I wish I could say this is just a post from “The Onion” or an April Fool’s Day joke. Alas, it is not. Long-time ERE writer and speaker — and accomplished recruiter and recruiting technology expert — Raghav Singh was involved in a nightmarish accident that has led to a series of intense medical treatments in Minnesota.
The cover of his hot tub, which he was in with his children, apparently flipped back over on to him. The hot tub cover landed on his head, sending him under water, paralyzed. His son dove under the cover to get him out, and held him up while his daughter ran for Singh’s wife.
Singh’s children saved his life. I believe he was airlifted at this point to a hospital; a colleague of Singh’s tells me Raghav is grateful for the rapid medical response, something he said wouldn’t have been the case in his native India. He was in intensive care; had spinal surgery; has limited mobility, particularly below his chest; and is in some discomfort. His wife is asking people to pray for him.
Singh’s company is called The A-List. His many ERE articles (many controversial ERE articles!) are here, as is a link to his email address. He’s also on LinkedIn.
If Dice Holdings is any kind of bellwether, Q1 is looking like it got off to a slow start for the publicly held job boards. The company reported this morning it earned 12 cents a share on $50.4 million of revenue, which put it mostly in line with what Wall Street was expecting and what the company predicted in January.
However, that was down a penny per share from the same quarter last year, and the analyst estimates were lowered after Dice issued a forecast below what Wall Street was looking for. The other indicator of a general job board slowdown is that most of the $4.3 million increase in revenue comes from the company’s acquisition of Slashdot last year. Taking that out of the equation, Dice Holdings grew organically by $300,000, and the tech and security sector saw a 2 percent increase. keep reading…
IT and other employees not interested in Nashville, Austin, Detroit, or even Yukon might want to take a look at Ireland.
Certainly, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter would like them to. Those firms are all involved in a push to get people from outside Ireland to move to the Emerald Isle as its tech sector grows fast and its pool of skilled employees grows not fast enough. keep reading…
During the newly reinvigorated and exciting ERE conference, two attendees posed related but powerful questions to me. The first was “What advanced topics should be on the agenda of recruiting leaders at elite firms?” Or as another put it “What should Google be planning to do next in recruiting?”
At least to me, future agenda items are an important topic. Because after visiting well over 100 firms, I have found a dramatic difference between the agenda items that are found on 95% of the firms (cost per hire, ATS issues, req loads, etc.) and the truly advanced subjects that only elite recruiting firms like Google, DaVita, Sodexo, etc. would even attempt to tackle.
So if you have the responsibility for setting agendas or recruiting goals, here is my list of truly advanced recruiting topics that elite leaders would find compelling but that most others would simply find to be out of their reach. If you want to be among the elite, you should select a handful for implementation. However, even if you are currently overwhelmed by your current agenda, you might still find them to be interesting reading.
25 Advanced Recruiting Topics for Bold Corporate Recruiting Leaders keep reading…
You can have a life-long career, not just a spring-break job, at a retail store.
That’s the message the retail industry wants to get through as part of a new campaign it’s launching.
The centerpiece of the campaign is a new website at the “thisisretail.org” address, a highly visual page meant to show that the industry is dynamic and exciting; a field, for example, that’s for you if you’re an artist, a designer, or a marketer.
The National Retail Federation will be gathering stories of people who’ve had good careers in the industry, and trying to spread them on social media sites. It’ll also advertise in print, on the radio, and online to play up retail careers.
One of the many — and perhaps the best-known — of the many makers of best-workplace lists has created a website for searching for career info.
This one comes from the “Great Place to Work” firm, maker of the Best-Companies-to-Work-for list that gets a lot of press at the beginning of the year.
This new search engine is called “Great Rated.” It gives you information on a company, and pulls in from Facebook and LinkedIn who I might know at my desired employer (as you see, I tried Whole Foods).
The site also includes a job search, through a relationship with Simply Hired.
Check it out here.
Enterprise is bigger than you might think, hiring about 8,000 college graduates a year to a company that includes National and Alamo. It’s also expanding in China via a partnership with an existing company there.
Marie Artim is the talent-acquisition VP and a long-time veteran of the company. It has about 200 recruiters based geographically — fairly decentralized like the Enterprise company as a whole. There’s no dedicated social media team with a separate budget. Some of the company’s recruiters, Artim said today at the ERE conference, embraced social media early; others are “terrified” of it.
Whether in Europe or the U.S., there are five aspects of Enterprise that its recruiters want candidates to come away with after they’ve interacted with the company on social media sites. keep reading…
No one ever said that recruiting was simple, or easy, and if you were listening Tuesday on Day 1 of the Spring 2013 ERE Recruiting Conference & Expo in San Diego, you know that there is an overwhelming desire for how to do it better in today’s rapidly changing, post-recession workplace.
Ron Mester, the president and CEO of ERE Media kicked off the two-day event by observing that recruiting seems to be at a precipice and is viewed by recruiters and other talent managers in one of two very different ways:
- The Golden Age of recruiting is over – We’re not at the strategy table and technology is taking over. Call this the “Wile E. Coyote Group,” or the people who are always worried that the anvil is about to fall on their head. Or,
- This is the time for recruiting to break out and soar — Executives finally seem to understand how important talent really is, and we are all about to become “Masters of the Universe.“
Challenges to Be Addressed keep reading…
You’ve read about the finalists — a mix of healthcare organizations, management consultants, past finalists, new entrants, small firms, and multinationals.
They all took the stage today as the winners of the prestigious ERE Recruiting Excellence Award were announced. Ernst & Young was among the big honorees, taking home multiple honors. Onboarding as a category was a first this year; its winner, Veterans United Home Loans, beat out the well-publicized and quite-impressive-itself H. Bloom. Dell won with a simple, clean site in the career website category.
