Make Your Metrics Useful Making metrics useful seems to be where most people get off track. A metric should be telling, regardless of whether it is intended to report performance or diagnose the performance of a process. Unfortunately, many metrics in use today simply don’t tell you anything of value. …

Employees Are Not Owned by the Corporation Poaching employees is not stealing, because employees are never owned. I literally laugh out loud when I hear individuals say that it is illegal or unethical to poach or steal employees from another company. Let me be crystal clear on this: Employees are …

Dan Hilbert, Manager of Recruiting When you meet Dan Hilbert, manager of recruiting at Valero, you see right away that he is someone who thinks differently from the typical recruiting professional. Among the many things that prepared him for his current role were four years of Jesuit training, an all-male …

The Problem Is Here Today Although many experts are talking about a shortage of talent that will hit in 2006, in many regions and industries the shortage is already occurring. Job posting sites that target recruiters, like ERE's job board, have seen a marked increase in the number of job …

“Disruptive Technology” and Strategic “Disruptive Recruiting” Google, through its branding, PR, and recruiting efforts, has made itself so well known and attractive to professionals from every industry and university that they have essentially changed the game of recruiting forever. If you know anything about technology, you know that people in …

Google has plans to nearly double its workforce, growing from approximately 5,000 employees to 10,000 employees in the near future. The recruiting structure that they have designed to enable such growth is, like most successful recruiting organizations, primarily a centralized operations model.

But Aren’t Best Practices Shared Already? I had often suspected that within large corporations best practices in people management were not being shared throughout the organization, a suspicion that was later proven time and time again through my advisory work in the area of employment branding.  While working with such …

“Our #1 opportunity is to build a competitive advantage, not to build benefit plans for our organization” –VP of HR Cisco I’ve met/ worked for over 100 VP’s of HR and dozens of CEO’s over the last few years and although there are clearly exceptions, I’ve found that CEO’s and …

HR “work” can be classified into five distinct levels from the basic to the most strategic. Those levels include: Level One –Information Management and Basic Transactions Every HR department must provide basic information, answer employee and manager questions and complete operational level transactions. These most would agree are the oldest …

Why it's essential to avoid layoffs Laying off thousands of workers is not only embarrassing, it's also expensive. Because the company has invested thousands of dollars in recruiting and training these employees, it makes no sense to release them in large numbers. The negative publicity related to the lay off …