On the Importance of Taming Hiring Managers

In an earlier life, and at a relatively young age, I was running a business group with more than 300 people for a Fortune 500 company. Primarily out of greed, I became a recruiter, and quickly did far better than working for a living. Things fell apart when I started taking on assignments I knew little about. I’ve summarized these trials and tribulations in Hire With Your Head. An alternative title could have been How to Tame Hiring Managers, but this would have limited the audience. Regardless, that’s what the book is about.

The idea behind it was to get hiring managers to do the right thing, which conceptually is easy, less so in practice. With this perspective, here’s the short list of how hiring managers mess up the hiring process and why they need some tough love to get it right:

1. They complain they don’t have time to describe real job needs. Of course, it takes extra effort to hire a top-notch person, and no effort to fill a seat with a sub-par person. So take your choice.
2. They haven’t thought through real job needs and instead rely on skills-infested job descriptions to screen candidates. Their counter to this is that they’ll know the person when they see him, so this is okay. My counter to their counter is top people want to know what they’ll be doing before they agree to meet, so you need to think through the job ahead of time and tell the recruiter why the job is a step-up, not lateral.
3. They knowingly let candidates accept offers without giving the candidate the true story about the job, about their management style, what the culture is actually like, and how they’ll be judged. In my mind this is unconscionable. For example, being responsible for developing the material selection for an advanced product line is not the same as conducting an exhaustive evaluation of different metals 45 days after starting, with no budget, when it normally requires six months and a fully staffed research lab to do this properly.
4. They exclude good people for superficial reasons based on flawed assessment techniques, rather than their inability to consistently deliver the results required for on-the-job success. In my mind hiring top people should not a game of chance.
5. They hire underperformers for superficial reasons, like strong handshakes, strong communications, strong academics, strong first impression, affability, etc., rather than their ability to meet the results required for on-the-job success.
6. They narrowly focus on the wrong stuff. It takes more than technical brilliance, affability, strong communication skills, and a great personality to consistently deliver high-quality results. While these are often necessary, they’re certainly not sufficient. Worse, even if they are necessary, you can’t assess them properly in 30 minutes.

Now sometimes hiring managers don’t have enough time. If not, they’re in a Catch-22 of being forced to make short-term decisions just to get the spot filled. More often than not, it is lack of good managerial ability and the use of traditional job descriptions to screen and select candidates. The problem with this is that the best people, even if they have the skills, are rarely looking for lateral transfers, so they never apply. The best people with fewer of the skills listed, or a different mix of them, who might see the job as a career move, won’t apply since the job spec indicates they’re not qualified. Collectively, this makes no sense if a company wants to hire better people.

With this in mind here are some ideas on how to tame your hiring managers and in the process see and hire more top performers.

1. Implement a raising the talent bar committee. Don’t let managers who aren’t able to hire people stronger than themselves make the decision alone. Either include the manager’s boss, or create a raising-the-talent-bar team, with one member involved in every hiring decision to ensure talent standards are always met.
2. Give managers quality-of-hire objectives. Make hiring top people part of the manager’s performance objectives and review process. Some of the metrics as part of this must include team turnover and job satisfaction and performance reviews.
3. Use a performance management process to write job descriptions. Have your company require all managers to provide new hires their performance objectives on the day they start. Use these as the screening and selection criteria, instead of job descriptions. Most managers are weak at clarifying expectations, so this logical step eliminates this problem in the bud.
4. Create the employee value proposition before starting the search. If the person is not looking, and/or has multiple offers before starting the search, ask managers why a top person would want this job. Generic statements are not acceptable. It must describe what the person can learn, will be doing, and could become, if successful. To highlight the importance of the position, tie it to the company strategy or a major project.
5. Conduct exploratory interviews before the in-person interview. Don’t let managers talk with the candidate in-person first. Ever. More mistakes are made in the first 30 minutes of the interview than any other time. An exploratory interview over the phone starts as a two-way dialogue among equals. It allows candidates to evaluate the job from a career-move perspective before deciding to be seriously considered a candidate. Adding online video minimizes the impact of first impressions, so there’s a double-benefit with this type of exploratory interview. (We’re now launching a beta test combining an exploratory interview with video, so email me if you’d like to consider participating. We’ll be taming hiring managers in the process.)
6. Control the first 30 minutes of the in-person interview. I worry that managers will become distracted during the critical first 30 minutes when they meet the candidate in-person. To minimize the impact of first-impression-related errors, I ask the candidate to write a quick summary of two major accomplishments related to actual job needs. I then ask hiring managers to review these right after conducting a quick work history review. As part of this, I highlight things in the candidate’s resume I want them to focus on. This allows me to know what goes on behind closed doors without actually being there.
7. Conduct more panel interviews. With hiring managers I’m really worried about, I lead the first interview between the candidate and the hiring manager. The way I can be sure biases are held in check and we both can focus on the candidate’s ability to deliver consistent results. Interestingly, this is always a second evaluation interview for me, and frequently my assessments of the candidates changes dramatically — some getting better, some worse. As a result, I always suggest hiring managers meet with their final candidates at least two separate times alone, and once in a panel interview.
8. Formal debriefing program. Under no circumstances add up a bunch of yes/no votes to decide whom to hire. This is akin to a popularity contest. Instead, use some time of formal talent scorecard system covering a broad range of factors. Assign different interviewers different factors and make them share and justify their rankings using evidence, not feelings. (Email me if you’d like to review the scoring system I describe in Hire With Your Head.)

