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One of the things I like about Jobvite is that the company keeps at it. Now no one in this sector can rest on their laurels. The competition is just too keen and the market too volatile for any vendor to take a day off. But Jobvite watches the trends and thinks out to what parts it can add value.

For sure, there are plenty of others doing the same in their own corner of the recruiting business. Jobvite just seems to be a little quicker. And it manages to work with the spirit of the trend.

For instance, 18 months ago Jobvite launched an app for Facebook and LinkedIn that made it possible to match a job to an employee’s friends and contacts. That employee’s friends and contacts could also opt-in to match the job to their friends and contacts and, well, you get the idea. Jobvite Source, as it is branded, is a lot truer to the spirit of social media than simply tweeting jobs. keep reading…

The ADP tea leaves are being read today as a warning that the June jobs report, due Friday, isn’t going to be rosy.

No one expects that it will come anywhere close to the 431,000 jobs that were added to the U.S. economy in May. That growth was fueled almost entirely by the hiring of temporary census workers. Remove them from the count and May saw about 20,000 new, private sector jobs.

In fact, the estimates are that the economy will have lost jobs during the month as some of those temporary government workers were laid off. Because the Census Bureau employment is skewing the numbers, the focus since April has been purely on the number of private sector jobs created. keep reading…

We talk about “top” talent and “top” performers, but how do you know you’ve reached the “top”? Is there some kind of altitude marker? A sign that reads “Welcome to the Top”? Unfortunately, no. But of all the recruiting metrics in your talent capital toolbox, one indicates a recruiting job-well-done above the rest: Quality of Hire.

Every CEO, manager, and corporate investor knows that hiring the best people is what ultimately drives an organization’s long-term success. Yet the recruiting metrics most companies employ evaluate efficiency rather than quality. Metrics like “time-to-fill” and “cost-per-hire” only tell us about the process, not its impact.

What matters most is how new hires perform and how much they contribute to your organization’s growth and goals. “Top” performers can exponentially increase your productivity and profitability, while those with lower standards can damage your bottom line and plummet your reputation. Those numbers far outweigh how much time it took to fill their position. Yet the question remains: How do you evaluate the quality of your hires?

Determining Quality of Hire: Across Your Organization

If you were to deduce a formula for calculating how well your organization is hiring overall, it would look something like this: keep reading…

Total reliance on anything is generally to be avoided, but relying on something that shows signs of vanishing comes either from a misunderstanding of the present, or an ignorance of possible future scenarios.

Long-term reliance has a slow, grinding positive feedback loop that in time can become a dependency, and actually preclude the vision necessary to see other alternatives.

We know that the momentum of high-speed travel makes it hard to change direction, or even to see clearly where you are going. In the same fashion China’s high-growth economic trajectory, and low-cost labor model, may fit the bill for a blind-spot when it comes to the future. This is not the least of China’s many Black Swans, but it is a big game-changer.

The source of the reliance is the well over 100 million people who make up China’s production line workforce. Clearly, it is impossible for anyone to summarize the lives of these hard-working people, but the commonalities are there, and could be worth exploring. keep reading…

Monster unveiled an applicant matching feature today at SHRM that leverages the 6Sense Semantic Search it introduced last fall. The new feature matches applicants to jobs, producing a ranked order list that includes a side-by-side comparison of the top matches.

Last fall, the company introduced 6Sense for resume searching in a product it branded Power Resume Search. Not long after, it launched Job Search, enabling job seekers to search for jobs using 6Sense.

Don’t confuse a 6Sense match to the traditional keyword match. Old school keyword matching does little more than search for certain keywords and rank the results on frequency and sometimes proximity. More sophisticated features allow you to take into account years of experience, and even career progression. keep reading…

What is the most important factor in successfully recruiting top candidates? If you said things like salary, benefits, or the economy, you’d be wrong. It’s your organizational culture. I have a longer article in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about the role of organizational culture in the hiring process. To give you a taste of it here … let me first say that when you start to throw around terms like “organizational culture” you may think that it’s academic, or that it’s abstract. It’s not.

How a company approaches the recruiting process and treats candidates during that process says a great deal about the culture and, in turn, reinforces the culture. For example, how a company treats candidates during the recruiting process teaches those candidates a great deal about how to succeed in that company. keep reading…

Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Based on the registration response and volume of questions submitted during a recent ERE webinar on Making Your Employee Referral Program Work Smarter, clearly many organizations have retooling their programs on their agenda. With nearly a question a minute coming in from the hundreds in attendance, responding to all simply wasn’t possible. What follows is Part II of the public questions that were submitted (grouped, combined, and summarized) and our brief response to each. Part I is here. Looking for more detail? Use the comments functionality following this article to let us know and we’ll do our best to develop future content along those lines. keep reading…

With the latest Business Roundtable survey of CEOs saying 39 percent of America’s biggest companies plan to hire in the next six months, recruiters can be forgiven for thinking of it as a mixed blessing.

On the one hand, recruiters get to have fun again, doing what they do best: recruiting workers. On the other hand, it means downsized staffs will have to cope with increased workloads.

