CareerXroads^®Update - September 2009

By Gerry Crispin, SPHR and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com

Since 1996 our Update has been published 10-12 times each year and aims to share commentary, observations, perspectives and data we come across during our staffing adventures. We hope you continue to enjoy it and pass it on to friends. All are invited to register for the Update for free. Coupled with our Bellwether, a provocative monthly look at trends we share with CareerXroads Colloquium members, we are always willing to challenge the accepted wisdom or poke a little fun at the staffing industry and ourselves in the process.
We invite you to keep in touch and join us during the year at the various conferences where we speak or simply attend.

Sources of Talent-09: The View Down Under

So urce of Talent, 09 is an extraordinary report published the 1st of September by two Australian staffing experts ‐ Phillip Tusing, Destinatio n Talent and Michael Specht, Inspecht. The report is a free download.

(We are somewhat biased - in a good way - about the study because Philip and Michael surveyed an area CareerXroads has long been passionate about: Sources of Hire. We were given an advanced copy and our initial analysis to the report is below. Much of it was also included, although in a slightly different form, as a Forward to their report.)

The Source of Talent 09 study provides International comparative data for the first time - and it is a delightful contrast to the US mindset because it opens a small but fascinating new window into how cultural differences drive staffing around the world.

On the surface, the Australian study includes information about 92,136 hires reported by 409 "organisations" and is easily compared to several similar US reports, including CareerXroads' annual Sources of Hire.

But, there is much more than a surface comparison here because the authors approached their data collection and analysis with an "eyes wide open" attitude ‐ willingly offering a transparent look at their methodology and the challenges they faced as they swam through the sometimes conflicting currents of information. Beneath the surface is a deep pool of data differences that should encourage serious conversation about the role culture plays in recruiting.

Here are a few "quick takes" comparing our US study with Australian sources. I'm sure much more will surface over time (and we encourage others to take a deep dive looking for even more). The Australian SOT- 09 lists the results for 18 sources. The top 6 (which account for 3 out of every 4 hires ) are as follows:

• Job Boards- 29.6%, Internal Recruiters- 16.8%, Corporate Website- 10.6%, Referrals- 7.6%, Recruiting Firms- 6.8% and Internal Promotion- 6.3%.

Our first reaction was to note that the US market typically separates internal moves and promotions from all "external" sources. The Australian approach incorporates the two.

We adjusted our US study of 14 sources to compare to the Australian SOT-09 results (by combining both internal and external sources into one list). Our top 5 results (which also account for about 3 of 4 hires) would be: Internal Movement (including promotion)- 38.8%, Employee Referrals- 16.7%, Corporate Web site- 12.3%, Job Boards- 7.5%, and Direct Sourcing- 4.8%

If Internal promotion and movement (US) are defined similarly in Australia then Internally filled positions are 6x greater in the US than in Australia! Not a minor difference no matter how you define this category.

Job boards are considered a source for Australian hires nearly 4 times as often as in the US.

No comment - for the moment.

In Australia referrals lead to hires half as often.

This gap becomes even wider when breaking out employee referrals for employers alone.

It is not surprising that company web sites are attributed nearly as often as a major "source" in both Australia and the US.

We are still of the opinion that a company careers site is a destination. Attributing hires to the Career Site as a "source" dilutes the impact of other channels that influence visitors to go to the site.

A quick comparison of adjusted agency hires shows the US at 1.7% versus 6.8% in Australia (really 9.9% if you compare only the employer hires).

Some of the difference is explained simply by the differences in the sizes of the firms participating in the respective studies but - not all. We would have thought Agency/Third Party hires in Australia would have tracked much higher.

In both the US and Australian data, the attribution of social network sites in staffing is still quite small.

The reasons for this result require a much longer conversation than this quick take but both collection methods and investor hype are part of the answer.

It is easy to assume (and is often noted by both US and Australian authors) that Australia lags the US market and eventually all these various sources will shift or converge toward US numbers. We are not in agreement with that analysis and, instead, believe we're beginning to map more basic differences in our respective approaches to hiring - country by country.

The evolution of a more sophisticated way to examine the staffing supply chain is still out of our reach but eventually we may discover that combinations of sources will interact to brand, confirm and eventually influence job seekers to make better career decisions. These influence clusters may be as related to the culture of the country as to technology and other business factors.

As more countries collect and share data similar to Source of Talent, 09 standards for defining and comparing sources will continue to develop and this conversation is going to move to a new level. Michael Specht and Philip Tusing have taken an excellent first step. Kudos.

Is It Time to Take On the National Education Association?

SHRM's Workplace Readings, a periodic online precis of relevant articles, recently offered a link to a CNN report concerned with US competitiveness.

The report noted that "U.S. students placed below average in math and science. In math, U.S. high schoolers were in the bottom quarter of the countries including Finland, China and Estonia."

One solution mentioned by Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, in a recent talk was that "we should pay math and science teachers a lot more money. We [now] pay everybody the same." Seems like a good idea to us.

Unfortunately, The NEA is dead set against that solution. It seems they feel that singling out a specialty would not be fair to teachers who lack those particular competencies but are good teachers nevertheless.

Surely we can find major incentives to upgrade the quantity and quality of our math and science teachers that won't tick off the rest of our educators who apparently can't teach these subjects. Maybe if we adopted higher standards of math and science in order for US students to graduate (as other countries do) we would eventually have more teachers capable of teaching the subjects and eventually more candidates capable of handling mission critical technical jobs - - - or we could just offshore them all.

Small Bytes

• Adidas recently launched its new Career Site featuring Athletes as guides. The approach builds on the ground breaking work of Bank of America and McGladrey to name two others who use guides to explain how to get around. Nicely done.
• Starting now (8/8/09) Federal Contractors must use E-Verify to check the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees, as well as all current employees directly working on a contract. (SHRM, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Council on International Personnel, the HR Policy Association, and the Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc. attempted to prevent the launch of e- verify on the grounds that the employer costs were too high and procedures too labor intensive. They lost.) The FAQs on the subject are a fun read (not really) and may impact the timing of your background checks.
• Work sampling made easy. Despite the problems new startups typically have getting traction (including this one), we enjoyed a brief conversation with the founders of new college career sites, Groupereye, who caught the eye of Ben Gotkin (we do not however understand the name of this site) and FolioFly. The idea behind these sites is to have graduating seniors demonstrate their candidacy by proposing solutions to real work sample challenges. On the plus side, it separates out those who apply everywhere. On the minus, automating the screening is now a major challenge.
• On-Demand Recruiter Training on Sourcing. "Searchologist", Jim Stroud, an Atlanta sourcer with a flair for learning has a new series of elearning videos for recruiters. Low cost, useful and entertaining.
• Getting recruiters Mobile Enabled. RIM's Blackberry is certainly the default winner for enterprise access but Apple's iPhone has useful apps as well as noted in this excellent ERE article from Carmen Hudson

Copyright MMC Group © 1996-2009 all rights reserved.

CareerXroads
The Staffing Strategy Connection
By Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler
mmc@careerxroads.com - 732-821-6652