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Archive for July, 2011 Join Kat Drum, Global Social Networks and Employment Brand Manager at BlackBerry, along with Alex Kinsella, Sr. Product Manager of BlackBerry app world, as they discuss a variety of key issues facing employers today in leveraging mobile platforms.
For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!
You’ve read, I’m sure, about the troubles many veterans arriving home from Iraq and Afghanistan are having in getting jobs. Navsea, among others, has done great work to try to change this.
Among the many other folks trying to do something about it is Ken Seville.
photo from the defense dept in Canada
Seville’s startup called “GuaranteedInterview” can be summed up briefly: get American and Canadian companies to agree to interview one qualified veteran each time they have a job open.
Seville — dialing in from Santiago, Chile — and I talk more about it in the podcast at the bottom of this post.
Meanwhile, some more information on the topic:
Here is my game-plan: share my thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness style blog as move through my 60-day journey to answer the following question … Improving the Candidate Experience: Why do good people and good organizations allow a bad candidate experience?
I’m going to be collecting information by interviewing as many company and HR leaders, some who I know other I don’t, focusing on HR leaders from the 2011 Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For list.
Below are some but not all of the questions we will be chatting about in my path of discovery. I’m also figuring that all this great information will create even more questions from the questions. keep reading…
Cold Calling is Proactive – Productive – Profitable… it gives you instant gratification… and when you know how to do it right it is the most powerful skill in your sales arsenal.
For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out The Fordyce Letter!
On a day when new unemployment claims fall below 400,000 for the first time since April, and Monster reports its strongest quarter since 2008, what happens? The company’s stock opens down and only goes lower.
If this was one of those no-future-for-job boards things, then we might expect to see Wall Street discounting all the publicly held recruitment publishers. But Dice Holdings, which reported its strong quarter Tuesday morning, is up. And the Chinese careers company, 51Job, which has annual revenue that’s less than Monster’s quarterly take, is trading at $64.82, down .2 percent.
Not two hours after the company ended its quarterly financial conference call with analysts, Monster’s stock is selling at $12.06 a share. That’s an 8 percent drop from Wednesday’s $13.14 close.
It doesn’t seem to make sense considering Monster earned 9 cents a share, a penny more than what analysts were expecting. It reported 2nd quarter revenue of $269.7 million, well above expectations and even a bit more than the company’s own best prediction.
Its international business grew 31 percent over the 2nd quarter last year and now rivals its North American revenue, which increased by a not-too-shabby 26 percent to $122.6 million.
With those kinds of numbers, and predictions of a strong 3rd quarter, Monster Chairman, President and CEO Sal Iannuzzi was hardly boasting when he opened his presentation this morning, saying, “We are pleased with our financial performance.” keep reading…
A job candidate who you’d like to have on staff would arrive at your company with a little extra bonus for you, beyond just her expertise: thousands of Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, and Facebook friends. But what are the legal implications of hiring someone — even a bunch of people, perhaps all from one company — partly for their social media connections?
Renee Jackson, a Boston attorney with the law firm Nixon Peabody, mulls over these issues in the podcast below, about 11 1/2 minutes. She talks about the role non-solicitation agreements play in all this, and the push and pull between being extra careful to avoid legal trouble and trying to stay consistent with the open-honest-transparent spirit of social media recruiting. keep reading…
I received some sad news yesterday. A friend committed suicide. He was despondent because he had been unemployed for over two years. He likely had other emotional problems. After years of looking for work, getting rejected or ignored, and financial difficulties, he gave up.
This isn’t uncommon. Joblessness increases the risk of suicide.
And yesterday, the New York Times ran an article about companies that discriminate against the unemployed.
As recruiters, our routine actions can be a direct blow to the emotional health of hundreds — even thousands — of people we’ll never meet. Our inaction, our silence, our casual attitudes, can add to someone’s set of worries. Our decisions impact families. Lives.
Stop. Think. Before dismissing entire categories of people. Our economy, this job market — they are complex. Simplistic thinking (e.g., “all the good ones are working”) doesn’t hold up. “Unemployed” is an easy filter to apply. Just like “years of experience.” Only junior recruiters and rookie managers rely on such criteria to assess talent.
