Newly Aggressive EEOC Sues Over Credit Checks

With the U.S. beginning its fourth year of a sour economy that is taking its toll on consumer credit scores, the EEOC signaled this week that it is taking a hard look at employers who use credit checks as a screening tool.

Kaplan Higher Education Corp. was sued Tuesday by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its use of credit checks. The suit claims Kaplan denied jobs based on credit histories in such a way that it had a disparate impact on blacks.

The EEOC said Kaplan “engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful discrimination by refusing to hire a class of black job applicants nationwide.”

“This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity.” The types of jobs at issue weren’t disclosed.

A company spokeswoman denied the charge, saying background checks are conducted on all potential employees. Credit checks are part of the screening for jobs involving financial matters, including advising students on financial aid.

A “disparate impact” case doesn’t require an employer to have intentionally discriminated against a class of applicants. Instead, discrimination can occur by the use of background criteria, experience, education, or other job requirements that appear neutral on their face but which more heavily impact a protected class of applicant. Unless the employer can demonstrate a “business necessity” for the requirement, it may be found guilty of discriminating. Even where business necessity can be established, a violation may still be found if there is another alternative available that is less discriminatory.

Labor lawyers and industry experts have been predicting that the EEOC is becoming more aggressive. Employment attorney Jon Hyman, who blogs at Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, warned last month that, “The EEOC is no longer an agency where charges go to die. Employers can expect more thorough investigations, quicker resolutions, and more aggressive enforcement.”

Nick Fishman, chief marketing officer, VP and co-founder of EmployeeScreenIQ, blogged about this same thing recently on ERE. In his look ahead at the background screening trends for 2011, Fishman listed the EEOC aggressiveness first, writing: “The EEOC is especially targeting ‘bright line’ hiring decisions that automatically exclude candidates with criminal records, arrest records that don’t result in a conviction, and/or poor credit.”

After reading about the Kaplan suit this morning, I called Fishman to ask about the issue and for advice about what recruiters can do to insulate their company against EEOC action.

He wasn’t surprised that the EEOC had sued someone over the issue. “They’ve become a lot more active in the last year,” he said.”We’re going to see a lot more out of them.” And, he pointed out, there is no way to protect against someone filing a lawsuit. However, no employer should be deterred from credit or background checks where the job demands it and there’s no intent to discriminate.

Fishman offered this guidance:

• Assess the exposure the company has for each job.
• Make sure there is a legitimate business purpose to conduct a credit check. Do the job responsibilities involve financial records or access to them? For a CFO position, the connection is clear. For a janitorial job, maybe not. Though there might be situations where a janitor has access by virtue of a master key to money or records.
• Have a written background policy for each position, including a description of the business purpose.
• If adverse credit information turns up, don’t automatically reject the candidate. Instead, ask about it.

Through conversations with clients and others in the industry, he has learned that employers these days are more sympathetic to credit problems. Even in the gaming industry, where many employees routinely deal with large amounts of cash, applicants with credit dings are getting more consideration than in the past, if for no other reason than credit problems are so pervasive.

Nevada, the gaming capital of the U.S., has the lowest average credit score in the nation. At 668, it’s 24 points below the national average of 692. No wonder, considering that Las Vegas has the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

Two months ago, the EEOC held a public meeting on the use of credit histories as employment screening devices. It heard from a number of organizations including SHRM, which concluded its presentation saying, “SHRM has significant concerns with efforts to eliminate the ability of employers to consider relevant credit information during the employment process.”

Most of the speakers at the meeting represented private organizations and advocacy groups; however, the comments by Richard Tonowski may foreshadow just what the EEOC wants to see from employers using credit checks and background screening generally. Tonowski, the EEOC’s chief psychologist, summarized the day’s proceedings listing four distinct reasons why employers use credit checks.

These are:

• To identify productive employees, a use he said that has “little evidence” to back it up;
• To identify reliable employees. Conceding there is “some evidence” correlating good credit with reliability, he said, “Similar results might be obtained through personality tests or their close cousins, integrity tests.” Interestingly, these, he noted, may soon be examined by the EEOC for having a potential adverse impact on protected classes;
• To confirm employment history, which, though “a credit report can confirm basic information” the same  “might be obtained from background screening providers without the applicant’s financial details”;
• To identify those with incentive for major fraud or theft.

