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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. keep reading…

A little something for our overseas readers up at this hour … or for us night owls in the U.S.: LinkedIn has just launched a new tool and a new little update at its conference in Sydney, Australia.

The hot social-network-meets-job-board-meets-database-meets-media-company announced two things for recruiters. The first is “CheckIn.” This one’s for managing candidate info at an event; candidates stop by your booth, give you their name and email address, and you use “Recruiter” to manage the information, such as sending follow-up emails to candidates. CheckIn’s getting fully rolled out in July.

The other new one is called “social campaigns.” The deal with this change is that recruiters used to send updates to their company followers from a company page. Now they can do that straight from “Recruiter.” This “helps them better track responses,” LinkedIn’s Joe Roualdes tells me.

A LinkedIn product launch at one of its events is usually a pretty sure bet. (Then again, so is a frequent LinkedIn product launch not at one of its events, like the recent revamp of “LinkedIn Today.”) Other LinkedIn additions through the years have included its “brand index” and “sponsored jobs”; “jobs for you”; follower stats and targeted updates; the “Pipeline” tool; the “Recruiter” product and various improvements; and more.

Let’s talk about the future of predicting job success and why the world’s biggest evangelist for pre-hire assessments thinks tests are in danger of becoming extinct (and is OK with it).

There are a number of emerging trends in hiring right now that center around the currency of the new millennium: data. The impact of our ability to collect, organize, and interpret data is rapidly changing all areas of the economy. Should employment be any different? There are three ways in which data is slowly killing the employment test as we know it. keep reading…

Did you read Lou Adler’s recent blog on LinkedIn posted May 2, 2013 titled, “There Are Only Four Jobs in the Whole World — Are You in the Right One?” More than likely if you’re reading this — you did. Consider these staggering statistics: according to LinkedIn as of May 6, Adler’s article has been viewed 380,000+ times, shared on LinkedIn 14,000+ times, liked on Facebook about 2,900+ times, and Tweeted 2,000+ times.

Since the late 1990s, we as a recruiting community have been following Lou Adler’s posts on ERE and other forums with well-deserved admiration. Adler has been an influencer in our industry for a long time and has earned our respect. However, I posit that if you were to take every article Adler has posted on ERE, and summed up the total amount of views and shares, that it may not match what his recent post has accumulated on the LinkedIn platform in less than a week. That to me is a seismic shift worth studying. keep reading…

Shares of LinkedIn and Monster moved in opposite directions today, although both careers sites met or exceeded, or, in the case of LinkedIn, blasted through, Wall Street’s expectations. Monster was up; LinkedIn is sinking.

Both companies reported their first-quarter financial performance today.

Reporting before the market opened, Monster said it earned 8 cents a share on revenue of $212 million. It was the first time in seven quarters the company beat Wall Street’s revenue expectation, which was $210.5 million. That surprise, and the company’s announcement it may buy back up to $200 million of its stock, drove the price up almost 9 percent.

LinkedIn reported earning 45 cents per share on revenue of $325 million. That was 15 cents higher than Wall Street’s estimates average of 31 cents per share earnings and well above its $317.1 million revenue estimate. What hurt the company was its Q2 forecast of revenue of $342 million to $347 million. Analyst estimates averaged out to $359.2 million. The stock lost 10 percent of its value in after hours trading. keep reading…

If you’re beginning to think every one is using LinkedIn to source candidates, you’re close to right.

Nearly every survey on source of hire or use of social media by recruiters shows LinkedIn to be a key part of the mix; often it leads all the listed social media sites. The company itself reported adding 2,400 customers in just the last quarter of 2012, bringing the total to 16,400 organizations under contract.

Now comes a Bullhorn survey to report that of the 160,000 registered users on Bullhorn Reach, 97% use LinkedIn to source candidates. That’s not as surprising as it might seem at first glance. keep reading…

Two years ago, LinkedIn realized how much it needed not just a lot of good employees quickly but a lot of good recruiters quickly.

It came up with an uncommon answer, one its recruiting director Brendan Browne talked about at today’s ERE conference in San Diego. keep reading…

A common mistake I see LinkedIn users making is not keeping InMail and invitations personal. In other words, don’t use InMail as another direct marketing message. It shouldn’t feel like another piece of spam for cheap prescription meds. If it does, you’re doing it wrong.

LinkedIn with its InMail tool does a good job of allowing you to create targeted, meaningful messages and save them as templates for tracking and future use. The following list will help you craft messages that get results.  keep reading…

New Recruiter Homepage

Sporting a new look and with some new features — including a recommendation engine that ‘learns’ the kind of people a recruiter most want — LinkedIn Recruiter is getting an official relaunch this morning.

The redesign itself is an update of the classic LinkedIn Recruiter look to make it more consistent with the LinkedIn homepage redesign that was introduced last fall.

Parker Barril, Linkedin’s Talent Solutions head of product, unveiled the fresh, new LinkedIn Recruiter at a live and webcast user event — ConnectIn — in San Francisco. As he put it, “the consumerization of the enterprise,” the trend toward making products and services easier to use, “is influencing a new generation of products.” keep reading…

We just updated our Recruiter Circle of Excellence Competency Model to take into account the expected surge in hiring in Q2 and Q3. There was also an interesting story by the co-founder of Meebo who concluded that most recruiters are pretty bad. Her big points: recruiters are afraid to pick up the phone and call, they don’t know the job so they sell smoke and mirrors, and most just post boring jobs or search through LinkedIn. It was a pretty scathing summary. This approach might work when you’re trying to hire the 15% of fully-employed who are looking, but totally useless when trying to hire the 85% of candidates who are passive, even the bad ones!

