Last week, SourceCon ran the first part of an article series on Twitter’s Hiring Strategies, outlining some of the significant new hires Twitter has made this year. I also showed you the video that Twitter put out to help its recruiting efforts. I was able to grab about 30 minutes with Twitter’s director of recruiting, Oliver Ryan, and talk to him about some of the recruiting and hiring practices that Twitter has in place for its internal efforts. While Twitter has talked with several tech media publishers about their recruiting video, this is the first time it has talked about their recruiting practices directly with the HR, recruiting, and sourcing community.
Oliver Ryan, Director of Recruiting (or “People Wrangler” as it states in his LinkedIn profile), joined Twitter about a year ago. When he arrived, there were no full-time recruiting resources at Twitter, and total headcount was only around 40 employees. Since then, Ryan was offered a full-time position and the company has grown to over 250 employees, with the recruiting team now at eleven people.
keep reading…
You’ve heard that old saw that if something quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck? Might as well apply it to the U.S. economy.
Today’s Economic Trends Index from The Conference Board declined slightly from July. It now stands at 96.7. In July it was 97.4.
Obviously, that’s not good news, though a .7 drop in an index that is up 9.4 percent in a year might be ignorable if all it did was quack. But the Index is also walking like the duck it is. For the first time since March 2009 seven of the eight components that go into the index turned negative.
The Conference Board reported the weakening indicators were: Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get”; Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now; Part-Time Workers for Economic Reasons; Job Openings; Industrial Production; and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales. keep reading…
Is there nothing new under the sun?
Sun Tzu was an ancient Chinese general. His Art of War is the oldest military treatise in the world.
He thought spies were an essential part of war — and where is Sourcecon being held in 2010?
At the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. (on September 28 and 29).
When I saw that, it made me want to go back to Sun Tzu and see if there is anything he can tell us about intelligence gathering today. keep reading…
It has taken many years to get to this point, but almost everyone in recruiting has come to understand the necessity of metrics. Unfortunately however, the vast majority of metrics in use today have little impact because they were not designed to effectively “get the attention” of executives.
The issue isn’t metrics in general; at firms like Microsoft and Google, executive team meetings are often referred to as the equivalent of “math camp.” While other firms may not be as “geeky,” metrics rule the boardroom. The lack of interest in HR metrics also cannot be attributed to HR being an overhead function, as that state is true for both finance and supply chain management, neither of which fail to garner attention.
The real issue few pay attention to HR metrics is a simple one: most simply are not compelling. Let’s face it: HR is rarely a strategic priority, and due to years of bureaucracy and failure to meet expectations, it is something that most managers and executives would rather deal with less rather than more unless it is immediately relevant to their business. keep reading…
The unemployment rate rose for the first time in four months in August, while private sector employers added 67,000 jobs. Overall, the U.S. economy lost 54,000 non-farm jobs during the month, almost all of it attributable to the continuing layoff of temporary census workers.
The numbers released by the U.S. Labor Department this morning continue a pattern seen for months. The unemployment rate has moved in a range from 9.7 percent in January to the 9.5 percent it has been at since June. The private sector, meanwhile, has been steadily, if slowly adding jobs. Government, is cutting workers.
So while the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report is essentially more of the same, Wall Street is reacting positively. Stocks opened strong with the Dow zooming 100 points in the early trading. Investors appear to be looking at the half-full side of the glass.
Economists were expecting a gloomier report. Estimates varied, as they do each month, depending on what analysts and economists are surveyed; however, the job loss was anticipated to be north of 100,000.
One particularly positive sign is that the private sector number was about twice what was forecast. Following Thursday’s report of fewer new claims for unemployment benefits, the second consecutive drop after weeks of gains, the improvement is at least that, an improvement. keep reading…
The company behind recruiter blogging site RecruitingBlogs.com has joined forces with the owner of Recruiter.com to launch a new company and eventually turn the long-dormant site into a multi-featured portal.
