Is your “six seconds of fame” enough to land you a job?
As a professor and a corporate recruiting strategist, I can tell you that very few applicants truly understand the corporate recruiting process. Most people looking for a job approach it with little factual knowledge. That is a huge mistake. A superior approach is to instead analyze it carefully, because data can help you understand why so many applicants simply can’t land a job. If you can bear with me for a few quick minutes, I can show you using numbers where the job-search “roadblocks” are and how that data-supported insight can help you easily double your chances of landing an interview and a job.
Your Resume Will Face a Lot of Competition keep reading…
Everyone seems to agree that generalist large scale job boards are in trouble, and others are profiting. The decline of the Monster share price to below five dollars, parallel to the success story of LinkedIn stock, and the recent valuation of Indeed.com nicely illustrates these shifting dynamics. Generalist job board revenue per posting is declining, and they are facing tough competition from smaller niche job boards, job aggregators, and social networks. Will job boards remain relevant in recruitment?
The main question is not whether job boards are relevant, but whether their search results are relevant for their users. Do job seekers find the job they want, and do employers find the candidates they need? It is a simple equation of attention and relevance, and currently the competition happens to play a better card on both aspects.
The typical job board offers this primary search interface to job seekers:
keep reading…
Hard-to-find talent isn’t interested in submitting resumes or engaging with career sites. These are busy people, deeply focused on a project or idea. Reaching them is not only difficult — it’s often next to impossible.
Many do not have an online presence. Most will not respond to emails, Tweets, or phone calls — if you are able to find them. They are known to their circle of friends and colleagues only, and participate online primarily in technical forums, professional sites, and through emails with associates.
An engineer I know is top in his chosen field. He is highly sought after by a small circle of technical experts for his depth of knowledge and experience. He has no LinkedIn profile, no Facebook page, and does not Tweet. He only answers his phone when he knows the caller personally. Yet, he regularly changes jobs depending on how interesting the project offered. He has never spoken with a recruiter (other than me as a friend). He finds his projects through his narrow but powerful network of fellow engineers.
How would a recruiter ever find him — or the hundreds of others who are similar? keep reading…
“Imagine what the world of recruiting would be like if Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare, and Monster combined into one awesome social recruiting platform that provides an easy way for job seekers and employers to connect in real-time.” That’s how Cedrick Dunn, founder of the Social Jobs Board, describes his company.
The Denver company has been working on its launch since about November of 2011. Employers (offerings are summed up briefly here) broadcast their jobs from their applicant tracking system or career site. Job seekers upload and send resumes to employers.
Of course, that’s just one of a long list of new companies, betas, updates, and so on. Here are a few more: keep reading…
While the debate rages on about the future of the resume, there’s angst, but not as much, over the destiny of the cover letter.
A year ago Fortune asked “Are we killing off the cover letter?” The answer, at least according to the survey the article references, is a resounding yes.
Earlier though, Ruby on Rails creator and 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson insisted, “A great resume will get you not-rejected, a great cover letter will get you hired.”
But compared to the “Resume: Love ‘em or Leave ‘em” controversy, the cover letter discussion comes down as more Solomonic. Four years ago, ERE’s founder and chairman David Manaster analyzed the relevance of the cover letter in the (then)-still-dawning age of social recruiting, summing it up this way: keep reading…
As most of you know, I think the continued use of traditional skills-infested job descriptions prevents companies from hiring the best talent available. By default they wind up hiring the best person who applies. That’s the same reason I’m against the indiscriminate use of assessment tests. While these tests are good confirming indicators of on-the-job performance, they’re poor predictors of it (square the correlation coefficient to get a sense of any test’s predictive value). Worse, they filter out everyone who isn’t willing to apply without first talking with someone about the worthiness of the position. keep reading…
The resume black hole is getting a little brighter among companies that care enough about the experience of their candidates to submit their hiring process to a grueling inspection in hopes of being found worthy of a Candidate Experience Award.