Real recruiters and real managers ask: keep reading…
Employ Media “transcended the purposes behind the creation” of the .jobs addressing system and “violated the promises it made to ICANN and the .JOBS Community.” For that reason the company should lose its appeal of a notice of breach of contract, and even its right to manage the issuance of .jobs addresses.
Thus concludes a just released 27-page argument by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN, as the Internet’s addressing authority is commonly known, filed the document and almost 300 pages of exhibits, in response to Employ Media’s arbitration request, submitted early in May.
Manager of the .jobs domain, Employ Media’s arbitration request claims its issuance of thousands of Internet addresses to a single organization for use as job boards is consistent with the 2005 agreement that created the .jobs domain in the first place.
To sum it up simply, ICANN says the opposite. keep reading…
A number of the big-name innovators in talent acquisition — the Sodexos, the PepsiCos, and others — are all trying to find a smooth way to get candidates using smart phones excited about a job at their companies, to apply for jobs without having to navigate a corporate careers site on the phone, all the while staying compliant with government rules, and not wreaking too much havoc on the employer’s applicant tracking system.
Matt Jeffery, who wrote that article on ERE that went quite viral, says his employer, Autodesk, is among the leaders in the mobile race. More on Jeffery and what his company is unveiling in a minute; first a look at how we got to this point.
A page from the Autodesk iPad version
What the amorphous term “mobile recruiting” has meant to many people so far is encouraging candidates to send a text message companies about jobs, like UPS has done, or the tinkering around with a careers website to make it show up better on smart phones, like companies such as Hyatt have done. Randy Goldberg and the Hyatt team are looking into having candidates submit some quick information on themselves using a cell phone, so they wouldn’t have to type in a whole resume or application. But right now, Goldberg believes that having candidates actually apply for a job using their cell phone would be quite a hassle for a candidate.
Most everyone tends to agree — including many folks you may have heard of who have an interest in mobile recruiting, people like Geoff Peterson, Craig Fisher, Gordon Lokenberg, and Chris Russell.
Lokenberg has helped Deloitte-Netherlands with its mobile recruiting. “There are a lot of apps out there that are mostly shortcuts to an Internet career site of the company,” he says. “That makes it hard to navigate.”
“The technology’s not 100% there,” says Peterson. “You’d have to have your resume already loaded up online and have a link to share, or something else like that. In theory (applying straight from a mobile application) can be done for sure, but do I see a lot of being done now? No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ve seen promise from a few different companies,” says Fisher. “But I’ve never seen a working product yet.”
Many of the applications out there are for certain groupings of people, like Lokenberg’s application created in 2009, which works only for companies that are a part of his database, and is called “Shake Your Job.” Or, Monster’s mobile application, for candidates to apply with the Monster accounts. LinkedIn says it does not yet have an “apply now with LinkedIn” mobile-phone application; Russell believes that in general, as LinkedIn makes its moves, it “should speed up the innovation around mobile applying.”
Anyhow, multiple recruiting departments I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on this, with help from various technology vendors. Among those many vendors is a small husband-wife Ohio consultancy working on an “apply now” mobile application, whose work is so private that it doesn’t want its name to be mentioned.
Pepsi, one of the innovators in the mobile arena, was aggressively working on an apply-with-a-cell-phone project, the company told me in the spring, though a spokeswoman tells me it’s not there yet. A little-known UK firm called AllTheTopBananas is its vendor of choice, a company that raves about the success of Pepsi’s mobile efforts to date. AllTheTopBananas has only about 13 employees, mostly developers. It started off in April 2007 as a job aggregator, sort of like a British version of Indeed or SimplyHired in the U.S.
AllTheTopBananas notes that “from the first 60 days from the apps going live, a soft launch only in the U.S., with the apps only being featured in only two places, on their careers website and in the app stores, PepsiCo had received over 3,500 downloads. Out of the 3,500 downloads, 85% of the candidates had job alerts set up on their device for targeted jobs they are interested in. When tracking the candidates who came from their apps, they have hired two new employees and have 10 in the recruitment process. Again, this was within the first 60 days of launch.”
