ERE’s daily article hits a chord with me today – Understanding Why Fast Hiring Is Critical to Recruiting Success.  We have been beaten down of late due to some slow-moving hiring processes.  The author, Dr. John Sullivan, provides many suggestions for putting metrics to your hiring process.  However, I found these stats to be the compelling reasons why you should worry about the speed of your hiring process:

One large accounting firm recently found that if they didn’t act within 22 days, their chances of landing “high-demand” candidates decreased by nearly 90%. A large electronics firm researched the issue and found that the very best in their field (the top 10% of candidates) were often gone within 10 days.

The logic of speed hiring is simple: if Tiger Woods decided to leave his golf team, he would be in such demand that he might be in and then out of the job market in as little as a few hours.

A second reason for speed hiring is the economic loss to the corporation of having position vacancies. Obviously, if an airline has insufficient pilots for each of its planes, it would lose revenue from each of those canceled flights.

We deal in sales positions only so we have a skewed perspective, perhaps.  But I am always caught by a company’s indifference towards an open sales territory/position.  These are real costs to a company, but we have seen some take an inordinate amount of time to schedule interviews, follow up with candidates or come to yes/no decisions.

The present economy probably gives some companies a false sense of security.  The economy is slow so there must be plenty of candidates and few opportunities.  This relaxed approach will have to change quickly as the Boomers retire and more positions flood a market with fewer candidates.

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Inc.com chronicles one Gen Y marketing campaign by BMW that I have not heard of.  The opening sentence forewarned me:

Generation Y’s indifference to traditional forms of marketing and advertising has some big companies and their ad agencies scrambling for creative ways to reach and engage this demographic.

Engagement is the key these days, isn’t it?  If you read the marketing campaign in the short article, you won’t read about magazine ads, TV commercials or radio spots.  Instead there are short films on YouTube, Facebook pages and micro-websites.

I think the author best sums up this new marketing approach (my bold):

It seems to me that the campaign is less about the actual product than it is about delivering a specific message to a target market: we understand what gets your attention, so we’re going to plant our brand where you live, give you fun stuff to look at and play around with online, and we’re going to facilitate an ongoing conversation that will engage you far longer and more intimately than a 30-second television commercial.

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Anesthesiologists.  From Forbes.com’s America’s Best- And Worst-Paying Jobs:

…the mean annual salary for America’s 31,030 anesthesiologists is $192,780, up 4.6% from a year earlier.

Not surprisingly, the top 9 jobs are all in the medical field (surgeon, orthodontists, etc.).

Oh yes, and the bottom end of the scale:

The lowest paid of all? People who cook, prepare and serve in fast-food joints, followed by dishwashers, busboys and the folks who shampoo your hair.

I am proud to say that I was a dishwasher in high school.  Technically, we called it a “dishlicker” and we were at the lowest end of the totem pole.  That is the type of job that should be on Dirty Jobs.  I can’t describe the funk that permeated my clothes.  Despite my mom’s extreme laundry efforts, she could not remove the odor.

Nasty.

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