ERE.net

The use of the Internet with a smartphone is fast becoming the next mass media channel. That’s particular true with social media such as Facebook. Recents statistics from a company called comScore show the mobile Internet audience is using Facebook nearly an hour more a month than they’re using it on a desktop.

Facebook mobile users have a choice of downloading an application, or using the mobile Facebook. Eighty percent of mobile Facebook users use the application. With Twitter, users prefer the application, too. This data has confused many industry commentators, with many bloggers writing that applications are “winning the battle.” This interpretation is wrong. keep reading…

In that recent look at Intel’s social media moves, I said the smart phone application for job-seekers was “still being tweaked.”

The company has now launched “Jobs at Intel” for Android phones. The iPhone application will probably be unveiled in a week or two. You can get an idea of what these applications look like at the “Google play” store; in a nutshell, right now you can view videos, search for jobs, and follow Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook feeds.

If you have a Droid, you can download it on the “Play Store” icon on your phone.

Intel is talking internally about how it can improve upon and expand the application, including doing more for internal job-seekers. Intel’s Keith Molesworth says it’s all part of an effort to improve the user experience for people connecting with Intel on the move, an effort that includes a tablet application designed by the U.S. college recruiting team, and developed by IT. There’s also a tablet app in use in Costa Rica, and mobile technology solutions in Germany and Israel.

“The app is part of our strategy to position ourselves to hire the best hardware and software talent to enable us to achieve our vision to connect and enrich the lives of every person on earth,” Intel’s Allen Stephens says. “Very few companies can say that.”

SelectMinds, TheLadders, an RPO, and more are making announcements at the ERE Expo in San Diego today. Just a sampling:

First SelectMinds, which “moved deeper into the employee referral world” a couple of years ago and then into the “talent communities” competition, today is launching what it calls the “first-of-its-kind software to allow corporate HR to automate all aspects of social recruiting.”

It’s an upgrade to the company’s TalentVine product with six new modules: a jobs distributor to send out listings and links to company Facebook pages and Twitter accounts; a talent community module; a referral program module; a Facebook jobs page builder; a social-media-friendly career-site builder; and a module that optimizes job listings for mobile phones. keep reading…

Regarding its new jobs app, Cummins says, “Finding a job has never been so much fun.”

Not for me, really — as I’ve got the new Droid 4 phone, and Cummins’ new application isn’t available on Android yet. But iPhone users looking for jobs with the company can view interactive engines using the application. They can also watch videos, get custom feeds with the jobs they want, and more.

The company says that the engine-viewing part of the app, where you can zoom and rotate around the diesel engine, is aimed at everyone from middle-school students to high-school students to experienced engineers who might want a new career.

Cummins is an Indiana-based designer-manufacturer-distributor with about $18 billion in annual sales.

Sodexo is launching two things: a new mobile-friendly careers site, as well as a job-hunting application for U.S. job seekers to use on iPhones, iPads, Androids, and soon Blackberries. Candidates can use the app, available from a landing page, to search for jobs, apply for jobs, join a talent community, get job alerts, and learn more about working for the company.

What makes it not just-another-mobile-recruiting-launch is, for one, that it’s Sodexo. The company earned the 2010 recruiting department of the year award; is a finalist this year in the best-brand category; and is a leader in recruiting with social media. Also, candidates who create a profile in the Sodexo career center can apply for a job straight from the mobile device; this differs from many other setups, where companies need candidates to eventually get to their laptop or desktop to apply. keep reading…

An IT staffing company you probably haven’t heard of is quickly hiring employees and recruiters after it won some new business that it probably hadn’t dreamed it would.

XpertTech has already grown about 400% in six months money-wise, and in terms of employee size, from 12 employees to 61 employees in six months. Now it’s hiring 30 people in 30 days in the San Francisco Bay area for a mobile phone application project. It’s looking for designers, coders, and others. Joe Budzienski, the company’s executive vice president, is telling candidates, “Whether you have just graduated college and have been developing in your dorm room between classes, or have worked as a senior engineer who realized app development was your true calling, we want to speak with you. The only thing we ask is you live, breathe, and eat APPS!”

“To be trusted with this project is an honor,” says Budzienski. “It’s a very very prominent company, global.” One job listing on LinkedIn suggests the client is a banking company, as do some other posts.

