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The goal of any team sport is to win. Professional sports takes this concept one step further, since winning at the game also leads to greater revenue and profitability through higher attendance. When you think of professional sports as a business,  it becomes doubly clear why the management of those teams is always looking to find ways to gain competitive advantage.

This is why it is not surprising that Big Data analytics are finding their way into the sporting arenas around the globe.

“Moneyball” made the concept of data analytics in sports famous, but other stories highlight its use as well. For example, the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association are pioneering the use of data analysis to improve the performance of its talent. Through statistical analysis, the team was able to uncover a blind spot where they did not know they were under performing. (more…)

“Just give me on thing that I can hold onto.”  –Bonnie Raitt

It bothers me that LinkedIn sells the fact that I have viewed someone’s profile to people who are willing to pay for Upgrades.

It just does.

When I joined LinkedIn years ago I didn’t expect the morphing of its Privacy Policy that has gone on over the years to the point where it resides today:

http://www.linkedin.com/legal/privacy-policy

Maintaining your trust is our top priority, so we adhere to the following principles to protect your privacy: (more…)

Demand for new accounting grads is expected to set a record this year, as CPA firms report plans to hire at least as many new accountants as they did last year, itself a banner year.

Just released by the American Institute of CPAs, its annual survey of accounting graduates and hiring says 40,350 new bachelor’s and master’s degree graduates were hired last year by CPA firms, a 22 percent over the previous year and the largest number of new grads to be hired since the AICPA has kept records. (more…)

Nothing excites organizations like another fad. The latest one happens to be a thing called “Big Data.” Big Data refers to collecting so many performance numbers that understanding them becomes difficult. Some people suggest Big Data be applied to HR, which brings me to my point. While Big Data might work for managing things and numbers, how can it apply to something few understand, let alone manage and measure … like human performance?

Human performance is A + B = C … that is, something stimulates the employee/manager (A), he/she does X or says Y (B), and the result is either good or bad (C). For example, a manager might have two problem employees (A), he/she talks to them (B), and later, everything is all better (C).

Sound simple? Sure, we can often record results (C), and sometimes we can even record the problem (A), but what the heck happened in the middle? Shouting? Warning? Exploring differences? Coffee chats? Bribery? Threats? Blackmail? Extortion? Something else? (more…)

It may not be fair; it’s certainly not nice, and it could even be illegal, but for all that, chunkiness is likely costing you candidates who could be perfect for the job.

That physical attributes influence a person’s career is hardly a new revelation; studies linking weigh, especially obesity, to fewer promotions and lower pay have circulated for years. Other studies have shown that attractive women can face discrimination in hiring, especially if the hiring manager is a woman.

More recently, a study involving human resource professionals demonstrated that even this group, which you might expect would know better, is biased against chubbiness. (more…)

Always in motion is the future. — Yoda, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

If Facebook is the social lounge, then LinkedIn is the post-conference after party. It has disrupted the recruitment profession in the way recruiters perform their work. It’s one of the more valuable sourcing tools in the toolkit (see graphic). It’s not the only but currently the most important. (more…)

Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the witty comedy The Internship starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. I went to this movie to experience the dynamic duo from the Wedding Crashers again, but I discovered the movie paralleled an important aspect of my job as a recruiter and university recruiting subject matter expert.

When the general population hears the word “intern,” they often think of the 21-year-old you recruit to file your papers, get your coffee, and complete those other tedious tasks you’d rather not spend your time doing. While this stereotypical view of internships has evolved, there are still internship programs in need of revamping. And The Internship provided some fresh ideas about how to do that. (more…)

How to develop a recruiter scorecard for assessing individual corporate recruiter performance

Champions insist that you keep score. If you understand that concept, you will ensure that in addition to function-wide metrics, you will supplement them with a scorecard for assessing the performance of each individual recruiter. Everyone knows that corporations are measurement crazy, so I have found that by not measuring something (in this case recruiters), you are inadvertently sending a message to executives and employees that whatever you are doing is not strategic or even important (because if it was, we would measure it).

So unless you want to purposely send a message that “having top performing recruiters doesn’t matter,” you have no choice but to develop an individual recruiter scorecard. In order to do that effectively, you first need to understand the foundation design principles for individual scorecards and then you must select the actual measures that you will use in your scorecard. In part one, I introduced the concept and provided three examples of what a scorecard might look like. In this part two, I will cover the design details and a list of the measure to consider for your scorecard. (more…)

CodeEval (part of HireVue), is launching a series of challenges on the 101 Freeway this summer, a very popular Northern California commuting route for technology employees.

The first billboard launches near the San Francisco airport today, and involves a commuting-related puzzle. The billboards point you online, where you have to find the shortest distance between a set of startup companies in San Francisco.

There’s a not-so-subtle message at work here: (more…)

Unpaid internships have been a dicey proposition for employers for almost as long as the Fair Labor Standards Act has been on the books.

For the first several decades since Congress adopted the law in 1938, the disputes were largely about employer training and apprenticeship programs and whether those trainees who weren’t paid were employees. If they were, they had to be paid and they were subject to other wage and hour rules.

These days, the issues almost all are about corporate internship programs, and whether the college students — and recent alums — have to be paid. If your company pays, even if it’s just minimum wage, you have nothing to fear from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.

For everyone else — and that’s a fairly significant one-third of all internships – this week’s decision against movie company Fox Searchlight should give you reason to evaluate the nature of your program and how it is actually being administered by supervisors.

