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Talking about millenials is a hot topic. Whether it’s how to hire them or ways to work with them, love them, or hate them, analyzing gen Y seems to be an area of continual fascination. And now thanks to Time, this issue is in the spotlight once again with this week’s cover story titled “The Me Me Me Generation,” which features the provocative subtitle “Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.” As a member of gen Y myself, I was curious to find out what the article, written by Joel Stein, had to say. Although it points out some troubling statistics, overall the verdict was optimistic. Here are three thought-provoking ideas: keep reading…

There have been several recent articles on the importance and, in some cases the lack of attention on, the candidate experience. One article goes so far as to call out the Candidate Experience Award winners and question why they are silent on the topic.

As the chairman of Talent Board, the nonprofit organization that delivers the Candidate Experience Awards each year, there is plenty I can say about the power of a positive candidate experience, and the amazing value and efforts that many employers, including some of the most well-known employment brands, are implementing to gain a competitive advantage and treat candidates with the respect they deserve.

Employers care, and they should. keep reading…

Last week, I found myself wearing down several hours sitting in an airport by catching the latest and greatest in the HR/employment sphere through LinkedIn, when I stumbled onto an article by Dr. Charles Handler titled “Employment Tests Are Becoming Irrelevant for Predicting Job Success.”  I was intrigued. After all, I am a consultant for a company in which a core area of our business is from said employment tests. Especially with that title, shock value achieved.

The article brings to light a number of interesting ideas about big data via social media and how it stands to influence the way we look at pre-employment. However new and edgy gathering such data via social media may be, it isn’t without its flaws.  Furthermore, if someone has to stand up for employment tests, I begrudgingly accept.

From the first excerpt, “The Impact of Publicly Available ‘Free-range’ Data,”

People born in the past decade or so, along with all persons to come, will begin accumulating a personal digital fingerprint that will be associated with them from cradle to the grave … We are even starting to see research that suggests we can gauge an individual’s job success from social media data such as one’s Facebook usage. keep reading…

We often read about a variety of supposedly recruiting-related topics which are designed to have in-house (either full-time or contract) recruiters “do better.” We typically work on 15-25 requisitions at a time, putting in 45-60 hours of work/week for immediate hires. Consequently, if it doesn’t directly lead to helping us “quickly and affordably put more/better quality butts in chairs,” these topics are wastes of our time.

A number of these suggested topics/tasks are useful (if not vital), and others aren’t. However, when we recruiters aren’t “drinking from a firehouse,” we’re wondering how soon they’ll lay us off, so in neither case can we work on these useful tasks. It would be valuable to have a company say to us:

We’re slowing down a bit now, so we’ll have you work on these other important tasks you haven’t had time to do up to now to keep you working for awhile.

Many companies are unable/unwilling to do this, and would rather lose our accumulated knowledge and practice and start all over again in the future with some largely/wholly new crew.

Anyway, back to those favorite wastes of time we’re supposed to do in the negative-5 to negative-20 hours of free time we have during the week: keep reading…

Did you read Lou Adler’s recent blog on LinkedIn posted May 2, 2013 titled, “There Are Only Four Jobs in the Whole World — Are You in the Right One?” More than likely if you’re reading this — you did. Consider these staggering statistics: according to LinkedIn as of May 6, Adler’s article has been viewed 380,000+ times, shared on LinkedIn 14,000+ times, liked on Facebook about 2,900+ times, and Tweeted 2,000+ times.

Since the late 1990s, we as a recruiting community have been following Lou Adler’s posts on ERE and other forums with well-deserved admiration. Adler has been an influencer in our industry for a long time and has earned our respect. However, I posit that if you were to take every article Adler has posted on ERE, and summed up the total amount of views and shares, that it may not match what his recent post has accumulated on the LinkedIn platform in less than a week. That to me is a seismic shift worth studying. keep reading…

I was reading an article today about the ferocious talent wars for tech going on right now in Silicon Valley and a sentence caught my eye.

“Whether she is scouring Stanford or Parsons for up-and-comers or more established candidates, de Baubigny says, ‘I am always very open-minded about what good talent looks like.’”

Maybe it’s because I watched a new show this morning called Brain Games

or maybe it’s because I’m a compulsive anagrammer, or maybe it’s my Dyslexia kicking in — for whatever reason when I read the word “scouring” I saw “sourcing.”

I started to think.

Has sourcing become scouring?

I believe it has.

What a few of us began doing (and talking about) in the latter days of the 20^th century and on into the present century has turned into an incessant scouring (for many) of what can be found on the Internet. keep reading…

Every few months here on ERE, some author writes an article discussing the “candidate experience,” or as I prefer to call it: the “c words”: candidate care. As a contract recruiter, I’m very frequently a candidate, so while I’m just one person, I’m very familiar with this side of the process, so let me discuss the candidate’s perspective. keep reading…

The fPhone is finally here. Facebook is launching its own brand of phones that put social networking front and center. With an estimated 650 million mobile users it was inevitable that Facebook would introduce mobile devices that integrate users more tightly with the site, allowing for faster posting, chatting, and commenting. They might even allow for voice calls (remember those?).

