switch back to the traditional resume view.
• New Candidate Profile Information Added: Resume Flip continues to evolve and now users will be able to directly view the candidate’s resume in the style and format that the candidate wanted it to be viewed as well as a profile view with a candidates experience, education and desires in a consistent and easy to read format.
• Loving the “Like” Button: With these changes, users can now use ResumeFlip’s “Like” feature to quickly and easily bookmark and save up to 25 resumes, which they can then email, forward or save to another folder.  that then can be acted upon including emailing, forwarding, and saving to a folder.
• Email from ResumeFlip: With the launch of the Resume Flip “Like” feature, the ability to mass email or forward resumes has been moved from the search results screen to the Resume Flip experience.

(Or, to summarize the changes another way…think of resume database as your favorite daytime soap opera actor who just went on Dancing with the Stars. See, you liked resume database just fine the way it was before, but now you can see that it’s got all these new skills and tricks up its sleeves and you’re like, “Whooooa, now you’re even more awesome than I thought you could be.” Yeah? Hope that helps.)

Need a refresher on how ResumeFlip works? Check out the video below:

Are you looking forward to these updates? What new features would you like to see added to Resume Database?

“You have to give your talent the opportunity to be part of the decisions that are being made, because that’s truly when you get the benefit of working with an A player.”

In the following interview, Jorge Perez Izquierdo, Senior Vice President, Manpower North America, discusses why recruiting and retaining the best talent isn’t simply an HR initiative, but a key leadership role.

Who has had the single biggest impact on the way you approach leadership?
My father. He gave me the opportunity to have the benefit of perspective in life. Having different perspectives helps me weigh decisions and gives me the opportunity to step back before making a decision or embarking on a journey that may not be the best. When I talk about perspective, what I mean is just looking at the different sides of every situation.

How do you keep perspective?
I think it’s a journey. It’s giving yourself time and opportunity to reflect on others’ position and where they’re coming from. Something that’s been key in my career is just giving myself the time to keep that balance between reacting and being proactive in a very purposeful way.

Do you have a leadership philosophy?
You have to attract, retain and develop the best talent possible. Once you have that talent, you have to give them the opportunity to be part of the collaboration and the decisions that are being made, because that’s truly when you get the benefit of working with an A player.

How does collaboration happen at Manpower?
Collaboration, for me, is about creating the rules of engagement for how we’re going to work together. For example, how do you define who’s responsible for what? Who has to be informed of the actions? Who has to authorize actions, and who just needs to know about it? Then you strive to have those conversations. I have weekly calls with the team to share information, monthly updates with the business, and quarterly meetings where we spend a couple of days reviewing our strategy, thinking about the models we have to work around, where are we with that, where we are making progress and what we need to adjust in order to keep moving forward. That helps us a lot in trying to keep alignment.

How do you define Manpower’s company culture?
The culture is very value-driven. We have defined three values: people, knowledge and innovation. At end of the day, our asset is talent. We work with talent within, and it’s a service we provide to our clients – providing the best talent for the job they need to get done. We not only talk about talent as an asset, but we really treat people with respect, and we’re inclusive: we ‘walk the walk’ in that regard. What I mean by knowledge is, we really need to understand what our clients are trying to achieve so we can provide the best talent possible and drive better solutions. And innovation comes from the workplace solutions we provide for clients.

What are some of the ways Manpower keeps employees engaged?
First and foremost, we listen to them and understand their expectations and their needs. In today’s environment, investing in recruitment, retaining people and developing them is critical to the business. And that’s not an HR role; it’s a leadership role. The leader of the organization has to be very engaged in that process. We have a global people survey we run every year, based on areas that are very important for our business. We want to learn more about our employees, what they need, and what they expect to have. Based on the survey’s scores, we create action plans to work on the things we need to improve.

What is one piece of advice you have received that has stuck with you?
Always look at the bigger picture, and always put your principles and beliefs as a platform for where you base your decisions. The decisions you make might not always feel comfortable, but at the end of the day, if you keep the bigger picture in sight, you will always make the best decisions.

What is something you know about leading a company that you wish you had known when you first took over in your current role?
Understanding differences of culture is critical. That drives a lot of behavior and you can understand yourself and why things are the way they are. You have to attract, retain and develop the best talent possible. Once you have that talent, you have to give them the opportunity to be part of the collaboration.

What kind of leader do you strive to be?
Someone who always challenges people. Someone who has high expectations, but at the end of the day, those high expectations always come with recognition and reward. You have to have high standards and you have to have high expectations, but you can’t lose sight of celebrating the wins you have today.

ABOUT JORGE PEREZ IZQUIERDO: Jorge Perez Izquierdo is senior vice president for Manpower North America. Manpower is the global leader in contingent and permanent recruitment workforce solutions and is part of ManpowerGroup. Under his leadership, market share has grown 20 percent, with a network of more than 700 locations across North America. Prior to joining the North American organization, he spent seven years as the director general of Manpower Mexico, Central America and the Dominican Republic Region. Perez Izquierdo is also the founder and first president of the AMECH – the Mexican Association of the Staffing Industry in Mexico, representing the country’s top employment services companies. Perez Izquierdo earned a degree in Electromechanical Engineering from La Salle University, Mexico, and an associate’s degree in the Executive Direction Program from the IPADE Institute in Mexico. He also has completed advanced studies in Finance and Quality Management. Active in the community, Perez Izquierdo is a board member of Milwaukee’s La Casa de Esperanza Foundation and United Community Center. He is also a member of the Executive Forum of the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility.

ABOUT MANPOWER: Manpower is the global leader in contingent and permanent recruitment workforce solutions, providing the personal flexibility and agility businesses need with a continuum of staffing solutions. Manpower is part of the ManpowerGroup family of companies, which creates and delivers high-impact solutions that cover an entire range of talent-driven needs from recruitment and assessment, training and development, and career management, to outsourcing and workforce consulting. Recently, Manpower was named to Inavero’s 2011 Best of Staffing™ Talent list, the nation’s only satisfaction award that recognizes staffing and recruiting firms who provide an exceptional experience for the talent they help find jobs. More information is available at http://www.us.manpower.com.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately over how employers can navigate the growing skills gap in the American workforce. In addition to adjusting compensation levels, retraining workers and refocusing recruiting efforts, one of the most effective ways employers can help ensure they bring in the qualified candidates they need is one they should already be doing: strengthening their employer brand.

Companies like Pepsico and AT&T have recently begun their own employer branding campaigns with the aim to build awareness about what it means to work for them and attract more relevant candidates to their open positions. Already known for their strong consumer brands, these companies realize having a strong employment brand as well will give them an edge in recruiting the most in-demand workers by positioning them as an “employer of choice” in the eyes of quality job candidates.

So then what, exactly, constitutes a “strong” employer brand? Generally, there are five ways to tell if an employer has an employer brand that effectively communicates the right message to the right audiences, according to Keith Hadley, Senior Director of Employment Branding Services at CareerBuilder. Below is a checklist you can apply as you evaluate your own employment brand.

Five Tests of a Strong Employment Brand

1.  Is it attractive? Are the benefits and opportunities you offer attractive to potential job seekers? In order to answer this question, you first need to consider your audience. Keep in mind that workers’ wants and needs vary depending on age and situation. For example, while younger workers might seek employers who offer ample advancement opportunities, older workers might be more focused on flexible schedules and retirement benefits. Rather than having a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, tailor your message to speak to and attract different audiences.
2. Is it authentic? Do you practice what you preach? Your brand should reflect the authentic work experience at your company; otherwise, I guarantee you people will find out: Thanks to sites like Yelp and Glassdoor, where employees discuss and rate their employers anonymously, it’s virtually impossible for companies to hide their true employer brands today. Not convinced? Search your company on one of these sites to see what people are saying about you. If you don’t like what you see, go straight to the source to see where you can make changes. Host an open forum to generate honest discussion and feedback or utilize employee surveys to find out your organizations of strength as well as opportunities for improvement.
3. Is it embraced? Does everyone – from the top down – believe in the brand and live it each day? A brand is an extension of the vision your leaders have for you as an employer. A well-defined employment brand aligns employee and management expectations so that promises made during the hiring process are delivered. Therefore it is critical your leaders work each and every day to deliver on these promises and reinforce the brand.
4. Is it unique? “Employment branding is about knowing who you are as an employer, but just as importantly, it’s about knowing who you aren’t,” employment branding expert Mary Delaney has said. Building a strong employment brand isn’t about trying to be Google or Apple; it’s about focusing on what makes your company unlike any other place to work. The best way to stand out is to find out which companies you might be competing with for workers, and then focus on what differentiates you from them.
5. Is it consistent? In order for any branding to be effective, it must be consistent. Would job seekers get the same impression about your employer brand from your company’s career site as they would when visiting your Facebook page? What about if they saw a job ad online or read it in a newspaper? What about if they talked to one of your employees? If you want to make a lasting impression on job seekers, you must ensure the message you send out is consistent across every possible employee touch point.

Easy, right? Okay, yes, it’s a lot to take in, and taking on such an all-encompassing initiative can be overwhelming. Fortunately, however, there are third party service providers available to help you evaluate your current employment brand and look at ways to enhance your efforts. CareerBuilder, for instance, offers Employment Branding services – including candidate and employee research, brand message development and creative – to help companies of all sizes build a foundation for a strong employment brand.

And if there’s any doubt as to whether building your employer brand is worth the investment, consider the words of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a recent interview in Wired:

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue.”

Bezos’ statement is just as true of employment branding. The efforts you make today to recruit and retain quality employees will help your business stay competitive in the long run.

They may not have experienced the type of PR nightmares that Netflix experienced from its ill-conceived decision to launch Qwikster or Yahoo! Inc. saw after firing CEO Carol Bartz over the phone, but two-thirds of American companies say they’ve made business mistakes this year they wish they could take back. Those mistakes, according to a new survey, came in the form of bad hires, the results of which ended up costing them in more than just bruised egos.

According to a new CareerBuilder survey on the cost of a bad hire, 69 percent of employers reported that bad hires lowered their company’s productivity, affected worker morale and even resulted in legal issues.

Forty-one percent of companies estimate that a bad hire costs more than $25,000, and one in four said it costs more than $50,000.

While some mistakes are beyond the hiring manager’s control, there are ways to avoid hiring the wrong person. “The more thoroughly the candidates are vetted, the less likely they will be a poor match,” says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder.

Haefner advises employers to allow job candidates the opportunity to meet as many employees in the department as possible – especially if they will work closely together. Also, candidates should provide ample evidence to show they have the skills and work experience required for the position.

Hiring mistakes happen…but why?
When asked to give a reason for the bad hires, an estimated 34 percent of employers attributed the mistake to the fact that sometimes things just don’t work out. A rushed decision, however, topped the list of reasons companies gave for making a bad hire.

• 38 percent of employers said they needed to fill the job position quickly.
• 21 percent say insufficient talent intelligence contributed to bad hiring decisions.
• 11 percent didn’t perform reference checks (a commonly undervalued part of the hiring process, according to Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan.)

The price of a bad hire: It’s more than just money
The price of a bad hire adds up in variety of direct and indirect ways. For example, 9 percent of companies said bad hires result in legal issues and 11 percent said they result in fewer sales. The most common effects of a bad hire are:

• Lost worker productivity: 41 percent
• Lost time to recruit and train another worker: 40 percent
• Costs associated with recruiting and training another worker: 37 percent
• Negative impact on employee morale: 36 percent
• Negative impact on client solutions: 22 percent

How bad is bad? Characteristics of a bad hire
When it comes to what makes someone a bad hire, employers reported several behavioral and productivity related problems:

• Failure to produce the proper quality of work: 63 percent
• Failure to work well with other employees: 63 percent
• Negative attitudes: 62 percent
• Immediate attendance problems: 56 percent
• Subject of customer complaints: 49 percent
• Failure to meet deadlines: 48 percent

Can bad hires turn into good employees?
For more tips on how to avoiding hiring mistakes, check out the recent interview with Hire with Purpose author Jay Goltz. Wondering whether to fire or try to fix an employee?  Get insight from this recent interview with management expert Anne Loehr, author of Managing the Unmanageable: How to Motivate Even the Most Unruly Employee.

“Making our people the most valued asset in our company is everyone’s responsibility.”

Patrick E. Connolly, President of Sodexo Health Care Market, discusses the qualities he looks for in employees – and how these qualities contribute to his organization’s success.

Can you tell me about your philosophy as it relates to people and their impact on your daily business?
Almost all of the services we provide can essentially be commoditized to some extent. This is one reason we focus on people as the essence of how we deliver an experience. It’s about the patient’s and the resident’s experience, their family’s experience; and the hospital’s staff experience. Whether or not we serve turkey or chicken has minimal bearing on whether we make things better for them. It’s our people who make things better for them. Since the beginning, we’ve been focused on improving the quality of people’s lives. And it’s the people in our organization who make that happen.

What do you do and how do you engage with and relate with your employees?
The majority of my job is internal communications and messaging, direction-setting strategy. I invest a large amount of my time inserting myself in situations where I can make sure that the people know what the message is and what’s expected. For example, I do open forums as a way to make sure of that. Sitting down with 15 to 20 managers at a time, just me and them—no bosses, no format. Open, honest, unfiltered conversation around how I view our work, what I expect the rest of the organization to be like, and how they see it and what they expect.

What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
Authenticity in leadership is really important to me. Bringing your genuine self to work is really important. And, we’re inclusive of everybody’s perspectives. I believe that you have to build teams of diverse people, in order to be as successful as you’re going to be.

What are some of your leadership lessons?
I feel very strongly about living your values. If you look inside your heart and make your decisions from a grounded principled perspective, it makes leadership easier. It doesn’t mean you always make the easy decision, but it makes it easier to make the right decisions and then live with those decisions. I also think accountability is really crucial. I can’t remember who it was who said, “It’s easy to dodge your responsibilities; it’s not so easy to dodge the consequences of dodging your responsibilities,” but it rings true.

How do your people affect your business, particularly as it relates to client services?
There are a lot of other organizations that are in the same businesses as Sodexo. Our teams make the difference by the way they view their roles from the perspective of how they can improve the quality of somebody’s life. We do CARES behavior training—Compassion, Accountability, Respect, Enthusiasm, and Service. Those five behaviors are critical for us to succeed in doing what we do. Our associates literally make a difference in peoples’ lives. They make others’ lives better.

How do you define your company’s culture, and, as a leader, what is your impact on that culture?
Our culture is one of caring and inclusiveness. And the role that I play is serving as a living example of that culture. It’s helping people see  that’s what’s expected from everybody. We’re a spectacular organization. This is the most diverse and inclusive organization around. We’re committed through and through to being the kind of organization that treats everybody fairly, with dignity and respect; and gives everybody opportunities. The organizational culture is about values. Some people believe that responsibility for the organization’s people falls under the human resources department. Not us. Making our people the most valued asset in our company is everyone’s responsibility.

How do you make your overall talent strategy a priority, and what role do you play in driving it?
I don’t believe in traditional views of hierarchy. Whether you run business development or human resources or strategy, you are equally involved with me in the success of this organization. I’m very involved in the high potential people on our team, their training and development, and their succession planning. I know who’s stretching to be in the next role, because I need to know – because people are so important to the organization. All of the leadership people on my team are responsible for the success of the human resources component of the business—and they must be.

What’s the best hiring decision you ever made?
My answer would be that there really isn’t one. There are a hundred of them. There isn’t one best hire in a 22-year career. But, the best hiring practice might be not going hiring simply based on technical fit. So, the best hiring decision is how we approach all of our hiring – looking for the best people who fit our culture and saying, “That’s who we want.” For me, all hiring decisions are really important.

ABOUT PATRICK E. CONNOLLY: Patrick E. Connolly is President of Sodexo Health Care Market, representing $2.9B in revenue. Mr. Connolly joined Sodexo in 1989 in the Schools Division. In 2007, he was appointed President of Sodexo’s Health Care Market Group, which includes the Hospitals, Senior Living and Laundry Divisions in the United States. He also serves as Chief Operating Officer of Sodexo North America. Mr. Connolly focuses on driving growth in a portfolio of management services designed to improve the quality of life of patients and residents across the healthcare and senior living continuum. Mr. Connolly currently sits on the Board of Directors of Comfort Keepers, a leading in-home care company. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Center for Healthcare Leadership. He is also the Chair of the Sodexo Senior Living Market Champions, responsible for development of the Seniors market worldwide. Patrick is holds a bachelor’s degree from Western Illinois University and a master’s degree from the J. L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

ABOUT SODEXO IN NORTH AMERICA: Sodexo, Inc. (www.sodexoUSA.com), a member of Sodexo Group, is the leading provider of Quality of Daily Life Solutions serving more than ten million customers daily in corporations, health care, long term care, retirement, schools, higher education, government and remote sites. Headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md., Sodexo, Inc. operates in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with $7.7 billion (USD) in annual revenue and 120,000 employees. The Sodexo Foundation (www.SodexoFoundation.org) is an independent charitable organization that, since its founding in 1999, has made more than $12.7 million in grants to fight hunger in America.

“You have to be in a place that’s more than a paycheck for people.”

In the following interview, Rick Federico, Chairman and Co-CEO of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc., discusses the simple philosophy that creates a huge effect, the three things that “keep it all going,” and why not having fun is a deal-breaker.

What’s your long-term proposition for your managers?
We’ve always viewed our business as a collection of individual restaurants, not a national chain. When we think of our long-term proposition, it’s truly geared towards the local restaurant entrepreneur. The philosophy was really simple: If I could find people who could live where they wanted to live, do what they wanted to do, and get a balance between home and work life, I would get a continuity of management leadership which would ripple into all aspects of each individual restaurant.

How do you create development opportunities for your employees?
We have two types of employees working in our part-time and hourly positions: one, those who are purely looking for part-time work to supplement their income; and two, those who want to start or further their career in the restaurant industry. The level of development is different for each, and we rely on the employee to share their aspirations and goals with the managers which allows our managers to provide the most appropriate development path. Then through having a continuity of leadership, we can create the right plan that says, “Well, if you want to get to here, here are the three steps you have to take in order to get there.”

Describe your culture. What characteristics does it take to be successful in your organization?
The culture of P.F. Chang’s lives in our message: “We are truly glad you are here, and we will do everything we can to make you want to come back.” When you think about every interaction you have – whether it be professionally or personally – you look for opportunities to create an experience that will trigger in either the guest’s mind or the employee’s mind that we want you back. At the core of the P.F. Chang’s culture and the characteristics we look for in our employees is a desire to serve and create amazing experiences for everyone we interact with each day.

What are some things you’re doing right now to go above and beyond to find the right people, rather than the traditional methods?
How and where job seekers find opportunities today is constantly changing – it’s very fragmented. Putting an ad in a newspaper and expecting the best of the best to walk through our restaurant doors is not a sustainable practice. It’s a big change for our managers, and having strategic partnerships with organizations like CareerBuilder gives us access to a large group of potential employees who can research our opportunities online and apply for the job or jobs they are most interested in. We need to make sure our job opportunities exist where people are looking versus expecting everyone to walk through our front door. The world has changed and we are changing with it.

What is the message you want me to understand about why i should come and work for your organization?
At the end of the day, you can go get a waiter job anywhere. So it becomes a function of, “Why A versus B?” One would argue it’s, “How much money can I make?” So beyond that, it becomes, “How do I feel about the team I’m working with?” How do I feel about their values? How much pride do I have in their product?” You have to be in a place that’s more than a paycheck for people. I have to feel good about what I’m serving, and I have to be doing it with people that I like. It all intertwines into that ability to have the cultural connection. If you can’t adopt it, then you’re not going to be happy. We like people. We’re a people organization. We want people to do well. We will give people more than second chances, if we believe that they’re actually trying.

How do your managers rally their individual teams and keep them focused?
Whether it be through pre-shift meetings, individual one-on-one meetings, sharing individual guest experiences, or technological communication, our managers live ‘The Message’ and do what they can to ensure our employees have a great experience. When the employees feel valued and respected it rolls right to our guests. Constant communication, maintaining high standards and keeping the focus on our guests is what keeps us all going.

What other words of advice to you have for other hospitality industry leaders?
In this particular business, you have to keep it fun. If you’re not having fun, it’s way too much of a job. It’s hard work running a restaurant. We will use as one of our recruiting advantages that we really do want a balance between work and home. I live it; I expect my team to live it. I will always err on the side of family before work. I would expect the organization to do the same.

ABOUT RICK FEDERICO: As Chairman and Co-CEO of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc., Rick Federico is responsible for the strategic growth and development of P.F. Chang’s China Bistro and the company’s casual quick dining concept, Pei Wei Asian Diner. Mr. Federico began his career in the restaurant industry as a manager at Steak & Ale. He later moved on to Orville Beans and Bennigan’s restaurants before becoming co-founder/partner and vice president of operations at Grady’s Goodtimes. When Brinker International acquired Grady’s in 1989, Mr. Federico became senior vice president and concept head for Macaroni Grill, where he later served as president of the Italian Concept division. Active in the community, Mr. Federico is a founding director of Chances for Children and serves on several boards, including the Arizona Youth Hockey Foundation, the NotMyKid organization, Banner Alzheimer’s Institute and the Rosen School of Management at the University of Central Florida. Mr. Federico is a graduate of the University of Tennessee.

ABOUT P.F. CHANG’S: P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Inc. owns and operates two restaurant concepts in the Asian niche. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro features a blend of high-quality, Chinese-inspired cuisine and American hospitality in a sophisticated, contemporary bistro setting. Pei Wei Asian Diner offers a modest menu of freshly prepared pan-Asian cuisine in a relaxed, warm environment offering attentive counter service and take-out flexibility. In addition, the Company has extended the P.F. Chang’s brand to international markets and retail products both of which are operated under licensing agreements. For more information on P.F. Chang’s, please visit the website at www.pfchangs.com.

If you had to wager a guess, what percentage of emails do you get on a daily basis that you really need? (And not just ‘you have to see this YouTube video of a kitten playing with a crocodile’ need but really need?)

Thierry Breton, CEO of tech company Atos, estimates that it’s as little as 10 percent, which is why he hasn’t sent an email in three years – and why he’s now banning Atos’ 74,000 employees from sending internal emails. Under Breton’s newly implemented “zero email” policy, Atos employees must now communicate with each other instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface, according to a recent ABCNews.com article.

While the policy doesn’t apply to external emails with clients and partners, Breton’s hope is to increase employee production and eliminating the data that is “fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” according to ABCNews. In lieu of emails, Atos employees use an internal Wiki to communicate by contributing or modifying online content, as well as an online chat system that allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing.

The End of Email As We Know It?
Unlikely as the move to eliminate workplace email might seem, the effort might just be part of a larger trend. Atos isn’t the only company utilizing alternative tools to replace internal email in an effort to eliminate the clutter and headache of junk email and increase production. In a recent blog post, Notebooks.com editor Josh Smith says his company has eliminated internal email altogether in the past year. Instead of sending email, Notebooks.com employees use Yammer – an internal social network similar to Twitter – as their primary means of communication on a daily basis. “Yammer lets us send messages to specific users, the entire team or as a private message to multiple recipients,” Smith says.

But because Yammer “will occasionally not update in real time,” Smith says the company also uses Google tools supplements.  Google Docs, for example, is ideal for collaboration on bigger projects, enabling employees to share and edit documents in real time; Google Talk helps team members stay in touch ‘for short one-on-one conversations;” and Google Voice enables employees to answer text messages by phone or computer, route phone calls and record calls for later reference.

I’ve discussed before how more and more companies today are utilizing internal social networks to encourage better employee communication and networking. (Over 50,000 companies worldwide use Yammer’s services, while a similar paid service is cfactor, which Starbucks and Pepsico utilize. Some companies have even built their own social communities, such as IBM and Best Buy, with their “Beehive” and “Blue Shirt Nation” hubs, respectively.)  It’s rare, however, to hear about organizations that are using these tools as a replacement for email altogether.

While email systems in the workplace probably aren’t in danger of going extinct any time soon, as alternative email tools become more streamlined and therefore easier to implement in day-to-day work, it’s very possible we’ll see more companies follow the example of Atos and Notebooks.com. Perhaps your company is next…

What’s your take on the move to eliminate email in the workplace? Are you use alternatives to email at your organization? If so, which ones?

“If you’re not prepared for change, you have a tendency to get left behind.”

In this interview with CareerBuilder, Randstad US President Dan Foley discusses the importance of accepting change in the business world, having the courage to do what you believe in, and maintaining a sense of humor throughout it all.

What or who has had the single biggest impact on the way you approach leadership?
Really I can’t point to one person as much as I can say there was an influence of lots of people in my life, whether it was a Jack Welch, a Colin Powell, a Rudy Giuliani, my parents, my grandparents, or employees. I look at all of these different  leadership styles, and what I try to do is take the best of all of them, and then find a way to translate them into my own personal leadership.

Do you have a leadership philosophy or a motto?
It really starts with caring about people. And really being interested in looking out for what’s best for them. And that’s where you can get to this place of transparency and honesty, and really leading them when they need to be led.

What do you want your people to say about you when you leave Randstad?
Fundamentally, what I’d want people to say is that I made it a better place and that I helped it grow.

How do you define Randstad’s company culture?
I think it’s an entrepreneurial culture. It’s performance-driven. It’s fun. (Humor is a big part of what we do, and it’s a big part of my leadership style.) I think we’re progressive, family-oriented, and very core value-driven. “Work hard, play hard”: I think that’s how people might sum up our culture here.

Do you have any advice to share with your executive peers?
Be prepared for change. If you’re not prepared for change, you have a tendency to get left behind. Recognize that change is inevitable, it’s a necessary thing, it’s a good thing. It’s hard to do, but you need to do it. The other thing for me, personally, is I get very focused on the destination. What I’ve got to remember is that the journey is the destination. I think for some of us, with these executive level jobs, it’s almost impossible to see where things are today. You’re always looking down this one- to three-year window, and sometimes you just need to look at where things are today, enjoy the moment and kind of take it all in.

What is something that has surprised you about your job?
I think it’s probably how many times you have to deliver the same message before people really understand it. I’d be talking in a meeting, and I’d say, “This is the vision,” And yet, that was always the question I got: “What’s your vision, what’s your vision, what’s your vision?” And I started to understand that if you really want the message to sink in, you have to say it about 12 times. You can’t just say it once and expect people to remember it.

What do you wish people understood about leading a company or Randstad in particular?
What comes to mind is how fulfilling it can be when you’ve accomplished a task that was really, really difficult, or a great journey to get to. I think it can be really fulfilling to help people get to a better place. Oftentimes, people see some of the negative sides of it…and yes, it can be overwhelming at times, but that gets really into the background of accomplishing a major goal with either a team, an individual or a major organization. That, to me, becomes incredibly fulfilling.

Is there one person you admire or aspire to be like professionally?
His name is Jack Connors. Jack is a big Boston guy who started an ad company called Hill Holiday. To me, he’s done it all: He’s built successful businesses, he’s incredibly philanthropic, he’s a wonderful father, because I know his kids, he’s at all the charitable events, and yet he’s got extremely high business acumen. But he’s never forgotten where he’s come from.

Complete this sentence: “I couldn’t be a good leader without ____.”
Courage. I think if you want to be a good leader, you’re not going to be someone who’s wrought with fear. You can’t be so concerned about what people might think. You’ve got to do what’s right, what you believe in. You rely on courage quite a bit, especially when you’re making change. When you’re trying to make a major change initiative, you’re going to have a lot of people telling you why you can’t do it. The fear of doing it would cripple you. The courage to overcome it is often the right way. But you’ve got to have courage.

ABOUT DAN FOLEY: Dan was promoted to President of Randstad US, Professionals in 2008. Based in Wakefield, MA, he oversees all of the professional staffing segments, including IT, Engineering, Accounting & Finance, Human Resources, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Legal, as well as Managed Services. As president, Dan is responsible for working with the Executive Vice Presidents and Divisional Presidents in developing and supporting a market growth strategy for each of the segments. Dan’s management also extends over the professional brands within the recently acquired SFN Group. With over 20 years of industry experience, he manages all aspects of Sales and Marketing for Professionals and HR Solutions, and contributes to the overall strategic direction of the professional staffing brands.

