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.

The announcement of today’s launch says, “The application helps younger candidates compete more effectively by overcoming an unlevel career playing field that gives preference to years of experience, and helps recruiters discover candidates who are on the verge of becoming stars.”

It’s an ambitious goal, and certainly the site has no shortage of Gen Y careerists eager for a showcase. It has 100,000 updates a month, which includes the robust conversations that take place. How many people that translates into is not a number the site shares, though the 600 percent growth suggests the Brazen Careerist is offering its target demographic what it wants.

But this is a well-trod path, with hundreds of  networks vying for participants and dozens of resume replacement and resume makeover sites launching in just the last few years.

LinkedIn and Facebook represent the establishment social networking sites: LinkedIn for business, and Facebook for fun. Granted, neither offers the same sort of stage for a Gen Y careerist as Trunk’s social resume. But both have a huge head start in traffic and brand recognition.

Then there are the resume-reinvention startups like Personavita and VisualCV. These offer flexible resumes that are more portfolio-oriented than what you’ll see on a LinkedIn.

When I discussed these with Penelope Trunk, I was thinking “How are you going to compete for time and attention?” How old school. Sixty seconds on the phone with her and I realized Brazen Careerist is part of the vanguard in new social media recruiting ideas.

There’s still plenty of room for the experiential resume — it won’t be going away anytime in the forseeable future — but as she made clear, the Brazen Careerist and its social resumes are a better portrait of a 25-30 year old than any single-sheet bio.

“The recruiting industry is shifting from search ninjas to those who understand conversations,” she said.

The social resume is not some standalone document, but a living, changing profile of a person. The conversations the members participate in with their Gen Y peers; how they analyze things, explain themselves, and relate are the ingredients of that social resume.

Finding talent in this environment is different than doing a keyword search on Monster or a Boolean search on Google. “It’s a skill to judge people through their conversation,” Trunk explained. “It’s like an interview in that way.”

The Brazen Careerist is, at heart, a social network for the Gen Y professional. There are niche networks for specific careers, locales, pop culture, and even, or should I say, especially for ideas. Read through a few of the posts and you quickly discover the nature of the conversations are more collaboratively helpful than purely observational.

That’s typical of Gen Yers, says Trunk. “They were raised on teams and teamwork. They’re not like the Baby Boomers where everything is a competition.” She also says that this generation is less into the one-on-one discussions of email, than it is social network conversations, yet another manifestation of its team approach.

There is no consensus about the long term effectiveness of social media recruiting generally. I explore that in depth in the March issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. However, there is no doubt that it is a growing trend and almost certainly should be a part of every recruiter’s toolbox.

Today’s young employees grew up with networks as a natural part of their daily experience. So it’s hardly surprising that they are engaged in professional networking on the scale they are.

As Trunk says in today’s press release, “The new workforce is about knowledge management. So you had better be known for your ideas, otherwise no one will know why they should hire you.”

It’s built by the same people who launched Zoho People, a low-cost talent management system we wrote about a while back.

Like People, Zoho Recruit handles all the basics, and then some. You can create a posting from a req, publish it (manually) to your own website, export it to other sites and, of course, manage all the inbound resumes and applications.

Zoho’s basic service is free. A premium service costs $12 per user per month. Don’t worry that the free service is a stripped-down shadow of an ATS. The principal differences between the pay and free services are storage size, posting volume, and resume parsing.

For a staffing agency with a healthy business, or a volume employer accepting resumes, paying the premium would be worthwhile for the parser alone. It’s eGrabber’s well-regarded ResumeGrabber.

There are plenty of nice touches that you’d expect to get only in a pay service. Things like candidate locking for staffing firms with multiple recruiters and offices so none is inadvertently competing internally. Documents can be attached to contacts and reqs; notes and logs are included, with everything integrated for easy retrieval. And you can export all your data — yes, including the documents — in multiple formats.

Resumark.com

It had to happen sooner or later that someone would offer to pay jobseekers to be jobseekers. Resumark is paying candidates $1 every time their resume is downloaded from the site.

Now, this isn’t a brand new service; Resumark launched last year. However, it was updated and relaunched in Septmeber with a more active job posting and search. It also has a Twitter account. But with unemployment now over 10 percent, Resumark is becoming more aggressive in promoting its unique resume collection technique.

Says Andrew Kucheriavy, Resumark founder,  “With the traditional model, job websites get resumes for free and then sell them to employers. With our model, employers actually pay job seekers for their resumes. All job seekers have to do is post resumes. We handle the rest.”

Jobs can also be posted for free on the site. Listings are redistributed to all the major search engines and are sent to jobseekers based on their interest.

How does Resumark make money? By charging you for resumes. It has a PPP model so you only pay for the resumes you want. It uses Google search, so it will help if you are adept at Boolean strings. Otherwise, sifting through the results won’t be a lot different than a typical Google search.  But for as little as $3 a resume, you may find the investment worthwhile.

CPICJobs.com

This is not a site that most recruiters will ever consider, but we include it here for two reasons: it illustrates just how niche-y job boards are becoming (and how plentiful), and; the two companies involved have singularly entertaining names.

“Federal Concierge, LLC and JellyBean Blue, LLC. co-launched a niche job board solution “CPICjobs” on a new website: www.CPICjobs.com,” was the opening line of the press release drawing my attention to the site.

CPIC, incidentally, is shorthand for Capital Planning and Capital Planning Investment Control. The press release notes that practitioners have such job titles as Capital Planning Analysts, Enterprise Architects, Exhibit Writers, Portfolio Managers and Earned Value Management Professionals.

Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, “By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition.” Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business.

If you haven’t tried it for yourself, go here and test it out. What you’ll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different — and better — than the typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and concepts. A bookkeeper doesn’t need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley; a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you’re going to get CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with accountants and … you get the idea.

It’s “the world’s best search engine,” said Monster’s Javid Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine “that really helps you stop searching.”

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali explained.

It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate results. Monster showed this off during the demo using “business development manager” for the search with the result that all nine listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer: the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants will be of higher quality since an ad won’t just turn up in a search because it happens to contain the seeker’s keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved, know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845 for a two-week access. Right now, it’s a bargain at $260 for three days of searching in an area.

It’s also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a specific keyword in a resume. And it won’t store search histories for OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it’s a big step. For Monster, it’s a $100 million-plus step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35 million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It probably won’t be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than on bookkeepers.

Why can’t they do that now? They probably could, but the technical management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search. But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you’re looking for a CFO, you don’t want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That’s worth something.

Google is a sourcing tool, but while it may get the job done, how long will it take to sift through the results? Jobvite Source is more of a blend of the best attributes of ZoomInfo and Broadlook with access to the social networks as well as the entire Web.

Last week, during a demo, Chief Product Officer Jamie Glenn did a search for an online marketing manager and came up with the resumes of, maybe, a couple hundred possibles from all the Web’s free sources. A similar search on Google turns up results in the hundreds of thousands.

The difference is Jobvite Source can compare the results to the job req, sifting out the job listings and other stuff, leaving you with resumes that match the requirements. It does the same as a well-structured query to your ATS or a resume database.

Before you say “Yeah, so,” consider that what Jobvite Source does for the job req, it can do for the candidates. Once you’ve compiled the initial candidate list, applied whatever additional filters you want — Glenn limited the search to candidates in the San Francisco Bay Area — and are satisfied, you can toggle over to a view of the candidate and whatever background is available online about them. The compilations are not as extensive as the summaries on ZoomInfo, but they are detailed enough to let you decide whether to look more closely.

Once you’ve narrowed your candidate list, you can import them into your ATS or create a campaign right in Jobvite Source. Either way, you send them a Jobvite, inviting them to apply and letting them know you’re interested. Likewise, any employee can use Jobvite Source to send a personal invitation to friends and connections in their social networks that the technology has matched to the job description.

The candidate contact is the very essence of Jobvite. Says Dan Finnigan, Jobvite CEO, “The Jobvite is the way to engage the candidate.”

