Catching up with Shally Steckerl; a survey about hiring; a mystery no longer; hiring from fraternities and sororities, and top CEOs, all in today’s roundup.
First, we have this breaking news…
Our source, which we will call PR, tells us Shally Steckerl is about to launch a new venture. It’s an online, educational site called The Sourcing Institute, which, PR tells us, is “the first ever online university fully dedicated to the discipline of sourcing.”
Frankly, if you don’t know who Steckerl is, we think you should Google his name. Shally would want you to. But briefly, he’s a sourcer, which is a little like describing Kobe Bryant as a basketball player. For years Shally has been teaching people how to find the needle in a haystack, when you have no idea where the haystack is. Now, he’s taking his expertise and developed a training program with courses for novices right on up to graduate sourcer, delivered through an online learning management system.
Check it out at The Sourcing Institute. He and his associates also offer consulting and live training, and other services.
Solving the Mystery About Mystery Applicant
A little loop-closing here — back in December, we said that “one of the world’s largest employers” was using Mystery Applicant. We now know that the company is G4S, which gets about 80,000 applicants monthly.
Greek Hiring
For those looking for fraternity and sorority members or alumni to hire, a new site called HireGreeks offers a way. You don’t have to be a frat alumni to use the site as an employer. And, right now, it’s free.
Top CEOs
From the department of burnt bridges, we have word that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, lovingly portrayed by former executive Greg Smith in the New York Times, has an 89% approval rating, down eight points from 97% last year.
This is from a Glassdoor look at the top-25 highest-rated CEOs, based on feedback shared by employees over the past year. Respondents were asked, “do you approve of the way your CEO is leading your company?”
Apple’s Tim Cook fared well (see graphic). So did Ernst & Young’s Jim Turley, Qualcomm’s Paul Jacobs, American Express’s Ken Chenault, and Google’s Larry Page.
Our Good Deed
Today being the penultimate day of March, we did our stock-taking and discovered we were one good deed short of our monthly goal of one. Fortunately, we salvaged from our Delete folder a plaintive plea from Rice University senior Melissa Sheng, who is doing her senior thesis on “how individuals with hiring capabilities evaluate candidates for top management positions.”
We resisted the temptation (part of that good deed resolution) to tell her that our readers are mostly recruiters and we’ve all wondered how those hiring decisions get made. You know how it works: You source top candidates and find four really good ones. You screen ’em to make sure they’re the genuine article; check references thoroughly; do a couple of phoners, maybe even bring them in for an in-person with you before passing them up to the hiring manager, only to find out that the fifth-place candidate — the “pretty good” one you brought in to fill out the five candidates the selection committee demanded — that candidate got the job because of the “chemistry.”
Melissa tells us: “Participants would be given a job description and information about a job candidate and then asked to assess the candidate for qualities such as leadership potential and hireability. It takes approximately 20 minutes to complete.” To help Melissa out and do your own monthly good deed, go here to take the survey.