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This video from Code.org, pointed out to me by my friend Julia Gometz, provides an awfully strong message that being a computer coder is fun, meaningful, and accessible — as in, you don’t have to be a genius to do it.

Stars include Bill Gates, Chris Bosh, and Mark Zuckerberg. keep reading…

The National Security Agency has made our jobs easier with the release of a 646-page document called “Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research.”

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: keep reading…

Today we pause in the hunt to source RNs to recognize nurses for the work they do and the dedication they bring to a profession that is among the most in-demand recruiting challenges in the U.S.

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. keep reading…

Jody Ordioni wrote a prescient view about the ROI of social recruiting which posted Monday morning. Monday night I discovered first hand just how prescient, at a recruiting roundtable that marked the opening of the ERE Recruiting Conference & Expo.

I moderated two separate discussions of social media issues in 90 minutes. ROI concerns were uppermost in the minds of the recruiting leaders who joined our conversation. (More than 25 different topics were available at roundtables set aside in the ballroom of the Marriott here in San Diego where the conference is being held.)

It wasn’t surprising that these leaders who hailed from firms both very large and more modest size struggle with proving the value of social media as a source of hire. LinkedIn, I should point out, was an exception. Most of the 20 or so recruiters at the roundtable, and several others I spoke with later at the evening receptions, were enthusiastic users of LinkedIn Recruiter for sourcing. Most, though, admitted that getting their senior corporate managers and leaders to be active in posting and commenting on LinkedIn Groups is a struggle.

What was more of a surprise, and what makes Jody’s article so spot on, is that I heard emerging among recruiters a recognition that social media is a marketing and promotional tool. The effectiveness of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, even Pinterest is probably not in the number of hires or even applicants a company can trace directly to one of the social media sites. Instead, as recruiting consultants Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler reported last year, social media is a channel of influence. keep reading…

CareerXroads released its annual source of hire report this week and, as usual, the report is full of information about the broader talent acquisition landscape. We’ll get to that in a moment.

The beginning of this year’s report spells out the demise of more simplistic views about source of hire tracking: that data is easy to get, that it is reliable across the board, and that it is clean (one source = one hire). If you’ve been in recruiting for more than a decade, you probably know that things weren’t much better before the Internet drove so much hiring activity. I remember laughably tracking sources of hire via a questionnaire we asked applicants (online and on paper) and trying to create data based on employee’s recollections of how they came to apply for their job 5-10 years ago.

So no data is perfect but this data is very imperfect. Still, it is the best set of data and analysis we have on sources of hire. With that monster-sized disclaimer out of the way, here are some of the results.

Referrals, Career Sites and Job Boards Top List Again

keep reading…

TheLadders is being sued in New York federal court in a class-action consumer lawsuit alleging that for years it falsely claimed it offered only high-paying jobs.

Brought by an Arkansas woman representing perhaps as many as a million customers of the job board, the suit says:

From its inception until September, 2011, TheLadders scammed its customers into paying for its job board service by misrepresenting itself to be ‘a premium job site for only $100k+ jobs, and only $100k+ talent.’ In fact, TheLadders sold access to purported ‘$100k+’ job listings that (1) did not exist, (2) did not pay $100k+, and/or (3) were not authorized to be posted on TheLadders by the employers.

According to the suit, many of the jobs offered on TheLadders were scraped from other sites with no attempt at verifying how much they paid or even if they were current.

The suit, filed yesterday by the New York class action firm of Bursor & Fisher, was reported by recruiting consultant and blogger Nick Corcodilos. He’s posted a copy of the lawsuit here.

TheLadders issued this statement in response to news of the suite:

We just learned about this yesterday afternoon, and have put it in the hands of our counsel to resolve. We remain steadfast in our commitment to providing the best job-matching service, while serving as the fastest-growing source for professional jobs. In fact, we’re focused on migrating our members to our new online experience, featuring Scout, by April 1, as well as launching our free native iOS app. We continue to be a free resource for recruiters and employers to help them find the right person for the right job.

Five specific counts are alleged in the class action suit: keep reading…

What’s the most trafficked site by Americans searching for a job? Turns out it’s Indeed.

Last month, says comScore, the web traffic measurement company, 17.3 million different visitors from the U.S. clicked into Indeed to look for a job. That translates into a 29% increase over December’s job search count.

Overall, January saw a 24% increase in the job search category, ranking comScore’s broader Career Services category among the fastest growing of all website groupings.

Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore, noted that in addition to big jumps in tax and travel sites, “We also saw a very seasonal spike in the Career Services category, including Job Search, Training and Education, and Career Resource sites, as Americans looked for ways to grow their careers and expand their skill sets in 2013.” keep reading…

Even as the number of tech jobs in the U.S. was steadily climbing in 2012, hitting an all-time high last month, workers were feeling just a bit less confident in their ability to find a new job.

In the last few days, several reports and forecasts have come online, all of them showing that tech workers, despite their own confidence issues, will be hard to recruit.

