ERE.net

Talk to Steven Toole about ResumePal for even just a few minutes and you get the feeling this is how sliced bread came about. ResumePal is a simple, elegant, and free solution to an annoying jobseeker and recruiter problem.

It’s an easy-to-use method to apply for jobs through corporate websites without having to reenter the data for each different employer. Jobseekers create a profile once, then by logging in to ResumePal from any participating employer’s site, they just click to apply. When they change their profile, by updating their contact information for instance, ResumePal automatically updates the database of every participating employer to which they’ve applied.

“It’s very similar to PayPal,” says Toole, vice president, employer marketing at Jobfox, which developed the service. “It’s convenient for jobseekers, but there are significant benefits for employers too.”

keep reading…

About two-thirds of companies use “time to fill” as a metric, a measurement that Stephen Lowisz, for one, pooh-poohs.

Tony Blake, of last night’s recruiting-department-of-the-year award-winner DaVita, says the “infamous time-to-fill metric is somewhat of a necessary evil in recruiting.”

But, Blake said today at ERE’s Spring conference, a better metric is “time to find.” This is the time beginning when a job request comes in, ending in the time the recruiter sends the candidate to the hiring manager.

“If it took five weeks to fill the job,” Blake says, “but if they sent the job to the hiring manager after seven days, the time-to-find is seven days. The great sourcers on our team are literally sending great candidates in the first 10-14 days of the process.”

By lowering registered nurse time-to-fill 15.1%, DaVita saved $5.5M in potential overtime and contract nursing costs, while filling over 3,300 registered nurse positions.

Monster has managed a coup over rival CareerBuilder, partnering with Microsoft to power the software company’s new consumer career center.

Where jobseekers browse MS Office templates for resumes, Monster’s name now appears prominently as the power behind the career information. A how-to job search video on the site includes both companies. In a section titled “Four steps to your next job” step one informs jobseekers:

“Monster.com and Office Online are teaming up to make the whole job search process faster and easier.

“Office Online provides templates for your resume and your cover letter, and Monster.com provides the Search and Submit features, so you can find the job you want and apply for it — quickly!”

keep reading…

Last night in San Diego, the winners of the 2009 Recruiting Excellence Awards were announced. After an intense judging process that lasted over a month, the finalists gathered in San Diego for the annual ceremony and dinner that kicks off the spring ERE Expo.

Congrats to this year’s winners:

• Best College Recruiting Program – Ernst & Young
• Best Corporate Careers Website – Yahoo
• Best Diversity Program – Microsoft
• Best Employee Referral Program – Accenture
• Best Employer Brand – Ernst & Young
• Best Retention Program/Practices – American Cancer Society
• Best Strategic Use of Technology – Microsoft
• Recruiting Department/Function of the Year – DaVita

Of course, none of this could have been accomplished without the incredibly hard work of our esteemed judging panel who graciously volunteered hours of their time to go through the entries.

If you want to learn more about what they did, tune in this afternoon to the live stream from ERE Expo at 11:15 a.m. PDT to watch the special panel session where many of the winners and finalists (including Valerie Kennerson, pictured, from the American Cancer Society) plan on sharing information about their winning strategies and tactics.

A valued customer asked me to ferret out 1,000 names and numbers from a satellite office of a large company (22,000 employees total). I’ve done this work for him before — I’m not sure but I suspect he uses the work for sales development, the theory being that these people all have well-paying jobs in one of the more healthy sectors of our economy.  He has ordered many of these custom-developed directories from me before, so whatever madness is behind his methodology it seems to work for him! This is how it’s done. keep reading…

David Lee, who has frequently spoken and written several articles about onboarding, says that if your new employees experience any of the following emotions when they join your company, you’ve got trouble. keep reading…

Little did I know, when I walked into the 2008 Spring ERE Expo, nervous and open-eyed, it would dramatically change the course of my life and work. keep reading…

More often than not, it is the simplest things in life and in business that produce the biggest impacts. Having spent more than 30 years analyzing corporate recruiting practices and strategy, I have noticed there are some rather basic questions that, if only posed, would have a profound impact on the effectiveness of most recruiting endeavors.

Unfortunately, the questions are rarely asked, resulting in inefficient, ineffective practices.

Do not pose these questions periodically; incorporate them into your approach to build an engaging candidate experience, a more compelling offer presentation, and ultimately, a more productive hire.

keep reading…

On ERE.net this week – ERE Expo 2009 Spring:

Hundreds of you are already in San Diego or en route for the ninth annual spring ERE Expo. However, there are still a lot of benefits to the entire ERE community around ERE Expo.

For starters, check regularly on the ERE.net article feed for posts from our editors and authors onsite in San Diego. If you use Twitter, make sure to follow @ereexpo and the hashtag #ereexpo for up-to-the minute updates from the show.

