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In this webcast, Dr. Charles Handler, president and founder of Rocket-Hire, a vendor neutral assessment consulting firm, shares his proven methodology for developing an assessment strategy and choosing the best vendor to help you execute it.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

In this webcast, we will show what the most important components of fit really are – the factors that matter in a person’s on-the-job performance. We will demonstrate how these factors impact performance. We will show what can be done and is being done to increase the likelihood that everyone in every job – not just new hires – has a high degree of fit with the position. We will describe specific steps to take, including time commitment, budgets and resources, to achieve the objective of high quality, high performing employees more likely to remain in the organization where they fit best.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Has anyone asked you “what’s your Klout score?” If you are on the leading edge of corporate recruiting and you are constantly on the lookout for new tools and approaches, one of the emerging tools that you should be aware of is social media analytics that measure online influence.

In a business world that is increasingly dominated by social media, it simply makes sense to hire individuals with extensive social networks and the ability to communicate with and influence others. keep reading…

It’s not often that a hiring process is described as “exhilarating” — a mystery with no clues is how candidates are more apt to feel about most such processes — but exhilarating is how one company is describing its selection for a healthcare technology trainer.

The crux of this “Big Break” as it’s called is a reality-TV-style day of speed interviews, a videotaped Q&A session, and a presentation. It starts with an online application to become part of this process, which is a partnership between the non-profit Ochsner Health System and an agency called Intellect Resources, which has been tweeting about this. Candidates “advance or face elimination” based on their “professionalism, presentation skills, communication skills, poise, attitude, teamwork and ability to think on their feet.”

The winner (winners, actually — 200 of them) will be a $20-25/hour trainer, teaching people the use of an electronic medical records system for at least a five-month contract.

“American Idol merged with a career fair,” is how this is all described on a recruiting video.

The online application is open through January 19, with the big audition day held on the 21st at the International House Hotel in New Orleans, and the job starting February 6. keep reading…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We began 2011 talking about new “matchmaker” job sites starting up. As 2011 progressed, as Jeff Dickey-Chasins said, such sites, some more art than science, “proliferated.”

A year later, we’re not done yet. At least one new site is hoping to join the bunch. Called “Better Weekdays,” it is being built behind the scenes, with one major player in the company, who’d rather we not use his name, telling us it’s about five months off from launch. keep reading…

No matter who you’re meeting with, make a good impression. But hiring managers even more so. You will potentially be partnering with these individuals during your entire stay at the company you are with, and potentially beyond.

During my first corporate recruiting position I felt that my role was as a “service provider” to my managers, so when they said jump, I did. Looking back on that now I realize how many opportunities I missed to set myself up as an expert in my profession of recruiting because I lacked the confidence to command a meeting and initiate a true partnership during the beginning of that relationship.

During my time as a recruiter I have run across several different types of managers and most can be intimidating. Below are some of the most common personality types that I’ve run across and ways that you can forge strong relationships with them despite some of their traits. keep reading…

The experience was exceptional.

I was impressed with the high level of professionalism.

Very professional interviews that provided me an environment in which I could be myself.

It made me want to work there even more.

Let’s hope that’s what your candidates are saying about your organization. Let’s hope that’s what they’re saying about your recruiting processes. But they may be saying stuff like this:

The worst and most unprofessional experience I’ve had.

You’ve yet to follow up with me.

The interviewer had absolutely no idea of what the position called for.

The reality is that candidates are probably saying things that cover both ends of the spectrum about your organization. What’s important is whether the first set of statements is more prevalent, or the second set is – and what you are doing about it.

There’s a lot of focus in our industry on finding and engaging passive candidates, developing a strong employment brand, using social media, and building talent communities, but a poor candidate experience can derail and minimize the impact of each of those efforts. My company did something about the problem. keep reading…

Learn how to improve recruiting efficiency and quality-of-hire with new online reference-checking

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Recruiting technology vendors have been sprouting in Silicon Valley at rapid pace over the last few months; some catch on, many don’t, and some are just worth checking in on. In the latter category is CodeEval, which I wrote about earlier.

In short, employers are using the site to offer “challenges” to job candidates. CodeEval’s community — the “ecosystem” I mentioned earlier this year — now has more than 5,000 developers in it. If an employer wants to hire an engineer, they can use CodeEval to have them solve a puzzle, and interview them if they like their answer. The company’s still trying to fully settle on a pricing model, but right now it only charges if you make a hire. Six people have been hired thus far using the site, including at Milo (part of eBay) and Lolapps.

About 20% of companies choose to make their own challenges on CodeEval, rather than use one the company has off the shelf for them. About 19,000 challenges have been done by techies on the site — some just for fun or learning, more as passive candidates than active.

The above is essentially sourcing: the challenges are a way of engaging some of these 5,000 folks, and hopefully, for employers, getting candidates to solve a challenge to take a look at candidates’ thought processes. CodeEval also has a screening tool, and that’s what’s now free. So if you’ve got your own folks ready for a challenge — say, five people you’re looking at for a job — you can run them through a challenge on CodeEval at no charge.

What happens when your manager — who goes out regularly after work with a group of employees to scarf down chicken wings — has a hard-core vegan show up in the lobby for an interview?

That’s where “fit” comes in. You’ve heard it at conferences and read it here and most everywhere else people talk about hiring: you should look not just for hard skills, but hire for fit.

But, then again, you’ve heard the opposite: that you should seek out diversity, diversity of thought, people who bring different ideas, experiences, and perspectives to your organization.

Carol Schultz and I talk about this these two ideas, and whether they are contradictory, in the approximately 13-minute video below.

keep reading…

I’m a zero. So are many of my friends. The wonder is, I really don’t care and I’m not going to do anything about it.