TechServe Alliance declared that the number of tech workers in the U.S. grew in 2012 by 4.14% to an estimated 4,339,800 workers. That’s more than two-and-a-half times the national rate of job growth (1.52%) exceeds even the growth in the health sector, which increased by 2.26% between January 2012 and last month.

Yet a Randstad Technologies poll conducted in the fourth quarter of last year found 44% of the participating IT workers confident of their ability to find a new job. In the third quarter, 55% were confident. Workers’ confidence could have been shaken by the showdown over the fiscal cliff issues. Another possibility is that with only 275 IT workers in the survey, a few real worriers could have skewed the results.

In any case, employers aren’t buying into that fear. CareerBuilder’s 2013 job forecast says 27% of hiring managers plan to hire permanent, full-time IT workers this year. That’s also what TechServe Alliance expects. keep reading…

Update: SilkRoad says there are errors in the report it published Thursday on which the post below is based. The most significant appears to be charts on pages 8, 11, and 15 and in the infographic on the SilkRoad blog showing some sources produced more hires than they did interviews. A company spokesman said in an email: “The issue concerning the numbers on Craigslist was an error and has been changed.  In regards to the information on page 15, that chart only represents the percentage of interviews and hires as a percentage of all external sources and does not take into account internal or offline sources.” Additionally, “There were no sources in our findings with a larger number of hires over interviews.  The issue with the image on page 11 is with the chart and Craigslist.” Note that as of this update, it does not appear the updates to the charts have been made.

Referrals and the company career site are the two leading sources for new workers hired by the 1,054 companies participating in SilkRoad’s just released study of recruitment marketing effectiveness.

Between them, they produced 40% of the more than 150,000 hires the companies made in 2012.

This is the second year the HR software provider has compiled ATS data from its customers to report on their source of hire. This year, the company included interviews as a measure of effectiveness.

The data set came from companies as small as 100 employees and some larger than 10,000; 60% had under 2,000 employees, 30% fall between 2,000 and 10,000, and the remaining 10% are larger. A company spokesman said the employers represent “the entire scale. We have lots of technology, healthcare, higher education, and several other strong verticals.”

As it did last year, SilkRoad found that job boards collectively yielded more interviews and hires than did all other external sourcing efforts. (For the report, SilkRoad classified corporate career sites and inside recruiter efforts as internal, explaining “they are company resources.” Company sites were included because they are “internally controlled element of job advertising.”)

Among the job boards, Indeed yielded more interviews and hires than any other single site. CareerBuilder was second. keep reading…

The resume black hole is getting a little brighter among companies that care enough about the experience of their candidates to submit their hiring process to a grueling inspection in hopes of being found worthy of a Candidate Experience Award.

This year, 37 of the 90 companies that entered won the two-year-old competition, seven of them with distinction. Most of the winners were large operations like Pepsico and Intel, with thousands or tens of thousands of employees. However, smaller firms like BTRG, with 500 or so employees, also made the list.

What all the participants share in common is a willingness to open their recruiting process to scrutiny.

Unlike almost every other HR award (excepting Great Places to Work designations), the Candidate Experience Awards are more report card than competition. Companies not only respond to a detailed survey about their recruiting practices, they also must submit their applicants — successful or not — who are also asked to complete a survey about the process. keep reading…

You’ve probably heard the hype about Facebook’s new search utility, which it calls Graph Search. Unveiled just a couples weeks ago, it’s already being described as everything from a LinkedIn killer to a privacy killer, and a recruiter’s new best friend. For every one of those you can find an article — or 100 — that says the opposite.

Except when it comes to recruiting. While calling it a best friend may be premature, it won’t be long before Graph Search becomes as valuable to recruiters as Google and LinkedIn.

As Stephane Le Viet, CEO of Work4 Labs, wrote in a post on Forbes, “Graph Search is about discovering people — their work history, their education, their interests and their motivations — and using that discovery to recruit better.”

Described simply, Graph Search indexes and quickly accesses all the information each Facebook user has made available. This includes their profiles, photos, comments, likes, friends, and whatever else is out there. Theoretically, what Graph Search does was always possible. In practice, sifting through the thousands of pieces of data was such a huge, time-consuming task, it was all but impossible. keep reading…

When U.S. News issued its list of the 100 Best Jobs for 2013, its No. 1 criterion was hiring demand. After that came salary. Also factoring into the equation were work-life balance, stress, and the unemployment rate for individuals in each of the occupations.

Based on those factors, and a few others, dentist ranked at the top of the 100 Best Jobs list. Registered nurse was second, followed by pharmacist and computer systems analyst. Of the top 10 jobs on the list, six are in health care. The other four are in tech. (Telemarketer ranked at the bottom of the list.)

HR came in 72nd in the rankings, sandwiched between sales manager (71) and plumber (73). keep reading…

More than half the employers in three of the four of the world’s biggest developing nation economies say they’ll be adding staff in 2013, a marked contrast to Europe and the U.S. where the majority of firms expect no change.

Hiring will be most aggressive in Brazil, India, and China where more than half the employers — almost three-quarters in Brazil — say they’ll be adding workers this year. Russia, where mining and energy exports are fueling growth, is more conservative in its hiring; just under half of employers expect to hire.

