This system suggests people who your employees might know — using their Facebook and LinkedIn contacts — who might be a fit for an open job. Employees can then send those people a note. The tool also, graphically, can show you any money an employee may have earned for a referral (e.g. $500), as well as a cumulative total.

This took about six months to make. Meanwhile, in August, SuccessFactors, an SAP company, expects to launch an improvement to the tool, where an employee can more easily distribute jobs on social networks, including Twitter, to their social media “friends” and contacts.

SuccessFactors’ social referral updates (and onboarding updates too) is just a taste of the many recent new launches and updates, such as: (more…)

Google made Glassdoor’s list of oddball questions with this one: “How many cows are in Canada? Salesforce made the list, asking, “If you could be anyone else, who would it be?”

Now, though, Rocket Fuel has kicked it up a notch, with a recruiting billboard along heavily traveled Rt. 101, the Valley’s main artery. It lists the company’s Internet address with an X. To get to page X, you need to solve this puzzle:

X=The largest 15 digit perfect square palindrome. (more…)

SAP says it’ll be hiring autistic software testers, programmers, and data-quality-assurance specialists. It’s going to do it through a partnership with Specialisterne, a Denmark-based firm operating in Europe and the U.S.

SAP had used the organization, where a majority of employees have autism or a related diagnosis, to do a pilot project in India and Ireland. U.S., Canada, and Germany will be on the docket next.

Specialisterne Founder Thorkil Sonne says “SAP is the first multinational company to partner with us on a global scale.” He expects others to follow its lead.

Smarterer

The award comes with a $10,000 prize. It was selected by three judges: ERE Media Founder David Manaster, Greylock Partners Talent VP Dan Portillo, and Universum Founder Lars-Henrik Friis Molin. The judging panel considered in its decision the results of an audience vote done via text message (judges and the crowd each received a 50-50 weighting).

Friis Molin says the Smarterer tests are “perfecting themselves” through crowdsourcing. (Here’s more on Smarterer.) He sees it as one of the potential future gold standards in the assessment field. David Manaster said he tried the test and found it as fun as Smarterer claimed. He also said that given Smarterer’s “consumer approach” he also thought the test could be a future gold standard.

It was the elite of an elite group of new tools and technologies rolling out for recruiting departments, including one that would help companies hire teams (vs. individuals); another that would add a one-page candidate proposal to the application process; and another that would help companies create mobile careers sites. And more.

Meanwhile, two other companies were also winners at the event. (more…)

The info covers cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and intellectual disabilities. (more…)

If you don’t know the company, it automates candidate feedback. So it asks job seekers what they think of your brand, whether they are satisfied with their experience as a candidate, their preferred interests/channels for job seeking and career content about your company, and more. One of its clients, G4S, has used the information it has gathered to improve recruiter skills, and refine its brand messaging.

Anyhow, back to what it’s up to. (more…)

Even as most leaders and founders of the firms surveyed by the bank for its annual Startup Outlook say conditions in the U.S. are better this year than last, the number of them who report hiring talent is their biggest challenge has grown. Nine out of 10 executives report finding and hiring the talent they need is their biggest challenge. (more…)

LinkedIn’s

That LinkedIn mother lode will keep growing, says Jon Bischke, founder of Entelo. But so will the rest of the world’s information — information that we won’t be putting into LinkedIn. (more…)

Perhaps that won’t be the case this year, says Toby Dayton, from the job search engine LinkUp. Dayton is “cautiously optimistic” about a decent second, third, and fourth quarter of 2013.

Dayton, speaking at the Recruiting Innovation Summit in San Francisco, gives these three reasons for his optimism, based on LinkUp’s data showing growth in job posts and recruitment advertising: (more…)

Most striking about the surveys is that while they measured different aspects of hiring plans, and talked to different types of companies and employers, the bottom line was the same: entry-level jobs in a grad’s field are few.

Here’s what the three surveys found: (more…)

The document was made public recently due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Michael Morisy and posted on Muckrock. The document appears to have been created to help government operatives understand how to retrieve information on the web.

Though last updated in February 2007, it contains massive amounts of data that will help sourcers and recruiters as they work to improve their sourcing skills and understand how the Internet works.

While I haven’t had time to read the entire document, sections that caught my eye were: (more…)

The hot social-network-meets-job-board-meets-database-meets-media-company announced two things for recruiters. The first is “CheckIn.” This one’s for managing candidate info at an event; candidates stop by your booth, give you their name and email address, and you use “Recruiter” to manage the information, such as sending follow-up emails to candidates. CheckIn’s getting fully rolled out in July.

The other new one is called “social campaigns.” The deal with this change is that recruiters used to send updates to their company followers from a company page. Now they can do that straight from “Recruiter.” This “helps them better track responses,” LinkedIn’s Joe Roualdes tells me.