ABOUT RANDSTAD: Randstad is a network of experts across industries placing talented individuals in your company who are ready to help you excel. Randstad US is a wholly owned subsidiary of Randstad Holding nv, an $18.8 billion global provider of HR services and the second largest staffing organization in the world. The company plays a pivotal role in shaping the world of work, leveraging the true value of human capital for the benefit of our clients, candidates, employees and investors. Randstad offers a comprehensive range of HR services to our clients. They provide temporary, temporary-to-hire, direct hire and outsourced placement services for local and global customers and fulfill all aspects of commercial and professional staffing within Finance & Accounting, Office & Administration, Engineering, Healthcare, IT, Legal, Life Sciences, and Manufacturing & Logistics. Other offerings include payrolling, managed services, recruitment process outsourcing and HR consulting solutions.

Less than you might think, actually.

Despite what Oprah may have you believe, $10,000 bonus checks, iPads and lavish Mediterrannean cruises aren’t the only way to say “thank you” to your employees. A new survey from Parago,  indicates that even a little bit can go a long way when it comes to recognizing employees this holiday season. In fact, the majority of employees surveyed don’t expect end-of-year rewards or holiday gifts from their employers at all this year.

Not that they would turn such rewards down…

Yet employers might be surprised to hear that it doesn’t cost much to make employees feel appreciated. According to the survey, 84 percent of employees say a prepaid gift card of $100 or less would meet their expectations for a reward. In fact, 64 percent said a prepaid card of $50 or less would meet their expectations for an end-of-year reward, with 55 percent expecting $25.

The survey also indicated that when it came to type of reward employees prefer, prepaid Visa or MasterCard gift cards won out above all other incentives, including other types of gift cards, company-branded merchandise or cash, due mainly to the fact that prepaid cards can be spent nearly anywhere at multiple retailers.

Did the prepaid gift card last year? Consider offering employees extra paid time off as another low-cost holiday incentive.  Almost everyone will appreciate the extra time to run errands, – especially at this time of year – or to simply relax and spend time with family and friends.

Are you offering any type of year-end bonus this year?

“We want an ad so compelling that makes someone say, ‘That seems like a cool company. I want to check that out.’” – Jay Goltz

While discussing ways companies can bring in better quality candidates and eliminate hiring mistakes during his recent webinar, Hire With Purpose, small business expert Jay Goltz suggested companies pay more attention to the content of their job postings.

While it might not seem like it, job postings play a major role in the hiring process. After all, consider how much time you take to scan a resume – that’s probably about the same amount of time a job seeker takes to review a job posting. In other words, you have mere seconds to grab – and keep – a job seeker’s attention, so what you say – and how you say it – matter.

With a little effort, however, you can turn your ordinary job posting into one that truly stands out in the eyes of job seekers, drives more applications and leads to better hires. All it takes is knowing what to include – and what to avoid – when creating your next job posting. Consider the following tips:

DO THIS: Utilize keywords as often as possible. NOT THAT: Get keyword-happy.
The more keywords your job posting contains that are relevant to the position – and that job seekers might use to search for jobs – the easier it is for search engines to find it; in effect, the higher it will appear in organic search results. Look at your job posting and consider where you can substitute keywords job seekers might use in their searches. (For example, instead of saying, “The person in this position will be required to…” say, “The Marketing Manager will be required to…”) Just don’t flood the posting with so many keywords that you lose the message.

DO THIS: Go traditional with job titles. NOT THAT: Advertise for “rock stars” or “rainmakers.”
Not only are these terms nondescript, but job seekers aren’t searching for these terms. Stick to advertising for more traditional job titles, which will increase the ability for your postings to show up in search results on job boards, search engines and social media sites.

DO THIS: Think beyond healthcare and 401(k)s. NOT THAT: Leave out “Free Bagel Fridays”
What may seem like small perks are really a window into your company’s culture. And that, for job seekers, plays a major role when considering potential employers. While you should definitely still include traditional benefits like healthcare and retirement, remember that the little things count, too – and are often what differentiate you from any other organization. In fact, when considering which benefits to include in your posting, seek the advice of those who know best – your current employees.

DO THIS: Break it up. NOT THAT: Pile everything into one block of text.
The challenge with creating any job posting is finding a way to maximize what small amount of space you have in order to ‘sell’ your company to a prospective applicant. And again, most applicants are probably skimming your job posting for relevant key words – at best. Make the most of the space you have by creating categories (such as “qualifications” and “responsibilities of the role”) and utilizing bullets (to list required skills, responsibilities and company benefits, for examples). The easier the job posting is to read, the more likely a candidate is to read the posting in full and recognize whether or not he or she is truly qualified for the position.

DO THIS: Show. NOT THAT: Tell.
Text alone won’t grab job seekers’ attention. Create a visual experience. CareerBuilder data finds that job postings that include logos bring in 13 to 21 percent more applications. The number goes up to 34 percent when the job posting is accompanied by a recruitment video. Why? Videos help you communicate your employment brand more clearly than any other medium, because potential recruits get to “see, feel, and hear” what it’s truly like to work at your organization from the employees and leaders themselves.

DO THIS: Address the elephant in the room. NOT THAT: Leave salary information out.
Research shows that job seekers are turned off when companies fail to include salary information in their postings, so reference compensation information whenever possible—even if it is only a salary range or a statement such as “competitive pay,” “salary negotiable” or “compensation commensurate with experience.” It’s important that you let job seekers know your organization understands that money is, if not everything, at least pretty important.

DO THIS: Proofread. NOT THAT: Assume candidates don’t hold you to the same standards as them.
If you wouldn’t give a resume with a mistake in it a second look, why should job seekers treat a less-than-perfect job posting any different? Even the best, most thorough writers aren’t immune to the occasional typo, so proofread your postings yourself – or better yet, ask a colleague to check for errors that you might have missed.

DO THIS: Double- (or triple-) dip. NOT THAT: Post your job under one industry and call it a day.
If applicable, associate your job posting with multiple industries to increase visibility. Many professions can be cross-posted, such as public relations, accounting, web design and programmers, just to name a few. Doing so allows candidates to pull up your job posting in more searches – just make sure the industries are relevant to the position.

Got any do’s and don’t's of your own to share?

First it was Arrested Development. Then it was Beavis and Butthead, followed by layaway and (presumably) pantyhose. Now, the latest comeback story of the season involves middle management.

Middle management positions were a significant casualty of recession-era layoffs, but new research from CareerBuilder’s various industry sites indicate that many employers saw counterproductive consequences and are now rehiring for those positions.

Employers surveyed in the retail, IT and healthcare industries indicated plans to bring back previously eliminated middle management jobs for the purpose of bringing structural gaps and addressing market demands. When assessing the impact of downsizing middle management, employers who made cuts in these industries cited both positive effects (cost-savings and more efficient operations) as well as negative ones (structural and emotional drawbacks).

Don’t know what you got till it’s gone?
According to industry experts, part of the reason for the resurgence in middle management jobs is that employers are now realizing just how essential middle management is to the organization.

“Middle management often gets a bad rap for adding bureaucratic layers to an organization, but these roles can be essential in maintaining team cohesion, retaining core talent and providing direction to workers,” says Bill Meidell, product director of WorkInRetail.com

Jamie Carney, product director of Sologig.com, agrees. “When a department lacks leadership or direction, it is easier to see the value of middle management,” Carney says. “The data suggests that middle management plays an important role in making an employee’s work experience meaningful and productive.”

“Middle management is essential to providing balance and direction within complex organizations,” adds Rob Morris, product director of MiracleWorkers.com. “They play important roles from onboarding new employees and tracking progress to building positive morale and maintaining chains of communication – all things that are difficult to do without.”

Check out details for each industry survey below…

Retail
According to a WorkinRetail.com survey of 240 retail employers, of the 30 percent of retail employers who’ve eliminated middle management positions since the beginning of the recession, 32 percent plan to bring back these jobs.

While 73 percent of retail employers reported that cuts netted beneficial results, 77 percent indicated the following drawbacks:

• Lower morale (39 percent)
• Lower productivity (32 percent)
• Workers less motivated (30 percent
• Less communication given regarding company news (27 percent)
• Training is less effective (25 percent)
• Workers are less organized (24 percent)

Information Technology
A Sologig.com survey of 195 IT employers found that nearly half (45 percent) of the 27 percent of IT employers who’ve eliminated middle management positions since the beginning of the recession plan to bring back those jobs back.

While 73 percent reported that cuts netted beneficial results such as cost-savings and more efficient operations, 76 percent listed the following negative results:

• Lower morale (39 percent)
• Less succession planning (28 percent)
• Higher turnover (26 percent)
• Workers are less organized (24 percent)
• Less communication given regarding company news (24 percent)
• Less recognition for workers (23 percent)

Healthcare
Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of healthcare employers has eliminated middle management positions since the beginning of the recession, according to a MiracleWorkers.com survey of 282 healthcare employers. Of these employers, 44 percent plan to bring those jobs back.

While 81 percent reported that cuts netted beneficial results such as cost-savings and more efficient operations, 74 percent stated there were several structural and emotional drawbacks:

• Lower morale (47 percent)
• Workers less motivated (27 percent)
• Training is less effective (26 percent)
• Less communication given regarding company news (25 percent)
• Less succession planning (23 percent)
• Less recognition for workers (22 percent)

Is your organization bringing back previously-eliminated positions?

“We’re all here to do the same thing: take care of our members.”

In the following interview with CareerBuilder, Eric L. Affeldt, President and CEO of ClubCorp, discusses the importance of being on a first-name basis with employees, how he gets employees to give 100 percent and the three things every leader should do to ensure success.

How do people have an impact on the daily business across the organization?
Our employee partners are the living embodiment of what ClubCorp is all about. We have some terrific physical plants and gorgeous clubs, but if the service isn’t there, and if the employees don’t make the members feel special, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is. 

How do you relate to your employee partners from a CEO level?
First of all, approachability is a given. Any employee partner who calls or emails gets direct access to me.  When I go out to visit properties in the field, my nametag says “Eric” not “Mr. Affeldt”.  I believe I should be on a first-name basis with them, and there should be no distinction between what they are doing and what I can help them do. We’re all here to do the same thing: take care of the guests. 

As far as leadership in general, what are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned along your journey?
I believe strongly that if leaders do three particular things, they’ll be successful no matter what business they’re in: First, establish a direction or a vision for either the company or a division.  Martin Luther King didn’t say, “I have a strategic plan.” He said, “I have a dream.” It’s very important for leaders to be able to visualize what perfection or what a really great day would look like.  Second, in order to achieve that dream or vision, leaders have to allocate resources—both in terms of capital as well as people. They have to put the right people in place as well as deploy the capital appropriately in order to achieve the dream.  The third thing is, ensure execution.  It doesn’t do any good to have a really neat dream and to have allocated the resources and then just kind of walk away and hope that it happens.  Great guest experiences are not the result of great accidents. They happen by design.

Is there anything else that you see as far as your employee partners affecting the business?
If you asked any of our employee partners what we do, I would hope that they say, “We build relationships and enrich lives.” That is our mantra. I hope that every day, employees are looking around and saying, “How can I put two people together? How can I make somebody feel good?”  Even if that means just doing little things that contribute to helping people feel better about themselves. 

How do you define ClubCorp’s culture from your standpoint as the leader of the organization?
There’s actually a quote by Aristotle I heard a long time ago: “What we are we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” That idea kind of gets back to ensuring execution [which I mentioned earlier].  From a leadership standpoint, it is imperative that we continually reinforce what we’d like our employee partners and ourselves to represent.

Some organizations believe that HR is really the only department responsible for people.  How do you make ClubCorp’s overall talent strategy a priority, and how do you play a role in that?
Two things:  I think really good leaders are people who nurture and encourage others.  I say, to everybody I work with, “I’ll help you go wherever you want to go in your career, even if it means that you leave our organization, as long as when you’re here, you give me 100 percent.” I think it’s the leader’s responsibility to help employees progress.  Second, I think it’s the leader’s responsibility to consistently look for ways to upgrade talent – whether that means new training for existing staff or visiting competitors and looking out for the best and the brightest, and trying to recruit those people. 

What do you do to rally the team and reinforce ClubCorp’s employment brand externally?
I try to be absolutely accessible, and stand up and take criticism when criticism is leveled at corporate or myself, in particular. I’m here to make the company better, and if you need to tell me that you think that there’s a better way to do it, that’s fine.

What would you consider the most important decision you’ve had to make as a leader?  Particularly with ClubCorp?
It’s a people decision.  Without the right people in place with the right training, you’re not going to be successful.  The most important decisions I’ve made have to do with, “Do I have the right people in place?  How do I get the best people?  How do I keep the best people?” It all comes down to human capital.

ABOUT ERIC L. AFFELDT: As President and CEO of ClubCorp, Eric is responsible for all aspects of domestic and international operations for “The World Leader in Private Clubs”. Prior to joining ClubCorp, Eric served as a principal of KSL Capital Partners, the private equity firm that purchased ClubCorp in 2006. Affeldt also previously served as president and CEO of KSL’s former golf division, KSL Fairways; vice president and general manager of Doral Golf Resort and Spa in Miami and the combined PGA West and La Quinta Resort and Club in California; and was a founding partner of KSL Recreation. In addition, Eric was president of General Aviation Holdings, Inc. He is currently an MDA Vice President and a member of the World Presidents Organization and serves on the Boards of Cedar Fair Entertainment Company and Fremont College. In 2010 Eric was a regional finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Religion from Claremont McKenna College.

ABOUT CLUBCORP: Dallas-based ClubCorp USA, Inc. is The World Leader in Private Clubs®. Since its founding in 1957, ClubCorp has operated with the central purpose of Building Relationships and Enriching the Lives® of its members. ClubCorp owns or operates a network of more than 150 golf and country clubs, business clubs, sports clubs, and alumni clubs in 25 states, the District of Columbia and two foreign countries that serve over 350,000 members, with more than 14,000 peak-season employees. ClubCorp properties include: Firestone Country Club (Akron, Ohio); Mission Hills Country Club (Rancho Mirage, California); Capital Club Beijing; and Metropolitan Club Chicago.

“There’s a connection between culture and recruiting,” Mike Grennier, Senior Director of Corporate Recruiting for Walmart Stores, Inc., told an audience of hiring resources professionals at the annual  HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas last month.

Grennier was leading a session on virtual interviewing, a practice Walmart began just two years ago in hopes to create a more efficient recruiting process that benefits both company and candidate. They consider the effort a success: Not only has the practice enhanced Walmart’s ability to recruit more candidates across many geographic regions at a fraction of the normal spend, but it also helped them to create a better candidate experience and, in effect, strengthen their employment brand.

“Candidates love that we take the time to do this because it shows that we care about efficiency, and it saves them time,” Grennier says. Not only that, but the effort also makes Walmart stand out from its competitors. “It tells the world we’re being more green.”

Walmart employs two types of video interviewing, depending on the position:

One-way recorded interviews

These interviews act almost like a ‘video resume of sorts: Enlisting the help of an external company’s online interview platform, Walmart sends standardized questions to a group of candidates. The candidates then record their answers and send them back to the hiring managers, who then review and rate the videos based on pre-determined criteria. Walmart then brings in the best interviewees for in-person interviews.  Walmart uses this technique for event-based hiring, volume hiring, campus hiring, and situations involving similar resumes. That is, when they’re interviewing for positions – such as pharmacists – wherein many of the resumes are similar in layout and style; In these cases, video interviews enable them to see if they have a good ‘counterside’ manner, something that wouldn’t come across on a regular resume.

Live, two-way interviewing

When hiring for professional level positions, or doing executive, campus or global recruiting events, Walmart conducts live, two-way interviewing, with the help of another online interview platform service. First, Walmart sends branded webcams to prospective employees. After a tech check to make sure all the equipment is working, a live interview on video can commence. Again, the process enables Walmart to evaluate the candidates virtually bringing them in for in-person interviews. If you’re thinking that the process sounds similar to using Skype, that’s because it is; however,  Walmart finds the benefit to using a third-party company is the additional technical assistance the company receives.  It’s also easier for candidates, too. While many of them may have webcams, they do not necessarily know how to use them or they might be hesitant to download additional software to enable Skype or a similar program.

And as for the results of these efforts, Grennier says the estimated the total savings from these virtual interviews will top $5 million by the end of fiscal year 2012. In addition to the significant cost savings, the practice has also helped lessen the company’s carbon footprint: Since Walmart began virtual interviewing, the company went from using up 623 kg of carbon dioxide to only 17 kg. (In layman’s terms, that’s like taking 315 cars off the road. Mother Earth would be proud, no?)

If others are wondering about the drawbacks to virtual interviewing, Walmart seems to have experienced very few. While Grennier asserts that there are costs up front, they end up being minimal compared to the money saved overall. And while the hassle of utilizing new technologies might scare some companies off, that’s where the third party technology companies come in to assist. Not to mention that these platforms are becoming ever more sophisticated, easier to use and more commonplace. “Before long, people are going to be able to do this on their iPhones,” Grennier says.

For Walmart at least, virtual interviewing isn’t even necessarily so much about being faster and more efficient as a company, so much as it is about the ability to offer candidates a better recruitment experience. “At some point, this will become less of a tech solution and more of a candidate experience solution.”

Get started

CareerBuilder offers an online video interviewing product that enables you to build a custom-branded application with your company logo and candidateswill  feel like they’re interviewing with you. You’ll no longer need to worry about coordinating schedules — both you and candidates have the freedom to use online video interviews on your own time.

Earlier today, while you might’ve been busy vowing never to eat again, voting for your favorite Muppet (Swedish Chef, anyone?), or shopping for that very special Jaleel White fan in your life… Nationally recognized small business expert, speaker and author Jay Goltz was discussing small business hiring trends and best practices for a free webinar titled Hire With Purpose.

In case you were busy with any of the aforementioned activities – or simply want to hear it again – lucky for you, we’ve got two ways to make sure you don’t miss out on the webinar’s great content: Simply download a recording of Hire With Purpose here or keep reading to check out some of Jay’s best sound bytes on the following topics:

On why hiring the right people is crucial…

• “If you want to have a great company, you can’t do so without great people.” Seventy-five percent of management is hiring the right people in the first place, Goltz says. Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t have a hiring protocol, which can be dangerous, when, according to Goltz’s estimates, only 1 out of 10 applicants will be a great hire.
• “People might forgive bad service, but not bad attitude.” Case in point for why you need to have great employees – they are the face of your business. You can’t always account for things going smoothly in the world, but when you have great people in place to deal gracefully with occasional mishaps, your business will be all the better for it.

On three things to do now to hire great employees…

• “Create a compelling ad.” “We want an ad so compelling that makes someone say, ‘That seems like a cool company. I want to check that out.” Great job ads include things like, “You’ll love our culture,” “Our people are valued,” and “our environment is open and challenging with plenty of freedom.” Talk to your current employees to see what they love about working at your company and include that. “You want to inspire people to apply to your company.”
• “Conduct great interviews – or find someone who can.”Ironically, Goltz says, the very qualities that make people great entrepreneurs – a love of talking, the desire to see the best in people – make them terrible interviewers. They often do not dig deep enough to see why someone might not be a good employee. Fortunately, there’s likely someone at your organization who has a talent for the craft and can dig deep to find great employees. A key to conducting great interviews is to ask better questions. Below are some of Goltz’s personal favorites, the answers to which offer insights into a candidate’s personality, work ethic and drive:
•  “Why did you leave your last job?”
• “How did you handle a difficult situation at your last job?”
• “If you were in charge of your last company, what would you change?”
• “Check references. Always.” “Not only is reference-checking one of most important things you can do as part of the hiring process, but it’s also one of most unused resources out there,” Goltz says. Hiring someone without checking references is “like playing with fire.” When checking references, listen for the red flags. Great candidates’ references are often forthcoming with information and compliments; not-so-great candidates, however, have references who are less willing to talk (whether because they don’t want to be unkind or perhaps fear legal ramifications, etc.).  Whatever you do, however, do NOT skip this step, Goltz says. “Trust me, it’s better to make 20 reference calls to guarantee right employee than deal with nightmare of dealing with a bad employee.”

On the crucial first day…

• “Make sure employees walk away from their first day knowing they made the right decision.” Few things are as important to keeping new employees around as giving them a great first day on the job. To ensure this, to the following three things:  Introduce them to everyone they’ll work with; Have their work area prepared for them ahead of time; and have someone take them out to lunch (or take them yourself!)

On one final thought….

• “If you don’t love them, don’t hire them.” I can think of lots of people we weren’t sure about who didn’t work out. If you put a little more time into the front end of hiring, your life will change dramatically. You’ll have less grief in the long run if you hire people you love during the interview process and get great references. Don’t lower your standards.

Did you hear the webinar? What did you think?

Related links:

Hire With Purpose: Q&A With Small Business Expert Jay Goltz

From Q&A to A: The Hiring Manager’s Complete Interviewing Guide

Are resumes -  as we know them – going the way of the dinosaur, Google Buzz and Kim Kardashian’s marriage? (Too soon?)

They might be, if Eugene Woo has any say in it. Today, Business Insider posted this interview with the visualize.me co-founder, who says that as paper resumes become “less and less helpful” to time-strapped hiring managers, visual resumes (or infographic resumes, like this now-famous one) are the way of the future.

But are they?

Sure, infographic resumes are undeniably more interesting to look at than the traditional paper resume (unless, of course, it’s been given the Elle Woods treatment), but are they truly the stuff every hiring manager’s dreams are made of?

Seriously, I’m asking for your input here:
Would you prefer to receive an infographic resume over a traditional resume? I could see both sides to this argument…

Pros
As mentioned earlier, visual resumes are definitely a lot more fun to look at – and definitely can help to set candidates who use them apart, enabling them to show their unique personalities in a way that is unmatched by a traditional paper resume; however…

Cons
I can’t help but wonder if the clever design could distract from what hiring managers might normally consider red flags. As my colleague Justin suggested, job seekers might use the technique thinking they can mask a lack of skills or experience with “pretty graphics.” And one more thing – are they really that much easier to read and review than clean, well-laid out traditional resumes?

What’s your stance on infographic resumes? Is it a fad that only adds clutter to your already crowded applicant box, or would you be happy to say goodbye to the traditional resume forever?

Leave your comments below, and we’ll share your thoughts (anonymously, if you prefer) in an upcoming post on our job seeker blog, TheWorkBuzz…

“Challenge your people to be better than they think they can be. People will produce more than they think they can if they’re challenged.”

In the following interview with CareerBuilder, Ray Titus, CEO of United Franchise Group, discusses how he ensures people get ‘the right seat on the bus,’ applies the Golden Rule to business and the evolving definition of ‘work hard, play hard.’

How do you engage with and relate to your employees?
We try to challenge our employees. I have 10 direct reports and they average over 20 years with the company; I’m really blessed with the people that have come along with our organization early on and stayed with our company over the years. We try to promote a fun, friendly working atmosphere but also one that accomplishes and is challenging at the same time.

What are the most import ant leadership lessons you’ve learned?
Lead by example would be the first one. If you’re going to ask people to work hard, you have to do it first. You have to be the hardest worker. Beyond that, you go with the Golden Rule of treating people the way you want to be treated. It’s all about, “What can we do together?” and creating a team atmosphere and a team among each one of the departments and brands. As a leader, I believe part of my job is to delegate to the leadership within each brand or each department. I want to give people the opportunity and the freedom to be leaders and the room to make decisions, right or wrong, and then help them make better decisions as we go along.

How do you define your company’s culture? As a leader, what role do you play and what is your impact on the culture?
Although I play a major part as the CEO and the founder of the organization, the people that we’ve brought in over the years are really what create the culture. Our company culture has always been: We work hard and we play hard. I started this business when I was 23 years old and have grown up in it. I’ve found that as one gets older, the ‘play hard’ part doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the culture of the business in the same way as it used to. For me, and for many employees, it’s now about balancing family values and family time with the business side of things, and finding ways to instill that in our organization. I think the more things we can do to get our employees in a good spot mentally, the better.

Some people believe HR to be the only department with the responsibility for the organization’s people. How do make your overall talent strategy a priority and what role do you play in driving it?
First of all, the people who think HR is the only department responsible are way off base. HR is a very important part of working with people, but everyone’s job organization-wide involves working with those people and getting them in the “right seat in the bus” as we say in strategic planning. HR actually helps in the initial hiring and they facilitate some of these moves, but these are business decisions that need to be made by individuals, departments, and brands as well as HR – they all work in conjunction.

How do you rally the team and reinforce your employment brand?
Getting everybody together is an important part — for people to be able to say, “Here’s what I’m doing” and show their work. With our employees, we accentuate their positives and are good-finders constantly. We’re not looking for the bad in any individual because you or I can always find the bad in somebody. To find the good and what makes them tick — that’s the key.

What would you consider the most important decision you’ve ever made as a leader?
From the business decision side of things, I believe it’s the lesson of not having to win every battle. It’s  understanding that parties in business are going to have conflicts, and learning to resolve those conflicts without taking a long-term approach or fighting to be a hundred percent right. I don’t think ‘compromise’ is a bad word.

What was the best hiring decision you ever made?
I would say it was to hire and to promote brand presence; to have brand leaders in charge of a company. Having people who eat, sleep and drink the brand is critical.

What other advice would you share with your executive peers through this piece?
Plan for success. You have to have one-year and three-year plans and keep them on your desk all the time and get back to them. Make your strategic plan a living, breathing document that you’re working with on an everyday basis. Challenge your people to be better than they think they can be. People will produce more than they think they can if they’re challenged.

RAY TITUS: Ray Titus is the CEO of United Franchise Group and its affiliated companies. Ray is a life-long entrepreneur who got his start with his father, franchising legend Roy Titus, and went on to develop a group of successful business-to-business brands and franchise development services. The company includes franchise industry giants SIGNARAMA, the world’s largest sign franchise; EmbroidMe, the world’s largest embroidery franchise; Plan Ahead Events, the world’s largest full-service event management company; Billboard Connection, the world’s largest out-of-home outdoor advertising franchise; and Transworld Business Advisors, a business brokerage and franchise consulting franchise. Ray Titus is an incredible leader and directly responsible for the continued success of the United Franchise Group as well as the many accomplishments yet to come..

ABOUT UNITED FRANCHISE GROUP: United Franchise Group (UFG) is the umbrella company to a successful group of the world’s largest franchise systems specializing in personalized business services including signage, embroidery, event management, business brokerage and outdoor advertising. The UFG corporate headquarters, located in West Palm Beach, Fla., controls operations for approximately 200 employees in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia and offers support to the remaining countries around the world. The experts at UFG have used their over 30 years of franchising experience to grow the industry giant into a $500 million dollar success story with more than 1400 locations in more than 50 countries. The company includes franchise industry giants SIGNARAMA, the world’s largest sign franchise; EmbroidMe, the world’s largest embroidery franchise; Billboard Connection, an incredibly successful out-of-home advertising franchise; Plan Ahead Events, a home-based corporate event planning franchise, and Transworld Business Advisors, which provides business brokerage and franchise consulting services.

Who says you have to wait until a position opens up to recruit candidates? For 43 percent of companies recruitment is a day-to-day effort, according to a new CareerBuilder study.

The recent survey of more than 2,600 hiring managers nationwide found that two-in-five U.S. employers continuously recruit where they might not have an open position today, but still market to candidates in case a position opens up down the line. (Which seems impressive, until you realize that less than half of you get to enjoy the benefits talent pipelines offer.)

They also said that year-round recruiting helps cut down on time and money associated with recruiting:

• 72 percent of employers who continuously recruit say they have reduced their time-to-hire, with 41 percent stating it has shaved off at least three weeks on average.
• 41 percent of employers who continuously recruit say it has lowered their cost-per-hire with 22 percent citing a savings of $1,000 or more per hire.

