A number of these suggested topics/tasks are useful (if not vital), and others aren’t. However, when we recruiters aren’t “drinking from a firehouse,” we’re wondering how soon they’ll lay us off, so in neither case can we work on these useful tasks. It would be valuable to have a company say to us:

We’re slowing down a bit now, so we’ll have you work on these other important tasks you haven’t had time to do up to now to keep you working for awhile.

Many companies are unable/unwilling to do this, and would rather lose our accumulated knowledge and practice and start all over again in the future with some largely/wholly new crew.

Anyway, back to those favorite wastes of time we’re supposed to do in the negative-5 to negative-20 hours of free time we have during the week: (more…)

For me, defining a talent community is easy.  (more…)

Below are four of the biggest social media trends I see today. (more…)

Nearly every survey on source of hire or use of social media by recruiters shows LinkedIn to be a key part of the mix; often it leads all the listed social media sites. The company itself reported adding 2,400 customers in just the last quarter of 2012, bringing the total to 16,400 organizations under contract.

Now comes a Bullhorn survey to report that of the 160,000 registered users on Bullhorn Reach, 97% use LinkedIn to source candidates. That’s not as surprising as it might seem at first glance. (more…)

While within the HR community gamification is still catching on (I find a number of my clients don’t even know recognize the word) gaming, in all forms, is incredibly popular. When the latest Call of Duty video game was released in November, one in four workers planned to call in sick. Look at it from a productivity standpoint: The amount of hours it took to create all of Wikipedia’s content in 12 years … is spent every three weeks playing Angry Birds.

During Jane’s keynote speech, she cited the 2012 Gallup study that found that 71% of American employees aren’t fully engaged in their work, making it “impossible to innovate” and costing $30 billion in lost productivity annually.

It’s no surprise that she believes gamification can help. Evidently she’s not alone. A study by gamification company Gigya showed that gamification increases website engagement by 29 percent, website commenting by 13 percent, and social media sharing by 22 percent. Here are some recent employee gamification success stories. (more…)

Marie Artim is the talent-acquisition VP and a long-time veteran of the company. It has about 200 recruiters based geographically — fairly decentralized like the Enterprise company as a whole. There’s no dedicated social media team with a separate budget. Some of the company’s recruiters, Artim said today at the ERE conference, embraced social media early; others are “terrified” of it.

Whether in Europe or the U.S., there are five aspects of Enterprise that its recruiters want candidates to come away with after they’ve interacted with the company on social media sites. (more…)

Jody Ordioni wrote a prescient view

I moderated two separate discussions of social media issues in 90 minutes. ROI concerns were uppermost in the minds of the recruiting leaders who joined our conversation. (More than 25 different topics were available at roundtables set aside in the ballroom of the Marriott here in San Diego where the conference is being held.)

It wasn’t surprising that these leaders who hailed from firms both very large and more modest size struggle with proving the value of social media as a source of hire. LinkedIn, I should point out, was an exception. Most of the 20 or so recruiters at the roundtable, and several others I spoke with later at the evening receptions, were enthusiastic users of LinkedIn Recruiter for sourcing. Most, though, admitted that getting their senior corporate managers and leaders to be active in posting and commenting on LinkedIn Groups is a struggle.

What was more of a surprise, and what makes Jody’s article so spot on, is that I heard emerging among recruiters a recognition that social media is a marketing and promotional tool. The effectiveness of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, even Pinterest is probably not in the number of hires or even applicants a company can trace directly to one of the social media sites. Instead, as recruiting consultants Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler reported last year, social media is a channel of influence. (more…)

From Life on Demand ROI Research

It appears that social recruiting is here to stay. The social recruiting site options are growing in number (I pity the person managing a global social recruiting campaign) and the expectations for a great candidate experience are mounting.

While most of the surveys, statistics, and comments I’ve read from Jobvite, CareerXroads and ERE (there are already 18 articles this year with the tag social recruiting) seem to indicate that the jury is still out on its effectiveness, one thing’s for sure. To do it well takes a passion, a strategy, and a lot of time. And time is a commodity.

There are many lucky companies who have dedicated support people to manage the process, but most of the corporate recruiters in my network either squeeze it in among other tasks, or assign it to their latest intern. In either of those two cases, strategy may fall to the wayside.

As you plan budgets and headcounts, here are two very compelling arguments that you might be able to present to your CFO to get some dollars to support your social efforts. (more…)

New Recruiter Homepage

Sporting a new look and with some new features — including a recommendation engine that ‘learns’ the kind of people a recruiter most want — LinkedIn Recruiter is getting an official relaunch this morning.

The redesign itself is an update of the classic LinkedIn Recruiter look to make it more consistent with the LinkedIn homepage redesign that was introduced last fall.

Parker Barril, Linkedin’s Talent Solutions head of product, unveiled the fresh, new LinkedIn Recruiter at a live and webcast user event — ConnectIn — in San Francisco. As he put it, “the consumerization of the enterprise,” the trend toward making products and services easier to use, “is influencing a new generation of products.” (more…)

Job candidates are also infusing their job search with Facebook activity. In a recent study conducted jointly by Facebook and Carnegie-Mellon University, results revealed that job seekers with strong ties who shared private messages, commented on each others’ posts, or posted directly on each others’ walls found new jobs at a rate of 33.2 percent over the three months. Those with weak ties found jobs a fifth as often, at only a 6.5 percent rate.

