During a trip to a suburban mall near Cleveland, I saw a man wearing a jacket with a logo for Hyland Software, a business-to-business software developer whose global headquarters are located nearby. In the B2B world, Hyland has a reputation of being a stellar employer with a fun streak. As evidence, it has a giant tube slide in the middle of its headquarters and has earned several top workplace awards in recent years.
Hyland also has a quirk in its interview process. Candidates applying online are required to write and submit a poem. Not an essay, not a biography — a poem. How does that strike you? keep reading…
There have been several recent articles on the importance and, in some cases the lack of attention on, the candidate experience. One article goes so far as to call out the Candidate Experience Award winners and question why they are silent on the topic.
As the chairman of Talent Board, the nonprofit organization that delivers the Candidate Experience Awards each year, there is plenty I can say about the power of a positive candidate experience, and the amazing value and efforts that many employers, including some of the most well-known employment brands, are implementing to gain a competitive advantage and treat candidates with the respect they deserve.
Employers care, and they should. keep reading…
Putting candidates on the spot with weird questions that have no real answer has been a hallmark of Silicon Valley recruiting for years.
Google made Glassdoor’s list of oddball questions with this one: “How many cows are in Canada? Salesforce made the list, asking, “If you could be anyone else, who would it be?”
Now, though, Rocket Fuel has kicked it up a notch, with a recruiting billboard along heavily traveled Rt. 101, the Valley’s main artery. It lists the company’s Internet address with an X. To get to page X, you need to solve this puzzle:
X=The largest 15 digit perfect square palindrome. keep reading…
I’ve talked before about efforts to employ people with Asperger’s. But perhaps no Autism-related effort will be bigger than one announced today by SAP, simply because SAP, with 200,000+ customers, is just so big.
SAP says it’ll be hiring autistic software testers, programmers, and data-quality-assurance specialists. It’s going to do it through a partnership with Specialisterne, a Denmark-based firm operating in Europe and the U.S.
SAP had used the organization, where a majority of employees have autism or a related diagnosis, to do a pilot project in India and Ireland. U.S., Canada, and Germany will be on the docket next.
Specialisterne Founder Thorkil Sonne says “SAP is the first multinational company to partner with us on a global scale.” He expects others to follow its lead.
Last week, I found myself wearing down several hours sitting in an airport by catching the latest and greatest in the HR/employment sphere through LinkedIn, when I stumbled onto an article by Dr. Charles Handler titled “Employment Tests Are Becoming Irrelevant for Predicting Job Success.” I was intrigued. After all, I am a consultant for a company in which a core area of our business is from said employment tests. Especially with that title, shock value achieved.
The article brings to light a number of interesting ideas about big data via social media and how it stands to influence the way we look at pre-employment. However new and edgy gathering such data via social media may be, it isn’t without its flaws. Furthermore, if someone has to stand up for employment tests, I begrudgingly accept.
From the first excerpt, “The Impact of Publicly Available ‘Free-range’ Data,”
People born in the past decade or so, along with all persons to come, will begin accumulating a personal digital fingerprint that will be associated with them from cradle to the grave … We are even starting to see research that suggests we can gauge an individual’s job success from social media data such as one’s Facebook usage. keep reading…
You post, you tweet, you activate social media, yet all the work you do to attract talent can go to waste if your applicant tracking system is too burdensome for candidates and your recruiting team. If you choose a strong applicant tracking system, your results will improve, candidates will have a great experience, and hiring managers will see more on-target resumes. A poor decision will have serious adverse effects costing you unhappy hiring managers, lost candidates, money, time, and frustration.
The following is a primer on things to take into consideration when making your decision on an applicant tracking system. It takes time and research, but the payoff will be well worth the effort. keep reading…
Is your “six seconds of fame” enough to land you a job?
As a professor and a corporate recruiting strategist, I can tell you that very few applicants truly understand the corporate recruiting process. Most people looking for a job approach it with little factual knowledge. That is a huge mistake. A superior approach is to instead analyze it carefully, because data can help you understand why so many applicants simply can’t land a job. If you can bear with me for a few quick minutes, I can show you using numbers where the job-search “roadblocks” are and how that data-supported insight can help you easily double your chances of landing an interview and a job.
