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The hot stuff in HR technology these days is all to do with social networking. Recruiters are flocking to social media with the energy of a bull let loose in a pasture full of lonely cows during mating season. All that effort does produce some results — candidates (or calves; depending on what you’re thinking right now) — but they’re inconsistent (in both cases). And there are plenty of skeptics that question the value of social networking as a scalable recruiting solution. Social media has its place in the recruiting universe, but the buzz around it is overshadowing other interesting technologies. Two in particular that I’d like to highlight may not be as exciting, but address fundamental needs for recruiters. keep reading…

Recruitment technology provider Jobvite has garnered a second round of financing, giving it $8.25 million to use for product development and to meet customer growth.

The company announced the Series B funding tonight. The round was led by ATA Ventures, whose co-founder and managing director, Hatch Graham, will join Jobvite’s board of directors. In December 2007 Jobvite received $7.2 million in Series A funding from a group led by CMEA Capital.

Jobvite says it grew its client count by 300 percent in the last year and now counts Accuweather, Mozilla, TiVo, Yelp, and Zappos among its customers.

One reason for Jobvite’s success is its versatility. Not only has the company built a nicely featured ATS, but it took care in the development to include the kind of networking capabilities that recruiters want. The recruiting platform allows for internal collaboration, encouraging employees to make referrals and, to the extent company culture and hiring managers allow, they can participate in the hiring process.

Making this a more active exercise is Jobvite’s behind-the-scenes job matching capability. Employees can choose to connect Jobvite to their Facebook friends,  LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. Jobvite analyzes the profiles of those connections and suggests good matches with company openingx to the employee, who can choose to send a “jobvite” invitation to their friend, follower, or 1st degree connection.

Jobvite is an on-demand system with a yearly subscription fee priced for the SMB market and designed to be less demanding of recruiter time.

“This recession is fundamentally changing recruitment, pushing companies to become more cost-effective, innovative, and strategic. Companies are looking to the technology industry to make this possible,” says Dan Finnigan, president and CEO. “Our growth this year proves we’re serving a big need and delivering immediate ROI to our customers. With this new investment, the strong additions made to our team this year, and the on-going advancements in our technology, I’m looking forward to what Jobvite will do for our customers.”

There’s been an explosion of ‘free’ out there — free social media, free long distance, and yes, free job boards. What is a free job board? For most recruiters and employers, it’s a place where you can post jobs (and sometimes search resumes) without paying a dime. Ever.

How can a free job board survive? Some make money from advertising (think Google AdWords). Some charge the job seekers for access. And many boards, I suspect, simply don’t make money.

So what gives?

keep reading…

… and nobody follows him, then was it written? Any discussion around Twitter raises a lot of questions from the sublime to ridiculous. And so it should be: Twitter is an interesting product, and there aren’t a lot of those in recruiting. My last article on social networking criticized Twitter, so I’ll start this one by accentuating the positive and discussing the merits of Twitter. keep reading…

How much would you pay for HotJobs? How does $1,396,709,461 sound?

That’s a princely sum for the site considering competitor Monster.com is worth a paltry $7,188,176 while CareerBuilder.com, the No. 1 U.S. job board by traffic and revenue is valued at $10,090,838.

This bit of silliness comes from Valuate My Site, which purports to estimate the value of a website based on traffic, links, and some sort of secret sauce. Here’s how the site says it does its work: keep reading…

August job losses in the U.S. came in lower than expected, but the unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent, a high not seen in more than 25 years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its August employment report this morning, putting the monthly job loss at 216,000. The average of guesses by economists surveyed by Bloomberg and Dow Jones was 230,000 to 233,000.

While the job loss is the lowest since August 2008, overall the economy has lost 6.9 million jobs since December 2007, the official start of the recession. This year alone the number of jobs lost tops 3.5 million.

The BLS numbers reflect the mixed messages the economy has been sending in the last few months. While job losses have declined significantly since the early part of the year, the ranks of the unemployed and the underemployed continues to grow. The BLS said the unemployed grew by 466,000 in August to 14.9 million. An additional 9.1 million people were involuntarily working part time because their hours had been cut or they couldn’t find full-time work. An additional 2.3 million people are out of work, but not counted as unemployed because they didn’t look for work during the four weeks preceding the government survey.