Also, several of the sessions will be live streamed right here on the ERE.net homepage. All you need to do is activate the Ustream box on the top of ERE.net during show hours to watch. Of course, we can’t recreate the entire experience of being there, but we still want to bring you a flavor of some of the valuable content being shared at the Expo.

Here is the rundown of what will be streamed live from the show. For more details on these sessions and speakers, view the agenda here. (Note: all times listed are PDT time):

TUESDAY, MARCH 31:

• 8:45 – 10:00 a.m. – Welcoming remarks & opening address from our conference chair, Michael McNeal from Intuit
• 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. – Trapped by Success w/ Scott Pitasky from Microsoft
• 11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. – Lessons learned from the 2009 Recruiting Excellence Awards (which are to be announced on Monday night!)
• 2:15 – 3:30 p.m. – How 20th Century Fox is using web-based onboarding for branding and retention w/ Garry Ellis from Fox Filmed Entertainment
• 4:00 – 5:15 p.m. – Integrating social media & web 2.0 into your strategy w/ Ben Gotkin from RSM McGladrey

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1

• 8:45 – 9:00 a.m. – opening remarks from Michael McNeal
• 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. – Morning Keynote Presentation: How the New President Will Affect the Outlook for the Economy, Financial Markets & Jobs w/ Dr. Robert Genetski, Sr. Management Director, Chicago Capital, Inc.
• 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. – Panel Discussion: Managing Change
• 1:30 – 2:45 p.m. – Social Media Marketing for Recruiting w/ Rob Humphrey from Veer Orange
• 3:15 – 4:15 p.m. – LEAN Recruiting w/ Cathy Henesey from Trane
• 4:15 – 5:00 p.m. - Closing session – the take-aways

On Monday night in San Diego, the winners of the 2009 Recruiting Excellence Awards will be announced, so watch the site to find out who won this year.

For those of you in the San Diego area who won’t be attending the full conference, make sure to try and come to the San Diego area recruiters meetup on Tuesday evening at the San Diego Convention Center.

A partial agenda is now available for ERE Expo 2009 Fall, which will be returning to south Florida in September. Book early to take advantage of the the big early bird discounts currently available.

Also stay tuned for more information about the first ever Social Recruiting Summit taking place on the Google Campus in June. There is already some healthy discussion around the topic taking place on Twitter so make sure to follow @socrecruiting to participate.

If you are in San Diego this week at ERE Expo and plan on providing updates to the community, please leave a note in the comments below with your blog address or Twitter account so others can follow as well.

Ken Zeigler, who talks, writes, and speaks about stress and productivity, offers tips on managing your day better. It won’t take long. keep reading…

Coming up on the second weekend of the NCAA tournament, I am happy to report that I’m in first place in my pool of 35 basketball fanatics. I won two years ago and I’m looking to repeat the performance. The funny thing is that I don’t even follow the sport. My personal secret is my professional weapon: pre-project research.

Research is an oft-forgotten yet essential business tool and can save money, time, and resources. While the cost of entry for my basketball pool was only $25, the stakes are significantly higher when assessing the costs to launch a new branding campaign, career site, or national recruitment program. Small mistakes can create long-term headaches like high turnover, poor performance, or dropped conversion rates.

So before the next round of hoops begins, lets take a moment to look at some of the different kinds of research there are, and when it makes the most sense to launch yours. keep reading…

I have often heard it asserted by people within the recruitment industry that we are all involved in a war for talent. The mantra asserts that in our role as corporate recruiters, we are in aggressive competition with other organizations for the same individuals. As a result, and despite the best efforts of media like ERE, there tends to be suspicious relations between the recruitment faculties of different companies.

As we enter a new and more challenging phase for the global economy, we’ve all seen a sharp increase in the numbers of capable candidates who are available. With a market like this, which should dispel any competitive fears talent acquisition teams feel, I think we have a great opportunity to re-assess how we relate to each other. keep reading…

The next time you get an impossible job req, think of Will Owens. He and a counterpart are looking for 1,413 people this year to become Allstate agents.

Big deal, right? Yes, it is. His agent prospects have to have $50,000 in the bank and want to be their own boss. Ideally they’ll have some insurance experience in their background or at least have held a business leadership role. All of them are expected to foot the bill for their Allstate training.

Then, when they finally start selling Allstate’s auto, home, and life insurance, they’ll be independent contractors who will have to cover their office and living expenses until the business starts making money, which can take more than a year.

Now how easy does it sound? Riiiiiiight.

Even in an economy that has seen thousands of financial professionals laid off, Allstate recruiters have to work every angle to meet their 2009 goal. He oversees recruiting efforts for part of the country. A second senior HR manager oversees another team.

keep reading…

It’s a good time to bring the kids to Friday’s, Applebee’s, or Chili’s. It’s also a decent time to be a shareholder in Panera Bread or to own some Buffalo Wild Wings. But not so much for a restaurant manager in a more pricey eatery.

