“How much would I have to pay you if I told you tomorrow you were going to die?” asks U.S. Army Col. Donald Bartholomew, director for marketing and strategic outreach for recruiting command.

With a question like that, it really puts the “typical” recruiting challenges in perspective. That’s the takeaway message after listening to how recruiters in the U.S. Army are working to recruit soldiers.

Col. Bartholomew spoke at the ERE Expo 2007 in San Diego, noting that Army recruiting has plenty of its own special challenges. For starters, about 70% of people are ineligible because of medical, “moral,” weight, or other issues such as asthma, flat feet, eye or hearing loss, and color-blindness.

Candidates for the Army accept risk to themselves, a long commitment, lost opportunities in a good economy, and separation from family.

Col. Bartholomew says their benefits, however, include training, values, education, experience, pride, and an opportunity to make a difference. Not to mention the Army’s little-publicized benefits, such as 30 days’ paid vacation.

Of the rank-and-file recruiters, he says 69% of are selected and 31% volunteer for the job. It’s a three-year job, and about 47% have recent combat experience.

The Army trains people in six weeks and four days to be a recruiter.

Some of its recent solutions include an increased incentive pay for recruiters, as well as a brand-new referral bonus program.

The Army also increased local marketing dollars. The Army had been spending on national advertising, but it increased its local budget from $22 million to $79 million to spend more locally.

It is also pre-screening people through numerous technology applications. Sergeant STAR, an artificial intelligence on the Go Army site, makes it easy to chat with recruiters online.

And even more exciting…the “Virtual Army Experience” brings tents around the country to provide simulations.

The Army is also finding new ways to reach out to different generations.

On one end of the spectrum, the age limit was raised, allowing recruits a “second chance” to join if it is something they had wanted to do when younger but hadn’t.

And to get to the targeted 17-24 generation, the Army created a MySpace.com page to direct traffic to the Army website.

“We’re getting tons of hits on the Army MySpace page every single day,” he says.

Despite earlier concerns that others could post negative comments on the public site that are against Army values, he has seen only a positive effect.

“Sometimes if you take some risks, especially within the bureaucracy of the Army, it pays off,” he adds.

HRchitect says Taleo’s on a roll, winning deals including Blockbuster and others.

Qualigence is doing work for Cisco, helping it and Cisco resellers better find passive candidates; this is happening as Cisco, which had outsourced much of its recruiting, brings it back in-house.

Nancy Kato of TiVo semi-jokes with Jason Warner of Google during the TiVo presentation: “Is it true you have 800 recruiters?” Warner replies with a “no comment.”

Earlier, in Todd Carlisle’s presentation (from Google), Carlisle provides his Hierarchy of Attention Spans: Recruiters’ attention spans range from an hour to infinity; a staffing manager/director, 30 minutes; a VP, 15 minutes; and a CEO, three minutes.

The Capital Group, a great Los Angeles employer where people stick around for decades, is (slowly) coming out of its long-standing and very thick shell, sending recruiters to the Expo and generally starting to raise its profile as a sought-after employer.

From the you-thought-you’ve-heard-it-all department, one vendor here, Spirited Sales Leaders, places former varsity cheerleaders into sales jobs.

One attendee sported a button saying “Ask me about Climber.com,” but when I asked her, she forgot what the company does, saying they had asked her to wear the button and told her about some sort of a $500 prize. “It’s funny,” the attendee said, “but I can’t remember what they just told me they do, but I can remember, from decades ago, Two All Beef Patties Special Sauce Lettuce Cheese Pickles Onions on a Sesame Seed Bun.”

Glenn Gutmacher notes during the 4:30 p.m. roundtables that he has 4,500+ 1st degree contacts on LinkedIn. Then again, Shally has 10,087.

A 20-year W.L. Gore veteran, Barbara Pizzala introduces herself at the ERE Expo presentation as the global leader of recruiting.

She quickly adds, “But titles don’t really matter at Gore.”

A repeat winner on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” Pizzala explains that “team” is a big word at Gore, which averages 7% to 9% turnover.

“If someone is not a fit, it’s usually pretty obvious pretty quickly. When it works, it’s awesome, and we have very engaged people who stay a long time,” she says.

Best known for its GORE-TEX fabrics, the company’s annual revenues near $2 billion. Gore’s four divisions include industrial products, fabrics, medical products, and electronic products.

The company has approximately 7,500 associates in 45 locations around the world. “Our culture is experiential. It takes living it for years before you really get it,” she says.

“As recruiters, we have to constantly set expectations for candidates, so we get pretty good at describing what life is like at Gore,” she says.

