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Four years (give or take) into recruiting’s embrace of social media, it turns out that job boards are the most productive source of new hires.

Where social media sources register a barely discernible 1 percent of all hires, job boards produced 19 percent. That was matched only by internal transfers; even referrals came in lower — 16 percent.

These are among the surprising, and not so surprising, bits of data developed from a survey of 414 employers conducted by HR consultants Bersin & Associates. Compiled into the Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011, and authored by principal analyst Karen O’Leonard, the 100 page volume offers details on the recruiting metrics from employers as small as 100  workers to those with more than 10,000.

Josh Bersin, founder of the eponymous firm, said the genesis of the factbook came from the company’s clients and conversations with many others since Bersin launched his talent acquisition practice a few years ago. keep reading…

From the place where happy workers and the disgruntled go to rate their employer comes this year’s Best Places to Work list. Topping the list this year with a near perfect 4.7 score is Bain & Co.

The global management consulting firm with 6,000 employees ranked 3rd last year, just behind Facebook and Southwest Airlines. This year, Facebook fell to third and Southwest came in seventeenth. keep reading…

Manpower says the U.S. hiring outlook for the first part of next year is the most positive since 2008. That’s not saying much, though.

The quarterly Manpower survey of hiring intentions released today shows 14 percent of employers expect to add to their workforce in the first three months of 2012. Nine percent expect a decline; 7 percent don’t know; and, 70 percent predict no change. With Manpower’s seasonal adjustment, the net result is nine percent overall increase in job growth intentions. keep reading…

Whether a sign of confidence or desperation, the number of workers quitting without having another job is growing. Last month alone nearly 1.1 million workers left their jobs.

It’s the largest number of  “job-leavers,” as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, in more than a decade. Included in the count are workers who took buyouts, some who quit ahead of a dismissal, and others who may be taking time off before starting a new job. The bulk, however, are those who decided to leave a job without having another lined up.

There’s no way of telling what kind of workers these job-leavers are. However, any number of surveys over the last few years show there’s a gathering wave of intentions about leaving, if not actual departures. keep reading…

I am worth $1.83 million.

No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth? keep reading…

If you haven’t invested in mobile recruiting yet, time is running out.

Only 7 percent of corporate career sites are optimized for mobile devices, according to a Potentialpark survey. However, 19 percent of job seekers reported using their mobile device for career activities; 50 percent “could imagine” themselves doing so.

The usage data comes from Potentialpark’s massive annual global survey of students, graduates, and early career professionals. It’s Online Talent Communication Study was completed in June and now, with the 2012 survey underway, the recruitment marketing and research firm says the number of mobile job seekers is already showing “a significant rise.” keep reading…

Facebook is emerging as the leading social network when it comes to job hunting. By a margin approaching 2-to-1, job seekers credit Facebook with helping them get their current job.

LinkedIn ran a distant second, with 46 percent of job seekers attributing their job to that business-oriented network. Twitter, the short messaging network, got a thumbs-up for its job help from 36 percent.

Those are among the findings of Jobvite’s Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 released this morning. The survey doesn’t say how the social networking helped the job-seekers. Other data suggests it may mean seekers researched the companies on social networks, reached out to their contacts for information, got a referral, or were contacted directly. Since most job seekers use more than one social network, the numbers add up to more than 100 percent. keep reading…

As America prepares to honor its military veterans, a new survey says  recent and soon-to-be vets are concerned about finding a job and many feel unprepared for the transition back to civilian life.

The survey was released this morning by Monster Worldwide, which, in addition to its flagship job board, also operates Military.com, the largest career and information site for veterans, transitioning military and their families. The survey introduced Monster’s new Veteran Talent Index. Separate indices score veterans’ confidence in their career opportunities, their job search activity level, and an employer measure of how they perceive the veterans they’ve hired measure up to other workers.

On the latter score, employers are much more gung-ho about hiring veterans than are the vets themselves. Almost every employer who has hired a vet (99 percent) would hire another. That’s due in large measure to their performance. Sixty nine percent of employers say the veterans they’ve hired do their job “much better” than their non-vet workers. keep reading…

Look around at most any HR conference and one of the profession’s little secrets is instantly obvious: HR is the domain of white, middle-aged women.

A little harder to see is that they are better educated than most of the population, and far better off financially.

Catbert notwithstanding, human resources is a pink-collar profession that looks very different from the rest of the corporate workforce, let alone the U.S. as a whole.

