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Lately I’ve been reading about how the telephone is so (19th and 20th Century) over.

The outcry goes that social media has reinvented the wheel and any of us left in that old telephone wheelhouse better come out into the light and get with it.

Despite all the naysaying snickering that goes on in the community about the old-school techniques that can’t seem to get out of their own way there is intense underlying interest in how to communicate with someone.

The “How to Make a Phone Call” article here on ERE has been riding the Most Commented/Most Emailed lists almost since it first appeared on March 9, 2011.

Let me tell you a thing or two. keep reading…

Note: This post has been updated.

TweetMyJobs, the first of the commercial Twitter-based job broadcast services, has been acquired by CareerArc Group. That’s the same Burbank, California company that owns Internships.com, which sponsored the Charlie Sheen intern contest.

The sale occurred in February. The sales price was not disclosed.

Gary Zukowski, who ran an IT staffing and consulting firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, founded TweetMyJobs in 2009. For a fee, the service distributes job listings to highly targeted groups of job seekers. keep reading…

A few days ago, John Hollon wrote a short blurb about the growing population of HR “experts.” I could not agree more. I blame it on public exposure from the Internet. The web has made it possible for almost anyone with a computer and an opinion to claim expertise. So how do we separate expertise from strong opinion? It’s not easy. In my case, it took studying jobs and developing selection tests to discover the clues. It’s embarrassing to admit they were there all the time …I just never thought about it until I had to measure them.

Rungs of Expertise

Expertise is ladder-like. The first rung is a pair of hands; i.e., people who make a living doing what the client asks. Usually they have some practical experience with the subject (e.g., they know slightly more than their clients); but, they are actually just skilled individual contributors. You might think of them as knowing how to use the most common Word features. keep reading…

Build Social Capital to Succeed with Social Media

“The Whuffie Factor” is a book about using social networks to build your business. The concept of whuffie (rhymes with whoopee, but don’t confuse the two) refers to social capital built through connections among and between people in communities of shared interest. This creates a sort of “cultural currency” that an organization (or individual) can “spend” for its own benefit.

The Whuffie Factor is about marketing and sales but it does have some lessons for recruiting. The main one is that in order to succeed in making hires, recruiters must actively participate in social networks in — well — a social way. What most recruiters are accustomed to is using any media or channel to push ads. keep reading…

Employ Media, manager and wholesaler of .jobs Internet addresses, got some support and more time to resolve a dispute over its handling of those addresses.

ICANN, the Internet’s addressing authority, extended a March 28 deadline for two weeks — and possibly longer — so the parties could continue efforts to work out a solution to what the organization says is a breach of contract by Employ Media.

The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN.org) claimed Employ Media had breached its contract by allowing the creation of job boards using a .jobs extension. It also complained that the rules for obtaining a .jobs address were so loose they “appear to exclusively serve the financial interests of Employ Media and SHRM.” (SHRM is Employ Media’s partner in the administration of .jobs. No response from SHRM to the charge by ICANN.) keep reading…

You want proof positive that the U.S. economy is picking up? The percentage of HR jobs being advertised is growing by double digits.

In March, says new data from Indeed.com, HR jobs were up 34 percent over March of 2010, and the number of human resource job postings grew faster than those in half a dozen other industry categories. In the last quarter alone, HR beat out the growth in most of the categories that Indeed tracks. Now that says something about the confidence of American employers.

Indeed, today, began listing human resources as the 13th category in its employment trends. The jobs site counts the number of HR and HR-related jobs during a month, scrubs the list to eliminate duplicates, and posts the results. It does the same for clicks into the HR listings on Indeed. (Because Indeed sends those clicks directly to the site where the job post originated, it can’t say how many turned into applications.) keep reading…

Mark your calendars! If you missed your opportunity to attend our last meetup, you’ll get another opportunity to meet with your peers this month at a location near you.

What we’ve seen from the ERE community has been great so far: Over 1,500 participants in more than 200 locations worldwide have participated in local networking events making it one of the largest meetup groups on Meetup.com. You can see some of the pictures on our Facebook fan page from the last events.

We’re looking forward to seeing you all at the next ERE Meetup on Tuesday April 19th, 2011. As was the case in the last one, we need your help organizing them in your local area. Here is how you can help us:

• Visit the ERE Recruiter Meetup page and sign up for a Meetup near you. If you don’t see one in your area, start one up!
• If you know a great location (bar, restaurant, office) where your group can meet, add it to the Meetup.
• Help us get the word out! We don’t need a huge group in each city to get together, have a good time, and make great connections. It can be as few as half a dozen, but the more the merrier, so tell all the recruiters in your area about the Meetup!

