Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Top Three Concerns of Recruiters Using Twitter (Resolved)
2. Don’t Forget Complex “Boolean strings” Just Yet
3. Indeed.com — Finally Playing with the Big Boys
4. On The Beach and Out of Home
5. Stop Looking for the Silver Bullet
6. Why Won’t You Hire Me? Part 3 – It’s a Gamble

1. Top Three Concerns of Recruiters Using Twitter (Resolved)

Ali Webster posts an interesting piece on the common concerns among recruiters using Twitter. She says, “A few weeks ago, I held a roundtable discussion with recruiters on their opinions of and experience with social media sites. Mentioning LinkedIn elicited a positive response and Facebook stimulated a robust discussion about balancing their personal and professional lives. When I brought up Twitter, one of the recruiters responded “eh…” and another shrugged her shoulders (sigh).”

Read through to see her top three concerns and how she resolves them.

2. Don’t Forget Complex “Boolean Strings” Just Yet

Irina Shamaeva posts an interesting discussion about complex Boolean strings. She writes, “I saw this on Twitter today: @shally Forget complex “Boolean strings” and check out this simple and highly effective new LinkedIn Search Technique: http://j.mp/b28XIH”

“It sounded interesting, so I read the new Shally’s article. It suggests to forget complex “Boolean strings.” In the case of LinkedIn searches we can do a simple search for  “Public profile powered by” instead of the usual URL-elimination techniques, it says. I was curious and tried to put this to work.”

Check out the comments for some good tips on using search techniques to uncover possible candidates.

3. Indeed.com — Finally Playing with the Big Boys

Matt Peter writes about some of the tremendous growth Indeed.com has experienced. He says, “Latest news from internet traffic rating sites shows that Indeed.com has joined the ranks of the major locations job candidates go to start the searches. Now surpassing Monster and on the heels of Careerbuilder, it’s clear that the Job Search Aggregator is gaining more traction.”

What do you think about this change? Is Indeed going to become the top dog in traffic?

4. On The Beach and Out of Home

Jodi Ordioni says that out of home (or OOH) advertising is picking up some fans. She writes, “According to the NY Times last Friday, Madison Avenue is having an out-of-home experience. ‘The ardor to reach consumers outside the home — and outside the realm of traditional media like television — continues to grow among marketers. They hope to fight back against technologies like digital video recorders, which make it easier to avoid conventional advertisements like commercials.’”

How are you using OOH techniques to reach potential candidates?

5. Stop Looking for the Silver Bullet

Russ Moon writes that we need to stop looking for silver bullets. He says, “People always want to know how to progress the fastest, here is one of the secrets.  Define your fundamentals and place the bulk of your training time on those skills, not sure what the fundamentals are….it would be worthwhile to ask someone you respect or perform your own research.”

What do you think? Are fundamental skills what separate the good from great?

6. Why Won’t You Hire Me? Part 3 — It’s a Gamble

The last word comes from Amanda Liimatainen who posts about a situation she encountered when she was in HR. She writes, “I was a Human Resources Representative at a large healthcare organization. I was responsible for hiring skilled services staff as well as entry level clerical positions. This was several years ago when everything was a paper process. I had hired a housekeeper, we’ll call her Ms. Gamble. She was doing well in her job and applied for a position in Patient Registration; however, she didn’t meet the requirements for the position. I could have written on her transfer request that she was not qualified for the position or that another candidate was selected. Instead, I took a few extra minutes to list what she needed to obtain a position in that area. She did not have a high school diploma or GED, which was the bare minimum requirement for the position. I suggested that she utilize the hospital resource center to help her obtain her GED and also take some medical terminology courses that we offered to our employees at no cost.”

“Less than a year later, Ms. Gamble applied for a transfer to Centralized Scheduling. She had followed my advice, obtained her GED, took a medical terminology course and was ultimately selected for that position because of all the effort she put in to obtaining the qualifications. The few minutes that I took to offer her feedback made a difference in her career and her family’s income.”

What are you doing to improve the lives of your employees? Can you think of examples when you’ve helped someone move up?

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

One of our goals with the new community is to reach out to the entire recruiting profession to participate in our conversation, not just those who visit the website each day. (Don’t worry — we’ll always love you best!) To that end, we’ve opened up the conversations on ERE.net in a couple of new ways.

Email

We received a lot of pushback from the community about our decision to do away with the email group discussion digests with the full text of each post in the group.  We originally did this because we were trying to cut down on the volume of emails that you receive from ERE.net, but doing away with it altogether was a mistake.

The team here has created a new email digest that I think will meet both goals. It has a personalized email with the full text of all the groups and discussions that you are following, and at the same time you’ll have fewer emails cluttering your in-box. In fact, it looks a lot like the digest that we had before we made the big change! Of course, if you prefer the new emails with just the synopsis, you can still get that.

To sign up for the new email digest, you need to click on the “manage” link at the top right of the ERE.net website (make sure you are logged in).

On your manage account page, just scroll down to the “Newsletter Subscription” section of the page, and check the box next to “ERE Discussion Digest.” After you check that box, you can choose to receive the “personalized” version (only messages from discussions you’re following or from groups you’re a member of) or the “all messages” version. Be sure to click the “change subscription settings” button when you are done!

Twitter

There are more recruiters every day who are active on both ERE.net and Twitter (and so am I), so I’m excited that we can now link those accounts and automatically let our Twitter followers know when we post to the ERE.net community!

To set this up, you must have a Twitter account! If you do, go to the ERE Community, click “Settings”, and then “Broadcast”.

Now check the box to enable the Twitter connection, save your changes, and finally click on the authorize link.

Here’s an example of how it looks – my status update on ERE about this post!

Give the new options a try, and let me know in the comments (or on Twitter!) what you think!