Facebook’s foray into mobile phones is a direct response to Samsung’s plans to develop a social network. Slated to launch this year, it is designed to rival Facebook. The project is codenamed Samsung Facebook (Brilliant! Who could possibly guess what that’s about?). The thinking behind the fPhone and Samsung’s network (I believe the official name will be Twitter Plus) is to control both content and the mechanisms through which it is created. Samsung dominates the mobile phone market and makes nearly a third of all smartphones sold worldwide — more than double what Apple does. All those smartphones are the source of huge amounts of content, which becomes the property of Facebook, Google, etc. This means that most advertising based on that content doesn’t accrue to Samsung. But the combination of mobile phones and a social network is a direct threat to Facebook’s business model.

The Mobile Recruiter keep reading…

On the verge of leaving the recruiting calling …

I am a second-generation recruit who knew he wanted to be a recruiter. In junior high I’d go to my dad’s office and stuff envelopes of candidates to prospective clients and help rewrite resumes. I went to school and studied HR management and organizational development. After a stint in social work to give back and learn more about how people ticked, I went into recruiting.

I have started departments, trained recruiters and managers on targeted interviewing, and worked for some of the top firms in life sciences and finance — making them able to compete in a global economy.

I have had the privilege to study sourcing from Shally Steckerl and to debate Lou Adler on the art of recruiting. And I read articles each day on the profession of recruiting.

So, I am stunned to say I am done. keep reading…

We are entering a time of social fatigue. A recent survey from Pew Research found that 61% of current Facebook users have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more, and 20 percent of the online adults who do not currently use Facebook say they once used the site but no longer do so.

The forecast is for decreasing use: 34% of current Facebook users say the time that they spent on the site has decreased over the past year, and only 3% say they will spend more time on the site in the coming year. Meanwhile, 27% say they will spend less time. The honeymoon is over. Among the top reasons cited for decreased time spent on Facebook are: it’s a waste of time; bored with it; content is not relevant; and just didn’t like it.

This doesn’t mean that people are abandoning social media. Overall time spent in social networking continues to rise — up 38% over the previous year according to Nielsen Media — more than any other online activity. The growth in time spent on social media is largely tied to the spread of smartphones, sales of which are accelerating overseas but slowing in the U.S. as we reach near saturation. That just means that the same pattern of skyrocketing use of social media followed by slowing use will be repeated in other countries in coming years.

Why Didn’t the Mayans Warn Us?

So what’s happening? keep reading…

NYU — one of the largest private universities in the U.S.

With the astronomical jobless rate and the skyrocketing cost of four-year college, many are questioning the value and validity of a bachelor’s degree. As a proud NYU alumnus, I treasure my education and wholeheartedly believe in the relevance of the college experience. However, over the years my black-and-white viewpoint on this subject has shifted to shades of gray.

That’s why the current educational phenomenon of “degree inflation” is so disconcerting to me. Economists and educators have coined this term to describe today’s hiring climate, where a college degree has become the basic requirement for jobs that don’t actually need an advanced education. According to Burning Glass, these positions include clerks, dental hygienist, administrative assistants, and paralegals. Corporate hiring professionals often adopt strict “degree required” criteria as a means of weeding out candidates and working with a manageable number of prospects. But very often this false criteria has no bearing on someone’s ability to engage, contribute, or excel in a role. keep reading…

working from home — a lost luxury?

Telecommuting has been all over the news this week and many of us think it has been blown out of proportion.

First, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer changed the company’s policy that allowed employees to work (sometimes entirely) from home. Yahoo tried to put the story in perspective with a press release that said, “This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

Just a few days later, Best Buy announced that it would eliminate its renowned Results-Only Work Environment, a program that allowed corporate employees to work when and were they chose, as long as the quality of the work met the company’s standards. Like Yahoo’s change, it’s not a total ban, but corporate employees are now expected to work 40 hours a week and come into the office “as much as possible.” Best Buy spokesperson Matt Furman said, “Bottom line, it’s ‘all hands on deck’ at Best Buy and that means having employees in the office as much as possible to collaborate and connect on ways to improve our business.”

So — bored or not — do you think Yahoo and Best Buy doing the right thing? I do. keep reading…

My last post on why I believe LinkedIn will never kill the professional recruitment industry seemed to generate a lot of attention. While some of the numerous comments made a lot of sense, I can’t help feeling that there are still a lot of people missing the point.