The chart shows the percentage of companies adjusting their restaurant staffing levels, including reducing number of managers per unit, number of hourly employees per unit, or number of hours.

The data is from a People Report study of hundreds of restaurant-chain executives.

Fifty-one percent of companies say they’re reducing or planning to reduce the number of managers per unit, while only 34% are doing so with hourly employees. Also, 42% of the companies have reduced or plan to reduce the hours worked by their restaurant employees.

In addition to cutting staff, the study finds that most chains have either closed down a restaurant unit or slowed the pace of new openings.

Most of the job cuts and restaurant closings, the study says, “seem to be already in the past, which means we should see job losses in the industry starting to slow down.”

I am always looking for trends, new ways of doing things, or emerging practices that are changing, or at least influencing, the way we attract, source, assess, and recruit talent.

Some of them will most likely slip into history with little impact, but others will become the new way we do things.

Twitter is a recent example of an application that seemed of little practical use to recruiting until hundreds of people began to apply their creativity and developed interesting and useful ways to use Twitter for recruiting. It is being used by many organizations to announce new jobs to those potential candidates who follow them. It is used to help the recently unemployed stay connected and aware of open positions. It is used to communicate with a select group of prospective candidates or to students on a campus.

Here are three trends that I see as potentially significant. Please leave a comment letting us know what you are seeing, and what other tools, applications, or practices you think are emerging. keep reading…

Okay, I’m probably going to break some dishes here (and in an in-depth article on the topic in the print Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership coming up) and maybe even discuss a few taboo subjects that somehow never seem to reach the light of day. Despite all of our HR and staffing-related publications, I have yet to see an article that addresses the often tense and troubled relationship that can exist between human resource generalists and the Staffing department. Yet, if you get a group of staffing professionals together and raise this question, we can all easily describe some of those relationships that were either highly effective or incredibly dysfunctional.

I suspect that our colleagues on the HR generalist side could also do the same. Why is that? What causes the separation that sometimes exists between staffing and generalists? Why is it we work so well with some HR generalists and have a terrible time with others? What can we do to minimize the friction and maximize collaboration? keep reading…

A conversation on Facebook today led us to TiVo’s source-of-hire pie chart (shown), one we had to share.

The 34% is employee referrals. The 20% are recruiter-sourced. The 17% is from the company’s site, though of course that begs the age-old question about how people arrived at the site. The remainder: 15% job boards; 11% temp conversions; 3% internal transfers.

The chart’s not so unusual. What we like is that TiVo shares it with candidates on its career page. The DVR leader will speak (commercial-free) at ERE’s 2009 Fall conference in Florida.

For more on referrals, check out the May issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, where Accenture will be profiled. The company’s a candidate for an ERE Recruiting Excellence Award in the employee referral category (winner to be announced at the upcoming Spring conference).

Sjoerd Gehring, global employee referral lead for Accenture and a marketer by trade, led the design, pilot, and now the global roll-out of a new employee referral program for the management, consulting, and technology services giant. Gehring listened to employees, met their needs, and got a big return. keep reading…

A senior manager could be out of work nine months before his or her career prospects are adversely affected, according to a Robert Half study of 150 senior executives from the nation’s 1,000-largest companies.

Executives were asked, “How long, in months, can a top manager remain unemployed before it hurts his or her career?” The mean response was nine months, with a significant number saying 10 to 12 months.

Nine years after the U.S. Congress endorsed the use of electronic signatures for commerce, research shows the majority of employers and academic institutions are refusing to accept them for verification purposes.

employeescreenIQ says it found “an alarming 57 percent of requests for employment and education verifications were rejected when an electronically signed consent form was used.” The company, one of the largest global screening firms, conducts hundreds of thousands of these verifications for companies of all sizes, including several on the Fortune 500 list. In the majority of screens, the former employer or academic institution insists on first getting a copy of the subject’s signature.

Schools rejected electronic signatures 59 percent of the time, while employers were only slightly better, rejecting them 55 percent of the time.

“We find that most employers and academic institutions still want to see an actual signature before releasing information,” employeescreenIQ’s Vice President of Quality Service, Kevin Bachman, says in the announcement the company issued today. “If an HR manager can’t get the information they need to make a hiring decision, there’s the likelihood they could simply move onto another candidate.”

keep reading…

Many sourcing expeditions are doomed to failure because the sourcer “assumes” they have found what the customer wants. The fact is, in these instances, the sourcer hasn’t asked enough questions of the customer on the front end of the process to know what the customer wants. This is because they do not possess the depth of experience in sourcing to know what questions to ask. keep reading…