The calls and emails have been coming in; the voices imperceptively waiver: The recruiters are nervous. Corporate leaders and naifs are looking out there windows, some even waiting for the call to come. Third party firms are wondering where the callbacks are> Who is Satan and who is the Saviour?

Satan is real and you are the Saviour but you don't know this yet. Satan wants you to be afraid; he wants to cull the herd. Don't let him scare you.

Push for long term planning; get away from your desk and meet them. Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace ...

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An old cowboy proverb asserts that "Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat."

Recruiting is the most difficult function within HR yet too many seem to be taking low-work shortcuts - like asking for assistance in finding "engineers" after exhausting all their "creativity"...perusing resumes off job boards. Ahem???

Because of this, I offer the second tenet of the Poupon Principle:

Hard work are two four-letter words (come to think of it, GenY is also a four letter word)

[for the quesy GenYers who are sick of being called prima donna whine babies, this isn't what I'm referring to ...

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Several varieties of Grey Poupon exist, each crafted to address one’s primal need for mustard. But like the original commercial, within the recruiting community there exist factions of recruiters and recruiting pundits/experts who believe that if you don’t follow in line to their proselytizing you are open to ridicule.

For instance, take Applicant Tracking Systems – please! How many are there? Rhetorical question. How many recruiters believe their choice is the best ATS out there? Another rhetorical question. Yet the number of “best ATS” discussions has proliferated on every recruiting forum with each discussion becoming more heated as ...

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I've lost track at the number of recruiting pundits and experts who spread (or have spread) their ascerbic viewpoints about all things recruiting - sourcing, hiring, technology, etc. They're here on ERE, RBC, individual blogs that spot (kind of like an incontinence) the Internet - all tossing around clever hyperbole (make a Rush Limbaugh voice when saying "clever hyperbole") about our craft (is it an art or a science? Ask it again like Rush).

Seems that no one can agree on anything recruiting related!

The next time your brow displaces another wet, salty drop on your keyboard as you offer ...

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Know the adage "When you become so good at using a hammer everything begins to look like a nail"? Same thing holds true for recruiting and the notion that peeps must have specific industry and/or product experience to be considered a viable employment candidate.

The only data is the self-fulfilling prophecy held by many hiring managers when they hire someone out-of-spec - the HMs spend a good deal of time "looking" for reasons to prove recruiting wrong and create structures that practically ensure a negative result.

Consider the best reason for hiring out of range...creativity. When you hire 100 ...

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Read here.

FYI, I'll be putting together a panel of students who are graduating in December 2008 and May 2009 for one of the NYC metro area's staffing groups this fall.

Comprised of students who are interviewing this Fall to find jobs, my goal is to open the eyes of the HR/recruiting community by hearing it straight from the horses' mouths about attitudes, beliefs and values of potential entry-level employees.

Stay tuned... 

"A Japanese labor bureau has ruled that one of Toyota's top car engineers died from working too many hours, the latest in a string of such findings in a nation where extraordinarily long hours for some employees has long been the norm."

Karoshi, or overwork, was cited as a prime factor in the death of a 45 year old engineer who worked for Toyota on their Camry line.

Read one of the articles here.

Wouldn't it be great if job specs included truthful descriptions of a company's culture rather than the recycled crap that permeates almost every ...

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"As long as the person has all of the skills, or satisfies enough of the skills requirements, if he has a good attitude, he’s worth his weight in gold. After all, you can teach technical skills!"

Wonderful discussion on TechRepublic.com about Hiring new people: Choosing between skills and attitude. Say what you will as a result of your experience as a recruiter but when you read what non-rectruiters say, think about how you feel.

The readers' comments are below the article. 

Another Industry Radar article that tickled my reality bone, Managers Behaving Badly: Five Killer Results. How do these relate to hiring managers? Hmm...let's see:

Cargo Cult Management

It’s a classic - you see a successful practice at another company and copy it. To a “tee.” It’s the same thing that happened when Jack Welch used to appear on the cover of Fortune or Forbes; the article extolled the virtues and attributes of some GE initiative. Every head of HRA would cringe upon seeing the cover because they knew that the next day their CEO would come by ...

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Last week, the Industry Radar offered an article on "What Tim Russert Taught Me About Dealing With People In The Workplace..." - it's a must read for anyone working with people. To summarize, here are the key lessons:

Don't interject your opinion into the conversation unless it's relevant.

Put everyone at ease with some stage banter.

You can be an "A" player without being a jerk.

At the end of the day, you're judged not by the number of carcasses you dragged in, but the fact you were good at what you did, and most importantly - if ...

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Another ubiquitous thread about the "best metrics" started my brain pondering the inherent problems with developing and maintaining metrics for recruiting.

