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Have you seen these people? The ones in the picture to the right? If you have, immediately call the marketing police and report their location. They are on the “Most Overused Stock Image Photo” list at MarketingProfs.com.

I’ve personally tracked the photo to eight HR-related sites where it shows up illustrating employee engagement, consulting services, headhunting, and a company’s commitment to diversity recruiting. I know there are more. Google has 19 pages of results.

Is your company among them?

A moment’s digression: Google has a new, handy image search that lets you drag an image into the search box to find where else it appears. You can also upload a picture, search by URL or, with the right extension, right click an image. Google explains it all here. keep reading…

Apply for a job that’s open at Zoosk, a dating site, start work by the end of September, and you also get a date with one of the stars of its TV commercials, Samantha or Steve. Zoosk will pay for the date — including a round-trip flight to Los Angeles, limo, and dinner.

It’s also offering a $10,000 referral fee for new engineering hires through September 30. Bad news, though: I read the fine print and you can’t collect the cash if you’re a recruiter.

In addition to its engineering and marketing jobs open in San Francisco, Zoosk is hiring an HR manager, and like many companies, an employment branding director.

The San Francisco headcount has doubled in the last 15 months, to 95.

A Massachusetts company with about 1,400 employees ended its contract with a large, national job board, and is allocating — as the graphic shows — its time and money to advertising on Indeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, SimplyHired, and more.

Athenahealth is a healthcare IT company, recently mentioned by Barron’s, that provides online services for doctors, such as billing services. It has received a number of honors like the 2011 “Best Place to Work in Massachusetts” by Boston Business Journal and was named to Fast Company’s list of the world’s most innovative companies in 2010.

While turnover is low, and Recruiting Operations Manager Susan Treadway says engagement is very, very high, athenahealth does have its recruiting challenges. Hiring for its critical sales and software jobs is challenging, competing without a big name against two that are quite big and have New England operations: Google and Microsoft.

Treadway’s department reports to an SVP and lies outside of the human resources department. Interestingly, it includes only six people, though it’s adding 400-450 people a year.

In 2009 in particular, it started to believe that its job board spending just wasn’t working well enough: too many applicants, not all qualified, a lot of sifting, too much recruiter time. keep reading…

Spend your days driving a honkin’ dual-tandem, 700 hp eco-machine through the most beautiful city in the world.

This was the winning job posting for a creative job posting contest we recently ran. This one was for a bus driver for the city of Vancouver, Canada.

Keeping on the bus theme, most of us recall Jim Collins’ theme from his bestseller Good to Great: In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.

Which brings us to my rather superficial Magic Bus Theory of Recruiting. The quick summary goes something like this: imagine your bus is a big job posting with compelling titles, flashy neon lights, cool horn, and stuff like that. It’s a big bus with enough space for all types of people, although some routes would just be for sales folks, or engineers, or whatever. The idea is to get everyone to want to get on the bus and drive it. This is what good sourcing is all about. Good recruiting is about putting the person in the passenger seat as soon as the person gets on board, with some type of clever phrase like “would you be open to go for a drive if this job represented a true career move, even if it only offered a modest salary bump?” Most talented people will eagerly hop on board, at least to go for the drive.

Once on board you’re going to conduct a quick screen to see if the person qualifies to be on the bus and possesses the “Achiever Pattern.” This means the person is in the top half of the top half from a performance and quality of candidate standpoint. If so, you’re then going to describe a job that is slightly bigger than the person now holds. If the person shows interest in proceeding, ask about a major accomplishment most comparable to the job just described. The candidate will then begin to sell you as to why he or she is qualified. You’ve now successfully put the person in the back seat.

Of course, now you’ve got to figure out where to let the person off the bus, which gets to the real purpose of this article and why you must learn to train fleas. With this as the first stop in our bus ride, let me add some destination points. keep reading…

Spam: it’s not just for breakfast any more, but what you may not realize as a recruiter is it could be keeping food off of your table.

Most recruiters are highly dependent on email. A single blocked email can result in the loss of a five-figure fee or the hiring loss of the top candidate. Blocked emails can be disastrous either from the receiving or the sending side. What most recruiters don’t realize is that blocked emails occur mostly as a result of the email recipient trying to stop spam. (And no, we’re not talking about that oh-so-yummy canned ham product!)

