The HR Bailout Plan

You might have heard - today the Dow dropped 777 points, representing the largest sell-off in 21 years. It is a more significant percentage loss than the day after 9/11. When you consider that the NY stock exchange was right n the middle of the 9/11 catastrophe, you get an idea of how serious traders believe this situation is.

If you watch the news, you will now encounter images of the food lines of the depression, and commentators instructing you to buy gold and stockpile rations. It's a serious situation.

So the bailout plan failed. Let's talk about the HR Bailout plan.

With constant bombardment of bad economic news, deteriorating personal investments, and an alarmist media, you can bet that your employees are scared. Human Resources must now take a very active stance to get ahead of these fears and lead corporations into normal and productive operations.

Here are a few ideas for your HR department to be a force a reason in this storm of uncertainty:

1. Reassure: Send a memo to all of your employees expressing empathy and understanding of the stress they may be undergoing. Highlight recent successes within your business and bright points in your market. Be honest about your business operations and write about a few challenges and how you can all overcome them.
2. Protect n' Serve: Now is a great time to reevaluate your financial support and services, including IRA, 401K, and banking options. Look for greater flexibility in investment choices, transparency, and financial strength of your partner firms. Promote these changes to your employees and get their input. Stay fixed on the protection of your employee's assets and financial future.
3. Advise: HR certainly should not function as a financial advisor to your employers. However, a certain amount of counsel might be warranted and helpful. During real economic crises, the best investment advice is often to do nothing. If you are fielding calls about your company 401K, for example, direct them to your plan provider, but approach the matter without alarm. If you can provide a general employee memo about such matters, keep the tone reassuring and use a lot of old adages: most of them are true.
4. Keep a seat at the table: Your organization will most likely be looking to reduce overhead. Your department may be involved in planning staff reductions. However, keep focused on productivity enhancements and employee related cost savings beyond staff reduction. For example, this may be a great time to consider remote work for some staff, training to improve production, and courses to improve organization and time skills. Now is the time to invest in your employees, both for them and the long term health of your organization.

The role of the Human Resources function cannot be overstated at this critical junction in our economy. You have the ability to counsel, motivate, and lead your company through these uncertain times. If organized correctly, this downturn can have very positive effects: your organization can emerge smarter, more productive, and courageous. It is up to all of us to affect this change.

Employment Branding for Diversity

Diversity is more important than ever in the new global economy. Successful companies realize that diversity is an effective and necessary weapon. Diversity breeds all of the forces most essential to 21st century business: creativity and effective globalization. Broad personnel diversity refers to racial, cultural, sexual, and geographic differences within your employee teams.

Yet if we agree that diversity is a very important factor to a company's success, how do we go about promoting diversity in our new hires?

Diversity recruitment is very complex challenge, especially for large companies. There are many accepted methods for drawing upon diverse candidates, including specialized job boards, niche advertising, networking groups, etc... However if these sources of recruitment comprise your entire method of drawing diversity, your programs will most likely fall short of long term goals.

In addition to these recruitment sources, there must be a fundamental shift in your employment branding strategy. You must not only think of how to recruit diverse candidates, but how to develop an organization that diverse candidates are drawn to. It is therefore a much deeper issue than we might first think: we must transform our company culture and then promote and market that change.

This is a broad and difficult approach, but managed correctly, long-term success is almost guaranteed. Some of the core principles to implement include:

1. Internal branding: Create a diversity program internally. Tell your employees in no uncertain terms that you consider diversity critical to success.

2. Promote your internal programs regularly and routinely.

3. Go external: When you get involved in groups and programs, highlight your internal programs and speak to the principles behind them.

4. Keep promoting: Every job posting or career event is an employment branding opportunity. Keep promoting your culture and programs on every job posting and website that you advertise on.

5. Track it: Measure the success of your programs through regular anonymous surveys. Be sure to continuously refine your strategies according to feedback.

If you use this approach over time, you will experience radically different results than a less comprehensive approach. If you only look to recruit diverse candidates you will surely fail - you must drive the change within your company culture. Simply put, don't just try to change who you are hiring, change your company.

Message in a Bottle...

You most likely have been asked by candidates or potentially outplaced employees for advice and suggestions on their resumes.

This can be a very long topic, but I wanted to write about one particular aspect of preparing resumes that often goes overlooked. We oftentimes get caught up with formatting: should we italicize the job title? Should we keep it to one page or cut it off at ten?

