Unemployment statistics are reminding us again and again this isn’t just any old recession. Globalization, increased computing power, and a dramatic shift in consumer spending have organizations radically overhauling the way they get work done. Companies are getting significant increases in productivity at the same time customer demand remains weak. This means companies are likely to hire fewer people coming out of this recession and employment may remain depressed until beyond 2012.

This has real-world implications for job seekers and job holders. Some people have advised downgrading expectations in a job search and playing it safe with career moves. Others have recommended the exact opposite approach, saying now is the time to reinvent yourself and your career.

We put this topic to the Glassdoor Clearview Collection, a panel of career and workplace experts to find out:

• Should employees play it safe, hold on to their job and not jump ship until better days? Or should employees and job seekers seize the day and make their next big career move?
• What’s realistic versus idealistic in terms of a job switch?
• What is your advice for today’s and tomorrow’s workforce?

Liz Ryan:

Job seekers don’t need to lower their expectations pre-emptively. What they need to do is understand their place in the economic picture. They need a great answer to the question, “What problem do you solve?”

I wouldn’t say that employees overall should downgrade their expectations for their career paths. Some will need to do that, and others won’t. It’s all about value. Just as there are industries that are counter-cyclical (sales actually rise during recessionary times – for instance, movie theatres did great business in 2009) there are skills that are MORE in demand during tough times. The job seekers who hold those skills will be calling the shots. Many or most salespeople, for instance, won’t need to temper their sales salary expectations. If they’ve cracked the code and can get clients to buy, they’ll be hot commodities on the job market. The theme for the coming decade will be ‘Know Your Value’. It doesn’t work anymore for job seekers to say “I create databases” or “I answer customer service calls.” Starting now, job seekers and job holders need to know how they help an employer thrive in its marketplace.

Job seekers don’t need to lower their expectations pre-emptively. What they need to do is understand their place in the economic picture. They need a great answer to the question, “What problem do you solve?”

John Sumser:

“Your soul will rot out of your body if you keep a job to avoid risk.”

Anyone who has survived a series of layoffs understands that the real victims are the ones who keep their jobs. Blessed with severance packages and the opportunity to reinvent themselves, the ‘redundant’ are given a major career advantage when they walk out the door. Sure it hurts in the beginning, but being required to reinvent yourself trumps deciding to do it any day of the week.

For most people, it’s easier to be pushed than it is to jump.

That said, your soul will rot out of your body if you keep a job to avoid risk.  The price for staying when you should go is a diminishing ability to look yourself in the mirror. How can you not hate your family (and how can they not feel it) when you are ‘doing it for them’. It’s a pathetic example to set.

In a lifetime, there are only a few opportunities for complete reinvention. Most of them qualify as personal disasters. Every once in a while, the economy makes spectacular failure a common thing. When that happens, you get a complete pass on the career consequences of a radical departure.

The people who stand still are failing by trying to hold onto the sand that flows through their fingers. As they try to maintain their grasp on security, they create a field of opportunity for those who refuse to believe that there is any such thing. It’s easy to stand out when everyone else is hiding under their desks hoping to avoid screwing up.

Rusty Rueff:

“Now is not the time to “run away” from a job.”

There are four glasses: the glass that is half-empty; the glass that is half-full; the glass that is overflowing; and the glass that is out to kill you. People feel like today’s job market is the glass that is out to kill them when in fact there is still good opportunity if you are prudent in your risk-taking.

Now is not the time to “run away” from a job. Many job changes are catalyzed by unhappiness or discontent.    Take ten deep breaths before you make that motivated move. That said, there are jobs to “run to” because they are doing what you want to do, where you want to do it, with the people you want to do it with.

If after more due diligence than usual, counsel from at least four people who know you well, and a long talk with yourself in the shower, you hear “Yes!”, then go for it.

However, if that kind of job is not our there for you now, spend this time homing in on your dream job to be sure that when the music starts again your next move is on the right path.

There is a glass that is overflowing out there for all of us!

Hank Stringer:

“We don’t have to lower our career expectations – but we may be well suited to take the opportunity to consider changing them.”

Seize the day…prepare now for better days!

Company productivity continues to increase and when the market improves those productivity increases will result in needed profits. Companies will hire in an improving market but not in all the industries and markets we know or at the levels we are accustomed to. We don’t have to lower our career expectations – but we may be well suited to take the opportunity to consider changing them.

Seize the day today to prepare for:

• New work: prepare for a new career in a field with legs – like healthcare, energy and agriculture.

• New life: Downsize, move to the countryside, collect rainwater and plant a garden or move to an affordable city, move downtown and work virtually.

