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The New Jersey SHRM council and eight other state HR groups have been honored for their innovative programs addressing local workforce challenges.

keep reading…

Wouldn’t it be great to have access to an off-the-shelf, easy-to-execute morale-boosting program, one that includes two “employee engagement killer apps”? Given how challenging—and important—it is these days to keep employee morale high, wouldn’t it be great to have this morale boosting program, and not pay a fortune for it?

Well you can.

It’s called: keep reading…

Diversity and inclusion may be the most poorly understood issues in business today. While many of us have come to believe that investments in diversity and inclusion are primarily about compliance, political correctness, sensitivity or special treatment, the truth is something different. keep reading…

There’s a new, free, ATS in town. Launched today, Zoho Recruit is a nicely featured candidate management system that’s suitable for smaller employers and staffing agencies.

It’s built by the same people who launched Zoho People, a low-cost talent management system we wrote about a while back. keep reading…

American businesses will stop shedding jobs by the end of March, says a new report from the National Association of Business Economists.

The organization’s latest outlook is even more hopeful than the one issued just a month ago. Today’s report says that the U.S. economy will grow at an annual 3.2 percent GDP, half a point higher than the NABE’s October forecast.

The economists say the recovery will be lead by the  housing turnaround already underway, which will gain momentum next year, and by business investment in equipment, software, and inventories.

“While the recovery has been jobless so far, that should soon change,” said NABE President Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University. “Within the next few months, companies should be adding instead of cutting jobs.”

Consumers, however, are unlikely to open their wallets anytime soon. The 48 economists participating in the survey expect “lackluster consumer spending gains over the coming year.” Instead, consumers will continue saving, averaging 4 percent during 2010.

The unemployment rate, now at 10.2 percent, is expected to hover there through the first half of next year, declining only slightly — to 9.6 percent — by year’s end. The report said that next to the size of the federal deficit, unemployment over the next five years was the biggest concern of the economists on the survey panel.

A few weeks ago John Sullivan wrote an article citing a few disturbing recruiting numbers: 70% of participants are dissatisfied with the hiring process; 46% of new hires turned over within the first year (50% for new executives); and top producers produce 40-67% more than others. Sullivan recommended a variety of solutions. One of them included better assessment tools. A few weeks later, Lou Adler wrote an article suggesting that quality of hire was significantly more important than cost per hire. He also suggested a few ways to evaluate source quality based on candidate skills.

I applaud these comments. They have been a long time coming. But in many ways they are like advising Robert Reich to grow taller: easy to say, but doomed to disappoint. The formula for fixing these recruiting problems is threefold: 1) if you cannot define it, you cannot measure it; 2) if you cannot measure it, you cannot control it; and 3) if you cannot control it, you have a 50/50 chance of being wrong. keep reading…

Last week I introduced this series by stating that a majority of social recruiting initiatives currently in progress in organizations around the world would fail primarily because they relied solely on the limited resources of the recruiting function to establish visibility online, engage an audience, and service that audience throughout a multi-stage conversion cycle.

This week my attention turns to why the recruiting function cannot — and should not — be the primary executor of social media activities, as well as tips for getting the rest of the organization to help out.

A List of Reasons Why Recruiters Can’t or Shouldn’t Do It All

There are a variety reasons why recruiters shouldn’t be expected to handle most of the day-to-day aspects of social media recruiting and communications.

keep reading…

When Monster bought Trovix in the summer of 2008, the blogosphere popped with wonder at how the job board would make use of Trovix’ job matching technology.

Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business. keep reading…

Erin Peterson joined us to discuss how to improve a candidate’s experience during the hiring process and the positive impact it can have on your hires and employment brand. For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

At an early age I had the unique opportunity to work at the corporate offices of two different Fortune 500 companies. One was number 37 on the list, and the other one 497. While there, I learned a few timeless strategy lessons. They might be useful as you develop the hiring strategy for your company or organization. keep reading…

I recently tried to arrange a meeting with someone visiting the Twin Cities and learned from his office that he’d asked that anyone wanting to reach him should “Tweet me.” Tweet me? E-mail or text messaging not good enough? Let me get this straight: I should try and arrange a private meeting to discuss a potential business deal using a medium that is literally open to the world. I have a better idea — Tweet yourself.

I suspect that the aforementioned twit, er, Tweeter was trying to look cool rather than gain anything practical from using Twitter instead of other modes of communication. After all, e-mail is so 20th century, and as for the phone — that was invented in 1876. Who would want to admit they used one? Might as well resort to carrier pigeons.

Let’s Go Surfing

Recruiters have a tendency to jump on the latest technology without fully appreciating its benefits or ramifications. keep reading…

With the recruiting industry stuck deep in the recession rut, it’s no surprise that companies are looking to diversify.

The RightThing, an RPO, acquired AIRS, a technology and training firm, in 2008. About the same time, CareerBuilder launched Personified, a recruitment consulting and outsourcing business. Two months ago, recruitment technology vendor Taleo acquired Worldwide Compensation, a comp management technology and services provider.

