For the fourth consecutive year Santa has welcomed us into his workshop to review his workforce management successes and challenges. Going into 2002, Santa was pretty satisfied with the accomplishments his recruiting team had made in 2001. As you may recall from the review last year, in 2001 Santa primarily worked on improving efficiencies in... [full article »]

July is nearly over, and we are now on the down side of 2002. How is the year shaping up for the industry? Are companies hiring again? What’s the buzz in the technology area? Is the search industry back on the upswing? How are companies approaching their recruiting? While the industry hasn’t jumped back as... [full article »]

You’ve spent all the money necessary to sponsor H-1B candidates to work in your company, and now you’re faced with laying them off. What are the implications? How much time does the individual have to remain in the country without employment? Is the intellectual capital you’ve just developed immediately being shipped out of the country?... [full article »]

Fewer speakers, fewer attendees, fewer vendors ó but no less substance, networking, or fun! I think everyone that attended ERE’s second annual ER Expo conference in San Diego last week will agree that it was probably the most worthwhile conference they have attended since, well, last year’s conference. Quality outweighs quantity anytime. Even the vendors,... [full article »]

The business and economic uncertainties of 2001 resulted in many companies choosing to delay their investment in recruiting technology. It wasn’t uncommon for projects to come to a halt midway through the vendor analysis process. But now that 2002 is well underway, budgets are opening up and the vendor selection task forces are beginning to... [full article »]

It was with much trepidation that I met with Santa for our third annual review of his recruitment and retention programs. I had heard through the grapevine that Santa had met with some dramatic challenges in 2001, and that the stress had resulted in significant weight loss. Never believe what you hear. While 2001 was... [full article »]

If you knew that spending an extra $50 to $100 per hire could potentially save an employee’s life, and save your company millions of dollars in liability, would you do it? In this article, I’ll tell you why you should. Now more than ever, it is critical to make sure that the people you are... [full article »]

In Part One of this article series, we reviewed the landscape of the recent and pending acquisitions of HotJobs, FlipDog and Headhunter.net by the industry giants by TMP and Tribune Companies. Part Two shifts the focus over to the niche boards and their potential for the future, including what they can do to drive success.... [full article »]

We live in confusing times. As we worry about our family, friends, personal security, and the security of our economy, it seems a bit trivial to be concerned about trends in the career site industry. In the grand scheme of things maybe it’s not so important, but in our narrow world of work life it... [full article »]

Online pre-screening tools seem to be the latest “buzz” in the e-Recruiting marketplace. They are becoming a standard feature on ATS systems, job boards are beginning to offer them as add-on options, and many of the “front-end” recruiting systems include pre-screening as a key feature. What do these tools really mean for you, the recruiter?... [full article »]

Reading Kevin Wheeler’s recent articles on customer service and the subsequent responses have sparked me to continue the discussion with a few additional thoughts. First, I support Kevin’s arguments completely. By accepting a position as a recruiter we have in effect accepted the role of being the face of the company. Aside from what candidates... [full article »]

How times have changed! A year ago our heads were spinning. We had so many open requisitions, managers to support, and candidates to contact that we would try anything to secure a hire. Budgets were not an issue. We gladly paid 30% search fees so long as we got a high-quality candidate hired. Today, many... [full article »]

The recent economic slowdown has caused some significant reactions by recruiting departments – many of which seem to be knee jerk. Advertising budgets are being cut, contract recruiters eliminated, and, in many cases, full-time recruiters laid off. The result is that many of the remaining recruiters are as frenzied as they were during the height... [full article »]

Internet Sourcers are continuously looking for new places on the Web to search for talent. The traditional “non-traditional” methods of building long search strings, flipping and x-raying sites, and peeling back URLs are here to stay, but we are always in need of ways to uncover new data that can be flipped and x-rayed. Lately,... [full article »]

After attending conferences people always ask me about the speakers and what new insights I gleaned from their presentations. Rarely does anyone ask me what I learned from the attendees. But when I attend a conference, like ER Expo in San Diego, I typically learn as much from the attendees as I do from the... [full article »]

Over the past 6 months we’ve been hearing about the dot-com shakeout and the perfunctory approach to many of the layoffs. More recently, we’ve heard about more established companies like Lucent Technologies, Motorola, Dell, Xerox and Nortel laying off hundreds of employees. The general reaction seems to be a ripple of fear. My perspective is... [full article »]

The most recent issue of Business 2.0 (January 23, 2000) features an interview with Ray Lane, the former COO of Oracle, who is credited with turning Oracle’s operation into a world-class e-commerce company. In this interview Ray discusses what he believes it takes for a large bricks and mortar company to develop an effective e-commerce... [full article »]

In an ERE article from last year (ERE December 16, 1999), we visited Santa’s Workshop to take a peek at how he was managing his recruitment during the 1999 labor shortage. What we found was that despite Santa’s remote location in the North Pole, his recruiting program was quite progressive. Apparently the Internet and newsletters/websites... [full article »]

On October 3, the Wall Street Journal published a wonderful article by staff reporter Rachel Silverman titled “Shrewd Recruiters Search Through Thousands of Sites for Top Talent,” in which she describes various active mining techniques and the results they can generate. She discusses the merits of “flipping,” peeling back URL’s, and “anchor” searches to uncover... [full article »]

For the past few years, the e-Recruiting industry evangelists have been preaching the importance of well-written job ads for achieving maximum quality results. Our focus has been on creating a marketing piece that will compel the job seeker to open the ad (creative titles), tell them about what they will be doing and how they... [full article »]