What Is Spam?

Here is partial definition from Wikipedia: “Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media … ”

“Spamming remains economically viable for advertisers because they have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet Service Providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.”

The effects of the spam epidemic can be felt far and wide, but are felt most acutely when important emails get blocked because someone, somewhere thinks it might be spam.

Can I Control What Email Gets Blocked as Spam?

There are multiple distinct chokepoints to consider whether you are sending or receiving email. keep reading…

Home Depot has quietly been expanding its use of Facebook in online games and recruitment advertising on people’s profiles, meanwhile operating with transparency and responsiveness — returning emails in 24 hours — often missing elsewhere in online recruiting.

Miko Covin, who manages the employment marketing group, is one of the key players. She and others in that group — people like Alison Foy — came up from recruitment ad agencies like Bernard Hodes, TMP, and JWT Inside.

Covin arrived in 2008 from JWT, wanting to use the basic marketing and advertising skills she’d learned at agencies and apply them to social media and recruiting. In early 2010 (late in the game, she admits) she opened up a personal Facebook page after a friend invited her to be a Facebook member. She also saw the agency world struggling, social media increasing its role in recruiting, and wanted to move Home Depot in the social media direction.

She spent 2010 on education. There were HR people in Home Depot who didn’t get social media; in fact, some even used the now-awkward word “The” preceding “Facebook.” “I don’t know about The Facebook,” one person said.

Covin kept talking up the importance of social media in recruiting. By the spring of 2010 Home Depot began testing two things on Facebook, targeting people based on the information in their profiles. First, it tried advertising store jobs to females, part of an effort to reverse the perception as a company for male jobs. It casted a “huge net first,” Covin says.

It narrowed after that, targeting people — now both male and female — whose profiles indicated they were in HR, and were based in areas where an HR district manager was needed.

It brought on JWT, the recruitment marketing agency, to help with the Facebook project.

By August, satisfied with the approximately 100 resumes it had received over the summer from these efforts, the recruitment marketing team was feeling that Facebook was a success in recruiting, and it should be expanded. keep reading…

I recently received an email with a job spec on it. An associate who had received it from a recruiter forwarded it to me because of my feelings on this type of “recruiting.” She (the recruiter in question) was obviously spamming the job opening to her entire email list. The email follows:

Subject: HR Software Sales Executive — MN or Denver

Hello,

We are looking for an HCM Sales Executive in MN or Denver. If you are interested or know someone worth speaking to, please let me know asap!

Sales Executive — HR Software Company

Location — MN or Denver

Compensation — Base — $100K/Plan — $225K

Our mission is to help employers dramatically improve the employee experience by making “must do” workforce communications more effective, more strategic and less costly. We execute an on-demand, personalized and searchable HR communications application suite that supports the entire workforce life cycle from “hire-to-retire” – and includes solutions for: onboarding, benefits decision support, work/life events, employee policies, total rewards statements, manager effectiveness and HR/Service Center staff.

Our solutions are rapidly deployed, provide a broad range of features for significantly less money than traditional communication venues and are hosted and maintained by providing a low total cost of ownership and allowing your internal HR and IT professionals focus on more value-added work.

Why work here?

1. You get paid on first year setup, maintenance, & other fees
2. Working WITH an inside sales rep generating leads
3. We have a lot in the pipeline; it needs to be CLOSED
4. Growth was 62% last quarter
5. We are growing and cash flow positive

Requirements -

1. Being a hunter, cold calling, and working hard
2. Very strong selling Software as a Service (SAAS)
3. MUST be able to orchestrate a deal internally & externally
4. 5+ years selling HR/HCM software
5. This person MUST be a awesome CLOSER

Responsibilities -

1. Carrying a $1.5M first year quota
2. Covering MN & CO
3. Selling Software as a Service is CRITICAL
4. Working with an inside sales person, hand in hand
5. Strong CLOSING skills — we need a CLOSER

So what’s “wrong” with this method? There are many things that don’t work about this type of “recruiting.” I’ll point out some of them: keep reading…

This is the week employment numbers for the U.S. will be released by the Labor Department, and economists expect them to continue the robust trend of the past few months.