Hiring is too important to leave to chance, yet most companies do just that by letting unsophisticated hiring managers run wild in a scarce population of in-demand top performers. A end-to-end companywide hiring process based on the needs of top people is one way to tame your hiring managers. Not only will you increase your share of the best talent available, but you’ll also turn your hiring managers into your best friends.

Stock Tumbles on Monster’s Report of Loss

The recession continues to take a toll on job boards, with Monster the latest and largest of the publicly held recruitment advertising firms to report a loss on declining revenue.

Monster said it lost $24.2 million on sales of $215.3 for the first quarter of this year. That compares to a loss last year for the same quarter of $10.3 million on revenue of $254.4 million.

That translates into a 20-cent-a-share loss, 2 cents more than the most pessimistic Wall Street estimate. Analysts, according to Yahoo Finance, had been expecting a loss in the range of 12 to 18 cents, with an average of 16 cents a share.

CareerBuilder, a privately owned company, voluntarily reports only its North American revenue, which, it said today, was $132 million, a 6.4 percent decline from the $141 million it reported for the same quarter last year.

Dice, the other major publicly held job board company, reported Wednesday that it earned 5 cents a share on revenue of $26.8 million. In 2009, it had revenue of $29.6 million and earnings of 6 cents a share for the first quarter. Wall Street bid up its stock, which closed today at $9.31, up $1.00 since Tuesday.

Monster’s financial  report sent its share price tumbling in after-hours trading. An hour after the release of the numbers, even as Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi was beginning to explain the numbers during a call with analysts, the stock had dropped 10 percent. It closed Thursday at $17.89 a share.

Despite the loss, the numbers did show signs of improvement. As CFO Tim Yates pointed out, the revenue for the quarter showed the smallest decline in more than a year, and it was higher than the company had expected.

Yates and especially Iannuzzi pointed to bookings (contract sales) as a sign of growing strength for Monster. The $219 million in contracts booked during the first quarter was a 17 percent increase over the same quarter the year before, the first positive growth for a quarter in 12 months.

Iannuzzi credited the improving economy and the 6 Sense technology for the boost in bookings. “Product innovation is driving growth,” the CEO said early on in the conference call. Later, responding to a question, he specifically credited Power Resume Search, a premium resume search using the 6 Sense technology, for helping to increase sales.

“Once customers understand the value proposition,” he told analysts who had asked about acceptance of the 30 percent premium Monster charges for Power Resume Search, “They are paying it.”

He also credited the 6 Sense search technology (used by recruiters to search resumes and job seekers to search listings) with improving Monster’s market share. Monster, Iannuzzi said, has “successfully reversed the negative trend” in the U.S. At another point he said the company commanded over 30 percent market share. “We are confident that we are winning,” he said, without referring to CareerBuilder, Monster’s No. 1 nemesis.