• New entrepreneurial opportunities: There are ALWAYS opportunities for entrepreneurs – embrace and learn to be one or provide the services they need. Just remember to solve a problem for a large enough market to sustain you.

Necessity is the mother of invention…if necessary why not invent a new career and way of life.

Clearview Counterpoint: Should Employees Downgrade Job & Salary Expectations For Next Few Years? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

Related posts:

1. Clearview Counterpoint: What Are The Consequences Of Being Uninformed About Your Salary & Compensation In 2010?
2. Clearview Counterpoint: Transparency – How Much is Too Much for Your Career?
3. Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate

For this Clearview Collection point-counterpoint debate we approach the topic of salary transparency and compensation concerns for 2010. Many companies have reset salary and bonus baselines (and maybe pay bands) in the past year and even though predictions of recovery rise, many companies are not planning to increase salary budgets.

I’ll start by telling you about a recent experience in which I was surprised by a Board Director when he explained that in order to save costs for one of the companies he served, he and the Board presented the CFO and other executives of the company with the ultimatum of reducing compensation significantly or they would let them go and hire executive talent available at much lower compensation. Now there are lots of reasons why this won’t work and there are certainly situations where companies must take these measures to survive. If this occurs at the executive level is it occurring at lower levels? I see that it is and I don’t see it changing anytime soon, not at least until the economy improves and that does not appear to be around the corner.

And not as long as companies have found that the road to profitability in today’s economy requires reduced staff and reduced pay.

The important point for all to consider is salary transparency. In the example above, the Board member made what I believe is a poor management decision based on his understanding of the market value of CFO’s. He had seen and spoken to enough interested parties to believe this was the best way to manage the companies’ finances going forward. Truth, management and HR have traditionally managed company finances by headcount expense so the thought process should not be that surprising. Today we have increased salary transparency through Glassdoor.com and other sites. So now both employees and management can know the value of a specific job in a specific city. As this salary transparency spreads throughout our global marketplace there simply will not be room for ‘bad actors’.  In other words, companies competing for the best talent will have to provide great cultures, work environments and competitive salaries.

I personally believe in relying on market forces such as Glassdoor to lead the way in effective salary transparency. Put the word out there and employees and companies alike will learn how to react appropriately. However, we are a litigious society and government intervention to make ‘things right’ seems to be the name of the game. One year ago the Obama administration enacted the Lilly Ledbetter Act to insure any employee unfairly compensated when compared to others could receive up to 2 years of back wages and significantly extends the window an employee may make a wage discrimination claim.  The act has been in place a year and has resulted in human resource departments taking a close look at equal compensation throughout their ranks. Overshadowed by current unemployment and negative economic news the act will play a greater role when the market begins to turn positive. Again, the natural market force of available salary information through Glassdoor may play a much bigger role in ensuring wages are fair, equal and competitive as time passes.

Our career and workplace experts weigh in on lower pay and the call from many corners requesting pay transparency. Please read on…

Rusty Rueff:

“We [employees] are like retailers selling a product and letting someone else set the price and we negotiate back with little to no knowledge and then we take the deal.”

Hank, you and I coined the term back in the early 2000’s: “Arrogance of Supply”.  This is when companies start acting like people and talent are commodities versus appreciable and precious assets.  Stories like the one you tell in the preamble make my blood boil.  And is there any surprise why employees today are preparing and looking for their first chance to bolt from companies that think this way?  Companies that think this way should be on Alert Stage Red for talent defection.

It’s crazy in this day and age to think that salary transparency is anything but already out in the open.  It’s not just with sites like Glassdoor.com.  It’s open sharing in the lunchroom, in the truck cab, at the water cooler.  It wasn’t always this way in the past but it is now most so because (hold onto your seats) workers have united.  No, they aren’t flocking to labor unions, although I believe how companies treat their employees in the months coming as we exit the recession could result in the largest growth of labor unions in 60 years if companies handle it wrongly, it is instead that the divide between management and labor has never been greater that I have seen in my work-life.  Trust has been eroded and emotional contracts so damaged that employees have banded together like a survivor alliance and as such sharing and transparency among each other is at an all time high. So, any company that thinks they can underpay, relatively pay against nebulous standards, or just try and test the lower limits of pay scales to save a buck, is up against a force of knowledge and emotion that managers have never seen before.

It’s time that anyone who works moves beyond guessing or having little knowledge about their job, pay and career prospects.  For too long we have managed our careers in the dark and it is time to take the reins and arm ourselves with knowledge.  When was the last time any of us made a major purchase without knowing the price tag, doing comparative shopping and trying to leverage and find the best deal? Think about it, we are like retailers selling a product and letting someone else set the price and we negotiate back with little to no knowledge and then we take the deal. The only place this works are yard/tag sales when you are just happy that all of the junk is gone at the end of the day.  We shouldn’t allow our talents, services and experience be bought like we are on the table at a garage sale.

