For the sake of this post, I’m broadening the definition of religion to include all organized religions, atheists, agnostics, scientologists, indigenous religions, etc., etc., etc. Meaning, for anyone who believes in GOD in whatever way and all those that who don’t in whatever way. So, pretty much all human beings. And all workplaces… from SMB, to Federal to publicly traded to non-profits, etc. All!

Ready, Set, GO! What if…

• What if atheists would only employ other atheists?
• What if Jewish folks could screen out Muslim folks solely based on religious preference?
• What if Mormons would only promote other Mormons? Because they were Mormons.
• What if your Catholic boss only gave raises to folks who sported a cross in their cube?
• What if performance reviews also included knowledge of The Bible?
• What if to be considered for the leadership team of your organization, you had to be a “Born Again” Christian?
• What if compensation was tied to volunteerism with your church?
• What if you could bonus employees based on religious recruitment efforts?
• What if you could ask a candidate to prove how much they believe during interviews?
• What if you could fire someone for being an agnostic?

And so on, and so on, and so on… you get the idea of the scenarios… religion, in whatever form, is: noticed, appreciated, incentivized, etc. In this new world, work and religion are one.

How weird would that be?

Let’s go further…

Would “similar” religious beliefs at work be a good thing? What would our HR world look like if we could hire similar people? Imagine an entire workplace of Methodist employees. The values of the Methodist religion deeply woven in to the values of the firm, into each and every hiring decision, every HR process, everything HR related touched by the Methodist faith. Methodist, Methodist, Methodist. Would that organization have more HR problems or less HR problems? Would that organization outperform competitors? Make more profit, etc?

Conversely, what if “dissimilar” religious preference was valued? Meaning, everyone comes to the table with whatever they believe in (or not) and the organization celebrates said differences. Opposite to the imaginary Methodist workplace above. This organization would hire folks based on religion but from a portfolio perspective. They would want as many differing views as possible. Think: strength in diversity. Same questions as above… Would that organization have more HR problems or less HR problems? Would that organization outperform competitors? Make more profit, etc?

Again, this is a “what if” article… Can we imagine a world so different from our day to day?

Lastly, would you like leading / managing HR in a decidedly more religious work environment?

But there’s one thing that would cause a lot of people to blink.  For every 10 people who took the time to comment that they loved it, there were at least two that didn’t care for the style at all.

Read the whole post over at Kris Dunn’s The HR Capitalist (an FOT contributor blog)

I know I’ve said many times I’m not sure what I’d do without my iPhone…the reality is I used to live and work without a smartphone, email, Facebook, etc…because I’m OLD.

As I read about Jake’s experience I remembered how much I used to write letters.  When I was in college my boyfriend (and now husband) graduated and went to work in a different city.  We didn’t have the money for daily phone calls, so instead we wrote daily letters to each other.  I’ve kept all those letters, as did he, and someday I’m sure we’ll enjoy looking back at our lives during that period of time.  Posts and tweets perhaps will live on forever as well, but I bet they won’t be as fun to go back and read.

Is there a lesson in Jake’s experiment for HR pros?  Would I be writing this if there weren’t?

Corporate HR folks have a tough job but sometimes I think we make it tougher because of email, texts and social media overkill.  I’ve sent the emotional response via email and wished I could pull it back after all hell broke loose.  What about the candidate who is overexposed and therefore not employable due to his social media presence?  When’s the last time you got up and went to have a tough conversation vs. sending an email or worse yet, a text?

I met with a VP of HR recently and was supposed to spend 30 minutes with him.  After an hour and a half I told him I knew he had work to do as did I.  We were talking about the outside perception of his company, how he almost lost a star employee and the ongoing development of his HR team.  This wasn’t a planned conversation – but it happened because we were face-to-face and really talking.  When I was leaving he said, “You’re not what I expected”, meaning I wasn’t a typical recruiter or HR consultant.  I took the compliment and smiled.  He has since scheduled lunch to talk more in depth about his ideas around developing his HR team.

In our current reality of 140 characters, responding to texts quickly and the expectation of being reachable 24/7, are you REALLY connecting with your employees and customers?

It’s tough – because if you’re not in the virtual and social space you’re not “with it”…but don’t forget how to write a letter or have a face-to-face conversation.  Having the ability to connect in our virtual world AND keep grounded in the real world may just bring comments like, “Wow – you’re so much more than I expected”.  Isn’t that what every HR pro would love to hear?

We’d like to  give a special FOT shout out to Stuart,  for taking the time to riff on KD’s post. Check out the strip and subscribe to 1.00 FTE to receive other hilarious impressions of corporate life, daily.

Do it.

A very attractive and intelligent woman came in for an interview. She aced it. I would totally buy a car from this woman.  I was ready to make her an offer when a Salesman stopped by my office to talk to me.

  Meredith, is her dad a lawyer or something in town?