CareerBuilder’s North American revenue, almost all of it coming from the U.S, was $35 million ahead of Monster’s. That gives it a pretty good revenue lead, which probably also makes it fairly strong in market share. However, when Monster completes the acquisition of HotJobs from Yahoo in the third quarter, it could move the company back into the top spot.

Still, Monster, like the U.S. economy as a whole, is not out of the woods. The company told analysts it expected to lose money in the current quarter and to lose between 12 cents and 20 cents per share for the year.

CareerBuilder doesn’t report profitability.

How to Get the Most from Your Social Network

Social networks have grown to the point where they now challenge traditional ways of communicating, marketing, and recruiting. One of the measures we often use to determine the success of our networking is to count the number of people in it. But this is not really a valuable measure: I have over 10 million first, second, and third-degree connections in LinkedIn and I get almost no value from that network, per se. I get little value because many of my contacts are active recruiters. As I am neither an active recruiter nor a candidate, not much interaction happens. And this illustrates one of the several criteria needed to make a network really valuable.

Valuable, robust networks need to meet at least four criteria: (1) they need to be focused and made up of people with similar interests and motivations who are seeking the same thing; (2) they need an instigator, a moderator, perhaps even a rebel, who rouses passions and gets people engaged; (3) they need a large enough number of people so that someone is always “there” to respond, comment, and keep the ball rolling; and (4) they need to save time and energy in some way.

They Need to Be Focused and Have Similar Members

Networks are collections, but they are collections of people rather than books or stamps. Successful collectors of anything do not just collect at random. The good ones have a system, a focus, and a rationale behind their collecting. For example, stamp collectors are usually focused on a specific country or on a theme. The same is true for coin collectors. Baseball card collectors concentrate on a team or league or person. Focus is necessary, and is the first rule for successful use of networks because it is so difficult to sift through thousands of anything to find the one(s) that meet your criteria. It is much better to have hurdles to entry that ensure the integrity of those who are admitted. A recruiter, for example, needs to know exactly what type of people they are looking for, and then spend the time to attract only those type, before admitting them to their community of similar people. If you are looking for dissimilar people, it is better to set up a separate network for each type.

There Needs to Be High Levels of Interaction and Useful Conversation

The second rule of getting value out of your network is to create a forum where there is interaction and conversation. You need to foster discussion and get people engaged in issues that shed light on their interests and skills. If no one comments on your posts, agrees or disagrees with your point of view, or adds their own thoughts that you comment on, most of the value is gone. When you think about the topics you discuss, you will probably see that much of it consists of small talk. We chatter about the weather events, books, music, and our kids — not that often about the big issues. And it is through these seemingly innocuous and even mundane chats that we learn what a person is really like. It is through the tweets and comments that we identify with people and come to understand their posture on issues.

It is very easy to think that people who always contribute to a discussion are the best, but I believe that the volume and frequency of communication are not necessarily indicators of quality. The networks where people engage in discussions about relevant issues and have arguments that are based on facts and evidence are powerful, but hard to find. It often requires someone to throw out the contentious statement or ask the tough question to get people interested enough to respond. It is by seeing how people respond that you can gain an appreciation for someone’s style and ability to get along with others or influence them.

Have a Number of Community Managers

The third rule is to always have someone ready to engage the network member in conversation, creating an widespread army of volunteers who are willing to monitor your network traffic and comment when appropriate. Nothing is worse that commenting on something or putting in a question and then getting nothing back for weeks. This person might be a full-time community manager. Even better, it could be many people dispersed throughout the organization. Crowdsourcing this role made sense and provides for more timely responses as well as for more variety.

Show Value

And finally you and others need to see that the network is delivering better candidates, better quality, and more hires than whatever you used before. I don’t think a social network can overcome the fact that other methods are cheaper or work better simply because it is new. We know enough about how to make them successful to ensure we get the metrics we need.

The number of people in your network is important, but not by itself. Size is important because it allows more network members to be equally engaged all the time, and the larger the network, the better the chances are that someone will be available and ready to engage in discussion and debate. Global reach and broader criteria for membership can help expand the numbers, but it is always a tradeoff between volume, quality, and focus.

