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I am worth $1.83 million.

No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth? keep reading…

As Yahoo prepares to lay people off, it’s looking like at least the techies in that crowd will find a slightly improving job market. New surveys, one from Dice and the other from TEKsystems, indicate that it’s getting a little tougher to fill technical jobs.

Let’s start with what Dice says. keep reading…

by Dr. Charles Handler and Mark C. Healy, M.A.

Many ERE readers know that we at Rocket-Hire have a fanatical interest in the pre-employment assessment industry, and continuously comment about its trends and happenings. This interest in how end-users such as recruitment, HR, and line management actually use online assessment has led us to continue to run our Online Assessment Usage Survey, annually dating all the way back to 2002.

At the end of this article, you’ll find a link to this year’s survey. Please take a few minutes to help us and other members of our community learn more about assessment usage trends by providing us with information about your company’s screening and assessment practices (Don’t worry: all responses are confidential and we will only report aggregate data).

Given the steady increase in interest and the lack of information about this industry, we feel the results will continue to have value for the ERE community. We look forward to reporting our findings right here on ERE sometime this fall.

In order to provide some extra motivation, here’s a quick summary of the key findings from last year. keep reading…

I feel so lucky that I am still working after 27 years with it and love every day I am alive.
–Jon Gundersgaard

Yesterday, my blog featured an interview of Jon Gundersgaard, a 30-year veteran of the HR/Staffing Industry. Jon’s compelling life story as someone who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and has been in a wheelchair since 1995 initiated a discussion with friend and mentor (pictured at right), Gerry Crispin, Chief Navigator at CareerXroads. Jon’s depiction of a life well lived, and intense productivity as a valued member of his staffing organization, missing work only six months in the last 30 years was provocative. Here was a perfect personification of an industrious, talented element of today’s workforce who served as a critical member of his team and was a productive contributor to society as a whole — despite a serious malady. As a paraplegic, his disability was a sidenote, to an otherwise determined approach to keeping his sourcing and recruiting skills up-to-date with the latest techniques and tools available. The story speaks likewise to a broader workforce effected by blindness, deafness, and other differently-abled categories. keep reading…

If one thing is certain, it is that the world of talent acquisition is in a state of constant change: Economic and other external challenges, rapidly expanding and multiplying technologies to support sourcing and recruiting, and organizations forced to act and react much more rapidly than even a few years ago. Some organizations are preparing for an anticipated rebound in hiring, while others are still in the grips of hiring slowdowns or freezes. And for larger organizations, simultaneous growth in one part of the business with reduction in another will be the order of the day. The business of recruiting and sourcing has probably not ever been more complex, with the proliferation in new technologies, strategies, all having to operate effectively in a dynamic economic environment.

In the last few years the emphasis on new technologies and leveraging of social networks for sourcing and recruiting have become much more prevalent. There are now entire conferences dedicated to what is being termed “social recruiting.” Many of the dominant providers of applicant tracking systems are increasingly adding more “social” capabilities to their offerings, but in such a rapidly changing market, can any large software provider keep up? Are these “traditional” ATS tools destined to be replaced by candidate CRM platforms, talent communities, or corporate recruiting Facebook pages? keep reading…

UPDATE FROM 9:28 A.M. EASTERN ON MONDAY…USA Today has the results of its Ad Panel up online. Monster’s fiddling beaver ad ranked #10. CareerBuilder’s casual Fridays commercial was 51 out of 63 ranked ads. The first place winner was the Snickers ad featuring Betty White.

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Peyton Manning? Who dat? Who DAT! The Who Dat Nation has spoken. The Saints won the Super Bowl. Decisively, without a doubt, without a question, and in a game that was one of the rare ones that got better and better after every play.

But you didn’t come to ERE to read about the game. You already know the Saints whipped the Colts 31 to 17.

Now comes the other important scores: Whose commercials made it into the top best. For the details on each of the commercials that ran, go to USA Today and its widely watched Ad Meter. All the commercials are available there.

But in the contest between CareerBuilder and Monster for the best job board ad, the highly populist, if less-well-known ERE poll has Monster in the lead by a touchdown. The fiddling beaver commercial had 40 percent of the vote to 30 percent for CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad. keep reading…

Who had the best Super Bowl commercial? Yeah, we know, it probably was Budweiser. The beer company’s advertising hegemony is so nearly complete that Anheuser-Busch should probably be given the lifetime achievement award and let somebody else have a shot at the top spots.

But we’re a recruiting-focused site, so we’re asking you to choose between Monster’s fiddling beaver and CareerBuilder’s (very) casual Friday.

If you’ve actually been paying more attention to the game than to the commercials , the two videos are below.  If you’ve been mostly watching the commercials, then you should know that as this is being written, it’s half time and the Colts are ahead of the Saints 10-6.

So much for the high scoring game me and everyone else was expecting. The Colts’ defense, by the way, is amazing.