More than a few surveys have noted the gender imbalance in human resources. A dozen years ago the federal Office of Personnel Management reported the dramatic change in its own workforce. In 1969, 30 percent of the HR jobs were held by women. By 1998, the percentages were reversed, with men holding 29 percent of the jobs. A SHRM survey from 2007 came up with similar numbers.

Now, one of the most extensive profiles of HR professionals ever conducted not only confirms that what the OPM found in the federal workforce applies to the private sector, but the diversity there is just what you would expect from eyeballing conference attendees. keep reading…

“Technology — rather than hiring — is on the minds of most executives of mid-market companies.”

So says Mid-Market Perspectives: America‘s Economic Engine – Competing in Uncertain Times, a Deloitte survey of almost 700 executives at companies with revenue of $50 million to $1 billion.

A majority of the executives expect both revenue (61.2 percent) and profitability (52.6 percent) to increase next year, despite limited faith in any significant improvement in the national economy. What drives their optimism is a continued focus on cost controls and increased productivity.

Of the 70 percent of executives reporting an increase in productivity, the average saw a 6.1 percent improvement since the beginning of the recession. The majority of executives credit the rise to improvements in business processes (62.2 percent) and technology (50.3 percent), especially the automation of business operations and increased use of data analytics for business intelligence. keep reading…

From the giant IPO-bound staffing firm Staffmark Holdings, to Indianapolis’ 14-person HR services firm FlashPoint, 156 self-described human resource companies made the annual Inc. list of the 5,000 fastest growing businesses in the U.S.

Inc. ranks the companies, all privately held, by growth rate; the faster revenue increased over three years, the higher the company ranks. By that measure, HR staffing and services firm Nextaff was first among the HR companies that volunteered to participate. (Participation requires companies to divulge annual revenue, employee counts and growth, etc. Only some companies are willing to publicize that kind of proprietary information.)

keep reading…

With 25 million Americans out of work or underemployed, you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to find a teacher, an admin assistant, or an accountant. But you would be wrong, according to Manpower.

Those jobs are among the 10 toughest jobs to fill in the U.S., says Manpower’s annual Talent Shortage Survey, which also reports that 52 percent of the employers in the survey are having trouble filling jobs.  Only in Japan and India do more companies report talent hard to find.

Globally, a third of all employers say they have difficulty filling jobs.  Lack of experienced workers is the most frequently cited reason,  globally, as well as in every region in the survey. In the Americas, lack of experience was followed by a lack of skills.

Particularly surprising was the the rise in U.S. companies reporting hiring difficulty. In the 2010 survey, only 14 percent of companies reported problems filling jobs. Now the percentage has nearly quadrupled.

If it seems unlikely the hiring situation could have worsened so much so fast, part of the disconnect may have to do with when the survey was conducted – months ago, long before the current round of gloomy economic reports started coming out. keep reading…

The number of  “free agent” workers has nearly exploded in the last three years, and now 44 percent of working Americans describe themselves that way.

A Kelly Services survey says  economic necessity, the desire for more freedom and flexibility, and age have driven up the number of workers not tied to a single company for their livelihood. It’s a dramatic change from 2008, when Kelly’s survey found 26 percent of workers describing themselves as free agents.

Also fueling the rise is the increasing reliance of American business on contingent and contract labor, say the authors of a whitepaper detailing the results. Companies, note Jocelyn Lincoln and Megan M. Raftery, “can scale up and down faster and easier by adopting more flexible workforce strategies.”

A significant driver is the economy. Respondents to the 2011 survey were twice as likely as their counterparts in 2008 to say they became free agents because they were laid off or couldn’t find another job.

That suggests, the authors say, that as recovery occurs, some of the newly minted free agents will return to a traditional employee role. However, “the trend toward more free agents is still very strong and is increasing worldwide. Accounting for differences in legislative frameworks and social and cultural norms, we estimate that the global free agent population is at
least 20 – 30% of the entire workforce, and growing.”

Recently, USA Today wrote about the phenomenon of well-established professionals abandoning comfortable jobs to pursue their own interests.  “Employees bid goodbye to corporate America” chronicled several workers, including two recruiters, who quit to follow their own path.

As the Kelly Services report makes clear, the move by knowledge workers to keep reading…

If you recruit in Italy, don’t check the social networks when you background a candidate. In Spain, you can monitor the time your workers spend on social networks, if you warn them in advance you’re going to. But without their permission you can’t monitor the content.

And do you have a company policy regarding social networking? Only 55 percent of the companies do, according to a survey by the International Labor & Employment Group at Proskauer Rose.

