What do you expect from a website feature whose URL is mynitro.com/nobullshit?
What’s after the slash is what Nitro tries to give you in its new careers site feature, a little game built by Nitro’s developers. The San Francisco company, in the paperless office/document management business, wants to show that it is creative, fun, Australian-influenced, and un-corporate. So it asks candidates if they want to take the “wombat pack” career track or the “corporate drone” career track, as well as a few other quick questions to that effect.
On the site, it says it’s looking for engineers and product managers (and even a recruiter) who are “rock stars” and who “get *%$@ done.” Except it doesn’t use those characters.
Like most every other careers pages, it unfortunately loses a bit of the cool factor once you click on the job descriptions. Anyhow, check it out here.
Fire Department of New York officials announced this month that a record number of minorities took its firefighter exam this spring. The Fire Department says nearly 46 percent of the potential recruits were members of minority groups. The number of women test-takers also saw an increase this year. Nearly 2,000 women took the test. That’s more than the past three test years combined. That’s a good thing, but it’d be even better if these applicants were even more prepared. More on that in a minute.
The use of the Internet with a smartphone is fast becoming the next mass media channel. That’s particular true with social media such as Facebook. Recents statistics from a company called comScore show the mobile Internet audience is using Facebook nearly an hour more a month than they’re using it on a desktop.
Facebook mobile users have a choice of downloading an application, or using the mobile Facebook. Eighty percent of mobile Facebook users use the application. With Twitter, users prefer the application, too. This data has confused many industry commentators, with many bloggers writing that applications are “winning the battle.” This interpretation is wrong. keep reading…
TalentBin officially launched from private beta to public yesterday. The service, which bills itself as a talent search engine, announced via press release that it “just turned the entire professional web into the largest talent sourcing database known to mankind with its public launch.”
If you’ll excuse the bravado, what TalentBin is trying to do is actually quite impressive and has leaped forward since I saw the beginnings of its private beta at the HR Technology Conference last October.
What it is trying to do is fairly simple: create a searchable database that merges information about a person from all over the web into a single profile so that recruiters can get all of the information about them in one, digestible place.
keep reading…
This week, recruiting leaders will be gathering at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley for the Recruiting Innovation Summit. If you aren’t going to be one of them, then clear your schedule for the end of this week and participate virtually.
To catch the live stream for free, go to this page Thursday and Friday. The event kicks off at 9 a.m. PDT both Thursday and Friday.
keep reading…
Business-to-business blue-chip ADP is trying to spread the word on social media to potential employees that it’s about more than just payroll. As part of that, it’s making sure recruiters are up to speed on how to use social-media sites, how not to use them, and why.
Lisa Sherr, senior director, global staffing marketing & analytics, talks with me about this training of “brand ambassadors,” “coaches,” and “certified social media experts” in the audio below. She covers:
- Why this was started in the first place
- Basic vs. advanced use of social media
- The use of recruiters to train ADP employees in other departments in social media
- Whether the training is tactical (e.g. how to use Twitter) or strategic (making and carrying out a plan)
It’s about nine minutes, below. keep reading…
presented by Bill Humbert
How often have you heard speakers at recruiting conferences extol the virtues of recruiting “Passive Candidates?” Generally these Passive Candidates are defined as performing at a high level in their current positions and are not actively looking for their next position. Many Human Resource Professionals and Recruiters are under intense pressure to perform their jobs without adequate training, especially in the Sales Arena called Recruiting or Talent Acquisition.
This webinar will provide Recruiters/Human Resource Professionals with the training required to create a solid foundation for the Recruitment Process. Using this process, the company will be able to recruit, screen, and select the Passive Candidates. The selection of better and more engaged employees leads to greater profitability, fewer Human Resource challenges, and greater retention.
This workshop is critical for employers who recognize the need to attract and deliver better qualified candidates to their business. This workshop helps corporate recruiters understand the corporate high performing talent acquisition teams; and how best to supplement their acquisition efforts to attract the Passive Candidate.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the Entire Recruitment is a Sales Process
- Develop Effective Job Description: Foundation to sourcing, interviewing, selection and retention
- Beware of conflicting goals – Do you seek passive candidates with a “screen out” recruitment process?