Liz Ryan:

“Once you’ve undergone a pay cut without explanation, and without the transparency-and-future-visibility items, and then once you’ve sealed the deal by continuing to work hard in the hope that things will mysteriously turn around for you, you’ve effectively cemented your new market rate for the foreseeable future.”

Whether an employer has been 100% transparent or (as is more common) 100% private about its pay practices in the past, the game changes when an employee is asked to take a pay cut.

I’m not talking, of course, about a performance-based pay reduction. I’m talking about the common situation where the employer says “Costs have risen, sales are down, and if you want to keep your job you’ll be working for 10 to 20/whatever percent less than you were before.” That may be an unavoidable business decision, but it comes with requirements, in my view.

An employer can’t expect an employee to take a pay cut and keep working hard without, at a minimum:

• Letting the affected employee know what other cost-saving measures the company is taking (unrelated to salaries);
• Assuring the employee that his or her leaders all the way up the chain have also taken pay cuts. If this isn’t happening, then it’s highly unethical to ask the rank-and-file employee to bear the cost-reduction burden – I hope this goes without saying;
• Letting the employee know what ‘reasonableness’ concessions the employer is making as it announces the employee’s pay cut – for instance, letting the employee work a 1/2 day less per week or letting the employee work some days from home; and
• Letting the employee know which financial milestones — e.g., reaching a certain quarterly EPS target — will trigger the employee’s return to his or her previous pay level.

If we cut an employee’s pay without these very reasonable transparency-and-future-visibility checklist items, we are saying “We need you to trust us, although we don’t trust you to know what we’ve done to reduce our executive comp numbers — if anything — or what else we’ve done to cut costs or grow revenues, or when or whether your pay might return to its previous level. Oh well. STBU.”

As soon as employee salaries are cut, the question arises in an employee’s mind: “What is my market salary now? Is it $85K, the rate I was earning six months ago? Is it $72K, the rate I’m earning now? Is it something else entirely?” Sites like Glassdoor help an employee in this situation peg his or her market level, but at the end of the day there’s no better tool than a live job offer to let an employee know “Here’s what the market thinks you’re worth.” An employee without an employment contract who’s had his or her pay slashed and who isn’t job-hunting is hiding his head in the sand, sad to say. Once you’ve undergone a pay cut without explanation, and without the transparency-and-future-visibility items mentioned above, and then once you’ve sealed the deal by continuing to work hard in the hope that things will mysteriously turn around for you, you’ve effectively cemented your new market rate for the foreseeable future. If you truly don’t have options, there may be no better course. If you’re clinging to the hope that the company that has treated you like an interchangeable cog in the machine is going to miraculously see your true value when the economy (slightly) improves, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you really must see.

Jeff Hunter:

“People who can demand salary transparency are going to get the lion’s share of the compensation.”

Companies are habitually risk adverse. Every thought is believed to be unique intellectual property, every relationship proprietary. Transparency has not come easy to these walled gardens.

If anything can change this knee-jerk approach to risk, it is greater risk. Disclosing compensation details may feel risky, but not being able to secure the talent needed to innovate and drive new markets is far riskier. And great talent will only go where they know they have the greatest possible control over their success.

But the big problem facing us is not whether companies are going to have to disclose compensation data. They are. And it is not whether people are going to be disappointed with their compensation packages in the future. Most will.

The big issue that is facing us is that the people who can demand transparency are going to get the lion’s share of the compensation. And the people who wouldn’t dare ask for such transparency, the people who feel lucky to just have a job, are going to be the people who are going to watch their real wages continue to decrease, just as they have done over the last 30 years.

Why does this matter? Because America is still the biggest market in the world and with the death of easy credit that market will only grow if people’s real wages are growing. Not just the few stars who can demand corporations bend to their will.

Companies tend to ignore these connections between their daily work practices and their markets. It seems like Henry Ford was the last person to understand that paying his people well created customers for his products. But companies are going to be forced to confront the deep connection between how they pay people and the size and opportunities of their markets.

Getting transparent is just the first step. Next comes the hard work of figuring out how to make that transparency part of a larger effort to increase profitable employment.

John Sumser:

“Today, transparency is a career survival tool.”

This is a time of enormous change in our organizations, large and small. The economic earthquake changed the face of many businesses. In the old days, the guys (all white, older) in the head shed made theor decisions in a vacuum. Today, transparency is a career survival tool.

So, the business needs to make pay cuts at all levels. It’s not uncommon. Yesterday’s flush markets are gone. Today require a new view. Pay cuts are here to stay.

