Human performance is A + B = C … that is, something stimulates the employee/manager (A), he/she does X or says Y (B), and the result is either good or bad (C). For example, a manager might have two problem employees (A), he/she talks to them (B), and later, everything is all better (C).

Sound simple? Sure, we can often record results (C), and sometimes we can even record the problem (A), but what the heck happened in the middle? Shouting? Warning? Exploring differences? Coffee chats? Bribery? Threats? Blackmail? Extortion? Something else? (more…)

That physical attributes influence a person’s career is hardly a new revelation; studies linking weigh, especially obesity, to fewer promotions and lower pay have circulated for years. Other studies have shown that attractive women can face discrimination in hiring, especially if the hiring manager is a woman.

More recently, a study involving human resource professionals demonstrated that even this group, which you might expect would know better, is biased against chubbiness. (more…)

Always in motion is the future. — Yoda, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

If Facebook is the social lounge, then LinkedIn is the post-conference after party. It has disrupted the recruitment profession in the way recruiters perform their work. It’s one of the more valuable sourcing tools in the toolkit (see graphic). It’s not the only but currently the most important. (more…)

When the general population hears the word “intern,” they often think of the 21-year-old you recruit to file your papers, get your coffee, and complete those other tedious tasks you’d rather not spend your time doing. While this stereotypical view of internships has evolved, there are still internship programs in need of revamping. And The Internship provided some fresh ideas about how to do that. (more…)

Champions insist that you keep score. If you understand that concept, you will ensure that in addition to function-wide metrics, you will supplement them with a scorecard for assessing the performance of each individual recruiter. Everyone knows that corporations are measurement crazy, so I have found that by not measuring something (in this case recruiters), you are inadvertently sending a message to executives and employees that whatever you are doing is not strategic or even important (because if it was, we would measure it).

So unless you want to purposely send a message that “having top performing recruiters doesn’t matter,” you have no choice but to develop an individual recruiter scorecard. In order to do that effectively, you first need to understand the foundation design principles for individual scorecards and then you must select the actual measures that you will use in your scorecard. In part one, I introduced the concept and provided three examples of what a scorecard might look like. In this part two, I will cover the design details and a list of the measure to consider for your scorecard. (more…)

The first billboard launches near the San Francisco airport today, and involves a commuting-related puzzle. The billboards point you online, where you have to find the shortest distance between a set of startup companies in San Francisco.

There’s a not-so-subtle message at work here: (more…)

For the first several decades since Congress adopted the law in 1938, the disputes were largely about employer training and apprenticeship programs and whether those trainees who weren’t paid were employees. If they were, they had to be paid and they were subject to other wage and hour rules.

These days, the issues almost all are about corporate internship programs, and whether the college students — and recent alums — have to be paid. If your company pays, even if it’s just minimum wage, you have nothing to fear from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.

For everyone else — and that’s a fairly significant one-third of all internships – this week’s decision against movie company Fox Searchlight should give you reason to evaluate the nature of your program and how it is actually being administered by supervisors.

It’s all well and good to declare in your internship materials that you provide training, hands-on experience doing real work, regular evaluations, and the like. But if the interns’ direct supervisors turn them into mere gophers, provide little or no training, and have them fill-in for regular employees who leave, you have a potential lawsuit in the works, even if the students say nothing. (more…)

CACI’s vendor of choice is AllTheTopBananas, a British company that has done work for Sodexo as well as some other high-profile companies.

AllTheTopBananas will announce some other big U.S launches soon.

As for CACI, you can use the app to join the “talent community,” check out CACI on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and search for jobs. Once you find a job you like, you don’t apply from your cell phone; you either save the listing, email it, or share it.

Yes, the company is hiring an CEO, but unlike many other job ads, this one you’ll actually remember. (more…)

Remember when you thought pizza and soda at an information session was enough? Now, it’s pizza and soda delivered to your dorm room during finals week with a personalized “good luck” note and invitation to interview. More than ever, companies are adapting to, and even embracing gen Y values in their recruiting processes to sign the best students from top-tier schools.

