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Laurie Ruettimann will be feeding her cats better and paying her mortgage now that she’s sold her blog, PunkRockHR, to RecruitingBlogs.

The announcement that the North Carolina recruiting blogger and widely quoted speaker sold the site popular with job seekers, as well as HR professionals, was made this morning.

The financial terms were not disclosed. Some other details, however, did leak out.  Jason Davis, CEO of RecruitingBlogs, reassured Ruettimann’s fans that she is obligated “to continue swearing. It was a major reason for all of this.”

“We’re not looking to change Punk Rock HR or move it away from what Laurie has built. It’s fantastic,” Davis said.

Ruettimann, in a video post on her site, said Davis bought the site name and its domain. She continues to post, but is also able to write for others and to continue speaking at conferences and HR events.

She told her fans that Davis, her “friend and my mentor and my adviser,” and she wrote the contract in a “really creative and clever way” to ensure that her unique point of view would continue uncompromised. Some fans expressed fear that now that it’s no longer independent, she’d be watering down her blog and her language.

As if to make the point, Ruettimann wrote about office Halloween parties advising, “I don’t care if you celebrate Halloween at work, but for the love of god, please do not ask your Human Resources team to plan the party.” keep reading…

As the summer’s gathering of social-media-using recruiters kicks off at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, recruiters at DaVita, KPMG, CO-OP Financial Services, Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen, and the University of California we talked to over the last couple of weeks say that social media is an ongoing experiment, one that in some companies is being done without any specific plan, but is nonetheless yielding results. keep reading…

I was first exposed to recruiting blogs at the 2005 ERE Expo (and will be leading a free-wheelin’ discussion about blogs and social media recruiting at ERE’s upcoming conference in San Diego). Blogging struck a chord with me, so I started up a personal blog, and a year later a recruiting blog. I kept that one up for a year and a half. From the very beginning, however, I ultimately wanted to create a corporate recruiting blog. In 2005, only a handful of companies had embraced recruiting blogs. I watched how those companies were using recruiting blogs, and saw how blogging enhanced candidate engagement and communications in a real-time, relatively-transparent manner.

For the past decade recruitment marketing has primarily focused on print collateral, career websites, and job boards. To me, a corporate recruiting blog creates a dynamic, digital recruiting “brochure” that can be accessed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. A blog can tell stories, promote opportunities, educate candidates, and provide an inside view into what was happening at an organization. I wanted to peel back the top layer of my company and let candidates see what it was like to work here.

Very little has changed though over the past few years. There are still only a few of organizations with active corporate recruiting blogs, with Microsoft, Sodexo, Rehabcare, and Hyatt serving as excellent examples. One thing did change however this past year: I finally had the opportunity to launch a corporate recruiting blog, “Success starts here,” at my employer.

Why has corporate recruiting been so slow to adopt? I believe it ultimately comes down to a lack of understanding and a lack of trust by the traditionally conservative and risk-averse entities existing in many organizations. These are barriers that can and should be overcome; there has never been a better time for corporate recruiting blogs.

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Here we are in 2008, soon to be 2009, and almost a decade into the 21st century. The Internet is maturing: it’s been around for ordinary people to use for almost 15 years and has already earned its place as a technology and a social movement as important as electricity.

Most recruiters, corporate or agency, have finally developed career sites and use the Internet for attracting, sourcing, and communicating with candidates and clients. The website is the bedrock of an effective recruiting practice, and while it may still be possible in local or niche markets to avoid it, for mainstream and volume recruiting a website is essential. In this article I am assuming you already have a decent website that has interactivity, video, audio, and other graphic material and updates frequently. That is old news.

But, to get a jump on your competition and to attract the savviest candidates, it takes more than a good website and good recruiting skills. Here are four essential tools for success.

Tool #1: Facebook or MySpace

You should have a personal and a corporate presence on a social network. I have only listed Facebook and MySpace because they represent the largest share of the social networking world in the United States and a significant percentage outside the U.S. If your organization has global operations and recruiting needs, then there are networks for China, India, and many other places that you should also consider.

College students and most other young professionals turn to these networks for information about you, to ask their friends about you, or to join a community of practice that you have created.