If you watch networks for a while, you begin to see how many disappear after a few months. Only a handful remain for more than a year or two. It’s generally because they do not meet these simple, but tough to pull off, criteria.

A Wage and Hour Checklist for Employers

In the past, employees knew even less about the standards in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) than supervisors and managers. The internet has changed this giving employees today almost instant access to updated information. Labor relations expert Hunter Lott suggests that the following questions are worth asking (and answering) in this regard:

Link to article

W. Garnett & Associates
Human Capital Management
1-888-884-3910

Talent Acquisition Systems 2010: An Update on Trends and Best Practices

Talent acquisition expert Ed Newman joined our webinar series again this week to give as on update on what’s new with talent acquisition systems in 2010. For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

A Phone Sourcer’s Union with the Internet

Many people think all phone sourcers do is phone source. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many phone sourcers of today started out life as Internet sourcers and some phone sourcers never really strayed from the original path.

In this article I’m going to discuss how Internet sourcing and phone sourcing can enhance each other.

Back in 1996 or so when the Internet began to gain ground in the consciousnesses of many there was much more “phone sourcing” going on than there is today because very few people understood how to find stuff on the Internet. Search engines were just beginning to become popular and only the mightiest of intellects really understood much earlier than that how they worked. I recall one sourcer telling me her mathematician-father recommended the new search engine “Google” because he knew the two guys at Stanford who’d created it and said they were plenty smart and knew what they were doing. I took her advice back then (it being the late 1990s) and trashed Dogpile and Altavista for Google in most of my daily Internet activities.

As we’ve discussed before, there’s a wide difference between phone sourcing and Internet sourcing. But that doesn’t mean the two never meet. They do, often. The bridge that connects the two is the Internet itself.

It’s a pretty well-received given that there are far more Internet sourcers today than phone sourcers. That may be the case, but I believe seasoned recruiters themselves are expert phone sourcers and when you add that back into the mix, the numbers become much more phone-centric. The one thing that successful recruiters find themselves pressed up against, time and time again, is time. And that’s where hiring outside research comes into play. Sourcing takes up a lot of time and in a recruiter’s ordinary day, an inordinate amount of time.

A phone sourcer typically relies on the Internet as a starting point. I elaborated on this in an article I wrote back in 2008 here on ERE called “Forgotten Fun.” Internet search is fun. If you’re the type (like my sourcer Pam) who enjoys learning new things, doing puzzles, or treasure hunting, you’re in for a treat! It’s easy to stay too long at the bar though and lose your way home. You’ll know this by that little voice in the back of your head that starts warning you that you’re procrastinating — putting off that moment when you must pick up the phone. You know: that voice.

That Forgotten Fun article includes some ways in which a phone sourcer’s work is amplified by the use of the Internet — how the two segue into each other, both forward and backward. I encourage you to read it.

If there’s one thing I want to impart to you as a prospective sourcer, it is to be constantly on guard regarding your time. It’s easy to sit down at your computer and have half a day gone by when you look up for air. That’s because a sourcer’s nature is to seek after things, and it’s very, very easy to chase off down dark mysterious alleys after shiny objects. The reasons some of those alleys are dark are because there’s no light at the end of those tunnels — they’re dead ends. Don’t forget that. Experienced sourcers know this, and that small annoying voice begins to pipe up earlier rather than later. But until you’ve run headfirst into that brick wall at the end of the tunnel more than a few times I suppose you’re just going to have experience this for yourself to believe me. My condolences.

The best use of the Internet, in my opinion as a phone sourcer, is to spend five, maybe 10 but not more than 10, minutes researching a particular target. After all, you only need a few names to “get in” to where you want to go. Grab three off LinkedIn to get started and then call in to the company location you’re tasked with penetrating. I say three because chances are one will “no longer be in the database” of the company’s directory and, as LinkedIn’s records are ever-more maturing, maybe even one more of those will have moved on to other pastures, long since forgetting that bright hopeful moment in their existences when they filled out their profiles at the networking site. So get three. One should still be there, and when that gatekeeper asks you for a name, you’ll be able to give her one that works for you like a key to pass you into the interior. That’s what a phone sourcer wants: to get inside.

