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What do you get when you search your name online?

Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.” keep reading…

Making the news this week are announcements from Jigsaw about an overhaul of its forums to bring them into the world of Web 2.0, a coup for outplacement upstart RiseSmart, and some good news for CEOs.

JIGSAW

The business intelligence and sourcing site has upgraded its community forum, giving it a cleaner look and implementing such to-be-expected features as tagging and contributor ratings. Tags are especially welcome, given that forum posts aren’t easily searched.

No one is going to mistake the new community platform as avant garde; think of it as functional, especially so if it adopts the name “The Corner,” which is beating out “Puzzleville” in the name voting.

The company also has an iPhone app that’s going into beta. Jigsaw is looking for iPhone users willing to provide feedback to the team in exchange for being the first to use the new app to “search, download and export contacts directly.”

CEO LONGEVITY keep reading…

You’ve heard that employment is a proverbial “lagging indicator.” Companies wait to hire until they’re sure an economic recovery is underway. Actually, that’s not true, says Stephen Lowisz, founder and CEO of Qualigence. keep reading…

As Johnny and Jane come marching back from war to prepare for the next chapter of their lives, they face the daunting challenge of turning their military experience into machine-readable resumes and elevator speeches that convince corporate recruiters to give them a second look.

“The novelette of their experience in the military,” says Sherrill Curtis, doesn’t always translate clearly.

Agrees Carl Blum, “The hardest problem they have is translating their military experience into civilian language so a recruiter can understand what they have to offer.

Curtis, Blum, and Blum’s partner in an organization called Tip of the Arrow, Bob Deissig, and Sgt. Major James Clark were the prime movers of a program last month at New Jersey’s  Ft. Dix called “Ultimate Warrior Career Workshops and Job Fair.”

They had plenty of help. The Garden State (New Jersey) SHRM council signed on early to the project, supplying dozens of recruiters, supplemented by career coaches from the state’s professional association, and representatives from federal agencies and area colleges.

But this was no ordinary job fair, although some 70 employers showed up and Blum tells us 200 of the participants expect offers. keep reading…

There are a raft of new find-a-job and career sites that have come to our attention in the last few weeks. There are the “me toos”: retooled versions of existing sites that may have a nice touch here or there, but overall do little except to add to the online recruitment clutter.

Then there are sites like UpMo.com that actually try to help a job seeker understand that a job is not a career. The subscription-based service launched earlier this year, but just this week added a job search engine that promises to filter the duff for its members. ResumeFit.com, meanwhile, serves the recruiter by incorporating a candidate assessment right into the resume. As a company partner told us, “this is great for triaging candidates on the front end.” keep reading…

New Vault

The new Vault came out of the vault this morning, and while it bears a family resemblance to the old site, it’s got deeper content, greater breadth, easier navigation, and enough improvements big and small that collectively they make the site more useful to more job seekers at a time when they need it most.

“Today, Vault is taking a major leap forward to provide our ambitious, educated audience with a faster, more comprehensive and personalized experience,” is how Vault president and CEO Erik Sorenson announced the release of the new Vault.

Founded in 1996, Vault has ever since served professional school students, recent grads, and, in increasing numbers over the years, mid-career professionals in the fields of finance, law, accounting, and consulting. Before consumer-generated content became a buzzword, Vault tapped into employees at major firms and companies in the U.S. who provided insider views of the work environment. They also helped Vault compile its salary information, its numerous surveys, and its famed company rankings. keep reading…

You have to wonder what a recruiter looking at Daniel Seddiqui’s resume would think.

Here’s an economics major from the University of Southern California who hasn’t held a job for longer than a week since graduating in 2005. On his website he admits, almost eagerly, that he went on 40-plus interviews and didn’t land a single offer in his field.

His lament is all too familiar to unsuccessful jobseekers: “I never received feedback from any employers.”

So the lanky 28-year-old began taking any job he could find. He tutored elementary school kids. Was a volunteer cross-country coach in Chicago, painting stairs, doing a little accounting, and some other jobs to pay the rent. When the cross-country job ended, he took another job in Indiana. And then another.