When used to identify potentially dishonest employees, Tonowski said, “This is perhaps the most problematic use, because — fortunately — serious crime is likely a rare event for most employers. It is thus hard to establish a predictive relationship between credit and crime.”

While hearing from the EEOC is enough to cause any HR professional to shudder, even if it decides not to proceed, private actions may be allowed. Two weeks ago the University of Miami was sued over the denial of a job to a black applicant because of a credit check.

Is LinkedIn Becoming a 21st Century Job Board?

LinkedIn introduced a resume building tool a while ago that, even though it’s slick, simple to use, and creates attractive resumes, would be otherwise unremarkable.

Except that it’s LinkedIn offering it. And it’s a step better than what Monster and CareerBuilder offer. And, more to the point, it’s another step in the LinkedIn transformation from a business-oriented social network to … something else, like a job board for the 21st century.

The LinkedIn people don’t necessarily agree with that. Francois Dufour, senior director of marketing, LinkedIn Hiring Solutions, wrote to tell me that “LinkedIn is a professional network.” It’s “a platform for helping professionals manage their careers.”

“Whether you’re looking to hire or be hired, LinkedIn is becoming top of mind for a lot of people,” Dufour says in his response to my email about what LinkedIn is becoming. “Yet the reason we continue to thrive is that we offer so much more than a job board.”

True enough. Being public, a profile is a marketing and brand-building tool. Participating in groups and building a network furthers those objectives, as well as gives participants a place to get help with professional problems.

Traditional job boards have their discussion groups, but nothing even remotely approaching what LinkedIn has. Yet with what we’ve been seeing from LinkedIn over the years,  the camel’s nose is getting further and further into the job board tent.

Recruiters began sifting through the profiles years ago. So adding LinkedIn Jobs in 2005 was, as Jeff Clavier described it a “natural extension.” Since then, the network has refined its candidate sourcing tools, improved the targeting of its jobs listings, added company profiles in what might fairly be described as a response to Facebook and, in the last two months, LinkedIn has added Jobs For You and Referral Engine (which ERE wrote about last month).

Along now comes Resume Builder. Technically still in the experimental stage and without a release date (though it is fully usable), it’s another natural extension of LinkedIn. From what Dufour says, LinkedIn agrees. “We want the LinkedIn profile to be the professional profile of record, whatever the context – personal and professional brand-building,” Dufour writes in his email.

He rightly points out that, “We are a leading source of quality candidates for corporations…” Indeed the public nature of most of the profiles provides a higher degree of confidence in their accuracy than do the private resumes of a job board. And because of the value the professional groups and contacts offer, the sheer number of participants — 85 million a month ago —  is well beyond what any of the job boards has.

So Resume Builder — did I mention how cool it is? — is a good thing, right?

Not necessarily, says Gerry Crispin. Partner in the recruitment consultancy CareerXroads, he told my colleague Amybeth Hale that LinkedIn could end up rebranding itself as “the new job board of the 21^st century.”

Should that happen, he told her, then professionals who want the business connections, but don’t want to be thought of as job-seeking, will go elsewhere.

“You want to find people who are actively engaged in work,” Crispin pointed out. “What you find out about them is that they’re looking to improve their capability on the job. It (makes) them great for recruiting. But if LinkedIn focuses solely on the recruiting aspect, it will drive those other people (non-actives) underground.”

There’s a thin line there that LinkedIn is walking. It’s adopting some of the best of what the job boards have to offer, and has so far done it successfully. But, as Crispin observes, it faces a risk if it becomes thought of primarily as a job-search site.

LinkedIn’s Resume Builder doesn’t tip that scale. The difference between resume builders on job boards and on LinkedIn are all about their reason for being. You use a resume builder on a job board for job hunting.

The LinkedIn tool is a convenience. It takes the profile you already have and turns into a resume.