Don’t fall victim to the thinking that LinkedIn can or will always be able to supply you with candidates. It can, but there’s a subtle cost included that experienced recruiters recognize. Of LinkedIn’s 65 million users worldwide, half are in the United States, 11 million from Europe and India, the fastest growing country (as of 2009) has only a surprising 3 million users. The Netherlands has the highest adoption rate per capita at an impressive 30%. Of the 33 million in the U.S., I believe about a fourth to a third have moved on to other pursuits and have not bothered to update their forgotten LinkedIn profiles. Another third are in danger of suffering the same fate at some time in the very near future. That leaves about 11 million registered users in the U.S. with current and correct information, and many of that number suffers the consequence of being contacted, time and time again, by recruiters about open job opportunities. You do the math and think about how many times someone can be contacted without tiring of the event. Of course, some never do tire of it and are on LinkedIn for exactly that reason: to keep their options open and their stock prices on the rise. I think they’re smart, but I suspect even this minority will show that even its patience can run thin.

LinkedIn has several other uses as well. As Shally Steckerl recently mentioned in a blog posting, LinkedIn “also provides some neat competitive intelligence.” Read his posting to learn how you can use the networking site to learn about different job titles companies use. You can also see location information on a company depending on where their people report themselves as being located. Not all company websites offer this location information anymore. In addition, you can use LinkedIn to “reverse engineer” a target list of companies based on where people worked before. I’ve found this to be one of LinkedIn’s most valuable provisions.

Transformative Change, Relocation, and Cheap Sourcing Tactics

Did you see the contest to get a free trip to the #socialrecruiting summit? If you haven’t checked it out,

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Transformative vs. Temporary Change
2. Relocation “Next” Practices
3. Creative Sourcing Tactics for $500 or Less
4. Are Recruitment Mailings Considered “Commercial Solicitation”?
5. Vacancy Rate as a Recruiting Metric
6. Featured Group of the Week: TOOLS Group

1. Transformative vs. Temporary Change

Courtney Claiborne writes about the difference between transformative and temporary change saying, “We all agree that change is necessary … that in order to survive in the ever-changing landscape of our chosen professions, we MUST change and adapt — it’s the only way true performance breakthrough can happen. Yet why is it that even though we recognize the NEED to change, so many of us so often (and please forgive me for sounding harsh here) absolutely STINK at making change happen?

How do you encourage transformative change in your organization?

2. Relocation “Next” Practices

Jill Heineck posts a piece on how relocation plays a huge part in your overal talent attraction program: ”In the day and age of the war on talent and cost containment, companies are challenged with continued business growth in a volatile economic climate.Incenting top talent to make a move in Today’s real estate market in an effort to take the business to the next level requires creativity, planning, and a strategic approach.

What are your thoughts on relocation as a recruiting differentiator?

3. Creative Sourcing Tactics for $500 or Less

Sarah Welstead has some interesting tactics for sourcing that don’t require a lot of money. “Remember when having a job to fill meant spending $500 to post it on a job board somewhere? Well, these days, $500 (or less) can buy you a lot of sourcing — and without having to wade through the masses of unsuitable candidates that job boards can deliver. Here are five you may not have thought of.

Take a look at some ideas and see if any appeal to you.

4. Are Recruitment Mailings Considered “Commercial Solicitation”?

A forum member asks if recruitment mailings are considered commercial solicitation, “I work for a large veterinary company. We order lists of licensed veterinarians from various states to populate our CRM database. Occasionally we get flack from a state that warns us against using their information for “commercial solicitation.” Can recruitment mailings (with actual employment offerings) be considered commercial soliciations?

What do you think? Have you experienced this before?

5. Vacancy Rate as a Recruiting Metric

Another forum member asks, “After reading the article on DaVita, i was interested to know more about using Vacancy Rate as a perf metric. I would like to more about your experience with vacancy rate. Is it a reliable performance indicator?  Is it more applicable for a specific type of recruiter and/or recruiting situation (IE. exempt vs non-exempt, high volume, Executive)?  Is there anything else I should know?”

6. Featured Group of the Week: TOOLS Group

I am featuring some of the groups we are looking to find leadership and increase activity for and our TOOLS group is a popular one for finding information about software, training, and other tools used to improve in recruiting.

