ERE.net

Spam: it’s not just for breakfast any more, but what you may not realize as a recruiter is it could be keeping food off of your table.

Most recruiters are highly dependent on email. A single blocked email can result in the loss of a five-figure fee or the hiring loss of the top candidate. Blocked emails can be disastrous either from the receiving or the sending side. What most recruiters don’t realize is that blocked emails occur mostly as a result of the email recipient trying to stop spam. (And no, we’re not talking about that oh-so-yummy canned ham product!)

What Is Spam?

Here is partial definition from Wikipedia: “Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media … ”

“Spamming remains economically viable for advertisers because they have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet Service Providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.”

The effects of the spam epidemic can be felt far and wide, but are felt most acutely when important emails get blocked because someone, somewhere thinks it might be spam.

Can I Control What Email Gets Blocked as Spam?

There are multiple distinct chokepoints to consider whether you are sending or receiving email. keep reading…

There’s probably not a week (or maybe even a day) that goes by in which we don’t read about how technology will help you in your business, whether it be a smartphone, tablet, computer, social media, applications, etc. I think many of us have the need to use every type of technology out there without really knowing why or even having a real need for it. I believe it has gotten to the point that if you don’t adopt every new technology and use it in business, people think there’s something wrong with you.

Yes, technology is wonderful — when used effectively. That’s the caveat. Too many people have just jumped on this bandwagon without evaluating how, when, and why they should be using various technologies in business. It has become so pervasive that some of the tried and true methods of doing business have fallen by the wayside. Let’s look at a partial list of some of the technologies used in recruiting: keep reading…

In this last and final installment of this series we’re going to talk about how to use low and high technology appropriately to tailor your message to your audience.

One of the ideas behind technology is that it empowers us to work creatively. By blending different technologies we can democratize communication in new and surprising ways.

If you buy into the theory (and I do) that future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations, then you’re far on your way to understanding that what works for one person might never work for another.

Once again, I’m going to approach this subject from a phone sourcer’s perspective and demonstrate how I blend the use of high technology with low technology. keep reading…

Jobvite, the company that helps recruiters tap the referral power of employees’ social networks, got a $15 million injection of new capital that it will use to accelerate its already rapid growth.

Announced this morning, the Series C funding round brings to just over $30 million the company has received in investor financing since its founding in 2007.

Jobvite has been on a tear since introducing its first product, the eponymous Jobvite Hire. The first iteration of Hire sent job announcements to a company’s employees, encouraging them to pass on the notice to their qualified friends and associates. No matter how far along a Jobvite was forwarded, a recruiter always knew who the original employee was whose chain of contacts resulted in a successful referral. keep reading…

Technology is evolving at the fastest rate in recorded history, and tools relevant to recruiters are not exempt. Every day a new piece of hardware, software, or service is announced that could be used to better support world-class recruiting. Staying abreast of evolving technology is difficult but essential for any savvy recruiter hoping to stay on top of efficiency and effectiveness expectations.

Technology by itself is never a solution, but it often enables leading-edge solutions and approaches. When someone becomes aware of a new tool or service that makes an activity easier or cheaper or faster, they naturally see how that tool could work in other parts of their life even if that tool wasn’t created with those other purposes in mind. Hiring managers, candidates, and savvy recruiters forge such expectations, so failing to be aware of and address how emerging technologies could impact your recruiting operations is akin to saying “I am happy being a laggard.”

While there are numerous indicators that that you may be on your way to becoming a “technology dinosaur,” some of the more obvious are highlighted below. keep reading…

Lawson Software, provider of a wide variety of business management programs including enterprise human capital management, will be acquired by equity investor Golden Gate Capital and its business software and services firm Infor, in a deal valued at about $2 billion. The official announcement was made this morning.

Lawson’s stock, which traded as high as $12.50 a share after Golden Gate and Infor made an offer last month, dropped $1.01 following the news. It was trading at $11.11 in mid-afternoon in New York, 14 cents below the $11.25-per-share purchase price.