This data suggests two things: The first is that we are hiring people who are spending a lot of time on social media. (Let’s hope they’re not doing it while on the job!) And second, Facebook is a powerful tool for active, hands-on users. Like job seekers, recruiters need to do more than just jump on to the Facebook wagon — they need to learn how to drive it and not to forget to use the phone along with it. (more…)

Facebook’s foray into mobile phones is a direct response to Samsung’s plans to develop a social network. Slated to launch this year, it is designed to rival Facebook. The project is codenamed Samsung Facebook (Brilliant! Who could possibly guess what that’s about?). The thinking behind the fPhone and Samsung’s network (I believe the official name will be Twitter Plus) is to control both content and the mechanisms through which it is created. Samsung dominates the mobile phone market and makes nearly a third of all smartphones sold worldwide — more than double what Apple does. All those smartphones are the source of huge amounts of content, which becomes the property of Facebook, Google, etc. This means that most advertising based on that content doesn’t accrue to Samsung. But the combination of mobile phones and a social network is a direct threat to Facebook’s business model.

The Mobile Recruiter (more…)

Companies, including my own, use the “Donut List” to simplify the major social sites to novices. But as these sites add features and move to our mobile devices, the differences aren’t all that clear. (more…)

The beginning of this year’s report spells out the demise of more simplistic views about source of hire tracking: that data is easy to get, that it is reliable across the board, and that it is clean (one source = one hire). If you’ve been in recruiting for more than a decade, you probably know that things weren’t much better before the Internet drove so much hiring activity. I remember laughably tracking sources of hire via a questionnaire we asked applicants (online and on paper) and trying to create data based on employee’s recollections of how they came to apply for their job 5-10 years ago.

So no data is perfect but this data is very imperfect. Still, it is the best set of data and analysis we have on sources of hire. With that monster-sized disclaimer out of the way, here are some of the results.

Referrals, Career Sites and Job Boards Top List Again

(more…)

PotentialPark, the Swedish recruitment market research firm, says college students and recent grads turn in large numbers to corporate career sites for information about companies for whom they may want to work. But they also expect those companies to have a presence elsewhere, especially on places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and on blogs, too.

The career site is fine for providing fundamental information about the company, but it’s one-way communication. Young adults want more interactivity, so they expect their future employer to talk with them on social media channels. (more…)

HR, though not traditionally considered a department positioned to drive external business, is, whether it’s intentional or not, finding a new purpose on social networks like Facebook. Suddenly, the department best known for finding and managing relationships with internal people (employees) has the power to start finding and managing relationships with external people (customers) as well.

In the world of social recruiting, HR and marketing were made for each other. A great social recruiting strategy can help strengthen your employer brand, because recruiting itself is an inherently social activity that targets the kind of people who believe in your company, its culture, or its products and services enough to want to work for it.

And while your marketing department may already have a great handle on using Facebook and other social media for business, it can still benefit from allowing your team to join forces and begin social recruiting on the company’s Facebook page. Here are three ways that you provide value for your marketing team with social recruiting while helping your team bring in new candidates.

Value #1: Your People Are Your Brand (And Your Brand Attracts People) (more…)

The forecast is for decreasing use: 34% of current Facebook users say the time that they spent on the site has decreased over the past year, and only 3% say they will spend more time on the site in the coming year. Meanwhile, 27% say they will spend less time. The honeymoon is over. Among the top reasons cited for decreased time spent on Facebook are: it’s a waste of time; bored with it; content is not relevant; and just didn’t like it.

This doesn’t mean that people are abandoning social media. Overall time spent in social networking continues to rise — up 38% over the previous year according to Nielsen Media — more than any other online activity. The growth in time spent on social media is largely tied to the spread of smartphones, sales of which are accelerating overseas but slowing in the U.S. as we reach near saturation. That just means that the same pattern of skyrocketing use of social media followed by slowing use will be repeated in other countries in coming years.

Why Didn’t the Mayans Warn Us?

So what’s happening? (more…)

What I want to do is point to the things that haven’t changed; I want to talk about getting back to recruiting basics. Because not everyone can afford the fancy social recruiting suites and very few can veto the boss when he says no to a perks program. These are the skills that every recruiter should know and all recruiters used to know. These things obviously work with the new tools and platforms … but they’re effective without them. So let’s get back to the basics.

Here are five things not to forget in the social recruiting fervor. (more…)

What to Tweet (more…)

Graph search supposedly makes it easier to find people in your network and discover potential connections. Filters such as “place type,” “liked by,” and “visited by friends” make locating things faster. The feature can serve recruiters by allowing for better search of people’s profiles. It appears to be reasonably effective. As an example I typed in “People that are Java Developers and live in Minnesota” and it turned up 38 names. That’s a small number so I tried variations such as “People that like Java and live in Minnesota” — which produced a much larger number, but many of these were coffee aficionados. Putting in more complex queries, such as adding another skill, produced no results. Switching to finding .Net developers produced only 18 names and trying “People that like .Net and live in Minnesota” turned up three names of people who like to fish.

Seek and Ye Shall Find (more…)