Sodexo USA’s team was named the department/function of the year in the larger-company category.
Here’s the complete list:
keep reading…
Two years ago, LinkedIn realized how much it needed not just a lot of good employees quickly but a lot of good recruiters quickly.
It came up with an uncommon answer, one its recruiting director Brendan Browne talked about at today’s ERE conference in San Diego. 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…
Danny Cahill, Knutson Award winner
Describing recruiting as an “industry remarkably bereft of recognition,” Ted Konnerth says it’s time that the efforts of individuals who stand out for their ethics, their honesty, and the excellence of their work be honored.
That’s why the International Retained Search Associates, a global corporation of boutique search professionals of which he’s executive director, founded an award that Konnerth hopes will one day be to recruiting what the Heisman is to football.
The David Knutson Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in Recruiting is given to an individual, Konnerth said, who has dedicated his or her professional life to making “significant contributions to the art of recruiting, and maintaining the highest ethical standards to serve both the client and the candidate.” Recruiters in all areas — corporate, retained, contingent, contract — are eligible. keep reading…
New Recruiter Homepage
Sporting a new look and with some new features — including a recommendation engine that ‘learns’ the kind of people a recruiter most want — LinkedIn Recruiter is getting an official relaunch this morning.
The redesign itself is an update of the classic LinkedIn Recruiter look to make it more consistent with the LinkedIn homepage redesign that was introduced last fall.
Parker Barril, Linkedin’s Talent Solutions head of product, unveiled the fresh, new LinkedIn Recruiter at a live and webcast user event — ConnectIn — in San Francisco. As he put it, “the consumerization of the enterprise,” the trend toward making products and services easier to use, “is influencing a new generation of products.” keep reading…
Did I say Wednesday’s when you should post jobs? OK, maybe — for people looking for jobs from a desktop or laptop. But new data from the hot job-search site Indeed shows that job-seekers using their mobile devices to find work are doing it more often Tuesday night than any other time.
Indeed’s mobile-device traffic has more than doubled over the past year, and a third of its searches are coming via mobile. Here’s what its data is showing: keep reading…
Marriott is launching a new application today for iPad users, aimed at European job seekers.
The app is (appropriately) called “Marriott Jobs in Europe,” and is in English, French, German, and Russian. It features stories of the hotel’s general manager, sales, housekeeping, and other employees consistent with the company’s theme you read about in December.
Evviva Brands helped develop the app, which is particularly targeted toward younger audiences. keep reading…
It is not going to be a good day in the financial markets. The government this morning reported that March saw only 88,000 non-farm jobs added to the U.S. economy, the worst showing since last June and far below the 200,000 range economists were anticipating.
European financial markets dropped sharply after the Labor Department released the numbers, hitting a one-month low. In the U.S., Dow Jones industrial average futures fell 143 points and S&P 500 futures were down nearly 17 points in the minutes after the 8:30 a.m. report.
Investors were poised to act quickly, put on the alert Wednesday when ADP’s monthly estimate of private sector job growth came in at 158,000, which was also significantly below what economists expected. “This is very weak labor market,” economist Martin Feldstein told CNBC after the report was issued. keep reading…
Hiring is slowing from last year, and the trend is predicted to continue at least through the rest of the first half of the year, says a new report from CareerBuilder.
The job board’s quarterly employment forecast says the U.S. should expect somewhat slower hiring through the end of June than it saw for the same period last year. That comes on the heels of a first quarter that was slightly better than what CareerBuilder’s survey foresaw three months ago, but which was still down from 2012. keep reading…
ADP says the U.S. economy added 158,000 private sector jobs in March, an estimate well below what economists were expecting, and a drop of almost 80,000 from the revised February number. It’s the smallest job growth reported by the HR services and payroll processing company since October.
Surveys of labor economists done before today’s report was released showed they were optimistic about March’s job growth. Bloomberg’s survey put the average prediction of 39 economists at 200,000. USA Today estimated 215,000.
However, no growth in construction jobs and a big slowdown in hiring since February in the trade, transportation, and utilities sectors kept job growth below the last few months, and just barely above the average of 152,000 for the last 12 months, as reported by ADP and its report partner, Moody’s Analytics. keep reading…
Glassdoor’s competitive analytics isn’t the only recent launch or update in the world of recruiting and human resources technology. There are quite a few new companies and products — or just ones you may not have heard of.
That’s particularly true in the hot social media/employee referral startup world. Some you may not know of: keep reading…
If you’re not getting exceptional hires, it may be because your traditional interview process is simply not designed to excite them. Instead of dwelling on the past, a superior alternative is to ask them to solve real problems, and to demonstrate that they are forward-looking and that they have solutions for the future. Top candidates routinely dislike standard interviews because they find them tedious and predictable. Most interviews are simply not designed to allow a top candidate to show off their capabilities, ideas, and innovativeness. As a result, if you are recruiting for a mission-critical job that requires an exceptional hire, you simply cannot afford to bore top candidates with standard interview questions.
Everyone who has done any reading about interview accuracy already knows that they are typically one of the weakest assessment devices for hiring. In fact my own research has uncovered no less than 50 different problems with standard interviews and more than 50 different alternatives to standard interviews. One of the weaknesses is that the interview questions that are typically used focus on historical situations that occurred at another firm. But what you need to know is how this individual will perform now at your firm. That requires getting them to demonstrate how they will solve the problems that they will face in your job. Most typical questions have already been anticipated and practiced for by the interviewee to the point that their answers are not authentic. So if you’re going to interview top professionals, here are 12 questions to select from that I have found will quickly reveal which one of your exceptional applicants is the very best.
12 High-impact Questions for Top Candidates keep reading…
