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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. (more…)

Building a house, a building, or a department all starts out with a plan. Many of us, however, don’t heed those textbook ideas of how we should start. Rather, we jump in and try to steer the ship while it is moving and frankly don’t know where it is going. As many have heard the adage, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

A recruitment plan starts out with an agreed-upon strategic vision of what a corporate recruiting department is to accomplish. This must be a consensus of the immediate management chain as well as the people on the top floor. It has to start out with both a forecast of intended hires in a given time frame (a people budget) as well as an overall concept of operations … also known as just how are we going to accomplish our people budget and ultimately drive the operational budget which supports the execution of the concept of operations.

A “people budget” is just that: a budget. We all know that budgets are guidelines that become fluid depending on changes in the business. After all, all business is dynamic and things do change. Development of a “people budget” should be an ongoing activity of the recruitment department, perhaps polling divisions, departments, etc. to provide you with not only an anticipated number of potential new hires in the next three to six months but also a general breakdown of skill sets that you envision hiring.

Your departments will resist this exercise. (more…)

Hiring is slowing from last year, and the trend is predicted to continue at least through the rest of the first half of the year, says a new report from CareerBuilder.

The job board’s quarterly employment forecast says the U.S. should expect somewhat slower hiring through the end of June than it saw for the same period last year. That comes on the heels of a first quarter that was slightly better than what CareerBuilder’s survey foresaw three months ago, but which was still down from 2012. (more…)

ADP says the U.S. economy added 158,000 private sector jobs in March, an estimate well below what economists were expecting, and a drop of almost 80,000 from the revised February number. It’s the smallest job growth reported by the HR services and payroll processing company since October.

Surveys of labor economists done before today’s report was released showed they were optimistic about March’s job growth. Bloomberg’s survey put the average prediction of 39 economists at 200,000.  USA Today estimated 215,000.

However, no growth in construction jobs and a big slowdown in hiring since February in the trade, transportation, and utilities sectors kept job growth below the last few months, and just barely above the average of 152,000 for the last 12 months, as reported by ADP and its report partner, Moody’s Analytics. (more…)

Nowadays, just about everyone is plugged into Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These social channels have opened up a completely new way for recruiters and companies to find skilled candidates for job openings across a range of fields. Beyond those three leading platforms, recruiters have also seen an influx of new social recruiting tools, like Jobs2Web. These new developments provide substantial evidence that recruiters and organizations are searching for innovative ways to source candidates through new and existing social media networks.

It’s interesting, then, that despite this clear ambition to make the most of available social recruiting channels, recruiters and organizations continue to underuse one prominent social network, Google+.

(more…)

Glassdoor’s competitive analytics isn’t the only recent launch or update in the world of recruiting and human resources technology. There are quite a few new companies and products — or just ones you may not have heard of.

That’s particularly true in the hot social media/employee referral startup world. Some you may not know of: (more…)

Selecting a pre-hire assessment vendor is not always easy, but doing it right can make a huge difference.

I’ve written about this subject before, as has my fellow I/O psychologist and ERE author Dr. Wendell Williams, and I’ll be doing a webcast with ERE on this very topic soon. I’m going to give you selection tips in a minute.

First, three major reasons why the vendor selection process can be so hard. (more…)

I hear from talent acquisition leaders that they want a seat at the table. I ask: “What does that mean to you?”

For an individual recruiter, it’s building trust with your hiring managers. For a recruiting manager, it’s building trust and showing progress on hiring needs with multiple hiring managers.  For the leader, it’s driving quality of hire, building relationships with leaders, enhancing the brand, globalizing hiring if required, managing a large budget,  driving productivity outcomes with the teams they manage, and delivering on hiring goals set out by the company at all levels especially the executive level. Any talent acquition strategy has to be aligned to these company goals and directly to the HR vision.

HR has to build bridges with their finance leaders and with those who influence strategy. For this to happen, talent acquisition has to be the bridge with its HR leaders to be the subject matter expert in hiring practices; specifically, hiring practices that help reduce short-term attrition. (more…)

We’re all familiar with the funny image that goes by various names, but is basically “Social media explained with donuts.” As a reminder, the full list is here.

Companies, including my own, use the “Donut List” to simplify the major social sites to novices. But as these sites add features and move to our mobile devices, the differences aren’t all that clear. (more…)

If it’s not already too late, don’t pull that April Fools prank before you read this. Considering what USA Today has to say about office pranks, you may want to just forget the whole thing.

“Career advisers,” says the newspaper, “recommend that pranksters keep the jokes at home.” A few years ago, notes the article in today’s edition, a survey of marketing and advertising agency executives found these creative types harrumphing at office pranks. “Not at all appropriate,” responded 41% of them.

Donna Farrugia, executive director of specialty staffing firm The Creative Group., which sponsored the survey, warned that, “April Fools’ jokes often have a target, too, which can make them hard to pull off without hurting someone’s feelings.” (more…)

If you’re not getting exceptional hires, it may be because your traditional interview process is simply not designed to excite them. Instead of dwelling on the past, a superior alternative is to ask them to solve real problems, and to demonstrate that they are forward-looking and that they have solutions for the future. Top candidates routinely dislike standard interviews because they find them tedious and predictable. Most interviews are simply not designed to allow a top candidate to show off their capabilities, ideas, and innovativeness. As a result, if you are recruiting for a mission-critical job that requires an exceptional hire, you simply cannot afford to bore top candidates with standard interview questions.