Earlier this year, Jobvite introduced an application allowing it to access the  LinkedIn and Facebook connections of a company’s willing employees. It searches out contacts who best fit the job requirements and suggests to whom a Jobvite ought to be sent. To use it, you had to take the whole Jobvite package. Jobvite Source is a standalone application that works with any ATS.

With so many companies moving toward integrated products, Finnigan explained that Jobvite choose to make Source available as a separate product in order to reach that part of the market that already has an ATS and doesn’t have the money or the inclination to switch.

Companies, Finnigan says, have been “obliterating their recruiting departments.” But they still need to fill jobs. He believes that recruiters are moving away from the for-fee resume databases to search for candidates elsewhere. “The world has changed to the open Web,” he says, mentioning all the networks and personal blogs and sites that have cropped up in the last five years. “What we think recruiters need is a way to integrate with all this stuff.”

Jobvite Source, with its automated searching and parsing and filtering, makes it possible for what remains of the recruiting staff — or an HR generalist, in the smaller shops — to source, rather than post and pray. It isn’t going to replace a sourcer like a Shally Steckerl, but there isn’t an employer who wouldn’t welcome a way to cut down on the average recruiter’s time spent looking for candidates.

With a starting price tag of $500 a seat, Jobvite Source can help the SMB market play on a leveler playing field with the bigger firms at a competitive price.

Effective Matching

The first is QuietAgent. It has developed a new approach to matching candidates and jobs. Matching technology is nothing new. Other products have been available for at least a decade. But most matching products are a black box. Using them requires having total faith in the methodology and algorithms developed by the vendors. They do work, but frequently it’s not all clear why candidates get ranked in a particular way. There’s also no way for a recruiter to influence the matching. The vendors are not inclined to let anyone do so because the technology is the result of a big investment in research. Recruiters find this “father-knows-best” approach frustrating when the matching doesn’t produce the kind of results they expect.

QuietAgent has moved beyond these limitations. The technology uses the ONet database as the basis for classifying and matching jobs with resumes. ONet is the largest occupational classification system in the world, and it’s in the public domain, making the basis for matches better understood. More importantly, QuietAgent’s technology can be adapted. Users can adjust how the matching works. A user can specify different combinations of criteria on which to match candidates with jobs. For example, five years of experience and certain skills, or three years and a different set. This is a big deal, as all recruiters know. Hiring criteria are rarely rigid, and search tools, such as the ones on job boards and ATS, allow for little flexibility.

QuietAgent is the technology behind AllianceQ and UnitedWeWork. The former is an association of larger employers that are willing to share resumes of candidates with others. The latter is a free job board. QuietAgent’s association with AllianceQ makes for a powerful combination, because it also provides a supply of candidates. This may not seem like much today, when candidates are in abundance, but the day will come when candidates are again in short supply; then, this makes for a great combination in one package.

Reliable Resumes

I recently heard an interview with a NASA veteran who was hired at the start of the Apollo program. What was most interesting was that he and most other engineers were hired at NASA purely on the basis of their resumes. They sent in a resume and subsequently received an offer letter. This wasn’t unusual, up until the 1960s. Bringing candidates in from out of town was rarely done because of the expense. And no one did phone interviews; long distance calls cost a lot, and the sound quality wasn’t all that great. If a candidate looked good on paper then they were often hired.

How things change. A resume isn’t worth a whole lot today. We use it as the starting point of a long process. That is the way it needs to be. By some estimates a third or more contain significant exaggerations or outright lies.

One company solving this problem is Resumefit. Candidates who complete the company’s assessments get a “certified resume” locked with a digital key. The value here is that any recruiter receiving the resume can be assured that the claimed skills are true. Other vendors have attempted to create equivalent products before, but they’ve focused more on verifying employment, references, and criminal history. That has limited value before a hiring decision is made. Knowing that the skills and abilities described meet a certain level is much more useful to employers using skills-based hiring. This makes the recruiting process much more efficient because recruiters don’t have to waste time trying to read between the lines and can be reasonably assured that decisions they make are based on reliable information.

QuietAgent and Resumefit may not generate the buzz created by Twitter but they are solutions to well-known problems and serve very fundamental needs in recruiting. These needs will still be around when the ardor for social networking cools, as it will. Recruiters use of social media will balance out once its usefulness is better understood, settling into a niche supporting referrals and talent communities. But we’ll still be looking for effective and efficient ways to match candidates with jobs and find resumes with reliable information.

Personality Assessments
I have always been suspicious of self-rated assessments, as candidates know the job they are interviewing for and can guess what to say or not say. Many studies, such as the one recently published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment (They Don’t Do It Often, But They Do It Well: Exploring the relationship between applicant mental abilities and faking, Julia Levashina, Frederick P. Morgeson and Michael A. Campion), have shown that self-assessments are indeed faulty:

This research [on fake personality measures] consistently demonstrates that candidates are able to fake personality measures by recognizing the correct, job-related, or preferred answers, and artificially inflate their scores.

Scary, right? Well, it depends on who is doing the cheating. Many candidates who have gone without a job for six months or more will tell you that it is good to know how to play the system in order to get a job.

Biodata Assessments
Some organizations may agree that personality tests can be faked, yet still believe in the strength of their biodata assessment. Are they correct in doing so?

First, what is biodata? Biodata is a commonly used term in industrial and organizational psychology for biographical data. Biodata is defined as “… factual kinds of questions about life and work experiences, as well as to items involving opinions, values, beliefs, and attitudes that reflect a historical perspective.” The basis of biodata’s predictive abilities is the axiom that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

Biodata has an advantage over personality or even interest inventories, as it tells you the past behavior of a person, and from there it can predict one’s future actions … assuming one tells the truth!

How Many Cheat?
A newly released study from Julia Levashina, Frederick P. Morgeson, and Michael A. Campion on real candidates in real job application situations will give us the answer.

And this is a serious study, as 17,368 applications were analyzed across many different job categories (general management, economic and political analysis, public relations, etc.) with an innovative but strong way to detect the fake. Also, it is important to note that “candidates were warned that their responses could be verified and that any attempts to falsify information could be used as a basis for not employing them.” Thus, it was not a laboratory experiment.

So, how many are fakes? How many among those 17,368 applicants were trying to fake their way in?

The researchers divided the applicants into three groups, which we have taken the freedom to name:

Complete liars: 173 candidates (1%)
Fakers: 1,389 candidates (8%)
Stretchers: 4,168 (24%)

In short, a third of the people you will see will pretend to have done many more things than they actually have. In practice it could look like this:

These examples look obvious, and are for the sake of fun and illustrating the point, but they are probably what you can read on a resume or hear during an interview. Some strategies can help you uncover the hoax. We will cover them at the end. But the question still remains: Does cheating work?

Does Cheating Work?

Statements used in the research assessments were not as obvious; they were experiences or behaviors important to successful job performance. These included interactions with others, adaptability, initiative or persistence, leadership. These are less easy to fake. For instance, when you first move into a new place, how much time do you spend exploring your new surroundings (5 = a great deal of time; 1 = very little time)? They were capable of cheating, but how well did that work in favor of the fakers?

The research on this is clear: all groups of fakers “obtained higher scores on the biodata measure.”

Interestingly, the research showed that people with higher levels of mental abilities fake less often, but when they do it they get significantly higher scores. In short, the clever fakers are the ones benefiting the most.

So, we can safely predict that once job seekers learn that stretching the truth on applications and interviews works in their favor, they will continue to do it more. Thus, if today we see one in three people stretching the truth, tomorrow we may see one in two.

Talent Acquisition Response

Of course I/O psychologists will combat these statements by saying that they use empirical rating versus rational rating procedures. In short, more is not always best and other techniques prevent the fakers from winning. Incorporating other testing strategies should therefore be the first step, but it’s best to not take a chance, so I advise complementing such techniques with the following three simple and cheap strategies:

1. For verifiable facts (i.e. Harvard MBA) perform a verification (academic, employment, etc). Not only will you avoid a bad hire, but you’ll prevent potential brand erosion and embarrassment.
2. For results or behaviors that require one to have expertise (i.e. “recoded and secured the whole encryption software”), if straight technical assessments aren’t possible, make sure that a technical person (on your staff or outside if it is very unique) is part of the interview team to cross check the candidate to validate the expertise. At a minimum, a telephone interview or video conferencing should be performed if a face-to-face meeting is not possible.
3. For results or behaviors where you can learn the jargon quickly (i.e. manage the on-time on-budget new ATS implementation), I recommend colleagues rate the candidate and or perform a reference check 2.0. These can be used as well for the previous section if you question the achievement level or the personality fit of a candidate, as technical competence is not always synonymous with performance and integration.

