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What would you do if the person interviewing you fell asleep? What Irwin did turned out to be worth $100. You’ll find out more if you read through this week’s roundup. And, as a little incentive to make it to the very end, there’s a link to some nifty free marketing analytics tools.

One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain. keep reading…

The pairing of Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett is talent acquisition’s Hewlett and Packard; its Ben and Jerry.

Sullivan’s name is on the firm, his wife is his partner, and there’s no doubt he’s the sensei. But over the years, Burnett came to be an alter ego, presenting at conferences, consulting with companies in the U.S. and globally, writing and co-authoring articles by the dozens, and, when Sullivan himself was unavailable, Burnett was the public face of the firm.

Now, after a decade with, Burnett is leaving for a global role as director of strategy for UK-based BraveNewTalent.  keep reading…

As LinkedIn’s annual user conference gets underway in Las Vegas today, it’s taking on an import that goes well beyond the quality of the agenda. This is its first conference since becoming a public company and the first since its dominance as the Internet’s leading business network was challenged — directly or otherwise — by such powerful brands as Google, Facebook, and Monster.

The sessions the company has planned for the three-day event are heavy on the training with a strong mix of sessions devoted to recruiting strategies and social media. The speaker lineup is first rate and the agenda promises enough variety and practicums that it should be easy enough to answer the boss’s “What did you learn?” questions.

On another level, though, the conference is spectacle, a physical manifestation of the reach LinkedIn has achieved into the recruiting world in just a few years. Founded as a sales and marketing leads business, LinkedIn has morphed into a jobs-focused social network. Today half its revenue — approaching $500 million — comes from recruiters.

But in just the five months since LinkedIn went in May the world has changed.

Google launched a social network, Monster launched BeKnown, a careers network, BranchOut, a startup careers network, announced a partnership with CareerBuilder, and, perhaps most significant of all, Facebook detailed sweeping changes to its 800-million-user social network that could trump the need for a separate business network altogether. keep reading…

A European version of BeKnown’s iPhone app was released today by Monster, the latest in a string of enhancements and features the company has been making in its careers-oriented Facebook network.

Last week, at Facebook’s f8 developers conference, Monster said it was tightening the integration between its BeKnown networking app, and Facebook, on which it built the professional network. The enhancements will make it easy for BeKnown members who update their business profile to add those updates to their more social Facebook profile.

In the weeks before, Monster released smartphone apps for the iPhone and Android devices, allowing members to update their BeKnown profiles, send messages, make connections and, naturally, search Monster for jobs. Now, European members of the BeKnown network have the same capabilities. An Android version was released in Europe previously.

With the sweeping changes being made to Facebook, Monster’s decision to build its network-in-a-network on the social site seems almost prescient. Despite the current roil by the users who will have to get used to the changes Facebook is making, they eventually will. As they fill in their new Timelines, some of it will spill over into their BeKnown profiles. As Monster’s announcement last week noted, the opposite will also happen. keep reading…

The Facebook changes announced last week at the developers conference, and those in the weeks before, have major implications for the way employers use the site to brand themselves and build relationships with potential candidates and future hires.

Recruiters who now use Facebook exclusively or mostly to push out jobs will become even more marginalized by the increasing emphasis the social site is placing on engagement. Those who actively invest in courting their Facebook “fans,” offering content of value, and real conversations, will reap even greater rewards than they do now, earning their brand a place on user’s forthcoming Timelines, and the ability to broaden and measure their reach as visitors “Share” content with their own FB friends.

One of the consequence of these and the other changes Facebook is rolling out, is that it will be harder than ever for employers to compete for attention. Even before last week’s f8 conference, when the company’s most profound changes in years were announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, routine updates such as a “like” or a me-too comment, and job postings, were being moved to a ticker-style activity window on the profile page. Even more is likely to appear there as Facebook’s standards of what’s worthy of being a top post, and thus rising to the top of a person’s wall, become more stringent. (A good summary of the announced changes is available here.) keep reading…

A new– and for now, free — toolset from Bullhorn is getting good marks from users who have been testing it for a few months, but what’s most impressive is that it can give recruiters an early heads-up about their connections who may be preparing to “go active.”

