ERE.net

In 2013, it seems everyone is talking about talent communities. Some people call their job alert system a talent community; some people refer to their CRM as a talent community; some people call their LinkedIn company group a talent community; and some job boards refer to their resume database as a talent community. And, it seems, there is a vendor solution for each flavor of talent community. These diverse opinions create interesting discussions and debate until it is time to seriously consider whether to invest in a community of talent; then the confusion sets in and creates the question — what is a talent community?

For me, defining a talent community is easy.  keep reading…

Informatica, the company for which I work, deals in big data challenges every day. It’s what we do — help customers turn their data into actionable business insights. When I took the helm as VP of global talent acquisition I was surprised to learn that the data within the talent acquisition function was not up to the standards Informatica lives by. Clearly, talent acquisition was not seeing the huge competitive advantage that data could bring — at least not the way sales, marketing, and research were viewing it. And that, to me, seemed like a major problem, but also a terrific opportunity!

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

Here are some ideas you can immediately implement in your organization to help get hiring managers on board with your recruiting efforts, quickly: keep reading…

Futurestep has quietly been developing a tool called “Foresight” it will be rolling out to its clients, a dashboard meant to make heads and tails out of the recruiting information global companies have stored in their many databases.

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. keep reading…

According to PwC’s 15^th Annual Global CEO Survey 2012, talent acquisition and retention are top priorities for companies worldwide. That doesn’t surprise me, and I doubt it surprises you either. It’s a great time to be in the talent business.

What does surprise me though is that despite talent being a top priority, most recruiting products don’t work very well.

That’s because most were designed more than a decade ago for decision makers — not you, the user — and haven’t evolved much since.

Now for the good news: things are changing. Consider the case of iPhone vs. Blackberry. In 2007, BlackBerry was the go-to device for professionals. Then Apple built a smartphone that was easier to use — the iPhone. Meanwhile, Blackberry remained laser-focused on decision-maker priorities: scalability, security, and administrative control. iPhone adoption steadily increased as a result. Eventually, people started bringing iPhones to work, but were frustrated that they couldn’t access their corporate email. Fast forward to today: iPhones are increasingly common in corporate America and are supported by many IT departments.

This is a prime example of a fundamental shift in behavior: the consumerization of the enterprise. keep reading…

Not everyone can afford (or wants to pay) $300 or more to post a job on one of the premier job boards like LinkedIn, Monster, or CareerBuilder, and few recruiters (outside of agencies) have the time to proactively mine resume databases for talent. Given this, let’s look at some creative and unique ways to distribute your job postings to increase the flow of candidates into your applicant tracking system. keep reading…

In this, the ninth year of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, finalists include a New York hospital that’s a finalist in two categories, a flower delivery company, a big technology and a big banking company, government contractors, management consultants, and a fast-growing home-loan organization.

“It really brings me hope to see people doing excellent things,” one judge wrote to me, about the industry’s leading awards for talent acquisition.

We made a few changes since last year’s ERE Recruiting Excellence Award winners and finalists were announced. For the first time we have an onboarding category. We split the “department of the year” into large and small companies. We altered the “careers website” a bit to encompass more than just a company’s own site, but social media and similar sites as well. And, we added an “innovation,” award, which will be announced at the upcoming Recruiting Innovation Summit.

The other winners will be announced at the ERE Recruiting Conference & Expo in San Diego, where the finalists will up on stage in a perennially popular q-and-a session for the audience.

Here are those finalists in alphabetical order within the categories: keep reading…

As online communities continue to grow, there are constantly new tools available that streamline the ability to locate talent. A recruiter who understands which tools to use has an advantage over the competition when it comes to finding truly passive candidates. The secret to sourcing success for passive candidate generation is having a diverse toolbox versus searching only the most obvious venues.

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: keep reading…

The recruiting buzzwords circle in our brains: candidate experience, employer of choice, culture, employment branding, talent pools, talent communities, candidate relationships, etc.

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. keep reading…

Bob is the kind of guy people don’t look at twice. He’s described as a family man, quiet, and inoffensive. For years he got stellar performance reviews, describing him as “the best developer in the building.”

But Bob had a secret. Years ago he had outsourced his job to China. Instead of slaving away writing software code, Bob spent his day surfing the Internet. Investigators discovered what Bob was doing only because his Chinese contractors regularly logged into the company’s network. When they dug through his work computer, they discovered “hundreds of .pdf invoices from a third party contractor/developer in (you guessed it) Shenyang, China.”