Your Resume Will Face a Lot of Competition keep reading…
Toby
We pause now, before beginning our workday, before we plunge into this post about Mars and Monster, to pay homage to television’s most real unreality comedy show, The Office.
The show’s finale aired last night, ending nine years of episodes that anyone who has ever worked in an office, especially a sales office, would instantly recognize as real life snippets slightly disguised. At one point or another, we’ve all had a boss or known of a boss as quirkly lovable as Michael Scott.
And what The Office did for — or is that to? — HR, but cast it as the stereotype of itself. Toby, the mild-mannered, accidental HR representative of corporate in the Scranton branch office, will forever be who every viewer of working age will picture when HR comes a’calling. (Unless they think of Catbert, who inhabits the opposite end of the HR spectrum.) keep reading…
Odds are, you read the title and just said, “not me!” So we’re left with the question, “Is it worth your time to build an employment brand?” Absolutely.
I get it. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and this isn’t exactly a “today’s to-do list” type of endeavor. But building an employer brand is only as complicated and time consuming as you make it. It will also be as expensive as you make it, but it will be worth more than its weight in work.
You will get more out of a properly constructed employer brand than you put into it. And if you believe that time is money, then take note. In a survey of more than 4,700 talent acquisition decision makers, a reported 50 percent savings in cost per hire is associated with a strong employer brand.
I work with small- to medium-sized businesses every day, and many of them don’t have the time, resources, or knowledge base that the big guys do to recruit. That’s where employer brand shines. According to research firm Universum, two of the top three channels that will be the most used for employer brand promotion are the website (92 percent) and social media (80 percent). Most of us have those things and in a smaller firm you often have far more access to the control of those things than you would in a Fortune 500.
Here’s what to do: keep reading…
Smarterer has won the 2013 startup competition at the Recruiting Innovation Summit.
The award comes with a $10,000 prize. It was selected by three judges: ERE Media Founder David Manaster, Greylock Partners Talent VP Dan Portillo, and Universum Founder Lars-Henrik Friis Molin. The judging panel considered in its decision the results of an audience vote done via text message (judges and the crowd each received a 50-50 weighting).
Friis Molin says the Smarterer tests are “perfecting themselves” through crowdsourcing. (Here’s more on Smarterer.) He sees it as one of the potential future gold standards in the assessment field. David Manaster said he tried the test and found it as fun as Smarterer claimed. He also said that given Smarterer’s “consumer approach” he also thought the test could be a future gold standard.
It was the elite of an elite group of new tools and technologies rolling out for recruiting departments, including one that would help companies hire teams (vs. individuals); another that would add a one-page candidate proposal to the application process; and another that would help companies create mobile careers sites. And more.
Meanwhile, two other companies were also winners at the event. keep reading…
The U.S. EEOC has some new documents out that help when recruiting and selecting people with disabilities.
The info covers cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and intellectual disabilities. keep reading…
From the department of where-are-they-know … whatever happened to Mystery Applicant, winner of last year’s competition between startups in the recruiting field?
If you don’t know the company, it automates candidate feedback. So it asks job seekers what they think of your brand, whether they are satisfied with their experience as a candidate, their preferred interests/channels for job seeking and career content about your company, and more. One of its clients, G4S, has used the information it has gathered to improve recruiter skills, and refine its brand messaging.
Anyhow, back to what it’s up to. keep reading…
More tech startups than at any time in the last four years will be looking to hire this year, says Silicon Valley Bank, but they worry they won’t be able to find the talent they need.
Even as most leaders and founders of the firms surveyed by the bank for its annual Startup Outlook say conditions in the U.S. are better this year than last, the number of them who report hiring talent is their biggest challenge has grown. Nine out of 10 executives report finding and hiring the talent they need is their biggest challenge. keep reading…
“Talent community” is one of those phrases that means something different to everyone — something I mentioned back in 2011 with the launch of a bartender community.
But — setting aside the definition of these communities in the first place — who exactly might be part of such a group?