  Yes, he actually sent me her resume. Why?

  Just Google her name. It’s important you do this before you make a hiring decision about her.

And there she was.

Her huge personalities were glaring back at me. I was absolutely entranced by the whole thing. I had never spoken to an adult film star before this point. I had always assumed you would know if someone had a past like this by the way they talk, but I couldn’t tell at all.  And now I was faced with a decision. Could I really hire someone who has flashed her personalities to millions?

Nope. I cannot hire her.

How can I hire her after she was recognized by a Salesman? How will her quality of life be working here with everyone Googling her name non-stop? The IT Manager will go out of his mind trying to block it all. And what sort of legal problems are going to arise from this hire with my current employees? What if a customer acts inappropriately to her?

I understand that I work at a car dealership, and we’re not hiring altar boys. But that’s exactly the point. These are fun-loving car salesmen. I don’t need to confuse them by hiring someone who puts us at risk for a lawsuit.

I know what you’re going to tell me:

• I should trust my employees to act like professionals around her.  I don’t.
• I should give someone a second chance at decent employment. I won’t.
• It’s illegal not to hire her. It’s not.

I am going to stand by my decision to not hire her. I plan to tell her father that I found someone else, and I’ll thank him for sending her my way.

I will not hire a former adult film star.  Her assets put our assets at risk.

• We Expect You To Be A Magician:  We call you up, give you the jobs specs (which by the way is usually one of our toughest jobs to fill), and as soon as you start telling us how long it will take to find candidates, we stop listening.  Why?  Because we think you have this secret crystal ball that you look into to magically conjure up candidates or that you’ve got a bunch of candidates sitting right there with you in your office just waiting to take the job.  You tell us it will take 2 weeks?  We hear 2 days.
• We Show Off:  Let’s face it – most HR Pros think that bringing in a recruiter somehow reflects poorly on them and they want to prove otherwise.  So we show off.  You think you know the market, Mr. Recruiter?  Ha, let me tell you how WE find candidates.  Or we say things like “we have some great candidates already, we’re just looking for you to help us round out the field and give us some good comparators.”  Or we try to prove just how good we really are by listing off our staffing fills from the last 10 years.  Also, did I tell you, I once scored 4 touchdowns in a single game?
• We Nickel and Dime You:  This is my favorite (and I have to admit, I’ve done it myself).  Clearly we’re calling you because we have a hole that we’re not capable of filling ourselves.  So once we’ve told you we expect you to pull a rabbit out of a hat and have wowed you with stories of our recruiting prowess, we go after your fee.  25% fee?  How about 20%?  20% fee?  How about 15%?  The number doesn’t really matter when we’re negotiating with you – we’re just looking for a “win” so we can go back and tell our HR pals that we knocked down the agency fee by X%.  Meanwhile, what we don’t know is that 5% fee knockdown is probably the difference between having an experienced recruiter work on your opening instead of the new grad we’re going to get now!
• We Use You As A Scapegoat:  Yes, you sent us 5 really qualified candidates, fully vetted them and gave us the full rundown on the timing of their other job prospects.  But we took 2 weeks to get them in for an interview and surprise, surprise, we lost them.  Rather than telling our internal stakeholders that we dropped the ball we take the easy road and blame the recruiter.  Doesn’t matter really what we say you did or didn’t do, we just say “the recruiter messed up.”
• We Never Call You Back:  I’m sure this has to be the personal favorite of every recruiter out there.  After putting in hours of hard work sourcing, prepping and debriefing candidates, we give you the ol’ high school break-up move.  We avoid your calls until you get the picture.  No explanation, no discussion, we just fade away into the sunset leaving you to figure out what to tell your candidates.

That is, until we have another tough job to fill and we call you up and start the whole process over again.

Over the past month I’ve been asked several times by different individuals, what are my top 3 sites for sourcing and what are the tools I would recommend.  Got money to burn?  Think I’ve got nothing to do? I don’t know.  I’m happy to chat with you all you want, but I don’t know that I’m necessarily going to give you the answer you are looking for, every sourcer is different, every recruiting budget is different.

Here’s the deal.  There’s no rote answer.  You give me a laptop and an internet connection, and I’m going to find you people.  That’s my day, every day.  In my world, that is the world of the third party researcher, I deal with a variety of different positions.  I have ones I love, and ones I hate, but they all pay the bills.  I do not have a set list of sites I go to for each search.  I do keep track of past performance and am aware of what resources and search strings produce results regularly.  I’ve got bookmarks and file folders and can easily throw these winners back into play at any time.  The reality is the internet is fluid and new resources appear all the time…I would not be doing my job if I didn’t recognize I need to check for these with every search.