The announcement was made today via press release and — appropriately — blog posts.
Jason Davis, the founder of RecruitingBlogs, has also relinquished his CEO title, promoting Miles Jennings to the job, while taking the job of EVP of Strategic Development. Ashley Saddul, a domain name trader who owned the Recruiter.com name, joins the new company as CTO.
“This is a big move,” Davis told me in a conversation this afternoon. “We’re going to be building out a network. Everything is going to be tied together under Recruiter.com.” keep reading…
It’s not a new phenomenon, but watch for the use of the cloud, and also the crowd, to grow in the coming months as more vendors vie for your cloud/crowd-recruiting business.
Hajo Engelke is trying it out. Engelke has started up an unusual company in Durham, North Carolina. It’s a website where you build your own cereal, clicking on cranberries, dried apples, pears, pineapples, and so on, add them to either granola or corn flakes, and voila, place your order.
A novel idea for a company, originating out of UNC’s business school, but you haven’t heard of it until now. So Engelke’s looking for someone to market it using a viral campaign. This weekend he plans on posting the project on a website called 31Projects. With that site, top, pre-screened students will have about three to five weeks to submit their suggestions for the build-your-own-cereal campaign, and Engelke will pick a winner. He’ll pay the winner in the neighborhood of $25/hour for implementing the campaign, and if all goes well, may end up hiring them.
Engelke heard about 31Projects through the Triangle area of North Carolina, where he says “everybody knows everybody through one or two connections.” 31Projects will launch next week. It has several hundred MBA and grad students signed up in its network, and has tested it with employers, including a non-profit research institute. Later, it hopes to expand, using undergraduate students as well. keep reading…
In the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I take a four-part look at credit checks in the employment process. I outline the current federal limitations on an employers’ ability to obtain and use information regarding an applicant’s or employee’s credit history. I delineate the current proposed amendments to federal statutes. I look at recently enacted state legislation bearing on an employer’s use of credit reports. Finally, I suggest possible options for employers in dealing with this fast-changing legal landscape.
For these purposes online, I’m just going to tackle the fourth part — your options for handling federal and state legislation in flux. keep reading…
The U.S. lost 10,000 private sector jobs in August, according to the ADP National Employment Report.
Released this morning, the report says the loss came from small and medium sized employers (those with up to 499 employees). Large employers added 1,000 workers.
Adding to the bad news, the report also adjusted the July numbers down. ADP now says the private sector added 37,000 jobs in July, 5,000 less than the preliminary number released early last month.
However, Wall Street much preferred the report from the Institute for Supply Management, which showed a sharp and unexpected rise in manufacturing production. The purchasing managers’ index rose to 56.3 in August, from 55.5 in July. Economists had expected it to fall to 52.5. keep reading…
Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan
HR software maker Kenexa will have a lot to talk about at its annual Kenexa World Conference later this month in Philadelphia.
That’s because Kenexa announced today that it has agreed to acquire compensation specialist Salary.com in an all cash offer for $80 million, or $4.07 per share.
According to a press release from Kenexa, “The agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of both companies, and Salary.com’s board intends to recommend that the Salary.com stockholders tender their shares in the offer.”
Salary.com, based in Massachusetts, makes software that helps businesses and individuals manage pay and performance, and, is very well-known in the HR space. Kenexa says that it expects to close the transaction for Salary.com in the fourth quarter of 2010. keep reading…
With the acquisition of HotJobs by Monster, Beyond.com now becomes the U.S. affiliate of The Network, a worldwide group of job boards that distributes employer ads globally.
Beyond, itself a network of some 15,000 employment sites, replaces HotJobs. The former Yahoo job board joined The Network in 2004 as the affiliate for the US and Canada.
The Network itself was founded in 2002 by two United Kingdom job boards — StepStone and TotalJobs. They brought in the Swiss board, Jobs.ch, and Irishjobs. Today, The Network claims a presence in 121 countries. It has 36 members, with multiple local job boards, and an especially strong presence in Europe.