The scenario in which a board member threatens a CFO smacks of really bad management. By the time the issue gets that far, the answer is obvious. Any CFO who cannot see the need to cut her own pay is not doing the job. If a board member is threatening, the CFO is headed to the door.

For the rest of the organization (CEO and Board members included), when the business shrinks, so does compensation. Layoffs are a good start but compensation is directly related to revenue. When revenue drops, a fair number of overhead functions shift their focus.

A salary is not an entitlement. It’s earned by working in the business. When the business stumbles, so does compensation. It’s basic math.”

Clearview Counterpoint: What Are The Consequences Of Being Uninformed About Your Salary & Compensation In 2010? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

Related posts:

1. Clearview Counterpoint: Transparency – How Much is Too Much for Your Career?
2. Clearview Counterpoint: Should Employees Downgrade Job & Salary Expectations For Next Few Years?
3. Clearview Counterpoint: Career Experts Divided On Medical Privacy Issue

How much personal health information should employers have about employees or job candidates?

Moderator: John Sumser

This month’s debate question is “How much personal health data should an employer be able to use to make job-related decisions?” Companies are getting more and more access to increasingly cheap ways to measure the physical status of their employees. Where should the limits be?

John Sumser: My desk is littered with the gadgets of personal health monitoring. Blood pressure cuffs, a blood glucose monitor, biofeedback gear, a breathing trainer and a meditation device. Nearby is a scale with a USB port. I’m looking at all of these devices to try to understand the future of personal health data.

My iPhone tracks all sorts of things. It manages health information, food consumption, the number of steps I take, exercise logs and medication schedules. It tracks where I am, what I’m doing, my finances and my physical status.

For me, it’s an amazing mirror showing me aspects of my personality that I never considered. A three-mile walk on the beach clobbers my blood pressure and sugar. The right blend of nutrients drives my mood over the following 24 hours. The more I quantify my behavior, the more I am able to manage it.

I’ve just ordered the new sleep-monitoring tool. It helps optimize the rest you get and gently wakes you at the right point sometime close to your desired wake-up.

All of a sudden, I’m swimming in personal data. Every item on my desk is rapidly getting wired into the cloud. I have little doubt that I am just an early adopter in the movement to self-quantification .

I understand that I am on the geeky edge of things. But, you can be certain that the ability to measure lots of physical aspects of human performance is right around the corner. Airports have begun measuring body temperature remotely to manage the spread of the flu.

The combination of at home DNA testing (a Google affiliate has introduced sub-$1,000 screens), health records and routinely collected bio-data offer unimaginable possibility and risks.

On the one hand, you will be able to spot and correct your own long and short-term performance problems. From weight management to diet and fitness, every aspect of your physical life will come under control. The ability to understand and improve one’s physical potential is an amazing leap forward in evolution.

On the other hand, you should expect that employers are going to be increasingly interested in the physical dimensions of performance optimization. It’s easy to imagine compensation tied to biological peaks.

For example, a study released Tuesday discusses some of the chronic health issues associated with obesity, which is expected to plague 43% of Americans by 2018. Why wouldn’t you ask less healthy employees to pay more for health insurance? Imagine scheduling the workforce based on the basis of predicted productivity. Expecting employees to submit evidence of adequate restful sleep or specific dietary intake to maintain a healthy weight doesn’t seem that far afield.

My view is that as the employment social contract changes, both employers and employees will be increasingly interested in understanding the physical aspects of job performance. My bet is that we’ll have less privacy and improved job performance.

I’m for that.

Hank Stringer: No, we should not start using all the data available to measure how well an individual does their work. We should measure how well an individual does their work but the moment we start concerning ourselves with all the data available simply because we can, we are halfway down the slippery slope.

When I first saw your point I had dreams of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Orson Welles’s “1984” all rolled up into one scene of the future American work place and it sucked. The next thing we know we will be testing 14-year-olds to see if they have any future physical obstacles that could get in the way of their contributions to work and society; sorry FDR and Stephen Hawking. I know I am carrying this two steps too far but at some point we have to check ourselves and understand we don’t have to do everything just because we can.

Jeff Hunter: Two words come to mind when I think of companies evaluating talent through health and other personal data: Apollo Thirteen. The first reason this comes to mind is because when I read statements like “you should expect that employers are going to be increasingly interested in the physical dimensions of performance optimization,” I feel like saying, “Houston we have a problem.”

But Apollo 13 is important for more than just that one phrase. The story of Apollo 13 is a great example of why employers using health data to create performance optimization is such an astoundingly bad idea. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, Ken Mattingly was originally slated to be the command module pilot for the mission.