Armed with these tools, the next time you have three finalists in front of you, you will have the certainty of not picking the fake one.

Koda.us is a new networking site that describes itself as “the first platform dedicated to social recruiting, which brings the relationship-oriented process of social networking to job recruiting.” Think of KODA as Facebook without the embarrassing pictures and without the comments from friends you never want mom — or a recruiter — to see.

““KODA is more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn, letting both sides of the hiring equation get to know each other,” says Jeff Berger, co-founder (with Tony York) and CEO of KODA, in a press release issued by the site Monday.

The target is Gen Y, a group with academic chops but little business experience. For them a traditional resume isn’t going to land them a look, let alone a job, considering all the recession-fueled layoffs that are hitting the entry-level workforce hard. So KODA has structured, yet personal profiles that give you a feel for the person behind the words. There’s a place for those oh so old-school resumes, but the heart of the experience are the “Me in Three” bullet points and “A Deeper Look.” Together, these two categories, and a third for “Life Experiences,” offer a refreshing and candid self-description of the people on the site.

For instance, one of the KODA members got a master’s in landscape architecture after earning undergrad and graduate degrees in theater design and stagecraft and working for several years (not one of the Gen Y’ers) with opera and dance companies. Why is a puzzler, until you read about her decision in her “Life Experiences” section where she explains she wanted to help her adopted New Orleans rebuild after the hurricane.

These are the kinds of things a recruiter wants to know, but will never find out from a resume.

On the other side of the equation are the companies with jobs. Although KODA reports having relationships with some 350 companies and non-profits, the majority on the site say they aren’t hiring and have no listed jobs. All, though, complete a profile of their own. The expectation is that these profiles will give job seekers a feel for the company and its culture. In time, perhaps they will.

KODA’s features are still on the raw side, not unexpected for a site in beta. The promise, however, is that once built-out, KODA will present its members with jobs that match their interests and background and help them connect with those companies. Right now, completing the “compatibility criteria” — such things as company size, type of job, attire, corporate environment, and so on — produces about the same result as a keyword search, but with fewer jobs.

KODA’s business development lead, Katie Del Guercio, says the site is not just for job seekers. It’s for “having an online professional identity,” she explains, going on to say that college freshmen and sophomores are encouraged to create a profile and use it to manage their professional persona as they grow themselves.

KODA isn’t the first site to launch with similar goals. Jobster, after completing one of its frequent transitions a couple years ago, offered both candidate and company profiles. The difference, though, was that Jobster made it possible for candidates to contact company employees to get an insider’s view that might — or might not — be more honest than what the recruiter’s said. But at least it was available.

KODA doesn’t connect individuals. As its FAQs say, “While KODA is inspired by social networking sites, it simply isn’t one.”

Interesting paradigm shifts have occurred. An interview has gone from a job function to an event worthy of a phone call to mom; I no longer screen my calls, and in fact, am excited when the phone rings; and, of course, the worst of it all: I’ve become the target of a billion-dollar industry of profiteers who promise to give my search the winning edge, but they’re no longer contingency recruiters on biz dev calls. That, at least, would represent a career opportunity.

Let me be clear: I actually admire those who have figured out a way to monetize providing services to the unemployed. Most marketers would probably, conducting a SWOT analysis, point to the fact that categorically, those without jobs who are “actively looking” likely lack disposable income. But, you see, that’s capitalism in action.

Perhaps the most common service offered is professional resume writing. These services promise that, for anywhere between 400 and 800 dollars, a professional resume writer will not only critique your resume, but also work with you to create a resume guaranteed to “break through the clutter” by using better verbs to craft the “story of your career.” Corporate recruiters, apparently, have very strict guidelines for formatting on a resume, and a secret code known only to them and somehow cracked by the Professional Resume Writer’s Association. I must have missed that workshop at ERE, but I suppose so too did a lot of my colleagues, who I have seen commit such violations to code as cut and pasting resumes off of Monster into Word or forwarding horrifically misformatted LinkedIn profiles to hiring managers.

Since there seems to be an interesting amount of conspiracy theory around how recruiters read resumes (if they do at all, since apparently, talent acquisition systems are to candidates what the Meadowlands are to Jimmy Hoffa), I hope to add to the body of knowledge and present, from first-hand observation, how recruiters read resumes. And we do. Hundreds of them, every day, but there’s a method to our madness: overstaffed, overworked, we’ve developed a short-hand to get through that resume. It involves a few simple steps.

1. Recruiter tears off cover letter (or, more likely, doesn’t bother opening the attachment in the ATS). Since most resumes lead with an objective statement (which are always subjective, in a nice bit of irony), we can only handle so much generic doublespeak in one sitting. Recruiters also don’t normally read objective statements, because the objective is pretty apparent when you send in a resume … to get a job. Everything else is window dressing.
2. Recruiter looks at the candidate’s mailing address. If it’s going to require relocation or there’s any chance the commute is going to come up during salary negotiation, then on to the next candidate. Many resumes do indicate that the person will pay out of pocket to relocate and interview, which raises an immediate red flag as to why. We have enough desperation in our lives already. We’re recruiters, for heaven’s sake. This rule, of course, only applies to applicants, not passive candidates. If you’re top talent with a niche skill set, we’ll relocate you from Zanzibar, if that’s what it takes. Unless, of course, you require visa sponsorship. We have our limits, you know.
3. Recruiter looks at company name. If we, in our infinite wisdom of all companies, do not recognize the company, we will move on, because there’s so much truth that branding is everything. You’re only as good as your last company, unless you have the letters CPA, MD, or JD after your name. Conversely, if the company has been in the news as either an acquisition target or a source of corporate scandal, on to the next resume (assuming the recruiter reads anything BUT resumes, which most do not). So it goes.
4. The candidate’s most recent title must be in the same ballpark as the job for which they are being considered. There are some notable exceptions: candidates coming from the financial services industry, for instance, where we well know that interns are Assistant Vice Presidents, or consulting, where the titles are intentionally vague (Analyst, Associate, etc.) and flat so that everyone can be billed out at the same exorbitant rate. Traditionally, though, if you’re a Marketing Manager applying for a Marketing Manager job, then we’re still reading. If you’re looking for a step up, well, best of luck to you, because we promote from within, which will later be transformed into a selling point when offered a lateral move. If you’re looking to gain experience and aren’t title conscious, and are willing to lop off silly corporate constructs such as the word “Senior” or “Executive” from your title for a clearly better opportunity, you are the ideal candidate. But not for our corporate culture, which as a heavily matrixed, hierarchical organization, is obsessed with titles as a designator of worth. Without them, how would you know your place?
5. If you don’t require relo, work for a brand name company and have the same title as the position you’re applying for, then it’s on to the first listed experience on the resume. Then we become Goldilocks … too heavy or too light? Here’s a rule of thumb. Refer back to the job description. Take the number of years of experience and add two … postings are a lot like dating in reverse. If the job’s looking for five years, the recruiter is looking for seven; 10 years means 12, and so on, until you hit the 20-year mark, whereby it’s onto the next resume because you’re “overqualified.” Besides, anyone who began their career prior to 1985 likely wears cardigans, talks about Andy Rooney around the water cooler, and will complain incessantly about how cold the office is when they’re not using their Dictaphones to compose correspondence. It’s a strange new world out there … and your Facebook page does little to convince the recruiter otherwise. Although interesting Matlock widget … It’s all about millennial now, which is why recent college grads are so successful in finding immediate, meaningful employment.
6. Education check: Recruiters assign a baseline value of zero for a bachelor’s degree in a related discipline, which is to say, none of you crazy liberal or fine arts majors who spent your way doping through college while the rest of us were studying differential calculus need apply. We’re still bitter. A.A. on a resume? Take 12 steps back. Add one point for a Master’s, add two points for an M.B.A. (2.5 if it’s from a top-25 program), and subtract one point for a PhD. You’re probably either too smart to function here, or you’ve come crawling back from the Ivory Tower with a foiled plan B and the debt to prove it. Subtract the term “viable candidate” if secondary education has come from an institution whose admissions criteria involve clicking through pop-up ads or calling an 800 number on the side of the bus. While you’re obviously easy to close, we’ve got our shareholders to think about, and you’ve demonstrated little knowledge of the concept of “ROI.” The Phoenix will rise from the ashes only in myth. In reality, you should have saved those 30k for the premiums you’re about to pay on our “comprehensive” health benefits package. Oh, yeah. And we offer tuition reimbursement. Eh, too late.