A LinkedIn product launch at one of its events is usually a pretty sure bet. (Then again, so is a frequent LinkedIn product launch not at one of its events, like the recent revamp of “LinkedIn Today.”) Other LinkedIn additions through the years have included its “brand index” and “sponsored jobs”; “jobs for you”; follower stats and targeted updates; the “Pipeline” tool; the “Recruiter” product and various improvements; and more.

This is National Nurses Week, and today in particular, is set aside as both National Student Nurses Day and National School Nurse Day. In many of the English-speaking nations of the world, including the U.S. and Canada, May 6-12 is a week to honor professional nurses. The timing coincides with the May 12 birthday of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.

Born 197 years ago into a wealthy, upper-class British family, Nightingale would be both amazed and pleased at how the work she did tending the wounded in Crimea has today become in the U.S. a profession of 3.1 million with responsibilities second only to the doctors with whom they work. (more…)

Articles from academics don’t always provide practical lessons, but there have been two recent ones that everyone in talent management should pay attention to.

The results of the first one focus on the output differential produced by top performers. This study published in February in Personnel Psychology which cut across several industries, revealed that the top 5 percent of the workforce at the researched firms produced 26 percent of the firm’s total output. The top-performing 5 percent produced 400 percent more than you would expect (26 percent rather than 5 percent).

That means that top performers have an incredibly high ROI because they produce more than four times more; however, they are generally paid less than 20 percent over an average worker in the same job.

Just like on the business side of the enterprise where the 80/20 rule prevails (80 percent of your profit comes from 20 percent of your products) there should be a similar 80/20 rule covering employee performance. This disproportional impact means that despite the fact that many in HR are enamored with the practice of “treating everyone equally,” it turns out that that approach may be well-intentioned but misguided because in business, just like sports and entertainment, top performers have a significantly higher business impact than the average. Top performers need to be prioritized.

Prioritization Is Also an Essential Element of Referral Programs (more…)

No worries. The report from the U.S. Department of Labor this morning said 165,000 new non-farm jobs were created last month, while the unemployment rate declined slightly to 7.5 percent, even as the size of the workforce ticked up slightly. (It is still lower than at any time in more than three decades.)

The government also adjusted up its initial numbers for both February and March, increasing the new job estimates by a combined 114,000. With the revisions, job growth in the first quarter totaled 618,000. That’s just slightly behind the 208,000 monthly average during all of last year.

The April job growth was better than analysts were expecting. Before the release in Washington, surveys of economists showed them expecting job growth to be in a range between about 125,000 and 155,000. (more…)

Both companies reported their first-quarter financial performance today.

Reporting before the market opened, Monster said it earned 8 cents a share on revenue of $212 million. It was the first time in seven quarters the company beat Wall Street’s revenue expectation, which was $210.5 million. That surprise, and the company’s announcement it may buy back up to $200 million of its stock, drove the price up almost 9 percent.

LinkedIn reported earning 45 cents per share on revenue of $325 million. That was 15 cents higher than Wall Street’s estimates average of 31 cents per share earnings and well above its $317.1 million revenue estimate. What hurt the company was its Q2 forecast of revenue of $342 million to $347 million. Analyst estimates averaged out to $359.2 million. The stock lost 10 percent of its value in after hours trading. (more…)

The Denver company has been working on its launch since about November of 2011. Employers (offerings are summed up briefly here) broadcast their jobs from their applicant tracking system or career site. Job seekers upload and send resumes to employers.

Of course, that’s just one of a long list of new companies, betas, updates, and so on. Here are a few more: (more…)

The HR services firm, which handles payrolls for more than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce, reported that the nation added 119,000 private sector jobs in April. ADP lowered its March number from 158,000 to 131,000 jobs. Surveys of labor economists had the consensus estimates of the April ADP number in a range of 150,000 to 155,000.

The ADP report is seen by investors and economists as a predictor of the official government employment report that will be released Friday by the U.S. Labor Department. Because of different counting methods (the government uses a survey, ADP uses actual payroll information) and the inclusion of government jobs in the Labor Department numbers, the two jobs reports rarely synch up precisely. However, both are closely watched for signs of employment trends.

“While it cannot be said enough that the ADP report, while helpful, is hardly a perfect guide to Friday’s payroll report, weakness in the number is never welcome,” Dan Greenhaus, an analyst with BTIG LLC, an institutional brokerage firm, told The Washington Post. “And by and large, that’s what today’s report was; weak.” (more…)

Futurestep (a recruitment outsourcing company owned by Korn/Ferry) started thinking about this about a year ago, and has had an internal technology team working on it. It’s “high-end, graphical, display analytics,” Bill Sebra says.

Sebra is Futurestep’s North America president. He says the company’s global clients wanted more data — more real-time data. You may have “the people in China running something different from the folks in North America” when it comes to HR software, he says. “If you’re the chief talent officer, it becomes very difficult.” This challenge can be multiplied if you’re a company with, say 8-10 different firms you bought, all around the world. (more…)