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A Pfizer division is bringing on people to work on brain-related research through an expanded postdoc program, website, two-day recruiting symposiums, and a related ad campaign.

Pfizer Neuroscience employs about 130 people working on neurology, including Autism, psychiatry (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression), Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more, out of Groton, Connecticut. Last summer it began an effort to expand what was then a limited Postdoc program, from one person to about 15 or 20.

The result was, in short, a website built in about a month and a half with help from CareerBuilder, honored at Wednesday’s Creative Excellence Awards, and marketed around the science world.

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If you are consistently recruiting from the same competitors or for similar positions, pipelining provides you the opportunity to have a candidate list ready to discuss with a hiring manager after your first intake call.

Building a pipeline of candidates by recruiting for openings you are likely to have in the future allows you to manage your daily tasks efficiently and limits your daily sourcing needs going forward. With no urgent need to contact the pipelined candidates, you can focus on gathering data and dedicating 1-2 hours per day of pipeline-building activity.

With that, let me get you started by offering five key components to pipelining: keep reading…

Fresh off its Inc. ranking as one of the 10 fastest growing HR companies on the magazine’s fast 5000 list, BountyJobs is announcing a $5 million round of financing.

Led by Greylock Partners, the latest financing is coming from the company’s existing investors, which also include Accel Partners and Michigan-based RPM Ventures. BountyJobs said it will use the money to expand software and services support for new and existing customers.

“Despite fragmentation and inefficiency in the contingent search market, companies still spend billions of dollars each year on headhunters in the U.S.” said Dave Strohm, partner at Greylock Partners. “By giving companies a free, streamlined way to find and hire candidates through specialized headhunters, BountyJobs is transforming a major sector of the recruiting market.”

BountyJobs provides a marketplace for contingent recruitment, connecting companies that have open reqs with vetted recruiters who bid for the jobs. When a deal is struck, BountyJobs handles the paperwork and billing. Even in the touch economy of the last few years, BountyJobs reported it grew from $1.6 million in revenue in 2007 to $16.2 million last year.

Two days before the President unveils his plan to put Americans back to work, new reports are out with mixed jobs news.

First up is a survey by Hay Group that says that while a majority of  retailers are expecting stronger sales this holiday season, hardly any expect to bring on more seasonal help than they did last year.

The management consultancy, which annually surveys 21 major U.S. retailers, found two-thirds expecting to hire the same number of workers as last year. Another 25 percent plan to reduce the number of hires.

Competition for those seasonal jobs is likely to be even keener than it was last year, the Hay Group predicts. Last year, retailers got about 41 percent more applicants than in 2009. This year, 21 percent report they are already seeing between 5 and 25 percent more applicants. keep reading…

Over the past few years there seems to be a change in the candidate experience, and it isn’t a positive one.

Let’s forget for a moment the hundreds of applicants who apply for a particular position, with a small percentage of them qualified. The candidate experience is not going to be positive for the unqualified applicants, and that’s okay. If they had taken seriously the minimum qualifications listed on the job posting, they would have realized they didn’t have a chance.

And let’s even forget those applicants who are qualified, but don’t have a strong enough background to be considered for an interview.

What we are talking about, however, is the candidate experience for those individuals who get invited to the company for an onsite interview. That’s where we have a problem. And it’s a big one. keep reading…

Welcome to Labor Day and the last day of summer.

Yes, I know. Astronomically, summer won’t end for another 18 days. But, I’m talking symbolically, not scientifically. And in that context, the U.S. Labor Day marks a transition from summer white to fall brown. It’s when kids go back to school, and the pace of the office quickens as workers return from vacation.

Once a day of parades and political speeches in praise of American workers, which still occur here and there across the country, Labor Day is mostly now a time to head for the beach or the park, fire up the barbecue, and kick back.

In the spirit of years past, however, I present you some inspirational words on life and work in the 21st century, from two of the most widely seen commencement addresses ever delivered.

First, is the advice given to the graduating class of 2010 at Auburn University by  Tim Cook, then Apple’s COO and now, its CEO: keep reading…

Job growth was a wash in August, with the U.S. economy adding 17,000 private, nonfarm sector jobs, but losing the same number of government jobs. That leaves the unemployment rate at 9.1 percent, according to the monthly job numbers released by the U.S. Labor Department this morning.

It was the weakest report since last September, when the nation lost 29,000 jobs. Few economists expected August to show much strength, but all but the most pessimistic expected some growth. keep reading…

In the frenzied change of today’s market many times we are faced with situations that thrust us into unfamiliar roles that are mission critical. Here’s the Survival Guide for a common sense approach to staying cool while the pressure is on to adapt, survive and ultimately thrive in your new role. Join us as Russ Moon explains how to stay afloat in a sea of change.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on sourcing be sure to check out Sourcecon!

Let’s get real here. Anyone who thinks LinkedIn is in the doghouse when it comes to recruiting the best talent isn’t a real recruiter, or they don’t know the difference between active and passive candidates, or they think sourcing is recruiting. So I’m going to use this article (and this webcast) to set the record straight.

First, let me first define a real recruiter:

1. They have excellent relations with the hiring manager and the hiring team. As part of this, 100% of their candidates they present are interviewed by the hiring manager, and none are bad.
2. They understand what it takes to maximize quality of hire, and achieve it on every assignment.
3. They thoroughly understand real job requirements and why the job is important to the company. As part of this they can convince their hiring managers that using traditional job descriptions minimizes the opportunity to hire top performers.
4. They are subject matter experts when it comes to knowing the company, the industry, the compensation ranges for the positions they handle, and the competition.
5. They prepare sourcing plans and programs based on how the best talent looks for work, especially passive candidates.
6. They are comfortable picking up the phone and talking to real people and getting outstanding referrals.
7. The best candidates consider these recruiters great career advisors and proactively refer other top people to them.
8. They can accurately assess competency and job fit on multiple measures including how the hiring manager and the person will work together.
9. They maximize their first contact to final close yield (candidate opt-out rate) by recruiting at every step in the process.
10. They can close the deal by emphasizing the career growth opportunity, not the compensation.

Being a real recruiter is less important if cost per hire is more important than quality of hire, and your management team is comfortable with hiring average people. However, if you want to implement a raising-the-talent-bar strategy, or facing a situation where the supply of talent is less than the demand, you need a real recruiter to pull it off, and in most cases they’ll need to target passive candidates. (Here’s a “real recruiter” competency model we created, if you’d like to rank yourself or your teammates. You need to score at least 35 out of 50 points to be considered a “real recruiter.”)

From a “let’s get real recruiting” standpoint, LinkedIn has a major edge over its current rivals. This is important since 82% of the professional fully employed categorize themselves as passive candidates. With real recruiting in mind, here are my top reasons why LinkedIn has a significant edge over Facebook, Google+, and those newbies who think they offer a better solution. keep reading…