While building a talent pipeline can save time and money long-term, it does require significant dedication on behalf of the entire organization. Fortunately, third-party resources, such as CareerBuilder’s Talent Network offering, are available to assist employers as they build their talent pipelines by:

1. Optimizing their jobs for organic search on search engines like Google so that they show up higher in organic listings and drive traffic back to their site.
2. Providing automated engagement emails to target talent using CareerBuilder’s proprietary matching technology that continuously matches qualified candidates to jobs.
3. Providing a lead and candidate management tool that allows employers to send targeted communications to prospects and candidates who didn’t get a job offer, but might be a good fit for another job down the line.
4. Delivering analytics around Internet sources of traffic and labor supply and demand to help employers build more strategic sourcing strategies.

For more information about the why’s and how’s of continuous recruiting…

• Check out these related articles: Smart Recruiting: Doing More More With Less Through Talent Pipelining and Recruiting for Tomorrow Today: 4 Key Reasons You Need a Talent Pipeline
• See a free webcast: “Your Company in 2020: Capturing Talent to Fuel Future Growth”
• Or visit the Talent Network page to learn more about the solutions available, as well as a full list of companies clients using the Talent Network solution, including WellPoint, Sunrise, IHG and Midas

Does your company recruit year-round?

“Establish a vision, be flexible and agree that it’s okay to disagree with the boss.”

Pierre L. Gauthier, President and CEO of Alstom, a global technology services provider, talks leadership lessons with CareerBuilder in the following Q&A.

How do you  – as the leader of such a large organization – engage and relate to your employees?
We have a people philosophy built around “Team, Trust and Action.” It is a part of everything we do. With our work, we have to work in groups: It’s the engineering department, it’s the manufacturing employees, it’s the project management team — everything has to run smoothly. You have to really count on the other people in the team so the project is a success. Action comes into play, because there are all sorts of things that can happen. For example, a shipment is delayed, or a supplier is having trouble. Every step toward the ultimate goal of delivering quality products to the customer in the scheduled time requires a lot of action. So, “Team, Trust and Action” is really what we work on with our employees.

What do you do to reinforce your corporate employment brand?
If you look at our company, we’re a business-to-business company. We don’t really have retail products that we can advertise or a name brand that is easy to recognize. We try to regroup all these businesses under what we call ‘One Alstom,’ and that is certainly one of the objectives that I have and that my peers have elsewhere in the world — to regroup a “One Alstom” brand and vision. That takes a lot of communication, and it’s not easy to do. People work very hard in making sure our employees in Chattanooga producing gas turbines are also aware of our employees in Hornell producing metros for transportation. The other thing we do to foster “One Alstom” on the human resources side is cross-mobility. We move people, especially the managers, from one business to another within a given sector, and from one sector to another. That way, we have managers who know as much as possible about the scope and global activities of our company.

What would you consider to be the most important decision that you’ve made as a leader?
I think the one that probably strikes me the most is probably not one you would expect, and it is disagreeing with my boss. That’s a trait also, I think, that goes along with our culture: We’re allowed to disagree. When you talk technical activities, everybody has his or her point of view. Obviously, you have to make a decision at some point for everybody to work together and support that decision whatever it is. In this case, it was the closure of a plant which I really disagreed with. In the end, with my team, we worked on an alternate plan and we went back to my boss and I proposed a restructuring plan which was accepted and turned out very well. Today, it’s one of our more profitable plants in North America. I think that’s part of doing business. I talked about managing risk — these are some of the risks, and that is something that you must as a manager constantly review. You must establish a vision, look at what’s going to happen in the future, and rearrange things within the organization in order to be successful. I think the more flexible organizations are probably the ones that will have the most success.

What was the best hiring decision you made?
I think probably some of my best decisions were to replace myself. I think that is important, because the organization is more important than any individual. If you want the plans and the vision that you’ve set forth to be executed, which often take a long time, you have to have the right people who will continue that. Otherwise, you wind up continuously starting back at square one on the learning curve. All the managers have to work at eventually replacing themselves, and that’s more work than somebody would think.

Can you give an example of how a person has made an impact on the organization?
This is where empowerment becomes very important — meaning that we’ve trained employees, we’ve given them the experience, and in that sense we enable them to do extraordinary things. One extraordinary individual is Mr. Stephane Cai, the former manager of our Chattanooga plant. He had the responsibility of rebuilding one of our biggest investments, which is today one of our biggest plants in the world, to produce nuclear steam turbines and gas turbines. He was responsible for building that plant, and then running it. He had to make sure he satisfied customers, that he had the right suppliers, and that his people were trained. This shows how one individual can really do it all — that’s the exciting part. The risky part, of course, is that he had to live with what he built, and therefore had to make sure that what he did was well done.

What advice would you share with your executive peers?
I think you have to stay very close to your customers. To me, that is the number one criteria. You have to constantly empower your people in order to satisfy customer needs and staff the organization accordingly. The market (your customers) is not static, and your organization has to constantly adapt to changing needs. I think you also have to be fast to adapt to the changing market realities. I remember when I was a much younger manager, we used to do five-year plans and even 10-year plans. Today, we do yearly plans and we review them every year. I think being fast and staying close to customers are two very, very key responsibilities.

ABOUT PIERRE L. GAUTHIER: Pierre L. Gauthier joined Alstom (then GEC Alsthom) in 1996 as Vice President of Marketing and Sales. Over the years, he held various leadership roles with the company before being named President and CEO of Alstom Canada in 2003. In 2008, his role expanded to include leadership of Alstom’s presence and activities in the U.S. In this capacity, he directs Alstom’s effort to address the country’s energy and rail transportation challenges. Gauthier is also Chairman of Alstom Inc. and Alstom Power and Transportation Canada Inc. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the École Polytechnique de Montréal and has pursued further studies in leadership and business administration at McGill University and the European Institute of Administration (INSEAD).

ABOUT ALSTOM: Alstom is a global leader in technology, equipment and services for power generation, rail transportation and power transmission. With a team of more than 6,000 U.S. employees across 45 states and the District of Columbia, Alstom delivers clean innovations to address America’s toughest energy and rail transportation challenges. Globally, Alstom employees 93,000 people in more than 100 countries. Visit www.alstom.com to learn more.

“I’m not looking for great storytellers. I want to figure out what makes people tick and how they operate on the job.” – Jay Goltz

In the following Q&A, small business expert Jay Goltz draws from his experience as an entrepreneur to discuss the lessons he’s learned – often the hard way – about what it really takes to hire and retain the best people to run a successful business (or, in his case, five). On Wednesday, November 9, Jay will host Hire with Purpose, a complimentary webinar to discuss insider tips, takeaways and tactics small business owners can apply right now to ensure they make the right hiring decision for their teams.

In your book, The Street-Smart Entrepreneur, you talk about lessons you learned the hard way. What’s your most memorable lesson in terms of hiring? I once interviewed a sales manager at a retail shop that had five salespeople, and I asked her, “How many people did you go through before hiring those five great salespeople?” And she said, “Just five.” I literally laughed and said, “Either you have much lower standards than I do, or you’re a hiring guru.” I hired her, and she turned out to be a hiring guru. She moved away about 10 years ago, but most of the people she hired while she was here are still with me.

The lesson there is that part of hiring well comes down to who’s doing the interviewing. There are some people who can hit a fast ball and some people who can’t. Likewise, there are some people who are great at interviewing and some who aren’t. There’s some element of natural talent there. And that realization has had a profound impact on my company. It used to be, when I hired, only 30 or 40 percent of the people I hired worked out great, and now it’s up to 80 percent. And that’s because we’re much better at hiring.

At the recent Inc500/5000 Conference, Gilt Group CEO Kevin Ryan mentioned how reference checks are often an underrated virtue of the hiring process. What’s your stance on that? I totally agree with that. Whenever I hear about people who are having problems with an employee, I always ask them, “Tell me how you hired this person.” No one has ever said to me, “I put an ad out, I interviewed a lot of people, I did some really thorough questions, and then I really checked references.” It’s always, “Yeah, I didn’t check references.” So people are getting what they deserve, I’m sorry to say.

The other thing is, when you’re doing reference checks, you have to read between the lines. I had a call in about a designer one time, and the reference just blurted out, “Oh, she’s really talented.” After interviewing [the candidate] some more, I realized she was really neurotic, but the woman I used as a reference clearly didn’t want to say that. All of a sudden, it made sense why the reference didn’t say, “She’s great. You should hire her.” When someone’s a great employee, people say things like, “Oh, you’re really lucky she applied. You should hire her right now. She’s a wonderful employee. I really miss her.”  Is reference-checking 100 percent reliable? No. Even if you do everything right, you’ll still probably only have a 90 percent chance of them working out – maybe 80. But if you don’t do everything right, those chances go down to 30, 40 or 50 percent.

Aside from failing to check references, what are some of the biggest mistakes people make in the hiring process? They don’t ask right questions on the interview. They don’t drill into the reasons people left their previous jobs. I’ll ask them, “Did you quit or get fired?” And a lot of times, they’ll say, “Well, it was sort of a combination of both.” And I go, “Oh, really? So you quit, and your boss said, ‘That’s such a coincidence – I was just about to fire you.’” To me, that sounds like bull.

Other mistakes people make include asking bad questions, not listening to the answer, hearing what you want to hear, or not asking enough follow up questions. I follow up with stuff, because the fact of the matter is, if someone’s looking for a job, (unless they’re straight out of school) there’s a story to tell. People change jobs for a reason. One of my favorite questions to ask is, “Tell me about the most difficult customer situation you’ve had to deal with, and how you dealt with it?” Those [behavioral questions] are always telling. I always say, “Past performance is the best indicator of future performance.” If someone’s had six jobs in the last two years, they’re probably not going to be with you too long. Questions like “Who’s your hero?” might work for some people, but I’m not looking for a great storyteller. I really want to figure out what makes them tick and how they operate on the job.

What specific traits do you look for when you hire? I have four things I look for, which we call the BATH test. B means I want someone who buys into the concept. In our case, the concept is that we’re a design company, we’re a customer service-driven business, we do what we can to take care of the customer, and we treat people well. I look for people who buy the concept of what we do and are into it. A means they’re able. I want to know from past jobs that they have the ability to do this, not just someone who says, “I’d like to do that. I’d probably be good at it.” The chances of that being true could be as low as 25 percent (when it’s a highly skilled position) – and it’s not that they’re not lying, they just don’t know. I want someone who has a proven track record. T means they’re team players. I want someone who’s going to tell me what’s on their mind, who can tell me right to my face, “Jay, you’re driving me nuts. What can we do about this?” And finally, H is for hungry. I want someone who’s hungry, who really wants to do this.

In your upcoming webinar, one of the topics you’re going to cover is creating compelling job advertisements. What constitutes a ‘compelling’ job ad?  A compelling job ad includes some piece of information about your company that might make candidates stop and take notice. Maybe you can offer them flex time, for instance. Or how about free parking? What about 401(k) plans, or health insurance plans? Employees are more enlightened these days. They want to work at a company where they have input in the decisions that are being made. The best employees are mission-driven. So if you can let them know that they’ll be involved in things at the company, that’s compelling.

What do you do to orient new hires into the company? After they’ve been here a month or two, we have an indoctrination where we tell them things like the whole mission of the company, where we came from, the history, as well as more tangible stuff such as if they have a problem, what they should do about it, etc. And we purposely don’t do it on the first day. We wait till they get a little used to the place, so that at the end of it, we can go, “Okay, do you think I’m lying, from what you’ve seen?” So at least one time, they’re sitting there with the big boss, and I’m telling them, “Look, if you think I’m full of it, call me on it. Feel free – I’m telling you right now: stop me in the hall, leave me a note, give me a call. If there’s something I’m telling you that really isn’t the case here, please tell me!” It lets people know we believe what we say, and if they’re not happy here, what they can do about it.

What is your stance on exit interviews? We do them. Our HR department conducts them, but, personally, I’ve never gotten any huge revelations out of them. That’s not to say that exit interviews are worthless, but if you’re running a good business where there’s open communication, you shouldn’t need exit interviews. If you’re learning something new, that’s the symptom of a problem. You shouldn’t be learning anything new in an exit interview. There’s a value in it, but they’re like seatbelts: Most of the time they’re useless, but once in a while, it might really make a difference.

Jay Goltz is a nationally recognized author and speaker on the topic of running a successful small business. Jay has been featured in various media, including Fox Business News, Inc. Magazine and Bill Clinton’s bestseller, Giving, and is currently a business blogger for NYTimes.com.

Want to get a free copy of The Street Smart Entrepreneur: 133 Tough Lessons I Learned the Hard Way? Simply register now for Hire with Purpose (happening live on Wednesday, November 9 at 1 pm CST), and be one of the first 100 attendees. Learn more…

Perhaps a trip to American Staffing Association’s Staffing World 2011 just wasn’t in the cards this year…or perhaps you were too busy attending sessions, entering to win a [insert flashy handheld electronic device here], and learning how to pronounce “beignet” to catch everything there was to see at this year’s conference, which took place earlier this month in New Orleans.

We had a feeling that might happen.

Lucky for you, CareerBuilder was there, shooting video from the expo room floor, and gathering feedback from fellow attendees on everything from lessons they’ve learned in this industry to current trends, to what they foresee for the future of staffing and recruiting.

Visit CareerBuilder.com/StaffingWorld2011 for complete video coverage or checkout highlights below.

Overheard at Staffing World 2011

 “You learn something new every day…Learn to love the new things.”

“We believe in giving people opportunities…to change their lives.”

“You’re only as good as your resources.”

“The more staffing firms can recognize that it’s a mobile environment, the better off they are.”

“I don’t think we’re going to go back to the way things were done before.”

Don’t forget to check out CareerBuilder.com/StaffingWorld2011 for more behind-the-scenes footage from Staffing World 2011.

A Different Kind of Conference Swag: The 2011 Opportunities in Staffing Guide
One of the hot topics at this year’s staffing world was the findings from Inavero and CareerBuilder’s 2011 Opportunities in Staffing Guide. The survey of more than 14,000 participants provides in-depth research and insight into the behaviors and perceptions of candidates, clients and internal employees…and – what’s that? – oh yes, it just happens to be available for download here.

Did you go to Staffing World 2011 this year? What was your biggest takeaway?

“I’ve always had the philosophy that strategy in leadership is as much about what you don’t do as it is about what you do.”

In the following interview for CareerBuilder’s Leadership Series, Sun Life CEO Wes Thompson reflects on the importance of people as they relate to sustainability, what he looks for in candidates, and the value of trusting your gut.

What do the employees at Sun Life mean to your organization?
People are really the only sustainable advantage that any organization has over time. Products come and go. Ideas can be copied. These are not sustainable differentiators. Companies that are truly sustainable are those that focus on A-player talent, because you can’t copy talent. So if you’re able to constantly recruit, retain and develop the best people, you can differentiate in the markets that you compete in, and you’ll have a sustainable advantage. It’s really that simple in my view.

What’s your philosophy in terms of how you find great people?
There’s a lot of hiring that’s gut-related, especially when you get more experienced at interviewing candidates. Technical competencies, product knowledge—those kinds of things can be learned over time. Oftentimes, I’m looking for the challenges individuals have taken on in their lives and careers. I look for examples that clearly demonstrate they’ve been able to overcome some significant challenges. I try to ascertain the values they stand for and if they fit with our core values here at Sun Life. This fit is critical to building a solid foundation and culture at any good company.

Throughout your career as a leader, what’s the best or most significant hiring decision that you’ve made?
It’s hard to quantify your best hiring decision. As I reflect on my career, there are so many talented people that I’ve had the pleasure of hiring and watching succeed. In one instance, I hired someone that was my peer at another company. I knew our competencies were extremely complementary, which is important. And we both realized that we could build something unique. I firmly believe if you surround yourself with great talent, you’ll figure out how to win.

Why would someone want to work here?
The culture at Sun Life is shifting and so are the reasons behind why our employees enjoy working here. Historically, you would want to work here because it’s a nice place to work and you could be here for 30 years. I think our employees are beginning to consider Sun Life a great place to work because you can be challenged, you have the autonomy to drive results, and the results are visible and rewarded.

What’s it like to work for this organization? How is the Sun Life culture reflected in the brand?
Our first ever national brand campaign in the U.S. has had a tremendous impact on the culture and the way our employees feel about working for Sun Life. Everyone wants to be affiliated with a company that has a strong brand. And it makes it easier when your brand reflects who you really are. We highlighted our strengths that are deeply ingrained in our culture, particularly our financial strength and focus on sustainability, but we had some fun with it and added some humor to the campaign. It resonated well with our employees, particularly long-term employees, because we stayed true to ourselves. Our people really embraced that.

What is your leadership philosophy?
First, I don’t believe that the leader has all the good ideas, and I’m open to being challenged. Leaders can’t be successful if people are afraid to challenge them. This will stifle the creativity of the organization and you will not get the best out of people. Second, I’ve always had the philosophy that strategy around leadership is as much about what you don’t do, as it is about what you do. Through my experience, I have found that it’s really easy to figure out what to do and what to start, but it’s really difficult to figure out what you’re not going to do, particularly when there are implications for not pursuing or stopping initiatives. And, third, I am big believer in rotating talent at all levels of the company. This not only develops our people but brings new perspectives to all areas of the business, helping to drive collaborative and innovative thinking.

So you just went through, a tough time, a recession.  What did you take out of it?  What did you learn in those last three years?
During a time when external forces are affecting your business, you must focus on the things you can control. You must have a long-term view of the business and what is truly sustainable under various market conditions, not just the favorable conditions. Alignment along all aspects of the value chain is critical in order to be sure you’re focused on markets that have sustainable value from a shareholder perspective.

ABOUT WES THOMPSON: As President of Sun Life Financial, U.S., Wes Thompson leads all aspects of the company’s growing operations in the United States across the annuities, employee benefits, and life insurance business lines. Since joining Sun Life in 2008, Thompson has been instrumental in renewing the strategic direction of SLF U.S. He has championed key initiatives focused on growing the business and positioning it for further success. Prior to joining Sun Life, Thompson held leadership roles at Lincoln Financial Group, where he created the company’s wholesale distribution organization, before becoming President of Employer Markets and then President of the Retirement Solutions division. Thompson started his career at Aetna in 1979 in the Executive Management program. He later joined CIGNA in 1994, where he played an active role in the integration efforts as Lincoln Financial Group acquired CIGNA’s individual life insurance business in 1998. Thompson received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. He is an active board member of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Hartford and the Wadsworth Atheneum-Amistad Foundation.

ABOUT SUN LIFE FINANCIAL: Sun Life Financial is a leading international financial services organization providing a diverse range of protection and wealth accumulation products and services to individuals and corporate customers. Chartered in 1865, Sun Life Financial and its partners have operations in key markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China and Bermuda. As of March 31, 2011, the Sun Life Financial group of companies had total assets under management of US $484 billion. For more information, please visit www.sunlife.com/us.

“At the end of the day, it isn’t just about a having a visionary idea or business plan. It’s about employees who bring passion and flawless execution.”

Such is how Kevin Ryan began – and set the tone for – his keynote address, Hirer’s Remorse? Why 80 Percent of Business is Choosing the Right People, at the recent Inc500/5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony in Washington, D.C.

Ryan should know a thing or two about what it takes to grow and run a business. He has launched several New York-based businesses, including Gilt Groupe (for which he is the current CEO), Business Insider, ShopWiki, 10gen/MongoDB, and, not least of all, DoubleClick, which he helped grow from a 20-person startup to a worldwide company with over 1,500 employees.

Drawing from his own experience, Ryan discussed the beliefs and practices that have fueled his success as a business leader, the foundation of which, are based on people.

Rules to Live – and Lead – By
Lessons from Gilt Groupe Founder and CEO Kevin Ryan

• Don’t just say people are your greatest asset. Believe it. “Your idea isn’t what’s separating you. It’s the execution. And that goes back to people,” Ryan says. While companies tend to claim that people are the most important thing to their business, they don’t really believe it. Instead, they operate under the illusion that products or ideas – not the people – determine success. If you want your company to be successful, recognize that people truly are your greatest asset – and you should treat them as such.
• Make recruitment your primary job. “Do you spend more time recruiting and managing people than anything else by far?” Ryan asked the crowd of entrepreneurs and small business leaders. Ryan says he spends as much time with head of HR as he does with CFO, because the two are equally important. “It’s just as strategic,” he says. “I want someone who not only has the skills to be head of HR, but who also has business skills as well.”
• Create success for your employees – even if it mean they won’t be your employees anymore. If you were the coach of a professional sports team, Ryan says, you would constantly be evaluating your players to ensure the team is operating at its best at all times, wouldn’t you?  The same goes for your organization. Don’t be afraid to say to an employee whose no longer a fit for your company or performing to your company’s highest standards, “Maybe this isn’t the right company for you. I want you to be successful, and I don’t think it’s here.”  If someone’s not working out, it’s your job as CEO to address it; otherwise, the more you let it go, the more you let the problem fester, the greater chance you have of ruining the morale and the performance of the whole team down the line.
• Don’t underestimate the value of the reference check. Of the three main steps in the hiring process – resume, interview and reference check – Ryan says, people tend to over-evaluate the first two and under-value the third. “When I think of why people don’t succeed, it’s not because they don’t have technical skills. It’s because of those intangibles that don’t come up in interview that are hard to judge.” Reference, therefore, are the key to finding out if those candidates have the intangibles you need. “People who worked with that person know,” Ryan says.
• Be the person you want to work for. “There’s a saying that A-level people hire A-level people, and B-level people hire C-level people…but I think it’s actually that A-level people want to work with A-level people, and the B-level people who are hiring can only get C-level people,” Ryan told the crowd.  “People will put up with a tremendous amount of unrest [at a company] if they wake up every day and think, ‘I like my managers. He/she supports me, and I’m learning from that person,’” Ryan says. He attributes Gilt’s low rate of turnover to the company’s “obsessive focus” on making sure employees are constantly having fun, learning, being challenged and being recognized.

In closing, Ryan made sure to reiterate that his number one focus as CEO isn’t on business results, but on people. “People, people, people. That’s what I do all day.”

From zero to 103,000 in 30 days…

What sounds like the tag line of a lame Nicolas Cage action movie (redundant?) actually describes the change in the number of jobs created since last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released September’s Employment Situation Report this morning.

Here’s a summary:

• Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 103,000 in September; however, that number includes the return to payrolls of about 45,000 [Verizon] telecommunications workers who had been on strike in August.
• The private sector added 137,000 jobs in September, with health care and education leading the growth, while local government shed 35,000 jobs, including 24,400 in public education.
• The number of unemployed persons was relatively unchanged at 14 million and the unemployment rate held at 9.1 percent.
• The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was 6.2 million in September.
• Since April, payroll employment has increased by an average of 72,000 per month, compared with an average of 161,000 for the prior seven months.

While it’s nice to see that jobs were actually added this month (and even surpassed economists’ predictions of around 55,000), 103,000 still falls far short of the around 200,000 jobs needed each month just to fuel growth.

But before I become too much of a Debbie Downer, I’ll just reiterate White House blogger Katherine Abraham’s advice to “not to read too much into any one monthly report.” Done and done, Katherine.

Related links:

• Get a read on employers’ hiring expectations for the remainder of 2011.
• See how unemployment rates vary by age, education and gender on NPR’s Planet Money.

From zero to 103,000 in 30 days…

What sounds like the tag line of a lame Nicolas Cage action movie (redundant?) actually describes the change in the number of jobs created since last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released September’s Employment Situation Report this morning.

Here’s a summary:

• Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 103,000 in September; however, that number includes the return to payrolls of about 45,000 [Verizon] telecommunications workers who had been on strike in August.
• The private sector added 137,000 jobs in September, with health care and education leading the growth, while local government shed 35,000 jobs, including 24,400 in public education.
• The number of unemployed persons was relatively unchanged at 14 million and the unemployment rate held at 9.1 percent.
• The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was 6.2 million in September.
• Since April, payroll employment has increased by an average of 72,000 per month, compared with an average of 161,000 for the prior seven months.

While it’s nice to see that jobs were actually added this month (and even surpassed economists’ predictions of around 55,000), 103,000 still falls far short of the around 200,000 jobs needed each month just to fuel growth.

But before I become too much of a Debbie Downer, I’ll just reiterate White House blogger Katherine Abraham’s advice to “not to read too much into any one monthly report.” Done and done, Katherine.

Related links:

• Get a read on employers’ hiring expectations for the remainder of 2011.
• See how unemployment rates vary by age, education and gender on NPR’s Planet Money.

For fashion designers, it’s Mad Men. For chef entrepreneurs, it’s food truck mania. But for employers, the economy and seasonality are what’s having the biggest influence on them this season – at least when it comes to their hiring plans.

According to CareerBuilder’s Q4 2011 Job Forecast, a nationwide survey of more than 2,600 hiring managers and human resource professionals, employers are erring on the side of caution with their upcoming hiring plans, as they assess ongoing barriers to economic growth and wrap up 2011.

Only 21 percent of hiring managers report plans to hire full-time, permanent employees in Q4, according to the survey. While the finding indicates a slowdown in hiring from the previous two quarters, it is consistent with trends typically seen at the tail end of the calendar. Add to that a volatile stock market, concerns over Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, etc. etc…and it’s no wonder employers are showing more hesitance in their hiring plans this quarter, in comparison to the previous two.

According to CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson in a statement for the press release:

“While hiring is historically slower in the fourth quarter, recent world events and a structurally impaired U.S. economy are causing employers to be a little more guarded. Job creation levels are not yet high enough to drive down the unemployment rate, but the hiring trends we’ve seen through our surveys and on our job site still indicate an overall positive sentiment among employers. For eight consecutive quarters, 20 percent or more of employers reported adding new jobs and the same is expected for Q4.”

Q4 Hiring Trends: A Preview of What’s to Come

You can download CareerBuilder’s 2011 Q4 Job Forecast here, but below is a summary of what we should expect to see from employers in the coming months:

• Education and Skills Gap Remain a Major Concern: Two-thirds of employers (67 percent) expressed concern over the education and skills gap in the U.S. and corresponding deficit in talent for specialized positions, particularly when it comes to engineering (37 percent) and information technology (33 percent) positions.
• Temporary Hiring Remains a Crutch: To supplement staffs, 32 percent of employers turned to temporary help in Q3, while 27 percent plan to hire temporary or contract workers in Q4. Seventeen percent of employers expecting to transition some of these employees into permanent staff.
• Mixed Messages as West Leads in Hiring, Downsizing: While the West leads the U.S. regions in the number of employers expecting to hire full-time, permanent employees in Q4 (23 percent), it also houses the highest number of companies planning to downsize by year end (12 percent) – showing a blend of both optimism and uncertainty seen across regions.
• Slower to Hire, Slower to Fire? Small businesses continue to lag larger organizations in hiring activity, but are also less likely to reduce staff levels.  Of companies with 500 or fewer employees, for example, 17 percent plan to increase full-time, permanent headcount in Q4 and only 8 percent expect to reduce staff levels. Of companies with more than 500 employees, on the other hand, 27 percent plan to hire full-time, permanent staff in Q4, and 11 percent plan to decrease headcount.
• Raise? What Raise? The majority (41 percent) of employers anticipate no change in salary levels in the fourth quarter compared to the same period last year.  On the upside, only 4 percent anticipate a decrease in salaries.

How do these findings compare to your own hiring plans this quarter?

“You can’t let fear cripple you to the point that success eludes you. Somehow you’re going to get through it if you just stay with it.” – Wayne Cederholm

CareerBuilder recently sat down with Wayne Cederholm, CEO of C.R. England, to discuss the leadership lessons he’s learned in his nearly three decades with the company.

What is your philosophy on people as they relate to your business?
I don’t believe there is an organization that can function competitively, competently or have any capability in doing what they’re supposed to be doing without very good people. People are your business. They’re the heart and soul of what you do. If you have poor people, you’re going to have a poor organization and product. Having the right people is one of the most critical elements of any organization. They’re the engine of your organization.

What leadership lessons have you learned throughout your 28 years with C.R. England?
I think creating autonomy for people is a big one. It is important to give your leaders and employees the leeway to do their jobs and inspire creativity. It’s all about letting them take the job somewhere you never dreamed it could go and allowing free thinking to occur, while holding them accountable to quantifiable measurements and goals.