The first thing you need to know about Gore, she says, is that “hardly anything is required.”

“We obey the law, but we don’t have bosses. No one has authority to tell anyone what to do. We make our own commitments, and we’re responsible for keeping those commitments,” she says.

What guide employees’ actions are principles and core actions, something that is taught early on in the life of a new associate.

“We look for good judgment, maturity, and a track record of making good decisions. People bring their brains to work,” she says. “We guide them with some things, but hardly anything is in a policy. We don’t even have an employee handbook!”

“We put an amazing amount of energy into building trusting relationships. If you don’t see the value of relationships, forget even coming. Trust is the grease that makes everything work at Gore. Until recently, we operated mostly in small, local teams; it was very easy to build trust in that environment.”

Gore has managed to expand successfully in a truly global nature…certainly not an easy task in its “policy-less” culture. Pizzala doesn’t seem fazed, adding that it’s simply a matter of working hard to build those types of trusting relationships around the world.

Highlights from Arte Nathan’s fantastic keynote presentation:

On recruiters’ sometimes reluctance to do direct sourcing: “We’re there to steal people’s employees.”

On the frequent talk of “driving people” to your web site. “How about if you attract people to your site, how about if you attract people to your company?”

On assessing people: “We trained hiring managers to play poker — it’s a game of people - reading people - it’s about the bluff. A lot of interviewing is about the bluff.”

On what he told Steve Wynn when Wynn doubted if cooks and others would use the Internet to apply for jobs: “I’m willing to bet my career on it.”

On PeopleSoft: “Having PeopleSoft is like plugging your laptop in the tree.”

On recruiters: “Those are the real champions. They’re the heroes in our organizations.”

On drug tests: “I’m sure not sure why employers have to do drug tests.”

On what he said to someone who asked him what his “alternate dispute resolution” policy was: “I said, don’t have disputes. Train your managers to resolve the dispute.”

On convincing CEOs of the cost of turnover. “You have to know the financials, you have to know the economics. Track the cost of losing, track the cost of failure. You better be all about numbers. They don’t give a damn about time to hire.”

On what he learned from the slow hiring process in China. “We learned to have patience — Something we don’t have here in America.”

The San Diego conference opens with a larger crowd than expected, people signing up for workshops on the spot, and shuttle busses running because the Marriott filled up.

Pierpoint, which handles recruitment outsourcing out of Argentina, holds a party in honor of its client Aimco, which hit the jackpot at the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards.

Soon-to-be-released statistics from ExecuNet will show recruiters very confident about the job market, and, according to VP Lauryn Franzoni, ready to spend money on hiring. “They’re putting their money where their mouths are,” she says.

Ben Gotkin, from RSM McGladrey, says there’s a massive shortage in the public-accounting field.

Ladd Richland, CEO of the outsourcing firm CRI, says business is on fire.

Nice-guy Mike Temkin, from Shaker, says the job market is decent, but not red-hot — noting that the U.S. must create a large number of jobs to keep up with population growth.

We would like to congratulate winners and all of the finalists for the
2007 Recruiting Excellence Awards:

BEST DIVERSITY PROGRAM
* Compuware Corporation - WINNER
* Sodexho - Finalist

BEST CORPORATE CAREERS WEBSITE
* Starbucks - WINNER
* Citigroup - Finalist
* FedEx - Finalist
* Rackspace Managed Hosting - Finalist

MOST INNOVATIVE EMPLOYEE REFERRAL PROGRAM
* Tenet Healthcare - WINNER
* Fair Isaac - Finalist

BEST EMPLOYER BRAND
* Intuit - WINNER
* Merck & Co., Inc. - Finalist
* Starbucks - Finalist

MOST EFFECTIVE USE OF STAFFING METRICS
* AIMCO - WINNER
* Microsoft - Finalist

MOST INNOVATIVE RECRUITING PROCESS OR DEPARTMENTAL STRUCTURE
* Whirlpool Corporation - WINNER
* AIMCO - Finalist
* HealthEast - Finalist

BEST EMPLOYEE RETENTION PROGRAM/PRACTICES
* AIMCO - WINNER
* I Love Rewards - Finalist

BEST COLLEGE RECRUITING PROGRAM
* Ernst & Young LLP - WINNER
* Microsoft - Finalist
* Qualcomm - Finalist

MOST STRATEGIC USE OF RECRUITMENT TECHNOLOGY
* Electronic Arts Inc. - WINNER
* AIMCO - Finalist

RECRUITER OF THE YEAR
* Achuthan Nair, Wipro Technologies - WINNER
* Brian Krueger, Unisys Corp. - Finalist

The ceremony and dinner was sponsored by Monster, the leading online global careers network, and hosted by the company’s vice president of alliances, Neal Bruce.