When those persons are included in the tally of the unemployed, the unemployment rate would be 16.8 percent.

The August job losses were generally across the board, with construction jobs taking the biggest hit dropping by 65,000. Close behind, though, was the 63,000 lost manufacturing jobs, with automotive responsible for nearly a fourth of the loss there.  The financial sector, which precipitated the recession, cut another 28,000 positions. Only healthcare had any appreciable gains, adding 28,000 jobs during the month, mostly in ambulatory care and in nursing and residential care.

Over the past few months, I’ve been tracking employee satisfaction vs. job hunting activity. Here’s the link so you can take the survey yourself, see the results, and forward it to others.

The idea here is that by tracking changes in satisfaction and the job-hunting activity level for the fully employed, we’ll have a leading indicator of employment churn.

Fully employed people switching positions with other fully employed people doesn’t do much for the national employment rate, but it can still keep a recruiting department extremely active. This employment churn becomes a problem when a company is forced to find a bunch of new hires to replace a significant number of tenured employees who have left voluntarily. This becomes a really big problem when it’s unanticipated and when it’s a company’s best people. Replacing them is then even more difficult.

The underlying cause of employee churn is similar to any financial or real estate bubble — greed, or the feeling of not wanting to be left behind. On the hiring side it’s nothing more than a few people getting better jobs, which leads to more people getting more active and finding better jobs, which in turn leads to even more activity, and so on, until you have a tidal wave or avalanche effect.

On the job-hunting side, it’s obvious that once a few new jobs are created, those who are fully employed, but most dissatisfied with their current jobs, will jump ship first. As these people are replaced, it will create a wave of job-hunting activity for those slightly less dissatisfied, and as these positions are replaced, even more people will start sensing the economy is recovering, and begin looking as well.

This churn will accelerate rapidly, as the pent-up demand for better jobs and salary increases is unleashed.

Based on our survey results, this could happen sooner than expected. These surveys are starting to indicate a decline in overall job satisfaction coupled with increased job hunting activity. None of this job switching will affect the overall employment rates, but this replacement activity will force corporate recruiting departments to gear up their activity level at a rapid rate. Things will be much worse if these replacement hires haven’t been forecasted.

The accompanying chart shows the decline in satisfaction over the six-week period from mid July to late August.

What’s most surprising is the decline is from the group of people who indicated just a few weeks earlier that they were extremely satisfied with their jobs. This has dropped from 21% to 13% in just a few weeks.

Those who indicated they were satisfied didn’t change much, with the biggest pickup in those who indicated they were neither satisfied nor unsatisfied with their jobs. This increased from 11% to 21%. Essentially, 40% of the group who were initially very satisfied with their jobs no longer feel this way.

What happened in two to three short weeks to cause this decline? keep reading…

Former Monster president and COO James Treacy was sentenced Wednesday to two years in federal prison on his conviction in May of stock options fraud.

In addition, Treacy was ordered to pay $6.3 million in fines and another $6.3 million in restitution.

Treacy is the only former Monster executive to receive prison time in connection with a stock options backdating scheme that netted the recipients – including Treacy – millions. Andrew McKelvey, who founded TMP Worldwide, which owned Monster, and was the company’s CEO and chairman, was accused of stock fraud, but because of his terminal pancreatic cancer, was allowed to defer his prosecution after he admitted his guilt in court. McKelvey died in November 2008. keep reading…

Economists are expecting that Friday’s labor report will show the lowest job loss in a year even as the unemployment rate rises. keep reading…

Two apps to tell you about today. One will get your job openings from your company website to your Facebook page in a snap and the other will get your jobs before on-the-go candidates.

The Facebook app comes from LinkUp, one of the second-tier job search engines. It’s owned by JobDig, which operates a traditional pay-to-post job board and an inexpensive on-demand ATS called JobDig Tracker.

If your company career site is one of the 22,000 indexed by LinkUp, then installing “Current Jobs at Our Company” will automatically update your company’s job listings on Facebook every day. The first five jobs are free. Any more than that and you’ll have to pay $39 a month.

In either case, LinkUp must be indexing your career site. Check LinkUp to see if that’s happening and if you don’t find them there, then you have to contact the company.