Today, The Ladders, the job board for $100k minimum jobs, begins offering its contract customers a sourcing service that promises to deliver at least five, and up to 10, best-fit candidates within 48 hours. keep reading…

It has been some time since I have done one of these posts, but a lot has been going on around the ERE.net world:

• On July 13, ERE community members will be coming together across the globe to attend a series of local meetups. These meetups will be locally run and organized by the people attending them. To date 94 cities across nine countries featuring 600 people will be coming together to meet and network. Want to see what is going on near you just click here and sign up!
• We have finalized our 2010 fall events schedule, and everything will kick off with the fourth #socialrecruiting summit. Following up on a highly successful event last month in Minneapolis, we will be heading out west on September 13 at Microsoft’s Corporate HQ in Seattle. This event, which will break through the social recruiting hype and bring you real-life case studies that are currently in use at companies, will feature Chris Hoyt from Pepsico as the chairman. Learn more at http://socialrecruitingsummit.com.
• We just announced last week that the next SourceCon event will be taking place on September 28-29 at The International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. I am pretty sure you will be hard pressed to find a cooler venue for research and sourcing professionals to learn and play than the Spy Museum, and a better group of speakers to learn from.
• Capping it off will be the annual Fall ERE Expo, once again returning to the beautiful Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood, FL from October 26-28. Featuring over 30 corporate recruiting practitioners and thought leaders, you won’t want to miss this year’s event. And you can save $400 on the registration fee through July 16. Visit www.ereexpo.com for all the details.
• For the past few years we have teamed up with Jason Corsello and Knowledge Infusion for their annual Future of Sourcing & Recruiting survey. If you haven’t already, please take a few minutes to take the 2010 Knowledge Infusion & ERE Future of Recruiting and Sourcing Survey, and share your perspectives to help the talent acquisition community better understand and navigate this challenging environment.
• If you are in the recruiting ad agency space, time is running out to apply for the 2010 Creative Excellence Awards (CEA). The CEA has been recognizing excellence in recruitment advertising for over 30 years and this Friday, July 2 is the deadline to apply for this year’s awards. If you haven’t already, check out the full list of categories and apply online at http://www.ceawards.com/2010/.
• The past few weeks have also been very exciting around our parent company, ERE Media. Earlier this month in Las Vegas at the annual Fordyce Forum conference, we announced that Amybeth Hale will be joining us as the new Editor of The Fordyce Letter. The Fordyce Letter, which ERE Media acquired back in 2006, has been delivering its monthly newsletter for over 30 years, and now features additional content online at www.fordyceletter.com. Many of you may already know Amybeth, who has applied her eight-plus years in the recruiting and sourcing world by writing for both The Fordyce Letter and ERE.net in the past, and has been the editor of SourceCon’s The Source newsletter. If you are on the search and placement side of the business, you will certainly want to check out what Amybeth has planned at FordyceLetter.com.
• About a week and a half ago we quietly turned live our newest media property, TLNT. This site is something you will want to tell your colleagues in your HR department to check out. It’s covering comp, benefits, training, and all HR management issues — aka “The Business of HR.” The site is edited by John Hollon, who until recently was the Editor of Workforce Management magazine & workforce.com.

If you have any questions about what I have posted above, please leave them in the comments or drop me a line. Have a great week!

Validation can get squirrelly fast. Without first conducting a legitimate job analysis and choosing a legitimate hiring test, there is no need to go any further. Everything is worthless without the first two steps. Once that is behind you, establish a strong link between a specific test score and on-the-job performance.

Litigation vs. ROI

Litigation threat has down-the-road implications for developing sound hiring and promotion processes. Attorneys seldom work for free, and you do not have to lose in court to lose money. keep reading…

This might seem like a no-brainer, but many tests used for selection/promotion have no validity. In lay terms, the scores predict absolutely nothing! Not only do these tests fail their basic purpose, but they invite legal challenges, favor the inept, and eliminate the qualified. That’s why validation is so important. We all know personal opinions and unstructured interviews are lousy tests. Tests scores (including interviews) are supposed to accurately predict job performance.

Tell Me About Yourself

Asking someone to “Tell me about yourself” does not sound like a test question. But, what would you call asking a question, evaluating the answer, and making a decision? It makes no difference if it’s written on paper or verbal. If you make a decision based on a candidate’s answer, it’s a test. Now, how about this kind of test question: keep reading…

Glassdoor, thus far known as a place for job-seekers to see what salaries people are earning and to read reviews of employers, is launching a service for employers.

keep reading…

A close friend of mine landed the job of her dreams last week. Competition was fierce, the testing process was exacting, and the interviewing process connected her with very impressive representatives of the firm.

Yet when the offer package came, there was a significant typo, which could have translated into several thousand dollars of unintentional income to my friend.

Of course my friend pointed out the error, and new docs were drawn up, but something sad happened in the interim.

A bit of tarnish on the brass ring.

(What do you do when the cover letter has a typo? Recruiters are always looking for reasons to dump resumes in the garbage, and when candidates send cover letters with typos, they throw them out — no matter how good the credentials might be.)

