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John Zappe Jan 16, 2008, 1:56 pm ET
Taking the industry by surprise, CareerBuilder this morning launched a new talent management consulting and employment branding firm it calls Personified .
Headed by Mary Delaney, formerly chief sales officer for CareerBuilder.com, the new company says it works in four key areas:
- Acquisition, providing an RPO service for continuous and large scale hiring, as well as consulting on internal procedures and processes;
- Employment branding;
- Workforce culture, with a focus on creating a diverse workplace;
- Training in recruitment, leadership, sales, diversity, and project management.
“That’s a pretty big area,” says Peter Weddle , executive director of the International Association of Employment Web Sites and a nationally known recruitment consultant. That CareerBuilder would launch such a company is “not surprising, but it is interesting. There are forces that argue for it and forces against it.”
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Todd Raphael Jan 16, 2008, 10:39 am ET
With government employment rates of people with some disabilities headed in the wrong direction — downward — the U.S. EEOC issued a report discussing strategies to reverse the trend.
The EEOC says the federal government should be a “model employer” in this area, which from the looks of things, it isn’t at the moment. The participation rate in the federal workforce of people with “targeted disabilities” is at a 20-year low.
Targeted disabilities includeds deafness, blindness, mental illness, mental retardation, paralysis, convulsive disorders, missing extremities, and limb/spine distortion.
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Howard Adamsky Jan 16, 2008
Please allow me to take a quick breather from my writing so I might ask you a question: Isn’t it time you wrote an article?
Surely you must be tired of my face by now, perhaps even what I have to say and how I say it. (Just wait until you see my new pic; Mac glasses and all…) Tell me, are you tired of any of the others as well? Truth be told, at times, I also get so weary of the same people writing variations on the same things (e.g., 8 Ways to Do This, 4 Things to Get That, and How to Supercharge Your Whatever).
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Madeline Laurano Jan 15, 2008, 8:26 pm ET
Passive candidates are different. They don’t look for jobs the same way as active candidates, they won’t return your calls unless you leave the right type of message and they certainly won’t meet your client unless you make a compelling case. In this hands-on webinar industry guru Lou Adler will guide you through the decision-making process of the passive candidate and what you must do to attract and keep their attention. If you’re currently recruiting passive candidates or would like to, this is one webinar you won’t want to miss. Some key topics Lou will address include:
- What you must know and do before you pick up the phone
- Passive candidate recruiting metrics and how to track your own performance
- What it takes to get your voice mails returned
- How to get every passive candidate to say “yes” to your offer
- 1st contact – how to breaking through the mental gatekeeper
As recruiting professionals, quite often our clients solicit our advice when defining the roadmap of a particular business unit within their organizations. Some of us even go so far as to become third-party consultants on subject matter with which we have particular expertise.
Regardless of the industry vertical in which we specialize, our clients rely on our guidance to assist them in reaching/exceeding their revenue goals by leveraging the benefit of our experience. Telephone selling brings with it a unique set of challenges and opportunities that, if managed correctly, can produce new incremental revenue streams and deliver an impressive ROI.
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Few people would disagree with the premise that stories are powerful mechanisms for selling ideas and concepts. In fact, there have been books written about how stories can help build and maintain corporate cultures. But, what most recruiters don’t know is that stories can and should play a prominent role in building a firm’s employment brand and in improving the effectiveness of the employee-referral program. No recruiting ad, brochure, website, or recruiter pitch can have the same power and effectiveness as current employees telling powerful stories about what it’s like to work at their firms.
Google: the Master Story Creator
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Phil walks into his favorite retailer to apply for a job. He sits down at the kiosk and begins to fill out the employment application. He fumbles through the online form and realizes that he forgot to enter his apartment number. He clicks the browser to go back to the prior page. In doing so, all of the information he already entered is wiped out. Darn it! He begins completing the application again. Name, address, social security number, etc.
Once done, the manager waves him into his office as if he is flagging down a cab in Midtown Manhattan during rush hour. Phil makes his way down to the office. He is shocked and disgusted by what he sees in the office. It is a mess, and that is putting it mildly. Scattered papers are one thing, but leftover crumbs from lunch are another. Phil begins to wonder if he might need a tetanus shot after this experience.
