Agenda: Privacy legislation and career site data.

Participants:

• VP Staffing
• Counsel
• Privacy Officer
• CIO
• Marketing Communications
• Applicant Tracking System Vendor

Summary:

New laws, like California SB 1386 (in effect 1 July 2003), affect what data you collect, keep, how you use it, and who gets to to see it. We do all of that through our career site. Where do we stand? What's our plan? 

Topics:

The rules:

• What laws and regulations apply to our pre-employment data now?
• What are coming soon? 
• Which jurisdictions apply to our online staffing process?

Our behavior.

• What data do we collect now?
• How are we protecting the data electronically? Physically? Procedurally? Is it enough? 
• Does our responsibility start on web sites that collect information on our behalf, like job boards? 
• Do we share information with contractors and business partners? How can we determine if they compliant? Is that a new condition of working with us?
• What can we do to both serve our recruiting goals while meeting job seeker needs for privacy? 
• Will this change our data sharing policy within the organization? Across sister organizations?
• Do we have procedures and a mechanism for user notification? Have we tested the mechanism?
• How do we communicate our actions in a way consistent with our employment brand?
• How flexible is our ATS? How fast can changes be turned on?
• What is our data retention policy? Does it need updating? 
• Is our current privacy policy sufficient?

ROI:

• What is our risk exposure? 
• What are the direct and indirect costs of compliance?
• What is the effect, positive or negative, on recruiting?
• What upside potential can we earn by being compliant sooner and better than other employers? Are there stricter standards worth bragging about to potential employees?

Our process:

• What should we do to stay ahead of privacy compliance changes?

References:

• Official California State Government site on SB 1386
• California Attorney General site on SB 1386 notifications
• Text of SB 1386
• Epic, privacy advocates.
• InfoWorld article: Leading the charge into privacy legislation
• InformationWeek article: California Security Law Background: The state passes a tough law regarding public disclosure of security breaches after a hacker breaks in to a state employee database.
• Threat Focus, consulting firm. California SB 1386 mandates public disclosure of computer-security breaches in which confidential information of ANY California resident MAY have been compromised. The law covers every enterprise, public or private, doing business with California residents. Come July 1, 2003, those who fail to disclose that a security breach has occurred could be liable for civil damages or face class actions.
• "95 percent of people who use the Internet at home think they should have a legal right to know everything about the information that websites collect from them." CIO article. Annenberg news release (pdf) and the Americans and Online Privacy: The System is Broken report (pdf). 

Use an Emblog Agenda to jump start your thinking on an important topic. For internal use only.

A few employment brand life cycle metrics.

Today's Deploy webinar is over. People didn't throw tomatoes (that I could see), the questions were sharp, and I had fun.

One caller asked what he should measure about his company's employment site. I said accessibility. But he clearly wanted operational measures. Here are a few.

Conversion and Abandonment Rates.

Is your abandonment rate 95-98%? Nearly everyone landing on your career home page would rather be somewhere else?

Then your home page is the first thing to fix. The perfect search is useless if nobody uses it. You have to give people reasons to stay, give hope that they can complete their mission for this visit.

Once you start measuring CR and AR, go deeper:

• Rate by source of referral. 
• Rate by occupational category.
• Rate by browser version (you'll be surprised).
• Rate by geography (if you ask, IT should be able to tell you from which metro area people are connecting).

Goal Accomplishment.

Pick a user goal. For instance "find out if there are jobs for people like me here." You can measure the time it takes. The effort, in clicks. The abandonment rate as people try and fail.

Experiment. Try a change, maybe a "we're hiring n of X" link on the front page. How does this change user behavior? Are some people clicking on it, instead of leaving? Can you cut the time people spend before making commitments? Shorten the distance from entry to goal?

Pick 10 goals that lead to candidate behaviors you want. (Choose wisely, please.) And measure goal accomplishment over time.

Speed.

Most people connect to the net via dial-up, especially when looking for work from home or a library.

I just checked the career home page load times for 5 large US employers (2.8 million employees among them). 3 seconds is acceptable. 6 seconds is very slow. 9 seconds convinces a user your site is broken, provoking back-buttons or checking if the url is correct.

Over dial-up: 26, 20, 27, 26, and 14 seconds. Just for splash pages that don't let users do anything.

The same pages from your corporate office? 0,0,0,0,0.

Measure how fast every page on your site loads. Talk with your webmaster and ATS vendor about web site optimization. You can contract for reports that measure how fast your site loads, and how reliably, from different parts of the US or the world.

Make your site fast. Speed makes up for a multitude of sins, since users can afford the time to work around design problems.

Hope this helps.

Webinar today, a case of stage fright, anger, and hope.