Recruitment can mean different things to different people. There are a plethora of different business models within the staffing industry, so I thought it might be a good idea to define what I believe good recruitment is. This will perhaps put into context why I don’t believe that  LinkedIn — or for that matter any other web-based product — can ever replace the service we provide. I expect this will be particularly helpful for those who seem to feel that they are qualified to comment on the impending death of our industry without having ever having been a recruiter, or in some cases ever having recruited a person themselves.

Talent Is Not an Online Commodity keep reading…

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. — Abraham Lincoln

Honest Abe must have known about hiring tests. You see, the results of a foolish test will always show-up as soon as someone takes a closer look. Foolish tests make bad candidates look good on paper, but crash on the job; and, they make good candidates look bad on paper … but never get a job offer.

Like Abe said, you can’t fool everyone all the time.

I call the difference between good and bad hiring vendors “Black-Hearted” and “White-Knights.” A White-Knight vendor presents thorough research showing its test predicts job performance with a very high degree of accuracy. White-Knight vendors always report jobs, demographics, charts, tables, subjects, correlations, and probability of being wrong. They are very dull. A Black-Hearted vendor presents happy-user stories that are very light on real data and heavy on nonsense numbers.

You might ask why they do this. Well, I guess they might be reluctant to say anything negative; they don’t know how to develop a professional quality test; they don’t know any better; they don’t care; or, a little of all the above.

Right or Wrong, Never in Doubt keep reading…

Are a few gender-themed words in your job descriptions signaling women, unconsciously, to not apply?

A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women.

This study addressed questions such as: do job descriptions that lack feminine-gender words repel female applicants? Could the lack of gender-inclusive wording in your job description influence women to opt out and not apply? Are there gender bias characteristics in your job advertisements? Could the lack of gender-inclusive words actually be perpetuating gender inequality in your organization? keep reading…

I’ve been using Facebook’s much-vaunted graph search for about a month now, having been on the list for early users. The feature was launched with much fanfare by Facebook in January at a press conference that proved to be distinctly underwhelming. Expectations were high that the company would announce a Facebook phone (The fPhone?) — a blue device capable of automatically recording all your activities and posting them publicly (privacy settings would be permanently disabled). But instead those watching found that the company was rolling out … a better search. Evidence of disappointment was the company’s stock price which had been rising but reversed course halfway through the press conference.

Graph search supposedly makes it easier to find people in your network and discover potential connections. Filters such as “place type,” “liked by,” and “visited by friends” make locating things faster. The feature can serve recruiters by allowing for better search of people’s profiles. It appears to be reasonably effective. As an example I typed in “People that are Java Developers and live in Minnesota” and it turned up 38 names. That’s a small number so I tried variations such as “People that like Java and live in Minnesota” — which produced a much larger number, but many of these were coffee aficionados. Putting in more complex queries, such as adding another skill, produced no results. Switching to finding .Net developers produced only 18 names and trying “People that like .Net and live in Minnesota” turned up three names of people who like to fish.

Seek and Ye Shall Find keep reading…

Marissa Mayer’s decision to require Yahoo employees to “come into the office” has already been criticized by many. But most of the criticisms that I have come across have been based on emotion rather than data. If you understand the science behind increasing innovation through face-to-face interaction, her decision can only be classified as “a brilliant business decision.” keep reading…

In a surprising move, it was announced on Friday that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has mandated a telecommuting ban for all employees, which will go into effect this July.

As a female professional and career coach, I am shocked by this turn of events. Mayer has been an icon for millions of working women who are constantly striving to strike the right balance between their responsibilities in the home and at the office. In fact, there have been numerous articles written about Mayer’s strategy to avoid employee burnout, such as letting employees like “soccer mom Katie” leave early on certain days to attend her kids’ soccer games, and then jump back online after the kids are in bed. By the looks of this decision, it sounds like Mayer has changed her tune.

Telecommuting is not a realistic option for all employees, but when used appropriately for the right people, it can be a win-win for both employers and employees. Catering to more than 33,000 employers, TheLadders works with an array of companies that offer flexible and remote work schedules to select employees, and judging from their results, I think it would be wise for more companies to follow suit. Here are five ways companies can benefit from offering telecommuting and other work-flexibility options to their teams. keep reading…

I have taken notice of something over the past year. I am struggling with communications and interactions with my HR vendor partners who supply my clients with services and products. This struggle, for me, is in how to deal with a full-court press with these vendors who are super-imposing themselves and their wares on me, and not in a helpful way. I will explain. keep reading…

Like you, I started seeing the posts and pics last week on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (yes, Instagram) from friends who were receiving the “You have one of the top X% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012” email from LinkedIn.

First it was 10% then 5% and later in the week 1%.

And I started thinking, “am I really not that cool to have ranked in the top 1%? How can that be?” keep reading…