Crowdsourcing on Twitter: A New Way to Write a Job Description

You don’t need to put an ear to the ground to know that Twitter is one of the most talked-about Web 2.0 channels for recruiting. Posting jobs on Twitter, sharing company news with your followers, advertising about upcoming recruiting events—these are all ways that recruiting organizations are dabbling in this social media site.

However, sometimes it’s easy to forget the social aspect of this site and the collaboration that this channel enables. A few organizations are turning up the dial on Twitter usage by not only sharing information with followers, but also gathering feedback from them as well.

In one instance, Best Buy recently “tweeted” a job description for a media marketing position on its Twitter page, which triggered a number of re-tweets and blog posts discussing what the appropriate qualifications should be for this position.

This is a phenomenon known as “crowdsourcing”—outsourcing a task that is traditionally performed by an employer or contractor to a community of people in an open forum. In Best Buy’s case, the Twitter universe helped the company design a job description, a task that is typically relegated to recruiters and hiring managers.

The end result: a media marketing job description that is compelling and distinctive, clearly spells out the qualification requirements, and speaks to the right candidates (and hopefully, at the same time, deters unqualified ones without these skill sets from applying). For those of you who are familiar with our insights on quality of hire, you know how important defining a job description is for improving quality of hire (Members: Access this training guide to help you get the upfront recruiting activities right).

It’s great to see recruiting leaders starting to use Twitter and other similar social media in a Web 2.0 manner—not only maximizing the information-sharing aspect of these channels, but also emphasizing the collaborative aspects. In other words, don’t just push content to job candidates—also listen to them.

Written by: Xi Chen

Ratio of Job Seekers to Openings Hits Record High

Unemployed workers are facing one of the bleakest job markets on record, despite reports of an economic recovery in sight. Job seekers now outnumber job openings at a rate of six to one. To put this in perspective, the worst that this ratio reached during the 2001 recession was just over two job seekers to one job opening, and at the beginning of this year, it was four to one.

The outlook for job openings doesn’t look like it’s going to improve any time soon. The average work week for U.S. workers is at an all time low of 33 hours/week. And as the economy improves, organizations will be more likely to increase the workloads of existing workers before they start to hire new workers. Combine this implication with an environment of economic uncertainty, and prospects for workers’ job search become even bleaker.

How will this impact recruiting? There will continue to be fewer requisitions coupled with higher application volume—the noise in the labor market may not be dampened in the near future.

Now's Your Chance, Recruiting

Over the last six months, high-potential employees expressed a 13% increase in their desire to leave their company within the next year, compared to no change in this desire for non-high-potential employees. In other words, our best talent is sticking it out to weather the recession and thinking about leaving (and probably many will leave) once the recession eases.

What does this mean for Recruiting? It signals perhaps the biggest chance—and challenge—we’ve seen in recent history for Recruiting to support the business. Maintaining pipelines of quality talent was important during the “war for talent” a few years ago, in part to help strategic business expansions become successful. But today, the stakes might be higher. At many organizations, there will be a struggle for recovery and continuing (or even increasing) employee productivity, with creative use of dwindled resources.

With the risk of seeming overly dramatic, innovative talent pipelines is a “need-to-have” in this environment. RR members, see one organization’s approach. Everyone, see Executive Guidance for 2010: Confronting Six Enemies of Post-Recession Performance to support the case for Recruiting to maintain (or to start) talent pipelines today.

Finding Candidates in an Online Job Marketplace

Finding the right candidates for some positions can be really difficult, even in this economy. Search firms and headhunters are knocking down our doors, often times with less than qualified candidates. At the same time, many of us still need to turn to these third-party agencies for their expertise in filling these challenging positions. And you wonder—if there could only be a mediator to help you manage these search firms and headhunters without the laborious contracts (not to mention extra vendor management work) and your phone ringing off the hook.

Some organizations have turned to a new brand of service: online talent marketplaces. Vendors like Bounty Jobs, Recruit Alliance, and Dayak create an online job marketplace—a spot where you can post your available jobs and search firms/headhunters can view and submit candidates to fill those jobs. These marketplace vendors manage the third-party agency contracts, and get paid either by taking a cut of the payment made to the search firm/headhunter once a placement is made or by the organization paying a monthly fee.

Initial review of these marketplace sites are somewhat mixed. Some organizations love the freedom from contracts and vendor management, while others complain of quality issues. Search firms and headhunters aren’t particularly the biggest fans—they face increased competition when using online job marketplaces, share fees with the marketplace vendor, and lose the protection guaranteed to them through direct contracts. As hiring picks up, it will be interesting to see how well these marketplaces fair going forward.

Taleo Adds Worldwide Compensation to its Talent Management Suite

Taleo announced last week that it will be acquiring Worldwide Compensation for up to $16 million. Taleo has partnered with the California-based company since early 2008, and the acquisition is expected to complete in early 2010. Worldwide Compensation offers compensation solutions for global organizations, including total compensation planning software and tools for base and variable pay for global organizations.

Taleo’s recent acquisition introduces another prong to its multi-pronged talent management vision, which is now comprised of Recruiting, Performance Management, and Compensation. Taleo, founded in 1999 as a recruiting software provider, has made a fair number of acquisitions over the past two years within the recruiting space, including Vurv, one its major competitors in the ATS market. The company built its Performance Management system organically and released it in early 2008. Worldwide Compensation represents the company's first major acquisition outside of the recruiting realm (although Vurv did dabble a bit in performance and compensation as well). As of mid-last week, Taleo also announced a partnership with Learn.com.