I have butterflies.

Giving my first webinar today. New subject for me. New medium.

People can't see me and I can't see them, just the droning sound of my voice until Q&A.

I'm an old hand at stand-up presentos. Been a professional IT trainer. Hundreds of sessions, thousands of attendees. No rational reason for performance anxiety.

But still...

My audience: hiring managers.

My thesis:

The way you hire today (advertise on job boards so active job seekers fill out your forms) is broken.

The key is to change job seeker behavior.

The best place to do that is your company job site. Low cost. Access. Effective.

Good manners and respect are the keys to changing beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. Google on persuasive technology for technical details.

So your web site becomes a natural magnet for the people you're seeking (workforce demand forecasting, anyone?).

And a magnet that kindly drives off those whose employment needs won't be met.

Taking control of your company employment site is about wrestling your destiny back into your hands.

My commercial motive?

My firm, Candidate Voice, certifies employer sites from a job seeker's perspective.

The better to measure, analyze, and plan how well you serve or abuse job seekers.

Flat fee, hard numbers, actionable plan. Call me.

My personal motive?

Anger.

I'm angry that the proxy for HR, the employment site, does such a rude and incompetent job that it would be fired if it was a human being.

But it isn't. After five years.

I'm angry that millions of job seekers are treated with disrespect.

So much so that youngsters think of job boards and career sites as time wasters.

That the same technology that opened up the world to companies is raising walls around them, making them cold and impersonal.

I'm frustrated that human resources has become less humane in tough times.

And more bureaucratic.

I believe that many staffing people got into HR to help people.

They must be frustrated as hell.

I'm bewildered that most HR people feel helpless to change things.

I'm angry that vendors think adding a browser cookie to bureaucratic workflow substitutes in any way for a human relationship.

I'm angrier that any HR pro would think so.

I'm angry at the agony perpetuated in labor markets by all the employers who optimize their internal workflow at the expense of 50 million U.S. job seekers every year.

With sites that are

Unresponsive.

That make job seekers ineffective.

That waste lifetimes of precious time and attention.

That are intrusive and one sided.

That demand all of your information and share none of theirs.

That don't treat job seekers like adults.

That don't behave with simple courtesies, like greetings, farewells, and thank yous.

I'm angry.

And hopeful.

Staffing pros are getting frustrated too. And angry. And afraid. And ambitious.

Motivated for change.

I'm hopeful that lessons from IT, and logistics, and marketing will be discovered and applied. Things that work.

I'm hopeful because 400 people signed up for my webinar.

In three hours.

Hmmm.

Don't think about it, Phil.

Just do it.

Thanks for listening.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Faces Looming Labor Shortage

I saw George Will's commentary, Pittsburgh Seeks to Return to Its Immigrant Roots, on ABC This Week.

Pittsburgh is no longer a "steel city." Its largest employer is the University of Pittsburgh and its medical center.

But like the rest of America, it still needs a steady infusion of immigrants.

However, immigrants go where other immigrants from their country have gone. And when European immigration stopped, Pittsburgh did not become a destination for immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

Americans who complain about immigration do not know what Pittsburgh knows: We still need immigrants. Always will.

Duquesne University's Center for Competitive Workforce Development started the Pittsburgh International Communities Project. From a PittsburghLIVE.com article:

A Duquesne University report released this summer says that as older people retire and fewer young ones are available to take their place, the region may face a shortage of as many as 125,000 workers within a decade, limiting growth and development. The shortage could reach 400,000 in 20 years.

Good to read about policy makers taking the baby bust seriously. Does your employment site reach out to immigrant communities? If not, why not?

U R FIRD

Technology is most liberating when you don't worry about the future.

2500 UK Workers Sacked by Text Message
Australians like to believe we lead the world in all things related to technology, and at least in the bad business department, that seems to be the case.

The most recent example is the cowardly use of SMS text messages to sack staff. I have to wonder if the decision by failed UK personal injury claims litigator, The Accident Group (TAG), to sack its 2500 staff by mobile phone text message (SMS) was inspired by the February 18 sacking by SMS of Australian worker, John Eid. If that was the case, then TAG's directors may have thought that, unlike in the Eid case, no penalty would have to be paid for their actions.

"Its official, you no longer work for JNI Traffic Control and u have forfided any arrangements made," read the message sent to Eid by a director of the company.

Compare that to what TAG staff received in the early hours of the morning according to reports in the British press: "sorry folks im gutted 4 u good luck in ur future careers mike", read the SMS from TAG's regional manager.

TAG's collapse comes a year after the implosion of competitor, Claims Direct, which was attacked for its US chainsaw management style.

Aren't you glad this isn't on your CV?