What is the culture at C.R. England like today? How has it changed during your tenure?
At C. R. England we have always created a spirit of entrepreneurship. Chester England was an entrepreneur. Gene and Bill England, his sons, were entrepreneurs. This same spirit lives on in the 3rd and 4th generation. Gene England, to this day, still runs a little business from our corporate office. He’s 93 years old and the kind of role model we all grew up with. While we were always big on technology, I believe the biggest change is that it has advanced immensely now. The fourth generation is much more analytical than we ever were before and we’re all pushing for automation through advanced technology.

What is your overall talent strategy and how do you make it a priority?
We ensure all managers are involved in hiring decisions. It’s important to bring in the right person and essential that we’re right for them as well. We want an individual who can fit our culture, but we want them different enough so they add a unique perspective, too. If we’re all the same, we’re just going to do the same thing, over and over. It’s not a science. Hiring people is an art. And I’ve certainly had my hit and misses.

How do you motivate people?
I think the best way to motivate people is by ensuring that you’re communicating your vision and expectations, and then celebrating successes or talking about where enhancements need to occur. You need to create a culture where people feel they are contributing.

To what do you attribute your success with C.R. England?
Don’t quit. Just keep staying with it. In spite of how bleak it sometimes looks, you just have to say, ‘Okay, what do we do next?’, and keep moving forward. You can’t let fear cripple you to the point that success eludes you. Somehow you’re going to get through it if you just stay with it. That’s the only way I can explain it.

How would you describe C.R. England’s employment brand?
It’s our entrepreneurial spirit. We love creativity and innovation, and we’re cheering for those people who embrace it. That’s our culture, and our employees know it. That’s what’s exciting about our organization.

What do you consider the most important decision you’ve made at C.R. England?
I like to think of this question from the opposite angle. I believe not making a decision is the worst hiring decision you can make. The best thing about decisions is making it as timely as you can and having the guts and nerve to say, ‘Okay, I have to make this decision and move forward here.’ Often managers just procrastinate and procrastinate, and no decision is made. And the company struggles because of it. If it’s a hiring decision, or any decision, there are always tough decisions to be made each and every day.

What advice would you offer to your peers?
I can’t stress enough the importance of having great people and making sure you adhere to consistent management fundamentals. Your people need to share your vision of where the company is going. You need a strong bench of potential future leaders to ensure consistent growth. You also have to allow for creativity with dogged measurements to track your progress. The right people, who are challenged and have opportunity.

ABOUT WAYNE CEDERHOLM: Wayne Cederholm is the chief executive officer at C. R. England Inc., a Salt Lake City-based global transportation provider. Mr. Cederholm joined C.R. England in 1983 and held various roles before taking over as chief operating officer in 2004. He is responsible for overseeing the management of all asset and non-asset operations within C.R. England. At the start of his career, C.R. England was an $18 million company. Today, the company is a billion dollar organization. He has served on the board of the Professional Truck Driver Institute and as a chairman for the Utah Safety Council. In 2003, he received the Heart and Hands Award from Junior Achievement, where he serves on the board of directors. Mr. Cederholm has a degree in organizational communication from the University of Utah.

ABOUT C.R. ENGLAND : Founded in 1920, C.R. England, Inc. corporate headquarters are located in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the world’s largest refrigerated carrier and has grown to be one of North America’s largest transportation companies. C.R. England services include National, Mexico and Regional Truckload service in addition to Dedicated and Intermodal services. Additional services include Leasing, Brokerage, LTL/Parcel, Supply Chain Engineering, Special Project Engineering, Warehousing, and Global Sourcing. For more information, visit www.crengland.com.

Anne Loehr is a nationally recognized management coach and author of the award-winning book, A Manager’s Guide to Coaching: Simple and Effective Ways to Get the Best of Your Employees. I recently spoke with Loehr about her new book, Managing the Unmanageable: How to Motivate Even the Most Unruly Employee, a collaboration with workplace communications expert Jezra Kaye. She discussed some key takeaways from the book, including how to identify when an employee is worth holding on to and when it’s time to walk away.

How do you define an “unmanageable employee”?
We call an unmanageable employee (UE) an employee who exhibits constant, repeated, unproductive behavior. Everyone has a bad day, a bad week, sometimes even a bad month, depending on what’s going on in their life. But we’re talking about someone who’s constantly, repeatedly – on a fairly long-term basis – unproductive. This book is about helping managers uncover what they need to put UEs back on track.

The majority of organizational challenges are because the goals, the roles, and the processes are not clear. So people will say, for example, “Gosh, Mary’s driving me crazy, do something about Mary.” And I’ll go in, and I’ll do some work and then I’ll say, “Well, you know what? It’s not actually Mary – it’s never Mary – it’s Mary’s behavior that’s not working, for one. Two, she’s doing this because she actually thinks it’s her job, and you think that’s your job, and that’s the problem there.”

Do you find this happening a lot more now, with the economy and people taking on bigger workloads now, or is that always how it’s been?
I think that’s always how it’s been. You’re right – we have a lot of downsizing, a lot of reorganizing. Also what’s contributing to this is you’ve got a lot more virtual teams. So you’ve kind of lost that face-to-face feeling, which I’m not saying is a bad thing at all, but it’s just harder to have those kind of conversations to say, “What’s going on?” and it’s harder for a manager to spot a challenging, unmanageable employee until maybe it’s too late.

What makes managing the unmanageable different from other management books?
My work in general is very practical. I call it the one third/two thirds rule: One third, I’ll explain the model and two thirds is practical examples, practical exercises, and practical tips that people can walk away with. In my opinion, a lot of books right now are academic theory. Who’s got the time to read that right now? One third of my book is about understanding the [five C] model (detailed below), and the rest is, “Here’s how you do it, here’s how you have that conversation, here are the questions to ask.” That type of thing.

Does an employee ever pass the point of no return?
One question I get asked on interviews a lot is, “Why not just fire someone? There are so many unemployed people out there, why not just hire someone else?” But there are a couple of reasons. The Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) have done a study: to replace the average employee costs two and half times that employee’s salary. For someone who’s more specialized, it can be up to four times their salary. I don’t know of any company that can afford that right now.

The other thing is, you can bring someone off the street, but it’s not going to guarantee you’re going to find someone any better, especially if you haven’t done any of the internal organizational work to prevent you from hiring the same type of person. And you’re still going to have the onboarding costs even if you bring in someone new.

And sometimes it’s not worth it, to be honest; Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes organizations just grow so fast, they change so much, and sometimes a person who was good fit two years ago isn’t a fit anymore, and it’s through nobody’s fault. However, if you can hold on for five more months, and practice some of the things in this book, you might be pleasantly surprised, [and your UE] is going to be thrilled that someone is helping him or her grow, and you’re going to save a bundle of money.

Managing the Unmanageable: The Five-C Framework
When asked to contribute some tips managers can use to manage UEs, Loehr provided the following Five-C Framework, which she discusses further throughout Managing the Unmanageable. “Once people understand this framework and model, it will help them with not only the unmanageable side, but it will also help them help people get better,” Loehr says.

Commit or Quit: “What that means is, “Look, you’ve got to commit or quit.’ This step is about figuring out, monetarily – as well as with the soft tangibles – if it’s worth six months (which is usually how long it takes to salvage a UE) to spend on this person,” Loehr says.  Those intangibles to which Loehr refers are costs associated with decreased morale and lost productivity.

Communicate: Many managers try hard to avoid this step, “a frank and open conversation with the person who’s been making their life hell,” according to Loehr. Ongoing, honest communication, however, is a necessary and beneficial step to understanding the source of the problem and then overcoming it.

Clarify Goals and Roles: “The majority of organizational challenges are because the goals, the roles, and the processes are not clear,” Loehr says.  Oftentimes, employees aren’t consciously trying to be difficult; they are simply unclear on their roles and expectations. Making the effort to clarify these elements will eliminate a lot of challenges before they begin.

Coach: While the first two steps will help most UEs correct their own problems, some may still need a little help. This is where the manager comes in to assist the UE as he or she examines the attitude or mindset that is giving rise to the problem.

Create Accountability: In order to ensure UEs don’t revert to old habits, it is imperative to create a process that will help them maintain – and build on – the progress they’ve made up to this point.

Do you realize…

…one in two job seekers want to find and engage with companies in social?
…80 percent of companies use social media to recruit?
…12 percent of job searches are done via mobile devices?
…54 percent of job seekers are more likely to apply to your job at your company after they follow you on social media?

Yesterday, CareerBuilder’s Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Branding, Jamie Womack, along with CareerBuilder Area Vice President Andrew Streiter discussed these very findings in the featured webcast, Going Social: How to Leverage Social Media In Your Recruitment Strategy. 

In addition to these findings, they also gave practical tips for employers on the best ways to leverage emerging media to strengthen employment branding and recruiting efforts, including…

…the latest tools, trends and techniques for attracting top talent
…what emerging media are and what they mean for your business
…how to integrate emerging media into your current recruitment strategy

Missed the webcast? Download it now at www.careerbuilder.com/GoingSocial.

Keep the conversation going – use #CBGoSocial on Twitter…

During the webcast, participants were urged to join in the conversation by following and posting the hashtag #cbgosocial on Twitter! Visit Twitter and search #cbgosocial and put in your own two cents!

Related articles:

• Think Like a Marketer to Capture Top Talent
• Emerging Media: The Best Ideas You Aren’t Taking Advantage Of
• Why Video? 6 Benefits of Making Video Part of Your Recruitment Mix

New surveys released through three of CareerBuilder’s niche sites – MiracleWorkers (which caters to healthcare workers), WorkinRetail (serving the retail industry) and Sologig (focused on contract and freelance positions) – reveal the information workers value most on an organization’s social media pages – and what social media moves they despise.

More than 500 workers nationwide in each of the above industries participated. Take a look at the results, and use them to inform your own social media recruitment efforts:

Healthcare

Fifty-three percent of healthcare workers who use social media are interested in seeing information on company social media pages, according to the survey from MiracleWorkers.com.

What healthcare employers should post…

• Job listings on company pages (wanted by 40 percent of healthcare workers)
• Fact sheets or Q&A about the company (26 percent)
• Career paths within the organization (26 percent)
• Employee testimonials (22 percent)
• Something that conveys fun about working for the organization (19 percent)

…and what they should avoid:

• Company communication reads like an ad (a peeve for 35 percent of healthcare workers)
• Failure to respond to submitted questions (33 percent)
• Failure to regularly post information on social media or blog entries (23 percent)
• Filtering or removing social media comments (20 percent)

Retail

Fifty percent of retail workers who use social media are interested in seeing information on company social media pages, according to the survey from WorkInRetail.com.

What retail employers should post…

• Job listings on company pages (wanted by 33 percent of retail workers)
• Facts sheets or Q&A about the company (27 percent)
• Career paths within the organization (27 percent)
• Employee testimonials (18 percent)
• Something that conveys fun about working for the organization (18 percent)
• Pictures of company events (13 percent)
• Videos of a day on the job (13 percent)
• Video of new products and services (13 percent)

…and what they should avoid:         

• Company communication reads like an ad (a peeve for 43 percent of retail workers)
• Failure to respond to submitted questions (38 percent)
• Filtering or removing social media comments (27 percent)
• Failure to regularly post information on social media or blog entries (24 percent)

Information Technology

Fifty-one percent of IT workers who use social media are interested in seeing information on company social media pages, according to a new survey from Sologig.com.

What IT employers should post…

• Job listings on company pages (wanted by 39 percent of IT workers)
• Fact sheets or Q&A about the company (32 percent)
• Career paths within the organization (24 percent)
• Something that conveys fun about working for the organization (21 percent)
• Video of new products and services (17 percent)
• Employee testimonials (16 percent)

…and what they should avoid

• Company communication reads like an ad (a peeve for 53 percent of healthcare workers)
• Failure to respond to submitted questions (32 percent)
• Inconsistency in company messaging in different social media venues (26 percent)
• Failure to regularly post information or blog entries (25 percent)

Employers must lead the social media path
Despite this interest, very few workers on social media (18 percent of IT workers, 12 percent of healthcare workers, and only 9 percent of retail workers) currently use it as a means to research jobs. Representatives from each site say social media users are waiting for companies to take the lead.

“Social media communication is a two-way street,” says Bill Meidell, product director of WorkinRetail.com. “Retailers need to keep their pages active and respond to as many fans and commenters as possible in order to see a positive return on their efforts.”

“IT workers are not only interested in learning about new career opportunities, but willing to refer jobs to friends or people in their professional networks, as well,” adds Jamie Carney, senior product director of Sologig.com. “Forty-one percent will pass job leads along to others, according to the survey, making social media the perfect vehicle for improving a job listing’s reach.”

Rob Morris, product director of MiracleWorkers.com, echoes this sentiment, saying, “The referral process makes social media a great avenue for career information. We found that 30 percent of healthcare workers on social media pass job opportunities to friends or people in their professional networks.”

Do these results surprise you? What industries are you interested in getting this type of info on?

Today, CareerBuilder announced its commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting in New York, which brings together leaders from all over the world to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. The commitment is part of CareerBuilder’s ongoing effort to educate job seekers on where to find opportunities and put Americans back to work.

Hope Gurion, CareerBuilder’s Chief Development Officer, is going to be at the annual meeting this week to speak on behalf of CareerBuilder.  She recently answered a few questions for me about the mission and history of the CGI, CareerBuilder’s involvement in the initiative and what she hopes all of us can gain from this meeting.

Can you tell me a little bit about the Clinton Global Initiative?
President Bill Clinton established the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in 2005. Over the years, CGI Annual Meetings have brought together nearly 150 current and former heads of state, 18 Nobel Prize laureates, hundreds of leading CEOs, heads of foundations, major philanthropists, directors of the most effective nongovernmental organizations, and prominent members of the media. These CGI members have made nearly 2,000 commitments, which have already improved the lives of 300 million people in more than 180 countries. When fully funded and implemented, these commitments will be valued in excess of $63 billion.

What role does CareerBuilder play in the CGI?
CareerBuilder is a full member of CGI, and I represent the company at the numerous meetings throughout the year.  I actively participate on the “workforce development” committee, and this week I am in New York City for the annual meeting. The key focus area for the first day of the meeting is jobs, and I’m particularly looking forward to a healthy discussion around the opportunities to empower current and future workers with new skills.  This is an area where there is a lack of transparent and current data to inform both students and workers, and where we are focused to illuminate and inform people in making good choices that will provide them with income and opportunity.

What do you hope to accomplish by participating in the CGI?
CareerBuilder’s commitment provides CareerOneStop centers, sponsored by the U. S. Department of Labor, with complimentary access and usage of CareerBuilder’s online Supply & Demand Portal. The Supply & Demand Portal was designed to help employers zero in on the best markets to recruit hard-to-find talent as well as enable CareerBuilder to help job seekers discover occupations that are in high demand and hone skill sets for areas with great growth opportunities. CareerOneStop Center staff can use information from the portal to assist job seekers in the retraining and “re-skilling” they need for opportunities available today and in years to come. The commitment runs for 12 months starting on October 1, 2011 and offers a single annual license for CareerBuilder’s Supply & Demand Portal, available at no charge, to the 1,819 Comprehensive CareerOneStop centers and 1,095 Affiliate CareerOneStop centers across the U.S.

Want to know more about the Clinton Global Initiative? Follow @ClintonGlobal on Twitter or check out the CGI Facebook page for news and updates; visit live.clintonglobalinitiative.org to view and share session webcasts; or visit CGI’s Flickr page to see photos from the sessions.

This morning, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings issued an apology on the company’s blog for failing to show “respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes.”

For those who haven’t heard, Netflix recently announced it was going to start charging its streaming and DVD-by-mail services separately (now, the latter service will be named Qwikster). Now, Netflix customers who want only DVDs or only streaming can pay less for the one service, but will end up paying more if they want to keep both.

Not surprisingly, the veiled attempt to charge customers more while pretending that they’re charging them less made for some unhappy customers.  To add insult to injury, most customers didn’t even get the news directly from Netflix itself, but through stories leaked on various blogs and news sites. (I myself didn’t get so much as an email to make me aware of this change, and had to find out through Twitter.) To say the company lacked respect and humility is an understatement: Netflix had no regard for their customers whatsoever in this situation. As a result, the company will – and already has – lost a great deal of customers and business from the ordeal.

Now, as Hastings desperately attempts damage control, not only do businesses have the opportunity to learn from about what not to do when it comes to customer service, but leaders could also apply these lessons to handling bad news- and correcting mistakes – with their employees.

5 Do’s and Don’ts for Communicating Bad News – and Righting Wrongs

• DO: Own up to Your Mistakes. “I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation,” begins Captain Obvious’ Hastings’ blog post. Well done: straight and to the point. Some leaders frown on admitting wrong, but in Netflix’s case, the admission was necessary. So overwhelming was the backlash from customers, that for Hastings to do anything less than apologize would be an even bigger insult – and more fuel for unhappy customers’ fire. Sometimes, all customers want is to know they’re being heard, and Netflix finally took the time to acknowledge their customers’ feelings. And while many will see Hastings’ post as too little, too late, it’s at least start in a long way to winning back customers.
• DO: Utilize video. Realizing that people have shorter attention spans today – and that angry people have even shorter attention spans -  Hastings also issued a 3-minute video apology for the many customers who likely will not take the time read through the lengthy apology and want to see and hear for themselves that Netflix is sincere in its efforts to appease customers (at least, we hope that’s the case). Video is the next best thing to apologizing in person, and it’s a quick, easy way to reach your audience – be they customers, employees or candidates.
• DON’T: Try to make bad news sound like good news. Netflix keeps insisting that what is really a price hike is really a better deal for its customers. C’mon, Netflix. Give us a little credit. As NPR’s Linda Holmes puts it, Netflix’s attempts to sell the price change as a bargain is “like a shoe company deciding to sell right shoes and left shoes for 12 dollars each where pairs of shoes used to be 20 dollars and thinking that consumers will notice the lower 12-dollar price but not the fact that it buys only one shoe.” Tell your customers/employees the truth from the start; otherwise, they will notice that you’re hiding something from them, and they will lose trust in and respect for you.
• DO: Listen to what people are saying about you on social media. Netflix customers used the greatest weapon at their disposal to fight the price hike – by taking to Facebook, Twitter and blogs in droves to voice their disgust. Finally, it got to the point where Netflix could no longer ignore the overwhelming criticism on social media – try as the company might have (which brings me to my next point…).
• DON’T: Wait two $&@%ing months to make an ‘official’ announcement. Two months? That’s decades in social media time, y’all! By the time Netflix customers got the ‘apology’ from the CEO this morning, the story had already been circulating the Internet for weeks, and Netflix was way past the “My bad! Forgive us?” stage of admitting wrongdoing. This, in my opinion, was the company’s biggest offense of all. Hastings was wrong to not alert customers about the price changes in the first place, but he should have owned up to that mistake far earlier than he actually did. Customers deserve better than that, and so do employees. The more you try to ignore a problem, the worse it will get, and it’s going to take one helluva a team bonding outing to undo that drop in morale. (Good luck!)

As we’ve discussed before on The Hiring Site, your employees are your customers, and if Netflix has taught us anything, it is how imperative it is that you treat this group with respect – especially when it comes to handling bad news – otherwise, you risk losing the loyalty and respect of your employees – if not employees themselves.

Do you think Netflix was right to apologize the way it did?  Were this a company CEO addressing his employees about a leadership wrongdoing, how would you have handled the situation?

More than two decades and countless discussions after the term “work-life balance” entered the workforce lexicon, we don’t seem to be any closer to figuring out how to achieve it. Author Matthew Kelly believes he knows why.

“The question has always been framed in the wrong way,” Kelly told me in a phone interview last week. “The term itself is fatally flawed.”

He says the term implies that work and life should be separate, when in reality, they are intertwined. “Most people spend the majority of their lives working. So when you tell them their work isn’t a part of their life, they don’t respond very well to that.”

In fact, prior to the early 1990s, when Fortune 500 companies started addressing the topic in their employee surveys, Kelly believes employees didn’t give much thought to having a work-life balance at all.  After interviewing more than 3,000 people as research for the book, Kelly and his colleagues found the same holds true today: workers don’t truly care about balance at all. What they want is satisfaction in both areas of their lives – personal and professional – at the same time.

An internationally renowned speaker and business consultant, Kelly has built a career around a core principle he developed as a first-year business school student: “becoming the best versions of ourselves.” Today, as president of Floyd Consulting, Kelly helps organizations and people become the best versions of themselves on a daily basis.

In his new book, Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction, Kelly refocuses this core principle to help others become the most satisfied versions of themselves. When I spoke to Kelly last week, he discussed how employers could use the insights from his book to tap into their employees’ needs and create a more satisfied – and more productive – workforce.

Employers need to take ownership of employee satisfaction
While no one is more responsible for their satisfaction levels than themselves, Kelly says, companies do have a responsibility to help their employees achieve satisfaction.  And a large part of that responsibility lies in defining its culture. “A lot of company cultures are passive aggressive, saying, ‘We care about our people, and we want them to have a work-life balance and satisfying personal and professional lives,’ but there’s an underlying pressure to work a 60- to 70-hour week,” Kelly says.

Companies have an obligation to be honest and open with their employees about what is expected of them. He uses Microsoft as an example of a company that takes on this responsibility well. “At the start up of Microsoft, all these guys were working an 80-hour work week, but they knew what they were signing up for.”

At the same time, however, companies also need to be aware of the higher workloads their people are taking on and extra hours they are putting in, especially in light of the recent “macroeconomic meltdown.” Employees simply can’t withstand that kind of pressure over a sustained amount of time. “It’s okay if we know the fourth quarter is the busiest quarter, but every quarter shouldn’t be like that,” Kelly says.

In addition to defining one’s culture, Kelly says it is of vital importance for a company to have a compelling, clearly defined vision – “something people can work toward” – in order to keep them engaged.

“Highly engaged people tend to have a vision for their life, and there are dreams that they are working toward,” Kelly says. Therefore, in order to increase engagement, employers should find ways to let employees pursue their passions at work – in any way possible, no matter how small.

“If we can nudge people closer to their core strengths so they’re spending a little more time doing something they’re really impassioned about…even if big changes aren’t made in that area, if employees are seeing their employers are interested in that, I think it makes a seismic shift in the culture.”

Help Your Employees Increase Their Level of Satisfaction with One Simple Exercise
In Off Balance, Kelly outlines various ways to increase one’s level of satisfaction. Here’s one you can suggest your employees try today: Suggest they carve out a half hour each week – say, on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning – and take out a notepad. Then, on a scale of one to ten, rate their level of professional satisfaction and rate their level of personal satisfaction. (Professional satisfaction, after all, can influence personal satisfaction and vice versa.) This exercise will do two things: First, it helps people identify the source of their dissatisfaction. Once they’ve identified this source, they can then begin to work toward changing it for the better. This step is where you come in. Be open to discussing ways your employees can increase their satisfaction at work – whether that means taking on a new challenge or perhaps scaling back in other areas.

Matthew Kelly is the New York Times bestselling author of The Rhythm of Life and The Dream Manager. His newest book, Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth, comes out today.

It’s Your Turn
What do you think? Is it your responsibility to support a climate of work-life balance, or is is the right focus employee satisfaction?

One in five Americans who work from home spend one hour or less working, according to new CareerBuilder survey.

(See the full infographic.)

It’s a debate as old as time: Is working from home an efficient alternative to the traditional office job or a productivity killer?

Thanks to the results of a new CareerBuilder survey on telecommuting, the debate…well, continues. According to the survey of nearly 5,300 employees nationwide, of those Americans who telecommute at least part of the time…

• 17 percent spend one hour or less per day on work
• 35 percent say they work eight or more hours per day (up from 18 percent who said the same in 2007)
• 40 percent work between four and seven hours per day

Thanks to the mass adoption of smart phones and advanced network technologies, Americans are able to work from home on a more regular basis than they were four years ago. Ten percent telecommute at least once a week – up from eight percent in 2007.

“The autonomy of working from home can be very rewarding so long as it doesn’t diminish productivity,” says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder. In order to ensure telecommuters are staying productive, managers should be clear about expectations and establish daily objectives, Haefner advises.

Telecommuters are largely split as to whether time spent at home or at the office is more conducive to high-quality work.

• 37 percent of workers say they are more productive at the office
• 29 percent report they are more productive at home
• 34 percent say they are equally productive at home and the office.

What’s keeping workers distracted?
While most offices have their fair share of productivity roadblocks, home is hardly a disturbance-free zone. Telecommuters say the following are the biggest distractions:

• Household chores – 31 percent
• TV – 26 percent
• Pets – 23 percent
• Errands – 19 percent
• Internet – 18 percent
• Children – 15 percent

4 Tips for Managing Work-from-Home Employees
In July, I posted a recap from a particularly interesting SHRM session about managing remote workforces. Below are a few of the takeaways:

1. Put Your Expectations in Writing. Create a physical document that outlines the expectations and responsibilities for everyone on the team. The physical reminder will keep people aware and accountable for their duties. Schedule a time to revisit this document every six months.
2. Harness Technology. From project management software and CRM tools to micro-blogging sites (like Twitter and Yammer) and Wiki’s, there are so many resources today that enable remote teams to work together–it’s just a matter of picking what works best for your team.
3. Set Goals and Track Performance. Make sure you clearly communicate deadlines and projects. Everyone should know who is responsible for completing which part of the project when in order to ensure everyone’s on same page. Consider having employees submit short, weekly reports to keep everyone in the know of the projects they’re working on.
4. Build a Strong, Cohesive Team. Strive to build a sense of community by promoting teamwork and team building. It will make working remotely seem much less distant.

What do you think?
Do you struggle with managing employees who work from home? How do you keep them in check?

This year’s HR Technology^® Conference & Expo promises to be “the largest and most exciting in our history” according to the registration site.

Hmmm…what a coincidence that this also happens to be the year CareerBuilder will be there. OR IS IT? (Cliffhanger!)

If you’re planning to be at HR Tech, don’t forget to stop by CareerBuilder booth #333 – where you can snag a free Supply & Demand Report – and see for yourself why it’s one of our bestselling new solutions.

Register now for your free Supply & Demand Report.

Go for the demo, stay for the party…
You’ll also want to check out the CareerBuilder Demo Room for two reasons:

1. See demonstrations (it’s not just a clever name) of Talent Network, CBMobile and Supply & Demand Portal – our newest, most innovative solutions to date!
2. Get a free ticket to our exclusive Unplug and Unwind happy hour on Tuesday, October 4th: Mix, mingle and relax with fellow conference attendees – compliments of CareerBuilder!

CareerBuilder Demo Room Hours and Happy Hour Ticket Pick-Up
When: Monday, October 3, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Where: Booth # 333

Unplug and Unwind Happy Hour
When: Tuesday, October 4, 2011, 5:30 – 7:30
Where: Mix Lounge (atop THEhotel at Mandalay Bay)

About the Supply & Demand Report

This report, generated from our new Supply & Demand Portal, is completely customized to your organization and provides real-time access to:

1. Supply: The availability of active candidates for any position.
2. Demand: Locations where you will find the most and least competition is for that talent.

See you in Vegas!

The employment situation report for August is disturbingly similar to that of July.

Zero: It’s not just the amount of interest you have in seeing the remake of Footloose. It’s also the number by which both nonfarm payroll and the unemployment rate changed in August, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics today.

(Un-fun fact: Today marks the first time since 1945 that the government has reported a net monthly job change of zero. Most depressing. Record-setting. Ever.)

Employment numbers across the board showed little to no change last month, but in case you don’t feel like clicking over to July, here’s a summary of August’s employment situation report:

• Total nonfarm payroll employment, at 131.1 million, was unchanged (0) in August. Employment changed little in most major private-sector industries.
• The number of unemployed persons was relatively unchanged at 14 million and the unemployment rate held at 9.1 percent.
• The labor force rose to 153.6 million.
• The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was about unchanged at 6 million.
• The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.4 million to 8.8 million in August.
• The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls edged down by 0.1 hour over the month to 34.2 hours.
• In August, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 3 cents, or 0.1 percent, to $23.09. This decline followed an 11-cent gain in July.
• The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from +46,000 to +20,000, and the change for July was revised from +117,000 to +85,000.

So, yeah. No change. No growth. No closer to buying that summer share in the Hamptons…This is usually the part where I try to be optimistic, but if “at least we didn’t lose jobs, y’all!” is the best thing I can say about this report…I’d rather go see Footloose.