The oddest diversification, though, has to be TalentHook’s launch of a directory of, ahem, gentlemen’s clubs and their entertainers. The company that provides resume search software to hundreds of employers now lets you search for what less euphemistically are called strip clubs. keep reading…

Many years ago, the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, had more than its fair share of fires. Most of the buildings were made of wood, and the city literally burned down several times.

Then, in the year 1405, it got smart and created a position of a night watchman to keep an eye on the city and identify fires.

The watchman’s job was to climb the 153 stairs to the top of the cathedral tower and at each hour from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m., he would call out in four directions, C’est le guet; il a sonné l’heure (“This is the nightwatch; the hour has struck”).

Apparently the night watch was effective, because the tradition still continues today! keep reading…

In the wake of ERE’s Social Recruiting Summit Monday comes a contest to expand job seeker use of Twitter, while another quarter counsels caution in how job seekers use social media, but says it’s a must for 21st-century workers.

TweetMyJobs, one of the first job distribution services to use Twitter, is now using the service and its followers to promote itself.  TweetMyJobs is running a contest that has a plasma TV or $500 as its grand prize and the only requirement for winning is to watch a video and enter. So far, so traditional. Here’s where the social media aspect comes in: The winner will be the person who accumulates the most points during the contest. Points are earned each time a person clicks on a unique link to access the TweetMyJobs site.

Contestants are emailed a unique link that can be tweeted, posted to Facebook, and shared on over 20 other social sites. The more friends, followers, and connections you have and can convince to click the link, the more points you earn. keep reading…

I don’t need to fight

To prove I’m right

I don’t need to be forgiven.

–Baba O’Riley

“Why is this taking so long” is one of my favorite hiring manager questions. The best answer is to not have it asked in the first place. Sadly, it makes the recruiter have to justify their existence with a flurry of undocumented and ill-prepared remarks on past activity while feeling awkward and flat-footed. All in all, it is not a fun time.

I believe that we can avoid this awkward question in almost all cases, but before we discuss how that is done, let’s look at four sample answers to that question. These answers are not good ones and should be avoided. (The answers below might be accurate, but we need to be sure that candor and objective conversation take a back seat to organizational politics.) keep reading…

Despite mixed results with HR outsourcing, outsourcing parts or all of the recruitment process is growing as companies discover the flexibility and scalability that external worker provisioning can offer.

A new study from outsourcing research firm Everest Global suggests that while the recession is reducing the size of RPO contracts, interest is growing, especially among employers with 8,00-15,000 employees.

“RPO buyers are attracted to a value proposition with cost reduction and scalability elevated due to the current economic climate, followed by improvement of recruitment processes, access to best-of-breed options and technologies, and enhanced employer branding,” said Katrina Menzigian, Global’s VP of  Research. keep reading…

Social media presents progressive organizations with a plethora of recruiting-centric opportunities. Every day, new ways to directly source talent, support the engagement of people with the organization, market employment opportunities, and influence the employer brand arise.

The sheer volume of potential directions to follow is confusing, daunting, and at times, just plain overwhelming. While some organizations have stuck a stick in the sand and are pushing forward with a defined approach, the majority of efforts currently underway will fail for one key reason: they rely solely upon a small handful of individuals attempting to maintain visibility in a sea of content growing exponentially.

Relying upon a social media coordinator, online brand ambassador, or a team of recruiters dedicating only a portion of their desk time to social media initiatives dooms such efforts to stumble and underperform. Such efforts produce corporate fan pages on Facebook, where the only comments ever visible are sanitized “PR” posts and boring job announcements! (I actually viewed one such page last week where the only wall post visible was a notice from the organization’s legal department advising visitors to the page not to post negative comments!)

Delivering an engaging, interactive, authentic, and personalized experience requires a scale of participation that the limited resources of the recruiting function simply cannot provide. The alternate approach, the one most likely to drive success, is an employee-centric approach that relies on your employees to build and manage relationships and the recruiting resources to coordinate, influence, and support their efforts.

The 12 Most Common Social Media Strategies keep reading…

How well does your organization select and integrate talent for internal promotion? If you are like many organizations we’ve seen — not very well.

When promoting from within, do you select the person who is doing the best job in their current role? Do you promote the person you like the most, the person who has the most seniority, or the person who gives you attention and deference? It is not unusual to promote a good technical person or a good clinical person into a management position. Technology companies and healthcare organizations do this frequently.

If this is your current practice, then you are missing out on the opportunity to improve business performance. You may also be dramatically and unnecessarily increasing your cost of operations. This is hardly a good strategy in the current economy.

Look at the cost of a bad (mismatched) promotion: keep reading…

Sourcing guru Shally Steckerl joined us on our webinar series to discuss strategies and free online tools that can help to facilitate sourcing executive talent. For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

If you aren’t one of the nearly 300 people headed to New York City in a few days for Monday’s #socialrecruiting summit, you aren’t totally out of luck. As has become standard for ERE events, we will be streaming the event live here on the ERE.net homepage for free for those of you who can’t be in attendance.

Social media is rapidly becoming more than just another tool in a recruiter’s toolbox — it’s an important part of the future of the talent acquisition profession. The goal the summit is to have an industry conversation about these tools, and talk about tactics and strategies that are already in the field and working, not pie-in-the-sky ideas. And even if you can’t make it, you can still participate in that discussion.

keep reading…