It’s all well and good to declare in your internship materials that you provide training, hands-on experience doing real work, regular evaluations, and the like. But if the interns’ direct supervisors turn them into mere gophers, provide little or no training, and have them fill-in for regular employees who leave, you have a potential lawsuit in the works, even if the students say nothing. (more…)

CACI, the contractor in the U.S. that won the recruiting-department-of-the-year award in 2012 and was a finalist in 2013, launched a mobile app today for job-seekers.

CACI’s vendor of choice is AllTheTopBananas, a British company that has done work for Sodexo as well as some other high-profile companies.

AllTheTopBananas will announce some other big U.S launches soon.

As for CACI, you can use the app to join the “talent community,” check out CACI on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and search for jobs. Once you find a job you like, you don’t apply from your cell phone; you either save the listing, email it, or share it.

That not-so-subtly large graphic at right is just as large when you land on the lululemon careers site.

Yes, the company is hiring an CEO, but unlike many other job ads, this one you’ll actually remember. (more…)

The War for new-grad talent has never been fiercer. More and more companies are turning to universities as their main pipeline to build up their workforce of amazing engineers, designers, and quants. However, many companies who haven’t been active in campus recruiting for the past few years may be surprised to find that the game has dramatically changed.

Remember when you thought pizza and soda at an information session was enough? Now, it’s pizza and soda delivered to your dorm room during finals week with a personalized “good luck” note and invitation to interview. More than ever, companies are adapting to, and even embracing gen Y values in their recruiting processes to sign the best students from top-tier schools.

Jane Graybeal wrote a great piece titled “Valuing the So-Called Me Me Me Generation”,  summarizing three key ideas around gen Y. While some companies may work against these “me me me” values, a handful have worked with them to get some of their best hires. Let’s take the three concepts that Graybeal summarized and apply them on a more practical level — specifically on how university recruiting programs are staying competitive on campus: (more…)

With all due respect to Lou Adler, the world now knows how to discover his “hidden job market.”

Call the NSA. Skip the networking with the hoi polloi and just cozy up to a spy who works IT for the agency.

As we all now know, the National Security Agency is tapped into every phone call and every email we all send and receive. (Which explains why those Nigerian businessmen and royalty have so much trouble getting their millions out of the country. But that’s another story.)

So who better to know who’s hiring, what the jobs are, and how to get directly to the hiring manager than one of the agency’s network admins? (more…)

With all of the buzz about social media recruiting, there may be an even better way to reel in top talent — creating quality content through a company infographic. (more…)

A study by Deloitte estimates that companies will spend more than $4 billion annually on talent management technology this year. Because the HR technology industry is …

• Dominated by a handful of large players such as Taleo/Oracle, Kenexa/IBM, and Success Factors/SAP
• Also heavily represented by hundreds of smaller specialty tech companies who are agile and focused on growth, most of whom have been in business less than 10 years
• And changing rapidly changing in response to technological innovations (such as mobile computing and the cloud) as well as evolving reporting/compliance requirements

… buying decisions can be extremely complex.

At talentRISE, we are all too often contacted by clients who have made a less-than-optimal technology purchasing decision and are now seeking a post-purchase “fix.”  So, in this post, we want to share a few “lessons learned” to help others seeking to replace or upgrade current systems — whether an ATS, a comprehensive talent management system, or an HR Management System make the best buying decision possible and avoid buyers’ remorse.   (more…)

The vast majority of job interview advice is directed at interviewees. We all know, however, that it takes two to tango. Both parties are important. Despite that self-evident principle, interviewers are relatively neglected, and that neglect can by no means be attributed to the great skills they universally employ.

It’s equally obvious that every organization has an interest in making every interview as productive as possible. There are obstacles, however. One difficulty is that there are few reliable guidelines, especially if reliability entails the correlation of interview variables with job performance. Sometimes, that difficulty becomes an excuse: Since the interview is more art than science, we may as well accept its imperfections and settle for a “good-enough” result.

Instead of giving in to that state of mind, it’s at least worth remembering some of the basic principles that help the interviewer do a better job. (more…)

With the addition of 25,600 temp workers to the nation’s payroll in May, there are now more workers employed as temps than at any time since before the start of the 21st century.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that on a seasonally adjusted basis some 2,679,800 people were employed as temporary workers in the U.S. last month. In the last year, the temp sector has averaged 15,500 new hires a month. Since the recession ended in June 2009, the average is just over 16,000 a month.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, temp workers numbered 2,659,300 in May, not far off from the record 2,767,300 temps working in October 2006. (more…)

INHABITANTS WANTED: Mars One, the Dutch-based, nonprofit space travel organization, is recruiting a few brave men and women to colonize the red planet.

I’m a skeptic of the Mars One mission. In fact, I think Mars One’s interplanetary initiative is based on more nonsense than facts — a publicity stunt at best (or worse, a Ponzi scheme.) Will Mars One explorers ever get off the ground, given the scope of this unprecedented scientific and technological undertaking? I doubt it.

Still, as a staffing professional, I am astonished by the early success of Mars One’s astronaut recruitment efforts. Believe it or not, nearly 80,000 video applicants have paid up to $75 for a chance to explore the heavens. While many question the motives of this so-called boundary-pushing space mission, employers can’t deny that Mars One’s unique recruitment process provides some fascinating takeaways. (more…)

A new contest for the best recruitment advertising in 2013 comes with a twist: the ad being submitted has to focus on hiring women. (more…)