We hope you can join us again!

Recruiters and employers want to “do the right thing” when it comes to using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But what’s the right thing? That’s what they’re not sure of, says Keith Watts, an employment law attorney with Ogletree Deakins.

We talk about this challenge on the podcast below, including:

• How to handle photos you see on Facebook
• The Catch-22 of hiring the “most qualified” candidate
• The legal risks of inconsistency in the hiring process

keep reading…

“I don’t know who I’m calling,” Marianne said.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I answered, while thinking to myself that none of us ever really do.

She nodded unhappily.

“Did you read One Lesson Lois?” I asked.

She nodded that she had.

“Did any of that resonate with you?” I asked again.

“Well, sort of,” she said.

“But Lois was never in the recruiting business so I can kind of understand her reluctance. I know it’s my job to call people …” she trailed off.

I watched her body language as she said this.

The right hand that she had drawn back clenched to her chest moved to her leg and she started to scratch at her knee. Her left hand went to her mouth and started pushing at her lower lip.

She appeared to be thinking. keep reading…

You may have read about the big case against Wal-Mart, where to sum it up, the Supreme Court will decide if a gender-discrimination lawsuit can be brought as a class action, one that’d involve more than a million women.

On the podcast below, Gerald L. Maatman, Jr. of Seyfarth Shaw LLP, talks about what this case could mean to recruiting departments when the Court’s verdict arrives. Mattman works out of the firm’s Chicago and New York offices; one of his specialties is defending employers sued in employment-related class actions. keep reading…

Do you use your personal phone to access the company ATS when you’re not in the office? Or maybe just to contact that hard-to-reach hot prospect? Of course you do.

How about texting prospects from your personal phone? Or tweeting out a note to your talent community? Or downloading a spreadsheet or document to your flash drive so you can work on it over the weekend?

All of this is so routine you may be wondering why I’m even bringing it up. Well, it may be more routine than you suspect; 95 percent of information workers use at least one personally purchased device for work, according to a study by IDC/Unisys. The average number of consumer devices used for business by workers in a day? Four.

The big deal about this is that most companies haven’t caught up to what’s going on in the workplace. A 2009 study by Robert Half Technology found more than half of companies block access to one or more sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Only 19 percent allowed access for business purposes.

Remarkably, a CareerXroads survey about the same time found 35 percent of recruiters and hiring manager were blocked from social media sites. keep reading…

Recruiting leaders tend to be a pretty conservative group, sticking with tried-and-true approaches, tools, and methods. Because they are almost always managing from the weeds, there is little time invested in identifying, testing, and refining new solutions, but that doesn’t mean such solutions don’t emerge.

The inventory of available approaches is quite large, with many solutions existing under the radar. keep reading…

Carmen Hudson stopped by this week to discuss the wealth of untapped passive candidates that can be found in the blogosphere and how you can reach out to them.

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

No April Fool’s joke here: The U.S. added 216,000 jobs in March as the unemployment rate crept down to 8.8 percent.

It is the second consecutive month of strong growth in private sector, non-farm jobs, providing additional evidence that the U.S. economy is gaining momentum. Today’s jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also offers support for the various surveys of the last few days predicting increased hiring.

Investors were obviously in the mood for a little good news. They sent the Dow up within minutes of the market’s opening. At 9:45 a.m. in New York, the Dow was up almost 43 points.

Economists had been expecting a much more modest jobs growth, with the consensus falling in the 190,000 area. They’d also anticipated that the unemployment rate would either remain flat at 8.9 percent or climb to 9.0 percent.

The other surprise in the BLS report were upward revisions to the job counts for January and February. Between the two months, 7,000 more jobs were added to the counts. keep reading…

A North Carolina recruiter has decided he will place future candidates and deal with all future clients solely through technology, without having to speak to anyone on the phone or in person.

“Social media works and I’m going to take advantage of it,” says Damon Kornbluth in an IM to me. “I don’t need people anymore to recruit.”

Kornbluth says he attended a number of recruiting-industry conferences in the past, as well as local networking events, but just got tired of dealing with humans, preferring computers. “Although I got into this business because I liked people,” he says, “the more I got to know them, the less I liked ‘em.” keep reading…