Let me explain. Yesterday, Forbes, TechCrunch, and some others detailed the beta launch of Identified. This is a startup that connects to your Facebook profile and assigns you a score that in the words of the company’s PR “shows people how their professional brand is perceived by the world.”

Identified assesses your work history, education, and your social network, crunches it together, and voila, a score. Since this is supposed to be a recruiting tool — it’s billed by the founders as the “World’s Largest Professional Search Engine” — companies can use Identified to search for candidates with certain qualifications, plus a score range. And just so everyone knows they really are using Identified, there’s an activity box that lets you know “Levi Strauss & Co. has viewed profiles of candidates with scores from 16 to 77.” keep reading…

Monster is taking its branded, 6Sense semantic search into the cloud in a clever and innovative application that will not only make life simpler for recruiters, but suggests the company is thinking beyond the classic post-and-search job board business model.

SeeMore is Monster’s newest 6Sense product. Introduced today during a group demo for bloggers, consultants, and HR tech writers, SeeMore applies the 6Sense search power to candidate databases stored in the cloud, producing a ranked list of qualified prospects.

That brief description, however, hardly does it justice. More broadly, SeeMore makes sense of the thousands of resumes that lurk in every ATS. Instead of writing impossibly long Boolean strings, or entering a bunch of keywords and getting back hundreds of results, 6Sense knows, for instance, that an audit manager must have certain skills and experience.

Power Resume users already know that with that job title and a few other parameters — years of experience for instance — 6Sense will scour Monster’s database for qualifying candidates. You won’t get CFO resumes just because there’s a keyword match. (If you haven’t tried Power Search, you can read about it here.) keep reading…

Join Iris Libby, successful owner of IRLC a division of ALT Search Recruitment Consultants – a leading research and placement company – as she shares tips and secrets developed by her team over the course of a decade of high-caliber service. In her uniquely warm and friendly style, she delivers a blend of insider tips and common sense approaches that you can take back to the office and use right away.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Some of the ways employers screen out potential employees are inefficient, ineffective, and even immoral.

That’s according to Richard Hadden, who’s a speaker, writer, and coach specializing in leadership and employee engagement. In the 9 1/2-minute video below, he and I talk about some of the most common ways employers screen out candidates. Topics covered: keep reading…

Have you ever hired that dream candidate who met every criteria of the position, was courted by the hiring manager, and who negotiated that huge sign-on bonus and then crashed and burned within a few months?

There are hundreds of stories like this. Candidates with great education, experience, and who have worked for all the right companies often fail miserably because they don’t fit into the culture of the company.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, believes his success has been in finding the right people — the ones who fit comfortably into the corporate culture. So do a growing number of recruiters, hiring managers, and CEOs. keep reading…

The early bird catches the worm. Mom and Grammy knew that, as did the English four centuries ago. Hardly a surprise, then, that a study of 6,600 hires finds that the sooner a candidate responds to a job posting, the better their chance of getting hired.

This confirmation of what most of us intuitively suspected comes from StartWire, a job search networking collaboration service launched six months ago by Chris Forman, formerly of AIRS, and his partner Tim McKegney, also an AIRS alum.

As part of the research and testing for StartWire, Forman collected hiring information from employers across 10 industries. Cumulatively, the companies shared data on 6,600 hires. From that emerged the correlation between speed of response and hiring.

What Forman and StartWire found was that almost 50 percent of the hires the companies made had applied within the first week a job was posted; 27 percent of the hires applied within two days. And three-quarters of those hired had applied within the first three weeks.

Forman says it sort of a “duh” revelation, but since he’s never seen a study that examined the matter, he decided it might be interesting. In the aggregate, the conventional wisdom about applying early improving a candidate’s chances is correct, he notes. On a job-by-job basis though, it might not be so. keep reading…

I’ve been trying to figure out what to make of Jobaline.

In some respects, what the recruitment tech vendor offers is just another — if more clever — screening variant intended to weed out resume spammers. Interesting, but no game-changer as I told Jobaline founder and CEO Miki Mullor.

What did catch my attention, though, is that Jobaline also attempts to rank applicants on their “seriousness.” An elusive concept to be sure, Mullor says “People who are more serious about a job will take more time on the website.”

Mullor wouldn’t detail everything that goes into the Jobaline mixer, but the amount of time a candidate spends responding to questions is one of the measures, as is the number of jobs a candidate has applied for. Out of the crunching comes a score Mullor says suggests the candidate’s level of interest in the job. keep reading…

suitability matrix

Technical screening is testing candidates in order to identify those with particular characteristics listed in a job description. This can be done in order to avoid the unnecessary cycles of presenting several candidates for interview who are rejected either because the job description was misunderstood or the candidate screening process was ineffective, or a combination of both.

I get into this more in an upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, but wanted to give you a taste of all this concept today.

During a training session with technical recruiters, we reviewed a C# Developer job description that was posted on their corporate website. The job description was seeking a mid-level developer with 1 to 2 years development (C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, and Web Services) and analytical experience, who also had experience in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

On reviewing the job description, I saw bright red flags and proceeded to explain. keep reading…

Charlie Sheen’s recent firing by CBS was likely well deserved. It followed a very public war with his producer and widespread publicity about his bizarre behavior and personal life. But scratch the surface and the decision seems illogical. His behavior today is no different than when he was hired for the show. The show is a hit and his antics haven’t turned off the viewers and he’s making money for his employer, so what’s the problem?

This is similar to what many employers do when recruiting: rejecting candidates for reasons completely unrelated to any ability to do the job. keep reading…