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Erin Peterson joined us to discuss how to improve a candidate’s experience during the hiring process and the positive impact it can have on your hires and employment brand. Watch it here!

Sourcing guru Shally Steckerl joined us on our webinar series to discuss strategies and free online tools that can help to facilitate sourcing executive talent. Listen to it here!

Toby Nathan joined us on our webinar series to discuss the importance of establishing a personal brand, tips for doing so, and tools you can use to facilitate the process.

Watch it here!

ERE was joined once again by J.T. O’Donnell as we discussed generational differences and how to overcome them in the workplace.

Watch it here!

Alan Strauss, who’s doing a talent-acquisition project for Lockheed Martin and is well-connected in the D.C.-area corporate recruiting community, talks below about bringing in “A-players” to corporations; what the best recruiters are doing to keep their jobs; and what sorts of questions recruiters should be asking their customers. keep reading…

Pete Kaiser, CEO of the Kaiser Group, talks about how recruiters can benefit from dollars allocated in the recent government stimulus package.

Kaiser, a former recruiter who operates “one-stop” shops for the government; explains how employers can use the government to find everyone from military veterans to IT employees. keep reading…

Rick Fletcher, of HRchitect, talks about:

• Which recruiting-technology vendor is the “red-hot category killer”
• How the economy’s doing, when it comes to the recruiting field
• What ever happened to Vurv customers
• How to tell if your potential vendor is in bad shape
• Vendors such as SAP, Workday, Deploy, Taleo, Kenexa, iCIMS, nowHIRE, SilkRoad, HRsmart, and others
• What Kronos is doing right
• Buying a niche product vs. a talent-management suite of products keep reading…

Sodexo recruiter Angela Guidroz and I talk about:

• Recruiting veterans
• Whether Sodexo has actually hired anyone who it connected with via social media
• What to do with fewer jobs and more time
• Personal lives and corporate lives on Twitter keep reading…

Ken Zeigler, who talks, writes, and speaks about stress and productivity, offers tips on managing your day better. It won’t take long. keep reading…

An interview with Rich Kenny of Northwest, who talks about the company’s combo with Delta; reducing time-to-hire; background checks; on-the-spot hires; recruitment advertising; and improving the candidate experience.

keep reading…

Stephen Lowisz, author of Six Good Metrics, isn’t fond of some of the most common measures of recruiting success. He talks about one company that’s doing it differently; how to measure whether recruiters are “just passing paper”; and the “biggest buzz” right now in recruiting metrics.

keep reading…

Larry Horton, a police-officer-turned-recruiter for the Phoenix police department, talks about one of his favorite of the general job boards (hint: it’s not Monster, CareerBuilder, or HotJobs). He also discusses the part of the U.S. where he’s finding the most physically fit applicants; his employer brand, and more. keep reading…

If nothing else, video branding is without a doubt the recruitment trend du jour. Hardly a recruitment conference is without at least one workshop (here’s one and another) on the subject. ERE has a discussion group devoted to the subject. There are even entire websites devoted to the subject.

The wonder is that with so much attention paid to the subject, there are so many uninspired videos. You can find them everywhere. A college recruitment video from Appalachian State University, described as the worst recruiting video ever, is so bad it’s become a legend.

And then there are the “jobs” videos that newspaper websites still manage to sell to unsuspecting hiring managers and recruitment associates.

So why is Mike Nale jumping into employer video branding with a half-hour TV show?

“This is not some boring video clip of some company,” insists Nale, founder and managing partner of Honolulu based The Brand Management Group (profile; site). “This is really unusual stuff.”

We haven’t seen any of the actual employer videos, though there’s a show sampler online.
But Nale’s vision is convincing. “We’re doing a segment on a skydiving school,” he tells us. “We’re going to show you what a work day is like jumping out of a plane over an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Another planned segment is on a seafood restaurant that is growing and needs 10 more people. “It’s a company profile, with real human interest,” Nale says. How’s that? “There’s always good people stories,” he says.

That 30 minute shows called “Help Wanted Hawaii” will have two or three magazine style employer pieces, a segment on employment and job trends, job hunting tips and career advice and possibly stories from career fairs or job hunter interviews and the like. Interspersed among the pieces will be the commercials, preferably employer branding videos.

Pulling off a show like this is not easy. We haven’t found anything on the mainland U.S. that fits Nale’s vision. Undaunted, Nale tells us his secret is producer Jeff DePonte. Owner of JDesign, also in Honolulu, DePonte has done work for Children’s Miracle Network, PBS-Hawaii and for local Hawaii stations and companies. If the “Help Wanted Hawaii” work is even half as good as DePonte’s demo video, the show might just last the planned 13 episodes.

The show is set to debut on Aug. 7th on a cable channel. It will also be posted online. Watch the blog for details.

Most readers already know about ERE Expo. It’s coming up on October 28-30, and at the last one, we had over 1,200 industry professionals join us in San Diego.

The Expo is a chance to meet other recruiters face to face and learn from the best. This Thursday is the end of our $400 early bird discount. It’s your last chance to go to ERE Expo for this price, so sign up this week.

If you want to learn more, check out the agenda. Dr. John Sullivan and Kevin Wheeler will be there, and they will tackle new and timely topics. We’ll also have speakers who are making their first appearances at an ERE Expo including the Ritz Carlton’s Director of Talent Management Susan Strayer, Coca-Cola’s Director of Global Talent Acquistion Tom McGuire, and many others.

And that’s just the sessions. The Expo exhibit hall features the largest collection of technology vendors of any recruiting industry event, with the latest products and services for you to check out. See for yourself what the last one was like – Benny Hill style!

