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Monster took another step last week in its drive to become more social adding a “friends” connection to the thousands of listings on its jobs board.

Almost a year after launching BeKnown, its Facebook-based business network and competitor to BranchOut, Monster is now enabling its network members to see who they know at companies offering jobs on Monster.com.

It works just as you expect: Job seekers searching Monster are invited to “See who you know.” A click pops up a list of their BeKnown connections who work at the company. Those not already on BeKnown get an invitation to join, needing only a Facebook login. keep reading…

BranchOut announced today that it got $25 million in new funding, raising the total investment in the professional networking service to $49 million, and spurring talk the nearly two-year-old company is positioning itself to take on LinkedIn.

Besides the cash, fueling the talk today on startup blogs and Silicon Valley news sites is the company’s dramatic growth spurt. Now at 25 million registrants, BranchOut says it has been adding 2 million members a week since since launching its mobile invites app in February.

“It’s unprecedented to see this type of growth, which makes BranchOut one of the most-used apps on Facebook,” said Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield Fund, which lead the Series C investment. “I’m excited by the opportunity BranchOut has to introduce the notion of a professional social network to the 90 percent of the population that is not on LinkedIn.” keep reading…

This past Saturday an event was held at Best Buy headquarters in Minneapolis called MinneBar. No, not that kind of bar, although there was some of that after it was over.

This is a BarCamp style event with 1,000+ Minneapolis and St Paul tech folks gathered for a day-long structured unconference to talk about techie, geeky, and nerdy things.

The event is free, including parking, lunch, and post-event beer.

Number of recruiters or HR folk in attendance: less than 10.

WHAT??? keep reading…

When Glassdoor launched its Facebook connection a few minutes ago, the company that’s the Yelp of employment jumped full-on into the scramble for dominance in the world of careers social networking.

Among the players already in the ring are BranchOut, the first to build a business networking presence on Facebook, Monster’s BeKnown, and LinkedIn, the reining leader. (Facebook had its own big news Wednesday, filing for its much anticipated IPO.)

Like BranchOut and BeKnown, Glassdoor leverages a user’s Facebook data to find connections at companies in which they have an interest. These can then help provide a direct line to the recruiter or hiring manager. It works simply by using your Facebook login.

Setting Glassdoor apart is the wealth of information it has collected about tens of thousands of companies that’s hard or even impossible to find anywhere else. From its beginning as a place where workers could review their company (or former company) with sometimes no-holds-barred bluntness, Glassdoor has broadened its scope, providing just the kind of information job seekers want: job listings, salaries, interview questions, company background, those unvarnished opinions — both pro and con — and now, who among a person’s Facebook connections has an in. keep reading…

Facebook is emerging as the leading social network when it comes to job hunting. By a margin approaching 2-to-1, job seekers credit Facebook with helping them get their current job.

LinkedIn ran a distant second, with 46 percent of job seekers attributing their job to that business-oriented network. Twitter, the short messaging network, got a thumbs-up for its job help from 36 percent.

Those are among the findings of Jobvite’s Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 released this morning. The survey doesn’t say how the social networking helped the job-seekers. Other data suggests it may mean seekers researched the companies on social networks, reached out to their contacts for information, got a referral, or were contacted directly. Since most job seekers use more than one social network, the numbers add up to more than 100 percent. keep reading…

The President came to California this week to do a little fundraising and hold a jobs town hall meeting.

Neither of those were particularly noteworthy except that the townhaller was hosted by LinkedIn in Silicon Valley, with 80,000 people watching a live feed of the event. keep reading…

The American Jobs Conference is underway right now and let me tell you, the conversation is vigorous.

I don’t know how many participants the conference has, but the tweet stream is moving fast, especially at the start, when the tweetnote speaker, Republican presidential candidate and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, started tweeting.

His 16-tweet conference opener was a Twitter first. Not only because he was the first presidential candidate to keynote a conference via Twitter, but also because conference organizers say it’s the first conference to be conducted entirely via Twitter’s short messaging.

Being a first didn’t count for much among the conference followers (#Jobs4US) who took Pawlenty to task for delivering a political address and challenged his record when he was governor. This one got loads of retweets: “Number of ppl that can fit in the Metrodome (home of the MN Twins): 64,000. Number of jobs created by @timpawlenty: 6,200.#jobs4US”

Things picked up when he got to answering questions. Tweeted one participant, Oh! @TimPawlenty is answering questions on #jobs4US — this is much more interesting than the speech. I hope it lasts a bit.”