So as part of updating the competency model to take this 85% into account, I decided to revisit my old virtual mentor, Stephen Covey, for some inspiration. You might find the results interesting. keep reading…

We have all seen the stats: more and more people are using smartphones and tablets to connect to the web. We probably all use our own mobile phone to interact online every day. But what does this mean for recruitment? Do people use their handheld devices to research companies and find their next job? keep reading…

I’ve been using Facebook’s much-vaunted graph search for about a month now, having been on the list for early users. The feature was launched with much fanfare by Facebook in January at a press conference that proved to be distinctly underwhelming. Expectations were high that the company would announce a Facebook phone (The fPhone?) — a blue device capable of automatically recording all your activities and posting them publicly (privacy settings would be permanently disabled). But instead those watching found that the company was rolling out … a better search. Evidence of disappointment was the company’s stock price which had been rising but reversed course halfway through the press conference.

Graph search supposedly makes it easier to find people in your network and discover potential connections. Filters such as “place type,” “liked by,” and “visited by friends” make locating things faster. The feature can serve recruiters by allowing for better search of people’s profiles. It appears to be reasonably effective. As an example I typed in “People that are Java Developers and live in Minnesota” and it turned up 38 names. That’s a small number so I tried variations such as “People that like Java and live in Minnesota” — which produced a much larger number, but many of these were coffee aficionados. Putting in more complex queries, such as adding another skill, produced no results. Switching to finding .Net developers produced only 18 names and trying “People that like .Net and live in Minnesota” turned up three names of people who like to fish.

Seek and Ye Shall Find keep reading…

Aurecon has C-suite buy-in

The term “employer brand” has been around for a while, but the branding game has changed radically in recent years.

It has been said many times on ERE that in days past, employer brand meant one-way messaging pushed out to the marketplace, while now it’s the highly social, public reverberation of what people think, feel, and share about a company as a place to work.

So who’s minding the “talent brand” store? keep reading…

Like you, I started seeing the posts and pics last week on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (yes, Instagram) from friends who were receiving the “You have one of the top X% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012” email from LinkedIn.

First it was 10% then 5% and later in the week 1%.

And I started thinking, “am I really not that cool to have ranked in the top 1%? How can that be?” keep reading…

LinkedIn didn’t so much beat Wall Street’s financial expectations, it shattered them.

The company earned 35 cents per share on revenue of $303.6 million. That was $24 million more than the average of analysts’ estimates and more than $11 million above the most optimistic projection. The average of their earnings estimates was 19 cents a share.

The numbers released this afternoon show LinkedIn brought in more total revenue for the year than did Monster and its fourth-quarter recruitment revenue alone was 90% above the same quarter in 2011. keep reading…

There is nothing like a good controversy to stir up one’s feelings and subsequently a fierce debate. One of my favorite things about reading articles on ERE is how some of its contributors have a wonderful ability to write articles that generate comments a mile long because of controversial subjects covered. We were barely into 2013 when Adrian Kinnersley wrote an article entitled, “Why LinkedIn will never kill the professional recruitment industry,” which was very on point.

People are so polarized around this issue, but the comments section was what really made it an interesting read for me. If I didn’t know better I would have expected a fistfight to break out. One commenter even suggested that commission-only salespeople are unable to provide independent advice to candidates, and candidates know this. This inspired me to pick up my pen (figuratively, that is) and write, which I haven’t done lately.

The Demise of the Agency Recruiter keep reading…

As an in-house recruiter or HR professional, have you ever been in a meeting with a recruitment supplier and been very impressed with their pitch and excited about the results that are going to follow, only to be completely let down by their performance? It won’t surprise you to read that you’re not the only one.

We all know that for every good recruiter who walks the earth, there are others who don’t quite make the grade. Many sell a value proposition that isn’t being followed up with action — recruiters who purport to headhunt and cold-call top people in the market, but actually only advertise their clients’ vacancies. As a client of these external recruiters you need to be in a position to make an accurate assessment of their worth — not just by what they tell you, but what they actually prove.

Many contingency-level recruitment firms haven’t evolved their value proposition as technology has evolved over the past 10 years. As in-house recruiters have been able to catch up with doing direct sourcing through job boards and social media, external suppliers should be getting more sophisticated in their approach to maintain a value proposition worthy of the fees that are charged — mapping out competitors, gathering referrals, building expertise and relationships in their chosen niche, for example. Too many contingency firms are still charging 15% to 25% for doing nothing more than advertising a poorly written or cut and pasted job spec, and it’s just not good enough.

So here are some questions to ask your suppliers next time you invite them in for an update or suppler appraisal. keep reading…

Last month, I wrote a post called “Recruiters: Your Days Are Numbered” for which I was lynched in the comments thread for disparaging the recruiting profession and forecasting its demise. Even Josh Bersin — a leading authority on HR — chimed in to describe the article as “a bit of a joke.” 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…

As JobSync works on a new tool for searching applicant tracking systems, an ERE reader from Glattbrugg, Switzerland, emailed me today to tell me about a new tool for searching LinkedIn. keep reading…