Everyone who has done any reading about interview accuracy already knows that they are typically one of the weakest assessment devices for hiring. In fact my own research has uncovered no less than 50 different problems with standard interviews and more than 50 different alternatives to standard interviews. One of the weaknesses is that the interview questions that are typically used focus on historical situations that occurred at another firm. But what you need to know is how this individual will perform now at your firm. That requires getting them to demonstrate how they will solve the problems that they will face in your job. Most typical questions have already been anticipated and practiced for by the interviewee to the point that their answers are not authentic. So if you’re going to interview top professionals, here are 12 questions to select from that I have found will quickly reveal which one of your exceptional applicants is the very best.

Employer branding videos are beginning to pop up with greater regularity on corporate websites as companies strive to attract top talent.

But what separates the good ones from the pack?

You don’t need to spend a gazillion dollars and bring in a team from Hollywood.

Here’s a simple formula for success: (more…)

Maybe it’s the season, Passover, Easter, the Spring equinox. You know that whole rebirth, cycle of life thing. Whatever it is, something got BusinessInsider into taking the lipstick off the pig and showing the warts of life on Wall Street.

In 23 frames that no banking recruiter will ever show a candidate, BusinessInsider lists the kinds of Wall Street hell that would make even Dante reconsider whether he should have added a tenth circle. In its own version of “abandon all hope,” BusinessInsider inscribes its entry to the frames: “Click to see how working on the Street ruins your life.” (more…)

If you aren’t already using video for interviewing, what are you waiting for?

More and more employers all the time are finding that conducting at least an initial, live interview can save them both money and time, and can give them a better sense of their candidates than even an in-depth phone screen.

The heaviest users of live video interviews are the biggest employers; 80% of those with more than 10,000 workers have used or use video interviews. But even employers as small as 100 workers are giving it a try.

A GreenJobInterview survey of corporate leaders, most of them in HR, found that nearly half of all employers with fewer than 100 workers have conducted a video interview. And almost six out of 10 employers with 1,000 to 5,000 employees use remote video interviews.

This isn’t one of those shiny new object trends. Unlike the video resume, the use of video interviews is steadily growing as the technology has become both more affordable and easier to use.

(more…)

On the verge of leaving the recruiting calling …

I am a second-generation recruit who knew he wanted to be a recruiter. In junior high I’d go to my dad’s office and stuff envelopes of candidates to prospective clients and help rewrite resumes. I went to school and studied HR management and organizational development. After a stint in social work to give back and learn more about how people ticked, I went into recruiting.

I have started departments, trained recruiters and managers on targeted interviewing, and worked for some of the top firms in life sciences and finance — making them able to compete in a global economy.

I have had the privilege to study sourcing from Shally Steckerl and to debate Lou Adler on the art of recruiting. And I read articles each day on the profession of recruiting.

So, I am stunned to say I am done. (more…)

We just updated our Recruiter Circle of Excellence Competency Model to take into account the expected surge in hiring in Q2 and Q3. There was also an interesting story by the co-founder of Meebo who concluded that most recruiters are pretty bad. Her big points: recruiters are afraid to pick up the phone and call, they don’t know the job so they sell smoke and mirrors, and most just post boring jobs or search through LinkedIn. It was a pretty scathing summary. This approach might work when you’re trying to hire the 15% of fully-employed who are looking, but totally useless when trying to hire the 85% of candidates who are passive, even the bad ones!

So as part of updating the competency model to take this 85% into account, I decided to revisit my old virtual mentor, Stephen Covey, for some inspiration. You might find the results interesting. (more…)

The majority of job descriptions are a waste of space. Potential candidates read job titles, look at the renumeration, the location, and then many throw their resume out hoping it will stick. Most simply do not read all that text between the job title and the apply button. So is it time to rethink the job description? What is wrong with the job description? Why is it ignored by so many?  (more…)

Remember the Yugo? Yugos were cars built in the old Yugoslavia, in the 1980s. They were sold solely based on their low price. More than 100,000 cars were sold in an eight-year span, but their poor quality and service resulted in zero buyer retention.

When it comes to hiring talent, most companies place too much emphasis on compensation competitiveness and not enough on their cultural brand. They may have flashy careers websites and other candidate attraction materials, but these are generic and not reflective of the company’s unique culture.

In this article I will give you tips on how to make your company more competitive by taking the vital first step of identifying your culture. Only after this step will you be able to successfully attract candidates who will fit your values and be successful in their roles. Without it, you will be stuck in the Yugo Trap, continuing to hire mismatched candidates leading to poor retention. (more…)

Entrepreneurship has been described as taking a blank piece of paper, with all its uncertainty, and then developing it into a work of art. Recruiting is more of an art than a science. All the processes in the world cannot stop Joe Candidate from cancelling his interview with you five minutes before it was scheduled. Rigid procedures cannot prevent Jane Employee from not showing up to work the first day. Because of this uncertainty, flexibility and creativity are huge factors for success in the recruiting industry. The other day, I asked one of my staff members, Matt Greenburg, to write a recommendation for me. Here’s what he said:

“Jenny is a new wave entrepreneurial management type who is hell bent on macro- and micro- growth and development. Working under Jenny was a decision essential for my growth both professionally and personally. Jenny’s management style brings out the best and highest qualities of her team.”

The key words here are growth and development. With the new Generation Y workforce, we cannot ignore their values, which are different from that of their predecessors. In surveying a number of Gen Y recruiters in Silicon Valley, what they believe to be a successful work environment are: (more…)

A new site from the Labor Department in the U.S. bills itself as a one-stop shop for “hiring, training, and retraining a strong workforce.”

There’s a not a ton new here, and some of it’s a bit basic. But it’s also a pretty handy collection of links, on everything from tax credits, as well as on hiring veterans, people with disabilities, foreign nationals, and ex-offenders.

You’ll also find information on the hiring process, like some illegal interview questions, for example.

The main page is here.