ERE.net

All the major mobile phone platforms today with apps also have advertising capability within the app itself. This doesn’t necessarily mean that recruiters need to become programmers, but it does mean that they have the ability to use mobile advertising within an application just as any other business does.

It may seem like a far-fetched idea to advertise within games and social media posting tools, but many businesses today are doing just this. keep reading…

The way Chris Holmes quit his border security job must have made Gordon Ramsay proud.

It wasn’t a bad-boy, burn-the-bridge resignation that has garnered all the attention for the 31-year-old new father whose friends and co-workers call him Mr. Cake (for reasons that will become obvious in a moment). That might have been more the Ramsay style.

Holmes let them eat cake. keep reading…

Over the past five to seven years, the recruitment industry has faced great disruption due to the advent of social media recruiting and a proliferation of new software tools. These changes have been driven by demographic, economic, technology, and media trends. U.S. corporations alone spent $140 billion trying to find candidates to fill their jobs, according to a recent article in Forbes. With so much at stake, companies are increasingly seeking out new and improved solutions to a myriad of problems.

The new solutions address different stages of the recruiting life cycle. Whether it is social sourcing, candidate relationship management, or video interviewing, the common thread binding them together is engagement — the desire to find better ways to engage top talent.

However, one aspect of the recruiting process has not changed at all … the humble job description. keep reading…

Are a few gender-themed words in your job descriptions signaling women, unconsciously, to not apply?

A scientific study of 4,000 job descriptions revealed that a lack of gender-inclusive wording caused significant implications for recruiting professionals tasked to recruit women to hard-to-fill positions underrepresented by women.

This study addressed questions such as: do job descriptions that lack feminine-gender words repel female applicants? Could the lack of gender-inclusive wording in your job description influence women to opt out and not apply? Are there gender bias characteristics in your job advertisements? Could the lack of gender-inclusive words actually be perpetuating gender inequality in your organization? keep reading…

Quick quiz: Your job postings for customer service reps on average get 28 applications each. Is that good or bad?

If you answer is along the lines of “I don’t know,” CareerBuilder has a solution for you. Any employer with a job posting can now see how well their ad performs against every other similar ad in the CareerBuilder network. Free.

That alone is pretty cool, since knowing your ads for customer service reps draw fewer applications than your competitors get is important business intelligence. But as the cliche goes, “Wait, there’s more!” Besides the raw counts, CareerBuilder’s new Recruitment Performance Portal tells you at a glance how experienced they are, how educated, as well as ethnicity, gender, and a fairly broad range of other details. keep reading…

As a marketing person for a somewhat large (200 recruiters nationally) staffing firm, one of my biggest difficulties has always been ensuring consistency across the board. When it comes to things like brand standards, policies, messaging, etc., it can be difficult to police all of it so that the company image looks unified on a national front.

Thanks to my terrific marketing team across the country we have been able to manage all of this relatively easily, but the one thing that seemed to always escape our grasp was quality control of our job ads.

Up until this year, we never really had a policy on ad format. It was simply up to the recruiter to write and post their ads. Our guys didn’t necessarily write poor ads, they simply lacked a level of formatting consistency across the brand.

We spent the first few weeks of January doing a complete overhaul of our ads, explaining the importance of SEO, working out an ad template, and removing any usage of superlatives in job titles.

We saw immediate results. keep reading…

Alas, it’s true. For the first time in 15 years (could be more, could be less, but it’s around about that) there will be no recruitment Super Bowl commercials this Sunday.

The commercials Monster, and later, CareerBuilder produced are among the best ever shown in the 46 years the game’s been played. Sports Illustrated ranked Monster’s 1999 “When I Grow Up” ad in its top eight. (The photo to the right is from that ad.) CareerBuilder’s monkey ads often made it into the top 10. The company built a hugely successful email program called Monk-E-Mail around their simians.

So popular have the commercials become (in more than a few years more popular than the game itself), that TV specials like the one Wednesday night,are just about the ads. It had ads from both the two big job boards. keep reading…

I recently took a cruise on Royal Caribbean with my girlfriend. It got me thinking about the services we provide as HR and agency recruiters. Some of these may not be a total surprise to you, but realize just how effective these five points can be if you truly invest time and energy into accomplishing them. keep reading…

How LinkedIn is eating the recruitment industry suggested that LinkedIn, an essential tool in a recruiter’s arsenal, is actually going to devour the recruitment sector like an aggressive parasite. This is a very popular viewpoint — and an understandable one given the state of the jobs market, the focus on reducing recruitment spending, and the undeniably impressive growth of LinkedIn’s revenues and share price.

There is undeniably a shift in behavior with regard to LinkedIn, and it has impacted the recruitment industry — but in a different way than the article suggests. LinkedIn needs recruitment to survive. Despite views to the contrary, recruitment companies still contribute the lion’s share of its revenue. LinkedIn is undoubtedly negatively impacting parts of the recruitment market. But it’s not the third-party agencies. It’s the job boards. keep reading…

Wednesday’s looking like an awfully good day to post a job.

At least that’s what you glean from job-distributor eQuest, whose data indicates a lot of U.S. job-seekers are hunting on Wednesdays, as well as Tuesday and Thursday. It studied more than a million jobs posted online to see when candidates searched and sent in resumes.

It found: keep reading…

Conversations around talent communities have been steadily increasing in the U.S. in the last 12 months. Brands are looking to engage above and beyond existing social media platforms by creating professional candidate communities. Driven by particular segments of talent that are becoming increasingly hard to find, the need to have a pipeline or a pool of potential employees is now, for many, an imperative.