KC Carpenter, a healthcare recruiter and co-founder of K.A. Recruiting in Boston, says the still-in-beta Bullhorn Reach is “great. It’s a huge, huge time saver for us … What would take 10 times as long, we can do with one click.”

If automating postings to social networks and optimizing them for search engines was all the service did, “it would definitely be a site I would pay for,” he says. But Radar, the tool that tips you to the likelihood one of your connections may be starting an active job hunt, is something Carpenter sees a “great for business development.” keep reading…

Mostly what HR professionals are looking up online is pretty standard information about candidates, like LinkedIn recommendations. Fewer — but still quite a few — are trying to find out more controversial stuff, such as photos or what groups on Facebook a job candidate belongs to.

That’s the upshot of a SHLPreVisor study of more than 460 human resources professionals. The majority (53%) were in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with 39% in the Americas and 8% in Australasia. Here’s a chart showing what’s being searched: keep reading…

An early Happy Birthday to Twitter. And a Happy, if somewhat belated, Birthday to TweetMyJobs.

The former will be 5 yearsold in a week; the latter is now 2. Both of them have enjoyed a robust growth, built on the seemingly preposterous notion that the world would beat a path to their door via 140-character messages.

Indeed the world has. Estimates of Twitter account holders are in the 200-250 million range. (Twitter is secretive about many of its numbers. As far as anyone knows, the company has not shared its active user count, but it’s a safe assumption that regular tweeters are fewer in number. It did report that its current growth rate is about 460,000 new users a day.)

TweetMyJobs has a quarter of a million users and sends between 50,000 and 75,000 tweets a day.

Founder Gary Zukowski says he expects 1 million followers by the end of the year, an ambitious goal for a service that now has so many imitators and competitors that they’re almost impossible to count. Every major job board and every major (and not so major) employer now regularly tweets its job posts.

Twitter users themselves send just about a billion tweets a week. (It took Twitter 3 years, 2 months and a day from first tweet to one billion. That’s another of the factoids Twitter is sharing for its birthday celebration.) Thousands of tweets were sent in Japan within mere seconds of the earthquake last week. Millions more were sent in the hours and days since. keep reading…

Finding a programmer is easy. Resumes are everywhere: Dice, Craigslist, CareerBuilder, personal websites. You name it.

But how do you sort through the stack to create your short list? (I’m deliberately ignoring the issues of availability, interest, and candidate affordability.)

Like most recruiters and software ranking systems, you look at skills, years of experience, types of projects they worked on, career progress, and the like.

What if you could also factor in the opinion of their peers? Suppose you could see how their peers rated your prospect’s solutions to problems that befuddled other programmers?

That’s the idea behind the revamped careers site on StackOverflow. It’s a popular Q&A coding site, where programmers can post their programming challenges and see what solutions others offer. Responses — and the questions, too — are rated by the programming community, and result in a reputation score. keep reading…

Reuters is reporting that LinkedIn is moving ahead with plans to go public this year and has already picked the banks it will work with.

Citing three sources, Reuters says the financial institutions include Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and JPMorgan. The company supposedly heard presentations about IPO prospects in November.

Based on individual sales of the private company’s shares, as reported by SharesPost, LinkedIn is currently valued at around $2.1 billion. Speculation is that the company has revenues of $200 million and has been cash flow positive for at least two years. It makes money by selling premium services to its 85 million registered users, providing access and job postings to recruiters, and through advertising. keep reading…

I’m so excited to chair the upcoming #socialrecruiting summit. If you are like me, you are telling your friends and colleagues about the upcoming event in NYC. If you are like me, you have to stop and explain exactly what social recruiting means in the talent management world.

Michael Specht wrote a great post, several months ago, with a simple and concise definition of social recruiting.

• Using social media tools as part of recruiting.
• Building a community of potential candidates.
• Engaging with candidates as people not numbers.

Can anyone do better than that? Do we have a universal definition for the act of social recruiting?

When you talk about social recruiting as a construct, I want to know how you define it. Do you leave off the word social and just use the broader term of recruiting? Is ’social recruiting’ something so unique that it still requires a separate definition, or is it ubiquitous enough in our industry that it’s embedded in your daily operations and recruiting strategy?

I’d love to know what you think. The comments are open…

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on socialrecruitingsummit.com