The company, 11 percent owned by investor Carl Icahn, shopped itself around after the offer, according to Reuters, but found no takers. keep reading…

Jody Henderson of Scottsdale Healthcare discussed the advantages of video interviewing on this week’s show. Find out how video interviewing can save you time and money and allow you to get the right hire.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Technology forces forward movement. It makes us figure out what could be more meaningful or useful for people to do. Rather than dig ditches and plow fields by hand, we have machinery that makes that work faster and safer and frees individuals up to do work that machines cannot. Rather than take work from people, technology creates new opportunities while taking on the boring, repetitive, and dangerous jobs.

Are you able to take advantage of technology to do the boring, repetitive parts of recruiting? Do you have tools that automatically schedule interviews, recommend people based on their resumes, create all the reports and documents you need? Are you able to recruit faster than before? Have you invested in systems, technology, and process improvements to lower costs and improve the speed to hire, develop, retain, or engage your employees? If not, you are clearly lagging behind those who have, and will have a tough time catching up. keep reading…

You’ve already created a careers page that’s separate from your main site. You even have a mobile site. You’re posting news and photos on your Facebook careers page and talking to applicants on your Twitter careers profile. You’ve set up your company’s Careers tab on LinkedIn and put videos of your office life on YouTube. What’s next?

Get ready to add AR to your HR. AR stands for augmented reality, an exciting new technology that will change many of our interactions with the world, including job searching. What is it? Applications that use augmented reality overlay links, images, and information onto whatever you’re viewing on your mobile device’s screen. In a way, it’s no different than the scoreboard superimposed over the live broadcast of a baseball game. But in other ways, it’s a whole lot more. keep reading…

Do you use your personal phone to access the company ATS when you’re not in the office? Or maybe just to contact that hard-to-reach hot prospect? Of course you do.

How about texting prospects from your personal phone? Or tweeting out a note to your talent community? Or downloading a spreadsheet or document to your flash drive so you can work on it over the weekend?

All of this is so routine you may be wondering why I’m even bringing it up. Well, it may be more routine than you suspect; 95 percent of information workers use at least one personally purchased device for work, according to a study by IDC/Unisys. The average number of consumer devices used for business by workers in a day? Four.

The big deal about this is that most companies haven’t caught up to what’s going on in the workplace. A 2009 study by Robert Half Technology found more than half of companies block access to one or more sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Only 19 percent allowed access for business purposes.

Remarkably, a CareerXroads survey about the same time found 35 percent of recruiters and hiring manager were blocked from social media sites. keep reading…

There are a handful of beliefs within most professions that need to be examined from time to time for validity and accuracy. The medical profession believed for years that ulcers were caused by stress and certain foods. It took a modestly qualified medical researcher in Australia to prove that they were caused by bacteria and could be cured with antibiotics. He spent fruitless years trying to persuade highly qualified, educated, and experienced peers that they were wrong. He would never have been hired by any major university or hospital.

This is but one example of the many times we accept tradition for it face value. Far better to be a bit of a skeptic and question everything that seems to be common sense or that everyone believes. keep reading…

suitability matrix

Technical screening is testing candidates in order to identify those with particular characteristics listed in a job description. This can be done in order to avoid the unnecessary cycles of presenting several candidates for interview who are rejected either because the job description was misunderstood or the candidate screening process was ineffective, or a combination of both.

I get into this more in an upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, but wanted to give you a taste of all this concept today.

During a training session with technical recruiters, we reviewed a C# Developer job description that was posted on their corporate website. The job description was seeking a mid-level developer with 1 to 2 years development (C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, and Web Services) and analytical experience, who also had experience in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

On reviewing the job description, I saw bright red flags and proceeded to explain. 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…

Sourcing master Shally Steckerl returned to our webinar series this week to demonstrate the incredible results you can get using peer regression search.

We examined finding people through image and video searches, as well as blog comments and social media interactions. At the end Shally showed off some impressive new technology.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

About that Anna Rodriguez, HR head of the fictitious Magnus Group. She was a busy lady.

