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Two of the hottest topics in corporate recruiting today are the candidate experience and need for transparency. And although many corporations are making a sincere effort to improve that candidate experience, they often pay only lip service to becoming more open, honest, and transparent. No corporate leader that I know directly lies to applicants.

However, if you consider omitting information that could directly help the applicant successfully understand the process or land a job to be a lie, then there are quite a few areas where corporations are omitting the complete truth. keep reading…

When we said VisualCV was shutting down at the end of the month, we hedged with a Hail Mary closer: “unless, we suppose, a buyer swoops in.”

So this morning we discover that Talent Technology did the swooping and scooped up the site for job seeker portfolios. Financial details weren’t in the announcement, but Talent Technology made clear the site would continue. “The service will continue to operate as a standalone offering,” said Talent Technology.

Just in case you don’t recognize the corporate name, Talent Technology is the Canadian firm that sells the HireDesk ATS, and a sourcing system it calls Talementry. A new version of the latter was just released.

Even if you’re not a job seeker, and don’t plan on being one, VisualCV is worth a look. It’s a great place to showcase work for anyone building or managing their personal brand. It supplements your LinkedIn profile.

As Amybeth Hale wrote on our sister site, SourceCon, the site enables professionals “to easily build and manage an online career portfolio that comes alive with informational keyword pop-ups, video, pictures, and professional networking.”

All good for VisualCV, but what’s in it for Talent Technology? The announcement doesn’t really say. There’s only this: “As part of Talent Technology, users can also look forward to new innovations to help them create even more engaging online resumes faster and easier in the future.”

For users of the site, VisualCV says everything will stay as is, except that it will now be free. The premium service is being discontinued. Subscribers should already have gotten a refund.

Job search company StartWire recently got a $3.25 million investment from Baird Venture Partners. The VC firm, which has invested in other human capital businesses including SnagAJob and Pinstripe, said “Startwire stands out in the human capital sector by addressing a real problem facing job seekers.”

StartWire was founded by Chris Forman, former CEO of AIRS, and Tim McKegney, who was previously EVP at AIRS. It launched this year with the promise of helping job seekers avoid the black hole and connect with a network of trusted friends and business connections for advice and job referrals.

Forman said StarWire would use the funds to grow its development team and speed product enhancements, as well as for marketing.

Bullhorn on a roll

Recruiting software provider Bullhorn reported new bookings and paid user count were both up over 40 percent compared to the same period in 2010. Heavy demand pushed usage to over one billion transactions per month, the company said.

The one billion monthly transactions include about 150,000 new and filled job orders as well more than a million job seeker views. Between the company’s recruitment CRM and social recruiting product lines, over 45,000 users across more than 5,000 companies rely on Bullhorn.

The company also announced this week the release of  Bullhorn Time and Expense. The new module for its ATS and CRM software platform provides online time and expense management and integration with accounting and payroll systems.

iCIMS partners with Payscale

iCIMS, a provider of talent acquisition and management technology, has partnered with PayScale. Now, iCIMS 1,000+ customers will have access to detailed compensation information for 13,000 job titles in all cities in the U.S., Canada, and seven other English-speaking countries. PayScale solutions allow companies to design and implement a compensation strategy tied to business results and ensure competitiveness in what has been a volatile talent market.

New twist on resume search

Urecuitme.com is a new jobs site that skips the posting part of job boarding, instead selling access to its resume database. Recruiters pay a flat fee to search for candidates, then pay up to $300 to contact those on the shortlist.

The business model is pretty much the same as LinkedIn Recruiter or buying only the Monster or CareerBuilder resume database, though all three sites likely have millions more resumes and profiles than does the Atlanta startup. The other differentiator appears to be that candidates also must take an assessment test as part of the registration process.

Google+ stalling?

Could be that Google+ has hit a wall. Or it could just be the plateau effect at work (as in loads of publicity generates lots of traffic, that then drops off, but at a higher level where it was prior to the publicity.)

Whatever the cause, Chitka says that Google+ traffic soared 1,200 percent in the days after its public launch on Sept. 20, then fell by 60 percent. The data analytics company is evidently in the “failure to launch” camp, suggesting in prior posts that the site peaked late in July and has been sliding ever since, public launch and publicity notwithstanding.