His resume now lists jobs as diverse as agronomist, hydrologist, cook, rodeo announcer, Border Patrol agent, and boilermaker. If you’re reading this during the fourth week of June 2009, then you’ll see 39 different jobs listed. This week he’s working as a furniture maker in Pennsylvania’s Amish country. keep reading…

Talk about win-win. There’s a job networking event tonight in San Francisco where everyone comes away with at least a new pair of designer jeans.

!IT Jeans is giving away jeans that retail for around $65-$70 a pair to everyone who shows up with proof they’re unemployed and proof they tweeted or posted to Facebook about the event at Lime, a retro-60s restaurant and bar in San Francisco’s hip Castro district.

With the jeans carrying names like “Hottie,” “Industry,” “Dream Diva,” and “Studio,” don’t expect to see any resume-carrying, tie-wearing, business-suited, job-seeking mid-managers at this event. But it also doesn’t look to be just a group of 20- and 30-year-olds surprised to be out of work. Judging by the profiles on the MeetUp site that the Bay Area Job Seekers & Professionals Looking to Network group calls home, there’s a curious mix of talent coming to make contacts and learn how to get into consulting, which is the theme of the evnt.

According to the description, “This event will also focus around the theme of ‘Creating your Consulting Career,’ which simply put, means how to focus your job search efforts on consulting positions instead of permanent positions.”

One of the sponsors of the networking event, the MeetUp group is organized by Mark Thomas, CEO of the equally curious job site, WorkYourCareer. It’s a sort of job board that incorporates classic job postings with an interview auction. Participants apply for a job in the usual way, with one exception: neither application nor resume may carry contact information. If an employer shows interest, the job seeker is invited to bid for an interview. The top bid gets the pick of interview time, with other bidders winning slots until they’re filled.

And yes, the job seeker must pay; most credit cards are accepted.

Thomas, whom we couldn’t reach, also has MoneyBackJobs.com. Pointing back to WorkYourCareer, it seems to have faded with the recession. Its business concept, though, is similar to the many bounty programs that have been tried over the years. Job seekers who accept a job with an employer participating in the MoneyBackJobs program get paid between 4 and 10 percent after 30 days on the job. There are some hoops they have to go through, but the concept is fundamentally bounty.

Tonight’s event, however, is free and open to all job seeking members of the MeetUp group or co-sponsors Pinkslipmixers.com and Slipsquad.com, both of them national networking groups for the laid-off and unemployed. Recruiters from IKON, LOLApps, Jobspring Partners, and Magley & Associates are expected, says Slipsquad.

In the July/August print publication Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’m spelling out my “10 predictions for the coming year.”

If you’re a recruiting leader who subscribes, you’ll get those 10 in the postal mail. For now, here’s one: the traditional career path and all its assumptions (such as that the MBA is the ticket to success, and it’s the only path to the top) will be gone. keep reading…

Like tens of thousands of seniors across the U.S., Eric Barker graduated this month with no job.

But unlike every one of those tens of thousands, the newly minted MBA from Boston College took the unconventional step of running a job-wanted ad on Facebook.

“You know that old saying,” he wrote us explaining why, “If your stock broker knows so much, how come he isn’t rich? I think the same thing goes for marketing: ‘If that marketer is so good, he’d better be able to market himself.’”

So that’s just what this marketer did. His target is Microsoft; the work is entertainment, and; the results? Well, no job yet, but a boatload of contacts, lots of buzz, and offers of help from people like Glenn Gutmacher of Arbita and JobMachine. “Considering this was just a little experiment in unconventional job hunting that cost about a half hour of my time and less than $50, it’s been insanely successful,” Barker says. keep reading…

A new survey says students choose nursing because they want to help people. But the money doesn’t hurt.

The student nurses who frequent CampusRN by a margin of 4 to 1 say  they chose a nursing career for altruistic reasons. Even after a year or two of chemistry, biology, anatomy, and other challenging classes, 98 percent said they would still choose a healthcare career.

At the same time, 54 percent of the students taking the survey said salary is their No. 1 consideration in picking an employer. Close behind are hours and schedule, benefits, and the quality of management and staff, each with 45 percent.

CampusRN, which, as its name suggests is a niche career site for nursing students, conducted the survey in conjunction with Bernard Hodes. As do most of these online surveys, the report cautions not to draw far-reaching conclusions since the 661 respondents came exclusively from the CampusRN site and chose to participate, coaxed by a contest and $5. keep reading…

Amanda Picton doesn’t like disillusioning nursing students about their first job out of school, “but I want to be honest with them.”