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Leslie Stevens Jan 10, 2008, 1:56 pm ET
Gwen Brooks, director of Staffing and Records at Ohio University, has learned that there’s more than one way to eliminate process redundancy and drive cost improvement through the hiring process. If you can’t drive process change before automating, perhaps the technology will enlighten users and serve as the wake-up call for instituting change.
When the university decided to automate its hiring process, Brooks was directed to mirror the university’s existing manual applicant process during a migration to PeopleAdmin, an online HR solutions system geared toward higher education and public sector needs. While many organizations seize the opportunity to use an ATS installation as a way to review and streamline processes before going live with new technology, the university users were happy with the current process, so there was no perceived need to make changes. When the ATS went live, the lights went on in user departments across the campus, opening the door for change.
“The implementation of the PeopleAdmin system pointed out the redundancies in our hiring process because for the first time, the users could see the entire 18 step process required from creating a requisition to onboarding a new hire,” says Brooks. “Prior to the technology implementation, we were paper-driven and most of the requisition process was hidden from the view of the users. They generated one piece of paper and they had no idea really what happened to the requisition from there. Now they had to be involved in every step of the process and we started to receive complaints and lots of feedback.”
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Kevin Wheeler Jan 10, 2008
Finding a focus is the mantra for corporations. Most organizations expend time and energy to identify and focus on a core product or service and not dilute their efforts with other activities. Marketers narrow their messages to a specific audience and promote products via media aimed at that audience. One of the inherent benefits of the Internet is that it can deliver a message cheaply to as few as just one person. We live in an age of personalized messaging and customized products.
We in the recruiting profession need to do the same. Unfortunately, the recruiting strategies I see are typically broad and try to encompass all positions and openings the organization has. The result of this broad recruiting practice is that no one at all is targeted. Messages are generic. Advertisements attract anyone and everyone. And, the result is that we are swamped with countless unqualified applicants, hundreds of useless resumes, and many unhappy candidates.
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John Zappe Jan 9, 2008, 12:27 pm ET
Smart as a fox. That’s an even more apt description of JobFox now that it has another $20 million in the bank and is expanding into six more U.S. cities and Australia.
Already in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., where it first launched in 2005, Jobfox will open new offices in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle in the next six months.
The Australia expansion is fueled by a partnership with Fairfax Digital’s MyCareer.com , the second largest job board in Australia and New Zealand. MyCareer will incorporate JobFox’s matching and branding technology in the early part of this year.
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Laura Retzler Jan 9, 2008
In the world of recruiting, there’s no substitute for a strong attraction. And, while current employees can court candidates during interviews, an inspiring job announcement makes great candidates say “yes” to the first date.
To get a passive candidate to apply, you need an inspiring job announcement: one that stirs emotion, piques curiosity, prompts wonder, and triggers surprise.
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John Zappe Jan 8, 2008, 10:23 pm ET
We can’t tell if it was the last one to launch in 2007 or the first one to announce in the new year, either way the world has another job board. ITarchitectjobs.com is a niche site specifically for jobs in a narrow slice of the high tech world: IT architects, a specialty that is one part technologist and more parts communicator, planner and business strategist.
You may be thinking “Aren’t there plenty of sites to post jobs like this” and the answer is certainly yes. Dice , IEEE , Craigslist all come to mind. So what will get tech companies to post to this site? In a word, free. For the next three months, posting is free for the first 100 companies.
That may not mean much since the site has little traffic and the press release announcing its launch and the free posting program offered no insight on how it would build an audience. The 35 jobs on the site include one that must have come from a recruiter pitching a member of the ITArchitectjobs team.
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Leslie Stevens Jan 8, 2008, 2:54 pm ET
The mortgage industry suffered massive layoffs during 2007, leading the way in job reduction among all industries with more than 100,000 job cuts. While word of job elimination is generally unwelcome news, the recent worker reductions in the cyclical mortgage industry may provide an opportunity for talent-hungry recruiters entering 2008 with positions to fill and approved hiring budgets.
The mortgage industry job cuts were unevenly dispersed by geographic region and by skill level, according to a recent analysis conducted by MortgageDaily.com. In some cases, the job losses detailed in the report mirror the volume of sub-prime loans written in the region, or the location of the sub-prime lender’s main processing offices and employment base. While job elimination most widely affected staff that support mortgage processing functions, companies such as J.P. Morgan Chase added sales staff to bolster sales of new mortgages and actually ended up with a gain of 4,465 jobs during 2007.