If you have a discussion or question about selecting or using tools in recruitment, this is a great place to start!

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

True Cost of Ownership: Contingent vs. Retained

Search is expensive, exponentially so relative to the level of talent that you are seeking. A failed search is expensive; even more exponential is that cost relative to its particular need.

Let’s talk through this one. You just made a hire. For the sake of round numbers and because it is too early in my day for me to break out my Ti 89, let’s call this person a manager making $100,000 plus 15% target bonus.

Since this manager is a “specialist” and you are a busy HR leader who doesn’t have the time or resources to conduct this search internally, you called in a headhunter. And by the way, I love this term. It is so aggressive, and whenever someone asks me “oh, so you are a headhunter?” I beam with pride. I have the image of some primitive tribal warrior with shrunken heads strung around his neck. But I digress.

When you were choosing to use a third party for this search, how did you evaluate that talent?

I know: the whole reason that you decided to go outside for this one is because you didn’t have time to evaluate talent. But bear with me. There are a tremendous amount of options, and all too often hiring managers and HR leaders don’t even consider the option of retained search because “why would you pay up front when you can use five contingency firms at once that will fight against each other, and you only pay them if you make a hire?”

I understand this. If I go out to a restaurant with my family, I am not going to give the waiter $20 just because his team “has more experience or a better process.”

But this is not a steak dinner, and frankly, if you had the resources in house, you would do this on your own.

My point here is that the industry is too competitive and too saturated for anyone to claim a distinct advantage over the candidates, or end product that they can produce, through a contingency search. If you were in their shoes and you knew that you were competing against four other firms, you are going to try to find people as quickly as possible, and just like in that restaurant, when your steak is rushed it either comes out way too rare or burnt to a crisp.

You can’t afford a rushed process and or no process at all. Retainers protect your investment. They are like insurance policies. You know that when a firm is retained, you have their undivided attention, or you should. If you don’t have that level of interaction, then you didn’t vet them properly. If a competent firm has the ability to truly screen candidates out of the process rather that screen them in, you will get a better product, and it will be guaranteed (another benefit of the retainer is a one-year replacement guarantee; why do you think contingency firms don’t make that promise?).

Back to cost. You haggled all of these contingency firms and played them against each other. We are down from a fee of 33% to 25% (which, by the way, many retained firms will entertain in the right situation). $100,000 plus 15% bonus is a $115,000 first-year total cash compensation. That’s $28,750. Nearly $30,000 just to hire this guy, and you want to rush this? It isn’t just the steak that is going to get burned.

Now you train this guy, and he gets through the 90-day contingent guarantee and you start to see the warts. For a litany of reasons, this guy isn’t working out and you let him go. How much have you spent? Three months of salary plus payroll cost is nearly $35,000. A search fee of $28,750. Many estimates put the training of skilled labor at this level at nearly double the salary — $200,000, but lets call it half that because this guy wasn’t there a full year, so $100,000.

Now you have down time or lost productivity to account for the loss of new business or any number of direct impacts to the top and bottom lines of your business. And you have to conduct another search that you now have to manage more closely because the rushed search the last time created a black hole that is sucking money from your company. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that this search has cost you because it failed.

How much have you spent? What is your total Cost of Ownership? I’m not trying to berate the contingency model. There is a place for every service, and there are many contingency search firms that can perform at a very high level in the right situations. Rather, my point is that there is a better way to control costs, develop talent, and find a partner that can help you … truly help you in your process. I cut my teeth in the contingency search business and ran as fast as I could away from that model. Retained search is more difficult and it is more intense and I have to be available at all hours. But I love it! I am free to add value in a positive way by deeply understanding my clients’ problems and finding creative ways to come up with solutions with them, as part of their team. Contingency search is transactional in nature, and when you are dealing with a commodity that is as variable and volatile as human capital, give retainers a chance. The total cost of ownership is lower in the long run.

Craigslist Recruitment Revenue to Jump This Year

A new report says Craigslist will bring in $65.3 million from job postings this year, an amount rivaled only by the $36.3 million take from its adult ad istings.

The report by classified advertising consultancy AIM Group says quirky Craigslist will have revenues of $122 million this year. Estimates of its costs last year, suggest that it could have a profit somewhere between $89 million and $99 million. (See note at end of article for full disclosure.)