Three days before launch he was replaced with Jack Swigert. The reason? Health data. Specifically, Ken had been exposed to the German measles, a disease for which he had not been inoculated. Swigert was a superior health risk, and therefore more likely to perform better during the mission. The rest of the story is history. An oxygen tanks explodes three days into the flight, Mattingly (having never gotten the measles) helps save the three astronauts by figuring out how to conserve power and everyone returns safe and sound.

In short, Mattingly (the health risk) saves Swigert’s life. An astronaut’s health is measured seven ways to Sunday. They are quarantined and monitored. Even in the wildest dreams of a corporate actuarial no company would ever undertake to measure and control this much of a person’s health (or any other data, for that matter). But it turns out that you can poke, prod, measure and manipulate as much as you want: the real threat is the one you aren’t watching.

In the case of Apollo 13 it was bad quality control on the wire that connected to the lead that stirred the oxygen tank. The teflon coating on the wire was compromised, causing the explosion. Putting Mattingly on the flight with measles was never as remotely dangerous as a system failure that was created years before poor old Ken ever had the bad luck to be exposed to the disease. And this is the broader lesson, and the reason attempting to increase performance through measuring and managing health is such a bad idea.

Corporations are poor at evaluating risk. They much prefer to examine the data in front of them than to evaluate system weaknesses and hypothesis about unpredictable but catastrophic events. At the same time, all companies are being inundated with urgent but strategically irrelevant data. Into the midst of this risk paralysis and information overload steps the overworked hiring manager, who is already doing the work of three people.

Adding to that hiring manager’s info-glut won’t just fail to have the desired effect of predicting or optimizing employee performance. It will add to the distractions they already face, taking what precious little time and attention they have left to think about unpredictable change that will ruin their business and focusing it instead on whether the chunky engineer is as good as the distance runner. And all the time they will be missing the point: the reason their business objectives are at risk is general systems failures built into their team long before their dream candidate caught a cold. Houston, let’s not start this problem.

Rusty Rueff: There’s no doubt that this type of information will eventually become part of the menu of performance management, the question is who will have the guts to do it first?

As people first, employees second, we already are all over this. Just look around the office and the cubicles and see the assortment of vitamins, energy drinks, herbs and tonics, that we all use to make our overall human condition better and we are already smart enough to know when we have to perform and peak, that we get a better night sleep the night before and we caffeinate (okay not all that healthy) and we ready ourselves for the big moments.

So, why not add this into better performance management? Imagine that Lance Armstrong would proceed into any race without all the data in front of him? I doubt he would.

Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf have been on this for a while with their Quantified Self tools (http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/) and continue to push the boundaries on what can be measured. We already try as employers to assess some of this already in the interview process.

Haven’t we all sat in debrief meetings where someone says, ”it seems like they just ran out energy at the end of the day?” I see it this way: we are each a human operating system. We boot up each day and all day long we run routines until we run out of battery. We refresh and then we do it all over again.

The problem is that we are variable in our operating procedures and if any other operating system was this variable we would throw it out the window faster than we hated Vista. So, why wouldn’t we want to take the variability out of the human operating system to improve and predict more consistent performance?

Again, who will have the guts to try first? There will be lots and lots of ’big brother’ and privacy conversations but with a little bit of good design thinking and the right incentives, we could be there sooner than we think.

I’d love to be in the test group.

Liz Ryan: Employers are limited in what they can legally learn about an employee’s health situation before making an offer. They can require a physical after an offer is extended. I would hate to see an employer’s right to collect more health data increase. Employees — people in general, in fact — have little enough privacy as it is!

I was thrilled to see public pressure convince Clarion Health Systems, a midwestern hospital organization, to back off on its plans to weigh employees at work and fine them for exceeding a certain body-mass index, a few years ago. I remember stories from Ceaucescu’s Romania, where that sort of intrusion (and much worse) was a matter of course for working people. What was especially galling about the Clarion plan was the idea that employees exceeding a certain BMI should be fined, because their health claims would cost the company money….notwithstanding the fact that hospitals are among the most unhealthy and stressful places to work!

My hope is that if employers attempt to push the health-information envelope when it comes to extending offers, talented candidates will Just Say No to those employers and leave them to their talent-deprived fate. For the record, I believe that pre-employment drug screening should be used sparingly and that in general, the pendulum is already too far over to one side with respect to pre-employment poking and prodding. I can’t wait for the economy to improve so that affluent older Boomers can begin to retire in droves and force employers to pick up their recruiting game in order to get and keep talent.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sumser: Health and fitness are the first areas that will come under management (as they say). In the short time involved in having this conversation with the Clearview team, several new interestedin products have come to market that track and monitor our health:

• The Zeo which tracks and analyzes your sleep patterns and acts as an alarm clock
• The MioWatch which gives quick access to on the fly heart performance.
• Directlife from Phillips which includes corporate fitness programs in its agenda.
• In addition, the MIT Technology Review is reporting the development of a A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor – with one of these, you can have your measuring chip implanted without ever having to replace the battery. It’s activated by a radio.