OnStar, we have an emergency.

Not only is video a dominant form of communication; it is proven to be influential, as well.  Consumers are not just viewing content, but absorbing it, and letting themselves be swayed by it. When it  comes to recruiting, potential and current employees are the customer, and the companies they choose to work for are the products they invest in.

With that in mind, employers need to consider the way users consume information as they evolve their recruiting strategies. Between employee testimonials, executive interviews, facility tours and special event footage, online recruitment videos help answer the following crucial questions job seekers have when deciding to apply for a position.

Why should you invest in using online video for recruitment? Consider the following benefits:

1. Increase your ROI: As technology gets more sophisticated, producing and housing online videos becomes increasingly cost-effective – even more so when you consider the high level of engagement and interest online videos generate over static text. You can also get a lot of mileage out of these videos by distributing them over multiple channels – and encouraging employees to share them with friends and over social media.
2. Stay competitive: As video increases its dominance as an online communication tool, recruiters who stick with text-based career sites and even text-oriented social networks will find themselves overshadowed by competitors who are using this medium to reach potential employees.
3. Widen your audience reach: As noted earlier, 178 million internet users watched online video for an average of 16.8 hours per viewer in June 20111.  Video’s popularity as a source for information is only growing, and it is reaching wider audiences on a broad scale, representing the opportunity for employers who use this medium to reach out to a larger, more diverse candidate base.
4. Strengthen your employment brand: No other medium so completely enables you to showcase your organization and truly make it stand out. Videos help you communicate your employment brand more clearly than any other medium, because potential recruits get to “see, feel, and hear” what it’s truly like to work at your organization from the employees and leaders themselves.
5. Get higher response rates: According to CareerBuilder internal data, job postings with video icons are viewed 12 percent more than postings without video. On average, CareerBuilder customers receive a 34 percent greater application rate when they add video to their job postings.
6. Eliminate irrelevant candidates: Videos allow outsiders to decide for themselves if they are a fit for your organization – by enabling them to “meet” your employees and executives, tour the facility and get a feel for what life is truly like at the organization. A good recruitment video covers the most crucial questions job seekers have about why they should apply for your organization. Once job seekers understand what it means to work and be successful at your company, those who do not possess the relevant skills or see themselves as a cultural fit will be dissuaded from applying. As a result, they’ll effectively weed themselves out (saving you the trouble of doing it later).

Already using video in your recruitment mix? What other benefits have you seen for your organization?

Veteran employees bring unique skills sets to the workforce.

The holiday may be well over two months away, but really, is it ever too early to start preparing for it? I’m talking, of course, about Veterans Day.

Do you realize about one million military veterans today are unemployed? Hard to believe, considering the vast array of skills they possess, training they’ve gone through and discipline work ethic they demonstrate – all of which are valuable skills in any industry. So if you’re looking for suggestions on ways to acknowledge the upcoming holiday, you could start with focusing your recruiting efforts on this remarkable group of men and women.

But don’t take my word for it…

A 2009 CareerBuilder survey asked employers who have hired U.S. veterans or members of the National Guard to list the top attributes military personnel brought to their organization.

Survey participants cited the following valuable traits these employees possessed:

• Disciplined approach to work (cited by 68 percent of employers surveyed)
• Ability to work as part of a team (63 percent)
• Respect and integrity (57 percent)
• Leadership (50 percent)
• Problem-solving skills (46 percent)
• Ability to perform under pressure (44 percent)
• Communication skills (37 percent)

A few other things you might want to know about hiring veterans: With an honorable discharge, service members are basically certified drug-free. And many military personnel have achieved some level of security clearance, demonstrating that an individual is recognized as a trustworthy person. It’s also possible that you could qualify for government-paid relocation services if hiring a military person coming off active duty from another location.

And now that President Obama has proposed a new tax credit for employers who hire veterans, there’s even more incentive to hire military service men and women.

But perhaps Obama articulated the greatest reason to hire veterans when –during a speech last month in Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard – he said:

“Just think about how many veterans have led their comrades on life-and-death missions by the time they were 25 years old. That’s the kind of responsibility and experience that any business in America should want to take advantage of.”

To further help companies find employees with these valuable skill sets, CareerBuilder recently launched Employvets.com, dedicated to helping match employers and military personnel. Veterans and National Guard members can identify employers who are sensitive to their employment needs, while employers can benefit from targeting these uniquely skilled workers for their positions.

According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, 60 percent of workers who were laid off in the last year have found new jobs. Of that 60 percent, 88 percent found full-time positions, and 54 percent found jobs in entirely different fields than where they previously worked.

Among the workers who are still searching for new opportunities, 56 percent said they are nervous about returning to work after an extended period of unemployment, citing the following reasons:

• Pressure to prove themselves (50 percent)
• Fear of the unknown (40 percent)
• Anxiety around new, unfamiliar technologies (21 percent)

The survey – which was conducted by Harris Interactive© from May 19 to June 8, 2011 and included more than 800 workers who were laid off from full-time jobs in the last year – also revealed the following workforce trends:

• Relocation: Of workers who were laid off and found new jobs, 36 percent reported they relocated to a new city or state. Of those who haven’t found new jobs yet, 38 percent said they would consider relocating for a position.
• Pay Increases: The majority of laid off workers who found new jobs reported their pay is similar to or higher than their previous position, with 45 percent taking a pay cut, (down from 47 percent last year), and 27 percent finding jobs with higher pay (up from 22 percent last year).
• Starting Small Businesses: Some workers may replace their job search efforts with entrepreneurship. More than one-in-four (27 percent) who have not yet found work said they are considering starting their own business.

But while it’s encouraging to see more companies hiring laid off workers (especially in light of recent reports that some employers refuse to consider unemployed job seekers for their open positions), it’s also crucial that they keep this momentum going.

It’s important to recognize that every segment of the workforce brings unique skills and value to the workplace, and that excluding any segment of the population from your applicant pool only cheats you out of talent that could benefit your organization.

In a statement for the survey’s press release, Brent Rasmussen, president of CareerBuilder North America, discussed the significance of these findings and the need to keep hiring in this economy:

“We need to do a better job as a nation to help workers identify jobs that are in-demand today and are projected to grow in the future. We have a growing skills gap and the need to get millions of Americans back to work. As the economy recovers, we need to focus on retraining and ‘re-skilling’ workers to help them move to new fields with a greater number of opportunities.”

Not to mention that companies that invest in hiring and retaining currently unemployed workers not only qualify for certain government tax breaks and benefits as part of the HIRE Act, but they’re also helping the nation overall in contributing to economic recovery.

Have you recently hired a laid off worker? Any advice for your peers?

Recently, CareerBuilder released its new e-book,Streaming Talent: Using Online Video to Create a Virtual Candidate Experience, Differentiate Your Company and Recruit Top Talent. 

Video may have killed the radio star, but don’t judge it too harshly. When it comes to recruitment, more employers are finding that video is an increasingly powerful resource.

Online video is the fastest growing medium for consuming content, and companies are investing in video to help them attract better candidates, brand themselves as an employer of choice, differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a more efficient recruiting process.

Learn the secrets to their success with this quick-and-easy guide to creating and promoting your own online recruitment videos.

• See the latest findings about the influence of online video in decision-making
• Understand the benefits of implementing online video into your recruiting efforts
• Learn best practices for creating recruitment videos
• Overcome the challenges to creating recruiting videos – before you even start
• See real-life examples of recruitment videos from top employers

“We want good people, we want to hire good people, and we want to retain them—but my real focus is in building a team.” – Robert A. DiMuccio

In the following interview, Robert A. DiMuccio, CEO of Amica Mutual Insurance Company, talks trust, humility and the necessity for ‘speed bumps’, among other things.

What do your employees mean to you?  What do they mean to this organization?
We sell what I would term ‘intangible product’: security and financial protection for our customers.  Our business is based on our customers’ interactions with our employees: How professional they are, how empathetic they are, how much time they put in with the customer.  Our employees are the organization; they are what the company is all about.

As you look at the characteristics of the most successful people across your organization, is there a common pattern among those individuals?
I think we have successful people from all different academic disciplines and backgrounds.  Their success is not necessarily based on, for example, what sport they played and how good they were at them, nor what they achieved academically. All those things are important but are just pieces of the puzzle. It really comes down to the person.  Can that person make a connection with other people, and is that connection real?  I don’t think you can fake empathy.  People will figure it out very quickly.

What’s the best hire that you’ve ever personally made and why?
An organization is built around a team.  A good team is not built around one person. I have this list in the back of my mind – the things I look for in people – and it varies depending on the position, the duties and that sort of thing. If you’re looking for 10 attributes, you might get lucky and find six or seven, because we’re all human beings.  But in a team, you’re going to get all 10 attributes.  We want good people, we want to hire good people, and we want to retain them—but my real focus is in building a team.  I think that all of our greatest successes came out of team efforts.

What do you look for when you’re hiring talent?
Obviously, for a particular job there are requirements and you want to make sure that who you hire has the core requirements for that job. But beyond that, you look for a positive perspective. People who enjoy being around other people, who want to work with people. That’s number one.

What is your leadership philosophy?  What are the main tenets of what you believe in terms of leadership?
Number one:  Treat everybody with respect across the organization. Number two: Find the right people, let them do their jobs and trust them to do their jobs.  I think if you find the right people with the right with the right skills and attributes, they’ll come into work charged up every day.  They’ll be self-motivated.

I’ve seen this written a hundred times, so I can’t take any credit for it: There are certain attributes a leader should display and one of them is humility. To realize that there are people around that probably know more of the answers than you do. It is also important to celebrate their successes and be public about it.

During 2009 and 2010 years, a lot of companies had tough times, tough decisions to make.  Did you as well?  What did you learn during that time frame?
You always try to look back after an incident or period of time where you’ve had to deal with something and say, “What did we do well and what could we have done better?”  A couple of things that we looked at: In the period leading up to the recession, we managed our company with the same basic principles we had managed for the previous 20 years: Number one, solid customer relationships. Through the recession, we held our customer base very well. The customer base provides revenue and pays for your overhead, and in return we provide service to them.  Number two, we’re an insurance company. We’re designed to take risk; however, through years and years of experience, we’ve also learned to manage risk and cap risk where we think it’s appropriate. 

What do you consider the most important decision that you’ve ever had to make as a leader?
One of the things I’ve always believed is when you’re in a position to alter the course of somebody’s career or even life – those are the decisions you should put the most time into. If you’re in a position where you can impact somebody’s life, the decision should be hard to make. There should be speed bumps. There should be a process for getting input from a lot of different people, and there should be a feedback process.  Those are the hard decisions, and I always spend a lot of time on them. Your really important decisions are the decisions about people.

ABOUT ROBERT D. DIMUCCIO: Robert A. DiMuccio, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Amica Mutual Insurance Company, graduated from Providence College in 1979 with an accounting degree and began his career with the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwic. DiMuccio joined Amica in 1991 as an accounting department vice president, and, over the years, has served as senior vice president, treasurer and chief financial officer. He was named executive vice president in 2003, and president and chief executive officer in 2005. In 2008 he was elected company chairman. In addition to his work at Amica, DiMuccio serves on the boards of the Property Loss Research Bureau and the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, and as president of the Board of Directors of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council.

ABOUT AMICA MUTUAL INSURANCE COMPANY: Amica Mutual Insurance Company, the nation’s oldest mutual insurer of automobiles, was founded in 1907. The company, with corporate headquarters in Lincoln, RI, is a national writer of automobile, homeowners, marine and personal umbrella liability insurance. Life coverage is available through Amica Life Insurance Company, a wholly owned subsidiary. Amica employs more than 3,100 people at Amica Center in Rhode Island and 39 offices countrywide. Amica has been acknowledged by financial services industry analysts for its superior financial strength, and it has been recognized repeatedly for exceptional customer service in auto and homeowners insurance surveys by a leading consumer publication.

Last week, CareerBuilder released the results of a recent nationwide survey, which found that 34 percent of hiring managers are placing greater emphasis on emotional intelligence when it comes to hiring and promoting employees post-recession.

The survey also revealed that 71 percent of hiring managers value emotional intelligence in an employee more than IQ; 59 percent would not hire someone with low emotional intelligence; and, for a remarkable 75 percent of hiring managers, emotional intelligence trumps IQ when it comes to deciding on employee promotions.

But how do those numbers compare when broken down by certain industries? Let’s take a look:

Government

• 34 percent of government employers said they are placing a greater emphasis on high EI for hiring and promotion decisions post-recession
• 70 percent value emotional intelligence in employees more than IQ
• 62 percent would not hire someone who has a high IQ but low EI
• 77 percent said they’re more likely to promote the high EI worker

Government employers also said they value emotional intelligence because employees who display this quality tend to resolve conflict effectively and are more likely to stay calm under pressure. In response to the findings, Chuck Loeher, area vice president for CareerBuilder, said:

“Government jobs aren’t just about producing information and ideas – there’s a lot of moving and organizing people, as well. A deep knowledge base is important no matter your position, but dynamic interpersonal skills are needed to successfully motivate groups made up of diverse personalities, ideologies and work ethics. All workers, at all levels of government, can benefit from deeper insights into their own emotional intelligence.”

Information Technology (IT)

• 37 percent of IT employers said they are placing a greater emphasis on high emotional intelligence for hiring and promotion decisions post-recession
• 52 percent value emotional intelligence in their employees more than IQ
• 55 percent would not hire someone who has a high IQ but low EI
• 61 percent said they’re more likely to promote the high EI worker

When asked why emotional intelligence is more important than high IQ, IT employers said they believe employees with high emotional intelligence know how to resolve conflict effectively and tend to make more thoughtful business decisions. Jamie Carney, senior product director of Sologig.com, had this to say about the findings:

“The data helps unravel the myth that the best IT professionals are smart people locked to their computer screens. Technical competency is a must, but when it’s down to you and another candidate for a promotion or new job, it’s dynamic interpersonal skills that will set you apart. Emotional intelligence is a sign of leadership and the ability to be a team player – that’s the type of worker most IT managers want.”

Retail

• 34 percent of retail employers said they are placing a higher emphasis on emotional intelligence for hiring and promotion decisions post-recession
• 79 percent value high emotional intelligence over high IQ
• 55 percent would not hire someone who has a high IQ but low EI
• 79 percent said they’re more likely to promote the high EI worker

For retail employers, high emotional intelligence is valuable in employees because it indicates they know how to appeal to customers and can stay calm under pressure. According to Bill Meidell, product director at WorkinRetail.com:

“The nature of retail work demands employees who can sense what their clients and customers need the moment they walk through the doors. A high IQ is important in any profession, but retail is a social space that demands dynamic interpersonal skills. Workers with high emotional intelligence are the key to customer loyalty.”

Health care

• 37 percent said they are placing a higher emphasis on emotional intelligence for hiring and promotion decisions post-recession
• 81 percent said they value high emotional intelligence over high IQ,
• 72 percent of health care employers would not hire someone who has a high IQ but low EI.
• 87 percent said they’re more likely to promote the high EI worker.

The ability to stay calm under pressure and resolve conflict effectively topped the list of reasons health care employers place such high emphasis on emotional intelligence in their employees. Looking at these results, Rob Morris, product director at MiracleWorkers.com, said:

“High Emotional Intelligence is important in the health care field because understanding a patient’s emotional needs is sometimes just as important as treating their medical condition. Moreover, stress can take its toll on health care workers. Emotional Intelligence is a sign that professionals will be able to ease the pressure by empathizing with both their patients and colleagues.”

How important is emotional intelligence in your industry?

Today, CareerBuilder released its new e-book, From Q&A to Z: The Hiring Manager’s Complete Interviewing Guide. 

Few things are as critical to the hiring process as the interview. If nothing else, the interview process is a networking event – an opportunity to brand your company in the eyes of a potential employee, brand advocate or customer. But ultimately, if executed correctly, it can help you find the right fit for both the job and your organization overall (and, as a bonus, reflect well on you for finding this person).

This quick-and-easy hiring guide covers everything from preparing for the interview to evaluating candidates afterward.  Readers will walk away with the following takeaways:

• Steps to take to prepare for the interview
• The importance of body language
• When to raise the red flag (and when to let it go)
• The best and worst interview questions
• How to avoid asking inappropriate interview questions
• What the candidate wants to know

Get From Q&A to Z: The Hiring Manager’s Complete Interviewing Guide for free today. 

Get the inside information you can apply today to conduct more effective interviews and make smarter hiring decisions.

Heeding the timeless advice of Roxette, a majority of employers are listening their hearts when it comes to hiring, and placing a higher emphasis on candidates’ emotional intelligence than their IQ’s.

That’s according to CareerBuilder’s latest survey, which indicates that 71 percent of employers say they value emotional intelligence over IQ.

What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a general assessment of a person’s abilities to control emotions, to sense, understand and react to others’ emotions, and manage relationships.

The survey of more than 2600 hiring managers and human resource professionals nationwide reveals that EI is a critical characteristic for landing a job and advancing one’s career. According to the survey:

• 34 percent of hiring managers said they are placing greater emphasis on emotional intelligence when hiring and promoting employees post-recession
• 71 percent said they value emotional intelligence in an employee more than IQ
• 59 percent of employers would not hire someone who has a high IQ but low EI
• 75 percent are more likely to promote an employee with a high EI over one with a high IQ

Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, cites today’s competitive job market as a reason employers are focusing more on emotional intelligence when it comes to hiring.

“In a recovering economy, employers want people who can effectively make decisions in stressful situations and can empathize with the needs of their colleagues and clients to deliver the best results,” Haefner says in a statement for the survey’s press release.

Survey participants gave the following reasons for placing a higher value on EI over IQ (in order of importance):

• Employees [with high EI] are more likely to stay calm under pressure
• Employees know how to resolve conflict effectively
• Employees are empathetic to their team members and react accordingly
• Employees lead by example
• Employees tend to make more thoughtful business decisions

Looking for Signs: How to Spot a High EI
HR managers and hiring managers assess their candidates’ and employees’ EI by observing a variety of behaviors and qualities. The top qualities they look for, according to the survey, include the following:

• They admit and learn from their mistakes
• They can keep emotions in check and have thoughtful discussions on tough issues
• They listen as much or more than they talk
• They take criticism well
• They show grace under pressure

What do you think of these findings? Do you place a higher emphasis on EI than on IQ?

“We strive to nurture an environment where you are able to develop and grow; one that helps to develop your personal interests and clinical skills.” – George V. Hager, Jr.

In the following interview, George V. Hager, Jr., CEO of Genesis HealthCare discusses overcoming professional challenges, the importance of instilling confidence in people, and the experiences that have shaped his leadership philosophy.

Can you talk a little bit about how Genesis Healthcare has evolved over the last 10-15 years?
Genesis HealthCare grew via acquisition in the late 1990s. Acquisitions present interesting challenges as well as opportunities. The first issue you are dealing with is cultural. There is a culture you want to create, especially in a mission-driven business. Trying to fully integrate the acquisition companies into the Genesis culture presented many challenges. I think people underestimate how difficult integration can be and how long it really takes to fully integrate, especially considering the number of acquisitions we completed over that time period. Many of those acquisitions created opportunities for us in new and existing markets and allowed us to adopt a best practices approach to merge the companies.

As the CEO, how do you stay engaged with your employees?
That’s a real challenge for a company like Genesis. We have 40,000 employees in 250 inpatient sites of service, and nearly 1,000 Rehabilitation Therapy provider sites. Fortunately, we are somewhat geographically concentrated.

I think the first thing you need as the Chief Executive Officer is confidence in your management team and the people on the ground doing the heavy lifting. The challenge I faced was the fact that my background was finance. (My prior work experience was as a partner in charge of the healthcare practice at KMPG.) Not only was I challenged with leading a clinically-focused organization, as a finance person, I was dealing with huge capital and technology needs, and an over-leveraged balance sheet. I had to find a way to grow through all those challenges in an industry that still suffers from a poor public perception. The first thing I did was dedicate two days every month to visiting our facilities.

In the first two years in my role, I visited over 200 facilities to allow me the most informal way to actually meet our caregiver teams. I did not go out with the Chief Operating Officer, the President of the region, or the Executive Vice-President. I went out with one person from our Public Relations group. She was a great resource to the field, and she organized all my visits. She was also well respected in the field. When the two of us would go out to the facilities, I met with as many people as I could, and I tried to get them to tell me what was on their minds. Believe me, I got an earful. They  wanted to make sure I knew what the issues were from their vantage points on the frontline. It was extremely valuable for me; and I felt that I really developed a special relationship with the employees I talked to.

What was your biggest takeaway from those visits? How did that experience make you change the way you operate today?
The center leadership teams were incredible during my tours through the facilities. As I walked around the facilities (typically with the Administrator and the Director of Nursing), they would grab anyone who walked by and say, “Hey, I want you to meet George.” They would introduce me by first name; and it did not matter if the person was in housekeeping, the kitchen, or in a nursing area; they couldn’t care less. There was no question that they took an interest in their people, and you could tell their staff reacted positively to them as well. The effective leaders were engaged with the residents and patients, as well. Sometimes they would grab one of the residents in a wheelchair and take them with us. It was fascinating to see. In some instances I found leadership not well engaged with staff, patients or families. I noted differences in leadership style and ability which impacted on center relationships and operations. The importance of the leader’s commitment to the people who carry out the mission of our company every day, was the most obvious take-away.

When you decided to create a formal leadership program, did your leadership team develop it, did you bring somebody from the outside, or was it a combination of both? How did they come together?
We used outside consulting resources to help us design the programs and to help us run the classes in our Leadership Development Program with our in house experts. It was a combination of both, but it was led internally in our HR function. Our Leadership Development Program was given a high priority despite the limited resources we had at hand to get it started. Enabling our leaders to get the job done in alignment with our mission and core values has driven our program’s success. If you do not think leadership development is the most important part of the company, you should not be leading the company.

What is it about Genesis that makes it a place where people want to work?
I would say that you would come to Genesis because your choice of profession has an inherent mission element to it. Our mission statement reads: “We improve the lives we touch through the delivery of high quality healthcare and everyday compassion.” If you don’t buy in to that mission, then you probably shouldn’t be part of our team. That said, we are hopeful—I am hopeful—that we serve our employees as we serve our patients. We strive to nurture an environment where you are able to develop and grow; one that helps to develop your personal interests and clinical skills. We also are very passionate about the patients and families we touch every day. Our staff strives to make a difference in the lives of those they care for.

ABOUT GEORGE V. HAGER, JR.: With over 25 years experience in the healthcare industry, George V. Hager, Jr. serves as Chief Executive Officer of Genesis HealthCare, LLC. He joined Genesis in 1992 and, prior to being named CEO, served as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and later as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. George spent the first 13 years of his professional career at KPMG, LLP. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Dickinson College and a masters in business administration from Rutgers Graduate School of Management. He is a certified public accountant; Board member and audit committee chair of Adolor Corporation; member of the Board of Trustees and finance committee of The University of Sciences in Philadelphia; member of the Board and executive committee of the National Investment Center; member of the Board of the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association; and member of the Board and audit Committee chair of REACH Medical Holdings, Inc.

ABOUT GENESIS HEALTHCARE: Genesis HealthCare, one of the nation’s largest long-term care and rehabilitation therapy providers, employs over 40,000 people, each one dedicated to the delivery of quality healthcare to the residents and patients in its Centers.
Genesis has more than 250 Skilled Nursing Centers, and Assisted Living Communities, located in 13 eastern states, while its Genesis Rehabilitation Services division provides contract therapy to over 750 healthcare providers in 26 states and the District of Columbia.
As a premier care provider since 1985, Genesis offers a variety of compassionate care services to patients, residents, and their families. Genesis is committed to clinical excellence and is ranked among top providers for overall satisfaction and quality medical care, according to national independent research.

While you were busy hobnobbing with Michael J. Fox, greasing up with the Thunder From Down Under or singing along with da best singer in da world at Caesar’s Palace, here’s what you might’ve missed at CareerBuilder’s booth during SHRM 2011…

The following videos feature presentations given by our recruitment experts during SHRM’s annual conference in Las Vegas this past June, and they cover everything from social media, video and mobile recruiting efforts to the wonders of data intelligence, to what CEO’s really want from HR.

See below, or check them on our YouTube channel.

Emerging Media and Your Recruitment Strategy

Here, CareerBuilder’s VP of Corporate Marketing, Jamie Womack, discusses how and why companies need to utilize social media, online and mobile platforms for recruitment right now.

Your Company in 2020

Building an integrated recruitment strategy is a much different task today than it was three years ago. Here, Jamie Womack talks about how to build a talent pipeline to fuel your company’s future growth, pulling in aspects of messaging and emerging media and compensation.

Data Not Just For Data’s Sake

Personified’s VP of Development, Abdel Tefridj, demonstrated both the need and the opportunity for business leaders to use data – and use it more efficiently – as they make critical decisions daily in an ever-changing world.

What Your CEO Wants to Know

This year was particularly exciting for CareerBuilder, as our CEO, Matt Ferguson, presented during the SHRM official sessions. Here he is at the Las Vegas Hilton, discussing a recent nationwide survey of CEOs that highlights how the CEO/HR professional relationship has evolved over the last five years.

What’d you think? Anything we didn’t cover that you’d like to see next year? Let us know!

“My number one priority is to seed the organization with bright, young, innovative thinkers that can become the next generation of leaders for CORT.” – Jeff Pederson

In the following interview, Jeff Pederson, President of CORT Business Services, discusses where ‘kicking up dirt’ comes into play at his organization and how doing business can sometimes feel like performing an autopsy, among other things.

What is your philosophy as it relates to people and their impact on your daily business?
Our business is our people. Our client companies and customers are involved in transition or planning something special in and around their job or personal life. We deal with people in relocation, long distance temporary assignments, project management, marital transition, college students, first time job professionals as well as trade show, party rentals and special event furnishings. In addition, thousands of companies rely on CORT to provide their temporary and permanent office furniture. Our B2B clients and consumer clients count on CORT’s people to understand what their needs are and to find solutions that are appropriate for their circumstances.

How do you engage with and relate to your employees?
Senior management travels a lot to our regional and local offices; we’re very active in the business and strive to understand what our team faces everyday in providing services to our customers. We’re always out there, kicking up dirt and turning over rocks to help uncover opportunities with our employees.

 What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?
There are a couple that have stood out to me over the years…”be yourself, forget yourself and be interested in others,” and to “keep your commitments.”

How do your people (employees) affect your business, particularly as it related to client services?
Our people are all about who they service. We get a lot of testimonials that start off with “I don’t know what I would have done without [this employee]’s help….” Without that level of customer service and customer caring, we wouldn’t survive.

How do you define CORT ’s culture? As a leader what role do you play and what is your impact on the culture?
CORT’s culture is entrepreneurial…to a degree. We like to develop best practices and be able to repeat best practices from market to market. We always strive to be “best in class.” Again, senior management strives to meet with our employees regularly and do our best to listen. I think that has led to a collaborative environment with very little turnover.

Some people believe HR to be the only department with a responsibility for the organization’s people. Can you tell me how you make your overall talent strategy a priority and the role you play in driving it?
We are fortunate to have tremendous tenure at the middle and senior management levels. That is a blessing and poses challenges as well. My number one priority is to seed the organization with bright, young, innovative thinkers that can become the next generation of leaders for CORT. This mixed blessing is something our management group talks about all the time and is a priority at every level.

What do you do to rally the team and reinforc e your employment brand?
There’s very little cheerleading I need to do to reinforce the employment brand. There is however a challenge to reveal our business to an upcoming group of young motivated managers. Most people are surprised to learn that CORT is a Berkshire Hathaway Company and likewise surprised to hear about our reach and scope of business. Expanding that piece of the brand will help draw additional talent into the organization for our future development and expansion.

What would you consider the most important decision you ever had to make as a leader?
There isn’t one particular decision that comes to mind, but having done a Chapter 11 reorganization back in the 1980’s taught me that it’s much easier to build a business than it is to carefully deconstruct one. It’s akin to an autopsy…as you never realize what’s under the skin of an organization until you’re forced to do that kind of forensics.