The 30-day hiring blitz started Monday, and XpertTech has hired 12 of the 30 already. keep reading…

Mobile technology especially the apps that go hand-in-hand with portable devices, is fueling tech hiring this year, as companies scramble to build out their mobile capability.

Just over half (54 percent) of IT leaders surveyed for the quarterly TEKsystems’ Executive Outlook Survey will implement some mobile initiative during the year, with more healthcare leaders (76 percent) planning projects than those in any other sector.

Mobile apps are among the leading projects, according to CIOs polled by Robert Half Technology. Twenty-two percent of them say they’ll be developing a mobile application for their company before the end of the year. Besides getting their development teams, the biggest challenge, say 28 percent of the CIOs, is finding and hiring IT staff with the necessary skills.

“Building mobile applications requires intense collaboration between numerous groups within the organization, including marketing, IT, operations and sales,” said John Reed, executive director of Robert Half Technology. “It’s important for mobile application developers to have strong soft skills, in addition to the ability to write code and test and debug software applications.” keep reading…

I was just reviewing the predictions I made for 2011 written at roughly this time a year ago. Much of what I thought would happen unfolded as expected, except for talent management. I had thought there would more focus on integrating the employee development and recruitment functions, and more internal hiring. I still think that’s on tap for this year. I was on target regarding hiring: There was no great uptick in the volume of hiring, and unemployment remained static. And I was on target with predicting that social media would be core to recruiting success and that RPOs would thrive.

Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. keep reading…

Recruiting never seems to change very much. As I have often written, even with computers, smart phones, cheap video, big bandwidth, and years of accumulated experience, the way we look for people and select them looks very much the same as it looked 50 years ago.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section. keep reading…

Matt Jeffery said this was coming, as did Kevin Wheeler: Using games in recruiting. It has been tried by a consumer product company and an animal hospital on Facebook, among many other companies, like Siemens.

Now, a company called Upstream, in the mobile marketing business, has created an online game for its marketing campaign manager positions. Candidates are led through seven “missions” or questions — that is, after they put in their contact details, including a resume. (A requirement I wasn’t so fond of, as it deters those without one.)

One question — one of the seven missions — asks, “If you were to promote Skype to a general target audience who are not current users, which features would you highlight?”

Upstream has added about 45 people in 2011, and opened offices in Silicon Valley, Rio, and Dubai, and is still hiring. Part of what it plays up to potential customers is its use of games in mobile marketing.

John Sullivan asked: Are QR codes the next big thing in recruitment technology?

For adidas, an award winner last year, they’re already a big thing.

Craig Larson heads up U.S. recruiting. He started about a year ago, about the same time, he says, that adidas “identified a problem that needed a solution.”

The problem begins with the fact that adidas sends lots of people to trade shows in places like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York. These people aren’t recruiters, usually — and in fact recruiters sometimes are not welcome at the conventions. They are designers, marketers, buyers, and others there to “push product and get orders,” Larson says. “There’s a lot of deals down there and a lot of passive candidates.” Depending on the event, adidas can send a recruiter or two, but “a lot of times they don’t like us tagging along.”

On top of that, trade-show goers are often with their bosses, and not able to talk jobs. keep reading…

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention. keep reading…

Intel is working on a flurry of online recruiting activity, with the biggest being a new technology for its recruiters to manage college recruits, a new mobile application for all job candidates, as well as changes to its Facebook pages.

First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”

Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”

Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.

Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job. keep reading…

If you are a recruiting leader or recruiter who is constantly on the lookout for new recruiting trends, practices, and tools, you have surely already heard of QR codes.

QR codes are a second-generation barcode that allows potential candidates to quickly and directly access supporting materials and websites using only a camera equipped smartphone. QR codes have many uses, but are most often used to direct target audiences to online content that cannot be easily conveyed in print. keep reading…

If you haven’t invested in mobile recruiting yet, time is running out.

Only 7 percent of corporate career sites are optimized for mobile devices, according to a Potentialpark survey. However, 19 percent of job seekers reported using their mobile device for career activities; 50 percent “could imagine” themselves doing so.

