What can you say about an organization that has nearly $100 million in annual revenue, $150 million in the bank and a huge national membership but seems to be in no big hurry to name a new leader after the old one retires?

If this were a publicly traded company, stockholders and Wall Street would be getting pretty antsy and asking a lot of pointed questions. But this is a not-for-profit organization that isn’t bound by those silly business rules. Yes, I’m taking about SHRM—the Society for Human Resource Management.

I’m often critical of SHRM (as others are critical of me for being so critical), and it is largely because of things like this. To wit: letting the organization drift for six months after the old CEO announces her retirement. In other words, why hasn’t the SHRM board gotten its act together and hired someone already?

Sue Meisinger announced her retirement as the organization’s CEO on January 8  and said at the time that she would “remain at SHRM until a new CEO is selected to ensure a smooth transition.” I believe she was being honest when she said that because she thought the SHRM board of directors would move fairly quickly to find and name a successor.

In fact, I thought that it would happen at the annual conference in Chicago last month, because it offered the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to Meisinger, welcome the new leader and have a very visible passing of the baton from the old to the new. But clearly even Meisinger, the ultimate SHRM trouper, got tired of waiting for the board to act and her successor to be named. She left June 30, with SHRM saying at that time that they would have a new leader named by August 1. China Miner Gorman, SHRM’s chief operating officer, is the acting CEO.

I hope the SHRM board of directors follows through and names a new CEO this week, as they’ve indicated, but I’m not holding my breath. As I wrote from the SHRM conference last month, I think the board missed a marvelous opportunity to help the organization make a smooth transition to the future, but it would be well worth the wait if it was because the board was nailing down the perfect candidate to lead SHRM into the future.

And who would that person be?

That’s easy to answer: It should be someone like former SHRM chief executive Mike Losey, a strong businessperson with top leadership experience who knows how to drive an organization ahead. Or it could be a creative, experienced, strategic HR professional—someone like former Home Depot HR chief Dennis Donovan. (Donovan, it should be noted, already has a pretty interesting job—running HR for Cerberus Capital Management.) In any event, SHRM needs someone strongly grounded in business and managing people, and not a bureaucrat or organization professional.

How hard is this executive search, anyway? Do you have any ideas on whom SHRM should name CEO? Have you heard any chat on the grapevine about candidates? Feel free to send any thoughts to me at jhollon@workforce.com or add them to the bottom of this post. If the SHRM board fails to deliver a candidate by August 1, they may need some help from all of us getting this CEO thing figured out.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a big issue confronting Facebook “legal battle over whether Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ripped off Harvard classmates in launching his social-networking Web site,” as the San Jose Mercury News summarized it.

Well, Facebook got a big win in a California courtroom when a “federal judge in San Jose late Wednesday rejected a bid by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime adversaries to reopen a recent confidential settlement in a case,” the Mercury News reports.

“The principals of ConnectU, who claimed that Zuckerberg stole source code and ideas from them while they all were attending Harvard, were hoping to revisit a confidential settlement reached Feb. 22, based on new evidence that it said had surfaced in Zuckerberg’s instant message logs,” according to the paper’s latest story.

“But Judge James Ware rejected their bid, issuing his ruling two days after a hearing Monday that he ordered closed to the press. … Ware rejected ConnectU’s claims that Facebook had committed securities fraud in procuring the settlement … (and the judge) appeared to concur with a Massachusetts judge who portrayed ConnectU’s attempt to undo the settlement as ‘buyer’s remorse.’ ”

This still doesn’t change my opinion that Facebook and MySpace are overhyped by people who seem to have a singular goal of convincing the world that social networking sites are a really big deal in—and the clear future of—recruiting.

That remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Facebook can get on with its business life without a potential company-killing legal action hanging over its head.

I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook, or MySpace, for that matter. As such, I’ve never been swayed by the relentless overhyping of those who have tried to convince the world that Facebook and other such sites are the future of recruiting.

Some of the big job boards, such as CareerBuilder, Jobster and Yahoo HotJobs, currently have or are developing Facebook applications in hopes of helping recruiters and hiring managers reach out to Facebook users. As we reported here at Workforce Management, “More than half of the site’s users are out of college and many are seeking full-time jobs in a career-oriented environment, which makes them a coveted workforce group among employers searching for young talent.”

But now Facebook has a big problem: a “legal battle over whether Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ripped off Harvard classmates in launching his social networking Web site,” according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The case is currently being heard in a San Jose, California, courtroom. “At issue is whether ConnectU, founded by some of Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates, can reopen a settlement they reached with Facebook over their claims that he stole their ideas and code to start his company. ConnectU claims it found new evidence relevant to the case,” the story says.

The stakes, the newspaper notes, are enormous: “ ‘The worst case scenario is that Facebook doesn’t own its core code and that it’s been using someone else’s code for the foundation of its company. That could lead to damages that are catastrophic,’ said Eric Goldman, assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and director of SCU’s High Tech Law Institute. ‘In the worst case scenario, this could be a fight for Facebook’s life.’ ”

So, even if social networking does become a big deal in recruiting, Facebook may not be a part of it, depending on the outcome of this lawsuit. And even if Facebook prevails, it may be a costly victory. As the Mercury News points out, “Facebook appears to be racking up considerable legal bills. On Monday, Facebook attorney Neel Chatterjee was backed up by 10 colleagues from his firm, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe. ConnectU’s side included attorneys from Finnegan Henderson, which specializes in intellectual property, and attorneys from the high-powered Washington, D.C., firm Boies Schiller & Flexner. Attorneys representing two separate interested parties were also present.”