What was the best PROFESSIONAL decision you ever made?
Taking a leap of faith, trusting our Chairman and joining CORT.

ABOUT JEFF PEDERSON: Jeff Pederson has held several executive management positions of increasing responsibility with CORT Business Services since he joined the company in 2002. Jeff has been a director of the Company since 2004 and was named president of CORT Business Services in September 2006 following two years as chief financial officer. Prior to joining CORT, Jeff held senior executive positions at rental companies including Globe Business Resources and Budget Rents.

ABOUT CORT: CORT, a Berkshire Hathaway Company, is the world’s largest provider of rental furniture. In business for over 40 years, CORT has served millions of individuals and over 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies. The industry’s leading provider of residential and commercial rental furniture, CORT is also a leader in the rental of Tradeshow & Event furnishings, offers a full line of houseware rentals and provides access to millions of available apartment units nationwide through its free online apartment locator, ApartmentSearch. In addition to over 100 showrooms and clearance centers across the US, CORT also has established a global network of business partners in close to 70 countries around the world. CORT’s greatest assets are the more than 2,000 employees who understand the difficulties and stresses involved with major transitions. CORT’s motto, “Wherever you’re heading, we’ll be there,” embodies its commitment to make transitions for individuals and companies as smooth and pain-free as possible.

Nearly 30 years later, Bananarama’s haunting words once again ring true: it truly is a cruel, cruel summer…

…at least it is for those employers who say their workplaces are suffering from a decrease in employee productivity right now.

According to CareerBuilder’s recent survey on employee productivity, one in four employers (26 percent) think workers are less productive in the summer and nearly half (45 percent) think workers at their organization are currently burned out on their jobs.

Turns out, the reason employees seem burned out is because they are. (Shocking, right?)

Of the nearly 5,300 employees surveyed, 77 percent say they are sometimes or always burned out in their jobs, and 43 percent say their stress levels on the job have increased over the last six months.

The rising stress could be a result of heavier workloads. Nearly half (46 percent) of employees reported an increase in their workloads in the last six months, while only eight percent said their workloads decreased.

As if feelings of burnout aren’t enough to distract workers, summer provides its own special recipe for productivity disaster: Nicer weather, vacation-fever, and kids being out of school led the list of reasons employers felt their workers were less productive.

Productivity perceptions differ
The goodish news is that productivity is actually up from previous years…depending on who you ask: Looking at overall productivity trends year-round, 30 percent of the more than 2,600 employers surveyed say workers are more productive today than before the recession began; while 12 percent feel workers are less productive than before the recession.

Employers who saw a rise in worker productivity during the recession primarily attribute the increase to the fear of losing a job and the effects of downsized staffs on individual workloads. In addition, 73 percent are seeing the increase sustain today and 14 percent state productivity has increased even more.

Brent Rasmussen, president of CareerBuilder North America, says it’s no wonder workers are feeling burned out right now. In a statement for the press release, Rasmussen says:

“The recession produced consequences for not just those who were laid off, but also for the many employees who were asked to work harder as a result of leaner staffs. While getting more out of a smaller workforce is a sign of organizational agility during unpredictable times, it’s hard to see such yields in productivity holding forever. Headcount will be needed to meet increasing demands.”

4 Fast Fixes to Employee Burnout
While there’s no (legally available) magic pill to make employee burnout go away, you can help relieve some of their feelings by implementing a few of the following tactics.

1. If you love them, let them go. Encourage your employees to cash in their vacation time. Even if they can’t afford to leave town, taking a day or two off will help them refresh.
2. Add an “ish” to that clock in/clock out time. If it works for your company, be a little more flexible with letting workers come in later or leave earlier, or maybe work from home a few days a week, so long as they get their work done. Better yet, consider implementing “Summer Fridays” and letting your employees off at noon to let them enjoy a little extra weekend time.
3. Have class outside. Re-energizing your team could be as simple as taking a break from the routing and getting out of the office every once in a while. You might consider organizing an outing to a museum, baseball game, bowling alley or nearby restaurant for a team lunch or happy hour. In addition to boosting morale, out-of-office gatherings give co-workers a chance to mingle in a more relaxed environment, strengthening both business and personal relationships.
4. Adjust the A/C. Yep, you read that right. It may sounds simple-to-the-point-of-silly, but a recent survey shows extreme office temperatures can affect worker productivity. It may be hot outside, but that doesn’t mean the a/c has to go bull blast inside. Don’t ignore the a/c either, though. Smelly, sweaty and hot is a triple threat to productivity, if not the senses.

Are you feeling the effects of worker burnout this season? How are you coping?

CareerBuilder’s Small Business Job Forecast points to improved, but cautious hiring in the second half of 2011

In a move that should make John Legend and high school gym teachers everywhere feel validated, small businesses plan to take it slow in the second half of 2011.

When it comes to hiring plans, that is.

According to CareerBuilder’s nationwide survey of more than 1,400 small businesses, while small business hiring in the coming months is expected to be better than 2010, caution continues to steer the pace of job creation post-recession.

In a statement for the press release, CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson discussed why small businesses remain hesitant in their hiring plans:

Right now there is a multi-speed labor market with smaller organizations slower to add new headcount. There was a chill effect on confidence levels coming out of the last recession and small businesses are still waiting to see how the market will unfold before committing to fully expanded staffs. Hiring in this segment will continue with modest gains in the second half of the year.

Following are the major findings from the Small Business 2011 Mid-Year Job Forecast: 

Full-time hiring up from last year: The number of small businesses planning to hire full-time, permanent employees from July through December rose six percentage points over last year, with larger companies hiring at a more accelerated pace.

• Companies with 50 or fewer employees – 20 percent hiring full-time, permanent employees (up from 14 percent last year).
• Companies with 500 or fewer employees – 27 percent hiring full-time, permanent employees (up from 21 percent last year).
• Companies with more than 500 employees – 46 percent hiring full-time, permanent employees (up from 38 percent last year).

Part-time hiring plans remain relatively unchanged: Small businesses expect part-time hiring to be on par with last year. Larger organizations are slightly less likely to hire part-time workers than last year, focusing more on adding full-time staff.

• 50 or fewer employees – 9 percent hiring part-time employees, same as 2010
• 500 or fewer employees – 11 percent hiring part-time employees, same as 2010
• More than 500 employees – 19 percent hiring part-time employees, down from 21 percent in 2010

Contract or temporary hiring up slightly: Companies of all sizes plan to increase their use of contract or temporary support to fill in employment gaps before turning up the dial on permanent placement.

• 50 or fewer employees – 6 percent hiring contract or temporary employees, up from 4 percent last year
• 500 or fewer employees – 8 percent hiring contract or temporary employees, up from 6 percent last year
• More than 500 employees – 16 percent hiring contract or temporary employees, up from 13 percent last year

Customer service is in-demand: Similar to last year’s study, the functional areas for which small businesses plan to hire first are those on the front lines with customers and those driving innovation.

• Customer Service, Information Technology and Sales remain in the top three spots for recruitment in the second half of 2011 with Administrative and Business Development rounding out the top five.

Burn-out, turnover and competition for talent among major areas of concern: Retaining and recruiting top talent has become a major challenge for small businesses as the economy improves and employers fight worker burnout.

• 36 percent of small businesses believe their workers are already burned out.
• 25 percent are worried that workers will leave their organizations as the economy improves
• 10 percent say that top workers left their organizations in the second quarter
• 18 percent currently have open positions for which they can’t find qualified candidates

For more information – and to see how your business compares – download the full report here.

Being perceived as a hoarder may cost workers a promotion, new CareerBuilder survey shows

It may get you a cameo on a TLC reality show, but hoarding don’t do nothing for your career, y’all.

A new, very scientific survey by CareerBuilder shows hoarding can have a negative impact on your career.  Nearly three-in-ten (28 percent) employers say they are less likely to promote someone who has a disorganized or messy work space.

This doesn’t bode well for the 33 percent of workers – men and women equally – who say they tend to be hoarders. And even though companies have shifted to a more digital workplace, more than half of workers (51 percent) say they still love killing trees have paper files in their office/desk.

But let’s back up a touch, shall we? What exactly makes someone a hoarder? Survey says…

• 38 percent say that, currently, between 50 to 100 percent of their desk surface is covered with work and other materials, while 16 percent of workers said 75 percent or more of their desk is covered. For shame!!
• 36 percent of workers say they have paper files from more than a year ago, 13 percent have files that are five years or older and six percent have files dating back more than 10 years. Heathens.

Is it really that big a deal? Well, yes, according to the survey. It seems employers don’t think any more of hoarders than they do of tattooed employees.

Nearly two-in-five employers (38 percent) say piles of paper covering a desk negatively impacted their perception of that person; 27 percent feel they are disorganized, while 16 percent say they are just messy.

Public service announcement: If you or someone you know is a hoarder, there IS help.

Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder’s Vice President of Human Resources, offers the following tips to get your work area organized:

• Schedule time with the office recycle bin –Set a calendar reminder for Friday afternoon to take completed projects to the recycle bin.

• Work on one project at a time – While you may have 20 things on your “to do” list, prioritize what needs to be done that day when you arrive at work and take care of one project at a time.

• Don’t be a digital hoarder – Just because nobody else can see your clutter, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, especially in your email boxes. Delete unneeded emails on a weekly basis.

Please, share these tips with a friend or loved one.

Okay, I kid, but do you tend to have the same views as the employers who say they view hoarders as disorganized? If so, are you doing anything to address the situation?

“When you sincerely believe in what you do, your employees recognize that.” – James D. Speros

In the following interview, James D. Speros, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Fidelity, discusses the role trust and integrity play in an organization’s success, a leader’s role in setting the bar for innovation and creativity, and going beyond ‘rocket flare’ to connect with people.

How have you leveraged your brand to grow your business?
By making sure all our employees understand what the Fidelity brand stands for. There’s a lot of education and communication that we do internally.  It’s not just a simple what I would call ‘rocket flare’ where you do it once and then you walk away from it. There’s ongoing communication and activity throughout the year connecting people to the tenets of the brand, letting people express what the brand means to them and how they live the brand with every interaction.

We also surround the organization visually with the green line, the simple metaphor for guidance in navigation.  My fundamental philosophy is, “Leadership is the art of achieving results through people.”  You can’t do it all yourself.  You have to rely on your people to deliver on the brand promise and deliver results for the organization.  [The role of the] leader is to provide the vision for where you need to get to, and be the champion for innovation and creativity.

What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?  Or what are the most important leadership principles that guide you?
The most important leadership lesson I’ve learned is very simple: Treating people like people, the way you would like to be treated, regardless of background; providing encouragement; and giving people the opportunity to express their opinions without fear of criticism.  It’s so important to hold these values close to you and believe in them at all times.  People can see through corporate messaging, and when you sincerely believe in what you do, your employees recognize that.

How would you define the Fidelity culture and the impact that you have on creating that culture within Fidelity?
I would describe the culture of the organization first and foremost as one of very high integrity.  The most precious asset we have with our client base is trust.  We have one of the most trusted brands in financial services.  And trust is something you earn, not something you assert.  You earn it by acting consistently with integrity.

I think another aspect of the Fidelity culture is its sharp focus on professionalism and excellence. That informs the brand and how our associates interact and how our associates interact with each other and with our customers: integrity, professionalism and excellence.  Every single person who comes in the door needs to get inoculated with those cultural attributes, because they become brand ambassadors for the company.

As a service organization, your employees are as much as the brand ambassador as a television commercial.  Do you do anything particularly within their training and development to empower them to feel that way?
Yes.  From the moment people walk in the door here, they go through a very rigorous onboarding process.  Everyone learns about the history of the brand and its tenets.  I don’t think there’s a single person who would ever say this isn’t a company is founded on integrity, and it starts right with Mr. Johnson himself and the whole family.  This is a privately held company, and that integrity comes from the top down.

How are you, as the CMO, involved in your overall talent strategy and the priority of that strategy within the organization?
The employment brand starts with the fundamental reputation of the company.

So marketing clearly plays a role in shaping our reputation and projecting it externally. And it’s not just marketing; it’s our public relations work, our philanthropy, and, most importantly, every interaction with our customers to create a superior customer experience.

ABOUT JAMES D. SPEROS: James D. Speros is executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Fidelity Personal & Workplace Investing, a unit of Fidelity Investments. In this role, Mr. Speros is responsible for leading a team of 200 associates and directing the development of advertising, online marketing, media planning & buying, branding, direct marketing, collateral development and mobile marketing. Prior to joining Fidelity, Mr. Speros’ previous roles included serving as senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Marsh & McLennan Companies, as chief marketing officer for the U.S. Division of Ernst & Young LLP and as vice president, Advertising and Marketing Communications at AT&T Corporation. Considered one of the top thought leaders in marketing and advertising circles, Mr. Speros has been actively involved in numerous industry organizations, including the Association of National Advertisers, the Advertising Council and BPA International. Mr. Speros earned his bachelor of business administration degree in marketing from Bernard M. Baruch College in New York City, and holds an Advanced Management Certificate from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

ABOUT FIDELITY: Fidelity Investments is one of the world’s largest providers of financial services, with assets under administration of $3.7 trillion, including managed assets of more than $1.6 trillion, as of May 31, 2011. Founded in 1946, the firm is a leading provider of investment management, retirement planning, portfolio guidance, brokerage, benefits outsourcing and many other financial products and services to more than 20 million individuals and institutions, as well as through 5,000 financial intermediary firms. For more information about Fidelity Investments, visit www.fidelity.com.

If you’ve seen the movie Horrible Bosses, I’m hoping you did it because you lost a bet/got your money back/at least enjoyed your popcorn didn’t recognize yourself in any of the film’s managers, played by Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell.

If you’re not familiar with the film, which opened nationwide on Friday, here’s the gist: Three friends (played by Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman and Charlie Day), trapped in terrible jobs but afraid to quit due to the economy, plot to kill each others’ …wait for it…horrible bosses.  As you can guess (unless you’ve never seen a Hollywood film ever), things don’t go exactly as planned, and hilarity ensues. (Or at least I’m sure what the director had in mind.)

For the most part, Horrible Bosses is a complete waste of an otherwise entertaining cast – and viewers’ time; however, if there’s one redeeming quality about the movie, it’s the lesson it teaches in what not to do as a manager.  Despite the absurd characters and storyline, the movie brings to light one important truth: Many employers take unfair advantage of their employees’ work and time, falsely believing their employees are simply grateful to have a job.

Aside from the obvious offenses – blackmail, public humiliation, sexual abuse, cocaine-and-hooker benders – Horrible Bosses also reveals some not-so-obvious habits real-life managers need to break now (lest they don’t want to stay managers for long).

Five Habits of Horrible Bosses
Do any of these characteristics describe you?

1. You over promise and under deliver. You may think you’re motivating your employees by encouraging them to work for a promotion or raise that you know is never going to happen. (Hey, as long as it makes them more productive, right? And isn’t the satisfaction of knowing you did a good job enough?) But you can’t dangle that carrot in front of them forever, and when they catch on, they won’t see what you did as motivating – they’ll see it as manipulative.
2. “Because” is not in your vocabulary. Don’t leave your employees in the dark when it comes to business decisions – especially those that affect them directly. If they’re not getting a promotion or raise, give them a reason why – a real reason. You’d be surprised how understanding they can be; otherwise, they’re going to assume the worst – both about you and the company.
3. You don’t ask for feedback.  As a boss, you may feel like you need to have all the answers, all the time. (There’s a reason you’re in charge and they aren’t, right?) But you’re not always going to have the right answers. Or the best ideas. You’re just not…which is why you need to hear ideas – even arguments – from your employees’ perspective as often as possible. They’re not necessarily going to have the right answers, either, but they will have valuable insight that you can always use.
4. You do ask for feedback…but that’s all you do. What’s the point of employee surveys if you’re not actually using the results to change or improve some aspect of the business – and communicating your efforts to them. Otherwise, you’re not only wasting everyone’s time, you’re sending the message that your employees’ ideas don’t matter – and nothing kills morale more.
5. You take credit for their work. Sure, maybe a lot of victories are ‘team efforts’, but when you fail to recognize people for their individual contributions, you’re telling them, “I probably could’ve done this without you.” Give credit where it’s due…before you lose all the people who deserve it.

A key success factor in this business is attracting, recruiting and retaining the best people. Period.

In the following interview, Physiotherapy Associates CEO Dan Connors discusses how people have an impact on business on a day-to-day basis, the link between passion and performance, and the key to finding and retaining great people.

What is your philosophy about your employees and the impact that they have on the business? 

I’m sure every business says this, but in our business especially, our people are the most important asset we have and, really, the only thing that drives our business.  We have 650 clinics around the country.  Our Associates help patients improve their quality of life through rehabilitation, be it to treat a traumatic injury, improve post-surgical recovery, or gain greater flexibility and mobility. Much like a professional services firm, our people are our only asset. We place a very high level of importance on our Associates by recruiting the right people and making a conscious effort to retain them.

What type of person do you look for in an employee?

First, we have licensure requirements.  Physical therapists are licensed in the given states in which they will be treating patients.  In addition, we look for someone who is passionate for this profession.  This is a caregiving business, so having someone who is emphatic toward other people is extremely important. We also look for someone who is very results-oriented for two reasons: First, physical therapy is about obtaining results for the patient, and that needs to be the whole mindset of the caregiver. Second, we look for people who enjoy the business end of physical therapy. The clinic directors in each of our locations have the comfort of running their own businesses, hiring their own staffs and being responsible for their own profit and loss, all in the context of the foundation, support and financial stability of a large organization.

How do you tie those personality traits to office performance?

The quality of our Associates is directly tied to the performance of our clinics. We have clinics that have been in our upper quartile, performance-wise, for years because of the quality Associates there.Likewise, when we bring strong new talent to an under-performing clinic, our results improve dramatically. Our business is 100 percent people dependent.

How much time are you able to spend with the employees of this organization? 

There’s never enough time! It is one of the challenges of a distributed organization like ours.  I try to visit around 50 or so of our clinics yearly, and it’s one of my favorite things to do. But we also make sure to supplement these visits with both formal and informal communication channels. First, every person in the company knows they can pick up the phone and call or email me directly…and plenty do! We try to be very informal and encourage everyone to communicate with each other, and we also have formal channels as well to ensure constant, consistent communication with our Associates.

Can you tell me about the “Be the Best @ Physio” program?

A key success factor in this business is attracting, recruiting and retaining the best people. Period. So we take a very decided and holistic approach to our relationship with our Associates. “Be the Best @ Physio” is a program comprised of six different pillars: communication; compensation and benefits; community service; work environment; career path; and rewards and recognition.  Those pillars make up the basis of our relationship with our Associates. We have both informal and formal things we do weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually under each of these pillars to ensure that we have the best relationship possible with our Associates.

What’s the most important leadership decision you’ve made?

That’s relatively easy.  It’s a decision that I always try to make at some point in my tenure with a company, and that is to be the best company in our industry.  It’s a decision that you don’t take lightly, because it has ramifications, but we decided as a management team that we want to be the best in our business.  We committed with eyes open as to what that means in terms of personal commitment of time and going the extra mile.  In many ways, it’s very liberating because it makes some decisions very easy. For example, hiring decisions become easier when you will only settle for a world-class candidate, and decisions to invest in the latest technologies become easier. It’s challenging, but it’s very energizing, too! For our organization, “good enough” is never good enough. Our goal is to be the best provider in the outpatient rehabilitation and O&P space, and we’re excited to have the opportunity to make that happen.

ABOUT DAN CONNORS: As Chief Executive Officer of Physiotherapy Associates, Dan leverages the company’s strong foundation of clinical care to establish it as the clear leader in the outpatient rehabilitation and orthotics and prosthetics industry. Dan has more than 25 years of experience in leading customer-centric businesses. Prior to Physiotherapy Associates, he served as Chief Executive Officer of Wire One Communications, Inc., where he led the company’s turnaround and its sale to British Telecom. Dan began his business career with Bain & Company and has held executive positions with HQ Global Workplaces, Inc. and Wang Laboratories, Inc, and FedEx Kinko’s. Before pursuing a career in business, Dan was a lawyer for a prominent Washington D.C. law firm and in the Air Force General Counsel’s Office at The Pentagon. Dan earned his bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA from The Wharton School. He also holds law degrees from Georgetown University and The Ohio State University.

ABOUT PHYSIOTHERAPY ASSOCIATES: As the nation’s foremost provider of outpatient rehabilitation services, Physiotherapy Associates employs an industry-leading team of physical therapists and healthcare practitioners who are dedicated to high-quality patient care. With a comprehensive set of services – including physical therapy, occupational therapy, sports medicine, industrial rehabilitation, craniofascial therapy, women’s health, pre-op rehabilitation, and orthotics and prosthetics – the company’s clinics are well-equipped to treat millions of patients who have a wide variety of conditions. All Physiotherapy Associates clinics are staffed by licensed physical therapists who provide individualized plans of treatment for patients. Providing one-on-one care to patients continues to be the hallmark of the company. With more than 600 clinics, Physiotherapy Associates is national in scope, local in care.

You might call it the biggest anticipated iTunes release since The Beatles…

Today, CareerBuilder announced the release of its CareerBuilder for Employers iPhone app – available for a free download on iTunes.

Job seekers have long been using CareerBuilder’s original iPhone app to search for jobs on their mobile phones, but now there’s a place in the app world for employers, too. CareerBuilder for Employers gives employers access to job candidates anywhere, at any time directly from their mobile device. The application, called CareerBuilder for Employers, is available for download at iTunes.

“Being able to reach potential employees wherever you are provides a whole new level of speed, efficiency and convenience to recruitment,” said Brent Rasmussen, President of CareerBuilder North America, in today’s release. “Our new app is designed to help employers quickly connect with the fast-growing population of mobile job seekers and get a leg up on the competition for talent.”

App Features and Benefits
CareerBuilder’s new app enables employers to sync directly to their existing CareerBuilder accounts and provides the following features:

• Employers can call, email, or send a letter to the applicant directly from their iPhone
• Employers can save a candidate to a folder in their CareerBuilder account for later review
• Employers can flip through applicants by swiping left or right on the application or use the page button at the top right
• Employers can receive push notifications when new applications are available for review

Best of all, the app is free to everyone who wants to use it.

Speaking of (Free) Mobile Recruitment Resources…
feel, ahem, free to download our new eBook, The Evolution of Mobile Recruitment: What It Is, Why It Matters and Where to Start.

Resume mishaps, interview no-no’s and follow-up faux pas…

We’ve all witnessed some degree of embarrassment – be it our own or others’ – when it comes to job search process. And last night’s #cbjobchat presented the perfect opportunity to reflect on these experiences.

As you may recall, #cbjobchat is our monthly Twitter chat, bringing together both job seekers and career experts, and dedicated to addressing today’s most pressing recruitment process questions.

What was interesting about last night’s chat was that a lot of the mistakes discussed were by no means exclusive to job seekers. In fact, a lot of recruiting experts could stand to listen to this advice as well…How so? Check out some of night’s best #cbjobchat sound bytes – from job seeker offenses to words of advice – and then see how recruiters and hiring mangers can apply these insights to their own jobs:

• @RecruitingMegan A big one I run into a LOT–talking too much in the interview, not letting the interviewer lead conversation!This advice applies to interviewers as well. Know the difference between leading the conversation and dominating it. Most people go by the 20/80 rule, in which the interviewer should only be doing 20 percent of the talking, and leaving the rest to the candidate.
• @incblot: Being inauthentic or trying to gloss over weaknesses.Admit it: Recruiters and hiring managers are guilty of this, too. We know you want great candidates, but intentionally misleading candidates to make a position or opportunity sound more glamorous than it is bad for business (and possibly karma).
• @DawnBugni First and foremost KNOW what the company does. I’ve interviewed people who didn’t even know what the company did.Isn’t it annoying when a candidate hasn’t taken the time to find out what your organization does? Think about how annoyed candidates must feel when you haven’t taken the time to review their resumes before the interview. Doesn’t exactly make them feel wanted…
• @RecruitingMegan I see people try to cram it all onto one page, and then I see people include every job they’ve held… everKinda’ just makes you want to gloss over the application and toss it aside, huh? That’s exactly the same reaction job seekers have when they see cluttered, unorganized job postings with too much irrelevant information. If applications aren’t coming in, take a look at your job posting and ask yourself, “Would I bother reading all of this?”
• @tombolt The candidate experience is all about setting expectations. If applicants are not told the rules for follow-up etc. Always ask.Don’t want candidates harassing you with pesky follow up calls and emails? Set the ground rules during the interview for when they should expect to hear from you (and when they should effectively move on).
• @Ashley_Beste I recommend bringing any material that sets you apart. Letters of Recommendation, Projects, Research!Just as the candidate is trying to win you over, you’re doing the same for them. Always go into interviews (or networking events, career fairs, etc.) prepared to discuss all the things that make your organization unique – the benefits you offer, the special things you do for employees, opportunities for advancement – all the things that are going to put your organization at the top of their ‘most desireable’ list.

Got something to add or an idea for a future chat? Feel free to add your two cents in the comments section below – or on Twitter using the #cbjobchat hashtag.

Thanks again to all who participated last night. And feel free to join us the first Monday night of every month at 7 p.m. Central. We’ll post reminders and details for upcoming chats on our Facebook and Twitter accounts, so make sure you’re following us!

This afternoon, social media strategist and business consultant Amber Naslund again lent her expertise to CareerBuilder’s small business clients – this time by hosting the free webinar, Social Media for Small Businesses.

Over the course of the hour, Naslund discussed why and how small businesses can apply the lessons of her book, The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social, to engage both customers and employees and see bottom line results.

As always, Naslund was the perfect mix of energizing and insightful, offering useful tips and strategies that small business across every industry can apply to their organizations.  Check out some of the major takeaways from the presentation, and then go here to download the complete webinar.

Top Takeaways: 7 Social Media Tips for Small Businesses

1. Hire for Culture, Train for Skills. Naslund says we tend to do the opposite: hire for skills, figuring we can embroider people into the culture later. But the problem is that we don’t get people who are enthusiastic this way, who share in the mission of the company, who have a vested interest in the company and make for passionate brand ambassadors. Remember that your employees are your “unofficial marketing army…Harness their enthusiasm first,” Naslund says. “You can teach them the rest.”
2. Bad Feedback Can Be Your Best Friend. Ignoring – or trying to avoid – negative feedback is a fruitless effort. For one thing, people are going to talk about your organization – good or bad – no matter what. Secondly, getting negative feedback, reviews or comments can actually be a good thing, because it provides insight into what organizations can fix or do better. The advantage of social media is how it enables us to find out things people are saying that they might not necessarily call or email customer service about.
3. Don’t Relegate Social Media to One Part of the Business. Every department should play a role in social media – not just certain ones like communications or customer service. Figure out how social media can support the business goals across all departments. Every department – whether directly or indirectly – can support the company using social media.
4. There is No “Magic Number.” Numbers tend to be meaningless if you don’t put goals around them. You may have a high Klout score, thousands of connections or loads of fans and followers, but “the reality is none of those things mean anything unless they’re supporting a business goal that is agnostic of social media,” Naslund says. If you’re actually engaging fans in a way that drives them to take action – such as buying a products or services – then you’re doing something right because you’ve created a goal around it. Otherwise, a fan in and of itself means nothing.
5. Today, Social Media is a Job. Soon, It Will Be a Skill. Consider how there used to be an entire set of workers who just specialized in typing. That was a job in and of itself. Now, typing is a skill everyone has, that is essential to their job function.  Soon, social media will be the same way.
6. It’s Okay to Say, “I’m Sorry.” Saying “I’m sorry” [over Twitter, on Facebook, etc.] to someone who’s complaining about some aspect of your business doesn’t necessarily mean you’re accepting blame. It shows you’re listening. And oftentimes, that’s all people need: to feel validated. People are incredibly forgiving when they know they’re being heard. And if it’s something that you can fix on the spot, you should absolutely do so; not only will you win over the one person who is complaining, but it’s also likely that people are watching to see how you respond.
7. Be Human. “Doing social media right has everything to do with using the infrastructure of the tools, but communicating as yourself,” Naslund says. That means listening to what people are saying and participating in conversations that do not necessarily have to do with your business. Get to know your customers and peers and let them get to know you. Be helpful without being “salesy.” Build trust, engagement and respect that turns into long-term customer loyalty.