Average time for these steps for an experienced corporate recruiter: 15 to 20 seconds. If you pass this initial scan, maybe then we’ll drill down past the keywords, unless you’re so impressive you’re out of our price range.

Alternatively, if you have a funny name, or if there’s obvious irony (a “Lean Executive” at Krispy Kreme, for instance, or the recent Monster headline, “Desperate Single Mom Willing To Do Anything”) or mention your work as a runway model or professional athlete, prepare to have your resume circulated to the entire staffing department.

Of course, what do I know? If I was such an expert, I’d have a job. Like being a professional resume writer.

The list of companies offering resume writing, enhancement, and tracking continues to grow faster than you can say LinkedIn, with new vendors entering the market this summer.

You may have already heard of some of the resume managers, like ResumeBear. The Bear’ll follow your resume and tell you who’s opening it, forwarding it, and printing it. New features are on the way. Or you may have come across the Resume Donkey. The Donkey’ll rewrite your resume, using professional writers.

Let’s not forget VisualCV. Recruiting-industry junkies might recognize this guy’s resume using the VisualCV tool.

Likely, you’ve heard of Zapoint, which will “take a resume and transform it.”

And a friend of mine (who has to toil in the uncomfortable environs of Laguna Beach) will be launching a “free, online professional resume builder.” Jeff says his new tool will allow employees to create or redo their resumes the way employers want ‘em.

Those are just a few. You’ve got your Pongos and your Emurses; you’ve got your Resume Creator, Resume Maker, Resumizer, and resume everything else, some of which seem a little blah compared to all the new multimedia sites out there like VisualCV.

Now, at least three new players, some you may not know about, are joining the field:

• Verbal Summary. Recruiters can use it either to present a candidate to a hiring manager, or to describe a job to candidates. The important part is the audio; see its demos. What Verbal Summary’s doing that’s a little different is focusing on third-party recruiters (the founder was amazed to see how little money is spent by agencies to differentiate their candidates compared to how much is spent on sourcing, social media, tracking applicants, and branding). Verbal Summary is $50 a month, $500 a year paid in full.
• FacesForce, in beta, obviously excluded the word resume and its many variations, deviations, and permutations, from its name; the company hopes to be more than just for job-seekers. FacesForce wants to stay with people throughout their careers, such as if people want to record a video to pitch new business. Pricing, it says, is simple.
• Rezbuzz. This offshoot of Corp Shorts offers a long list of features, but in a nutshell, candidates pay $495 to have a resume made, and housed for a year. For the time being, at least, companies access the resumes for free. It sees consistency as its advantage: one community of quality professional resumes, not a hodge-podge of do-it-yourself bios. The CEO is executive search veteran Mark Sadovnick, who’s enjoying the good PR Rezbuzz is getting.

The careers columnist Joyce Lain Kennedy, author of Resumes For Dummies, says that when it comes to all these new fancy resume variations, she’s “up for anything new and improved that connects people with jobs.”

But, she warns, “the new wave of infinite Internet spotlighting can have unintended consequences.”

For one, Kennedy says, the multimedia features “revive with a heavy dose of steroids the classic photo-on-resume argument — legal exposure to charges of bias against protected classes.”

Kennedy also says the “wild card for the recruiting industry is what will happen when the federal government takes an updated look at discrimination and the ‘Internet Walking, Talking Applicant.’”

One of Kennedy’s favorite resume writers is Kathryn Troutman. Troutman is the CEO of The Resume Place, among the oldest resume services in the U.S. still operated by the original owner. Her firm’s sales doubled this year over last.

Troutman explains the multimedia-resume startup boom this way.

“Entrepreneurs recognize that the vast majority of potential customers have little idea of how to go about living their job hunts in public — adding videos, video clips, audio bites, and even RSS feeds to flesh out their digital beings. Resume providers are counting on a lack of technical skills, especially in adults of earlier generations, to boost demand for their wares. That’s probably why anyone who understands technology and writes well, but who lacks deep pockets for heavy investment in other industries, decides to start a resume-writing service on the cheap and jumps in. This inclination is especially true if the entrepreneur has a background in HR, recruiting, or some other claim to career management fame.”

Troutman says that if history repeats itself, the industry will shrink in a few years when the job market revives. “By then,” she says, “job seekers will have become more adept at preparing their own digital presentations.”

(When I was choosing the title for the article I thought of some recent titles like “Is Internet Sourcing Dead?” or “Will Boolean Be Replaced by Another Language?” or “Why is Twitter So Yesterday?” It’s useful to step back once in a while and question things that seem obvious, isn’t it? Our reality is changing so fast!)

OK, let’s look at the technical side of things. Ten years ago, when I was a hiring manager, I developed a habit of Googling candidates. Though I do not have any current statistics, we all know for a fact that many recruiters and hiring authorities do that. Many will also look the person up on LinkedIn at a minimum.

Let’s imagine now that you can automate getting a person’s list of profiles.

Last week I spoke with my good friend Chandra Bodapati of eGrabber. Chandra pointed out to me that with his product ResumeFinder you can get a list of online profiles at a click of a button. You can then put the links into an email or a document and send them off. He proceeded to send me an email with a couple dozen links to my online profiles and mentions. It took him a split second to do that. You can look at the result on my blog.

There are, of course, other online products and utilities that can do similar things, and they are all better and faster than “just” Googling. There are companies that create complex sourcing solutions like Broadlook; companies that help automate web sourcing for those of us who do not care about Boolean syntax like Autosearch; sites like www.socialmention.com that help collect this info; and ATS’s that have this functionality integrated. (Note to the readers: I do not have the goal of suggesting a comprehensive list here. I plan to write an overview of sourcing tools elsewhere, and I also do webinars covering people search tools.)

Chandra said to me: since this information is so readily available, shouldn’t it become a new standard of submitting candidates to a hiring manager and/or to HR? We typically send a resume, a short paragraph, a standard questionnaire, and, for some openings, a technical test to our clients. Would it be beneficial to always send a list of profiles along with that?

If I were a hiring manager, I would, of course, review the resume first and foremost. I am looking for professional skills and experience. I want the person to perform well. How would (or should) her kids’ pictures on Facebook affect this? But look: first of all, the person’s profiles are out there on the web and I could glance over them whether this is submitted to me or not. I’d most likely skip Facebook, or will only spend seconds on it if I get a link. But I may look on LinkedIn and blogs; well, maybe on Twitter, too. By spending a few minutes on LinkedIn, I may get additional information about the person’s skills and experience; I also may get a sense of who the person is. We are looking for a live member of our team; this always involves some chemistry, so the person’s style of presenting himself matters. If I have dozens or even hundreds of applications for a position (we do these days) and am trying to choose those people with whom I’d like to start interviews, this quick glance may help me select candidates. Or, if at the end of interviews I am checking the references, I may pull out information from profiles for a more complete picture.

Is this fair to candidates? Is this ethical? Is this all legal even, given that we want to avoid discrimination and would never ask certain questions at an interview? These are all good questions, and it would be great to hear from experienced recruiters, hiring managers, and specialists. I am very interested in comments from the ERE community members.

To make it fair to candidates I as a recruiter can give my candidates a heads-up, so that they could clean up their LinkedIn profile if they choose to do so. I may skip personal sites in my submissions. Or I could have the candidate suggest links that can be added to her submission. There may also be links to information that are specific to a job opening. As an example, many software engineers would be open to including pointers to their code posted online, and hiring managers love that.