First, I considered Weinberg’s Law of Metrics which states that which gets measured gets fudged. As it pertains to us, the issue here revolves around all the post hoc modifications of the data that take place if the numbers don't tell the story you want. From my quant background, I learned that you must put in place an analysis plan rather than phish for the data that supports your position. 

Then there is the Metric Law of ...

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It's the Canadian version of the Bureau of Labor Statistics but IMHO far better. I subscribe to The Daily - great information that any recruiter in Canada should be using to formulate and implement their recruiting strategies.

Here's something for people like me who hate salary disparities...

[Females/Males] who worked 49 to 52 weeks (mostly full time) in the reference year for pay or in ...

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FYI - FREE - NO MONEY WILL EXCHANGE HANDS

My friend of 16 years is far and away the best global HR person I know. His experience includes exceptionally productive roles as a Chief Administrative Officer and top HR Executive/Lawyer (reporting to the CEO). This guy is ridiculously board-savvy and has transformed or accelerated growth in companies ranging in revenue and employees to $2.8 BLN and up to 22,000.

Experience includes financial services, entertainment, consumer, media, recruiting of new senior management teams, management of corporate growth by acquisition, and executive comp/benefit and local/global organization development. Started his ...

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One year ago today - 1 PM EST - my beloved Mr. Stinky passed on to that great catnip meadow in heaven. Yes, I’m grieving today but it doesn’t prevent me from ratcheting up my recruiting efforts to help l me get through the day.

David Hosier ruminates about trivial matters here – I think his writings are pretty darn funny. One of his older posts is about lessons he learned from his cat Dilbert. Dave’s observations IMHO have direct correlations to recruiting success…

1. Show people that you’re happy to see them. It's unfortunate that far too many ...

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Serious and not-so-serious ruminations about telecommuting...

Finally getting to blogging about telecommuting again. In reading the American Electronics Association report of two months ago, I can't help to think of the volume of short-sighted companies who haven't yet embraced the concept. In case you're not into click throughs, ruminate these findings:

• Telework is the practice of allowing, encouraging, and even requiring that employees work remotely part- or full-time, usually from their home, facilitated by collaborative information and communication technologies.
• The Telework Coalition estimates that more than 45 million U.S. workers telecommute at least once a week ...

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Madeline Tarquinio, Research Director for ERE, put together a great get-together for the NYC ERE Group (the FIRST group on ERE - thanks David). Sadly, a family situation precluded her attendance but she was toasted by many.

Of course, Manaster took little time in dogging me about my blog posting frequency, so here it is D-Man, my public promise to blog far more than I have been the past year (ya hear that Snyder?). I have a notebook full of observations from the business world as it relates to talent and I'm coming back with no-holds barred.

Since I've ...

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Recruiting is so much more than pulling resumes off job boards (NOT recruiting but order taking). It has to take into account the person coming to your office or moving into the area and using mass transit to get to work.

It comes as no surprise that the New York Subway System is a huge money pit where even $1 Billion can't ensure that elevators and escalators can work properly. Just imagine that you have this incredible person on the hook to accept your job offer - and has some kind of physical disability - who will have to use our ...

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Resumania lives!

We've all shaken our heads at some of the odd things people write in their resumes and cover letters. Here's a story of an addition to the junk folder that I just received today.

I'm working on building a national sales team for a customer - these hunters and gathers cannot be run-of-the-mill; they must have specific company experience and of course, must have a Rolodex to kill for (for all the guffawers out there, I am in 100% agreement with the spec and targets).

So today I received the following in an intro...

I have ...

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"The S.E.C. told me that all of its actions were helpful to investors and that no one could have prevented the Bear Stearns collapse because it was caused by liquidity issues, not capital issues. My respectful response is that if Bear were thoroughly well capitalized, why would liquidity issues come up at all?"

This past weekend, Ben Stein wrote a scintillating piece in Sunday NYTimes explaining how he believed the Wall Street collapse turned into something of catastrophic proportions.

So much about the Wall Street collapse reminds me of recruiting these days...

"Weren’t fail-safe devices in place ...

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Not too long ago, there was a company on Lawn Guyland named American Home Mortgage; AHM was one of those sub-prime lenders who collapsed, thousands were unceremoniously let go, and the company filed for Ch. 11 protection.

I just checked out to see how they were branding themselves in the aftermath and on my buddy Paul Forster's site, Indeed.com, there it was;  listing for AHM Servicing stating...

Competitive pay! Great benefits! Fun atmosphere! Employee recognition programs! We are looking for talented mortgage professionals for our Irving Servicing Center

The AHM building stands vacant on Rt. 110 in Melville ...

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