There are many phases in the recruiting process, including: keep reading…

Tens of millions of searches are conducted on the job boards every month. These are the active job seekers, drawn to one or another or, as is usually the case, more than one job board because, as Willie Sutton never said, that’s where the jobs are.

But for every active seeker, there are many more who, if they learned of the right opportunity, might just be convinced to kick the tires. Reaching those millions of others in order to find just that one, perfect candidate, is a recruiting goal best described as a quest.

For years, now, the job boards have been in hot pursuit. They’ve partnered with newspapers — CareerBuilder is mostly owned by newspaper publishers and Yahoo’s network is hundreds of newspapers deep — they power niche sites, buy keywords on search engines and traffic from social media, and have built networks of hundreds, even thousands of blogs, content providers, hobby sites, professional associations, and others.

In most cases, the networks and traffic deals simply broaden the distribution of job postings. Some, like the programs run by SimplyHired and Indeed, offer publishers the ability to choose what types of job ads to display. It’s a rudimentary type of targeting based on the content and nature of the site.

Monster’s Career Advertising Network is more sophisticated in that it targets ads to the user based on their browsing and job search behavior. Come across an ad that catches your attention and you click into the posting on Monster.com.

But recruiters are looking for more; instead of simply collecting apps, recruiters, influenced by social media, want to build relationships with candidates and bring them to the corporate career site. keep reading…

Employee referrals and social recruiting, which already began melding through Jobvite, Cachinko, and other tools, are growing even closer as new vendors enter the field and corporations test how well their jobs spread on Facebook and other sites. Jobster has tried this all before, as did H3. But their mixed success did not mark the end of an era, but rather a foreshadowing of what was to come.

keep reading…

Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

The performance gap between the very best employee referral programs and the typical program is growing dramatically wider each day. Benchmark organizations dedicating resources and formally managing their programs are very close to producing 50% or more of all external hires from their programs — nearly double that of the average firm. They are also using their employee referral programs to accomplish objectives not directly related to closing requisitions, including increasing workforce diversity, and influencing their organization’s employment brands.

The increasing disparity in performance is largely attributed to the lack of management. Many recruiting leaders view ERPs as simple programs, requiring little in the way of resources and day-to-day management. They throw together a simple policy and call it a program. Unfortunately, such efforts lack formal design, formal goals, and often ignore a multitude of variables that lead to improved performance and prevent barriers to performance from emerging. keep reading…

Dad could use a little TLC this Father’s Day.

Whether employed or one of the 8.6 million men out of work, fathers are feeling stressed, fatigued, and for the 2.7 million who have been out of work more than six months, discouraged.

The “mancession,” a catchy, sound-bite of a description for the recession has hit men, especially those at mid-career, disproportionately hard. The 2009 summary from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells the story. At the end of the year, men accounted for 59.3 percent of the nation’s unemployed. But they made up only 52.7 percent of those working.

Both sexes are about equal when it comes to the average length of time it takes the unemployed to find a job: 24.6 weeks for men v. 24.1 weeks for women. Drill down a  bit and what you find is that way more men (59.7 percent) than women (40.4 percent) make up the long term unemployed — those out of work more than 26 weeks. keep reading…

From the beginning, SHRM’s .jobs advisory council agreed to veil its meetings in secrecy, withholding its minutes and cloaking the names of speakers with numbers.

The minutes, released Wednesday, also show the council wrestled with the reasons why Employ Media, the registrar of the .jobs domain, was looking to expand its use and what value that expansion might offer the HR community.

However, if the council at any time actually enumerated the specific benefits of allowing non-company names to be used with a .jobs extension, it is not shown in the minutes.

When the council voted 7-1 on June 3 it approved a measure declaring simply that the proposed amendment “would serve the needs of the international human resource management community.”

The dissenter was not identified. Nor do the minutes indicate the reason for the ‘No’ vote, except to note that the dissenter declared it had nothing to do with the resignation of Jobing CEO Aaron Matos minutes before the meeting. keep reading…

Leading industry strategist Dr. John Sullivan joined our webinar series yet again to discuss one of the top sources of hire in the country, employee referral programs. Topics covered included utilizing your referral program to find the best candidates when you need them most, how to link your ERP with social media tools, and how to measure your results. For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

keep reading…

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. --Andy Warhol

It is time to change the recruiting game. Someone has to reinvent a process that is aged, inefficient, and marginally successful in procuring high-performing employees.

Over the past 20 years recruiters have been given magical tools starting with applicant tracking systems, then the Internet, job boards, recruiting websites, and now an array of social media tools. Yet, it is a sad fact that a single recruiter can deal with no more open positions than he could two decades ago, still feels overworked, and is deluged with unqualified candidates.

It is time to challenge our assumptions and reinvent the entire recruiting process. Let’s start by asking dumb questions: why does recruiting exist as a function? Is it to hire people? Surely given our technology, hiring managers could be trained to screen and select the people they need. Is it to screen candidates, schedule interviews? All can be automated. Is it to sell the organization to the candidate? That often happens prior to any recruiter contact through the products and services you offer, through fellow employees, through brand and reputation, and through your location. What the recruiter adds to this is useful, but probably minimal.

So, then, how can recruiters add value? keep reading…