IBM DB2 developers have a Facebook community developed and maintained by IBM. KPMG in South Africa has developed a Facebook page to attract and communicate with potential candidates.

The U.S. Army, faced with massive recruiting challenges, has numerous Facebook and MySpace pages. Some of the pages act as testimonials or provide videos of real people talking about why they joined the Army. Other pages are focused on fun experiences such as simulations of driving a tank or on gaming.

However you use these networks, you will be exposing your brand to thousands of potential candidates who, at least to some degree, will judge their potential work experience by the quality of the content. That’s why these pages have to be done thoughtfully and have to connect to the type of viewer and what they are expecting to see and hear.

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A significant part of my work involves giving presentations around the world on the hottest recruiting topics. It is an aspect of my work that I truly enjoy because it affords me an opportunity to continuously learn about where our profession is headed.

Through speaking, I not only help companies understand the latest recruiting trends, but I also learn from hundreds of professionals about what they see as hot topics, emerging trends, and how they are approaching them. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on what recruiting trends will top the agendas of Global 500 recruiting managers in the next 12 to 18 months based on my interaction with more than 300 organizations around the globe this year.

The Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting

Based on conversations with recruiting leaders, questions asked during seminars, advisory requests, and best-practice research, expect to see an increased emphasis in:

• Upgrading employment branding. Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. Firms throughout Asia, in particular, are increasingly adopting employment branding as a wildly important activity for 2009. The success of Google, a firm that has built the world’s strongest employment brand over an amazing five-year period, has led others to focus on this impactful long-term strategy. Key focus areas include increasing media coverage, increasing visibility online, building your “green” brand, and countering your “negative” employment brand. Firms to watch: Facebook, Google, Yum Brands, Tata, E&Y, Enterprise, U.S. Army, and Sodexo.
• Reinvigorating referral programs. Despite the growth of career-related Internet sites, the highest volume and quality candidates still come from well-designed employee referral programs. While heavy adoption was initially hampered by cultural issues around the world, today such programs are proving highly effective everywhere. Key focus areas include proactively approaching key employees for referrals (program targeting), leverage non-employee referrals, making reward systems more comprehensive, immediate, and visible, and last but not least, helping employees leverage social media to restore relationships, make new relationships, and build stronger relationships. Firms to watch: AmTrust Bank, Edward Jones, Whirlpool, and Amazon.com.
• Renewing the focus on quality of hire. As a result of strong research by organizations like staffing.org, recruiting leadership has begun to refocus its efforts on identifying factors that increase the quality or the on-the-job performance of new hires. Key focus areas include improved quality of hire metrics, calculating the performance differential between average and quality hires, and identifying sources that produce high-quality hires. Firms to watch: Aimco and Wipro.
• Reinforcing the business case for recruiting. As budgets tighten and slow economic growth continues, recruiting budgets will face constant constraints. Instead of whining, many leading talent organizations are seizing the opportunity to reposition themselves as non-transactional organizations. When the focus in recruiting is placed on non-transactional, more systemic issues, such organizations can work with the CFO and risk management to demonstrate the importance of supporting recruiting even during times of reduced hiring volume. The key focus areas include predictive modeling, dollarizing recruiting results, and showing the dollar impact of vacancies in revenue generating positions. Firms to watch: Aimco, DFS, Wipro, and Google.

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As we enter the dog days of summer here in the United States and Europe, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on some of the blogs and websites that I find valuable. As an avid bog reader, I know how hard it is to sift through the hundreds that are available and narrow it down to just a few.

I have chosen four blogs/websites that I think are useful to recruiters and add new knowledge and perspectives. Each blogger that I have chosen is also an author of a book or two and is a researcher in his/her area. They all are looked upon as experts by their peers.

This list could be much longer, of course, and I know I have missed some other equally good blogs.  If you have a favorite, please send me a link and let me enjoy it too. I will do a new column from time to time and add more to the list.

Value Networks is a site that adds depth to the discussions we have about social networks. Verna Allee, the principal behind this site and discussion group, is known all over the world for her work in mapping networks – in other words, graphically showing us how people interact and with whom in a value chain. She has written several books on knowledge management and on social networking and has been a regular faculty member at my Future of Talent Retreat. Her website discusses and provides tools for value network analysis, which is a methodology for understanding, using, visualizing, optimizing internal and external value networks, and complex economic ecosystems.