This is the third annual Recruiting Excellence Awards program, which happens each year at the ERE Expo spring conference, the leading recruitment and talent management event for the industry.

The 2008 awards program will take place next April in San Diego at ERE Expo 2008 Spring.

ERE caught up with Joel Cheesman at the ERE Expo Tuesday, a day before what Cheesman calls “The Main Event.”

ERE: “Would you say there are job boards here at the Expo that might not be around in a few years?”

JC: “Yes, I think a lot are going to have problems. Globally, the economy is strong. So, the same economic tragedy of 9/11 isn’t going to happen, but everything I hear is a lot of the verticals are having trouble making money.”

ERE: “If one vertical job board is going to survive, which is it?”

JC: “Of the three that came out in 2005, Jobster, SimplyHired, and Indeed, from an outsider’s perspective, it’s Indeed. They are true to their core, run by guys who know the industry, and they stayed small. They are also doing the best job driving search traffic. Jobster has done a good job with profiles. So it’s driving some traffic. But I would venture to say times are tough for all three. Indeed has $20 million. But Paul Forrester told me they had 200 clients. So let’s say, on average, they’re making $1,000 per client, per month. That’s a $2.4 million business. A lot of local job sites are pulling that in. So, to me, that tells me Indeed is not taking off.”

ERE: “And this is the strongest?”

JC: “I said survive, not that it’s the strongest of the three. I like to think they all have exit strategies. Whether that is to sell to someone or exist under different management, time will tell.”

ERE: “What are the companies you are referring to, that need exit strategies? Any certain genre, such as job boards or social networking?”

JC: “I would say Jobster is probably hurting. Common sense tells you that when you give stuff away for free, you’re not evolving into a profitable company.

ERE: “What is Jobster — a referral company, a networking site for candidates, or something else?”

JC: “That’s one of the questions I might ask Jason Goldberg tomorrow. If you polled everyone here and asked them about Jobster’s position, you would get a different answer from everyone.”

ERE: “And SimplyHired?”

JC: “With SimplyHired, a lot of things they have done are out of reaction to things not being great, like throwing up banner ads that are not targeted. Selling jobs is hard. It’s convincing an HR person why they should use your site. SimplyHired’s relationship with MySpace is interesting, but it needs to make money. In the grand scheme of News Corp., it’s not that big. I think MySpace is going into classified space.”

ERE: “Is Jobster getting together with Facebook or MySpace?”

JC: “I don’t see why. Jobster is a great board, with great financial backing. For example, they have some Microsoft connections. Microsoft is in a buying frenzy. The time might be right to go to Microsoft and say, ‘Take your live expo and add in social networking.’ They’re still ticked about Murdoch getting MySpace.”

Less than a year ago, Safeco’s recruiting department looked a bit different than now. It didn’t exist.

It’s true. Safeco launched its centralized recruiting model in July of 2006. The 7,500-employee insurance company now has what National Recruiting Manager Cynthia Xamonthiene considers a well-oiled recruiting team. All of the firm’s 14 recruiters (a dozen of whom will be roaming around the ERE Expo here in San Diego) report to Xamonthiene, as well as three sourcing specialists.

Xamonthiene says it’s a “recruiter-centric model” that allows four recruiting coordinators to spend their time getting administrative work off the backs of recruiters, and allows Xamonthiene time to spend removing roadblocks from recruiters. The recruiters are divided both by geography as well as by function, such as legal recruiting and IT recruiting. “The recruiters really are recruiting,” she says. Safeco was able to attract Ginny Eagle (who Xamonthiene calls “amazing”) to head the team. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things people told us they liked most about last fall’s Hollywood, Florida, conference, was the roundtable discussion time. We’re doing it again.

Here’s how it works: if you choose (no need to decide now) that session at 4:30 on Wednesday, you’ll get a chance to talk to your peers about timely issues. There’s not a lot of structure here. You’ll pick a topic, go to a table to discuss that topic. A moderator will ask table participants to name their biggest challenges, and when that’s done, group members will offer suggestions for addressing the challenges. For example, if the topic is “Hiring Salespeople” you might say your biggest challenge is “getting people to move to San Diego where housing is so expensive.” Others in the group will offer any suggestions they have.

OK, with that in mind, here are two questions for you:

1. What issues are you most interesting having as roundtable discussion topics?
2. Are you interested in being a moderator? You don’t have to prepare – just facilitate discussion.