Taking the next logical step in its evolution from job search engine to job board, Indeed today unveiled its resume search service.

The carefully planned launch had been scheduled to occur tomorrow, but an error in distributing the press release forced the company to lift the embargo it had placed on bloggers, analysts, and others who got a preview of the service earlier this week.

It’s a straightforward search, identical in most regards to the site’s job search. It is keyword based, though it will accept some Boolean and Google query types. Searches can be easily narrowed by simply selecting from a menu on the left that shows up on results pages. keep reading…

While running the executive recruiting department for a Fortune 50 company, I once overheard a conversation between two people at a well-known coffee bar. Based on their dialog, they were executives from my company’s main competitor and were discussing a candidate they had just interviewed. Said candidate was a high-potential executive at my Fortune 50, and like many executive candidates, this person was a valued employee and not an active job seeker. The indiscretion of the two leaders from the competing company could have put their candidate’s career at risk, or at the very least, jeopardized his interest in continuing conversations with them.

The experience reminded me how much responsibility hiring entities have to maintain the confidentially of the executives they interview. There are at least five areas where exerting caution is imperative. keep reading…

Matt Epstein really wants a job at Google. Really.

He wants to work for the company so much he’s launched a silly, almost ridiculous “Hire M.E.” campaign in which a phony mustache plays a supporting role. keep reading…

A number of the big-name innovators in talent acquisition — the Sodexos, the PepsiCos, and others — are all trying to find a smooth way to get candidates using smart phones excited about a job at their companies, to apply for jobs without having to navigate a corporate careers site on the phone, all the while staying compliant with government rules, and not wreaking too much havoc on the employer’s applicant tracking system.

Matt Jeffery, who wrote that article on ERE that went quite viral, says his employer, Autodesk, is among the leaders in the mobile race. More on Jeffery and what his company is unveiling in a minute; first a look at how we got to this point.

A page from the Autodesk iPad version

What the amorphous term “mobile recruiting” has meant to many people so far is encouraging candidates to send a text message companies about jobs, like UPS has done, or the tinkering around with a careers website to make it show up better on smart phones, like companies such as Hyatt have done. Randy Goldberg and the Hyatt team are looking into having candidates submit some quick information on themselves using a cell phone, so they wouldn’t have to type in a whole resume or application. But right now, Goldberg believes that having candidates actually apply for a job using their cell phone would be quite a hassle for a candidate.

Most everyone tends to agree — including many folks you may have heard of who have an interest in mobile recruiting, people like Geoff Peterson, Craig Fisher, Gordon Lokenberg, and Chris Russell.

Lokenberg has helped Deloitte-Netherlands with its mobile recruiting. “There are a lot of apps out there that are mostly shortcuts to an Internet career site of the company,” he says. “That makes it hard to navigate.”

“The technology’s not 100% there,” says Peterson. “You’d have to have your resume already loaded up online and have a link to share, or something else like that. In theory (applying straight from a mobile application) can be done for sure, but do I see a lot of being done now? No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve seen promise from a few different companies,” says Fisher. “But I’ve never seen a working product yet.”

Many of the applications out there are for certain groupings of people, like Lokenberg’s application created in 2009, which works only for companies that are a part of his database, and is called “Shake Your Job.” Or, Monster’s mobile application, for candidates to apply with the Monster accounts. LinkedIn says it does not yet have an “apply now with LinkedIn” mobile-phone application; Russell believes that in general, as LinkedIn makes its moves, it “should speed up the innovation around mobile applying.”

Anyhow, multiple recruiting departments I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on this, with help from various technology vendors. Among those many vendors is a small husband-wife Ohio consultancy working on an “apply now” mobile application, whose work is so private that it doesn’t want its name to be mentioned.

Pepsi, one of the innovators in the mobile arena, was aggressively working on an apply-with-a-cell-phone project, the company told me in the spring, though a spokeswoman tells me it’s not there yet. A little-known UK firm called AllTheTopBananas is its vendor of choice, a company that raves about the success of Pepsi’s mobile efforts to date. AllTheTopBananas has only about 13 employees, mostly developers. It started off in April 2007 as a job aggregator, sort of like a British version of Indeed or SimplyHired in the U.S.

