ERE.net

First off, I’d like to hand out the “extra credit” to last week’s Sourcing Test.

Those seemingly sober-minded folks at Zapoint are cooking up a sales gimmick as clever as it is provocative. Over the next 12 months, Zapoint will compile dossiers on the HR, sales, and marketing employees of 300 of Fortune’s biggest companies.

Then, says Chris Twyman, Zapoint’s founder and CEO, the HR departments will be presented with skills maps for their company’s personnel.

“If some of the 300 don’t like what we are doing that is fine,” says Twyman in a press release going out today. “It will not be long before they need to consider the implications of this campaign.”

Talk about throwing down the gauntlet. The 300, as the project is called, is nothing if not ambitious and attention-getting. keep reading…

Indeed made it official this morning, decloaking its new resume service with a blog post encouraging job seekers to try it out.

I posted about this a week ago, as word was leaking out that Indeed was conducting a private beta test. Indeed CEO Paul Forster confirmed the test, but didn’t offer many details then.

Now, what we see is a broadening job seeker service. Users create an account (if they don’t already have one) on Indeed where they can build a resume or upload one.  The resume can be shared by making them public, or they can remain hidden and used only by the job seeker.

Public resumes are searchable on the site or via search engines. That makes Indeed resumes much more visible than the leading other public resume site, Craigslist. It’s also a significant improvement over Craigslist’s resumes, which can charitably only be described as free-form and clunky. Indeed’s resume builder creates the kind of resume any ATS can read. keep reading…

The U.S. added jobs last month at the fastest pace since the big run-up to the Census a year ago. This time, however, the new jobs came from the private sector, which created 222,000 jobs in February.

Continuing cuts in employment by government brought the overall number of jobs added during the month to 192,000. At the same time, the unemployment rate dipped slightly and is now at 8.9 percent.

Economists had been predicting strong growth, and the numbers released this morning by the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics were right in line with — or above — the consensus estimates. A Bloomberg survey put the average estimate for private job growth at 200,000.

Reuters quoted Brian Levitt, an economist at OppenheimerFunds in New York, saying, “We have moved into the expansion phase of the economic cycle and the economy is self-sustaining.”

Expectations for a robust report were bolstered this week when ADP projected private job growth of 217,000 new jobs in February. Thursday, a 20,000 drop in initial unemployment claims brought the filings to 368,000 for the last week of the month, the lowest number since May 2008. That report helped fuel a Wall Street rally Thursday that sent the Dow up 191 points. keep reading…

Saying SHRM has an “excellent opportunity to demonstrate its independence,” a coalition of trade associations, job boards, and others is calling on the HR organization to reconsider its position favoring an expansion of the use of .jobs addresses.

The two-page letter from the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition asks SHRM, sponsor of the .jobs address, “to exercise its oversight and enforcement duties and end Employ Media’s non-compliant operation of the .JOBS TLD…”

Issued today, the letter follows this week’s sharply worded reprimand from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Charging Employ Media, the administrator of .jobs addresses, and its partner SHRM with serving their own financial interests rather than the interests of the human resource community, ICANN declared Employ Media in breach of its agreement and gave it 30 days to make things right or face cancellation. keep reading…

Many recruiters lose too many good candidates at the beginning of the sourcing and recruiting process, due to lack of basic recruiting skills. As a result, they work too hard screening more candidates than necessary and lowering overall candidate quality, since they let the best ones get away without a fight. The problem starts by not responding properly to the “what’s the job?” or “what’s the comp?” question when first engaging with a hot prospect. keep reading…

Sourcing master Shally Steckerl returned to our webinar series this week to demonstrate the incredible results you can get using peer regression search.

We examined finding people through image and video searches, as well as blog comments and social media interactions. At the end Shally showed off some impressive new technology.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

College hiring brightened in February, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The monthly NACE hiring Index took a 5.4-point jump from January to February, meaning more actual hiring of college students took place. A second measure — of recruiting activity — took a 5-point jump.

“The February figure is the highest yet recorded since NACE launched the index poll in October 2009,” the organization reported, “indicating that the Spring 2011 recruiting season will likely be brisk.”

The increase brings the hiring component almost even with where it was in October, while the recruiting activity measure is stronger than it was a few months ago. keep reading…

If today’s employment report from payroll processor ADP is any indication, February was a good month for hiring. A very good month.

The 217,000 private sector jobs that ADP says were added during the shortest month of the year was the largest increase reported by the company since November 2006.

Based on ADP’s payroll data and compiled by Macroeconomic Advisers, the monthly Employment Report is considered a harbinger of the official Labor Department report that will be released Friday. While the two reports use different methodology and the government report includes public sector employment, the ADP report offers economists an early look at the employment trend.

Economists had been expecting the ADP report to show an increase of 170,000 to 180,000. Estimates for the government report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics average 200,000 more jobs in February, according to a survey by Dow Jones Newswires. keep reading…

I’ve spoken often in the past of the challenging relationship between human resources generalists and in-house recruiters. During the last few years, that relationship has become even more complex: Because of the recession, many generalists were asked to do more recruiting because resources were limited. Now that the economy is rebounding, it’s tempting to think the roles will revert back to normal. But will they? And if so, how have things changed or stayed the same? Have we learned anything at all in the last few years about how we can work more effectively together, or have we moved further apart?

The answers to these and other questions, as well as the opportunity to revisit this unique (sometimes good and sometimes not-so-good) relationship, prompted me to lead a comprehensive session on this topic at the upcoming ERE Spring Expo, March 23-25 in San Diego entitled In Treatment: The Complex Relationship Between Recruiters and HR Generalists. During the session, Mike Adamo, director, global talent acquisition at Edwards Lifesciences, and Susan Warner, director of corporate human resources for FMC Corporation, will join me representing a senior recruiting specialist leader and an HR generalist leader respectively. Together we will address the practical issues that arise between the two functions from all sides and look at ways to improve the relationship and increase everyone’s value within their organizations.

But to begin, we thought it would be helpful to provide some information on the historical challenges, or ‘True Grit,’ in the relationship between recruiters and generalists, from each of their perspectives, and what has worked in the past. So let’s hear from both sides: keep reading…