If we are looking for standards in a candidate’s submission, then profile information has its pluses compared to documents like resumes. Profiles are easier to parse and to search. Even the greatest resume parsing tools can’t possibly extract the information right in 100% of the cases. Candidates are required to fill profiles at job boards exactly for the reason of facilitating search and browsing.

My personal preference would be to have a professional chronological resume as “the” document (no colors; no pictures, please; substantial content in the “experience” section) and complement this with links to a number of profiles, if my client says that they would be interested in that. But looking into the future, could it happen that a submission of a candidate will not have a resume but will be done with a set of online professional profile links accompanied by a job-specific questionnaire?

So, will resumes become obsolete in their current form? What do you think?

It’s an easy-to-use method to apply for jobs through corporate websites without having to reenter the data for each different employer. Jobseekers create a profile once, then by logging in to ResumePal from any participating employer’s site, they just click to apply. When they change their profile, by updating their contact information for instance, ResumePal automatically updates the database of every participating employer to which they’ve applied.

“It’s very similar to PayPal,” says Toole, vice president, employer marketing at Jobfox, which developed the service. “It’s convenient for jobseekers, but there are significant benefits for employers too.”

Keeping candidate information current is but one of those benefits. Another is that the profile is configured to fit the employer’s database specs. A third is the reduction in application abandonment. Who hasn’t begun applying for a job only to quit part way through because the process was too long or complicated for the job being offered?

“Candidate abandonment on corporate sites and job boards will go down, because they already have a profile that gets submitted by clicking the link,” Toole explains.

Simplifying the process to encourage more candidates might not seem a benefit to all recruiters, but another feature, one born of Jobfox’ DNA, reduces the impact of getting minimally qualified applicants. Candidates using ResumePal are matched to all jobs in a company’s ATS, and the quality of the match is ranked. So even as a candidate applies for one position, a recruiter at the receiving end can quickly see where else that person might fit. And yes, the candidate also is told of these other opportunities.

The other nice part of this is that employers using certain brands of ATS technology need do nothing more than opt in to the free program. The heavy lifting has already been done by the vendors who have signed on to offer ResumePal: ADP, Kenexa, Oracle and Oracle’s PeopleSoft, SilkRoad Technology, and Softscape. Plenty of big names there, accounting for several thousand employer installations and jobseeker applications that reach into the seven figures.

“There will be other announcements,” Toole emphatically declared when we asked about some of the other vendors. If ResumePal works as advertised, the momentum for it will build, just as it did for PayPal, he adds.

Jobfox has certainly taken pains to help speed ResumePal’s acceptance. By offering it through ATS vendors, there’s no cost to employers. They simply choose to use it or not. Even when they do, candidates have the option of applying in whatever fashion the company previously used or by submitting a ResumePal profile. No ResumePal? No problem. The jobseeker registers for ResumePal right on the employer’s site.

Jobseekers already registered on Jobfox are automatically enrolled in ResumePal. However, the opposite is not true; ResumePal participants must opt-in to Jobfox. They might as well, however, since they’ll get a list of other jobs matching their interests and background and reach a broader group of employers.

While we think jobseekers will embrace a universal job submission system, and recruiters will appreciate the automatic candidate updates and matching features, even sliced bread has its tradeoffs. In the case of ResumePal, jobseekers have to complete a Jobfox-styled questionnaire to create a profile. Standard resumes alone don’t work. Plus, ResumePal isn’t open to job boards where a majority of the searching is still conducted.

The other, and far bigger challenge, is how ResumePal benefits Jobfox. Toole tells us that once recruiters begin to experience the job matching, they’ll be open to becoming Jobfox clients. We suggested that sounds a lot like a loss leader, and Toole agreed, up to a point.

“Once they (recruiters) see how this works we think they’ll understand the value of Jobfox and become clients,” he says.

Should this catch on (a major consumer publicity push is to happen later this year, says Toole) there is the potential to monetize ResumePal by charging jobseekers. For that to work, the big job boards would have to become partners, as would the remaining big ATS vendors. From a jobseeker standpoint, updating one resume or profile and then having it instantly updated everywhere would be a convenience and a billable value.

They were debating the value of the cover letters vs. a more comprehensive personal branding effort built around social media.

So here is my take:

Charlie is right. Social media allows you to take control of your personal brand and highlight your strengths. You can show rich examples of your work. You can let people peek inside your head in a way that resumes and cover letters never have and never will.

This morning, Jessica Lee linked to Matthew Cadwallader, a senior at UMass-Amherst who is using his website and blog to showcase his obvious skills and passion for communications, A/V production and writing. Matthew’s got it going on. He could not possibly have communicated just how impressive he is with only a resume and cover letter.

Alison is right too. The vast majority of professionals are unwilling or unable to send the time and effort needed to maintain a presence as good as Matthew’s. To do it well is a job in and of itself, and if you are looking for a new job immediately, a cover letter can absolutely convey that you have spent the time to learn about the company to which you are applying. When I receive a cover letter that shows an understanding of what ERE is and the position that we are trying to fill, I definitely take note.

Long term vs. Short term & Farming vs. Hunting

To a large degree, the cover letter vs. social media debate is like discussing the merits of the hammer vs. the screwdriver. Different situations call for different tools, and often both are necessary.

The social media approach is a long-term marketing approach to career development where you make yourself professionally visible to the world. It gives you the opportunity to show off your work, drive, personal philosophy, and depth of knowledge.  More importantly, it lets you engage in conversations that would never materialize if you were not “out there.” You plant the seeds today, and over time you grow relationships that will bear fruit throughout your career. Everyone should do this, but in the real world, it will always be a minority (and Charlie, Matt, Jessica, and Alison are all examples) who do it well enough to truly stand out. Isn’t that what marketing is about?

The purpose of the cover letter, on the other hand, is to convince the reader it that you are the right person for that specific position at that specific company. You’re hunting, not farming, and the cover letter is a tool  to show that you have done your homework and have real interest. It’s transactional, which some look down on as short-sighted, but your goal is to find work ASAP, so that’s just fine.

It’s not an either/or proposition. There are so many people today who need a job now. And these people cannot afford to wait for the farming approach to bear fruit. If you are serious about managing your career you should start planting those seeds, but if you are hunting for a job today, you had also better do what you can to tailor your resume and cover letter to show your interest in the position.

Social media as a career management tool will definitely be a topic of conversation at the Social Recruiting Summit @ Google HQ. Follow @socrecruiting on Twitter for updates on the Summit as they become available!

This is not up for discussion. We sometimes dance around the premise, but recruiting is essentially the selling of a company on a candidate and a candidate on a company. Those who choose not to engage in selling can pretend to be noble, but they’re doing a disservice to their clients and employers. It’s engraved on stone tablets for every third-party recruiter who makes it longer than three months, and even the most sales-averse HR generalist has to admit that at one time or another, they’ve tried to talk a manager into meeting with a candidate based on their internal interview. It’s the nature of our business.

Where we sometimes butt heads is in the implementation of a sales mentality versus that of a process-oriented human resources approach. I have good news: The sales mentality is remarkably effective for finding high-quality candidates or hiring large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, no company needs that kind of structure forever, and the friction caused by a sales mentality in hiring can lead to management, administrative, and even legal obstacles. The human resources approach of a kindler, gentler HR works when you don’t have urgency, and when you have an enlightened HR/executive management relationship, but process-oriented hiring turns off the top creatives and results in the hiring of a stable, but less aggressive workforce. That’s no way to run a company in uncertain times.

These are uncertain times, but also exciting ones. Jobseekers, through social media, now have access to information on their would-be employers that is truly revolutionary. In addition to being connected through social networks to hiring managers and other employees, candidates can gather information on individual recruiters, staffing firms, referral programs, and even interview questions. They can do so while they are sitting in an interview room waiting for that manager to arrive. The imbalance of information has been a strength of companies, who can set wages, benefits, and generally control the employment process. Today’s job-seeker has access — and is learning the skill — necessary to balance that information. The result is smarter, better-prepared candidates with wider options as to where they work and what’s acceptable in the employment process (such as whether someone will put up with multiple interviews and long assessments).