It did, briefly. Pawlenty took a handful of questions, answering most with some variant of this: “My priority is getting the economy moving again — we must create jobs by cutting taxes, and controlling spending.” keep reading…

Men are better online networkers than women? True, says LinkedIn.

It may fly in the face of other surveys, but LinkedIn insists that men are savvier networkers when it comes to their participation on the global business networking site and when their number of connections are taken into account.

“Women,” explains Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s Connection Director, “can sometimes shy away from networking because they associate it with schmoozing or doling out business cards, when in reality, it’s about building relationships before you actually need them.”

Well now, just a couple weeks ago ComScore said women in five of the biggest European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom — spent more time on social networks than men. And it didn’t matter if they were 15 or 50. In every age grouping the women were ahead. keep reading…

If you remember KODA as the clever,  irreverent, and often-entertaining Gen Y business connection site, you’ll be sorry to hear it’s gone.

It closed down officially a couple weeks ago. That no one much took notice until blogger, author, and LinkedIn champion Lindsay Pollak tweeted the news Saturday speaks volumes about the reach of the site. As tuned in to the Gen Yers as it was, Koda.us simply couldn’t get up the critical mass to really ignite.

The final blog post says nothing about the reasons for the closure, other than it came as a surprise to the staff. “The winds of change are swift,” says the final post, written by Lauren McCabe, who was Koda’s marcom specialist.

In truth, though, it had ceased to exist at the end of February. A note then said it was being taken offline while the team designed “a brand new product, one that is substantially different from the current version that you see today. As a result, we’ve decided to go “dark” while we build our new site.” keep reading…

At the constant urging of my gunslinger husband I recently took a concealed carry class.

It was fun.

Chapter 6 of the National Rifle Association’s guide to the basics of personal protection in the home published in 2000, says that, “…encounters occur at very close range, often in reduced-light conditions, and are over in a matter of seconds. One study of Police shootings in a major urban area showed that the majority of encounters took place after dark, at three yards or less, in less than three seconds, and involved the firing of an average of three shots.”

The instructor called these events, “up close and personal.”

That’s where I got the idea for the name of this series.

In this series you’re going to learn effective communication techniques — the “up close and personal” ones. keep reading…

Build Social Capital to Succeed with Social Media

“The Whuffie Factor” is a book about using social networks to build your business. The concept of whuffie (rhymes with whoopee, but don’t confuse the two) refers to social capital built through connections among and between people in communities of shared interest. This creates a sort of “cultural currency” that an organization (or individual) can “spend” for its own benefit.

The Whuffie Factor is about marketing and sales but it does have some lessons for recruiting. The main one is that in order to succeed in making hires, recruiters must actively participate in social networks in — well — a social way. What most recruiters are accustomed to is using any media or channel to push ads. keep reading…

With upward of 60 percent of job applicants saying they never hear from the companies to which they apply, you’d think some enterprising recruiter would use that to their branding advantage.

Just how hard is it to have the ATS send an auto-response at least acknowledging the application. (Answer: Not hard. No ATS? Set up an auto-response via your email program.)

I don’t hear from a lot of job seekers, but when I do, it is almost always about the application black hole.

No wonder then, that the seeker-centric startup StartWire introduced today an application update feature as the centerpiece of its first update since launching in January.

For more than 1,700 employers, applicants will be able to find out, at a minimum, whether or not they got the job. For some employers, those who have turned on the applicant self-service features of their ATS, StartWire will offer more detailed status updates.

“The one thing we will absolutely be able to get is that they didn’t get the job,” says Christian Forman, CEO and founder. “That should be some improvement.” keep reading…

LinkedIn introduced a resume building tool a while ago that, even though it’s slick, simple to use, and creates attractive resumes, would be otherwise unremarkable.

Except that it’s LinkedIn offering it. And it’s a step better than what Monster and CareerBuilder offer. And, more to the point, it’s another step in the LinkedIn transformation from a business-oriented social network to … something else, like a job board for the 21st century.

The LinkedIn people don’t necessarily agree with that. Francois Dufour, senior director of marketing, LinkedIn Hiring Solutions, wrote to tell me that “LinkedIn is a professional network.” It’s “a platform for helping professionals manage their careers.” keep reading…

CareerBuilder unveils a new service today for harried recruiters who know they should have a talent network, but just haven’t found the time to organize things the way they want.

CareerBuilder’s new Talent Network does it for you. It’s pretty much a turn-key service that takes your branding, your look and feel, your jobs, and creates a site, optimizes jobs, and provides a versatile link  that invites jobseekers to join your network and start getting personalized job posts. Recruiters get a searchable pool of candidates, and a way of keeping in touch with them, and with all those other candidates now languishing in your ATS.