Want to know more? For further insights, download the complete Social Media for Small Businesses now.

Before I go into today’s jobs numbers, can I just offer a word of advice to the economists out there?

Don’t play the lottery. Just don’t. You’re just not good at picking numbers lately.

Case in point? June’s Employment Situation Report, released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows that the economy added only 18,000 jobs last month.

Now, it doesn’t take someone who tested out of college math (thankyouverymuch) to understand that 18,000 is quite a departure from the nearly 200,000 added jobs economists predicted would be added.

(I won’t even bring up how something very similar happened with last month’s projections.)

Here’s a summary of the June Employment Situation Report:

• The U.S. economy added just 18,000 jobs in June, the fewest in eight months and far fewer than the 200,000 analysts originally anticipated.
• Private employers added 57,000 jobs, while government agencies cut 39,000 jobs.
• The unemployment rate increased from 9.1 percent to 9.2 percent, the highest it’s been since December.
• The number of unemployed Americans in rose to 14.1 million in June from 13.9 million in May.

Also like last month, the government revised the previous month’s numbers to reflect that job growth was even slower than originally thought, with only 25,000 jobs added in May (down from the 54,000 jobs reported at the time).

And just to intensify that migraine point out exactly how bad these numbers actually are for hopes of ‘recovery’ (should we still be using that word?), remember that the economy needs to add 125,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the population growth.

So, yeah…Hard to believe it’s been two years since the recession ‘officially’ ended, huh? Doesn’t it seem like never ago?

“We often say that if you don’t love social media, you suck at social media, and that’s often true,” social media consultant and business strategist Amber Naslund recently told me over email.

She has a point: You can’t fake enthusiasm if it’s not there, and if you try, it will come across in the social space. This truth can pose a problem for employers, who find themselves in an increasingly social world where “every employee is a potential spokesperson,” as Naslund writes in The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social.

One need only look at companies like Zappos, IBM and Southwest to see how employers benefit when employees blog and tweet on their behalves.  Unfortunately, not every employee is going to take an active interest in social media, and as hard as they might try, employers can’t force them to do so. Yet, if they give their employees a compelling reason to participate in social media, they won’t have to force anything.

“Employers need to educate their teams about the potential and opportunity on the web. They can show each employee how social media can relate to their jobs and make them more effective, and that’s compelling to anyone,” says Naslund, who hosts a free webinar on July 12 to discuss how small businesses can find social media success in today’s landscape.

Below, Naslund provides five more things employers need to understand about social media in order to stay competitive in today’s ever-changing business world.

The Five New Rules for Employers on Social Media

1. Above all else, you must have the desire to be successful in social media. “While businesses of every size and industry have the potential to be successful in social media, they do not always possess the desire and the willingness to do so. While an organization’s goals will ultimately determine what successful adoption of social media is  in general terms, it’s embracing the cycle of listening > responding > participating > storytelling while putting in place the internal pieces to make social media not just an add-on, but an integrated part of each piece of the business.”
2. Social media isn’t an and.  It’s an or. “Make no mistake: social media does take time and resources. But the businesses that invest  in it will find ways to adapt. “Auditing what we do already and finding the things that aren’t working anymore or that have run their course can free up people, time, and budget to put toward progressive ideas like social media. We learned to adapt to the phone, to the emergence of the web, and to email.”
   
3. Social media is not going anywhere. “Organizations that don’t adapt to social media aren’t doomed to fail; however, there’s no question that they are missing opportunities. And if their customers, partners, and peers aren’t driving them to adopt it now, they soon will. We used to argue whether or not we needed websites, and now not having one is inconceivable. The same will soon be said about social media.”
4. Listen first, decide later. “You don’t need to be on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to be successful in social media. At its core, social “media” is anything on the web that allows for interaction and engagement. Think about forums, blogs, video, audio (like podcasts), even mainstream news sites that allow for comment and discourse. Where you need to be all depends on the outcome of your listening strategy. Where are the people who you want to talk to? If they’re connecting on forums, be there. If you have an active blogging industry, get out there and start commenting and writing. Listening first is the guide to finding your best outposts on the web.”
5. Social media is the means. Not the end. “It’s important to understand that, as my co-author Jay [Baer] says, the goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business, and social media can support that. Organizations need to focus on how to integrate social media and make it an operational part of their business. Social media isn’t easy, and it isn’t fast, but it can transform the way people work and do business for the better.”

Want to know more? Join CareerBuilder and Amber Naslund for a free webinar: Social Media for Small Business. Learn what you need to know now to grow your business by leveraging new social technologies. Tuesday, July 12 at 1 p.m. CST. Register today.

New survey shows hygiene and appearance play into employers’ promotion decisions.

Kids today and their piercings, am I right!?  That seems to be the attitude of nearly 37 percent of employers, who admitted in a recent survey they’d be less likely to extend a promotion to an employee with body piercings.

CareerBuilder recently surveyed nearly 2,878 employers to find out if personal appearance and hygiene affect promotion decisions, and if so, which personal attributes would make an employee less appealing for a promotion.  Bad breath, disheveled clothing, piercings and tattoos ranked highest among factors.

The top personal attributes employers say would make them less likely to extend a promotion include:

• Piercings – 37 percent
• Bad breath – 34 percent
• Visible tattoo – 31 percent
• Often has wrinkled clothes – 31 percent
• Messy hair – 29 percent
• Dresses too casually – 28 percent
• Too much perfume or cologne – 26 percent
• Too much makeup – 22 percent
• Messy office or cubicle – 19 percent
• Chewed fingernails – 10 percent
• Too suntanned – 4 percent

What this survey tells me is – all other things (e.g. leadership skills, job performance) being equal – appearance could be the deciding factor in whether or not you promote someone over another.

Would you agree? If not, what do you make of these results? How important is professional appearance in your workplace, and does it seem to affect who gets promoted and who doesn’t? Does that seem fair?

“You already possess the skills to needed to manage people you can’t see. I’m just going to wake them up for you,” Kyra Cavanaugh told the audience of human resources, hiring and recruiting professionals last week to open her SHRM 2011 session, Managing People You Can’t See.

Those “people you can’t see” to which Cavanaugh, President of workplace solutions firm Life Meets Work, Inc., was referring are the employees who work remotely, a part of the workforce that is increasing day by day.

Recognizing the need to address the challenges that come with either managing people who work remotely or working remotely oneself, Cavanaugh led a highly interactive – and highly engaging – session in which she provided eight tips for managing and working with remote teams.

Eight Tips for Managing People You Can’t See

1. Identify and Acknowledge Discomfort.Regardless of your management style, you’re bound to feel a level of discomfort when managing people you can’t see. The solution? “We have to arm ourselves with knowledge and information to get more comfortable.” Of course, this requires some introspection. Consider your management style. (Do you tend to be more trusting or more controlling as a manager?) Then identify the challenges to that style, and finally, explore the various skills or tactics you can you use to fill the gaps.
2. Evaluate Remote Work Requests Objectively. Remote work requests should be handled like any other business decision, says Cavanaugh. “It’s not about ‘Is this a good enough reason?’ It’s about ‘What does the business need?’” The following factors should come into play:
1. Needs of business
2. Nature of position
3. Individual work style
4. Department restrictions/limitations
5. Individual performance
3. Say either “Yes, and…’ or “No, and…”Always give a reason for your decision. If you say no, explain why, especially if it has to do with the individual’s work style or performance (Cavanaugh suggests saying something along the lines of “I’m not comfortable with this for these reasons, but if you improve in these areas, we can revisit this in a few months.”)On the other hand, if you say yes, make sure you explain any concerns you have going into it, and establish ground rules (e.g. “If we find in a few months that business needs aren’t being met, we may have to revisit this decision.”).
4. Agree Upon and Document Team Values.  Create a “Virtual Teams Agreement,” a physical document – to be reviewed every six months – outlining a certain set of behaviors that everyone on the team helps create and agrees on.For example, the agreement should take into account all the ways your team interacts (e.g. “How often do we need to respond to emails? Check voicemails? Have meetings where everyone is physically present? Are conference calls mandatory? What’s optional?”) and ways to hold each other accountable.A VTA will not only create mutual understanding over expectations, but it will also “eliminate any feelings of jealousy over ‘why does she get to work remotely and I can’t?’” Cavanaugh says.
5. Harness Technology. From project management software to CRM tools, to micro-blogging sites (like Twitter and Yammer), to Wiki’s, there are so many resources today that enable remote teams to work together–it’s just a matter of picking your poison (so to speak).“Every team has preference over which technologies they like.  Have that conversation with your team” to find out their preferences – and don’t be afraid to mix it up.
6. Set Goals and Track Performance. Make sure you clearly communicate deadlines and projects. Everyone should know who is responsible for completing which part of the project when in order to “ensure everyone’s on same page.”One thing Cavanaugh suggests is utilizing is flash reports, short reports employees submit each week (or maybe or even every day) outlining three pieces of information: What they accomplished this week, what obstacles they encountered, and what they’ll do next week. Flash reports not only set expectations, but they hold people accountable for finishing their goals.
7. Communicate Deliberately. “When we can’t see each other, we can’t read body language,” Cavanaugh says, and that can be dangerous, because body language tells us so much. We do not always know when someone is being serious or sarcastic in an email…but we also tend not to ask.  For that reason “we have to have those conversations we do not want to have.”
8. Build a Strong, Cohesive Team. “People want to be participating in something bigger than themselves,” Cavanaugh says. For this reason, it’s important to build a sense of community by promoting teamwork. Team building among remote teams is certainly not an easy task, but it’s not an impossible one, either. It just requires a little innovation.For example, Cavanaugh suggests building a PowerPoint, wherein each person has a section in which they can talk about anything they want – from recent accomplishments to vacation plans.

Do you work with remote teams? What management tips have you found work for you?

“Who here is hiring right now?” Nancy Newell asked the attendees of SHRM 2011 in Las Vegas this past week, before quickly answering her own question: “Every hand should be up. We’re always looking for great talent.”

To help the human resource managers and recruiting professionals in her audience do just that, Newell, SPHR and a principal at nth degree consulting, led the audience in a session called, “Beyond Behavioral Interviewing: Asking the RIGHT Questions, Evaluating the Answers.”

Newell discussed the following strategies for what to do – and what to avoid – when it comes to finding the right candidate through behavioral interviewing.

Do This: Look beyond interview skills.
Not That: Mistake a good interviewer for a good candidate. Candidates today are more sophisticated than they used to be, Newell told the crowd. They know what interviewers want to hear.  “They’re good at interviewing, because a lot of them have had a lot of practice at it.” Someone who has been in the workforce for five, 10 or 20 years, however, will have rusty interview skills. That doesn’t necessarily predict what sort of employee that person will be.

Do This: Gather information during the interview.
Not That: Evaluate information during the interview. The interview process is your data-gathering process. The assessment should come after the interview. “If you find yourself evaluating during interview, I’m not going to tell you not to do it, but I want you to be aware of when it happens,” Newell said.  Everyone has biases, Newell admitted, but theses biases create “a filter that isn’t necessarily there, and that precludes you from making an accurate assessment for how this person will live in your organization.” You can’t always help it when your biases come out, but be able to recognize them for what they are so you can move on and focus on the purpose of the interview: gathering information.

Do This: Ask about past behavior.
Not That: Ask about potential behavior. Asking about specific past behavior will give you the most accurate predictor of future behaviors – and the more recent, the better.  A question that begins with “Tell me about a time when…” for example, is much more predictive than “What would you do if…” which tends to lead candidates to say what they think you want to hear, rather than give a real-life example that provides insight into their skills, personality and work ethic.

Do This: Get the information you need up front.
Not That: Give the milk away for free. Ask the questions first, then talk about the job and the company. Start by coaching candidates through the interview process, explaining the format and that there will be time for questions at the end. But don’t lead them by talking up front about the job and the organization, which enables them to give you the answers they know you want to hear. Remember, what you say and when you say it matters.

Do This: Consider the skills and competencies needed for the job.
Not That: Consider ONLY at skills and competencies need for the job. “There’s more to a job than skills and competencies. There’s a whole team to consider,” Newell said. When interviewing candidates, consider what skills are needed to round out the team, which skills will work best with the manager, and which skills will work best for your organization’s customers. Also, be sure to consider the skills you’re willing to train them on, so you don’t waste time asking about those. In short: hire for cultural fit as well as skills and competencies.

Do This: Ask the same questions of every candidate.
Not That: Apply the above rule to follow-up questions. “If we aren’t measuring candidates by the same yardstick,” Newell said, meaning asking the same questions of every candidate, “we have no reliability or predictability in the interview process…the yardstick doesn’t measure anything.” Follow up questions, however, can and should be different. Don’t be afraid to “pull the thread” to get the entire picture. Not only will you be able to ensure the behaviors your candidates talk about are consistent, but you’ll also be able to see whether or not their initial responses were genuine.

Finally, do this: Accept that there’s no “magic bullet” to getting the right answers from candidates and ensuring the right hire. If you invest the time, energy and discipline into the process, you’ll reap the rewards in the long term. According to Newell, “It’s not an easy process, but it’s so worth it.”

I’m going back to the future to start my SHRM 2011 Conference recap posts at the end of the conference, because frankly, hearing Michael J. Fox deliver the final general session yesterday was the highlight of my SHRM experience. (Now had I won an iPad, this might be an entirely different post….)

Going into the Las Vegas Conference Center to hear Fox’s speech yesterday, I already had high hopes. After all, this is Alex P. Keaton, y’all!! Marty-effing-McFly! Teen Wolf – the original!

And if I’m being completely honest, part of me really, really just wanted to hear him tell the audience, “Boy, are you a sight for sore eyes.”

But what Fox delivered far exceeded my expectations. Articulate and inspiring, Fox charmed the crowd with his humor and honesty, giving a brief history of his childhood, explaining how he got into show business, before launching into his discovery that he had Parkinson’s Disease, until finally discussing how the disease became the greatest gift he never asked for.

“Don’t play the result.”
Fox opened by giving the crowd the first acting lesson he ever received as a child growing up in Canada: “Don’t play the result,” a lesson he now applies to life. “You can’t play as though you know how the scene is going to end,” he told the audience.

“For me, this saying is about opportunities…The script of your life is not yet written.” You can’t plan for every event that’s going to happen in your life, but that shouldn’t restrict you. In fact, it is those unexpected events that create opportunities to try something new.

“Loss doesn’t create a vacuum. It creates opportunities.”
Shortly after going public with his disease (“Here’s a tip: If you ever want to get a secret out, tell Barbara Walters and People Magazine,” he joked…I think), Fox said he heard about a fan who also had Parkinson’s Disease and explained it to people as “like what Michael J. Fox has.”

At that point, Fox realized that he had the opportunity to help others like him by becoming an activist and using his fame to promote awareness and find a cure. He decided to start an organization specifically focused on finding a cure for Parkinson’s, because while there are federally mandated initiatives geared toward medical research, “what we don’t have is a Department of Cures. There’s no Secretary of Cures…Cures don’t seem to be anyone’s priorities.”

In setting up The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease, Fox made it his mission to assure anyone who, like him, was hoping to be cured of Parkinson’s, that while there might not be a cure available just yet, “at the very least, we’re on the job.”

“The choice I didn’t make…”
In addition to new opportunities, Fox has also discovered the power of choice. He realized early on that Parkinson’s didn’t have to limit him – not if he didn’t want it to. “The only choice not available to me is whether or not I have Parkinson’s. Everything else is my call,” Fox told the audience. He then reflected on Dwight, the bitter, world-weary character he played on several episodes of the TV series “Rescue Me,” whom he said was easy for him to play because he identified so well with the character.

“I know Dwight. Dwight was the choice I didn’t make,” Fox told the audience. The result of not making that choice, he found, has been more rewarding than he could ever imagine.

“The gift that keeps on taking…”
Despite everything he has endured, Fox calls Parkinson’s Disease a “gift.” (“It’s the gift that keeps on taking, but it’s a gift.”) It was, after all, this disease that gave him the opportunity to give back with his foundation. On a more personal level, it opened the door to bond more closely with his children (he calls the day he disclosed his disease to his son “one of the best afternoon’s of my life”) and his wife, Tracy Pollan.

“Parkinson’s has always put me in a box,” he told the audience. “Tracy has become expert at folding it up, turning it over and easing me out…We’ve given more to each other than Parkinson’s has taken away.”

Initially, Fox might seem an odd pick as the person to give the closing speech at SHRM, but his determination to see opportunity where others might see limitations is clearly a lesson for leaders everywhere.

It certainly moved the crowd at SHRM.

Before walking off-stage to a standing ovation, Fox closed by repeating his opening statement for emphasis: “Whatever you do, never ever play the result.”

“You constantly need to reposition and redefine yourself in order to continue growing.”

In the following excerpt from CareerBuilder’s recent interview with Philip Jaurigue, President and CEO of Sabre Systems, Inc., Jaurigue discusses, among other things, the importance of innovation, recognition and not looking in the rearview mirror.

Can you describe your philosophy as it relates to the impact your employees have on your business?

Because Sabre Systems, Inc. is a services business, our employees are the face of the company. A large portion of Sabre personnel work at customer locations and, in many instances, are the customers’ sole source of information with regard to Sabre’s culture and philosophy. This means that the attitude with which employees come to work in the morning, the way they conduct themselves while at work, and even their overall character convey a message about Sabre’s values and professionalism directly to our customer.

With that in mind, I encourage the leadership team to spend a fair amount of time engaging employees to ensure they feel they are a valued and integral part of the team. I also ask that company leadership ensures that potential Sabre team members are aligned with the mission, vision and culture of the company before bringing them on board.

How do you personally engage with and relate to your employees?

Sabre has an employee accolade program through which we reward employees who have exceeded expectations or have willingly stepped outside the confines of their daily responsibilities to provide support to another employee, manager or project. These employees often receive their “Above and Beyond” or “Employee Appreciation” awards in front of their colleagues or customers, who collectively celebrate their accomplishments and contributions. I urge managers to utilize this program and always try to be present to personally recognize those employees being honored.

I also make every effort to attend Sabre community events, holiday parties and other company functions, which provide opportunities for me to connect with employees outside of the work environment.

Recently, I have been looking for creative ways to use social media. I encourage Sabre employees to follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my blog so they are informed regarding the direction of – and what’s going on within – the company. This is especially beneficial to employees who spend the majority of their time at customer sites. Having access to these communication channels helps them feel connected, and sheds light on how they might grow their careers.

What would you say is the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned to date?

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t look in the rearview mirror and expect the things you’ve done things in the past that made you successful are necessarily going to be the same things that keep you successful. It sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but from a business standpoint, it’s probably one of the worst things you can do. You have to be constantly reinventing yourself to keep yourself relevant and stay competitive.

Oftentimes, companies will become successful because they have been able to differentiate themselves from their competitors and communicate that value proposition to their customers. Your competitors are all going to copy what’s successful, so you constantly need to reposition and redefine yourself in order to continue growing. A leader’s role is to be a change agent in managing these transitions.

How do you define your internal culture?

I think employees at Sabre feel that they are empowered and generally encouraged to be creative and entrepreneurial. Sabre leadership encourages employees to be innovative in finding solutions for their customers and improving processes to achieve enhanced efficiency.

My role is to make sure that our reward system and that which we praise in the organization are consistent with what we’re asking our people to do, and with the culture we have cultivated. We try to come up with creative ways to recognize people and to reward people for their innovation. Rewarding those behaviors we deem desirable and beneficial to the company is the best thing that any leader can do.

What do you do to engage your employees and to reinforce your brand?

One thing that makes employees feel positive about their experience at Sabre is our involvement in the community. Sabre supports a number of different charitable projects – from a financial standpoint, as well as in terms of the time we spend on pro bono efforts. In the Philadelphia region specifically, we’ve twice been named one of the most philanthropic large companies in the area. We have people who are very actively involved in a number of not-for-profits and different community endeavors.

In today’s marketplace, it is important for a business to show that it’s not just about profits, losses and maximizing shareholder value, but that it also takes responsibility to give back and really help the community.

What advice would you share with your executive peers through this article?

I’ll go back to the topic of change. You don’t lead your company by looking in the rearview mirror. Don’t be afraid to reinvent your company and don’t fear; rather, embrace change.

ABOUT PHILIP P. JAURIGUE: Philip P. Jaurigue founded Sabre Systems, Inc. in 1989, and has served as President since its inception. Mr. Jaurigue’s primary focus and responsibility is providing strategic business leadership to drive the direction, stability and growth of Sabre. A frequent speaker at the Wharton School of Business and the Entrepreneur’s Forum of Greater Philadelphia, Mr. Jaurigue is also part-time co-host on the weekly radio show Executive Leaders Radio for WHFS 1580AM in Washington, DC.

ABOUT SABRE SYSTEMS.: Sabre Systems, Inc. is a professional services company that provides worldwide technology, scientific and management solutions to government and commercial clients. Core capabilities include information technology, engineering, program management support, training and logistics, and software development. Headquartered in Pennsylvania, Sabre has major offices in Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, Indiana, California and South Carolina.

Earlier this month, I discussed the ways mobile marketing efforts can enhance a company’s recruitment efforts.

For instance, not only does mobile marketing provide a fast, convenient way to alert job seekers to opportunities and stay in touch with them, but it also helps you stand out among those who aren’t yet using mobile means to reach job seekers…just to name a few.

Now, if you’re ready to take that very special next step in your recruiting efforts, here’s your quick-and-easy guide to the various mobile recruiting techniques you can try:

Four Opportunities in Mobile Recruitment

Quick Response Codes: QR (quick response) codes are barcode-like squares that, when scanned with the camera found on most mobile devices, direct users to a specific mobile website.  For recruitment purposes, they’re an easy way to direct job seekers to your careers site (just take it from Ernst & Young). Here are a few quick ways to get started:

• Cre­ate a QR code for your com­pany job board and print it on com­pany promo cards to dis­trib­ute to attendees at career fairs and networking events.
• Embed QR codes on company brochures, business cards, presentations, hand-outs, and other promotional items to drive prospective candidate to your careers website.

And thanks to the many free QR code generators online that let you simply type in a destination URL, creating QR codes is surprisingly quick and inexpensive.  (Note, however, that because not everyone has a smart phone that responds to QR codes, you should always pro­vide mul­tiple avenues for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of information.)

Text Alerts: Recruitment SMS alerts enable you to alert job seekers to new and open opportunities in real-time.  You can also use SMS notifications to communicate other recruitment messages, including the following:

• When a candidate has made it to the next round of the application process.
• When companies require an interview.
• When career events take place, according to where the candidate lives.

Companies like AT&T are using this technique already. Anyone can sign up on the careers section of AT&T’s website to join the company’s Talent Network and receive hot job leads via text message based on location and job type.

Mobile-optimized Websites: ERE’s Dr. John Sullivan recently argued that one of the reasons corporate careers sites are going the way of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric is because they aren’t keeping up with mobile trends.

With over 300 million Americans using mobile phones – and mobile search up 130 percent over the past year – it’s increasingly important that organizations optimize their careers site for easier mobile viewing. Otherwise, they risk missing out on the millions of job seekers who are searching jobs and companies from their phones.

Creating an optimized version of your website should be simple and relatively inexpensive. Keep the content simple and focus on the most important content. Hyatt has optimized its mobile site to enable potential candidates to search for jobs, view mobile video from YouTube, link to the company’s various social media sites and read up on company information.

Apps: AT&T, Raytheon and Deloitte are just a few of the companies that have successfully implemented smartphone apps into their recruitment strategy.  While customized apps are ideal for bigger companies with a steady opening of jobs, employers of all sizes benefit from apps if the websites that advertise their jobs on have apps.

For instance, any organization with postings on CareerBuilder.com can potentially be found by job seekers using CareerBuilder’s job seeker app.  Additionally, employers can now use the new CareerBuilder for Employers app on their ends to find candidates, review their resumes and contact them - from anywhere at anytime - directly from their iPhones.

Have you made changes to your recruiting strategy in light of the current mobile trend?

“The foundation of business is changing under our feet, and we need folks who are adaptable to – even thrive on – engineering and stewarding that change.”

In the following Q&A, Amber Naslund, VP of Social Strategy for Radian6, discusses her new book, The Now Revolution: 7  Shifts To Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social, which she co-authored with social media strategy consultant Jay Baer. On July 12, Naslund will host a free webinar, Social Media for Small Business, to discuss how businesses can apply the lessons from her book to their own social media and recruiting strategies.

What gave you the idea for The Now Revolution? Jay [Baer, co-author of The Now Revolution] and I talked at great length about how many books there were about social media marketing, but how few there were about how to adapt your business to what social media has brought about. We wanted to write something that looked at social business from that angle.

What does ‘successful adoption of the social web’ mean to you? Successful adoption is unique to every business and its goals, to be sure. But in general terms, it’s embracing the cycle of listening, responding, participating, and storytelling, while putting in place the internal pieces to make social media not just an add-on, but an integrated part of each piece of the business.

Is there a difference between a company’s culture and its employment brand? Often there is, but ideally there isn’t. The brand is often the appearance we like to create for external observers. But if we do our jobs really well, the culture is expressed and represented by the brand, and the brand carries over internally as well as externally. It’s no coincidence that the companies that do social well have a strong cultural foundation; social media is a window into corporate culture unlike we’ve seen before.

Employers often argue that they do not have the time and resources needed to adopt a social media strategy. How do you respond to that? Make no mistake: social media does take time and resources. Without a doubt. So that’s a valid concern. But we keep thinking about social media as an “and” instead of an “or”. Auditing what we do already and finding the things that aren’t working anymore or that have run their course can free up people, time, and budget to put toward progressive ideas like social media.

Are businesses that do not have a social media presence doomed to fail? Fail? No. But there’s no question that they’re missing opportunities. And if their customers, partners, and peers aren’t driving them to adopt it now, they soon will.

You recently said that companies need to start ‘hiring a different breed of person.’ Can you expound on that? More than ever, we need polymaths. We need people who excel across disciplines and are capable of being more generalists than specialists. They need to embody strong and diverse character attributes, not just sets of functional skills. Mindset and work ethic are as critical as they’ve ever been, along with a capacity to innovate even in the most traditional of roles. The foundation of business is changing under our feet, and we need folks who are adaptable to – even thrive on – engineering and stewarding that change.

Finally, if readers can take only one thing from The Now Revolution what do you hope it will be? That we have to get away from a focus on the tools and tactics, and move toward an understanding that, as Jay says, the goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business, and social media can support that.

Want to know more? Join CareerBuilder and Amber Naslund for a free webinar: Social Media for Small Business. Learn what you need to know now to grow your business by leveraging new social technologies. Tuesday, July 12 at 1 p.m. CST. Register today.

Confession: Short of an in-depth Google search, I couldn’t recall a single piece of advice the speaker at my college graduation gave my classmates and me on that fateful day in May so many years ago.

Granted, the speaker wasn’t a celebrity like Stephen Colbert (no offense, whoever you were), but save for a few witty lines, I still doubt I’d remember much. I’m not proud of it, either, because I bet that advice would still apply to my professional life today.

With that in mind – and in honor of graduation season – I picked out a few takeaways from some of my favorite celebrity commencement speeches this year to see how they apply to professionals of all levels – not just new graduates.

Leadership Advice from 2011’s Celebrity Commencement Addresses

“There are few things more liberating than having your worst fear realized.” – Conan O’Brien

O’Brien discussed his own professional disappointment over having his worst fear realized – getting his dream job of hosting The Tonight Show abruptly taken away from him – and using it as a jumping off point to try “a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous ridiculous and seemingly irrational things.” The result, he said, was “the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life.” He continued by saying, “if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention,” a belief that applies to anyone in any aspect of life – both personal and professional – before closing with, “Work hard, be kind, and good things will happen.” Amen, Coco.

“Be open to collaboration. Other people’s ideas are often better than your own.” – Amy Poehler

Poehler reminded the crowd at Harvard’s commencement ceremony that they all owe their successes to the people in their life who helped them get there. Her next piece of advice holds true for anyone at any level of their career – but perhaps especially for those who are actively hiring and interviewing people to add to their teams: “Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you. Spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.”