AllTheTopBananas notes that “from the first 60 days from the apps going live, a soft launch only in the U.S., with the apps only being featured in only two places, on their careers website and in the app stores, PepsiCo had received over 3,500 downloads. Out of the 3,500 downloads, 85% of the candidates had job alerts set up on their device for targeted jobs they are interested in. When tracking the candidates who came from their apps, they have hired two new employees and have 10 in the recruitment process. Again, this was within the first 60 days of launch.”

Sodexo, not yet naming the vendor it’s working with, expects to launch its mobile application in about a month, allowing candidates to search and apply for jobs on their phones. keep reading…

Credit the Chinese for coming up with the latest trend in recruiting: The micro-resume.

Not those qualifications on a business card that made the rounds of networking events a few years ago, but a resume reduced to 140 characters.

Ever since China’s leading micro-blogging site weibo.com launched a jobs service in late March, 140-character resume summaries have mushroomed. One count in May put the number at 17,000.

Graduating students were the earliest adopters of the micro-resume, sending brief messages noting their academic degree, interest, and experience. Other job seekers have also begun to take to the micro-resume. A  Xinhua article quotes a senior manager who posted his own micro-resume praising their  efficiency.

Recruiters are also taking to the service, broadcasting micro-job posts to the site. On the home page of  the Sina recruiting site are company profiles for Manpower, Panasonic, and Alipay, China’s equivalent of PayPal, among others.

keep reading…

What do Santa Claus and job seekers have in common? Neither gets much respect from recruiters.

Three months after applying to the last of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, Santa has no idea if the job has been filled at 78 of them. He doesn’t even  know if 25 of them got his resume.

Applying under his given name, Chris Kringle (Anglicized from the original German), the jolly old guy was looking for a job as a systems engineer in logistics or product security.

With his uncanny ability to know who has been naughty or nice, and to manage overnight global delivery of billions of packages, Kringle should be a shoo-in for every recruiter’s short list. And even though he got turned down by 22 of the 100 companies, a few recruiters did call him up for a phone screen.

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…

Indeed made it official this morning, decloaking its new resume service with a blog post encouraging job seekers to try it out.

I posted about this a week ago, as word was leaking out that Indeed was conducting a private beta test. Indeed CEO Paul Forster confirmed the test, but didn’t offer many details then.

Now, what we see is a broadening job seeker service. Users create an account (if they don’t already have one) on Indeed where they can build a resume or upload one.  The resume can be shared by making them public, or they can remain hidden and used only by the job seeker.

Public resumes are searchable on the site or via search engines. That makes Indeed resumes much more visible than the leading other public resume site, Craigslist. It’s also a significant improvement over Craigslist’s resumes, which can charitably only be described as free-form and clunky. Indeed’s resume builder creates the kind of resume any ATS can read. keep reading…

Job search site Indeed confirmed it is beta testing resume uploads, but is otherwise mum about the details.

“We have been beta testing allowing users to upload their resume,” Indeed CEO Paul Forster said in an email. “That is all I can say at this point.”

Jason Davis of RecruitingBlogs.com first tweeted the news this morning.

Until now, Forster’s site, like its competitor SimplyHired.com, has indexed job postings from corporate career sites and job boards, including all the majors. Many of them, in fact, provide a daily feed of their listings, finding the two sites a valuable — and free — source of traffic.

Indeed ranks 3rd in the U.S. in traffic; SimplyHired is 4th. The leaders are CareerBuilder and Monster. However, with 13.1 million unique visitors in January, according to comScore, Indeed had more than twice the traffic of HotJobs, which is now part of Monster. keep reading…

There’s all sorts of tools for sourcing candidates. Much beloved are the resume search tools that leverage the search engines and scour pay and free sites to find resumes matching whatever criteria you select.

But when it comes to working the other direction — that is, sourcing placements and req –, the choices are pretty limited.

Now along comes BrightMove with a tool that turns resume sourcing on its head. Instead of searching for candidates to match a req, BrightMatch goes out and looks for job postings to match candidates you have in house.

How an agency might use BrightMatch is as obvious as it seems.

Say you have a particularly great candidate with unique skills, but no current req in house. With BrightMatch you can search thousands of corporate websites — more than 20,000, says BrightMove COO Mike Brandt — to see if there’s a match.