A spokesperson at MortgageDaily.com stated that most of the layoffs occurred as a result of companies within the industry reshuffling personnel or closing down entirely. In addition to sales staff, loan servicing personnel are being increased in many organizations to help collect loan payments and stay on top of potential delinquencies.
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Every year, I take a few minutes to reflect on the things I have noticed while working with both producers and consumers of screening and assessment tools. Overall, I am very encouraged by what I have been seeing. The market for screening and assessment tools continues to grow. This makes me extremely happy because we I/O psychologists know the value that is to be had via the use of quality assessment tools.
The science geek in me is also very happy to see strong investment in innovation. I am really pleased to see the ways in which quality content is being combined with technology to collect the mountains of data that are required to uncover underlying truths about the relationship between human traits and job performance.
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Almost every action and process in recruiting is designed for short-term gain. Despite talk about being strategic, most recruiters and recruiting managers alike respond only to requisitions, placing ads, visiting job boards, attending job fairs, and mining social networking sites in an effort to fill today’s job openings. There is lots of talk but little effort placed on building out truly long-term recruiting tools and strategies designed to impact the business. If all the talk were true, nearly every recruiting function on the planet would have dedicated resources to employment branding, the only long-term recruiting strategy that is designed to bring in a steady flow of high-quality applicants over a period of many years.
Employment branding stands alone as the only approach corporate recruiting managers can leverage to guarantee an end to their talent shortage problem. Unfortunately, most corporate recruiting managers spend less than 5% of their budgets on this powerful long-term solution. In direct contrast, firms that have taken the time to invest in building a great employment brand like Google and Southwest Airlines have not only dominated their industries, but they have also turned the common talent shortage problem into a more desirable talent “sorting” problem. If you’re tired of constantly fighting fires and of being continually bashed year in and year out by your managers for failing to produce a high volume of high-quality candidates, it’s time to shift your focus to the only solution that can reduce your job stress and make you a hero.
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Leslie Stevens Jan 4, 2008, 4:16 pm ET
Financial services firm Edward Jones has partnered with 100 Black Men of America, Inc. in a collaborative effort designed to raise awareness of the firm’s career opportunities within the African-American community, and to provide financial education programming in communities where both organizations have a presence. The goal is to offer more choices to investors who are diversifying faster than the pool of financial advisors.
“We’re trying to offer more choices to investors,” says Price Woodward, principal of Financial Advisor Recruiting and Hiring at Edward Jones. “A growing number of our investors are Asian, black or Hispanic and many are females. The investment advisor profession has been very white and very male dominated. Not only do we want to diversify because we think it’s the right thing to do, by the same token, we need to offer greater choices to our investors.”
In addition to the partnership pilot with 100 Black Men, the firm is using outside recruiters to meet its hefty diversity applicant requirements and has recently moved a tenured female financial advisor into a dedicated recruiting position in an effort to boost the strategic recruitment of female financial advisors.
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John Zappe Jan 4, 2008, 10:34 am ET
Monster is launching a worldwide branding campaign complete with TV ads that evoke memories of its darkly effective 1999 campaign “When I Grow Up.”
The 2008 version is tagged “Your Calling is Calling.” Breaking just as the new year begins, the campaign seems aimed at the dissatisfied passive job-seeker needing just a nudge to move into the ranks of the actively searching.
“Monster’s new brand is designed to resonate with ‘life enthusiasts’,” explains a company spokesman. “The brand is designed to position Monster as a resource for helping this group reach their life goals; by extension it also promises employers access to, and better visibility before, top talent around the world.”
How the campaign will resonate in parts of the world where cultural pressures are more to fit in than to break out remains to be seen. However, in the U.S. and U.K. where the first TV commercials and print ads began appearing this week, the message may well prove as effective as the 1999 campaign, which helped propel Monster to the head of a crowded online recruitment pack. The memorable TV spots had stark black and white video of children talking into the camera with lines such as: “When I grow up, I want to be a brown nose”; or, “I want to be in middle management.”
The ad, which first appeared during the 1999 Super Bowl, has been voted one of the 10 all time best ads.
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
This past quarter, I conducted two senior-level management searches. Each one stands out as a shining example of what to do and what not to do. Understanding the differences can double your monthly placement rate in about half the time. Before reading the details, you should benchmark your own recruiting skills using this 10-Factor Recruiter diagnostic assessment to get a sense of what it takes to be a great recruiter.
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