It may be a subtle difference, but it is a difference that recognizes all of us (OK, most all of us) are passive one day, receptive another, and active the fourth Friday in a row that the boss drops a project on you that absolutely, positively, has to be done for the meeting on Monday.

Glassdoor Lists the Best (Yes, Really!) Places to Work

From a site best known as the home of the disgruntled worker comes “The 50 Best Places to Work” list.

It’s true. It’s true. Glassdoor actually has loads of reviewers who like where they work, are happy there, and are telling the world about it. Their favorite employer? Facebook by a nose.

The social networking site made the Glassdoor list for the first time with a 4.6 rating. Next was Southwest Airlines, which headed the list last year.

This is the third year Glassdoor has released a best-places-to-work list. Based on a survey of at least 25 company employees, the list demonstrates pretty convincingly that not every one who posts to the employer review site is angry, bitter, or unhappy.

“Through anonymous employee reviews and surveys, Glassdoor offers a unique look into the top U.S. employers and some of the factors that make employees at these companies more satisfied with their jobs,” says Robert Hohman, co-founder and CEO of Glassdoor.

To be sure, there are plenty of negative reviews on the site. “AA is not worth it unless you’re not planning on going to college or finishing high school,” says one reviewer about American Apparel, a company that rated a 2.7.

But Glassdoor has plenty more to offer than just a place to vent. The list released Tuesday night in California shows a consistency with other top employer lists. A comparison with the venerable “Best Companies to Work For” list, published in Fortune, shows the two lists share 11 employers in common. Even more companies might have made the two lists but for the fact that Glassdoor lists 50 and Best Companies to Work for has 100.

The methodologies of the two lists is also vastly different — companies have to apply and pay to be rated in the the Best Companies to Work for list. Glassdoor’s list is based on a survey. Here’s how Glassdoor explains the process:

“Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards rely solely on the input of employees, who provide constructive feedback on their work environment and senior management throughout the year via an anonymous survey. The survey addresses eight key workplace factors that include work/life balance, career opportunities, communication, compensation and benefits, fairness and respect, employee morale, recognition and feedback, and senior leadership.”

Besides rating the company, reviewers also rate the CEO, which Glassdoor turns into a ranking. Ken Powell, CEO of General Mills, topped the list with a perfect 100 percent score. The lowest scorer was Jerry Fishman, CEO of Analog Devices. However, his 55 percent was an anomaly. All the rest of the rated CEOs scored above 70 percent; in most cases, well above.

The complete Glassdoor list is here, and includes, where appropriate, the Best Companies ranking.

.Jobs Expansion Stands, Says Internet Address Authority

It’s the end of the road for the year-long debate over .jobs addresses. In a decision posted late last week, the Internet addressing authority said its decision to expand the use of .jobs names would stand.

The 11-page decision by a committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — endorsed by the full ICANN board on Friday  – rejected an appeal by the .Jobs Charter Compliance Coalition, declaring its multiple arguments “unsupported.”

However, the Board Governance Committee did say that ICANN should “closely monitor” the way the new .jobs addresses are issued. The committee wrote, “Given the highly disparate views presented by the parties involved with the Request (for reconsideration), the BGC is not at all clear that it has a full picture of how Employ Media intends to implement the Phased Allocation Process.”

The ICANN Board, meeting last week in Cartagena, Colombia, approved the committee recommendation and directed the “President and CEO, and General Counsel and Secretary, to ensure that ICANN’s Contractual Compliance Department closely monitor Employ Media’s compliance with its Charter.”

That wording is being called a victory by the Coalition, a heavyweight group of organizations that includes Monster, CareerBuilder, the Newspaper Association of America, the American Staffing Association, Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communication, and the International Association of Employment Web Sites.

Though losing its reconsideration bid, the Coalition, in a press release Sunday said, “… the Board’s adoption of the BGC Recommendation fully achieves the goals of the Coalition.”

John Bell, CEO of Boxwood Technology and chair of the Coalition, said, “The Coalition is gratified that its efforts have resulted in heightened awareness of the significant Charter compliance concerns raised by Employ Media’s proposed implementation of its Phased Allocation Program.”