“Cultivate in them the faith to carry on, and they will take care of the rest.” – Tom Hanks

Though Hanks was advising the graduates of Yale on how to help war veterans make an easier transition to civilian life, he could have easily been telling managers how to lead their employees. He emphasize the need to work together to improve and unify the nation, mirroring the need for employers and employees to work together for the benefit the overall organization.

He also reminded all present for the speech that, even in the face of circumstances beyond our control, our success is determined by how we approach those challenges: “Each new day fear is…lurking in the darkness on the edge of town. Your rising from bed every morning will give fear its chance to grow stronger just as it will afford faith its chance to blossom. You will make the choice to react to one or create the other.”

“You are not the most important person in the scene. Everyone else is.” – Stephen Colbert

Colbert equated the first lesson he ever learned from doing improv at Chicago’s Second City to life, reminding the crowd at Northwestern that great improv scenes happen when everyone on stage works to make their scene partners look good. “Try to love others and serve others and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return,” he later said. The same applies to leadership: If you treat your employees with respect and work to help them succeed, they’ll return the favor.

“There are no mistakes.” – Tina Fey

Like Colbert, Fey relayed the lessons she learned in improv comedy to the Fieldston 2011 graduating class, suggesting that they apply these lessons to life. Also like Colbert, Fey could easily have been speaking to talent managers when she advised them to view mistakes as opportunities.  “I think the idea of living in a world where there are no mistakes – there are only choices, and we move forward from our choices – is a pretty great world to live in.”

Tina Fey at Fieldston from Cyber Shepherd on Vimeo.

What 2011 celebrity commencement speeches were your favorites?

Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of such Facebook games as “Farmville” and “Mafia Wars”, Marriott International, Inc. just unveiled its “My Marriott Hotel” game on Facebook, the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

But rather than simply build buzz, “My Marriott Hotel”, which simulates the experience of managers at the fast-paced hotel restaurant, is ultimately being used as a recruitment tool.

Marriott follows in the footsteps of Siemens, whose “Plantville” is designed to give users a feel for what being manager of a bottling facility, vitamin factory or train-building plant is like, and Home Depot, which offers games on its Facebook page like “Cart Hustle” and “Paint Misbehavin” to engage potential employees.

These companies, however, are just the latest in a long line of employers who now use virtual technology as a recruitment tool.

For instance, as I reported last year, staffing firm Kelly Services uses Second Life to give job seekers an interactive experience, while MITRE Corporation enables job seekers to download a 3D video game that gives players a better understanding of the company’s campus and how the interview process works.

The trend of using video games as a recruitment tool actually goes back several years: According to the Entertainment Software Association, an estimated 70 percent of major domestic employers used these “serious games” to train employees in 2008.  That figure is estimated to increase to 80 percent by 2013.

It seems as if the practice is working in these companies’ favor, though. According to a recent study from the University of Colorado Denver Business School, “organizations which use video games to train employees end up with smarter, more motivated workers who learn more and forget less.”

(For the record, though, what these companies are doing will never have anything on Oregon Trail. That game ruled.)

And while the obvious downside to using video gaming techniques to train is the time and money involved in setting it up, but it’s worth noting that with today’s technology, it’s much easier and much less expensive to execute today than it was even a few years ago.

What do you think about using video games as a recruitment tool? Worth the investment or overrated?

“Every customer is a potential reporter, and every employee is a potential spokesperson.”

Such is the overall message in The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts To Make Businesses Faster, Smarter & More Social.

Written by renowned social media and business strategists Amber Naslund and Jay Baer, The Now Revolution addresses how the prevalence of social media, 24/7 news access and “a globally interconnected world” is calling for businesses to revolutionize the way they treat both customers and employees.

“We used to argue whether or not we needed websites, now not having one is inconceivable,” Naslund recently told me over email, in reference to how businesses are still slow to create an effective social media strategy, despite its increasing importance as a business tool.

Recognizing this challenge, she and Baer set out to create a “playbook” with seven shifts businesses need to make today in order to stay competitive. Two of these shifts in particular – “find talent you can trust” and “organize your armies” – tackle how employers can find the right people to keep up with today’s fast-paced business world, and how they can then effectively turn those people into brand advocates.

“Employers need to educate their teams about the potential and opportunity on the web – not just in marketing, but in customer service, research, competitive analysis, etc.,” Naslund says in reference to how business can influence their employees to become potential marketers.

Social Media is a Means, Not the End
While not having a social media presence isn’t a deal-breaker for businesses in order to be successful, Naslund tells me it definitely means missing opportunities in a world that’s increasingly reliant on social media to connect with customers, employees and business partners.

But make no mistake: The Now Revolution isn’t a social media book. It’s a business book. “The goal [for businesses today] is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business, and social media can support that,” Naslund says.

Next month, Naslund will discuss how small businesses can accomplish both for a new webinar, Social Media for Small Businesses. Check back here later in the week to see my full interview with Naslund, in which she reveals more about her book and what to expect from her upcoming webinar. In the meantime, you can register for the webinar here for free.

Update: Check out my full interview with Naslund here.

Register now for Social Media for Small Business: Join Amber Naslund, VP of Social Strategy for Radian6, as she discusses the unique challenges small businesses face – as well as the unique benefits they have – in an increasingly social world. Learn what you need to know now to grow your business by leveraging new social technologies. Tuesday, July 12 at 1 p.m. CST

While you were busy advising and inspiring the great minds of tomorrow, hoping that Pottermore turns out to be everything you’re dreaming it will be and more, or breathing a sigh of sweet, sweet relief, here’s what was happening in the employment and workforce management world this week…

• Executives to Jobs Council: “What Else Ya Got?” A report that included five recommendations for fixing unemployment – such as “Boost jobs in travel and tourism” and “Train workers for today’s open jobs” – failed to wow the other members of the President’s Jobs and Competitiveness Council when presented at a jobs-related forum in Raleigh, N.C. last month. (Wall Street Journal)
• Career Sh*t My Dad Says In honor of Father’s Day on Sunday, readers shared the best career advice they ever received, including such gems as, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” and “You can’t change the circus, unless you change the clowns.” So true…Thanks, Pop! (TheWorkBuzz)
• Working – and Overworked – Dads Sound Off Speaking of Father’s Day, CareerBuilder’s annual study revealed that fathers are having a hard time finding a work/life balance, and suggests ways working dads can be both father and employee of the year. (TheHiringSite)
• America’s Managers Rule, Says Science Tina Turner could’ve been singing about U.S. bosses, who, researchers say, are simply the best. (Harvard Business Review)
• 10 Reasons Your Employees Hate You Right Now Bet you can’t guess ALL TEN of the top employee workplace complaints. (Don’t worry if you can’t: No one’s a winner in this game.) (About.com)
• Americans are So Miserable, We Need a Whole Index to Measure It Thanks to high unemployment and inflation, the nation’s misery level registers at 12.7, which, apparently, is bad. (CNBC)
• Much Like Beyoncé, Work-Life Flexibility Perk is a Survivor A new survey shows that work-life flexibility was one of the few workplace benefits to survive the recession. (United Press International)
• Employers Yearn for Corporate Version of Botox Trying to appeal to younger job candidates, ‘mature’ technology companies like Microsoft and HP have had to rethink their branding strategies in the face of stiff competition from ‘hipper’ start-ups like Facebook and Twitter. (Wall Street Journal)

Struggling to find that perfect gift for the father who has everything? (Perhaps a little too much of it?)

Some dads pretend to like ties, others wouldn’t say no to new golf clubs. What most working dads could use this year, however, is a better/work life balance.

At least, if a recent survey of more than 800 men – employed full-time, with children 18 and under living in the household – is any indication.

According to CareerBuilder’s annual Father’s Day Survey, more fathers report struggling to find a work/life balance today than a year ago.

Maybe, however, that’s because – and here’s the good news – the majority (84 percent) of working dads who were laid off over the last 12 months say they have found full-time employment again.

But much like asking for directions, giving up the breadwinner role post-recession is something few dads are willing to do. (Men! Amirite??)

According to the survey, only 33 percent of working dads who aren’t the sole financial provider for their household said they would quit their jobs if their spouse or significant other made enough money to support the family, down from 44 percent five years ago. 

Longer Hours, Less Quality Time
The survey also found that leaner staffs and heavier workloads have dads putting in longer hours away from home.

• 22 percent work more than 50 hours per week on average, up from 19 percent last year
• 39 percent spend two hours or less with their children each day, and 16 percent spend one hour or less.

And if they’re not away at the office, they might as well be:

• 20 percent reported they bring home work at least three days per week.
• 34 percent have missed at least two significant events in their child’s life due to work in the last year
• 19 percent said they have checked work voicemail or e-mail during their children’s events.

Given these findings, it’s not surprising that 21 percent said they feel their work has had a negative impact on their relationship with their children.

A Career and Kids? Can Men Truly Have It All?
According to Alex Green, General Counsel for CareerBuilder and father of three, it’s not surprising that more fathers are reporting difficulty balancing their home life with their jobs.

“As companies downsized during the recession and work demands accelerated, we saw dads having a harder time finding balance between providing for their families financially and spending quality time with them, ” Green says.

The key to maintaining a balance, he says, is open communication and planning ahead at both work and home.“  It’s also important to cut yourself some slack,” Green adds.“ Even the best dads need a break sometimes.”

5 Tips for Maintaining a Better Work/Life Balance
Green recommends the following tips to help working dads find a better balance at work and home:

1. Talk about it – Remember that communication is a two-way street.  Besides just listening to what is going on in your family’s lives, talk about what is going on in your office, so everyone understands why you are away or have to do some work when you are home.
2. Scheduling is key to success – Add every family member’s schedule to one master calendar so there are no surprises.  Also, save vacation days for important events and talk to your supervisor about flexible work arrangements.
3. Establish a “no work” zone – Put down your Blackberry and avoid checking e-mails from the time you arrive home until after your children have gone to sleep.
4. Consider flexible work arrangements – More companies are offering telecommuting options, flexible hours, condensed work weeks and other arrangements.  Approach your boss with a game plan of how the new arrangement would work and how it can ultimately benefit the organization.
5. It’s okay to say no – In addition to actual work, sometimes activities associated with your job can take a toll on your free time. Determine what additional activities you can turn down and which are necessary so that you can free up more of your time outside of the office.

“Sometimes you make wise choices, and it’s more luck than wisdom.”

In the following interview, Maritza Poza-Grise, vice president of DuPont Human Resources, discusses, among other things, employee engagement, open communication and the therapeutic affects of laughter.

How do you engage with and relate to your employees?

I’m a people person by nature. One thing I enjoy is our lunch and learn sessions we host. We go out into the field, give short sound bites of what’s going on the in company, then go around the room to hear from employees. It’s a great way to get a pulse of the organization. If there are issues or challenges, we want to have open conversations and an open environment where it’s safe to disagree. The one thing you learn very early on at DuPont is you are in an individual contributor role: your worth and your contribution has everything to do with how you succeed.

What are some of the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned throughout your career?

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a leader is just being authentic, trustworthy and credible. That gets harder and harder as your scope widens.  Through the veins of any employee in DuPont, the most important fluid is our core values.  We are a company where, when I come to work, I feel like I am working in the context of my own values.  I’ve never been asked to do anything that was unsafe, unethical or disrespectful of people; nor will we tolerate anyone who operates in an unsafe way, acts unethically or disrespects people.  I think in any company – whatever their values – living those core values is absolutely essential in order to lead and accomplish great things.

How do you as a leader try to have an impact on the culture?

Culture is an interesting thing in a 208-year-old company.  There are elements of the culture that were seated 208 years ago by Éleuthère DuPont, by the choices he made when manufacturing very dangerous explosive powders.  As a leader, you play into that and you embody that with regard to core values; however, you also have to think intentionally about what kind of culture you want to create. I strive to have an open culture at DuPont, where you can have some fun and laugh at yourself, even in the most serious of times – which was therapy during the global financial crisis.

What’s the most important decision you’ve had to make as a leader?

Far and away, the most important decisions you make as a leader are about people.  Last year, during the global financial crisis, we as a corporation knew there were markets that were not going to come back to their pre-financial crisis level, specifically construction and automotive.  We knew there were downsizing actions we needed to take, and we wanted to do enough because we wanted to survive.  We knew if we let it go for long enough, the business would sink, and that would have had a much bigger impact on the lives of our employees.

One of the more powerful things we did was preserve the talent we had and have been investing in throughout the years. We called them “Mega Projects” and figured out a way to deploy them into other roles needed in the organization. We provided training and, through careful thought by leadership, sustained the long-term survival of the business.

Is there anything else that you want to share, about DuPont or on your leadership philosophy?

I made the choice of [working with] DuPont because of the people I met and the diversity of the company.  It was pretty exciting to think I wasn’t just going to be working in one area.  Thirty years later, I have lived every single day of my career the wisdom of that choice. It’s just an amazing place with amazing, smart people who want not only to make technological breakthroughs, but who get totally energized with the “big purpose” stuff of feeding the world.  Sometimes you make wise choices, and it’s more luck than wisdom.

ABOUT MARITZA POZA-GRISE: Maritza Poza-Grise is vice president of DuPont Human Resources. She joined DuPont in 1980 as an engineer at the Edgemoor site in Wilmington, Del., where she went on to hold a variety of technical and business roles in the White Pigments, Fluoroproducts and Industrial Chemicals businesses in Wilmington. From there she went on to hold various management roles until 1999, when she was appointed director, Human Resources, DuPont Chemical Solutions Enterprise. After moving up the ranks in various project director roles, she became Human Resources director, Global Operations in 2004, and finally was named to her current position in 2008. Poza-Grise graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Chemical Engineering.

ABOUT DUPONT: As a market-driven science-based products and services company, DuPont creates sustainable solutions essential to a better, safer, healthier life for people everywhere. Founded in 1802 in Wilmington, Del., DuPont first produced high-grade black powder for explosives. By the early 1900s, the company’s focus shifted to chemicals, materials and energy to meet the changing needs of consumers and businesses. Today, DuPont operates in over 90 countries to deliver innovations that make real differences in people’s lives in areas such as food and nutrition, health care, apparel, safety and security, construction, electronics and transportation. With its ability to adapt to the evolving needs of customers and a foundation of unending scientific inquiry, DuPont has become one of the world’s most innovative and successful companies. What has not changed in 200 years, however, is DuPont’s core commitment to safety and health; environmental stewardship; the highest ethical behavior; and respect for people.

Confession: Until recently, every time I heard “mobile,” I would immediately picture Randy Quaid’s Cousin Eddie saying, “That there’s an RV,” in reference to the makeshift mobile home he’s just parked in front of the Griswold house in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Anyone else? No, probably not…

Lately, however, every time I hear the word “mobile,” I automatically think “recruitment” – thanks to the many conversations I’ve heard – and had – around the use of mobile as a recruitment tool over the past few months.

What these conversations often come down to is one simple fact: Employers and recruiters who don’t “go mobile” will simply get left behind.

Mobile technologies enable employers to reach the millions of job seekers who use mobile devices to search for jobs, research companies and connect with referrals. The sooner employers and recruiters realize this, the more competitive they will be in their search for top candidates.

Going mobile, however, isn’t about what you have to lose, but about everything you have to gain. In general, there are two major benefits to mobile recruiting:

• Convenience: Many of today’s mobile devices offer all the same speed and capability of a PC, but with almost unlimited accessibility.
• Immediacy: Mobile devices also enable users to  respond and react instantly.

5 (More) Benefits to Mobile Recruitment
If you want to delve even deeper into the benefits of creating a mobile recruiting strategy, consider these five:

1. Better Branding: When you’re mobile, you’re already ahead of those employers who aren’t. The ‘mobile movement’ also enables you to broaden your social media recruitment efforts, as more job seekers use their mobile devices to check and update their various social media accounts while on the go.
2. Better Targeting: Thanks to geolocation technology, employers and recruiters can target job seekers according to their exact location. No matter where job seekers are, employers and recruiters can locate job seekers anytime and anywhere, automatically connecting with them about real time job opportunities and career events in their area.
3. Low Cost: Sending messages is far more cost-effective than advertising via traditional media, like newspapers, magazines, radio or television.
4. Constant Engagement with Job Seekers: Gone are the days when people had to wait until they were at their homes or office computers in order to check email, search for information or log in to their social media accounts. Today, the first thing people do when they wake up is grab their phones and check their messages – and regularly check in throughout the day, right until they put the phone down to go to sleep. In short, mobile users are constantly connected.
5. Higher Response Rates: Mobile phone messages appear more personalized, so they enjoy a higher response rate than traditional media advertisements. Not only that, but because job seekers enjoy more privacy on their personal mobile devices, they feel more freedom to respond without fear that colleagues will find out.

Another not-so-little benefit to using mobile marketing recruitment efforts? Adding mobile marketing efforts only enhances existing social media recruitment efforts. With faster access to the Internet, mobile users are increasingly updating their social media accounts via this medium.

Does your organization employ mobile recruiting efforts? If so, how? If not, why not?

Last night may have been all about love’s lessons learned the hard way over on The Bachelorette, but over on Twitter, it was all about lessons learned through the job search…

At least it was for those who participated in CareerBuilder’s most recent #cbjobchat, our monthly Twitter bringing together both job seekers and career experts, and dedicated to addressing today’s most pressing recruitment process questions.

While last night’s focus was on the job search, the conversation was by no means exclusive to job seekers. Check it out…

Beyond the job search – Last night’s best #cbjobchat sound bytes – and how they apply to the candidate search:

• @KaraSingh “Use your network and connect via social media sites.”
• How it applies to recruiting: Social networking is a two-way street. Not sure where to start? Here’s what you need to know when using social media to recruit.
• @Give2GetJobs “When it comes to the job search remember that job opportunities are everywhere! You never know when you might meet right person.”
• How it applies to recruiting: Replace “job” with “candidate” here and the same rules apply. Every social interaction is an opportunity to meet your next employee or someone who’s going to eventually introduce you to that next employee. Don’t rush it, though. As @Give2GetJobs also reminds us:”Networking is all about building relationships.”
• @tombolt Employee referrals are the number one source of new employees. Network into companies using all the tools in the drawer.
• How it applies to recruiting: Yes, employee referrals are one of the best ways to source new employees, so why wait for job seekers to find you this way? You have the resources at your disposal to build a robust employee referral program at your own company.
• @Keppie_Careers If you’re not getting interviews, it’s time to make some changes. Avoid blaming external factors (economy, ageism).
• How it applies to recruiting: If you’re not finding candidates, it’s time to make some changes and pinpoint what’s holding you back: Are you failing to sell job seekers on opportunities? Maybe you’re not taking full advantage of niche sites…Is your application process too complicated? Is your “competitive” salary offering as competitive as you think it is? Or perhaps your overall employment brand could use some tweaking…

Got something to add or an idea for a future chat? Feel free to add your two cents in the comments section below – or on Twitter using the #cbjobchat hashtag.

Thanks again to all who participated last night. And feel free to join us the first Monday night of every month at 7 p.m. Central. We’ll post reminders and details for upcoming chats on our Facebook and Twitter accounts, so make sure you’re following us!

“We place responsibility on every employee to make XO an encouraging and exciting place for other employees.”

In the following excerpt from CareerBuilder’s recent interview with Michael Toplisek, CMO of XO Communications, discusses, among other things, his leadership philosophy and his secret for staying current with both customers and employees.

What is your philosophy as it relates to people and their impact on your daily business?

Our people are our business. We sell something that is intangible, but what makes the difference is our people. My philosophy is to have happy, engaged, knowledgeable and professional people who will help separate us from the competition.

How do you engage with and relate to your employees?

We engage with employee in a number of ways. We try to be with the employees as much as possible – whether it be through monthly conference calls or making our intranet interactive and profiling employee success stories. We recently launched an employee blog, and, if my schedule allows, I host “town hall” meetings in local markets that give employees an opportunity to ask me direct questions.

What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Communication and direction are the keys to successful leadership. You have to have the right people in place to execute a company’s strategy. Along with having the right people, leaders must also be engaged and understand their employees’ challenges and roles in order to make that happen. Ensuring that they are all working toward a common goal is also essential to achieving the company’s strategy.

Some people believe HR to be the only department with a responsibility for the organization’s people.  How do you make your overall talent strategy a priority? What role do you play in driving it?

One of our four Balanced Scorecard objectives is to make XO one of the 100 Best Places to Work. We place responsibility on every employee to make XO an encouraging and exciting place for other employees. HR has a part of the responsibility to provide the resources and tools to support that goal; however, the attitude that “it’s HR’s job” would never get us to our goal.

How do you define XO’s culture? As a leader, what is your impact on the culture?

Our culture is full of passionate and energetic employees. Their collective attitude is “never satisfied and always try to improve.” We recently launched a Balanced Scorecard initiative with stated objectives and measurements to hold ourselves accountable to our customers, our employees and our ownership. I think that initiative illustrates our goal to always improve.

How do your employees affect your business, particularly as it relates to client services?

Our employees in total equal our customers’ satisfaction. Our mantra is “think customer.” We want all employees to think about everything we do from the customer’s perspective and think, “Does this make for a better customer experience?”

What other advice would you share with your executive peers though this piece?

Choose a marketing partner with experience. Advances in technology have made it feasible and cost-effective for most companies today to develop one-to-one marketing strategies. Many consumers are using communication channels interchangeably – email, text, phone, online. This can pose a challenge for marketers, because you want to be able to ensure a consistent brand experience no matter what the channel. By improving the quality of their experience, customers will form a stronger bond with your organization and, as a result, increase your profit potential.

What do you do to rally the team and reinforce your employment brand?

We try to communicate success every day – even small successes regarding customer satisfaction or instances in which our employees are engaged in community activities or charitable events – to illustrate what it means to be XO.

What was the best hiring decision you ever made?

I implemented a cross-functional hiring process. That means new vice presidents or directors always spend time with a cross-functional team of executives to get many perspectives on a candidate – and so that the candidate can get a good perspective from every level of what it’s like to work at XO.

What other advice would you share with your executive peers though this piece?

Make sure you have enough interaction – schedule it, if necessary – with your customers and employees. Ask yourself, “Do I have my finger on the pulse of the current state of business?” Otherwise, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day challenges of our jobs.

ABOUT MICHAEL TOPLISEK: Michael Toplisek oversees XO Communications’ Business Services marketing organization, where he is responsible for marketing and sales strategy, services and solutions, pricing, acquisition and retention programs and market development. With 18 years of marketing and sales experience in the telecommunications industry, Toplisek leads an organization of customer-focused marketing professionals to help execute XO’s growth strategy. Prior to joining XO Communications, Toplisek served as a senior vice president of global enterprise and collaboration services for Global Crossing, where he oversaw worldwide enterprise, client support, sales engineering, government, systems integration and collaboration services teams. Previous experience also includes various sales leadership positions at MCI and other corporations in the telecommunications sector.

ABOUT XO COMMUNICATIONS: XO Communications is a leading nationwide provider of advanced broadband communications services and solutions for businesses, enterprises, government, carriers and service providers. XO’s customers include more than half of the Fortune 500, in addition to leading cable companies, carriers, content providers and mobile network operators. Utilizing its unique combination of high-capacity nationwide and metro networks and broadband wireless capabilities, XO Communications offers customers a broad range of managed voice, data and IP services with proven performance, scalability and value in more than 75 metropolitan markets across the United States. For more information, visit www.xo.com.

Information Age business leaders make critical decisions daily in an ever-changing world. They have access to more data than ever before, which is only accelerated by Internet search, social media and mobile technology.

Harnessing this information can offer companies great insight into the habits, preferences and behaviors of their current employees, job candidates and competitors. Data can answer some of your company’s biggest questions, such as:

• Where do the job candidates who have the skill sets to drive the long-term success of my company live and work?
• What are the best, most cost-effective ways to engage my employees?
• How strong does my employment brand compare to those of my competitors?
• How do both candidates and current employees perceive my company?
• Why are candidates applying for positions with my competitors instead of with my company?

Announcing Data Not Just for Data’s Sake - Thursday, June 23^rd – 1:00 p.m. CST

Join talent intelligence and recruitment experts Will Emmons and Jason Lovelace for this free webcast, as they review the latest talent intelligence available today and assess how leaders can use this data to make smarter business and hiring decisions and gain a competitive advantage.

Learn more or register for free for this exclusive webcast here.

Presented by:
Jason Lovelace, Area Vice President, CareerBuilder, LLC
Will Emmons, Area Vice President, CareerBuilder, LLC

Related Posts:
A Recruitment Strategy Without Data Isn’t A Strategy At All
The Secrets to Their Success: What Smart Companies Understand About Talent Intelligence

Okay, not really…But it is awfully convenient (perhaps even suspicious?) that for the second year in a row, the Labor Department released May’s employment situation report on National Doughnut Day.

I say ‘convenient’ because for the second year in a row, this dual event enables Americans to eat their disappointed feelings for free at participating locations.

(I recommend the jelly doughnut, traditionally the saddest of all doughnuts, because isn’t it so true about misery loving company? Anyway, I digress…)

And I say ‘eat their feelings’ because today’s report, well….(what’s a PC way to say ‘blows’?) let’s just say these jobs reports never let us get too attached to the idea of economic recovery.

Here’s a summary:

• The U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs in May, the fewest in eight months and far fewer than the 180,000 analysts originally anticipated.
• The pace of hiring slowed sharply from the previous three months, when the economy added an average of 220,000 new jobs. Private companies hired only 83,000 new workers in May — the fewest in nearly a year, and local governments cut 28,000 jobs, the most since November.
• The jobless rate went up to 9.1 percent from 9 percent in April.

To top it off, now the government’s all “Oh, and remember when we released last month’s numbers? Well, turns out we overestimated by about 39,000 jobs. Our bad!”

But before you reach for that second doughnut, keep in mind that you’re only allotted one per person “there are always bumps on the road to recovery, but the overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years, according to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors.

They also add, “The monthly employment and unemployment volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision…it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.”

So there ya go. With that in mind, go back to enjoying that free doughnut and consider the wisdom of Oprah, as told by dogs wearing scarves.

Obviously, there are a lot of reasons the team over here at CareerBuilder is excited to be in Las Vegas this year for SHRM – spectacular food, shopping and shows, the chance to relive the epic skydiving Elvises scene from Honeymoon in Vegas, etc….but the chance to meet all of the conference attendees is at the top of that list. Honestly. (I mean, Vegas is great and all, but if you’ve seen one American Storm show, you’ve seen ‘em all…I’ve heard.)

SHRM, after all, provides us one of the best opportunities to get quality one-on-one time with you, the people who are the driving force behind our mission to match the right people with the right companies. That said, if you’re planning to go to SHRM this year, I highly encourage you to visit us at booth 2217 on the showroom floor.

Here’s a run-through of everything we’ve got going on:

• Cash In Your Chips and Spin to Win Free Giveaways
• Featured Presentations: The Future of Social Media Recruiting and More…
• Speak One-on-One with Our Recruitment Experts
• Special Guest: Rock DeMarco “The World’s Fastest Speed Painter”
• Featured Event: What Your CEO Wants to Know

Cash in Your Chips and Spin to Win Free Giveaways

All SHRM attendees will receive a mail piece with a custom CareerBuilder poker chip in the mail in the weeks leading up to the conference. Bring this chip with you to Vegas, where you can “cash it in” at our booth – booth 2217 – for a spin at our prize wheel. (Did I mention we’re also going to have a daily $1000 Grand Prize giveaway?)

Forgot your chip? Not a problem. You can earn additional chips by participating in any or all of the following activities taking place at our booth:

• Check out an in-booth presentation on current recruitment trends. (Detailed schedule to come)
• Participate in a social media video: Look out for our camera crew, who will be out on the showroom floor, shooting man-on-the street videos, gathering testimonials and asking job seeker questions that will be featured on our social media sites.
• Stop by a workstation and speak with one of our recruitment experts.
• Download the new CareerBuilder Mobile App.
• Follow us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
• Attend What Your CEO Wants to Know on Monday, June 27 at the Las Vegas Hilton, featuring CareerBuilder’s own CEO, Matt Ferguson