We don't talk much about the primary goal of a resume: aligning your experience with an employer's exact expectations.

People commonly tell job seekers that they should convey the value they bring to potential employers: show your proven results and then concretely demonstrate how that experience will apply to your work in the future. Candidates are told to quantify their achievements, write assertively, use action oriented verbs, etc...

We often miss the most effective message (and it's always the same): I easily fit into an open role at your company! There is nothing cutesy about this advice - it's basic KISS (keep it simple, stupid).

However, there is really nothing simple about this strategy. The most important idea is that you must understand the role you are applying for - not just the company and job description, but what the company is really looking for. If it's a claims rep position that you want, one of the "real" skills might be extremely strong phone negotiation and friendly relationship skills. You have to understand the true dynamic of what the company is looking for and then play up those attributes on the resume. This "job homework" is also a great way to figure out if you really want the job.

So next time you are dusting off your resume or advising a candidate on theirs, don't spend too much time on the message itself - instead think about who is on the other side reading it. If you do this well, that employer will understand that they would be lucky to have you!

Time to get beyond Linkedin

There is a lot of information out there about how to develop your candidate & contact database using Linkedin, Facebook, mySpace, and dare I say it, the 6,559,123 other social networks that sprang from the ether in 2007.

There are also sophisticated tools outside of these sites to search these networks, scour the Internet, run complex keyword algorithms, pull down email addresses, etc... There are contact information resources like JigSaw and Zoominfo with millions of names.

Do you get the feeling that there is plenty of contact information out there?

If you are now in the recruiting business, you should be a real expert at these tools by now. But this kind of knowledge should now be a given. It is time to move beyond these tools (by first mastering them.)

One way to think about this unprecedented availability of contact information is the evaporation of one part of our jobs! Twenty years ago, you had to build contact information databases the old fashioned way: a ton of cold-calling. But this aspect of our business is going the way of $2 gasoline.

We have to move beyond this initial shock of so much contact data. Master the tools, but then move on - because the value of that simple data is declining every day. Remember, executive recruiters and their clients often know the five obvious potential candidates. So why do they use a recruiter?

The answer is the key to differentiating yourself in this industry - an intense knowledge of business. It's time to get hungry for the expansion of your knowledge of business operations, not just for names of candidates and contacts. Read everything you can about your chosen industry and be a real resource to your clients. You probably make more money than your clients - it's time to know as much about their business as they do.

Holden had it Easy

When doing some heavy duty technical sourcing a little while ago, we had a pretty funny experience. We emailed a candidate about a prospective job. He received our email because his resume on file with us matched a particular set of keywords - for example, mySQL, PHP, Linux, "Web developer."

A few minutes later, we get back a very simple email reply from him - "*&^@ YOU!"

Well, that woke me up!

It made me think of Holden Caulfield. Remember how he saw that same message scribbled on his sister's school wall? After a while, things like this can really make you pretty jaded and cynical about people. (A cynical recruiter, that's impossible!)

But was this guy just crazy and/or demented or was that a succinct summary of what candidates think of recruiters these days?

I'm sure it's the former. However, we do have to carefully take notice of our interactions with potential candidates. It's pretty easy to abuse keyword-targeted email blasts. Over time, who knows how many people we are frustrating with irrelevant, impersonal job descriptions? People certainly don't feel obliged to respond to emails, but why should they really even have to look at them? People want to see personal, targeted, decent job opportunities. We have to focus on delivering nothing else but this type of candidate experience.

It is more important than ever now to sort candidates personally. It can be as simple as having custom tags in your database that you apply by hand for each individual. Especially with very large databases, it is no longer adequate to automatically tag people with keywords. Peoples' work history is not an assembly of keywords, but rich human experience. What if I had instead talked to this candidate and then tagged him, "Project Manager with a web background?" He would never again receive Web Developer opportunities, but I might find a well suited Project Management opportunity sometime in the future.

The difficult aspect of personalization is that it takes a long time! Tagging and sorting candidates individually can take years. It is only after thousands of conversations and ritualized data entry that we arrive at a "personalized" candidate database. The best candidate database can eventually categorize aspirations and personalities as well as skills and experience. The important thing to note is that even if you are starting from scratch, NOW is the time to start rigorously recording your interactions with people. The most important part of your job is to cement the nuances and aspirations of others in your mind (and database.)

Of course, we also know that no one deals with the hostile vagaries of the public more than recruiters. Let's face it- Holden had it easy.