This year, 37 of the 90 companies that entered won the two-year-old competition, seven of them with distinction. Most of the winners were large operations like Pepsico and Intel, with thousands or tens of thousands of employees. However, smaller firms like BTRG, with 500 or so employees, also made the list.
What all the participants share in common is a willingness to open their recruiting process to scrutiny.
Unlike almost every other HR award (excepting Great Places to Work designations), the Candidate Experience Awards are more report card than competition. Companies not only respond to a detailed survey about their recruiting practices, they also must submit their applicants — successful or not — who are also asked to complete a survey about the process. keep reading…
Startups and new products handling employee referrals, screening, sourcing, background checking, healthcare recruiting, and resume-reading. All below. keep reading…
An Amazon page?
Apparently not, though I don’t blame you for being fooled, given the “add to cart” option, the shipping instructions, the product dimensions, the customer reviews, and more. keep reading…
This week, I thought I’d throw out a bunch of recruiting related questions that I’m curious about. Some may be easy to answer (and I’m just to lazy to do so), some hard, and some may have to be re-stated/re-defined.
Do you have any answers? keep reading…
Here’s a quick look at some of the newer recruiting-technology companies you may not have heard of, from gamification to screening to a significant new “social resume” tool launching right now. keep reading…
“There are hundreds of recruiting solutions available today,” Talent Sprocket says in its marketing materials.
Amen to that, but I have a couple you may not have heard of. Read on. keep reading…
For a guy like me, the six most terrifying words in the English language are, “Could I get your bio, please?” I hate describing myself and what I do. My LinkedIn profile has been reworked several times trying to do just that before I got it to its current, less fluffy stage.
For professionals in the talent business, your social media profiles — and especially your LinkedIn profile — are probably one of the first encounters potential employees have when they are looking at or researching your company.
Is it full of clichés and buzzwords or does your profile deliver a clear message that won’t sound like every other inane profile out there?
LinkedIn has recently released some data on the most used buzzwords throughout their network. It’s a good template of words to avoid using when describing yourself.
According to the release, the most used words for US-based professionals are: keep reading…
Update: Alex Douzet, co-founder and until today COO of TheLadders, is now the company’s CEO. His promotion was announced this morning in New York by Executive Chairman and Founder Marc Cenedella.
Looking to fill a high-paying position? Now you can search TheLadders and access the resumes of its fee-paying candidates at no charge.
A simple sign-up gives recruiters and hiring managers access to the career site’s millions of resumes, and permits them to post jobs and send alerts about those openings to targeted groups of job seekers.
It was in January 2011 that TheLadders made its posting service free to employers with jobs paying $100k or more. Called Passport, the free posting was a return to the company’s roots. When it launched in 2003, the service was free to recruiters to list their high-paying jobs; job seekers paid — and still do — a monthly fee to list their resume and access the jobs. In 2007, TheLadders started charging recruiters to post jobs.
Making the resume search also free to recruiters brings the company full-circle. keep reading…
A new employee referral tool, a new way to source IT employees, a career site for developers and engineers, a young startup working on verifying resumes, and an applicant tracking system. It’s all below.
First, out of Bangalore comes WhistleTalk. The CEO tells me the company has closed a round of seed funding, and have seven full-time employees and a few freelancers.
In short, WhistleTalk’s a way for people to earn a bonus by sharing a job opening with their friends via social media. Here’s a short video about it. keep reading…
NASA artist - black hole
There is probably no more misleading statement in corporate recruiting than “we will keep your application on file for six months.” While such a statement may be factually true, the reality is that at most corporations, hell will likely freeze over before anyone will review that application again.
Not only is this misstatement damaging to the candidate experience, but it may also mean that the corporation is missing out on a great opportunity. And that opportunity is to rapidly share exceptional “not hired” finalists with hiring managers located in other areas of the corporation so that a higher percentage of these highly qualified candidates can be hired. The best solution to this problem is a “top 100 candidates sharing list” based on a social media model.
