Smarterer has won the 2013 startup competition at the Recruiting Innovation Summit.
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. keep reading…
The U.S. EEOC has some new documents out that help when recruiting and selecting people with disabilities.
The info covers cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and intellectual disabilities. keep reading…
From the department of where-are-they-know … whatever happened to Mystery Applicant, winner of last year’s competition between startups in the recruiting field?
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. keep reading…
More tech startups than at any time in the last four years will be looking to hire this year, says Silicon Valley Bank, but they worry they won’t be able to find the talent they need.
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. keep reading…
LinkedIn’s killing it when it comes to gathering data on each and every one of us, with each and every one of us doing the work for it to populate our profiles and thus collect that data.
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. keep reading…
You know what’s been happening seemingly every year, the last several: we start out the year talking about how the economy and job market are improving, and then as the year goes on, we start talking about how they are not.
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: keep reading…
With only days left before this year’s college seniors become alums, those who don’t already have jobs are going to find it as hard to find work as last year’s grads did. And for those in the liberal arts, in the last few weeks, three different surveys of hiring managers and recruiting leaders found employers are only planning slight — if any – increases in the number of entry-level grads they bring on board.
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: 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…
A little something for our overseas readers up at this hour … or for us night owls in the U.S.: LinkedIn has just launched a new tool and a new little update at its conference in Sydney, Australia.
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.
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…
Top performers have an incredibly high ROI
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 keep reading…
After a mediocre jobs report from ADP on Wednesday, and the government’s own anemic March report last month, economists and the financial markets were hoping today’s report on April employment would make it at least into six digits.
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. keep reading…
In addition to making you hungry, the Smokey Bones website accomplished something else: it was one of the sites that helped one company’s recruiting department when it was looking for models for a new career site. keep reading…
Shares of LinkedIn and Monster moved in opposite directions today, although both careers sites met or exceeded, or, in the case of LinkedIn, blasted through, Wall Street’s expectations. Monster was up; LinkedIn is sinking.
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. keep reading…
“Imagine what the world of recruiting would be like if Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare, and Monster combined into one awesome social recruiting platform that provides an easy way for job seekers and employers to connect in real-time.” That’s how Cedrick Dunn, founder of the Social Jobs Board, describes his company.
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: keep reading…
The news about April’s job growth is not looking good. Economists were predicting a mediocre month even before ADP released its estimates this morning, but the company’s numbers took even the more bearish of them by surprise.
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.” keep reading…
Futurestep has quietly been developing a tool called “Foresight” it will be rolling out to its clients, a dashboard meant to make heads and tails out of the recruiting information global companies have stored in their many databases.
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. keep reading…
While the debate rages on about the future of the resume, there’s angst, but not as much, over the destiny of the cover letter.
A year ago Fortune asked “Are we killing off the cover letter?” The answer, at least according to the survey the article references, is a resounding yes.
Earlier though, Ruby on Rails creator and 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson insisted, “A great resume will get you not-rejected, a great cover letter will get you hired.”
But compared to the “Resume: Love ‘em or Leave ‘em” controversy, the cover letter discussion comes down as more Solomonic. Four years ago, ERE’s founder and chairman David Manaster analyzed the relevance of the cover letter in the (then)-still-dawning age of social recruiting, summing it up this way: keep reading…
David Nosal
A former Korn/Ferry regional director who launched his own search business has been convicted of hacking and trade secrets theft. David Nosal was found guilty last week on six federal charges that, in addition to three counts of computer hacking and two trade secrets charges, included one conspiracy count.
What makes this case especially noteworthy is that Nosal did no hacking nor did he download confidential Korn/Ferry files himself. Instead, former colleagues did it on his behalf. They later cooperated with the FBI and testified against him.
The case goes back to 2004 when Nosal, an eight-year veteran of Korn/Ferry, left to start his own search firm. For the first year, federal prosecutors said, Nosal partnered with his former employer, signing an agreement not to compete and not to use its trade secrets. Prosecutors said, he convinced two of his Korn/Ferry colleagues to quit and start their own firms, which he used as cover for independent searches until the non-compete agreement expired and he launched Nosal Partners. keep reading…
If you’re beginning to think every one is using LinkedIn to source candidates, you’re close to right.
Nearly every survey on source of hire or use of social media by recruiters shows LinkedIn to be a key part of the mix; often it leads all the listed social media sites. The company itself reported adding 2,400 customers in just the last quarter of 2012, bringing the total to 16,400 organizations under contract.
Now comes a Bullhorn survey to report that of the 160,000 registered users on Bullhorn Reach, 97% use LinkedIn to source candidates. That’s not as surprising as it might seem at first glance. keep reading…