Elsewhere among the world’s 10 largest economies, far fewer employers expect to add workers. According to a CareerBuilder survey, in the U.S., Japan, and four European countries, the largest share of employers either expect to cut staff or make no change during the year. Even in the UK and the U.S., where more than half the employers surveyed report being better off financially than a year ago, not many of them plan to hire. keep reading…

“A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero,” your interviewer says, then asks, “What does he say and why is he here?”

If you answered, “Where’s the sunscreen?” congratulations and welcome to the Clark Construction Group family. The candidate who came up with that got the job.

And congratulations to Clark Construction, a 3,900-employee, $4 billion company with just a quirky enough interview process to make Glassdoor’s annual list of the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions. It’s a list distinguished by questions that range from the almost ordinary — “How would you rate your memory?” asked of a candidate for a front desk job with Marriott — to the absolutely impenetrably bizarre — “What kitchen utensil would you be?” asked at Bandwidth.com, a connectivity and network company that has absolutely nothing to do with kitchenware. keep reading…

The employment outlook here at the start of 2013 is a lot like it was just last week at the end of 2012: cautious, slow, but with a few areas — high tech, for instance — where competition for talent will be even keener.

On the employee side, there’s a little less optimism now, with more workers than at any point during 2012  saying they don’t expect things to change much where they work in the next six months. As recently as the third quarter of last year, Glassdoor’s quarterly survey of workers found 48 percent of them expecting their company’s business performance to improve in the months ahead. Now, the fourth-quarter survey released this morning, says only 40 percent feel that way.

The findings of Glassdoor’s Employment Confidence Survey mirrors the monthly Consumer Confidence survey conducted by The Conference Board. The business organization’s much-watched Index declined by 6.4 points between November and December. While worries over the impact of the fiscal cliff accounted for a big part of the decline, The Conference Board said fewer consumers expect business conditions to improve in the next six months. In November 21.3 percent thought things would get better. In December only 17.6 percent said that, while those expecting business conditions to worsen increased to 21.5 percent from 15.8 percent. keep reading…

Many of the mighty have fallen, but much of the cream of last year’s “Best Places to Work” remains.

Glassdoor’s annual list of the 50 best places to work, as determined by the scores awarded by employees and former employees, is out, and fully half the list is new. But among the top 10 for 2013, four companies remain from the 2012 list: Facebook, McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., and Google. All four were in the top 10 last year.

Facebook is a double winner; it ranks #1 for 2013, and also took the top spot for 2011. In the 2012 survey, it ranked third, right behind Bain and McKinsey, where were one and two respectively.

“We’re honored to receive this award from Glassdoor,” said Lori Goler, Facebook’s vice president of people and recruiting. “We strive to make Facebook a place where everyone is able to have an impact doing what they love. Receiving this award is a testament to the culture of builders we’ve worked hard to create.” keep reading…

Recruiting can be boiled down to three critical ingredients that make up the mix: sourcing, screening, and verifying. A traditionally manual function of HR, process automation is snatching the reins from bloated HR divisions and outside recruiters.

According to Bersin & Associates, spending on outside recruiters represented a third of recruiting budgets in 2010; however, due to high commissions (averaging 21% of a new hire’s first year salary), spending halved in 2011 in favor of sourcing talent directly on social networks.

Of course, fancy recruiting IT is imperfect and can not (yet) replicate the intangibles of a seasoned recruiter. Plus, someone has to pilot the software — push the button, as it were. But make no mistake, the tech industry is going after 100% of the pie. And that means cutting out the middleman.

We’re already seeing signs of disruption. keep reading…

The Federal Reserve says hiring activity in the nation generally has improved in the last several weeks particularly in some of the high tech and energy-producing parts of the country.

In its just-issued “Beige Book” report on the economic condition of the country, the Fed says that in more than half the districts, which carve the nation into 12 financial geographies, it’s seeing “modest gains in hiring.” However even in these areas, the Fed got mixed signals from the employers and staffing firms it contacts for insights on economic conditions.

For example in the Chicago district, covering the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the fed said “a number of firms were putting hiring on hold and had delayed temp-to-perm conversion decisions until next year.” In Richmond, the Fed found the employment market less positive than it did when it published its last report on October 10.

The one common thread running through each District’s report on its employment market is a reference to the shortage of skilled labor. While different skills are at issue, depending on the District, almost every one says employers and staffing firms mention shortages. keep reading…

Following up our recent article about the 12 things you could do to improve your careers pages, we’ve listed 10 companies with great looking careers sites and one in particular that we really like. We’ll also give a few details on why we like them so much. So if your careers site is lacking a certain something and you’re not making enough direct hires, take a look at how this group do it and start copying !

My company, iKrut, reviewed more than 500 corporate careers sites which represented a cross section of as many industry sectors and types of organisation as possible. The criteria we judged them against were ease of use, the quality and quantity of information provided, how likely the site would be found by a search engine and it’s overall attractiveness. Here are the sites, alphabetically:
keep reading…