For instance, there is an ongoing requirement in the FMCG industry in North America for sales and marketing talent — making it a vibrant, fast-paced and ultimately competitive recruitment market. Organizations are battling with the fact that they know they will need talent at a point in the future, but in today’s economic climate they don’t have the luxury to hire them when they first encounter them.

It is against this backdrop that talent and recruitment professionals are exploring the role that talent communities can play in adopting a more strategic approach to recruitment. keep reading…

In the modern age of recruiting, reputation is everything. Before (pre-modern Internet age), recruiters would make their money on referrals or word of mouth with maybe a newspaper ad thrown in the mix for good measure. But it seems that in the age of the Google, job boards, and social networks, your name might not carry the same weight it used to, right?

Yes, and no.

Job boards are still a big source of the job search for most professionals, and oftentimes job postings are anonymous with regard to companies. For most job seekers, it’s an opportunity to fire through job applications in one sitting hoping that something sticks and they get a reply from a hiring company.

Gone are the days where it seemed that all you had to do to attract candidates was turning the phones on in the morning. Now recruiting has shifted to where competition is so crowded that you not only have to go to the job seeker, but convince them your opportunity is unique  — not an easy task. So how do you separate yourself from your competition?

Online reputation.

Here are four simple but important things to be aware of regarding your reputation online: keep reading…

The U.S. Marines are apparently picking up on the “good job is a meaningful job” thing, as it will be using some of its ad dollars to emphasize that a Marines career involves helping people and the community.

The Marines campaign to attract officers is being done with help from the ad agencies UniWorld Group and JWT. The Marines are using the tagline “Fighting with Purpose” and the web address Marines.com/impact. The Marines and the agencies are trying to resonate with millennials, and, in particular, what the Marines call the “diversity prospect audience.”

The marines.com/impact website has sections on “rebuilding communities,” “being quality citizens,” and “community impact.” The messages will also be spread using a 30-second TV commercial, as well as print and mobile advertising.

Meanwhile, the Marines’ page on Twitter (“a Marine is never unarmed“) has a more combative theme. The Marines also have pages on YouTube and Facebook.

It’s amazing how many companies say that “people are at the heart of our business.” Oh really? So how come so few employers bother to really develop their careers site to try to attract absolutely the best person for the job? How many bother to develop it beyond a simple list of current vacancies?

Most companies don’t have a very good careers site. Some suggestions follow:

Avoid Visibility and Death by Clicks keep reading…

What do employees want? Joel Spolsky says that what they most want is to grow, to learn. Robert Half once showed that what they want is a stable job, and what would cause them to leave their jobs is better pay and benefits.

The latest such query comes from Hogan Assessments, which asked 941 people, “”What do you consider most important in a job? Rank your priorities from 1 to 10, with one being most important.”

The priorities they could choose from: benefits; interesting/meaningful work; office hours/location; opportunity for advancement; relationships; responsibility/control of own work; salary; job security; training, learning, and development; working conditions.

This time around, at least, interesting/meaningful work was the big winner — as the graphic shows.

Over the last two years, LinkedIn has used its fast-growing user conference to roll out products that have become such a part of the daily life of LinkedIn-o-philes that we barely remember when they didn’t exist. The idea of pushing really targeted jobs to passive job-seekers was highlighted in 2010. Last year, LinkedIn unveiled the since-improved tool for managing candidates called Talent Pipeline. Those looking for an even-bigger announcement this week may be disappointed, but LinkedIn is, however, rolling out multiple improvements to existing products, and launching significant new ones.

It’ll soon make big, not-yet-specified changes to the profile pages. For now, though, here’s what’s new: a way to measure your brand against others; an index of the most in-demand employers; “sponsored jobs” to get your listings up higher in the results on LinkedIn; and, upgrades to LinkedIn Recruiter. keep reading…

If you’ve ever shopped for a house, you know that after a certain number of days on the market, you start to wonder, “What’s wrong with this house?”

Something like that goes on with jobs. After a certain point, some folks ask themselves, “why hasn’t this job been filled?”

That point is somewhere around 72 days. keep reading…

As the new fall television shows are starting to air, viewers across the U.S. are deciding which shows they want to check out. This sort of judgment process is nothing new to recruiters. In fact, the recruiting process is much like getting a new TV show on the air. Television is broken down into three primary areas: the pitch, the pilot shoot, and the acquisition of viewers, all of which contain valuable lessons that recruiters can learn from.

The Pitch

Writers get at most 10 minutes to convince a network executive that their ideas are worth pursuing. A good pitch is a lot like a good job description: dynamic but concise; intriguing but clear; persuasive but direct. Here’s how to pitch a position: keep reading…

With the acquisition announced today of Indeed.com, Recruit.com has taken a major step toward becoming a worldwide recruitment powerhouse, directly challenging CareerBuilder, Monster, and Indeed’s most direct competitor, SimplyHired, for a share of the global employment advertising market.

A curiously eclectic conglomerate with holdings in the B2C classifieds and direct sales marketplace, Recruit has been moving aggressively to expand its human resources market, and broaden its footprint from Asia Pacific and especially Japan where it is headquartered. In the last two years, the company spent more than $700 million buying American staffing firms, establishing its first U.S. presence while simultaneously become one of the top four or five staffing firms in the world.

Recruit already was the dominant staffing and placement firm in Japan, where it operates both job boards and employment agencies. It also owns a piece of 51Jobs, the leading publicly traded job board in China. Buying Indeed, the No. 1 or No. 2 most trafficked job board in the world (depending on what’s counted and how), Recruit leaves no doubt it intends to be a global player.

“I think that’s their goal,” said Paul Forster, co-founder and CEO of Indeed. “We are the No. 1  job site worldwide, which makes us a good fit with the company plans … They are looking to Indeed to be their tech platform worldwide.” keep reading…