Sodexo, not yet naming the vendor it’s working with, expects to launch its mobile application in about a month, allowing candidates to search and apply for jobs on their phones. keep reading…
Job board operator Dice Holdings turned in a financial performance in the 2nd quarter that was in line with Wall Street’s expectations.
Reporting this morning before the U.S. markets opened, Dice reported it earned 11 cents a share on revenue of $44.9 million. Dice beat the Street’s high-end revenue prediction by almost $1 million. Revenue was 50 percent higher than in the 2nd quarter last year, due in part to acquisitions last year, as well as a 48 percent increase from eFinancialCareers, especially in the U.K.
For the current quarter, the company said it expected to earn 13 cents a share, which is what analysts were expecting to hear. keep reading…
I received an email recently asking for articles on recruiting best practices within immature companies. It’s a solid request but broad in scope because, depending on who you ask, “recruiting best practices” will vary with the number of people you ask. What I feel are best practices may differ significantly from someone else’s. I say this because it was the lack of quality recruiting practices I experienced that ultimately drove me out of recruiting and into what I do now. There is a school of thought that small companies need to approach recruiting best practices differently from large companies.
At a high level I disagree. I believe that a company, regardless of size or maturity, needs quality, effective recruiting practices and has the ability to implement them. In determining what these best practices are for your company, a number of questions need to be asked and evaluated. That said, there are some issues early stage companies deal with that large companies don’t, and vice versa.
I suspect that if I asked 100 recruiters what they consider to be best practices in recruiting I’d get similar responses at a high level and different responses at a granular level. For example, if I asked recruiters whether or not candidates should receive a response to job inquiries, I believe they’d all say “yes” (high level). Where many people would differ is in answering the (granular level) question, “How should I respond and in what timeframe?” Elaine Orler wrote a post recently telling a story of an individual at a large company who asked each of his recruiting departments around the world a question with a negative consequence to get ideas on how to make the candidate experience better. It was a very interesting approach to get his recruiters to look at issues in a new way. The bottom line is that overall there are practices that we can probably agree are positive for our organizations. How they’re implemented is where we may differ in our approaches. keep reading…
The two largest, publicly held job boards are scheduled to report their 2nd quarter financials this week, and there are indications that the news will be good.
Tuesday morning, Dice Holdings releases its financials. Two days later, on Thursday, Monster reports. LinkedIn, which may or may not be a job board depending on your point of view, reports on August 4.
Privately held CareerBuilder released some limited numbers last week. One of the two largest career sites in the world, it reported $160 million in revenue from its North American operations. That represents a 15.1 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010, and a 6.67 percent increase over the first quarter of this year. keep reading…
Just before lunchtime in New York City, LinkedIn announced it is offering employers a button to include on all their job postings enabling candidates to use their LinkedIn profiles to apply for the position.
This “Apply With LinkedIn” feature wraps up the candidate profile in a tidy package that feeds directly into any one of the several tracking systems it has or will partner with. No ATS? No problem. LinkedIn will email the profile to you.
This portable feature can be used on any job, anywhere, on any site, including any job board.
Five ATS providers — Peoplefluent, Jobvite, SmartRecruiters, Bullhorn, and Jobscience — turned on the automatic feature this morning. Taleo, Lumesse, and Kenexa will have it enabled in a matter of months.
However, as LinkedIn’s VP of product management, Adam Nash, explained, the company designed the “apply” feature to be used by small, as well as large employers. It’s “really trivial” for a hiring manager at even the smallest of firms to add the button to a job posting, and specify how and where the resume is to be received. keep reading…
It’s hard to build a world-class corporate recruiting function without a comprehensive list of the principles that define a top function. While tips on being a good recruiter are available in abundance, there is little written that focuses on the undocumented principles that separate merely average functions from those that truly deliver.
Based on my observations in the field over the past 40 years, I’ve compiled the following list of what I have seen that leads to greatness. keep reading…
Some points to make before you read this article:
It’s somewhat controversial, but by the end you’ll agree (if you get that far).