In advance of Friday’s release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average of economists’ predictions are that it will show the U.S. added 183,000 non-farm jobs during April. ADP’s National Employment Report, due out tomorrow, is expected to show 198,000 private sector jobs were added. The unemployment rate is predicted to remain at 8.8 percent.

Optimism in continued jobs growth is reflected in several indicators measured by the Conference Board. Both the CEO and Consumer Confidence indices showed improvement. The CEO Confidence index climbed in the first quarter of the year by five full points, and now is at 67. keep reading…

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One of the things that frustrated me when I was a recruiter was a poorly written job description. This was just one of many puzzle pieces that provided the impetus for me to leave recruiting and work on aligning talent strategy with corporate strategy.

For those of you who are responsible for writing job descriptions and/or approving them for your company (hiring managers, corporate recruiters, RPOs), what guidelines do you follow to produce exceptional and accurate job descriptions? Do you even follow any guidelines? Has anyone ever taught you how to write an effective and accurate job description? Have you thought about what’s necessary to attract the “right” candidate for you and used these things to recruit those top performers so they want to come to work for you? Do you just throw the job description onto your “careers” page, a job board, or social networking site, and hope (I always say “hope” is never an effective strategy) great candidates find you? But most importantly, is your job description a reflection of an aligned executive team, benchmarked employees, and well-thought-out recruiting practices that are directly in line with executive alignment and culture?

One of my LinkedIn connections passed on a job description through his network for one of his connections who’s looking for inside sales folks. The individual who wrote it is a VP of Sales & Marketing. I’m not sure if he’s responsible for all their recruiting or if this company also employs corporate recruiters and/or 3rd party agencies. Either way, this is a wonderful teaching example of what won’t work, unless you’re looking for low-quality employees. I’ve included the entire job description (click to enlarge) with the company’s name removed, for obvious reasons.

As you read this, can you see some of the main the issues I’m seeing? It occurs to me that they are just casting a very wide net to see what they may catch. Let’s look at the most important items. keep reading…

As the economic outlook improves, companies will need to rethink their hiring strategies in order to maintain their current quality of hire, as well as fill an increasing number of open positions. Much of this will require an increased emphasis on passive candidate recruiting, and less on active candidate sourcing.

In a survey conducted in collaboration with LinkedIn in late 2010, we discovered that 22 percent of the fully-employed workforce was absolutely not looking. Another 44 percent were open to considering something if contacted by a recruiter. Sixteen percent were discreetly looking, networking only with former associates. Only eight percent were actively looking, with the remaining 10 percent casually looking using search engines and job aggregators a few times a week, at most.

Surprisingly, most companies, even those using social media and Web 2.0 techniques, are only reaching the 16 percent who are considered active. This leaves 82 percent relatively untouched. This will have to change if companies want to maintain their competitive edge in a growing economy.

Over the course of the past 10 years I’ve identified eight core strategies for hiring top talent. keep reading…

The biggest challenge I find for managers responsible for the employer brand strategy is they don’t understand the science of branding and lack knowledge in branding principle and practices which have been informed by decades of research into how brands grow. I’m going to go over that here, and then get to what you can do to grow your company brand.

Common employer branding mistakes

Some of the most common mistakes I see made by companies include: keep reading…

You see them everywhere: job ads that are little more than corporate gobbledygook, pulled from a job description more interested in covering legal points than communicating with humans.

Ask yourself: as a recruiter, is this really the best you can do?

I would suggest that, in fact, you can do better — and that doing better will bring you great rewards.

In the fall session of ERE’s conference, we will be tackling the challenge of creating compelling, enticing, and effective job ads. We’ll be looking at some of the best examples — and examining why the bad ones are so awful. We’ll talk about why the art of creating a great job ad transcends any technological changes, be they social media, job boards, or ATSs, and how a great job ad lowers your cost per hire and drives up the quality of your candidates.