- Understand recruitment marketing metrics
- Now that you have a base of resumes, develop Best Practices to screen qualified resumes
- Best Practices for engaging hiring managers for pre-screening and interviewing candidates
- Provide hiring manager with training and tools to select the best qualified candidate that fits the organization
- Create positive change in talent acquisition
- Attract the Passive Candidate
More information | Register for this webinar
How familiar do the three scenarios below sound to you? They’re a few examples of how the siloes in talent management impact HR, employees, managers, candidates, and corporate executives. The impact: companies waste time and money; they compromise on the quality of their talent; their employee engagement deteriorates; and, ultimately, their business performance suffers. Breaking down these siloes is the topic of a workshop I’m running at the fall ERE Expo.
Here are those three well-intended but ineffective scenarios of siloed talent management:
- Company X has a rigorous succession planning process, but the results of this process sit in binders in several HR business partners’ desks. Mary, a senior manager, has a critical vacancy, so she calls her recruiter, John, to fill it. John hires a retained search firm at great cost and expends a great deal of effort, but finally fills this critical but difficult-to-fill position. After the hire, John gets a call from his HR business partner, who asks, “Why were the three ready-now internal successors identified during talent reviews not even considered for this position?”
- Brad, a manufacturing site manager at Company Y, reviews his staffing needs on March 15 and determines that his plant is fully staffed. However, on March 22, he calls his recruiter, Jane, and tells her a change in business strategy has occurred, and he needs 100 new people at his plant by the end of April. Jane thinks, “Senior leadership must have known about this change three months ago. If only I had known ahead of time, I could have proactively pipelined external talent, and worked with Learning and Development and Succession Planning to pipeline internal talent. At this point, I’ll never be able to meet Brad’s timeline!”
- Peter, a new employee at Company Z, meets with his manager, Lisa, two weeks after his start date. In that meeting, Lisa tells Peter that HR requires every employee to have a development plan. She hands him a copy of the development plan template, and tells him to put anything he wants on it. Peter thinks, “I wish Lisa would give me more direction and support for my career development. I interviewed with so many people to get this job; you think they’d have some sense of my development areas and some suggestions for how to grow. I guess this company’s stated commitment to employee development is just lip service.”
Integrated Talent Management: the Solution keep reading…
Yahoo’s beleaguered CEO Scott Thompson is out, in a shakeup that replaced the company’s chairman of the board and added new directors chosen by a dissident shareholder.
Unable to ride out the storm over a false academic degree listed on his resume, Thompson left the company over the weekend. Yahoo issued a statement Sunday mentioning Thompson’s name briefly, and only in connection with announcing his replacement, Ross Levinsohn, as interim CEO. Levinsohn was Yahoo’s executive vice president and head of global media.
The decision to replace Thompson over his false claim of holding a degree in computer science jelled late Friday, after search firm Heidrick & Struggles denied it had anything to do with the falsification. In meetings he held to attempt to calm the waters last week, Thompson blamed a staffer at an unnamed headhunting firm for making the resume mistake, which he failed to notice for eight years.
That firm would have been Heidrick & Struggles, which was handling his placement at eBay. keep reading…
When most recruiters learn about a potential new media channel like Pinterest or Instagram, their initial reaction is often to discount them as a low-volume source. Many recruiters shortsightedly fail to see their value, no matter how many desirable prospects “hang out” on them, simply because the new source is not designed primarily to be a recruiting site. But don’t let those recruiters with a shortsighted “fill the requisitions mentality” steer you away from a strategic opportunity to build your firm’s image as an innovator by being the first to use new approaches.
Including innovative practices and sources in your recruiting is essential because innovators look for signs of innovation in the recruiting process as an indicator that innovation permeates the firm. And if your firm is one of the first users of these hot sites, you further reinforce your employer brand image as a first mover and innovative firm. If you are going to be a strategic recruiting function, you need to look beyond the short-term goal of filling reqs.