But back to the poll. Conveniently, both commercials aired before the half. So take a look at the commercials, and cast your vote.

Here’s Monster’s fiddling beaver:

Here’s CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad:

The following was written Friday, before the Monster ad was available.

Our poll, unlike the USA Today poll or those marketing professors at Western Michigan University is limited to only the two job boards whose ads ran during today’s Super Bowl.

As this is written on Friday afternoon, Monster hasn’t released its Beaver-themed 30-second spot. CareerBuilder, which offered a choice of three for visitors to its website to vote on, hasn’t said which it will run.

So even though we’re opening the poll at the kickoff, you really do need to wait until both ads have run. When the game is over, we’ll try to remember to find the ads online and either post them here or provide links.

If you can’t wait for us, then try going to Spike.com, which religiously posts all the commercials that run during the Super Bowl.

We’ve set the poll up to allow everyone one vote. And don’t waste your time clearing our poll cookie; we’re also tracking your IP. We’re wise to you.

(the chart in this story was updated February 23)

Once again referrals have turned out to be the leading source of external hires in the annual CareerXroads source of hire survey. In 2008, 27.3 percent of the external hires made by the 45 large employers who completed the survey came from referrals made primarily by employees, but also by alumni, vendors, and others.

Corporate web sites — a destination and not an actual “source,” insists the report — was second with 20.1 percent of the external hires coming from there. Rounding out the top three were job boards, which accounted for 12.3 percent of the hires.

No big news in those results. For the last several years the survey that CareerXroads principals Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conduct every January has consistently found referrals accounting for about 3 of every 10  external hires made by the participating companies.

What is different this year is that 38.8 percent of all openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

“We found that very interesting, ” says Crispin. “That’s the highest number since we started this survey eight years ago.”

His explanation is that despite hiring freezes, critical openings still have to be filled. But, now that’s being done internally and the  jobs the transfers leave are simply being absorbed by the remaining staff.

keep reading…

In today’s tumultuous economy, companies have been forced to make some devastating workforce decisions. In an effort to prepare for the future, best-practice companies are taking a long-term strategic approach to attracting and retaining their employees. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Given the number of massive layoffs, companies are looking to restructure their organization, streamline business operations, forecast staffing needs, and above all else, reduce costs. As a result, workforce planning is no longer a fad; it is a necessity. (Bersin & Associates is conducting a survey on this topic and we would love your participation. In return, we will provide you with an executive summary of the findings.)

Companies such as T-Mobile and McKesson are stepping up to the plate by establishing a formal workforce planning process with a designated leader in order to achieve results. So, what exactly is workforce planning? How can it help organizations achieve these goals? And why should you care?

keep reading…

In the past few weeks, you have read several articles with predictions about what to expect in the coming year. Now for your insights.

We are conducting our annual ERE Reader Survey. Take just a few minutes out of your busy schedule to help us out.

Why do we want this info?

All of the information on ERE.net is free for recruiters, and this would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. By completing the survey, you are telling our sponsors who is in the ERE audience, which helps them continue to support us.

None of the information you provide in the survey will be used in any way other than in aggregate, so your contact information and your feedback is protected.

Simply click here and take the survey. It will just take a few minutes.

I appreciate your help and look forward to sharing the results with you in a few weeks.

“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.      It is shocking to find how many people do not believe  they can learn, and how many more believe learning     to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune

This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty many people have in learning. Learning means change, examining what we are now doing, and being open to explore what we could do differently.

Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, the desire to be like everyone else, the need to be liked, and many other needs and fears.

Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge, and in the process, learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.

Our organizations reflect this as well. Only a few are true learning organizations that invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. Perhaps fueled by Steve Jobs and his seeming less-ruthless focus on perfection, it remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.

Recruiting remains a transactional and traditional function for most of us. Not much learning, and consequently change, has taken place despite huge changes in how organizations design, manufacture, and sell their products and services.

Talent remains local. Competencies reflect yesterday’s needs. Sourcing is still a reactive process based on templates designed in the past. And hiring happens the same way it did 50 years ago.

If you want to be a mover and shaker in this profession, you have to learn to learn. You have to take some chances and do things differently.

keep reading…

Should recruiting be part of the human resources department? A recent survey of 256 staffing professionals shows that 45% believe the role of recruiting does not belong in a traditional HR department.??

“More than any other function, recruiting shapes the future of an organization,” says Maureen Conn, U.S. staffing manager at Siemens VDO Automotive in Troy, Michigan. “Companies need to ask themselves where they want to be in 10 years, and they should remember that the future is driven by the people we select to have as part of our team. Some companies may view recruiting as a transactional department, but really, they should view it as a business partner to effect corporate strategy. The business world tends to view HR as incompetent police and that makes it difficult [for recruiters] to get a seat at the strategic table.”

keep reading…