This trend may not yet have affected your open requirements, but the strategies employed by the very top candidates are spreading to other high-quality candidates. I know this because I, and others like me are helping train them. Every time I write about a tool on a blog or a social network, candidates have every bit as much incentive to read as do recruiters. And from my website stats, those kinds of readers are growing in droves.

A declining economy, high unemployment, and an increasing need for knowledge workers is running up against demographics, increased specialization, and social media. Recessions are supposed to be times when companies get lean and mean. They cut benefits, reduce or eliminate raises, and often use layoffs to restructure the business. All of that is happening, but the ease of finding candidates hasn’t changed. Companies sometimes get hundreds of resumes per open position, and with the implementation of ATS and database search technology, one would assume that companies could afford to sit idly by and let job-seekers come to them. Companies adopting that attitude are already hurting, and have been for years.

The Answer: Become A Marketer

You don’t have to buy non-prescription lenses and large amounts of hair gel, but will have to adjust to a world where employment branding is not a buzzword, but something that defines what kind of candidates come knocking on your electronic door. Those companies that brag of hundreds, or even thousands of resumes per position aren’t happy with their results. Candidates looking for work blast off resumes hoping for a lucky hit, which ultimately clogs up the recruiting system, especially when you’re in an industry required to log what you’ve received and why you accepted or rejected the resume.

Recruitment marketing used to mean writing job ads and placing them in newspapers. Today, it covers a wide range of disciplines that includes creative, copywriting, SEO, web analytics, pay per click, video, blogging, and social media marketing. The new goal is getting in front of the right people at the right time, and that’s a marketing function. To be successful, it requires that every touchpoint (another marketing term) within your company be aware of how you hire and the best way to apply. Providing accurate information to channel candidates into the correct funnel is the most efficient use of your recruiting time, freeing your employees up to interview and match, rather than sort and sift.

Let’s be honest. Even with massive databases and an influx of resumes, most recruiters still spend over half their time on the job boards searching for new resumes. The reason is simple. Resumes are old the second they hit your database, while resumes posted on job boards (particularly if you search by “last posted”) show an interest in getting hired right now. The advantage of a marketing mentality, especially one of pull-marketing, is a value to all activities taken. Searches for a position today can be magnified by social media to create a long-term search engine value and online profile for your company. Unlike job boards and company websites where information appears and disappears, online marketing creates relationships that continue to bring value after a search is completed. It’s not easy, and much of this work is in its infancy, but companies that embrace online marketing through the prism of social media are finding that recruiting gets easier, and more efficient.

It’s no panacea. Marketing requires a lot of retraining and a sympathetic management who puts a priority on hiring. Marketing requires a commitment to long-term employees and long-term strategies, but the benefits of an enhanced company profile are easy to measure using onboarding surveys. Rather than simply asking where the candidate heard about the position, questions should focus on what worked to influence the candidate during the employment process. Where did they get information? What information was helpful? Who was helpful? Companies who embrace a thorough strategy of recruitment marketing will find it easier and easier to hire the best employees. Those who focus on short-term sales or long-term process-oriented hiring will find it easier to hire those who are left.

We rely more and more on pictures, graphics, and videos to display data, deliver the news, give us instructions, and keep us up-to-date with our families. The facts are amazing. Using Quantcast as my source, here is a rough idea of what’s going on. The online version of the New York Times, for example, has a monthly readership that averages about 14 million people in the United States. And that’s the largest readership of any print media I could find. The online Wall Street Journal does a paltry 4 million and even the prestigious Economist does only 3 million globally and most are seeing declining readership.

On the other hand, YouTube averages about 71 million viewers monthly — just in the U.S. And its rivals are also doing well and growing. Veoh does about 23 million, Hulu about 19 million, and Break about 15 million globally.

This indicates a decisive trend: more and more of us are getting information and education from video, rather than from words – whether in print or online.

We have already seen video slowly gaining in popularity and importance in recruiting. All top-tier career sites incorporate both pictures and video. Usually the videos are of employees talking about their jobs, but some include campus tours or chats with the CEO or a hiring manager. Many recruiters have received a video resume, and chat rooms have buzzed with concerns over the legality of such resumes and whether they should be accepted.

I don’t believe there is any serious legal issue in using video resumes, as long as your organization has a policy about how they are used. They are no more discriminatory than a face-to-face interview and may actually help to showcase communication skills and other positive traits. They can speed up the pre-screening process and may even eliminate the need for the number of interviews we subject candidates to.

Younger candidates, who are just entering the job market, may prefer to create a video resume as it reflects the media with which they are most comfortable. I can also easily imagine a time when the face-to-face interview is replaced with a live, virtual interview, perhaps with the hiring manger and several others also present virtually. The use of video lowers costs, expands the number of people who can participate in an interview, allows asynchronous viewing, and makes it more convenient for a candidate.

Here are just four of the ways organizations are using video.

1. Branding and position promotion. Many organizations are including videos that showcase the organization or promote a specific job or group of jobs to prospective candidates. For example, KPMG, Starbucks, and Nike all incorporate at least one video on their careers’ homepage. Many other organizations include clips of chats with employees or even take you on a guided tour of the company, as does Tivo. Just as the Internet allowed sites such as Amazon to provide more product information and user ratings, candidates are now starting to expect the same from career sites. The practice of incorporating videos about the organization and about available positions will expand over the next few years as candidates expect a much higher level of information and awareness than they did even two years ago. Several companies produce these types of videos. One is a Dutch company, C-Looks, which is able to provide videos for a variety of purposes, including promotion. Another is RecruiTV, which allows you to make and embed videos in your career site. Still another in this expanding arena is Vipe, an organization that serves both the corporate marketing effort as well as the candidate.
2. Screening or interviewing candidates. Another growing use of video is to screen candidates. Sites such as InterviewStudio and FaceHire allow a recruiter to set up an online interview easily. InterviewStudio was founded by Colleen Aylward who is the author of a fabulous white paper that I recommend you download a video called “Unmuddying the Waters.” Here is an example of a tool that allows a recruiter to video chat with a candidate. Candidate screening via Skype or other webcam service seems to be inevitable and a great way to expand the limited capabilities of a telephone.
3. Resumes. The practice of candidates submitting their resumes as video clips is just beginning. From as far back as the first CD/ROMS, candidates have been intrigued by the idea of submitting their resume in a video format. Video has advantages – it allows candidates to show their communication skills and it is often easier for a candidate to be expressive about past achievements when telling a story to a camera. Although these are not a substitute for an interview, they are a way to pre-screen candidates and develop a more complete picture than one gets from a written resume. If you are doing a lot of college hiring or are looking for entry-level people, the video resume may be a good way to differentiate candidates and a way to get more qualified people to apply. Many younger people who lack in-depth experience but feel they have other qualities might rather put together a short video than write a resume. The Dutch site C-Looks allows candidates to easily make their own short resume using a webcam. John Younger, President and Founder of Accolo, a San Francisco-Based RPO provider, says, “While I don’t think videos designed to replace a complete resume will ever take off, short videos where a candidate answers one or two particular questions will become very popular and useful.”
4. Outplacement. Videos are a wonderful gift to outgoing employees as part of their severance package. A creative organization could provide the tools and coaching to help each person create a video summary of their experience and capabilities that could be circulated to organizations that are hiring. A copy could be given to the employee to use on their website or as part of en email job-seeking campaign. Once again, C-Looks provides this service as well.

Over the next few years, all recruiters will come to embrace and more effectively use video to brand, inform candidates, receive resumes, provide information to candidates and hiring managers, and provide onboarding for new employees. Are you ready to join?

“We want to let everyone know about us,” explains JuJu’s Euan Hayward. Around since 2006 (with the JuJu brand) and with respectable visitor numbers, Hayward says it was time for the company to reach out to recruiters. “This is our first booth experience.”

A job search engine with roots in the late 90’s, JuJu is nearly identical in concept to the better known Indeed and SimplyHired, both of whom are also at the Expo here in Hollywood Beach, Florida. Like them, it “scrapes” job postings from commercial and corporate job boards making a jobseeker’s search a one-stop effort.