Build Your Image as an Innovative Firm keep reading…
Recruitment process outsourcing by definition is a form of business process outsourcing where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider. Each letter in the term RPO represents a valuable and equal piece of the RPO process model, yet more and more RPO providers today are using the letters in the phrase but not performing up to standard expectations around each functional letter R-P-O.
Whether outsourcing any particular business function is good or bad can be debated, but for those companies who choose to outsource their recruitment departments and select an RPO provider, there are several key elements that will either make or break the initiative. Most important, understand what a particular RPO provider is willing to deliver and what they are good at delivering. Through personal experience it seems that most RPO providers have forgotten or ignored the “R” or “Recruitment” in RPO and spend the majority of their time and resources focusing on “Process” and/or “Outsourcing/Optimization.”
For me, the “R” is the most important aspect in the term RPO and is what I focus on. If a provider can’t deliver on the “R,” then “P” and “O” are useless to me. Other organizations may place a higher value on the “P” and “O,” and again it is all what is best for organizational needs. To me, most RPO providers have lost the concept of recruiting and now focus on the outsourced part.
Although it may be more efficient and although it may be more cost effective — I still demand a certain bang for my buck and while I don’t expect executive-search-quality candidates for every position, RPO providers should still be focused on providing candidates of a certain level of quality and not just numbers.
Lucky for me after trial and error, I was able to locate a provider who has not lost focus on “recruitment” and that can and does deliver at a high level, and that is what it is all about for me. Do your homework, talk to some other professionals in the industry, and conduct a proper assessment prior to partnering with an RPO provider. And if all else fails – meet me at the 2012 ERE Expo in South Florida where I can tell you an RPO story that will make the hair on the back of any HR executive’s neck stand straight up. See you there.
A report in Reuters has indicated that LinkedIn is among a handful of potential companies expressing interest in purchasing all or some of Monster Worldwide. According to sources close to the situation, LinkedIn and Silver Lake Partners are two of “a broad range of strategic and financial buyers” who are weighing Monster as a potential acquisition target.
According to the report, the company plans to send out more detailed financial information by the end of next week to potential buyers.
Monster Worldwide shares are up over 15% in late-day trading in reaction to the report.
keep reading…
With Google instead taking the lead, for the first year since 2008 Disney was not listed as the overall first-choice employer. Disney did rank in fifth place overall in our study of where high school and college scholars most prefer to work in the future.
That’s what we found at the NSHSS, an international honor society recognizing outstanding academic excellence in high school and college scholars globally — 750,000 scholars representing over 160 countries. The full list is at the bottom of this article.
Members were asked to rank their preferred companies to work for and selected from a list of more than 200 companies. The list of companies was created by combining the 2012 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity, selected companies from Fortune’s Global 500, and popular write-in choices from prior surveys. Respondents were given the opportunity to select up to three companies and were also allowed to write in choices. Results have are available charted by overall ranking, gender rankings, high school/post-high school rankings, and diverse/non-diverse rankings.
The most popular choices continue to reflect interests in technology and health fields, with Google moving to first place in 2012 as the most preferred employer. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, local hospital and health providers, and the Mayo Clinic all placed in the top 10 most preferred. Teach for America was a popular choice, ranking 16th. Many government agencies place highly as well. The FBI ranked #6 and the CIA closely followed at #8. The Air Force ranked #15, the Navy ranked #26 (up from # 31 in 2011), the Army ranked #28, and, the Marines ranked # 64.
Respondents were also asked about the importance of certain workplace factors when choosing an employer, with options separated into four categories. Students ranked responses based on what they most want in an employer, ranked below. The factors ranking as most important in each area included fair treatment, strong benefits, opportunities to enhance career skills, and the ability to create a harmonious work/life balance.
Financial and business consulting group PricewaterhouseCoopers captured the top spot on DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity.
Of PwC, DiversityInc said this: “Always cognizant of the war for talent, PwC continuously creates innovative strategies to find, engage, and promote the best and brightest employees, especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups.”