As they dug deeper, the investigators reconstructed a typical Bob day: keep reading…

Last month, I wrote a post called “Recruiters: Your Days Are Numbered” for which I was lynched in the comments thread for disparaging the recruiting profession and forecasting its demise. Even Josh Bersin — a leading authority on HR — chimed in to describe the article as “a bit of a joke.” keep reading…

A new tech company launches today, aimed mainly for the recruiting needs of small and mid-sized companies. It says it has “sliced off the front-end of the recruiting firm.” That, and a new company in the mobile-phone-recruiting genre. And more, below. keep reading…

HR technology is evolving rapidly, with huge advancements in social, cloud, and mobile solutions this year. We’re excited for what 2013 will bring and how the latest technology will transform the way hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates engage with each other in the hiring process. keep reading…

One of the biggest complaints we get from college students and grads is that they need to fill out long applicant tracking system forms when applying for jobs. This becomes a bigger issue for students when they’re applying to 10-plus different employers (the norm these days) with each organization using a different system. These systems may help employers stay organized, but they also hurt the candidate experience and can even scare away good applicants.

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: keep reading…

At once swooping up two of its largest competitors, Bullhorn today became one of the largest, if not the largest, technology providers to staffing and independent recruiting firms in the world.

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. keep reading…

Of all the developments and trends in human resources, what would be at the top of your list?

Would strategic HR be there? How about outsourcing; or, should that be in-sourcing? Does employer branding and the “war for talent” belong there? And where would technology fit in, especially the trend away from so-called best-in-class components and toward integrated systems?

Not an easy call is it? Just since the start of the recession in late 2007 human resource departments, and the profession itself, has seen a remarkable shift in both function and practice. Strategic HR, a concept that began to percolate about the same time companies changed the personnel division to the HR department, got jumped into the C-suite consciousness shortly after the layoffs began. It was helped along by the angst created earlier by Keith Hammond’s wake-up call to the profession, “Why  We Hate HR.” keep reading…

(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. keep reading…

Scientist at Xerox

If you are into the use of technology to support the hiring process, read the recent Wall Street Journal article about algorithmic hiring.

It offers a very real glimpse into the future of hiring. To those companies who are looking for ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the hiring process, the value returned by the newest wave of advanced technology can be significant.

But it would be wrong to blindly accept that computers are poised to take over the hiring process from human hands.

As a traditionalist who also embraces change and loves technology, I straddle two sides of this issue. I believe in the value of algorithms and data to help optimize and automate decision-making. However, the role of humans in the hiring process cannot and should not be replaced.

The last book I read, The Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku, provided me with some really good perspective on this issue. This is a fantastic book in which the author, a physicist, uses factual scientific information to predict what we can expect in the near future.

The author discusses the future of the workforce and suggests that by midcentury (2030-2070) almost all lower-level jobs will be automated. He goes on to suggest that the types of jobs that will not be automated will be those that require “the one commodity that robots cannot deliver: common sense.”

The inability of machines to think creatively and to have intuition creates a limitation to their use and value. So, while the wealth of information available to us will be staggering, it will still take a human brain to digest it, evaluate it, and make decisions that cannot be programmed or made using algorithms.

I could not agree more with Kaku and when it comes to machines and hiring, we need to keep a sense of realism about what we can expect machines to do. More than anything we need to see them as a helpful tool to make experts better, not as a substitute for human intelligence.

Know this about hiring by algorithm: keep reading…

It’s that time of year: the start of the fall holiday season. Halloween will be here soon. Soon there’ll be skeletons, ghosts, monsters, candy being handed out, and people in weird costumes. There’s a lot of similarities with the conferences that dominate the fall. Go to any and you’ll see vendors that are skeletons of what they used to be; ghosts of vendors that have been swallowed up by others; one Monster (never more), and, of course, candy being handed out and people in weird costumes. I saw people dressed up as cows, pirates, Romans, and angels, in the expo hall at some recent conferences. Maybe it’s the silly season — this is why elections are held in the fall.

Deja Vu All Over Again keep reading…

I’m here at the HR Technology Conference in sunny but chilly Chicago. One of the best reasons to come to the HR technology show (besides the great people here, the sessions, and parties) is to talk to people and vendors about the new technologies they are working on.

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:

keep reading…