The document was made public recently due to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Michael Morisy and posted on Muckrock. The document appears to have been created to help government operatives understand how to retrieve information on the web.

Though last updated in February 2007, it contains massive amounts of data that will help sourcers and recruiters as they work to improve their sourcing skills and understand how the Internet works.

While I haven’t had time to read the entire document, sections that caught my eye were: (more…)

This is the story of how Informatica Talent Acquisition became data-centric and used that centricity to our advantage to fix the problem. (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…)

It may seem like a far-fetched idea to advertise within games and social media posting tools, but many businesses today are doing just this. (more…)

“Whether she is scouring Stanford or Parsons for up-and-comers or more established candidates, de Baubigny says, ‘I am always very open-minded about what good talent looks like.’”

Maybe it’s because I watched a new show this morning called Brain Games

or maybe it’s because I’m a compulsive anagrammer, or maybe it’s my Dyslexia kicking in — for whatever reason when I read the word “scouring” I saw “sourcing.”

I started to think.

Has sourcing become scouring?

I believe it has.

What a few of us began doing (and talking about) in the latter days of the 20^th century and on into the present century has turned into an incessant scouring (for many) of what can be found on the Internet. (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…)

LinkedIn with its InMail tool does a good job of allowing you to create targeted, meaningful messages and save them as templates for tracking and future use. The following list will help you craft messages that get results.  (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…)

It’s interesting, then, that despite this clear ambition to make the most of available social recruiting channels, recruiters and organizations continue to underuse one prominent social network, Google+.

(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

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Welcome to the Great Talent Gap of the 21^st Century

In an article for Inc.com, Keith Cline wrote, “The demand for top-tier engineering talent sharply outweighs the supply in almost every market, especially in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. This is a major, major pain point and problem that almost every company is facing, regardless of the technology ‘stack’ their engineers are working on.”

If you’re a hiring manager or a recruiter in the trenches, you’re not seeing a way out of it any time soon  You may need a production manager who knows calculus, or an experienced software developer, or a technology strategist with cloud-based computing experience; and you need them yesterday. Oh and, by the way, you need them at a “competitive salary” (i.e., the lowest wage possible).

To begin to close the gap, we first need to recognize that the talent gap of the 21^st century is made up of smaller fissures. Second, we need to understand the interrelated economic and organizational forces which formed these cracks. And lastly, we need to get started now. (more…)

With a multitude of free mobile image and video posting apps that are available for smartphones today, the ability to reach the public through multimedia has grown significantly, and today many companies take advantage of these major marketing channels. So what does this information mean for recruiters? (more…)

What Donna has done anyone can do — she started small, made a business case for what she did, and because of her practical and business-focused approach was able to get additional resources and expand the usefulness of her analytics.

It is not necessary to have sophisticated analytic tools or exceptional expertise. These are useful, but they are not necessary to get started. Even simple data can be powerful, and is often more useful in the beginning because it is easier to see the connection between the data and the results that business leaders respect.

Donna started with simple tools — just an Excel spreadsheet and Survey Monkey. She gathered basic data from surveys created in Survey Monkey. She gathered data about the needs and issues the hiring managers had, especially from areas where there were problems. Once she had this data, she was able to look for common issues and target areas for improvement. This was then shared with recruiters and HR for action.

I have laid out a simple model of how you could begin to set up a sourcing strategy that is both effective and that does not require great expertise. (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…)

You have maybe three seconds to engage a Gatekeeper.

What you say in those first few, fatal moments will determine in what direction your sourcing call will go.

The following are the most used words and sentences you’d hear if you could sit next to a phone sourcer for a day. (more…)

Referrals and the company career site are the two leading sources for new workers hired by the 1,054 companies participating in SilkRoad’s just released study of recruitment marketing effectiveness.

Between them, they produced 40% of the more than 150,000 hires the companies made in 2012.

This is the second year the HR software provider has compiled ATS data from its customers to report on their source of hire. This year, the company included interviews as a measure of effectiveness.

The data set came from companies as small as 100 employees and some larger than 10,000; 60% had under 2,000 employees, 30% fall between 2,000 and 10,000, and the remaining 10% are larger. A company spokesman said the employers represent “the entire scale. We have lots of technology, healthcare, higher education, and several other strong verticals.”

As it did last year, SilkRoad found that job boards collectively yielded more interviews and hires than did all other external sourcing efforts. (For the report, SilkRoad classified corporate career sites and inside recruiter efforts as internal, explaining “they are company resources.” Company sites were included because they are “internally controlled element of job advertising.”)

Among the job boards, Indeed yielded more interviews and hires than any other single site. CareerBuilder was second. (more…)

The company earned 35 cents per share on revenue of $303.6 million. That was $24 million more than the average of analysts’ estimates and more than $11 million above the most optimistic projection. The average of their earnings estimates was 19 cents a share.

The numbers released this afternoon show LinkedIn brought in more total revenue for the year than did Monster and its fourth-quarter recruitment revenue alone was 90% above the same quarter in 2011. (more…)

But finding top talent among professionals is now becoming painless to the point where almost any firm can do it successfully. The time is rapidly approaching were nearly every professional and working individual in the developed world can be found by a recruiting function.

Finding Talent Is Easy Because Everyone Is Now “Visible” (more…)

Firstly, make sure to take advantage of an abundance of online communities. Being a skilled social recruiter does not stop at LinkedIn. It is obviously a great resource today with a high Alexa traffic rating and an abundance of professional profiles; however, a large population of talent acquisition is sourcing through the same people, making many profiles more “active” versus “passive.” To reach truly passive talent, a recruiter needs to dig deeper into the less-traveled websites if they are going for the gold. These types of resources include industry specific blogs, professional forums, or even online multimedia sites. Believe it or not, YouTube and Flickr can be great candidate resources and they both allow user “messaging” with a free account.

Next, Boolean is a must today for name generation in particular. Any recruiter who knows how to use our (I work for AIRS) advanced Boolean techniques has the ability to locate passive talent a competitor may never find. This is highly beneficial when higher trafficked resources, such as job boards or LinkedIn, are exhausted. These types of sourcing techniques can uncover lists of industry professionals’ names, members of specific professional organizations, or even online resume type documents that would never show up in a simple Google search.

Finally, build and use advanced sourcing tools. RSS feeds, custom search engines, data miners, posting tools. and apps are all good things to add to a sourcing strategy for 2013. The following list can be used as a guide to follow for implementing these: (more…)