Does the world need another vertical — or meta — job search site? Hayward thinks so. “There are some additional opportunities,” he says. “Innovation is not dead in this market.”

There was other evidence of innovation on the show floor.

Take CareerAthletes for instance. Much to my disappointment, it’s not a job board for athletes at least not in the way I was hoping (“Quarterback wanted for NFL team”). It is, however, a means for companies to hire college athletes for more typical jobs, such as in sales, marketing, engineering, and the like. It is the product of a merger between Career Athletes and Athletes4hire.com.

Working through college athletic departments, CareerAthletes provides a branded networking-oriented site for the athletes and former athletes. The focus is on community, and a site might include alums of a particular sport mentoring current athletes and sports news and similar types of content. There’s also a job board, which is supplemented by a resume-like database of the college’s athletes, which, over time, can grow to be quite extensive.

What sets CareerAthletes apart is the company’s campus-based orientation for the athletes. “We’ve done over 800 on-campus presentations,” company CEO Chris Smith says. “We are hands-on with the athletic department.” These presentations, made to the athletes, include on-the-spot sign-ups for the site, ensuring their participation and availability to recruiters.

At the other end of the showroom, AllianceQ was making a first appearance. A consortium of several large employers, AllianceQ enables these firms to share resumes of employees they don’t hire. Besides cutting the cost of sourcing candidates, the resume-sharing opportunity can salve the sting of rejection. Before sharing a resume, the candidate has to agree. And not every candidate is shared. Participating companies get to decide whether they want to share a particular resume — a precaution against losing a hot prospect for whom there may not be a position just now.

There are also at least three companies exhibiting here that focus on helping employers market their jobs through search engine optimization, a term which means tweaking a Web page in such way as to improve its placement on the results a search engine returns.

We’ve seen Jobs2Web (profile; site) before. It helps employers manage their websites and job listings to increase visibility and traffic. Also showing at the Expo are SEO4Jobs and OptiJob. Both create microsites for job listings, with OptiJob focusing exclusively on the individual job posts and SEO4Jobs also providing some additional careersite optimization.

I asked OptiJob’s VP of Business Development Chad Hensler what he has been hearing from recruiters. “It’s a mix,” he says. Most recruiters understand the value of a high Google ranking, but many are uncertain how those search results (typically called organic search) differ from search engine marketing (which, in this context, means paying for a position on the search results page).

“We do a lot of explaining,” Hensler adds. “This is a critical part of recruiting.” Not to mention having some fun. OptiJob is giving away toy rockets that fire a good 20 feet straight up.

Jonathan Duarte of SEO4Jobs was even more of an evangelist. He says search engine optimization and search engine marketing are things recruiters absolutely need to know about to be competitive. “We’re getting a lot of (recruiters) stopping to ask us all sorts of questions.”

And then he pitched a workshop on the topic at the next ERE Expo, which comes up the end of March 2009.

At ERE’s Fall Expo in Hollywood Beach, Florida, recruiters will meet the newest businesses to launch. Two of the founders will talk about how their respective companies are harnessing the power of video to help recruiters make better hiring choices and save the environment while also saving the hiring company a few dollars.

Greg Rokos, founder of FutureResume.com and its affiliate, GreenJobInterview.com, and Darryn Severyn, founder and CEO of Interactive Applicant, will try to convince recruiters that video resumes and video interviews are effective ways to screen candidates without the cost or carbon expenditure of bringing them onsite.

FutureResume.com is where candidates post a video and standard resume, the latter searchable by the usual means. Then, instead of bringing in a candidate for a first meeting, they can be interviewed online.

Interactive Applicant takes a little different tack, pre-screening applicants via an automated series of questions that candidates can be required to answer via video, audio, text, or any combination. Then the recruiter can review the candidate’s presentation skills before bringing them in.

SnapTalent’s CEO and founder Sumon Sadhu will describe how his company’s online advertising service helps recruiters and hiring managers source better candidates. It’s similar to a keyword marketing campaign but places targeted ads on content sites, rather than on search results pages.

Jeff Stewart, Urgent Career’s serial entrepreneur founder, will show how linguistic technology can be used to match sales candidates to jobs. That’s different than voice analysis, though there are some similarities. Just how it works and how effective it really is are questions that Stewart will be answering next week.

If the Spring show is any guide, these founders will get questions as tough — maybe tougher, since the audience knows recruiting — as any venture capitalist will ask. Hardly a shy bunch, the Spring ERE audience point-blank asked that crop of company founders and executives how they intended to make money and why an employer should do business with them.

Ben Yoskovitz, founder of Standout Jobs and one of the presenters at the first Startup Forum, told us that since the show he’s learned more about the HR industry than he thought possible. “The panel was a good place for us to start getting feedback, ” he told us recently.

His company provides easy-to-use software for smaller companies to build their own career sites.

Since the spring, Standout Jobs has grown to over 200 customers. While still a free service, that will soon change. An upgrade to the service is also planned. And, Yoskovitz says, now that the intensive testing and learning period is mostly behind the company, promotion of Standout Jobs is the next major effort.

Path 101, a content-intensive community networking site, is still in alpha, which, though growing in depth, is about where it was last Spring. But then, it’s an ambitious effort, which founder Charlie O’Donnell, at the forum, described as a site for job-seekers to research their career options before they apply for jobs. The site itself says it is a place where “Job candidates can figure out what “people like me” are doing with their careers and the site aims to be the first stop for career research.”

At Jobscore, CEO and founder Dan Arkind told us that the last six months have been a learning and testing period. “Not much to report,” he said at first. After a little prodding he said the resume-sharing site has been making inroads into the smaller employers the company is targeting. Especially those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Jobscore is headquartered.

The company was developed to help smaller businesses source better candidates by sharing resumes and easily post jobs to one or multiple sites. Companies can choose to pay to gain access to the resumes or earn free access by sharing resumes. So far, Arkind said, 96 percent of the customers share.

He has intentionally kept Jobscore low-key. Soon, he said, it will be making a bigger splash. When? “When it’s ready,” Arkind said.

Finally, there’s VisualCV, a site where jobseekers build an online presentation of their experience, background, skills, and more using text, multimedia, and even work samples. It’s an adjunct to the standard resume, not a replacement, at least not yet. Though COO Doug Meadows told us, “What we want to do everyday is wake up and replace the resume.”

We didn’t get to talk to our presenter co-founder Clint Heiden, but Meadows said the company has been “going gangbusters.” VisualCV has been the most visible of all our startups. Cheezhead, alone, has featured the company no less than four times since the Startup Forum in early April. It has a new CEO.  It’s also added new features, most recently a VisualCV Marketplace.

There are now 800 companies signed up with VisualCV, meaning they accepting the VisualCV and have their own posted on the site. Participation in the program is still free; the company is generating revenue from private labelling VisualCV to business groups, associations, alumni organizations and others. The China Business Network uses it to help its thousands of members better connect. Search firm Heidrick and Struggles uses it for its elite group of candidates. A few firms are also using the site to search for candidates, Meadows said, paying a findersfee when a VisualCV member is hired.

What will the next six months bring for these startups and for the four new companies presenting next week? That’s an even tougher question today than it was last Spring because of the economic conditions in the U.S. and around the world. We don’t know how they will adjust, but you can be sure that’s a question our latest crop of presenters will be asked.

Ask five people, and you’ll get five definitions. Look for resumes, and you’ll get hundreds of people doing vastly different things.

Mark Bielecki is trying to clean it all up with a new site, Joblish. (And you thought startups had used up every possible fanciful variation of the word “job”!)

It sounds more complicated than it is. Employers can fill out some drop-down menus as to what they’re looking for — let’s say, for example, that the employer wants these four things in a candidate:

• a functional area of engineering;
• the R&D department
• division head reporting to chief executive
• supervising 10 or more people directly.

The employer picks those four attributes from the drop-downs, and generates a code that looks something like this:

joblishDENERBE

Job candidates who fit that criteria will, in theory, have added the code joblishDENERBE to their resumes or LinkedIn pages or elsewhere, and employers searching for joblishDENERBE can find them.