We’re entering an era of evidence-based decision making. The degree to which the aggregate data about the employee group is a valuable corporate asset is just beginning to be understood. Every increment of measurable behavior is going to be utilized to help improve personal and collective performance. There are ways to embrace it and there are ways to recoil from it.

As we enter the data onslaught, issues like the  one we have discussed here will give us polar conversations at the dinner table and in the media. Remember that you heard about the personal performance data issue first here on Glassdoor.

Clearview Counterpoint: Career Experts Divided On Medical Privacy Issue is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

Related posts:

1. Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate
2. Clearview Counterpoint: Transparency – How Much is Too Much for Your Career?
3. Clearview Counterpoint: Should Employees Downgrade Job & Salary Expectations For Next Few Years?

Here’s the issue:  Observers of the current organizational recruiting-and-selection process, in place at most employers, have noted that it’s a contender for the dubious ‘least functional corporate process’ award.

While Six Sigma and LEAN principles are in place in large and small organizations, governing processes from new-product design to the ordering of paper clips, the recruiting function too often sits in a slow, bureaucratic, talent-unfriendly realm of its own. A few of the symptoms include:

1. Candidates wait for weeks to hear from employers after what seemed like promising job interviews.

2. Candidates are treated like third-class citizens during the selection process as they go through the tedious and even insulting screening steps, also known as the Seven Trials of Hercules routine. (“Here’s our online personality test key, and when that’s done, we’ve got an honesty test, a writing test and a little math test for you to take…”).

3. Employers ask candidates to trust in them (that the company will stay in business, that the managers are ethical) but show less and less trust in candidates (“We’ll be needing W-2s for the last five years of employment … ”)

4. More and more selection processes are ‘front-loaded’ (“Before an interview, we’ll need three references, a credit check, and a ten-page business plan that you’ll write for us…”)

We asked the Clearview Bloggers panel:

What’s your take on this issue:

Is corporate recruiting broken?  If so, how would you fix it?

Here’s what they said:

John Sumser:

Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk up to a potential boyfriend, propose marriage and get an immediate answer? It would be fantastic if you could decide you wanted a new house and then immediately go and buy it. Adoption would be vastly improved if you could see a child on the streets and take her home with you.

Not.

Changes in demographics, technology and management create unforeseen opportunities to supplement and improve the process of finding and filling jobs. It is easy to confuse the fact that the process can be improved with the notion that it should be improved. Virtually all of the people who argue that recruiting is defective just happen to have something to sell that improves the process.

Today, employers have amazing levels of instant access to information about every size and stripe of potential employee. Those same potential employees find a wealth of opportunity and information on their desktops. Far from being broken, the hiring process offers plenty of choice for both sides of the equation.

Hank Stringer:

Broken and busted…

The systems that support corporate recruiting, primarily sourcing and applicant tracking systems are not designed to support efficient recruiting. The sourcing solutions today post positions that are aggregated, scraped and spread all over resulting in a talent flow of qualified and unqualified talent that cannot be dealt with effectively.  Ask any candidate who has submitted their resume to a corporate site if they expect to hear ‘anything’…you know the drill, submit, wait, hear nothing. The sourced flow is stored in the ATS – a system built primarily for compliance not for a gracious recruiting relationship. The corporate recruiting department won’t respond – they don’t expect to because they can’t.

The problem is serious and requires new approaches to the way we source, filter, assess and recruit/deliver talent. And I mean new approaches, new technology focused on solving the problem supported by businesses models with the same goal. Increased advertising dollars based on page views and clicks is not the sourcing goal – connecting the right talent with the right opportunity is. And forcing corporate recruiting departments to use technology to comply first VS attracting and hiring the best talent at all costs continues to be the focus of too many HR Departments.

Some companies get it right, they invest and use whatever resources (internal and external) are necessary to work talent through the process efficiently and they reap financial benefits of attracting and retaining better talent than the competition. The truth however is that most don’t. Broken….but a great opportunity to get it right – quality talent will appreciate the companies that get corporate recruiting right.

Jeff Hunter:

As the sole member of the Clearview team with direct responsibility for a corporate recruiting department I feel that I should rise to the defense of my chosen profession. After all, every day I get the privilege of seeing great people working hard to find and hire people. Recruiters usually get into recruiting because their heart is in the right place: helping people find work is a good thing to do. But when I read the list of indictments, I had to agree that we have a long way to go.

