ERE.net

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…

Companies sprout up in bunches. In tough times, for example, lots of companies started up to help job candidates with their resumes. In an improving job market, as social media recruiting expands, a number of companies are working on the employee-referral social media connection.

Now, a growing cluster of new vendors is in the matching-screening business, a field already occupied by companies like JobFox as well as the one called StrictlyTalent I mentioned previously. These vendors are trying to go beyond the job board by serving employers only the candidates who could be a fit, not the 300 who email a resume in.

Just a sample of the new tools includes: keep reading…

A San Francisco startup has a way for employers to test a job candidate’s ability to write computer code.

Here’s how it works. An employer or recruiter either chooses a ready-made “challenge” or creates their own.

Let’s say the challenge is that candidates have to write a program showing all the prime numbers up to a million. Candidates are given a set amount of time, such as two to four hours, to complete the challenge. The CodeEval tool then can rank them in a “pass/fail” sort of way, or by percentages, depending on what the challenge was. In addition to seeing whether candidates passed the test or not, the employer can also take a look at the code that candidates have written. “There are million ways to write a program,” the site’s founder, Jimmy John, says. “You can write a program elegantly or write it in a really crappy way and still get the right answer.” keep reading…

That “Revenue Accelerator” system I mentioned this week isn’t the only new tool created to help companies with sales positions. A new site called StrictlyClosers will launch next Tuesday to match candidates seeking sales jobs with employers seeking the same. keep reading…

Sales consultant Lee Salz will soon launch a tool that’ll be used to better “onboard” and train salespeople. He says there are plenty of learning management systems, onboarding systems, and sales tools, but he thinks this is the first to focus on all three, to be a “learning management system applied to onboarding salespeople.” keep reading…

from Starpulse.com

Are you a good-looking man or woman? Depending on how many X chromosomes you have, this could be a good thing if you’re looking for a job. A new study shows that good-looking people are more employable. Well, men at any rate. Women are out of luck.

The study done in Europe and Israel shows that employers contact good-looking men in significantly higher numbers than they do women. More importantly, good-looking women appear to be at a disadvantage even compared to less-attractive women. Employers in the study contacted almost 20 percent of male candidates considered attractive (based on a picture attached to their resumes) compared to about 13 percent of the men with “plain” looks. For attractive women applying to a company, the call-back rate was about half that of their less attractive compatriots. keep reading…

Imagine you are a coach. It could be in the business world or on a playing field. What can you control: how the game is played or the final score? If you said final score, then you have probably never coached. If you said how the game was played, you probably know good skills almost always lead to good results. That’s why professionals never stop drilling, practicing, and learning. Focusing primarily on numbers is generally short-sighted and ineffective — like saving time by leaving for work at the last minute. keep reading…

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

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