My day would be done, and quite dull, if I could get every single hire off of LinkedIn.  Don’t get me wrong, I do get a lot of hires off of LinkedIn.  And I do like to test it.  But because it relies so heavily on user generated content, sometimes I’m better off generating a name first via lists or directories or industry articles.  Or maybe I’m sifting through a company’s website, annual report, Hoover’s or ZoomInfo.  And no, I’m not doing that click by click….there are automation tools for that.  But if I had to, I could do it that way.  I’ll dabble in Beknown….because every once in a while it yields interesting search results and I do want a call of Facebook hires in 2012.  But so much of where I’m going to go and what I’m going to do is determined in a 30 minute strategy call with our lead recruiter.  That’s vitally important.  Gathering information, running search strings, shooting information back and forth that’s critical.  And this is where my most important tool comes into play, if I didn’t have it, my work day would be completely hamstringed and I’m quite certain I’d crash our mail server; it’s………Google Docs.

Did you know Google Docs is searchable? If you’re retaining candidate information in there, it can function as a mini ATS.  And did you know that if you’re using site: to search LinkedIn via Google or Bing because you’ve got a thrifty recruiting budget, well I’ll be darned if you aren’t going to see different results for the same searches.  And if you save those searches in different documents, or spreadsheets, you can combine them into one massive big daddy spreadsheet?  That’s searchable.  From the main google docs search bar as well as within the document itself? So if you’re absolutely sure you’ve seen Joe Knickerbocker before…you can figure out if you have or not in this pre-ATS tracking system.

And then there’s calibration….and re-calibration.  Where we, the Lead Recruiter, the research team and I,  really hone in on what’s generating the best results, where should we focus our research hours and where should we call it a day. Again…Google….Docs and now Google Chat comes into play.  When I’m working with a Lead Recruiter I don’t have to coordinate a webex or livemeeting….we can just jump into a document and simultaneously update.  And all of our recruiting team can track me down when I’ve shut down everything else to get my head in the game, because they know now I’ll be in Google Docs and with one click they’re asking me a super quick question via Chat.

So while I could suggest you invest at least 30 minutes a day honing your search skills on Google, Bing and Devilfinder (either do some training or find a mentor) or investigating tools like Scavado, The Boolean Bar or Broadlook, I have to tell you that the key to my success in 2012 will be Google Docs and the team I work with, the people I work with are so strong in recruiting and dissecting every opportunity we staff, that the rest is easy.  Those are the things I need to be successful in the TPR world.  The rest is icing on the cake.

Read the whole post over at The Tim Sackett Project (an FOT contributor blog).

Today, HR/Talent Pros would be publicly hanged for encouraging their IT staff and other hard to find talent to put their profiles up on LinkedIn.  You are basically encouraging your employees to go out and put up a billboard that says: “I’m available! Come find me and make me an offer!”  That is what LinkedIn has become – Generation-Next-Job-Board.  Don’t get me wrong – I love LinkedIn!  They are one of the largest sources of talent for my company.  When I was on the corporate side of the Talent desk – I still loved LinkedIn – because I could more easily yank talent from my competitors – but I also hated it for that same reason!

Facebook is what LinkedIn was 5 years ago – the Haters just don’t want to admit it.

Recruiting Pros, both corporate and 3rd party, love to rail against anyone who feels Facebook is the “new” LinkedIn – in terms of recruiting potential.  Here’s why -

The 3 Myths about Facebook as a Recruiting Source:

1. Facebook is for your private life – LinkedIn is for your professional Life!

You hear this right!  This is the same type of myth that LinkedIn perpetuated for years – “We are a professional network!” – yeah, right.  You might have started that way – but you are now one big job board – thank you!   Facebook is a “social” network.  Yes, but this is fast changing and will continue to change as people become more comfortable living one life, and learning how to use the Facebook tools and Apps to have both a social life and a professional life on Facebook.

2. There are too many people on Facebook to be effective as a recruiting source.

This is the lazy myth.  Basically, the haters are going to discount Facebook because there are too many people to choose from and that’s hard.  Sorry – you don’t get to say that!  Figure it out – the talent is there, the tools to find them are there – stop making excuses!  Facebook is 1 degree of separation for every person in the world.  Any time you spend trying to figure out how to take advantage of that won’t be a waste.

3. Facebook is a fad, it will be die out in 3 years. 

The one thing I know for sure is, Facebook has changed how our society communicates.  As a recruiting Pro – I want to be a part of how our society communicates. Will something new come out – sure it will. Will Facebook be gone in 3 years – probably not!   In the meantime, we have been given a list of every possible candidate we might ever want to contact, or at least be within one contact point of every candidate – Fade or not – Talent Pros need to take advantage – now. If it’s dead in 3 years, I’ll move to the next source – but for now – I’m using it!

Want to learn how you can take advantage of using Facebook for Recruiting?  Check out the FOT webinar TOMORROW February 2nd at 1pm Est – Register Here!

Read the whole post at Kris Dunn’s The HR Capitalist (an FOT contributor blog)