Besides allegedly scamming SuccessFactors, she roamed the aisles of last fall’s HR Tech show, stopping to chat up the folks at the Sonar6 “unbooth.”

Mike Carden, Sonar6 co-founder, called from headquarters in New Zealand to say the company had a few contacts with Rodriquez, the first at the tech show in Chicago. keep reading…

With their stock price zooming today, HR software vendors Taleo and SuccessFactors have got to be enjoying Wall Street’s reaction to their 2010 financial results.

Taleo reported a small profit. SuccessFactors reported a pretty sizable loss. But both companies did better in most areas than financial analysts had expected and both predicted strong first quarters and full-year performance.

SuccessFactors estimated its current quarter would see revenue in the range of $62.5 million to $63.5 million and $265 million-$270 million for the full year. Taleo, which beat Wall Street’s 4th quarter revenue estimate of $67.3 million by just over 5 percent, also expects a strong 2011.

The company’s stock closed today at $35.01, up 16.3 percent on the day.

Kenexa, which saw its share price climb Wednesday, was down about 1 percent today, closing at $24.33. The company beat its own income prediction, coming in at $7.4 million, or half a million above its top-end estimate. It also beat its earnings per share guidance by 1 cent.

Kenexa’s 2011 estimate is for revenue in the $240 million to $248 million and per share earnings of 62 cents to 82 cents. The guidance is in the range of Wall Street’s estimates. keep reading…

This was the seventh year of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, but it was the military talent category, added for the first time, that was mentioned by more judges than any other category, as employers searched for creative ways to attract the many returnees coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

One judge (Rob Dromgoole) wrote on Facebook:

Finished voting for Recruiting Department of 2010 and Military Recruiting Program of Year 2010 for ERE. Lots of great applications. I’m humbled by how great some programs are.

And another (Gerry Crispin) emailed to say about the “military talent” category:

EVERY ONE of the Public and Private Companies and Agency firms who submitted to this category are winners. They are ALL engaged in ensuring that an underutilized but highly prized segment of our population is getting up to bat for jobs and competing for openings.

The judges took this project seriously, some showing me the spreadsheets and algorithms they created to keep track of their entries and sending me feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

As always, you’ll hear a lot more about the finalists throughout the year. At the Spring conference in San Diego, the winners will be announced, and you’ll be able to ask them how they did it, how they overcame challenges, and so on. We’ll also talk about them more on this site, in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on the ERE.net site, and we’ll ask some to speak at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (September 7-9, 2011).

This year’s finalists, in alphabetical order within each category:

keep reading…

Shares of Ultimate Software are down today following the company’s announcement that it is not looking for a buyer.

“Ultimate’s policy is not to comment on rumors and speculation. Nevertheless, Ultimate believes that investors need to be aware that Ultimate has no present intention to engage in a sale of the company.”

That terse statement was prompted by a Reuters report Wednesday saying the HR technology company had hired investment banker Lazard to shop it around. Reuters cited, but did not quote, three anonymous sources, as the basis of the report. keep reading…

Among the first advice job seekers get about conducting a job search is to enlist their contacts in the effort. Do that, job seekers are told, by connecting with everyone, especially by using their “friends,” “1st degrees,” and other social network associates.

As About.com’s employment writer Allison Doyle says, “Connect with everyone you know, because you never know which contact may be able to help you with your job search or put you in touch with someone who can.”

Sound advice, but I don’t want to take it.

Huh? keep reading…

When Chris Forman left AIRS earlier this year he told friends he intended to kick back for a while, tend to his New Hampshire farm, enjoy sugaring season, and watch the maples leaf.

Few of them thought that plan would last, joked Forman, who sold AIRS to The RightThing in 2008, staying on to run AIRS and serve as chief development officer at The RightThing. So it was no surprise to anyone that barely two months after “retiring” that Forman was scribbling ideas on a whiteboard. Not much after that he teamed up again with Tim McKegney. The two spent a dozen years together building AIRS; Forman as CEO and McKegney as EVP. keep reading…