Find one, pitch the candidate, close the deal. keep reading…

I’m always hearing recruiters say they want to be more helpful to candidates.

I wonder. I wrote the following with the idea that it might help some express some of their challenges through a third-party voice.

I’m a phone sourcer. That means I am paid to find people who hold specific titles or who are doing specific job functions inside (usually) specific companies.

I’ve been doing this a long time.

There are a few things that spell disaster for you as a job seeker. keep reading…

There’s an FAQ on the new site, Talentag, that asks the right question: “What is Talentag and why do you need it?”

Precisely what I was wondering after reading the TechCrunch Europe post about this site. The answer to the first half is straightforward enough. Talentag is the online equivalent of the afterwork social hour; think of it as what LinkedIn would be if it was more like Facebook and less like, well, less like LinkedIn. keep reading…

If you are wondering why you aren’t called in to interview for great job opportunities, it’s undoubtedly because your resume is not “powerful,” and significantly undersells your abilities and experience. Having worked with major corporations on the design of their hiring and resume screening processes, I can attest that nearly all applicants fail to adequately highlight themselves in a way that increases their chances of being selected for further evaluation. While you may actually be a very good fit for the roles and the organizations to which you have applied, chances are that your boring resume doesn’t instill that perception in the 15-20 seconds that those charged with screening resumes typically spend per applicant.

Even if you are not currently seeking a new role, failing to adequately highlight your achievements is a weakness that can impact you throughout your career. When it comes to performance appraisal, promotion consideration, and even day-to-day work assignment, learning how to influence the perception of you as a performer is key to ensuring that your career reaches the heights you desire. keep reading…

For several days now, Gawker has been shining a light on hiring practices at American Apparel, a 10,000-worker garment manufacturer where “employee relations” is, apparently, a double entendre and provocative ads are the norm.

Over the last few days, Gawker reported that the financially troubled, but oh-so-hip firm has a hiring and promotion policy that has more to do with high cheekbones than it does with almost anything else. For instance, Gawker wrote about a “full body head to toe” photo requirement for employee referrals, espoused during a manager conference call in May.

A follow-up article, based, Gawker said, on internal documents and photos, offered a closer look at just what the company wanted in the way of candidate photo submissions. An accompanying extract, presumably from one of the documents, offers such detailed photo instructions as “Include a close-up of face…” and “We need to clearly see everyone’s hair, color length, and style.” keep reading…

I’ve been raving for a good while now about the fact that the resume is doomed.

Lets take a quick look at the facts: keep reading…

Taking a relaxing bath last night, I found myself thinking about making an update to my Facebook page and about how I need to get going on creating an invite for an event I am having in a few weeks. My thoughts then wandered to musing on how I had used LinkedIn extensively during my daily work and how absolutely helpful it had been. In the space of about an hour I: connected with an old colleague who I hadn’t spoken with in a few years; found the right contact to speak with regarding one of my client engagements; entered into a really interesting theoretical discussion with other I/O psychologists and was invited to a networking event at an upcoming conference.

Reflecting on my Facebook and LinkedIn experiences got me thinking about the excellent article about Brazen Careerist that recently ran in the ERE Daily and how it is seeking to use social networking to change the way people demonstrate their ability to perform jobs. It was at this point that I had an “aha” moment in which I realized once and for all that Social networking is here to stay.

Forgive me for being a master of the obvious but I think that while many of us are actively using and benefiting from the latest in web technology, a good number of us have yet to fully contemplate the gravity of the changes that are currently going on right under our very noses. To begin comprehending the depths of what is going on, just observe any person under 30 for even a short amount of time and you will realize that connectivity and interconnectivity are becoming firmly woven into the fabric of our modern existence.

I then must ask myself why it has proven so attractive. keep reading…

The Brazen Careerist has launched an interesting experiment in social recruiting, introducing what the site and its founder Penelope Trunk call a “social resume.”

Aimed squarely at the young Gen-Yers for whom Brazen Careerist was designed, the social resumes allow these early career professionals to offer hints at their potential. Besides all the usual biographical stuff of a traditional resume, these social resumes provide a home for the professional musings and business ideas of the participant.

keep reading…