The following is a primer on things to take into consideration when making your decision on an applicant tracking system. It takes time and research, but the payoff will be well worth the effort. (more…)

Futurestep (a recruitment outsourcing company owned by Korn/Ferry) started thinking about this about a year ago, and has had an internal technology team working on it. It’s “high-end, graphical, display analytics,” Bill Sebra says.

Sebra is Futurestep’s North America president. He says the company’s global clients wanted more data — more real-time data. You may have “the people in China running something different from the folks in North America” when it comes to HR software, he says. “If you’re the chief talent officer, it becomes very difficult.” This challenge can be multiplied if you’re a company with, say 8-10 different firms you bought, all around the world. (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…)

Your expensive and time-consuming investments in all of these things won’t be worth it the technology is used wrong. Candidates will sour on you or abandon the process. They’ll self-select out for reasons having nothing to do with aptitude or job-related qualifications.

Let me explain. (more…)

And when they do go through your hiring process, they hate it. Here are the top reasons why: (more…)

Amen to that, but I have a couple you may not have heard of. Read on. (more…)

If you’re talking about students and grads in computer science, engineering, and allied health, you can bet that these students will most likely forgo applying to your organization and will take one of the many offers that are already being put in front of them.

Here are some factors to consider when telling entry-level candidates to apply to your organization: (more…)

It’s all below.

Let’s start with Reqcloud, which launched about six months ago. “Nobody really knows about us,” says founder Ivan Kedrin.

I’m thinking you should, as this one may be around a while.

(more…)

Describing it as “an incredible moment for Bullhorn customers,” company CEO Art Papas announced the acquisition of both MaxHire and Sendouts.

“We’re acquiring two extremely talented teams, both of whom have succeeded in delighting their large customer bases with a combination of product innovation and excellent service,” Papas said in a news release. “These acquisitions dramatically increase our ability to execute on our vision of helping recruiters be more successful, develop new products, and serve our exponentially expanding user base.”

Details of the sale weren’t disclosed, however both MaxHire and Sendouts will operate under the Bullhorn brand. MaxHire’s CEO Peter Blitz, who founded the company in 1995, will become Bullhorn’s product innovation officer. Sendouts’ CEO Brian Hopcroft will become general manager.

Customers of each company will continue to use the existing software and will be supported as they always have, assured Andrew Hally, Bullhorn’s vice president of product and marketing. “Both products (MaxHire and Sendouts) are staying… We are not shutting down the products,” Hally explained, though the individual companies will immediately be folded into Bullhorn. (more…)

Workday Recruiting is no big surprise for Workday, a company that’s a cloud-based competitor of Oracle and PeopleSoft. The system for managing applicants, and onboarding them, isn’t yet available. Workday is merely announcing that it’s working on the product, and that it’ll include “headcount planning, job requisition, and pipeline management analytics” and “candidate workflow management, collaborative interview management, offer management, support for local data compliance and configurable rules, and connectors for postings, social sourcing, and background checks.”

It’ll be sold as an add-on to Workday customers in the first half of 2014, the company says.

What you should be asking — and I loved this one from BrazenCareerist – is “Tell me about where you’ve traveled.” People who travel without the safety net of tour leaders and have to rely on their wits to solve problems when they don’t speak the language, know much about the culture, or have much idea of where they are — these people, says the author, make the best employees. (more…)

(This article was co-authored with Amy McKee, Sr. Director, Global Talent Acquisition, at Autodesk.)

Mobile …finally! DNA footprints in the cloud; recruiting back to basics: getting to know the candidate; the end of the traditional ATS; emerging markets dominate; augmented reality; disruptive marketing and stunt PR; the end of social media; candidate cloning and the end of recruiters as we know it!

The impact and level of debate created by Recruitment 3.0 & 4.0, certainly took us by surprise. Based on feedback, it is clear that there has been healthy discussion and many companies have re-appraised/reviewed their recruiting strategies.

Recruitment 5.0 is the final paper in the trilogy.

3.0 was all about building.

4.0 all about driving value.

5.0 is all about … Personalization, self-sufficiency, predictability, big data, and back to basics.