While this may sound overwhelming, the site contains rich information about social networks and how to understand the interactions and interrelationships between the members of a network. The methodology is being used by many organizations to better understand how their customers interact with them and each other, how suppliers interact with customers, and how employees network both within and outside the organization.

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So many recent news articles proclaim that social networking and blogging are the keys to effective recruiting. The vibe of these stories is that if you aren’t already using these activities, your fate in the war for talent will be to become another battlefield casualty. You are a dinosaur and deserve to be extinct.

Whenever something new comes along, there tends to be a lot of hype, based on the “promise” of what it may deliver. Think ATS and job boards. It’s a lot like elephants trying to procreate: there’s a lot of hooting and hollering and dust getting kicked up at the start, and then nothing may happen for a very long time. And if it does happen, it’s going to be difficult and painful.

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Blogs are hot. Recruiting blogs have sprouted up on a regular basis for months, and competing writers now vie with each other for readership and “followership.” The majority of readers of blogs are Gen Yers, and they are the influencers and indicators of what the future of media may look like.

A survey published last fall by Forrester’s Charlene Li indicates that “24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs.”

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Quite often, recruiters ask me to recommend today’s best books and blogs. I’ve compiled some links to blogs that are a bit out of the recruiting mainstream and are not written by recruiters. These blogs provide you with a slightly different view of things and often from a wider perspective as well.

Out of the hundreds of books that are published every month, only a very few make my list. I try to recommend books that I will refer back to and that carry a message that isn’t faddish. The three I list here are all keepers.

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I read around 50 blogs on a regular basis and find myself scanning more and more of them. They are replacing newspapers and even magazines as a source of information. Some blogs are taking over the product review business and give you and me the chance to express our candid opinions about products and services we use.

This means that, eventually, blogs will comment on your recruiting process, your career site, and even on how people were treated when interviewed by your organization. They bring what used to be private, or at least fairly contained, to a much wider audience. Hence their power and their potential to do harm.

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Passion is perhaps the most important component of performance. Blogs are providing a new window into what drives individuals that we’ve never been able to see on a resume.

In the course of building my own teams and recruiting for other companies, there was always a certain intangible quality I sought that was one of the strongest indicators of on-the-job performance.

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Just a year ago, there were fewer than a dozen blogs that related to recruiting or talent. Today there are probably over three dozen and more appear every day.

Gen Y recruiters regard them as mainstream and so do many Gen Xers and Boomers. Vendors of talent systems and services feel pressure to have a blog to showcase their awareness of the market and of the customer.

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Just when you think you’ve mastered the Internet, along comes a new generation that is changing the way we use the Web. It will be incumbent on today’s recruiting innovators to rethink and shift their recruiting tactics in response to the changing dynamics of the Web’s second generation.

Ten years ago, leading companies identified that the habits of their target audience were rapidly changing. The Internet, once an exclusive haven for techies and geeks, was now becoming an indispensable resource for everyone from college students to experienced professionals.

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The world of the traditional, reactionary recruiter is gone. The traits that characterized the 20th century recruiter are summarized in the table below, along with those that will be requirements for a model, proactive 21st century recruiter.

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MySpace, blogging, texting. If you don’t have a true understanding of these words and how they’re influencing today’s candidate pool, chances are you aren’t effectively tapping into the next generation of our workforce. Whether you are a third-party recruiter, corporate recruiter, or hiring manager, showing up for a war for talent with a knife isn’t going to get you very far.

With all due respect to my friends at Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, and so on, they have become a knife in a recruiter’s arsenal. When I started my career, I began working for a very successful staffing agency. I had no experience in recruitment. I just knew I liked the pace and the competition, and I figured out quickly that if you worked hard, you could make great money. So, I came in everyday, logged on to Monster.com, and proceeded to pick the low-hanging fruit. Back then, it was pretty much all low-hanging fruit.