It’s a sad but common corporate occurrence in recruiting. Your employer brand and recruiting process have worked wonderfully and you get an abundance of highly qualified applicants for a key opening. However, after you make your selection, even though the remaining finalists are outstanding and are interested in your firm, nothing happens to them and they disappear into your “ATS black hole” database.
Instead, what should happen is that these top candidates should be marked as “recruiting opportunities” and then proactively shared with other managers from one end of the corporation to the other. This candidate-sharing problem is so frustrating but pervasive that it consistently appears on my list of “major talent management problems without a workable solution.” Nearly every corporate talent manager is aware of this lack of top candidate sharing, but almost no one has found an effective solution. But fortunately, now that we have learned about the tremendous effectiveness of using social media approaches for sharing information, it now makes sense to revisit this problem and to design a proactive social-media-based candidate sharing process to finally solve the problem.
Examples of the Candidate Sharing Problem keep reading…
How is a job search like an Ironman triathlon?
Bet you’ve never been asked that question before. How is it like a marathon? Sure. Now it seems we — OK, not we, but TheLadders — has kicked it up a few notches. It’s not enough anymore to liken a job search to a 26.2 mile run so grueling people die. A job search is a triathlon where before you do that little run, you do a 2.4 mile swim, and bike 112 miles.
What do you get at the end? Alex Douzet’s “Ironman’s Seven Rules of Job Searching.” Douzet, co-founder of TheLadders and its COO, just completed his first Ironman triathlon (you knew that was coming), and from his experience came up with his list, beginning with “Have a map.”
Along the way to Rule 7, Douzet says, “It’s 75% Physical and 75% Mental.” It’s that kind of thing that makes us glad we’re more the passive job seeker kinda guys.
Proven Ability; Transferable Skills
Still on the job search thing, Monster has come up with a handy translation for common resume phrases (of course, recruiters have their own code words, too). Just like when the real estate listing calls a tiny shack a “quaint cottage,” the translation for “transferable skills” is “I’m not qualified, but do me a favor.” keep reading…
The Hilton in Istanbul
In part 1 of this article, I highlighted my top 10 recently implemented bold and outrageous practices in HR and talent management.
The goal is not to recommend these practices, but instead to more clearly define the leading edge of current practice.
In this part 2, I will highlight 13 additional practices that define the leading and “bleeding edge” of HR. If your goal is to “push the envelope” in talent management, this list can give you an idea of where the average ends and the truly bold practices begin.
Although every firm cannot directly adopt the practices listed here (some are reprehensible), I find during my corporate presentations that merely becoming aware of these bleeding-edge practices can create great energy and a strong desire for individual HR functions to do more and be bolder.
Additional “Bold and Outrageous” HR and Talent Management Practices
Here are my selections for the remaining top recently implemented bold approaches that define the bleeding edge of HR practices. keep reading…
So Raghav Singh gave us a little sneak preview of his upcoming ERE Expo presentation about recruiting in China and we couldn’t help but share one of his slides, taken from a Shanghai newspaper. Those with too much time on their hands can play our fun parlor game called “Count the EEOC Violations if This Was in an American Newspaper.”
The Cheez is Moving
Anyone still around from the old days (that would pre-the Great Recession) will undoubtedly remember Cheezhead, an utterly irreverent blog about all things recruiting. Written by Joel Cheesman, the blog could be at turns informative, satiric, newsy, and polemical, especially when it came to job boards, and especially when it involved CareerBuilder or Monster. keep reading…
If Garrison Keillor were to catch wind of what Eric Auld did, he’d have him drummed out of P.O.E.M.
The job seeking, 26-year-old Massachusetts part-time teacher phonied up a job ad to see what his competition was like. He posted it on Craigslist and sat back to await the responses.
As most of you reading this are recruiters, you can guess where this is going. However, try not to spoil it for the few others here, while I fill in some of the background.
Auld, like so many young people who failed to heed mom’s advice, majored in English instead of engineering, even got a Master’s in it. Now, three years out of college and saddled with $40,000 in debt, he was a discouraged job seeker applying, as he put it, “to dozens, maybe hundreds of jobs per week.” keep reading…