As much of a time saver as this app can be, if you don’t work your Facebook presence then it really won’t make a difference. Simply posting jobs to a friendless Facebook site is a waste. keep reading…

“Apply or Goodbye” is a great metaphor for a transactional recruiting process. Sadly, “apply or goodbye” seems to be the end result with most recruiting processes. Everything seems to be about a transaction—filling the open requisition. If a prospect is qualified and interested, then they are moved through the process. If they are not qualified, then at best, they receive a letter of rejection. If a prospect is not ready to apply to do a job, we usually do not know about them. We have de facto told them “goodbye.” And given the prospect-to-candidate falloff rate (research projects application non-completion rates as high as 70-80%), a great number of prospects get lost because of the transactional nature of recruiting technology.

In a moment of frustration (or epiphany) I quipped that candidates were seeking relationships and our recruiting technology offers them the equivalent of a one-night stand (or more accurately a chance to complete an application). Looking past the potential off-color nature of the comment, the truth is there is a gap between what people in this world of Web 2.0 desire and what a typical recruiting operation allows. That gap is the williness on the part of recruiting to have a conversation with you unless you are part of the chosen few that meets with requirements of a specific job. keep reading…

Warning bells are ringing. The emerging economy will be quite different from the one we have come from. There are signs of change everywhere. General Motors breaks down, and Tesla, Phoenix Motorcars, and Detroit Electric begin to make electric cars, changing the paradigm about what a car manufacturer should look like. Companies like IDEO are organizing themselves differently and deliberately to foster innovation. They are small and look for capabilities and interests and passion in the people they hire — not degrees and pedigree.

Rather than a focus on rapid growth, companies will look for sustainable growth. To achieve this, many more workers will be contractors, consultants, or work as temporaries or part-time. The average age of the workforce is going to get older as Baby Boomers stay longer and fewer young people seek regular corporate jobs. Learning to re-use and find new positions for internal talent will be important.

Many economists are worrying that we may have a jobless recovery, which means that rather than hire lots of people, companies will not seek to fill the jobs eliminated in this recession. They will try hard to maintain a small, highly productive workforce. Today’s BLS figures indicate that productivity is at an all-time high, despite the layoffs and slower economy. That means we are all working harder (and maybe also smarter). So CEOs may be asking: why do we need to add more people and lower our productivity?

What Does This Mean for Recruiting?

Recruiting is full of managers. These are the people who run their recruiting organizations efficiently and effectively. They implement processes, cautiously install technology, focus on customer satisfaction, and stay within their budgets. As long as the world doesn’t change too much, they thrive.

For many organizations, this can be outsourced. A solid, well-chosen RPO can take over the transactional side of recruiting and provide the people you need. It may cost a bit more than the internal recruiter and may not always be as tuned-in to the environment, but they will be capable and offer flexibility in times when hiring is slow.

As I have written many times before, internal recruiters will have to become competent in thinking more broadly about talent. Here are five things you can do. keep reading…

Developing candidate pipelines (i.e. having a ready “pool” of candidates available when a position opens up) is a topic that has been talked about for years.

Of late, given the decrease in open positions, the candidate pipeline subject has resurfaced again as a hot topic among many recruitment leaders and hiring managers.

I’ve heard comments like:

“Now is the time to fill the pipeline for future hiring needs.”

“Since the recruiters have extra time, let’s have them build candidate pipelines.”

These comments are being made at companies throughout the country.

What I find most interesting is a growing frustration and disconnect between recruiters and hiring managers regarding this subject. keep reading…

Review your senior leadership positions. You might take the top 2% or 10%; whatever is a logical method to review your organization’s top tier talent. It might be that you review all director and above positions, or VP and above. You may wish to review only positions in a certain pay grade and above. (By the way, I’ve got a more in-depth article on executive pay coming up in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.)

As you review these positions, find out if there is a person or persons in the organization who could take that individual’s position should it become vacant. Document who could fill the void, and/or make note if there is no one who could fill the position, should it become vacant. You might also make note of any imminent retirements in any key positions over the next few years as well. Once complete, you will have a clear understanding of which positions you need to plan recruiting for and when that recruiting might be coming online. Make this a subset of your strategic workforce plan.

After you complete this top talent succession planning exercise, compute the following ratio: keep reading…