If this sounds like something you could do for yourself, it is. And if you have already done all the heavy-lifting to make it happen, pat yourself on the back. But from my conversations with recruiters and vendors, doing it yourself  — from the planning to the ATS customization, to implementing it in a way that automates all the routine work — is  so much effort that making it happen is far down the priority list for most employers. keep reading…

What do you suppose ZoomInfo is up to?

The company launched Fresh Contacts a month ago offering participants two months free access to the ZoomInfo database just for uploading their personal contacts. Upload one or one thousand contacts, it’s all the same – two months’ access to the 45 million contacts and 5 million company profiles ZoomInfo claims.

Without a doubt, it’s a shot over the bow of competitor Jigsaw, which built its leads business on an early faith in crowdsourcing.

But as you’ll see shortly, there could be more afoot here than a front-on challenge to a competitor. keep reading…

Great people don’t make a job change for money. Great people have to be enticed to talk to a great organization. How I overcome this is by arguing that my “tribe” is a better fit for them than their current tribe. My tribe is cooler, funner, more interesting, faster, more successful, and contains less management-by-spreadsheet than their company. Come jump ship and work with us. This is the difference between “sourcing as selling” and resume mining.

I chose the word tribe because it is a good, short noun for the idea that “birds of a feather flock together.” And top managers can be a destination. They have their own posse and peeps who follow them wherever they work. I know: I work for one. But even the most incredible managers eventually run out of people to call when rounding up the usual suspects. This is where I come in. I sell the manager and the team. I look at the group that I am headhunting for and try to find some common denominators. keep reading…

Social networks are so hyped right now among recruiters that it is hard to separate their real value and purpose from often overblown marketing promises. By creating a social network specifically for your organization, you can differentiate yourself from the crowd, build your brand, and find most of the candidates you need without any other sourcing techniques. keep reading…

I have not always been a cell phone technology enthusiast. Until my last phone — the world’s smallest brick — refused to charge. This sent me sauntering into the AT&T store, determined to keep my existing pre-historic calling plan. When it comes to cell phones, I am pretty cheap. I root for the vigilant “Rollover Minutes Mom.”

“I never use data services,” I haughtily told the salesperson.

And then it happened. I palmed (pardon the expression) an iPhone. Sheepishly, I upgraded my plan. I am a convert — to unlimited everything! The iPhone makes handheld technology fun and accessible. (I still get a kick out of the level application. I fire it up to randomly to test the lopsidedness of tables. I also play mobile Scrabble. Hours of geeky fun!)

In addition to entertainment value, the iPhone also provides opportunities for recruiters to improve productivity. Joel Cheesman and Michael Marlatt have written extensively about the coming mobile revolution. Joel, who has launched a mobile recruiting marketing agency, outlines why recruiters should be paying attention to mobile technology in an excellent whitepaper.

Most of the recruiting/job-related iPhone applications were developed for jobseekers. Here are a few apps that will help recruiters save time, allow greater mobility, or improve communication with networks and contacts. You may very well have some favorites to add; please include them in the comments. keep reading…

Control freaks hate community. And most recruiters are control freaks. Ergo, recruiters hate community. Perhaps my deduction is a little harsh (and purposely attention-grabbing). Maybe a better way to describe how many recruiters feel about community is that they are suspicious, or at the very least skeptical.

To suggest that recruiters are control freaks is not an epiphany or an “ah-ha moment,” as being controlling is one of the traits that make recruiters good at our jobs.  We are managers of a set of projects called search assignments or requisitions and are required to direct a volume that easily reaches the double digits. And we need to control as much as possible to be successful.

Recruiters like the idea of community and having a relationship with prospects and/or candidates. But when recruiters take a deeper dive, they begin to understand that some of the conversations that transpire in community are outside of their control, they lose some enthusiasm. So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome?

In my upcoming Fall 2009 ERE presentation, I am weaving five topics/questions/discussion points into the storyline. One discussion point is “Web 2.0 solutions proclaim that this is the new way to pipeline candidates into a private talent community. What is a talent community and how do I build one? In this article, I will deal with the “why” of talent communities.  And if you are in Florida in September, I will discuss the “how to” at length. keep reading…

There is a lot of confusion and uncertainty about social networking and its role in recruiting. Conferences and seminars are everywhere. ERE recently held a conference on social media at Google, and there are dozens of articles here on ERE and elsewhere that are touting the benefits of social networks. There are hundreds of social media blogs and websites as well, and an expanding number of social media applications and tools.

But the big questions for many are simple: What are social networks, what do they replace, and what makes them useful? keep reading…