So when she tells the students who call her for career advice to look in Texas and expect $50,000 a year, rather than in Missouri for $100,000, she’s not surprised that some of them tell her she’s wrong. “In nursing school they are mislead to believe they are going to be making $50 an hour and are in demand everywhere,” says Picton. “We do this (recruit and place nurses) everyday. We know what the market is like.”

Now, Picton and her recruiting colleages at InHouse Assist are sharing their knowledge of healthcare careers with anyone for free. keep reading…

Not a lot of surprises in the latest career trends report from Beyond.com. Healthcare and medical jobs are the largest segment represented on the 15,000 site Beyond network. They represent almost a quarter of the jobs posted to the network during the first quarter of the year. Beyond says it’s a top spot the industry sector has held for the last three quarters.

IT jobs accounted for the next largest group, but their 11 percent of the total showed the continued weakness in the sector. The job count was off on a year-over-year basis, decreasing almost 3 points from the 14 percent of jobs in the first quarter of 2008. Even so, they were up slightly from the last quarter.

By far, the largest number of jobs on the Beyond network are essentially entry-level. The report says 59.5 percent of the jobs during the quarter specified less than one year of experience. Another 22.5 percent sought 3-5 years of experience.

That’s bad news for the 68% of network candidates whose resumes show five or more years of experience. The largest increase in candidates was the 2.1 percent jump in older candidates — those with 21 or more years experience. The biggest drop was among candidates with less than a year of experience (1.62 percent).

While the percentages suggest that companies, when they hire, are looking for cheap labor, which typically means entry-level or close to it, the survey results are specific to the Beyond.com network. Big though it is (traffic is among the top 25 employment sites), Beyond.com itself is the only all-purpose site; most of the company’s job boards are regional or industry.

What does a modern recruiter need to be good at? Is it all about knowing how to leverage social media, or are the traditional skills of cold-calling, screening resumes, conducting interviews, and closing candidates more important?

I have just been at the Australasian Talent Conference in Sydney, Australia, for the past week and what was most interesting was to listen to the issues and concerns of those recruiters who have not been laid off and whose organizations are still hiring.

They are faced with challenges that many of the ERE writing team have talked about over the past year. keep reading…

I saw a list that Publishers Weekly ran of publishing-industry employees who’d been laid off. And I thought: we need to do this. For recruiters.

There’s no need for anything fancy — we know that a lot of people are recently out of a job and want to make it easier for as many recruiters as possible to find a new gig.

So let’s do this super simple. If you’re a recruiter and you’re in the job market, leave a comment with your:

Name

Email address

Former title

Former company

Location

Feel free to leave additional details as well if you’d like.

We are getting emails and calls every single day from very capable friends in the industry who are being laid off or having contracts come to an end. There’s no shame in looking for a new job in this economy.

keep reading…

About 25 years ago when the self-help gurus came on the scene, I heard Jim Rohn say something that still sticks:

Things will get better for you when you get better.

Sage advice indeed, and now might be the best time to take heed. keep reading…

Little did I know, when I walked into the 2008 Spring ERE Expo, nervous and open-eyed, it would dramatically change the course of my life and work. keep reading…

Ken Zeigler, who talks, writes, and speaks about stress and productivity, offers tips on managing your day better. It won’t take long. keep reading…

A senior manager could be out of work nine months before his or her career prospects are adversely affected, according to a Robert Half study of 150 senior executives from the nation’s 1,000-largest companies.

Executives were asked, “How long, in months, can a top manager remain unemployed before it hurts his or her career?” The mean response was nine months, with a significant number saying 10 to 12 months.

When I saw Jill Geisler at Poynter, a site covering the journalism field, do the Ten Reasons You Should Hire a Journalist (I’ve pasted the beginning of her article below), I thought, “someone’s got to do a list like this about recruiting.”

Recruiters who leave (or get new jobs within) the profession have more to offer than most prospective employers probably realize. For that matter, they have more to offer their own companies than their own employers probably realize — for example, during tough times, a lot of recruiters have research skills that could be put to use in the sales department.

Perhaps we can get a reasons-you-should-hire-a-recruiter list going (post in the comments section). keep reading…