The estimated $122 million in revenue for 201o represents a 22 percent jump over 2009. Though the bulk of the growth is expected to come from the adult ads on the site, recruitment revenue is projected to increase 10.2 percent over 2009’s $59 million in estimated recruitment revenue.

If that turns out to be the case, it would be a significant achievement considering Wall Street analysts don’t expect much improvement in recruitment advertising. Yahoo says analysts expect Monster revenues to be flat to even slightly down this year. Last year, Monster and CareerBuilder (North America only) — the two biggest job boards in the world – reported declines of 33 and 27 percent respectively. (CareerBuilder is a private company and reports only some numbers voluntarily.)

Some other job boards have told me they don’t expect to see any appreciable growth until late in the year and expect to be flat to slightly up in revenue.That makes the Craigslist projections from AIM Group all the more remarkable. The consultancy counted job postings in February, projecting them for a full year. The results suggest Craigslist is already experiencing a lift in its job postings. And since the AIM Group counts, President Obama has signed a jobs stimulus bill, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the first growth in new jobs in three years.

How we should interpret the Craigslist projections is not at all clear. On the one hand, it could be an early sign of a recovering economy. Many of the jobs on Craigslist are part-time or entry-level or temp positions. Typically, these are the harbingers of a recovery.

Another possible conclusion is that acceptance of Craigslist continues to grow as a legitimate source of candidates. That acceptance likely has been nudged along by Craigslist’s attractive pricing. While recruitment is not especially price sensitive, a $75 job posting is pretty tempting compared to the $350-$400 the big boards charge for a single job posting.

Of course, it has to produce results. The evidence says Craigslist does; otherwise, it wouldn’t see the year-over-year growth it does. In past years, it has been able to increase the number of markets where it charges for job listings. Last year it added Austin, Texas to 17 others. Now, Craigslist charges in: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Orange County, California, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego,  Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

According to the report, some of these markets have surprisingly small counts, when their size is considered. The report says, “For its size, Houston — the fourth-largest city in the U.S. — recorded a mere 5,200 jobs, flat from a year ago. Chicago saw 9,900 jobs posted in February, slightly better than 2009’s 9,400 jobs. The fewest jobs in our survey were in Sacramento (3,700) and Austin (4,300).”

That tracks with the Monster Employment Index for those cities. In February, Houston’s index stood at 104 compared to the national index of 124. Chicago was at 66, and Sacramento stood at 62. Monster does not offer a local report for Austin.

Whether Craigslist is a bell cow for hiring trends this year will become a little clearer on Thursday, when Monster Worldwide reports its first quarter 2010 financial results. CareerBuilder, which typically releases its North American numbers about the same time, may also offer further clues. On May 7th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report on the jobs and unemployment picture for April.

Note: I participated in the AIM Group report. I did the analysis and writing of the section on Craigslist’s 2009 expenses.

E-Verify releases revised FAQs for Federal Contractors

USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) released a new 18 page FAQ report for Federal contractors who are required to use E-Verify under Executive Order 12989. 

Most Federal contracts awarded or renewed after September 8, 2009 contain what is known as the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) E-Verify clause.  Some Federal contracts are exempt from the requirement.  A contract is considered exempt if one or more of the following apply:

• The contract is for fewer than 120 days
• It is valued at less than $100,000
• All work on the contract is performed outside the U.S.
• The contract includes only commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) items and services (most food and agricultural products fall into the COTS category)

The E-Verify Federal contractor rule requires most Federal contractors to use E-Verify for all new employees, even if the employees are not assigned to the Federal contract.   There are a few exceptions to the rule.  The Supplemental Guide for Federal Contractors has specific information concerning these rules.

Employers with Federal contracts or those who are interested in bidding on Federal contracts must be fully informed concerning E-Verify.  Failure to follow the rules may lead to debarment from being awarded government contracts or being allowed to bid on Federal contracts.   Misuse of the E-Verify system may also subject an employer to discrimination charges.

The E-Verify specialists at I-9 Okay are experts in helping employers navigate the complex rules concerning E-Verify and Federal contracts. Contact us today.

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