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Over on our sister site, SourceCon.com, there is a report that that Seattle-based startup TalentSpring, an SaaS-based candidate sourcing solution that uses semantic search technology to find exceptional resume matches for job requisitions, has been acquired. The big news (and until now a mystery) is by whom — top sources say that the acquiring company is Talent Technology, a Canada-based company which produces HireDesk and Resume Mirror.

keep reading…

photo from the Intel Foundation, promoting math/science careers

Most recruiters complain that they cannot find the top talent or the talent they really need. Despite efforts to build databases and talent pools, they still struggle. In some case, lesser qualified people apply, but not the ones they identify as best. In other cases, good people apply but want too much money, or otherwise are hard to close.

Maybe this is because these firms are not listed as best places to work or have a bad reputation among job seekers, but the opposite is often true. Many of the complaints I hear are from organizations with sterling reputations, good career potential, and good locations.

What really makes a difference is the recruiting strategy they have pursued. keep reading…

It’s jobs report week in the U.S., and so far the news is not encouraging. For the first time in eight months, the economy lost private sector jobs, according to payroll processor ADP. The company’s monthly National Employment Report said 39,000 jobs were lost in September.

The report sent the stock market down and surprised economists who had been expecting another month of continued hiring in the range of about 20,000 jobs. The report did revise the August number to a gain of 10,000 from the initial report of a 10,000 job loss. keep reading…

After missing last year, I was happy to be able to spend a good part of last week attending this year’s HR Technology conference. As usual between the networking, the tradeshow, and the sessions, it was sensory overload. I made sure to take some time to try and notice the forest from the trees, while still sniffing around for interesting details.

Given my specialty focus on assessment, I want to focus my commentary on my specific thoughts about what the show says about the position of assessment within the bigger picture. However, to frame this commentary, here’s a very short summary of the main overall trends I took away from the show, as follows: keep reading…

On Tuesday, September 28 at the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Shally Steckerl gave an interesting presentation at SourceCon, one that covered competitive intelligence.

As an example of how competitive intelligence can be gathered over the telephone, let me tell you a simple story of a job I started upon my return from the conference.

On Thursday morning, I began sourcing sales reps for a paper manufacturing company in Canada. About two hours into my efforts I was talking to a receptionist in a company that was a supplier of industrial paper products to the Canadian marketplace.

There were a few names on LinkedIn at the company, but there were no sales reps listed. There was someone listed as “sales” but no other identifying information was contained on the person’s profile. keep reading…

LinkedIn rolled out a career mapping tool today, targeting it at students from the 60 colleges that provide the bulk of new talent for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The accounting firm sponsored the rollout and gets top billing for its jobs.

The Wall Street Journal says PwC paid millions (exactly how much wasn’t disclosed) for the privilege of getting first crack at the students. Other jobs from accounting firms may also appear, but PwC not only gets its jobs listed first, it also gets space on the Career Explorer pages for a branding campaign and for career content.

Career Explorer, as LinkedIn is calling its mapping tool, is much like similar services offered by some job boards, and bears a passing similarity to Monster’s. LinkedIn, though, has a whole network to leverage. As you might expect, for every job it displays in a student’s career path, it uses its network to show who works at the company. keep reading…

I returned from the HR Technology expo — a place to look at what’s new, what’s improved, what’s interesting. Well, that’s what it used to be. Now it’s déjà vu all over again. Not much seems different from the past few years. Ten, even five years ago, HR technology was exciting. Now the industry has reached a plateau. Changes in products are incremental, if that. John Malone, CEO of eQuest, put it well: it’s like love songs. All the memorable ones have already been written. It’s tough to come up with one people will remember. John’s a former professional songwriter. so he would know, but that’s an accurate assessment.

There were a few products of note in an otherwise dull field.

The first is Jobvite. keep reading…

A common question raised these days by senior HR leaders and business journalists pertains to the reality of social media empowered recruiting. By asking if it is “real,” I presume they want to know if it is a fad or something that will dominate recruiting in five years. My answer is simple: using social media to support recruiting is not only not a fad, it is the most powerful tool added to the recruiter’s tool box since the invention of the telephone. Social media is a wildly complicated tool that requires much more strategy and skill to master than other tools, but presents organizations with unrivaled capabilities. keep reading…

HR Tech introduced six companies to a comfortably large gathering of HR professionals and techies Thursday afternoon who gathered to see the “Awesome New Technologies for HR,” as the session was billed.

While there was a “gee whiz” factor to some of them, I don’t know how many  achieved the session’s goal, which was “to blow your mind.” But then, each of the presenters only got 10 minutes for their show and tell.

SocializedHR, with it’s cool (OK, awesome) iPhone app, managed a little buzz, even if the ResuReader app is a solution in search of a problem. As demoed by Peter Levy, CEO of parent company Veechi Corp., a recruiter at a job fair, on a college recruiting visit, or elsewhere who is handed a paper resume need only snap a picture and submit it. The SocializedHR backend parses the data, fields it, and can hand it off to an ATS. Meanwhile the recruiter can rate the candidate, make a few notes in text or voice (or both), snap the candidate’s picture, and have it all integrated into a single profile. keep reading…