But September is a long time from now, and I really want to get started — so I’m making an open call for the best and worst job ads you’ve seen (or even created yourself). keep reading…

Recruiting leaders tend to be a pretty conservative group, sticking with tried-and-true approaches, tools, and methods. Because they are almost always managing from the weeds, there is little time invested in identifying, testing, and refining new solutions, but that doesn’t mean such solutions don’t emerge.

The inventory of available approaches is quite large, with many solutions existing under the radar. keep reading…

An early Happy Birthday to Twitter. And a Happy, if somewhat belated, Birthday to TweetMyJobs.

The former will be 5 yearsold in a week; the latter is now 2. Both of them have enjoyed a robust growth, built on the seemingly preposterous notion that the world would beat a path to their door via 140-character messages.

Indeed the world has. Estimates of Twitter account holders are in the 200-250 million range. (Twitter is secretive about many of its numbers. As far as anyone knows, the company has not shared its active user count, but it’s a safe assumption that regular tweeters are fewer in number. It did report that its current growth rate is about 460,000 new users a day.)

TweetMyJobs has a quarter of a million users and sends between 50,000 and 75,000 tweets a day.

Founder Gary Zukowski says he expects 1 million followers by the end of the year, an ambitious goal for a service that now has so many imitators and competitors that they’re almost impossible to count. Every major job board and every major (and not so major) employer now regularly tweets its job posts.

Twitter users themselves send just about a billion tweets a week. (It took Twitter 3 years, 2 months and a day from first tweet to one billion. That’s another of the factoids Twitter is sharing for its birthday celebration.) Thousands of tweets were sent in Japan within mere seconds of the earthquake last week. Millions more were sent in the hours and days since. keep reading…

In case you somehow missed it — perhaps you were under anesthesia — Charlie Sheen is looking for an intern.

You have to wonder what parent would allow their child to take the job.  But leaving that issue for the parenting sites to take up, the job is both real and promotional.

While Sheen may have joined the ranks of unemployed actors, remarkably, he is not unemployable. The internship job posting and Sheen’s tweeting about it is all about promoting Internships.com. keep reading…

Google, Yahoo, and Bing have made great advances in targeted marketing, allowing brands to focus on their most prized demographics. But none of them can yet answer the most important question: does a particular person actually want to buy your product?

That’s where permission marketing comes in. Coined by best-selling marketing guru Seth Godin, it has included opting in for newsletters, requesting catalogs, or signing up for e-mail updates. Now, innovations such as Facebook Connect and Google Buzz have ushered in a new era of permission marketing. These and other emerging services can provide you with additional opportunities to connect with your chosen audience. keep reading…

PETA may not be amused, but that hasn’t stopped more than 800,000 people from replaying CareerBuilder’s Super Bowl commercial.

They’ve posted more than 100 messages on YouTube, saying things like “The only commercial that actually made me laugh hard,” and “That is the funniest commercial. I love it.” To be sure, there are some tasteless comments, and several from individuals complaining about the plight of captive chimps.

But the Parking Lot monkey commercial is on its way to being as big a hit as the original monkey ads were back in 2005 when CareerBuilder made its Super Bowl debut. Then, the three commercials ranked in the top 10 of the most popular game show ads. A later addition to the campaign, Monk-e-Mail went viral, with tens of millions of users sending messages in a matter of months. keep reading…

When we last left off, UPS said that the candidates who were coming its way via Facebook and Twitter were more likely to convert to actual hires than were any old candidates. But the sample was small: in other words, social media recruiting seemed to pay off in terms of ROI, but not in any large volume.

Things are different now. keep reading…

Monkeys, shirtless men, and come-hither women. What’s HR coming to?

CareerBuilder’s monkeys have the animal rights people in a tizzy, while the latter (from The Ladders) has the (oh, dear. Whatever adjective-noun combination I use will offend someone so let me just say) some people waving the employee handbook, aghast at the overtly provocative nature of the company’s latest TV commercial.

The Ladders’ “More Attractive” spot began airing shortly after the New Year. But the buzz seems to have grown noticeable last week. Set to the song “Desire” by Vassy, the commercial features several provocatively posed and dancing members of The Ladders job seeker community. The tagline is “Be more attractive to $100k+ employers.”

keep reading…