Recruiters work through the local affiliates to post individual jobs to the network. With increased volume, direct access is provided.
Beyond.com, based in Pennsylvania, operates niche and regional job boards under a variety of names. Its national site is Beyond.com.
It’s numbers week in the U.S. again. The time of the month when the official government employment data makes its appearance, influencing stock markets worldwide, and corporate hiring decisions nationally.
Predictions of what Friday’s labor report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will show are already beginning to appear. A Dow Jones Newswire survey of economists says that on average they expect the U.S. to have lost 110,000 jobs during August. That’s mostly due to the continuing layoff of temporary Census workers. keep reading…
A group calling itself the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition is asking the Internet addressing authority to reconsider its decision to allow the use of almost any name in conjunction with a .jobs extension.
Composed of several high-profile organizations and companies, the Coalition claims the .jobs expansion and the plan for allocating the new names violates the charter from the Internet Association for Assigned Names and Numbers, which spells out some of the terms for issuing a .jobs address.
The charter gives Employ Media, the domain registrar, the right to issue addresses, and gives the Society for Human Resource Management policy authority. It also sets the conditions for issuing addresses with a .jobs extension.
The Coalition says Employ Media’s plan, detailed in its RFP instructions, to allow third parties to use .jobs addresses for purposes that might including running a job board is inconsistent with the charter and exceeds the approval it won from SHRM in June. keep reading…
In the September Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I write about branding in a way that, hopefully, you haven’t thought about before.
There has been a lot of talk about employment branding recently and how organizations are dedicating more and more of their resources toward their branding intitiatives. In all the noise and in the race to create the best brand something essential not just to recruiting but for the entire entry-to-exit HR process was lost. Keeping promises! That’s right — keeping promises. It’s not as boring a subject as it might seem, and I make no ethical/soft arguments toward that end in my article. Simply put, I provide evidence and a discussion that supports either promising only what you deliver, or using your employment brand as a driver to deliver more than what you promise. It’s all there in the literature. It’s even very intuitive to see, yet time and time again we see that this advice is ignored in the branding efforts of even some of the most visible organizations.
What I say in the Journal is that branding isn’t a matter of good and bad, but about how much you promise, what you promise, and what you can deliver. If you raise people’s expectations too high, and under-deliver, that’s when you’ll have a problem. keep reading…
Dr John Sullivan and Master Burnett
The smart phone and the applications associated with it are radically changing the game for advanced, technically savvy recruiters (others need not read on unless you like shaking your head in disbelief). For those not afraid of evolution and innovation, an emerging class of “location aware” social networking applications can and are enabling recruiters to facilitate impromptu face-to-face meetings with top talent outside the structured assessment process.
Originally intended to help friends with time to kill coordinate impromptu meetings with other friends physically located nearby, services like foursquare, Facebook Places, loopt, and countless others provide savvy recruiters with an opportunity to engage face-to-face with elusive top talent often difficult to convert to an applicant or the offer-stage candidate sitting on the fence.
The scenario goes like this: while on your way to grab lunch you check out one or more of the location-based social networking apps (a.k.a. prospect locator apps) to see if any of the top talent you have been courting happens to be in the area. Within seconds, you have identified that a candidate you have been talking to for nearly a year recently checked in at a Starbucks just three blocks away. You make a beeline for that Starbucks, scanning the candidate’s recent wall posts and shooting him/her a quick instant message or text message in route. Upon arrival, you make contact, reinforcing the electronic relationship with a physical one even if the meeting lasts only minutes. You have successfully used GPS technology and social networks to provide you with an informal opportunity to recruit. keep reading…
Most candidates — even high-level executives — need to be prepped before the interview. The reason for this is obvious: they all think they’re great interviewees. Most aren’t. Making matters worse, the hiring managers they’ll be meeting think they’re endowed with some special instinct that allows them to accurately assess candidate competency. Most aren’t.