That program was one of the key elements of the controversy. While expanding the allowable names was certainly an issue, the elephant in the room was what Employ Media would do with them.

Employ Media is the registrar of all .jobs addresses and administers their issuance. Its Phased Allocation Program said it would accept RFPs for the bulk use of the new names; auction those not awarded via RFP; and, allocate the rest on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Had Employ Media not already signaled its plan for the new names, it might still have faced opposition to expanding the original company name-only address limitation. But the future was made plain last year when it “loaned” dozens of occupational and geographic domains to the DirectEmployers Association, which launched dozens of job boards with plans for thousands more.

That caused the commercial job boards to take notice of what Employ Media was planning and prompted ICANN to send letters asking Employ Media to justify its use of the unapproved names.

Back in 2004, when Employ Media teamed-up with the Society for Human Resource Management to propose a .jobs domain, the two told ICANN that only company names would be allowed. SHRM has been its policy partner ever since.

There were other restrictions, including that the name could only be registered by persons engaged in human resource management.

After an initial spurt following the creation of the .jobs domain in 2005, licensing of the names — and the revenue that generates — slowed dramatically. By early 2009 Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, was considering ways to revive the program.

DirectEmployers Executive Director Bill Warren pitched Embrescia on a job board plan and in October 2009 the first of them was launched. The program was halted in February after the ICANN inquiry and while Employ Media sought approval for the new names.

Because .jobs is a sponsored top-level domain, Employ Media had to win SHRM’s approval before going to the ICANN board. After a false start with a first SHRM committee that Warren himself headed, Employ Media got its OK. In the process, however, Employ Media’s attorney told SHRM if the new names were approved, it “would likely restart the shared domain beta.” That test was the job board program with DirectEmployers.

The proposal Employ Media sent to ICANN included its plan for allocating the new names and said it “may create a self-managed class of domains registered in Employ Media’s name.” That was essentially how it loaned the names out before. That provision has been withdrawn.

The Coalition says the BGC recommendation and the Board vote effectively mean Employ Media can’t use the new names for job boards.

“… the Coalition is highly confident that ICANN will not permit Employ Media to register domain names to ‘independent job site operators’ for purposes of operating job sites,” says the press release. “In particular, the Coalition views the Board’s approval of the BGC Recommendation as confirming that DirectEmployers Association’s proposed operation of a ‘Dot Jobs Universe‘ is not permitted under the .JOBS Charter.”

I don’t know if Employ Media agrees with that interpretation. I sent Embrescia and his VP Ray Fassett an email asking for comment, but have not yet had a response.

Note: A complete archive of .jobs posts can be found here.

Predictions Are for Hiring Improvement in 2011

Hiring predictions for 2011 are starting to come in and what they say is that we can expect more jobs next year, though there’ll be no partying like it’s 1999.

Manpower issued its respected Employment Outlook Survey on Tuesday that said employers anticipate small staffing gains in the first quarter of 2011. Although the outlook, says Manpower, is still below the average of the past 10 years, the picture is nonetheless brighter.

The seasonally adjusted  Net Employment Outlook is +9 percent, says Manpower. That’s up from the +5 percent of a year ago and up from the +5 percent for the current, 4th quarter of 2010.

The Net Employment Outlook is the percentage of employers saying they plan to hire over the percentage who expect to cut staff. Almost three-quarters of the 18,000 surveyed employers say they expect to make no changes in staffing.

Another survey, this one of CFOs done by the Bank of America, says larger companies are even more likely to hire in 2011. The survey says that 47 percent of businesses with revenue in the $25 million to $2 billion range plan to increase staff during the year. That’s a big improvement over the 28 percent who said that at the start of 2010.

The survey also showed them somewhat more optimistic about their own company’s prospects. Last year 61 percent of the CFOs surveyed expected improvement in their company’s revenue. This year, 64 percent do.

It may not be a booster club for the economy — they gave the economy a score of 47 out of 100 — but it does add to the sense that the U.S. is climbing out of the hole.

Brian Moynihan, B of A CEO and president, said in a PBS interview the other night, “I think we’re in a recovery and we continue to make progress for it.”