With the downturn economy proving to be fertile ground for acquisitions, this recruiting heavy weight has been (and still is, it seems) poised to knock out its existing competition and its missing talent management pieces through acquisitions. The question remains, however, whether HR organizations today are ready for these integrated technologies.

To learn more about Taleo’s recruiting capabilities, check out the Roundtable’s Taleo Vendor Review (members only).

Written by: Xi Chen

The (Potential) Coming of the “Just-in-Time Labor” Market

There’s a lot of uncertainty about the labor market, how it has changed in the last year, and how it will evolve when the recession is behind us. One thing that is certain? The labor market is getting older.

In the U.S. between 2006 and 2016, it is expected that 93% of the workforce growth will be in the 55 and older age bracket. While some older workers continue to work because they have to, o- many older workers work because they want to. A recent survey found that only 17% of today’s 65+ workers have jobs because they need the money, compared to over half who said they continue to work because they want to. The question is: how will the growing aging workforce impact the labor market?

One possible impact on the labor market is an increase in older workers filling “just-in-time labor” roles. Older workers who voluntarily stay in the labor market are probably more likely to work part-time and take on jobs that interest them. In today’s world of virtual work spaces, outsourcing, and contract labor, the concept of a growing, highly skilled just-in-time labor force supplied by baby boomers is very plausible. This market of on-demand talent is still relatively small today, but it could grow very rapidly in the next few years as baby boomers move from traditional jobs to contract labor to help meet future demands quickly (that is, if and when the economy picks up). These experienced baby boomers could provide organizations with much-needed specialized skills, but on an “as needed” basis--helping organizations save money by maintaining only their core talent as employees and contracting out the rest.

Of course, for this to work, organizations would need to develop a highly efficient way of delivering talent so that a project was truly “just-in-time”. With a shift like this, a whole new type of recruiting could emerge—one that focuses on delivering “just-in-time” talent.

Where Does Recruiting Belong?

There has been some discussion in the ERE blogosphere regarding whether Recruiting belongs under HR. Does any best-in-class recruiting function need to stand “on its own,” separate from HR? Does Recruiting belong under Finance?

These are worthwhile considerations, especially in the context of making Recruiting more strategic—a goal almost any recruiting executive will cite.

What I’ve seen over the years is that the core strategic value of Recruiting is its role in talent management. The recent shift towards “integrated talent management” (with Recruiting, L&D, Performance Management, and other groups acting more holistically) is a great example of the necessity of Recruiting in HR. Internal mobility, succession planning, workforce planning, defining hiring needs, and communicating the employment value proposition to the labor market—these are all activities that can only be performed effectively if Recruiting is closely intertwined with everyone else in HR.

In short, the best way for Recruiting to create value is not to declare independence from HR, but to work with HR.

Shorter and Sweeter: Branded URLs

If you’re a social media user like me, and frequent sites such as Facebook and Twitter, you may have noticed the use of mysterious-looking abbreviated links hosted by Web services like bit.ly and TinyURL. These services redirect longer URLs to a shortened version, allowing people to share previously long and unwieldy links in a small patch of social media real estate.

E-marketing gurus have discovered the power of using these shortened links for tracking the effectiveness of online campaigns. I’ve also seen a number recruiting organizations follow suit by using these shortened links within their Twitter and Facebook pages to direct their followers to their careers Web sites or job postings—a quick and easy way to source within a world-wide network.

But have you ever hesitated to click on one of these shortened links because you were worried about where it would lead you?

Coca-Cola claims that it is the first company to use its own branded URL: CokeURL. Not only does using its own branded URL allow Coca-Cola to track conversations about its products within social media channels, but the company also hopes to lend greater credibility to its followers that they would be taken to Coca-Cola sponsored Web page.

If using branded links take hold on Twitter, Facebook, and other similar social networking sites, imagine the implications for the recruiting world and the ability to control your employment brand and track conversations about your jobs.


Written by: Xi Chen

Alumni Recruiting: No Excuses

The benefits of rehiring corporate alumni (as in, individuals who are former employees of your organization) are almost too obvious to list. Alumni are a known asset, meaning we already know their strengths and weaknesses and can screen with relative ease. They also have prior organizational experience, meaning reduced onboarding time and assured cultural fit. In short, there are substantial performance and cost savings to be realized with alumni rehiring.

Yet surprisingly, on average only 5% of hires are alumni. This measly percentage is even more disappointing given today’s realities: layoffs, other labor market movements, and the renewed cost-consciousness of virtually every recruiting organization. There are no more excuses to pass up the opportunity to rehire former employees or keep former employees engaged for future rehires. You can start building a pipeline of these alumni easily by setting up free online professional networks on LinkedIn and Facebook, or a private social network using a third-party vendor. (Members, see the Vendor Directory for Online Social Networks.)

Also for RR members, check out our profile on how one organization approaches alumni hiring, and be on the lookout this fall for an upcoming toolkit to help you up an alumni recruiting program.

Unemployment Rate in Europe Highest in 10 Years

The unemployment rate for the 16 member euro region rose to 9.5% in July according to the EU statistics office. Although this is the highest rate this region has seen since mid 1999- is was actually right in line with economists' predictions. To make matters worse, there is little relief in sight. Unfortunately, most economists expect unemployment to continue to rise in the region until it reaches over 11% in early 2011. What does all this mean for recruiting? In all likelihood we will see a continuation of the trends we’ve seen this year- less hiring, more applications, and more aggressive candidates.