The usage data comes from Potentialpark’s massive annual global survey of students, graduates, and early career professionals. It’s Online Talent Communication Study was completed in June and now, with the 2012 survey underway, the recruitment marketing and research firm says the number of mobile job seekers is already showing “a significant rise.” keep reading…

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

It’s 5:30 a.m., and Joe McHenry, a 36-year-old international tax manager who works in New York City, wakes up, checks his e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter activity from his smartphone all before getting out of bed. By 6:45 a.m. he’s dressed and walking to the train station for his 40-minute commute into the city. From the moment he grabs a seat to the moment he steps off the train, his eyes are glued to the four-inch screen of his personal onramp to his digital life and the information superhighway. Throughout the day, he’ll spend another 4.25 hours engaging with the world through it.

Now consider this: you’re trying to recruit Joe McHenry. He has blown off your e-mails, your voicemails, and even your InMails. This morning, however, his friend who used to work for your firm retweeted a link to the job you’re recruiting for, and it appeared on Joe’s Facebook wall. While on the train, Joe’s curiosity got the best of him and he clicked the link. The browser on his smartphone opened and started to load a page from your career site. He waited and waited, but the page just wasn’t loading. He figured, “I’ll try the parent domain instead.” He typed in yourcompany.com and up came your company’s WAP site, nicely formatted and clean. He looked for the link to jobs, but couldn’t find it. Frustrated, he abandoned his curiosity and went back to catching up with his friends on Facebook.

Sound like a poor experience? Only eight of the Fortune 100 have a career site that detects mobile browsers, and sadly, few of them optimize content for mobile visitors. Among those companies that have invested in building a mobile website, jobs content is more often than not missing. An infant-sized handful have done something for the mobile audience. They have built a careers app users can install on their phone or built out a mobile careers site. You can check out the progressive few: Raytheon, Starbucks, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Hyatt, and AT&T.

The New Normal

Joe McHenry’s lifestyle is the new normal. keep reading…

TMP Worldwide has launched a mobile phone application called TalentBrew Mobile, which its clients could use to make their job listings a lot more friendly to people job-searching on a smartphone.

Matt Lamphear, senior vice president of interactive products at the recruiting ad agency, said that TMP looked at what job boards and others — including TMP itself — were doing with job listings, and realized they weren’t quite there yet. Job listings were being optimized, but they weren’t really being — I’ll sort of coin a word here — mobilized. Says Lamphear: “There’s nothing mobile-friendly about six paragraphs of text.” keep reading…

There are three things to know about mobile recruiting, says Eric Offner, managing director of CareerBuilder Mobile. And each of the lessons applies to mobile marketing for consumers, too.

1. It’s about them. Using a mobile phone and a mobile phone application, Offner says, have to be a no-brainer or people will bail. “Make it easy. Let’s capture them and not let them go to waste,” he says, referring to potential employees using smart phones.
2. There are two Internets. There’s the web and the mobile web. Says Offner with a grin: “You either suck on one of them and are pretty good on the other, or you’re pretty good on both.”
3. Know your audience. “You have one today,” he says. “Start catering to them.” Hertz, he notes, gets the importance of mobile marketing when it comes to consumers, and should extend that effort to recruiting. “I love that site,” Offner says. “I can rent a car in a minute. I just can’t wait to rent cars because it’s so easy. They need to apply that same technology to recruitment. Anyone who rents a car could work for them.”

The PepsiCos of the world are leading the way in mobile recruiting, but most companies are still figuring out what it is job candidates want to do with a mobile phone, how they’ll use it, how much time they’ll spend on it, and what sort of experience they’ll want as compared to what they might want in a corporate career site.

With all that in mind, Charles Purdy, from Monster, speaking at a conference on mobile recruiting a few minutes ago in San Francisco, gave some advice for those corporations looking to put career information on smart phones: keep reading…

Master Burnett sent over the infographic at right (click on it, probably twice, to enlarge) that he put together with Dave Martin from Brave New Talent.

Burnett emailed to say: “The digital world is globally moving at a huge pace to mobile Internet. The explosion of the smartphone and tablet is taking over the pockets of the world and will over take desktop web in 2013. The recruitment industry took 15 years to migrate from printed media to Internet media. Recently the impact of social media has provided innovation in recruitment and a new level of community driven and web-driven hiring outside of the traditional job board. Disappointingly employers have failed to maximise the mobile web and mobile apps.

Given the intrinsic partnership between social media and mobile web, employers around the world must recognize the value being missed on mobile. The attached infographic illustrates the opportunity and the failure to adopt mobile recruiting solutions.” keep reading…