Corporate recruiting is broken. This is how we can fix it:

Let’s start by asking ourselves the simplest question: how does the corporate recruiting department think of itself? Most companies treat their recruiting departments like an extension of their purchasing departments. Purchasing departments exist to make multiple vendors bid against each other to ensure that the company gets the best price. When you think about it that is how recruiting usually acts: treating candidates like vendors bidding against each other so that the company can get the lowest price. I think this is at the root of our problem. I propose a different way of thinking about corporate recruiting: A recruiting department should be just as strategic as sales: no customers, no company… no talent, no company.

Let’s keep asking ourselves tough questions: what does a sales department do that a purchasing department doesn’t? Cultivate relationships, even when the buyer isn’t interested. A company brings out new products and they want to know which prospects may be interested in buying. Sales needs to keep every prospect warm for just such an occurrence. Similarly, a recruiting department gets a new opening and needs to know which candidates may be interested in applying.

Purchasing departments wait until they have a need and then let the vendors come to them. Sales departments get as much information as possible so that they are ready when a new opportunity presents itself. Recruiting needs to be like sales.

Next question: how does a sales department treat is prospects? Like gold. No prospects, no sales. No sales, no company. How does a purchasing department treat its vendors? Like cattle – all pushing to get to the trough. No cattle, no big deal – more will be on the way. There are always more cattle. Recruiting needs to treat candidates like gold. No candidates, no talent. No talent, no company.

Rusty Rueff:

It’s hard to say that something is broken that was never built correctly in the first place, so I guess, yes corporate recruiting is broken.

My reasoning on why it is broken, and always has been, is that the process that has been built in most corporations does not align with the way real-life relationships are built.  When was the last time that we acquired a new personal friend by having someone else sit down and write a friend specification, distribute that friend wanted request through a bunch of other people and sources that we have never heard of, then have people apply and use a sorting process or technology to cull through the applications, then have someone that we don’t even know well, sit with these applicants and determine whether or not we will like our new friends?  Nope, we don’t acquire any relationship in our life this way other than those who are going to spend 40-80 hours a week with us on the job. BTW, that’s way more time a week than we spend with our friends and maybe even more waking time than we spend with our family.

Hank and I write in our book, Talent Force, about why we believe that corporate recruiting is broken and that is because of a foundational philosophical problem. That problem being, that most corporations have what we call an “arrogance of supply.”  This is a silly notion that there is always more than enough great talent out there and it causes much of these further sillier process barriers and hurdles that companies put on prospective talent.

I was talking to a person the other day who turned down a job at Facebook because after, in his words, he “endured the five hours of grilling” he didn’t know any more about where Facebook was going than he did before he interviewed with them.  So, he turned down the job.  No one took the time in those five hours to answer his questions about the company’s future or business model.  So, he punted the offer back when it came his way.  He felt he was treated like they believed they were giving him a gift of working at Facebook.  I suspect there is an arrogance of supply at Facebook.

Liz Ryan:

I think that corporate recruiting is broken, and maybe, as Rusty points out, it was never built correctly in the first place. When I think of my own experiences filling jobs in my department, what strikes me is the realization that at some point in every successful selection process the person sitting in front of me could do the job. I believed in him, or her. That belief didn’t arise because of a weighted list of essential requirements for the job, or some point-factor analysis that convinced me Candidate A was stronger than Candidate B. Belief comes from a different place – a terribly important, valid place, let me be quick to say. In each interview round, I talked to six or seven people, and one of them jumped out at me as the person for the job – or sometimes, sadly, two of them did, and in those cases I’d have a hard choice to make.

The corporate recruiting process breaks down job requirements into teeny, discrete parts that somehow don’t add up to a whole. The recruiting process demands that candidates crawl over broken glass to get an interview, or, more likely, wait forever for a friendly note, even a No-Thank-You note, that never arrives. Worst of all, it treats complex and worthy human beings like commodities. That’s unethical.

The only people I know who don’t find the standard recruiting process to be badly broken are the people whose jobs are made easier by its rigor and process: namely, corporate recruiters. Third-party headhunters denounce it. Candidates decry it. Hiring managers write to me every day to tell me how the recruiting process in their shops slows down their ability to hire great people.

I’d like to scrap the job-requisition/essential-requirements/online-job-ad process and start again, building a process that addresses the real need: something in a hiring manager’s domain that isn’t working. If we could start there instead of with the endless list of Essential and Preferred, nitpicky requirements, we’d be way ahead of where we are now.

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We’d love to hear from those who have experience recruiting, being recruited and those who continue their job hunt. What do you think?

Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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Rusty Rueff: There are no secrets, so it doesn’t matter what you have chosen to tell a prospective employer or not.  What you expose and share about yourself on any social media site is fair-game to be revealed.