Surprisingly, considering the layoffs and slowdown in hiring that have beset the finance industry, it was well represented on the list. Ernst and Young, Deloitte, Prudential, KPMG, and a few others in the sector made the list.
Tar Heel Cops Needed
The highway patrol in North Carolina is hiring. There are 183 jobs open in its “first recruiting blitz in five years.”
Recruiting Company Lawsuit
The U.S. EEOC says Randstad U.S. LP is settling an ADA-related lawsuit for $60,000. keep reading…
If you have ever been in a situation when checking references on a candidate you uncovered negative references and/or performance reviews, you are not alone. What you do with the information is key.
This is one of the most misunderstood, hence mishandled, situations preventing good candidates from being hired. I have seen people get poor reviews because of “sour grapes,” and it happens more often than you may think. I’ve had managers tell me negative things about a former employee, and upon diving in and asking more detailed questions, determined the negative feedback to be sour grapes or a poor fit with culture or the manager. Oftentimes a hiring manager calls a former associate of his whom the candidate worked for and gets a lousy reference. In a split second the candidate is dropped from consideration without further investigation.
The opposite holds true of positive references: if the same manager gets a glowing reference on the candidate, he makes an offer. But neither of these situations individually indicates whether or not the candidate is “right” for you.
When employers look for senior people — and 31 percent will be, a new survey says — the evidence is they’re all looking for the same qualities. Industry experience is important; so is proven problem solving.
Nowhere on the list of qualities a CareerBuilder survey reported as important to employers was craziness listed. Perhaps that trait was covered by the “Is creative” characteristic that 43 percent of the respondents look for in a new executive. keep reading…
According to the U.S. Labor Department, 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession.
This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.
In discussions with some of them, I heard talk about feeling they having been used to bolster executive salaries and inflate shareholder expectations unrealistically. Many felt unappreciated and disrespected — a word I hear a lot now and never used to hear at all.
And with eroding benefits and the potential of better access to health care, the hold that corporations used to have is loosening. keep reading…
With final exams underway at colleges across the U.S., it’s only a matter of weeks before the first of millions of young Millennials will be out of school for the summer. Will they have jobs?
The answer is a resounding, “Maybe.”
The National Association of Colleges and Employers says employers expect to hire more new grads this year than last, and the hiring picture has even improved since early last fall. The organization’s spring survey update found employers are planning to increase their grad hiring by 10.2 percent over last year. In the fall survey, the increase was 9.5 percent.
CareerBuilder reports that 54 percent of the companies it surveyed plan to hire from this year’s graduating class. That represents a 17 percent improvement over last year’s results.
Students looking for internships should also have an easier time. Another NACE survey found intern hiring plans are up 8.5 percent over last year. Not surprisingly, the best salaries will go to students in engineering and computer science programs. They’ll earn, on average, $20.79 and $19.10 respectively, says NACE. keep reading…
Marriott is giving away $100 each day for 10 days to a different job seeker, a Facebook freebie meant to generate a little attention to the company’s community and make more people aware it has open jobs.
The hotel chain received the 2012 ERE Recruiting Excellence Award in the employment branding category. It also has experimented with Facebook contests and games in the past, as mentioned in this post by Matt Jeffery.
Marriott’s Jessica Lee and I talk about the shoe program, below. She describes what drove the creation of the giveaway; how the company will measure results; what it means by a “spirit of community” it wants to create; and the balancing act between investing in a Facebook career page vs. a corporate careers site. keep reading…
Every staffing manager is concerned about the candidate quality and quality-of-hire metrics. These are very hard to measure. But if you have sourcers, recruiters, and candidate specialists who know what they’re looking for, and who know how to ask the right questions of the candidate who they’re talking to, then you vastly improve the quality of candidate, which in turn, improves the quality of hire.
If we don’t understand the technical functions of the job, then whole hiring process will be wrong, from start to finish. Here are the four problems that can occur: keep reading…
What do you expect from a website feature whose URL is mynitro.com/nobullshit?