Some news from various sources on employment eligibility, background checks, screening, and more:

New I-9 Form Released…

U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services just released its new version of the I-9 employment verification form, so make sure to update your records. (You can download it here; note that the new expiration date in the right-hand corner reflects 6/30/09.) You can move to an e-file for these forms, and perhaps you should: employeescreenIQ says its data shows that more than 85% of paper I-9 forms are filled out incorrectly. And electronically verifying this step is certainly a “greener” thing to do, and companies like Verified Person, Inc. agree. Its CEO, Jim Davis, says his Verified Person I-9 solution “affirms Verified Person’s belief in promoting an HR process that benefits the environment.”

From Resume Fluffing to Conviction Bluffing…

The folks at employeescreenIQ also say one of the hottest background-screening trends centers around the importance of thorough background checks in a shrinking job market. In fact, considering the state of the economy, “the job market is destined to become even more competitive, which in turn could lead some individuals to stretch the truth in order to secure employment,” according to the company’s new list of 10 background screening trends. Also, employeescreenIQ says conviction rates among job applicants are on the rise, and points to a 56% discrepancy rate between what is reported on a resume and what is found when conducting employment and education verifications.

keep reading…

Peopleclick SVP Ginny Gomez says five clients are testing out the company’s new onboarding product, and it’ll more generally available in Q4. Also, she says, “we’re not really seeing the big downturn” — and that the company’s European business is going strong. …

Personified (the new CareerBuilder subsidiary) has about 110 employees and is charging roughly $120,000 to do employer brand consulting, roughly $50,000 to evaluate a company’s applicant-tracking needs, and roughly $3,000-$10,000 monthly for outsourcing work, such as hiring people to staff a small part of a company. Mary Delaney, the endearing president of Personified (shown), says there’s a “very thick wall” between Personified and CareerBuilder to reduce conflicts-of-interest when companies are looking for sourcing advice and Personified is in the position of recommending and not recommending CareerBuilder. …

From the booth-size battles: Ultimate Software’s booth and People-Trak’s booth are surprisingly similar in size given that the former is a company with somewhere around a billion-dollar market cap. … People-Trak’s Jim Witschger, a former USC baseballer, says “I thought we’d see a lot of the whole gloom and doom thing” at the SHRM conference, but instead he found the opposite — people doing demos at his booth 15 minutes after the close Monday. He said the vibe at the conference was “very encouraging.” …

Enough talk of gloom and doom — onto boom: Jobing (a company we mentioned yesterday) held a blowout party Monday night, complete with fireworks off a barge near Navy Pier. It was a scene right out of … 10 years ago. …

Over at HRworks (profile), president Kurt Ronn says that companies are “falling asleep at the wheel” right now. Instead of using the slower economy as a chance to grab newly available talent they’ll desperately need soon, they’re cutting. Ronn realizes there’s pressure to cut costs and improve short-term earnings, but, he says, “you might as well miss it [earnings] a little bit more and get the talent.” He’s also working on some pilot programs with companies interested in hiring disabled veterans. …

Newlyweds AIRS (profile) and The RightThing (profile) seem to be adjusting to life together quite well. During the SHRM conference, the company closed a 6,000-hires-a-year outsourcing deal, and recruiter training is up about 10% over last year. Says AIRS prez Chris Forman: “Life is good in Internet sourcing.”

Talent software vendor Workstream (profile; site), which Friday canceled its planned merger with Empagio, said today it expects its fourth quarter financial performance to have improved enough that it will show an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) in the range of $400,000 to $500,000 before the costs of its abortive merger are accounted for.

If that turns out to be the case, it will be the first time in the current fiscal year that Workstream has posted anything less than a million dollar loss in EBITDA. In the last quarter, which ended Feb 29 (the company is on a June 1 to May 31 fiscal year), Workstream had an EBITDA of ($4.7 million).

In today’s announcement Workstream also reported it expected revenues of $6.9 million to $7 million, an increase of 11 to 13 percent over the previous quarter.

keep reading…

While historically devoid of much diversity, the tax profession is starting to change.

Tony Santiago, who recently launched the niche site TaxDiversity.com, says he started this site to change the perception of an industry dominated by white males.

“As a recruiting firm and industry resource, we saw a lack of diversity particularly among minorities in the tax profession, as well as a lack of women in senior leadership roles,” says Santiago.

“While individual companies have developed certain initiatives, no one has stepped up to create a comprehensive plan encompassing the entire tax profession,” he says.

The site has job openings, forums, case studies, and video commentary from successful minority tax professionals.

Santiago says he has hopes of setting up scholarships and providing mentors to those who are interested in the profession.

Microsoft must have heard Santiago’s pleas, because just last week the company pledged $1 million to the National Association of Black Accountants.

Microsoft says this gift — a mix of cash and software over the next three years — can help to build a pipeline of African-American talent in the accounting and finance professions.

keep reading…

In the news:

• Lawsuit filed after a 58-year-old job applicant was allegedly told the employer was looking for someone “not quite so old and with as much experience.”

keep reading…

The company now known as Altria Group (previously Philip Morris Companies) has been slapped with an age-discrimination lawsuit alleging that firings, hirings, and promotions within Philip Morris illegally considered the ages of candidates and employees.

The lawsuit against Altria Group and Philip Morris International alleges that at career development meetings, the company’s HR department presented PowerPoint slides listing individual employees’ birthdates and depicting the average age of the Brand Integrity department workforce versus the average age of other employees.

Further, the complaint alleges that senior management referred to older employees as “blockers.”

keep reading…