Jeff Hunter: Transparency is a good thing. More transparency is a better thing. Transparency reduces risk, increases the likelihood of engaged talent and is the only way to build more innovative companies.

Hank Stringer: How much is too much? Haven’t we crossed that bridge? Isn’t the cat out of the bag? If it is too much how in the world do we put the genie back in the bottle. From an elder point of view, the consequences for much of today’s transparency for workers will be felt throughout their careers.

John Sumser: When I was an east coast executive, I had a tailor. The suits I wore fit better than any clothes I’ve owned since. Delivering that level of customization required him to touch me in places usually reserved for lovers.

There is a direct correlation between level of intimacy and fit. If you want perfect tailoring, you have to have full disclosure. Intimacy builds on honesty.

My tailor did not need reciprocal transparency in order to deliver the result. I didn’t need to touch him. I needed clarity about prices, quality and schedule.

He offered a customer list (and had pictures of his customers on the wall). He told impressive rags to riches stories as we reviewed my wardrobe decisions. The supplementary information strengthened the quality of my experience. I always left his shop walking a foot off the ground.

Liz Ryan: Transparency, like nearly every new-ish idea that comes down the pike, was quick to be labeled a lot of things, and ‘virtuous’ seems to be the transparency flavor of the day.

Jeff: Many employers think they are avoiding risk by selecting people who think, act, feel, believe and (sometimes) look the same way. It worked for giant industrial mills in the 1860‘s, and it worked for IBM in the 1950s and so it has become a basic way of doing business.

But the times, they are a changing. The way companies make money now is through innovation. And if they can’t innovate, they are outsourcing work to cheaper workforces in other parts of the globe. Regardless of whether you think that is right or not, it is a reality.

In that world, our world, the world of today, the risk from companies from lack of transparency is far greater than the risk of opening up the old kimono.

Companies that look to repeat the past by recreating it in the future by hiring the same type of people can’t innovate effectively. Transparency gives employers a better chance of finding the talent they need to shake the place up.

Rusty: The real question, in my mind is what do you actively share and reveal?  I was on the phone with a candidate for a Board seat the other day and he said to me, “I am very transparent.  Everything you will want to know and more about me is on my website.  Feel free to take a look and also have others take a look”.  I appreciated his approach, because it is one that I use myself, but not everyone thinks about the ramifications of their personal, political, religious, etc. points of view.  Laws were created to not have those questions asked for a reason.  That said, if you are comfortable in sharing more than required, understanding the potential outcomes, then go for it.

Liz: Lots of successful business people, and others whose wealth and celebrity put them beyond the reach of judgment (or beyond caring, anywhere) like to say in interviews “I’m transparent. See? I was busted for jaywalking in 1982. I don’t care if you know about it.” Other folks, and many job-seekers, are not in that envious position. If you’re 22 years old and job-hunting, you might care a lot about some unfortunate event that dogs you, because your professional star hasn’t risen to the point where everyone knows and loves you, pot bust and all. For those people, ultimate transparency might not be ideal. I’d advise them to scrub the Facebook profile and take other steps to make sure the old, bad stuff doesn’t overwhelm the message they’re sending to the professional marketplace now.

One day, maybe they’ll let the impetuous-youth cat out of the bag, when their accomplishments have put them in a place where it can’t hurt them any more.

Rusty: A year ago I began writing a faith-based blog that I have now added into my signature file on my emails. I know that for some, this is a turn-off and I am sure I lose business and contacts because of it.  On the other hand, I have made a decision that if someone is turned off  by what I believe and can’t accept me for who I am, then it’s probably all the better that we don’t do business together anyway.

Jeff: You can’t get without giving, and you can’t expect transparency if you aren’t willing to offer it first. So potential employers and potential talent are in the same boat: they both need to be transparent to reduce risk, increase engagement and keep (or start) innovating.

So not only do I think that transparency is a good thing, I think it is a required thing, for you and for your future employer. The example Rusty gives is a great one. If you are a person of faith, do you really want to be spending your time pretending you are not?

Hank: To Rusty’s point, one’s religion or personal lifestyle known will affect work decisions and relationships. It is human nature. I wish it wasn’t but it is. So transparency to a 21-yearold today with pictures from that ‘killer party’ posted may not be appreciated when they reach 31 interviewing for that ‘killer career’ opportunity. I think we have taken transparency to a level many will, at some point in their lives regret. Or as the President told students last week…be careful what you post on Facebook.

John: Transparency is not supposed to be equal on both sides of a relationship!

Clearview Counterpoint: Transparency – How Much is Too Much for Your Career? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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3. Clearview Counterpoint: What Are The Consequences Of Being Uninformed About Your Salary & Compensation In 2010?