Like so many new ideas, the success of this one will depend on getting a critical mass of both job candidates and employers to use the codes.

“We didn’t add any staff because responding to candidates didn’t add more work — we just changed our process,” says Catie Cowher, candidate experience leader for Recruiting Strategy and Initiatives at Wachovia Corporation.

Wachovia posts some 600 to 800 openings per week on its website, which includes both newly created positions and vacancies, and averages 10,000 applicants. According to Cowher, rejected candidates receive an e-mail informing them about their status and the reasons behind Wachovia’s decision. Most candidates are declined early in the recruiting process, following a resume review by a recruiter. Nearly 90% of applicants responding to job postings at Wachovia are declined. Giving candidates immediate feedback about their status was a process change that served up numerous benefits.

Cowher cites anecdotal evidence that she’s received through feedback from applicant surveys that making quick decisions and informing candidates about their status has not only improved the applicants’ experiences with Wachovia’s hiring process, but more specifically their perceptions about Wachovia recruiters. The bottom line is that candidates don’t view unresponsive recruiters as overworked — they view them as incompetent. A surprise benefit is that declined candidates often refer a qualified colleague, after gaining a better understanding of the job requirements through post-declination feedback. Wachovia recruiters spend less time fielding calls from candidates requesting a status update, and have a better handle on the inventory of viable candidates.

In addition to informing declined candidates about their status, Wachovia refers them to other employers by including a link in the e-mail to the AllianceQ website.

AllianceQ pools candidates and shares them among member employers. The company has been building inventory since the end of May. For every 1,000 rejection e-mails sent by member companies providing a link to AllianceQ, 25% of applicants have clicked on the link and 89% have then completed a profile, according to the firm’s managing director Phil Haynes.

“We don’t make any judgments about candidates, and our feeling is that we don’t own them,” says Cowher. “Timing has a lot to do with whether someone is hired — or maybe they just don’t have the skill set we’re looking for.”

Although there’s no formal referral system in place, major Seattle employers Starbucks, Washington Mutual, Weyerhaeuser, and Microsoft sometimes refer candidates to each other, according to Rhonda Stickley, director for recruiting and staffing at Weyerhaeuser, especially when candidates align with positions offered at the other firms. Stickley adds that there has been some internal discussion at Weyerhaeuser about sharing retiree pools among several area employers, which has started a discussion within her team about managing excess human capital inventory more effectively.

In some companies, qualified candidates are referred to other managers when they aren’t a fit for one position, and some recruiters stay in touch with surplus hirable candidates through newsletters, phone calls, and touch campaigns. The key is that all resumes are reviewed when submitted and candidates are sorted into categories. Then the candidates are quickly informed about their status so databases remain pure, searches result in a slate of viable contenders, and relationships are built and maintained through the recruiting process.

“Dealing with surplus candidates or even inventory management is a challenge in our industry, and the bottom line is that we’re not doing it very well,” says Denny Clark, director of the Thought Leadership Institute. “The good news is that we’re going to see much better technology coming down the pike which will help with the problem. Another solution that I believe we’ll see more of, is a restructuring of the recruiting function so that more people initially screen candidates and stay in touch with passive candidates, so their status remains current in the database.”

The company won’t say how many jobseekers posted videos, but it seems the participation rate wasn’t high enough to warrant CareerBuilder’s effort. Job board spokesperson Jennifer Grasz told us, “We’re always testing the market with new tools and services to enhance the user experience. If the response rates are not there, we’ll reevaluate whether the market is ready and focus energies on other areas to aid in the job search and recruitment process.”

CareerBuilder’s main resume pages are still online, though no longer linked from the site. However, Grasz said the jobseeker videos have been removed. Jobseekers can always post their video to a service like You Tube and include a link in the resume or cover letter they have on CareerBuilder. When an employer downloads the resume, the link becomes hot.

Recruiters have so far not shown any great interest in reviewing video resumes, despite robust discussions about their pros and cons. Grasz says, “We didn’t promote the service to recruiters. We were testing market-readiness and waiting until we built up a large enough database.” So there are no metrics that would help resolve the debate over recruiter usage of jobseeker videos.

The major job boards, however, are moving cautiously. Monster is testing a video resume service in India, where CareerBuilder also had offered its. (That, too, was delinked.) Jobing.com, one of the most aggressive promoters of the use of videos (by employers) not only has no plans to offer a video resume service, but a company spokesman said recruiters have shown no demand for them.

Still, jobseekers seem enthralled by the notion of being able to speak directly to recruiters. YouTube has thousands of resumes, how-tos, and related videos posted by hopeful jobseekers and those offering them advice. A New York City company, Reel Biography, offers a professional video resume service. And ERE’s 17 member Video Resumes group encourages recruiters to make use of videos.

• Non-compete clauses
• “Color tests”
• Internal recruiting
• Resume search/software tool
• Working from home
• Job board debate

Non-Compete Clause
Non-compete agreements are always a hot topic of debate on the ERE discussion boards. This week, Les Noonan wants assistance on updating his company’s non-compete clause. David Rees offers some practical advice: get a lawyer. Although not an advocate of non-competes, he understands that it can be a complex issue since most states have very different rules. He also wonders why “employers are willing to constrain the freedom of a departing employee for the purpose of protecting their financial interests.” Les agrees with David’s comments and clarifies his request. He is actually looking for advice on a non-solicitation agreement. He wants to protect the “time and money” his company has invested in their current clients. Seems like a fair request to David but Nick Cobb feels that companies need to focus more on retaining their current employees. Maureen Sharib directs our attention to a recent case in California that you might want to check out if you are facing similar challenges.

Wednesday’s Question of the Day
I wanted to know if anyone thinks “The Color Career Counselor,” CareerBuilder’s latest tool that links job choices to favorite colors, would benefit recruiting. David Rees does not feel that this tool is validated. “Can you imagine going to an interview for a career as a computer programmer and they ask you why you choose the profession and you say…’well…I have always loved the color green.’” He later takes the test and comes to the same conclusion. Paul Davenport agrees that it is just for fun, not based in reality. Stephanie Wolf disagrees and feels that this tool can benefit college students who may feel lost with a career decision. John Kennedy wants to know if there are any tests that can predict job-based personalities. You might want to read John Zappe’s article from August 13 on the topic. Just curious…did anyone else take the test?

Internal Sourcing
David Hafernik wants to know the general policy of “internal recruiting” in most companies. Can employers recruit away from another internal manager? Are there limits? Pam Claughton worked for a large bank that had strict rules around internal recruiting. Employees had to work for a certain amount of time before they could post their resume internally. However, recruiters had great success working with the hiring managers and their direct reports to locate candidates from direct competitors. Each employee was then rewarded with an employee referral bonus. JB Smith agrees with Pam and adds that “we posted all positions internally for the first seven days then posted for external candidates. Employees were still allowed to apply after externally posting.”

Resume Search/Software Tool
Amit N is looking to purchase “resume search software” that will search multiple job boards, and wants to know if anyone has suggestions. According to Ashley Schettler, the decision will depend on the specific industry. She recommends TalentHook for IT but needs a more effective tool for recruiting in health care. Ken Kimbrough disagrees. TalentHook is “superb” and should generate resumes for all industries. According to Ken, “if you had databases, sites, etc that you wanted to search, they would accommodate your desires without much hassle.” Carly Eriksen recommends AIRS Sourcepoint. Does anyone else have other suggestions? We would love to hear them!

Work From Home Jobs
This topic always interests me since I work from home! Mack Will is also interested in learning of any “legit work from home jobs other than virtual recruiting.” Apparently, this is a very popular nationwide topic. Tim Esse referenced a local CBS show that addressed the topic and Christy Grimske reminded us that Google’s “Rat Race Rebellion” publishes a weekly list of legit work from home jobs. Susan Carson and Cassandra Firnstah both shared success stories of a virtual advertising company run by a group of women, and a customer call center.

Monday’s Question of the Day
The debate on whether or not job boards are obsolete is still going strong! It’s not too late to post a comment.