Jane Graybeal wrote a great piece titled “Valuing the So-Called Me Me Me Generation”,  summarizing three key ideas around gen Y. While some companies may work against these “me me me” values, a handful have worked with them to get some of their best hires. Let’s take the three concepts that Graybeal summarized and apply them on a more practical level — specifically on how university recruiting programs are staying competitive on campus: (more…)

Call the NSA. Skip the networking with the hoi polloi and just cozy up to a spy who works IT for the agency.

As we all now know, the National Security Agency is tapped into every phone call and every email we all send and receive. (Which explains why those Nigerian businessmen and royalty have so much trouble getting their millions out of the country. But that’s another story.)

So who better to know who’s hiring, what the jobs are, and how to get directly to the hiring manager than one of the agency’s network admins? (more…)

• Dominated by a handful of large players such as Taleo/Oracle, Kenexa/IBM, and Success Factors/SAP
• Also heavily represented by hundreds of smaller specialty tech companies who are agile and focused on growth, most of whom have been in business less than 10 years
• And changing rapidly changing in response to technological innovations (such as mobile computing and the cloud) as well as evolving reporting/compliance requirements

… buying decisions can be extremely complex.

At talentRISE, we are all too often contacted by clients who have made a less-than-optimal technology purchasing decision and are now seeking a post-purchase “fix.”  So, in this post, we want to share a few “lessons learned” to help others seeking to replace or upgrade current systems — whether an ATS, a comprehensive talent management system, or an HR Management System make the best buying decision possible and avoid buyers’ remorse.   (more…)

It’s equally obvious that every organization has an interest in making every interview as productive as possible. There are obstacles, however. One difficulty is that there are few reliable guidelines, especially if reliability entails the correlation of interview variables with job performance. Sometimes, that difficulty becomes an excuse: Since the interview is more art than science, we may as well accept its imperfections and settle for a “good-enough” result.

Instead of giving in to that state of mind, it’s at least worth remembering some of the basic principles that help the interviewer do a better job. (more…)

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that on a seasonally adjusted basis some 2,679,800 people were employed as temporary workers in the U.S. last month. In the last year, the temp sector has averaged 15,500 new hires a month. Since the recession ended in June 2009, the average is just over 16,000 a month.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, temp workers numbered 2,659,300 in May, not far off from the record 2,767,300 temps working in October 2006. (more…)

I’m a skeptic of the Mars One mission. In fact, I think Mars One’s interplanetary initiative is based on more nonsense than facts — a publicity stunt at best (or worse, a Ponzi scheme.) Will Mars One explorers ever get off the ground, given the scope of this unprecedented scientific and technological undertaking? I doubt it.

Still, as a staffing professional, I am astonished by the early success of Mars One’s astronaut recruitment efforts. Believe it or not, nearly 80,000 video applicants have paid up to $75 for a chance to explore the heavens. While many question the motives of this so-called boundary-pushing space mission, employers can’t deny that Mars One’s unique recruitment process provides some fascinating takeaways. (more…)

Champions insist that you keep score. If you understand that concept, you shouldn’t be surprised that one of the best ways to separate champion recruiters from weak ones is to bring up the topic of assessing individual recruiter performance. The worst corporate recruiters and way too many third-party recruiters that I have come across almost instantly react negatively to the topic of individual accountability. Their protests usually include some variation of three different excuses which are, “professionals don’t need to be measured,” “recruiting is too subjective or soft to measure,” or “it’s not my fault, others are to blame.”

In direct contrast, the very best in sports, sales, academia, high tech, entertainment, and yes, corporate recruiting, not only love to have their performance measured but they also like it to be compared and ranked against their peers. If you are a corporate recruiting leader and you want to know which recruiters to reward or to keep (I recommend that you release those who complain the loudest about individual accountability), you need to move beyond broad recruiting department metrics and dashboards and to also develop a “recruiter scorecard” for assessing the performance of every individual recruiter. (more…)

According to Venture Beat, GE is among the early partners.

Treehouse has step-by-step videos on topics like designing websites. Its mission is to “bring affordable technology education to people everywhere, in order to help them achieve their dreams and change the world.”

The job board right now is charging $99. Treehouse has about 35,000 students.