This is a case to watch, and it may be the one thing that can actually bring highflying Facebook back to earth. If so, it may be time to rethink all that hype about the site as the future of recruiting.

Lots of press releases drop into my e-mail each day, and most are eminently forgettable (Dear PR people: There is a lesson for you here …), but once in a while, one jumps out and offers up some great fodder for this blog, usually because they get into something incredibly dumb, ridiculous or both.

This one hits on both of those counts. It touts the thoughts of the director of an MBA program at a large university in the Northeast and the “trend” that “more and more business are utilizing ‘unusual’ questions as part of their interview process.”

“While we’ve all heard stories of the Microsoft interview questions (Why is a manhole cover round? etc.), more employers are using non-standard questions in their interviews,” the release states.

Although the press release is just flat wrong about the notion that non-standard interview questions are a new “trend”—I saw colleagues using them in the hiring process more than 20 years ago—that’s not what caught my eye. What grabbed me were the interview questions that were identified by this MBA program director as “actual tough/unusual interview questions.” Here are a few of the more ridiculous ones:

• If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be?

• If you could compare yourself with any animal, which would it be and why?

• If you were a car, what type would you be?

• If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be?

What kind of useful information could an interviewer possibly learn from a candidate by asking nutty questions like these? For example, the superhero question presupposes that everyone has a deep knowledge about the pantheon of superheroes and their unique qualities, and that’s a highly doubtful premise at best. On top of that, what kind of insight into a person are you going to get if they say if they would rather be the Human Torch than be Plastic Man? I can hardly imagine a serious interviewer listening to something like that with a straight face.

If you want to really find out more about a candidate, forget what kind of car a person thinks they would be and focus instead on behavioral questions that can really offer some insight into what kind of an employee they might be. This is what smart interviewers do, and questions that speak to a person’s behavior and how they might actually function in your organization not only give you a better read on the candidate, but also act as an effective predictor of future success on the job.

To be fair to the MBA program director being touted in the press release, that person also advises using behavioral interview questions to assess job candidates, but sadly, the focus on assessing a candidate’s behavior comes well after the list of goofy questions.

For my money, behavioral questions are the way to go, but really, don’t most interviewers make up their mind on a job candidate in the first two minutes of the interview? I’m not making a case for doing that, but really, I think it is a better indicator than forcing somebody hunting for work to have to prattle on about why they would like to be Wonder Woman.

If confession is good for the soul, as I was always told in Catholic school, then I have a big confession to make: I just don’t get recruitment process outsourcing.

We’ve written about RPO before, including this story, but I am one of those guys who wonder why, if people and talent are considered the lifeblood of any organization, a smart business would outsource the recruiting of that lifeblood to somebody else. It just never made much sense to me.

Well, I have finally had someone explain RPO in terms that even I could understand.

That someone is Paul Maxim, the global resourcing director at Unilever, the $90 billion global giant with more than 400 brands and 179,000 employees in more than 100 countries worldwide. Maxim put on a breakout session on “Recruiting & Retaining Talent Globally” in Orlando during Vurv Revolution 2008, the annual user group conference for Vurv, the Jacksonville, Florida-based technology company that specializes in talent management software.

Maxim made a compelling case for why outsourcing much of the recruitment process can really help. He talked about the benefits it creates for a company like Unilever that is hiring people in many different markets and particularly, in challenging talent environments like India and China.

Here’s what sold me: Maxim says that in the company’s revamped HR operating framework, despite outsourced recruiting, Unilever retains:

• Management of its “career brand,” resourcing strategy, and talent planning;
• The candidate assessment approach and the hiring decision; and,
• End-to-end responsibility for countries with low, permanent recruitment volume.

Accenture , Unilever’s RPO partner, handles the following:

• End-to-end resourcing services;
• Recruiting technology, deployment and management;
• Suppliers and vendors services management; and,
• All recruitment for jobs below “permanent” positions.

Accenture also centralizes the sourcing of candidates, schedules interviews, does pre-employment checks, facilitates pre-hiring paperwork and handles any other administrative processes. It also manages any other outside vendors to achieve both the best value and agreed-upon service levels while reducing the administrative burden.

The benefits to Unilever, according to Maxim, are a cost-effective, globally consistent service; detailed global reporting; and access to technology—in this case, the Vurv 7.1 recruitment system. In addition, Unilever employees get access to all internal job opportunities, a streamlined online application process and, for hiring managers and HR, regular communications to internal applicants on the hiring process.

More important, it allows Unilever’s HR business partners to be “free to provide strategic services to their management team” at the country level.
If that is what is truly gained with RPO–a greater focus on high-level strategy and the most critical components of the recruiting and hiring process—then I think I finally get RPO.