No one had time to cold-call the passive candidate; by the time you convinced him/her to take a look at your job, you could have submitted five or six candidates whom you found off a job board, all of whom were eager to interview for your position. Anyone in the recruitment space today knows just how much times have changed. During my career at this staffing agency, they made us read the book Danger in the Comfort Zone by Judith M. Bardwick, which is about employees getting complacent. A great book, but I never really got the full effect of that read until recently. You see, we’ve spent so much time worrying about our employees being caught in the danger zone that we as corporate leaders have let ourselves start to slip into this zone. We aren’t looking forward enough, we don’t have an understanding of what the next generation of our corporate leaders is doing now, and we don’t have a definition of what an A-player in this generation looks like. A-players in this generation share the following characteristics:

• They understand the importance of a good education, and they know the value of that education before they walk across the stage and grab their diplomas. They aren’t going to accept a $28,000 job that has them working from 7-7 just to get that next promotion. The days of hiring fresh college grads and dangling the promotion carrot in front of them while you work them to death are gone, and if your company is still trying this method, chances are, you’ve got the low end of that graduating class working for you.

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Blogs represent an emerging and rapidly growing communication vehicle. Today, there are over 14 million blogs, and this number is increasing fast — over 80,000 are added each day. The applications for recruiting have been fairly limited (Microsoft’s brilliant marketing/finance and technical blogs aside). Yet there is a very real and powerful place for blogs in a recruiting strategy. Done well, blogging can save you time and money, inexpensively generate brand awareness and word of mouth, and do a more effective job at employer branding than your employment website.

Blogs as a Marketing Tool

In the excellent book, Creating Customer Evangelists, authors Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell demonstrate with real-world examples how “buzz marketing” has started to level the playing field between large, advertising-driven companies and small companies with limited budgets. Rather than spending huge sums of money on media and advertising plans, companies that embrace buzz marketing know how to have more personal dialogues with their customers and prospects. In our increasingly connected world, word of this approach has the potential to spread quickly. Another suggested reading on the topic of word of mouth and buzz marketing is The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Blogs are becoming a de facto tool in the buzz marketing arsenal for emerging companies. They allow these companies to rapidly communicate information, get customer feedback, and create a community of potential customers that are more likely to purchase their products or services and spread positive word of mouth. Done well, a blog reduces the need for a big marketing budget to generate brand awareness. This is exactly why some CEOs, who are quite busy running the day-to-day operations of their companies, choose to spend their valuable time blogging. Even a company mascot has joined in the fray.

The Microsoft Recruitment Blogging Strategy

Microsoft has an interesting, love-them-or-hate-them employer brand challenge. They employ some of the most brilliant developers and business minds in the world, yet there is an entire population of their colleagues that would never work there. It is no secret that the reactions from candidates are often virulent. So how do you make Microsoft seem less like a slow-moving, bad-intentioned giant and more like a nimble innovator with a policy of open communication? Enter the Microsoft recruiting blogs, which now include an Australian entry. Add to this a host of blogs from Microsoft employees (over 3,500 of them in all), and you’ve got a phenomenon that has started to create a human face for the company. The Microsoft recruitment blog approach gives the company a competitive advantage for semi-active candidates by providing a level of personal interaction with candidates even some of the smallest companies don’t offer. If you post a comment, you’re almost guaranteed to be answered by the Microsoft recruiting gods and goddesses. In contrast, most candidates refer to employment websites as either “black holes” or “resume vortexes.” Posts are not always about recruiting or the Microsoft culture, which is exactly the point: create content that interests your target audience, and you can create a community of passive job seekers. In Microsoft’s case, there are literally thousands of readers of the recruiting blogs. Anyone researching a technical, marketing, or finance career will likely stumble upon one of the easily indexed blogs through a major search engine. This is low-cost, high-impact buzz marketing for recruiting. Microsoft has set a trailblazing example for the rest of the recruiting industry.

Blogging Strategies You Should Take Advantage Of

Today, blogs are a competitive differentiator used by an elite group of pioneering recruiting departments. As more companies realize their power, they may soon be an integral part of every recruiting department’s strategy. I’ve spoken with quite a few companies about incorporating blogs into their strategies. The most common reasons I hear that they don’t blog today (with my usual responses) are:

• “We don’t have the resources.” My response: Focus your resources on a better way to connect with passive candidates and you will see a return on investment.

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