Ascendify Founder & CEO Matt Hendrickson says there are five different categories of people who could be community members: keep reading…
presented by Jenny DeVaughn and Brett Underhill
Winning the war for “right-fit” talent is increasingly difficult, especially for harder-to fill positions. Many organizations are turning to social media to help increase their candidate pool with qualified applicants, but are unsure what the best strategy is for success.
Jenny DeVaughn, Senior Director of Employment Branding and Social Media at Randstad Sourceright and Brett Underhill, Director, Recruiting of Programs, at Prudential Financial will guide attendees through best practices and actionable tips for implementing social media strategy to identify and recruit the right talent. Through real-life examples of tactical recruitment campaigns and innovative ideas, attendees will learn how their organizations can implement a social media strategy that highlights a strong employment brand message and differentiates the organization to engage the individuals who will help them meet their overall business goals. Attendees will also gain insight into how they can identify and align recruiting and organizational goals to create recruitment marketing campaigns that engage a diverse candidate pool. A targeted social media strategy also helps to highlight what analytics and metrics should be measured to determine the overall effectiveness of their employment brand and return on investment.
Jenny and Brett will also highlight why interactive, live and shareable content is so valuable to social media strategy, and how employers can leverage employment assets about the organization’s brand and culture, and help candidates consider them for an opportunity.
More information | Register for this webinar
LinkedIn’s killing it when it comes to gathering data on each and every one of us, with each and every one of us doing the work for it to populate our profiles and thus collect that data.
That LinkedIn mother lode will keep growing, says Jon Bischke, founder of Entelo. But so will the rest of the world’s information — information that we won’t be putting into LinkedIn. keep reading…
You know what’s been happening seemingly every year, the last several: we start out the year talking about how the economy and job market are improving, and then as the year goes on, we start talking about how they are not.
Perhaps that won’t be the case this year, says Toby Dayton, from the job search engine LinkUp. Dayton is “cautiously optimistic” about a decent second, third, and fourth quarter of 2013.
Dayton, speaking at the Recruiting Innovation Summit in San Francisco, gives these three reasons for his optimism, based on LinkUp’s data showing growth in job posts and recruitment advertising: keep reading…
Everyone seems to agree that generalist large scale job boards are in trouble, and others are profiting. The decline of the Monster share price to below five dollars, parallel to the success story of LinkedIn stock, and the recent valuation of Indeed.com nicely illustrates these shifting dynamics. Generalist job board revenue per posting is declining, and they are facing tough competition from smaller niche job boards, job aggregators, and social networks. Will job boards remain relevant in recruitment?
The main question is not whether job boards are relevant, but whether their search results are relevant for their users. Do job seekers find the job they want, and do employers find the candidates they need? It is a simple equation of attention and relevance, and currently the competition happens to play a better card on both aspects.
The typical job board offers this primary search interface to job seekers:
keep reading…
“Death by interview” is the harsh but unfortunately all-too accurate name that I give to the majority of corporate interview processes because of the way that they literally abuse candidates.
Death by interview is worth closer examination because harsh treatment during interviews impacts almost every working American, simply because each one of us is subjected to many interviews during our lifetime.
The hiring interview shares a love/hate status, where even though applicants initially hope to be granted an interview, once they are finally notified, they almost universally undergo a wave of stress and painful memories that causes them to stop looking forward to them.
“Death by interview” is the term used to describe the drawn out pain that job applicants suffer as a result of requiring an excessive number of interviews, repeating the same questions across multiple interviews. and the unnecessary uncertainty that is part of most interview processes.
Death by Interview Component No. 1 — An Excessive Number of Interviews keep reading…
With only days left before this year’s college seniors become alums, those who don’t already have jobs are going to find it as hard to find work as last year’s grads did. And for those in the liberal arts, in the last few weeks, three different surveys of hiring managers and recruiting leaders found employers are only planning slight — if any – increases in the number of entry-level grads they bring on board.
Most striking about the surveys is that while they measured different aspects of hiring plans, and talked to different types of companies and employers, the bottom line was the same: entry-level jobs in a grad’s field are few.
Here’s what the three surveys found: keep reading…