To get companies to do more hiring, Moynihan said they have to believe that their top line is going to be improving and the recovery will continue.

That’s not so easy, of course. Earlier this year, when the U.S. Census was hiring hundreds of thousands of workers and the stock market was rising, there was a sense of optimism that the nation was on the right track. The Consumer Confidence Index in May was at 63.3, its highest point in two years. Grant Thornton’s Business Optimism Index stood at 67.6, more than 13 points higher than the year before. And 63 percent of the business leaders it surveyed thought the U.S. economy was improving.

Now, business leaders are more cautious and consumers wary. The Consumer Confidence Index is rising, but only a bit every month, after falling sharply since May. In November it was at 54.1. The most recent Grant Thornton survey says only 47 percent of business leaders believe the economy is improving. Better than the August survey when only 34 percent thought that.

What these surveys and others are saying is that most of us — consumers and business leaders — are hopeful, but we need to be convinced that what the data is showing is both real and sustainable.

Anemic Jobs Report Surprises Economists As Unemployment Rises

After three months of holding steady, the U.S. unemployment rate took a surprise jump last month, rising to 9.8 percent. It had been at 9.6 percent. At the same time, only 39,000 new jobs were added during November, far less than the expectations of most economists.

A Reuters survey of economists prior to this morning’s report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the average job growth prediction at 130,000. A Marketwatch survey said the average prediction was 155,000.

The November labor report is likely to depress markets today, which had been primed for good news after a week of positive economic news. On Wednesday, the ADP National Employment Report, said the nation added 93,000 private sector workers to payrolls during November, the largest increase in three years. The BLS said 50,000 private sector jobs were added. Cutbacks in government jobs reduced that by 11,000.

Particularly discouraging was how widespread the job growth weakness was. Manufacturing, retail, construction, government, and finance all showed declines. IT registered an anemic 1,000 new jobs. The only significant growth came in health care (up 19,200) and temp work (up 39,500).

One of the grimmer statistics in the BLS report is the number of long term unemployed. Of the 15.1 million unemployed workers, 6.3 million have been out of work for more than six months. Not counted as unemployed, because they didn’t fit the specific criteria were another 2.5 million, an increase of 200,000 over last year.

Another 9 million Americans are working part time because they can’t find full time jobs.

One positive in the report: The number of jobs created in October was revised upward from 151,000 to 172,000, and the September numbers were revised from a loss of 41,000 to a loss of 24,000.

.Jobs Decision Misses Deadline

Already two weeks beyond the deadline, a decision on the future of the .jobs domain seems even further off now, as the board of the Internet’s addressing authority heads to South America for one of its international meetings.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) travels this week to Cartagena, Colombia for workshops and meetings Dec. 5-10. The parties in the .jobs expansion dispute were invited there, but with one group declining the offer, no meeting is currently planned.

When last we left this saga, ICANN’s  Board Governance Committee had only a few days until its Nov. 20th deadline to decide whether the entire board  should reconsider its decision opening up the use of the .jobs address to almost any name. Until Aug. 5th, only business names could be used.

Since then, ICANN staff proposed a meeting of the various parties. SHRM, one of the three groups involved in the issue, declined to participate. The .JOBS Compliance Coalition, which asked for reconsideration, indicated its willingness to attend and even extend the deadline so the meeting could be held. There’s no indication how or if Employ Media, the third group and driver of the proposal, responded. Employ Media is the registrar of .jobs addresses and wants to expand the allowable uses.

John Bell, chair of the coalition, said his group will be represented in Cartagena by its attorney, but couldn’t manage the travel on the short notice ICANN gave.

He said the invitation to the parties came a day or two before Thanksgiving. The offer was to make a presentation to the Board Governance Committee on Dec. 5th, to be followed by a question-and-answer period. He said he assumes a similar offer was extended to Employ Media and possibly also to SHRM. There was no response to my emails sent to both organizations.

What’s next is unclear. ICANN’s spokeswoman Samantha Oltman said she had no information readily available on the current status of the reconsideration issue, but would check. Nothing yet.

If the committee recommends reconsideration, the ICANN board would likely vacate its previous decision, while it again takes up the matter. It would probably mean that the process Employ Media has already begun to award .jobs addresses in bulk would be halted.