Since I don’t like to present great candidates who get inadvertently excluded for dumb reasons, I need to prep both my hiring manager clients and my candidates to increase the likelihood the candidates are appropriately and accurately evaluated. This way I don’t have to do searches over again and rely on luck to make placements. keep reading…
The operator of the .jobs domain opened the competition today for the bulk assignment of new Internet addresses.
The RFP process announced by Employ Media solicits plans from third parties for the quantity use of addresses incorporating geographic, occupational, industry, dictionary, or combinations of these in conjunction with the .jobs suffix.
The 10-page RFP application notes that “A key goal of the .JOBS RFP is the enhancement of the .JOBS brand. Please include specific detail on how your proposal would help achieve that goal.”
This first round of the process — second round details will be announced later — costs $250 and closes on Sept. 24.
Besides the formal Request For Proposals application form, Employ Media also details the criteria by which submissions will be judged. Among the 15 listed points are: brand enhancement; quantity of the addresses to be used; “community value, impact and investment”; “quality, innovation, choice and differentiation”; the effect the proposal might have on SHRM, the sponsor of the domain; and typical criteria dealing with the financial stability of the proposer, and its ability to perform. keep reading…
Labor Day parade, Main St., Buffalo, N.Y.
Labor Day in the U.S. is almost here. Many other countries also celebrate a labor day, which has always seemed an unusual event to me. We didn’t celebrate such a day at all until Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. Interestingly, this is a date that coincides well with the world’s entry into the impersonal and mechanistic 20th century.
I have been noodling for quite some time over the work/life balance movement. I call it a movement because it really came about unexpectedly around 15 years or so ago and has swept corporate America from coast to coast.
I can’t think of any organization that has not had to change policies or at least address its employees about the issue. The work/life balance movement is an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think there has been a previous era when there was such an emphasis on specifically setting aside time for non-work activities.
It is a logical outcome of decades of isolating work from other aspects of life. The idea of creating a balance is based on a set of assumptions that aren’t questioned, yet are very strange from the perspective of a Baby Boomer such as myself or from that of anyone who has studied the history of work.
Assumptions About Work
If I were to state the assumptions, they would go something like this: keep reading…
presented by Kristen Neubert and Tracey Parsons
Initiating a successful social media strategy can be quite a challenge, especially in the healthcare industry where branding can make or break an organization. Join us as we take a look at how DaVita, the leading provider of kidney care in the US, has successfully implemented a social media strategy that engages their audience on a new level.
In this webinar we will cover:
- How DaVita set up their initial social media strategy “smart experimentation”
- Lessons learned along the way
- How to engage your audience in dialogue and timely engage candidates once they’ve applied
- How DaVita uses social media to maximize their reach and how they set up an effective social media response model
- How to measure your engagement and results for overall success
Learn from one of the most forward thinking organizations in healthcare how you too can utilize social media to its fullest potential.
More information | Register for this webinar
Have you ever gotten a video resume where the candidate brags about her gorgonzola mashed potatoes? Or another where the candidate declares his faults, one of which happens to be that he lies?
Trouble has. His given name is Nick Chiapetta. (Think about it. You’ll get it.) His job is to screen all the video resumes that the director of human acquisitions, Alina Deloris, gets, and recommend candidates to her for temp jobs with Celltons, a company that makes cellphone buttons.
Nick, or Trouble, as he prefers to be called, used to own the temp agency where Celltons is now, until an unfortunate incident involving a bus and a 33-week absence lead to the agency’s demise. Now he’s temping for Celltons.
Those of you still reading, but wondering what I’m talking about, you are excused. You may return after completing the pre-requisites for this post about what may be the most incredible branding adventure in recruiting history.
Everyone else here knows about The Temp Life, Spherion’s Internet TV show. What began as a branding effort aimed at the entry-level demographic has succeeded so well it has been declared a “bona fide phenomenon” by Fast Company. It begins its fifth season in November. keep reading…