No surprise here, but the answer to the headline’s question is an unequivocal yes. Here’s why the current version of the corporate recruiting department is heading toward extinction: keep reading…
Monster is taking its branded, 6Sense semantic search into the cloud in a clever and innovative application that will not only make life simpler for recruiters, but suggests the company is thinking beyond the classic post-and-search job board business model.
SeeMore is Monster’s newest 6Sense product. Introduced today during a group demo for bloggers, consultants, and HR tech writers, SeeMore applies the 6Sense search power to candidate databases stored in the cloud, producing a ranked list of qualified prospects.
That brief description, however, hardly does it justice. More broadly, SeeMore makes sense of the thousands of resumes that lurk in every ATS. Instead of writing impossibly long Boolean strings, or entering a bunch of keywords and getting back hundreds of results, 6Sense knows, for instance, that an audit manager must have certain skills and experience.
Power Resume users already know that with that job title and a few other parameters — years of experience for instance — 6Sense will scour Monster’s database for qualifying candidates. You won’t get CFO resumes just because there’s a keyword match. (If you haven’t tried Power Search, you can read about it here.) keep reading…
Since launching in 2003, TheLadders has been pretty clear what it’s all about. It’s the place for jobs who pay $100,000 and up, and for candidates in that range.
No more.
Beginning in September, says TheLadders, any salaried worker on their way up is welcome. keep reading…
Join Iris Libby, successful owner of IRLC a division of ALT Search Recruitment Consultants – a leading research and placement company – as she shares tips and secrets developed by her team over the course of a decade of high-caliber service. In her uniquely warm and friendly style, she delivers a blend of insider tips and common sense approaches that you can take back to the office and use right away.
For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!
Taking a page from the Teach for America playbook, a new program aims to put top college grads in entrepreneurial jobs in struggling U.S. cities.
Venture for America is recruiting 50 or more college seniors, and is looking for companies to match them with the students. Beginning in the fall of 2012, the students will take jobs at startups in Detroit, Providence, New Orleans, and other cities that have a hard time competing for talent with sexier locales.
Startups will hire the “fellows,” as they’re being called, for at least $32- $38,000 per year, for two years. Employers agree to pay the candidates’ healthcare benefits; contribute $2,500 into a training institute; host one event for Fellows; and more.
In return, employers are getting their recruiting partially done for them, and a job candidate willing to venture outside of the Bostons and San Franciscos of the world.
Venture for America is also going to keep a database of resumes, transcripts, and essays of candidates who apply to the program, and will make that database available to companies, even those not participating in this program otherwise, to search. I’m told it’ll be free to use the database, with a “tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 – $2,000 upon successful hire by the company.”
The web sure is an interesting place. Where else can people you have never met find you and reach out for highly specific advice, providing real world stories that help us keep in touch with the end-user perspective?
I received the e-mail below from a frustrated job applicant who must have found my website when searching for some straight talk about her pre-employment assessment experience.
Hello, My name is #####, and I am an insurance and financial services professional in (city, state). I work for a good company, but just this week I was contacted by large national competitor who was interested in hiring me. After speaking with a recruiter with that company, I was asked to complete a few questionnaires, sign and fax agreements to let this company research my credit and other very private information, and then was sent an email last night to complete an online assessment. I followed the directions, took the 139-question assessment (which took me about an hour) and was emailed this morning saying that I am not able to interview for the position.
I was blown away with surprise, as my credentials are outstanding and I have a clean, strong professional history. I asked for the results of the assessment, and I was denied any information as to why I was dismissed. The questionnaire asked me a few different times about my age, sex, and ethnicity, which I answered completely and honestly. My industry is typically dominated by white male professionals, but I haven’t had any problems with discrimination in the past. I am not assuming that this is discrimination, however, don’t I have a right to know what the results of my professional assessment is? How am I to know what the company views as weak or inadequate professional characteristics without answers or explanation? I want to be as professional and kind as possible with this matter, but I am not sure what to do. Any advice?
Thank you,
######
Here is my response: keep reading…
The fastest-growing human resources technology company many have never heard of is having its own challenges attracting techn... more »