NOTE: For more detail on the .jobs controversy, visit the ERE archive here.

Largest Employment Increase in Three Years

With two new economic reports today showing hiring growing faster than expected and worker productivity up, the evidence supporting a U.S. recovery is almost unassailable.

While it’s hardly a boom – a Christian Science Monitor headline today used the word “anemic” — the recovery has been picking up steam the last several months. Today’s ADP National Employment Report is particularly encouraging as it says 93,000 workers were added to the payroll of private employers in November. And, it revises upward by 39,000 (to 82,000) the number of workers added in October.

Particularly significant about the ADP report is that it was the largest increase in employment in three years, and that most sectors showed growth. Small businesses, those with fewer than 50 employees, added the most new workers, 54,000. Employers with 50-499 workers added 37,000. Bigger employers added a scant 2,000. Even the manufacturing sector, which has been shrinking, added 16,000 workers.

Meanwhile, revising its preliminary numbers, the U.S. Labor Department said worker productivity increased at a 2.3 percent annual rate during the third quarter of the year. That was right about what economists expected.

Because it foreshadows the more comprehensive government employment report, which will be out Friday, the ADP report is closely watched by economists and investors. A Bloomberg survey showed economists expecting a more modest 70,000 gain. So with the ADP surprise, and improved worker productivity numbers, the stock market opened up this morning. The rise was pushed even higher — the Dow was up over 200 points at noon — by news of a coordinated effort to stabilize the Euro.

The data is consistent with SHRM’s LINE report for the 4th quarter, which said that 26 percent of surveyed firms expected to add staff. The November Line report predicted hiring would be up during the month in manufacturing and the service sector, which the ADP report confirmed.

SHRM also reported that recruiting in some areas is getting more difficult. More recruiters said they had difficulty finding top talent in October than did the year before.

Early Reports Support Economic Recovery Hopes

With apologies to Meredith Willson:

It’s beginning to look a lot like recovery.

Today’s reports all show.

Take a look at the confidence, it’s rising once again

And Black Friday made the Redbook glow.

It’s beginning to look a lot like recovery.

Is hiring on the rise?

That’s what we will see the economists seem to agree

A happy Friday surprise.

That’s the essence of a variety of economic reports out today, which nearly all point to economic improvement.

The Consumer Confidence Index jumped 4.2 points to 54.1, its highest level in five months. The main driver of the increase was a 6.7-point improvement in consumer expectations for the future. Economists had expected a more modest rise to 53, on average, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Investor confidence, according to one index, also rose during November. The State Street Investor Confidence Index was up 9.3 points in November. It’s still off its 12-month high of 107.4, but well above the low of 88.1.

As a point of interest, Monster’s stock — at 22.47 a share at the moment — has more than doubled over its 52-week low of $10.00. Investors are not only rewarding the company for its product improvements and its revenue growth, but some of it has to be attributed to the expectation that hiring is picking up.

Retailers, anticipating improvement in sales this holiday season, increased their temp hiring. Early predictions by Challenger, Gray & Christmas were for a stronger hiring season.

Now, initial reports are bearing out retailers’ expectations. The Johnson Redbook Retail Sales Index, which measures same-store retail sales, was up 4.9 percent for the last full week in November. That included both Black Friday and the Saturday after. As a whole, November sales were up 3.2 percent over last year.

The more detailed International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs report supported the Redbook survey, though it said sales rose 3.5 percent over the same period last year.

Yet another report that exceeded economists predictions was this morning’s Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, which came in at 62.5. Economists were expecting a more modest 59.

Housing, however, remained relatively soft. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of home values rose .6  percent in September over the year before. It was the smallest gain since January.

Economists are expecting generally positive news from other reports this week, especially the market-moving employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The prediction is that the report due out Friday morning, will show the U.S. added 145,000 jobs in October, according to a Bloomberg survey.

Tomorrow, we’ll get some indication of how strong a month it was for private employer hiring when ADP’s National Employment Report is released.

Closing the Offer With Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

The pay’s about the same; the benefits are every bit as good; the job is equally challenging; and, the training and career ladders are equivalent.