The defining features of Recruitment 5.0:

• Mobile recruiting finally takes off and becomes the dominant channel.
• Recruiting gets back to basics and focuses on building relationships. Included in this is a focus on personalization/humanization and dominating/driving communications.
• Footprints in the cloud. Companies obsessively get to know their customers/consumers, and recruiters do the same with their “corporate” talent pools
• Data DNA: Companies draw data to profile candidates based on online habits and trends.
• Technological developments bring an end to the traditional ATS.
• Emerging markets emerge and dominate.
• Augmented reality and disruptive marketing dominate recruiting marketing.
• As companies seek to attract the best talent in a candidate short market, they set up their own courses, universities/academies, and “clone” future employees.
• As talent becomes more scarce, talent becomes more contract by nature and more flexible.
• It’s the end of recruiters as we know it … the death of the recruiting profession?

Some meaty stuff.

Reviewing these bullet points, some companies are already experimenting and executing on elements, but as time passes, these will become dominant in our thoughts, plans and strategies.

Let’s explore in more detail. (more…)

Like many of you, I love to focus on technology as part of my job. But, as I go through the floor here in Chicago, I’ve tried to pull out the recruiting vendors from the rest of the human capital space. As is typical, recruiting is often leading the pack in innovation and new products.

Here’s a brief rundown of the things I’ve seen (and haven’t seen) at the HR Technology show:

(more…)

In some sense this deal represents a logical pinnacle of a trend that has been going on for the past five or so years. While some have referred to this trend as the “death” of talent management, I prefer to look at it as the birth of a new era for humans and the organizations they call home.

No matter how you feel about it, this deal is about data and the ability to apply it to HR and organizational performance. The combined IBM/Kenexa organization will blend IBM’s capabilities with data with Kenexa’s ability to harvest data across HR functions using a mature set of tools such as ATS, surveys, and assessments, while helping IBM gain additional competency in the measurement of human traits that are important for defining, evaluating, and managing performance within the workplace.

The ability to provide sound measurement of the human elements that are required for effective job and organizational performance is a critical supplement to the type of raw empirical data IBM is used to working with. As we move forward, the real value in HR systems will not be in simply ballistic (unguided) data crunching, but rather in blending it with rationally guided measurement captured and managed within HR software and systems.

It will likely take a few years before we the consumer see any direct impact of this deal. In the here and now, it has meaning because it shows that pre-employment assessment has finally hit the big time and is poised to become the visible face of three major trends that are shaping the future of how people relate to work and vice versa. (more…)

Both developments involve Monster’s cloud-based semantic search, SeeMore. Both are big news for the company, representing in the first instance a market push into the long tail of employers, while in the second, a broadening of its service offerings into non-English speaking Europe. But otherwise, the developments are unconnected.

Somewhat more than a year after Monster first launched SeeMore, Monster is now offering the service to companies with as few as 50 workers. It’s not a stripped down version, Javid Muhammedali, Monster’s director, Product Management, assured me. “We didn’t slim down the feature set.”

What the developers did do was to make some adjustments so employers without a technical staff could begin to use SeeMore right after they sign up. For instance, instead of using APIs, the SMB version of SeeMore is email-based. Send one resume, or Zip up hundreds. (more…)

Work4Labs, which also announced it got $11 million in new funding, helps companies (like Intel, described briefly here) use Facebook to set up career pages, advertise to candidates, track results, and — as I mentioned last fall — get referrals.

The free version of its product, for small and medium size companies, allows companies to launch Facebook career sites and post jobs on the site, as well as generate referrals. It’ll cost extra to integrate the Facebook data with a company’s applicant tracking system, or to do certain customizations of the Facebook pages. (more…)

Jobmagic had been an iCIMS partner, providing its customers access to social media sites where they could post their openings, as well as enabling them to build networks and attract candidates through social media job matching.

One of the key strengths of the platform is its versatility. It allows recruiters and employment marketers to integrate video links and blogs with the postings, and to include a direct link to recruiters should a potential candidate have questions. Besides posting to the big three — Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter — Jobmagic has some 300 other social sites to which jobs can be posted automatically. (more…)

You know the four criteria for defining an Internet applicant are:

• An expression of interest (as in sending in an application);
• Meets the basic qualifications (education, years of experience, geography, etc.);
• You “considered” the individual for a job;
• The person never withdraws from consideration.

And you know about the recordkeeping requirements.

Now comes clarifications of these rules from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs that won’t make life any easier, but which do, at least, make it clearer what records to keep and who is responsible for keeping them. (more…)