The high-powered law firm conducted what it describes as an “informal survey on emerging trends and practices on the use of social media in the workplace,” finding that 76 percent of the 120 responding companies use social media for business purposes.

The results of the 10-question survey are supplemented by brief summaries of rules and regulations around the world, which, as in the U.S., can be fairly loose, or, as in Italy, so restrictive that employers can’t even monitor what their workers are doing on company time using company equipment. (Employers there can, however, prohibit the use of social networking sites during work hours.)

Rather than rely on existing company policies, Proskauer Rose says, “businesses need to have distinct and specific social media policies and practices in order to harness the benefits and minimize the risks these new media present.”

It’s telling that although 55 percent found value in the business use of social media during work hours, but not in its personal use, a significant 31 percent found an advantage in allowing both business and personal use.

The survey also found 31 percent of the companies took disciplinary action against an employee in connection with their use of social networks, while 43 percent have faced an issue with misuse of social networks.

Proskauer suggests companies consider three factors whether they use social networks for recruitment and selection or in disciplinary action: keep reading…

No longer just the shiny new object in the toolbox, social media recruiting has become an integral part of sourcing and hiring.

A Jobvite survey out this morning says 89 percent of the respondents to its poll (most of them not Jobvite customers) said they are either already using some form of social media in their recruiting or will in the next year. They are also having success; 64 percent said they’ve actually hired people through a social network.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has followed the development of social media. From their roots as a teenage clubhouse, social media networks today have become so ubiquitous and so much a part of American life that half of all adults use at least one of the sites. Pew Research Center says that last year, 48 percent of those over 35 are on a social network.

Facebook is far and away the most popular network. Pew says 92 percent of everyone using a social network use Facebook. No wonder then that 47 percent of North American companies are spending money to reach Facebook’s 700+ million users via PPC. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of businesses — Facebook doesn’t release the actual number of the so-called Fan Pages — have set up sites. keep reading…

Manpower says the U.S. can expect to steady, if cautious, hiring in the third quarter of the year.

Based on what the approximately 18,000 U.S. employers are reporting, Manpower’s quarterly Employment Outlook Survey predicts an 8 percent overall increase in hiring in the country over the third quarter last year.

“Although employers are not signaling dramatic upswings in hiring plans, there does seem to be hiring energy developing based on sustained year-over-year growth,” said Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup president of the Americas.

keep reading…

Tech hiring is tough and it’s only going to get tougher, says a new report from Dice.com.

The IT specialty job board said its survey of IT employers found 65 percent expect to do more hiring of tech professionals in the second half of the year. That kind of robust hiring is already bumping up against the low unemployment rate for computer professionals. The U.S.  Bureau of Labor Statistics put the unemployment rate for computer and math occupations (a category that includes actuaries and some other small groups) at 3.8 percent. Last year the rate for May was 5.5 percent.

Postings for information technology jobs increased by 41 percent over may of 2010, according to Indeed.com. The government’s count of job openings for the information industry (a classification that includes more than just IT) was 110,000 in April. During that month, there 69,000 hires.

While the various data points aren’t directly comparable, they help explain why half the 900 IT recruiters and hiring managers Dice surveyed reported that time to hire is getting longer; 64 percent of the respondents say the problem is finding qualified candidates for the jobs. keep reading…

If you don’t care a whit about candidate experience, then you aren’t likely to be much interested in being recognized for it. For everyone else, this one’s for you.

I had a chat with Gerry Crispin today and I can assure you he is passionate about the experience job seekers have as they navigate through a corporate career site in pursuit of information. So passionate, that he approaches the subject with near missionary zeal.

Yesterday he, his partner at CareerXroads Mark Mehler, and a group of friends released a monograph on the issue of the candidate experience. I posted about it here, but could not detail every valuable morsel in the paper.

Now, the group is hoping to take the matter to a higher level. Crispin, Elaine Orler, and Ed Newman want help with a survey about what it would take and how much information you would be willing to share to create an industry award around the candidate experience. keep reading…

Fortune magazine is out with its annual list of 100 Best Companies To Work For and the names there are recognizable to anyone keeping track.

SAS, the North Carolina software giant, is No. 1 for the second year in a row. The company, with onsite childcare, healthcare, employee gym, and more — lots more — is a regular. It has made the list for the last 14 years.

Wegman’s Food Markets, and Google, Net App, and Boston Consulting are all still in the top 10.  Zappos, the much-admired shoe company now owned by Amazon, and REI, the camping and outdoor recreation provisioner, are the only newcomers. Zappos is 6th and REI 9th on the 2011 list. keep reading…