So how do you attract the top talent when you don’t have quite the same brand awareness as your closest competitors?

“Flexibility is the number one carrot,” says Paul Peterson, national talent resource manager for the Canadian branch of international accounting firm Grant Thornton.

Grant Thornton is a top 10 accounting firm. In size, it ranks fifth or sixth, depending on who’s counting. Either way, it’s a firm with significant resources, career mobility, a global reach, and, as Peterson observes, a brand not as well known in North America as the Big Four (DeloitteTouche Tohmatsu, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG.) With salaries and benefits comparable among the firms, his recruiters have to be more innovative in selling Grant Thornton to top candidates.

So what do they do?

“We work hard to identify potential high quality employees in advance. When we approach them we have a stated goal of getting inside someone to find out ‘what makes them tick.’ Once you have a sense of someone’s values you can take a step back and determine ways to structure a job to accommodate them,” says Peterson.

Borrowing from the principles outlined by Daniel Pink in his bestseller, Drive, the Grant Thornton team emphasizes flexibility.

Pink, in his now famously viral 18 minute speech at the TEDGlobal conference last year, says, “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” What most motivates 21st century workers is  “autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things.”

These are the differentiators that Peterson and his team sell to their prospects. “I don’t know that we necessarily talk about it that way, but we try to appeal to those same drivers,” says Peterson.

While money always factors in, it is rarely the primary attractor. “It’s so much more than that …  Sometime we highlight the things that are already in place. Sometimes it’s about the flexibility in work arrangements. That flexibility gives them control, autonomy … ”

Tangible carrots of all sorts — the Yin of management — have long been the tools employers have used to motivate workers to higher levels of productivity. Sticks are the Yang.

An article in the Harvard Business Review detailed the results of a multi-year study of worker activities and motivations. As part of the study, the authors surveyed some 600 managers on what they considered to be important drivers.  “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” ranked as most important in motivating workers. While not unimportant to workers, they told the researchers that progress — what Pink calls “mastery” — was their most important motivator.

The managers, in a dramatic show of disconnect, listed progress dead last.

“A close analysis,” the study authors write, “shows that making progress in one’s work — even incremental progress — is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event.”

What should this mean for recruiters?

Writing in the September issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, Joseph Shaheen, managing director of Human Alliance, Inc, said, “The recruiting leader’s responsibility is no longer simply to recruit. It is to manage the livelihood of her entire organization.”

Amplifying his written comments in an interview, Shaheen says recruiters should be talking to hiring managers about their candidate experiences, sharing what they have learned from speaking with them and “get past” the conversation about pay and benefits.

“The way most HR managers are … they are not looking at alternatives,” he says. In fact, “Recruiters are not even expected to discuss these things.”

What kinds of non-monetary incentives might tip the scales for a high potential candidate? Regular access to the CEO or other high-ranking company executive — visibility — might convince a career-focused candidate. Another might value coaching. It’s a bene that is routinely offered to senior executives and almost never to mid-level candidates, Shaheen says.

Still another might be lured by the promise of working on challenging projects. That’s an incentive technology recruiters find works well, says Dice’s Tom Silver. Of the tech recruiters who are finding they have to sweeten offers, seven percent use projects as a primary incentive. More use flexible working arrangements.

At Grant Thornton, Paul Peterson’s recruiters have those conversations with hiring managers and supervisors.

“They have influence (on the corporate culture). Because they are talking to a lot of people, hearing from candidates and digging in to their motivations, trying to get inside them, they have the data,” says Peterson.

Grant Thornton recruiters, he says, have “a lot of input,” encouraging managers to be flexible in how they incent and manage staff. The feeling among recruiters and managers is that it is paying off. The candidates for whom the terms of employment were more flexible — call them the personalized offers — provide more and better referrals than more traditionally hired workers. There’s a sense, too, that they are more productive.

“You have to have a culture internally that accepts it (flexibility and non-traditional arrangements). In the end, it’s a lot more up front work, but it’s much more successful this way.”

NOTE: This article was excerpted from a longer piece originally published in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

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