Archive for July, 2008
3 FREE Recruiting Webinars in August
Posted by JasonBy Jason Buss.
I came across 3 free recruiting webinars I wanted to share, that run over the next several weeks.
Indeed and Jobvite Present “Get The Most Out of Your Sourcing Investments”
Wednesday, August 6, 2:00-3:00 p.m. Eastern time
Click here to register
LinkedIn Webinar for Recruiters and Sourcers
Thursday, August 7, 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern time
Click here to register
Pay-per-click Recruitment Advertising on Indeed.com
Wednesday, August 27, 3:00-4:00 p.m. Eastern time
Click here to register
It’s a bad day (and week) for newspapers.
Will Craigslist begin charging for job postings in more cities?
Congratulations to iCIMS’ CEO, Colin Day, for being named a “Forty Under 40” Award Winner.
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Announcing the RecruitingBlogs.com RecruitFest!
Posted by JasonBy Jason Buss.
After spending time with Jason Davis last week in Minneapolis, I can tell you that you will want to be 1 of the 80 participants at the RecruitingBlogs.com RecruitFest in September.
Sessions will include industry thought leaders such as Susan Burns, Craig Silverman, John Sumser, and Dennis Smith to name a few.
In addition to the great content, who could turn down a drumming circle or charity poker event.
Click here for the full details and registration information. Again, this is limited to 80 participants.
In a web 2.0 world and in a competitive market, we all know engaging leads and potential candidates is key. Having a job title of “Manager Human Resources - Pest Control” maybe OK for the business card, but probably not necessary for the online posting.
Guess what, boomers? Generation Y thinks you’re kinda inept. At tech-related things, that is. Check out Gen Y to boomers: You stink at Interweb
Yes you can – Join the Web 2.0 revolution – Twelve steps to get up to speed with Web 2.0
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Recruiting Top Talent - The Scopings Way
Posted by JasonIt would be great if attracting top talent to your company was a simple process - get prospective applicants excited about the benefits of working for your company, then offer them a private and effortless way to figure out whether the position is the right one for them to pursue.
In reality, however, attracting talent to your company or, on the opposite side, landing a new career opportunity, is quite frequently a very time consuming and frustrating experience.
Scopings, an innovative online recruiting service, has introduced a radical new way for professionals to find and explore career opportunities, using an intuitive “matching” technology. Professionals can find positions in a very private and targeted way without revealing their identities and without a resume, and for the first time can safely remain active in the job market on an ongoing basis.
Finding a position that one might want to pursue marks only the beginning of this exciting new service. Professionals using Scopings can anonymously request additional information from hiring managers before deciding to pursue a position further, and consequently, they only go after the few best-fit positions. Employers, on the other hand, can learn more about what excites these professionals and can effectively entice them to take the first step and apply.
Scopings’ innovation extends to its hiring process as well. Applicants start the hiring process anonymously and without a resume, and employers use an innovative online interviewing process to ask and collect the very specific information they need from applicants. This information is automatically analyzed, and employers are presented with only the few best-fit applicants to interview, all without reviewing one resume or conducting one interview.
It is quite challenging to reach out and recruit top talent, but the Scopings approach goes a long way to transform the way employers and professionals find one another and interact, resulting in a service that is applicant and employer-friendly, private, and extremely effective in meeting the hiring needs of employers and professionals alike.
What is Scopings all about?
Hiring top talent is difficult at best. They are busy with other things, serious about their privacy, and don’t want to devote time and effort just for the slim chance of landing the right opportunity. Scopings is all about changing that.
By treating each candidate like a future colleague, Scopings helps you engage more candidates with your current recruiting sources and reach out beyond just the most active job seekers. And that’s just the start.
How do we help?
Scopings offers professionals, working professionals in particular, a simpler way to explore new opportunities, and allows them to start the application process without revealing their identity and without submitting a résumé. By making your company more accessible and your positions truly applicant-friendly you’ll entice more candidates to take the first step who ordinarily wouldn’t.
The last thing you and your candidates need is to spend time interviewing just to find out that a candidate is not interested, not qualified, or over-qualified for the position you are looking to fill. Scopings helps you scope down your pool of candidates so that you can identify the candidates who are best fit for the role.
Scopings works with all of your existing recruiting sources helping you to engage more candidates and measure the quality of each source (not just the quantity). Our growing pool of passive candidates are automatically notified and our team helps to market your position. We’re driven to do everything we can to help you find your next colleague- our success is tied to yours.
Visit Scopings.com for more information.
By Jason Buss.
A Career Site Conversation with Benjamin Yoskovitz, CEO & Co-Founder of Standout Jobs.
Jason: Please introduce yourself for The Talent Buzz readers.
Ben: I’m currently the CEO & Co-Founder of Standout Jobs, which started in 2007 and launched at the end of January 2008. Prior to that I was the co-founder of another web software company, which I had started in 1996. As a software entrepreneur I’ve touched on every aspect of starting and running a business - financing, operations, recruiting, sales, marketing, product development, customer service, etc. I enjoy all of them, although I get especially excited about product development and customer service. These are areas that I’ve focused on in my career as an entrepreneur.
I have a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from McGill University - and started my first company (1996) while I was still in school finishing the degree.
I’m all neck-deep in the world of social media, blogging and social media marketing. I write a blog on startups and business called Instigator Blog (http://www.instigatorblog.com), and have done consulting work for numerous small and large companies on social media strategy.
On a personal note, I’m the father of two young boys (3 and a half and 14 months), and I’ve been happily married for 7 years. I live in Montreal, Canada.
Jason: How do you think career sites have evolved over the past 3-5 years?
Ben: From my own perspective, as the owner of a small company (prior to Standout Jobs) I don’t think career sites were even on my radar. Certainly they existed, but I think they looked / acted much the same way as they do now; they’re static, uninspiring and provide a very poor candidate experience.
Over 5+ years we’ve certainly seen significant evolution of corporate websites. They’re getting better designed, faster, and more streamlined. They’re targeting prospects better, and many companies do much deeper analytical research into visitors’ behavior. But little of that has translated effectively to career sites, at least for smaller and medium-sized businesses.
Jason: What are some of the biggest challenges with career sites today from your perspective?
Ben: I’ve mentioned some of them above - but I think the crux of the issue is that HR isn’t given the real estate or flexibility to do what it needs to on its career website to attract the right audience and keep them engaged. Corporate sites are dominated by Marketing/Sales - which is understandable; HR’s biggest challenge is being able to translate the Marketing/Sales-driven approach to corporate websites to their career websites. And, I would encourage companies (of all sizes) to give more prominent real estate on corporate sites to recruiting. Every single website should have a “WE ARE HIRING” sign right on the home page, because it works.
Beyond the “who rules the corporate website” situation, I think the next biggest issue is the quality of career sites to provide a great experience to job seekers, interaction and engagement. Currently, most career sites allow you to apply and do nothing else. But you can be sure there’s plenty of people who are “window shopping”, interested in engaging with the company but not ready to apply. Many of those people aren’t being supported effectively.
Jason: With all of the changes in technology, why do you think there have been few improvements in the overall engagement and experience for candidates?
Ben: There’s a lot of technology out there. There are even more buzzwords. That in and of itself is a big part of the problem. I’d say the next issue is that none of the technology, or solutions out there to-date are recruiting-centric. Yes, you can use an existing platform or existing technology to put something together and start to provide candidates with a better experience, but there’s a learning curve, you need to potentially get I.T. involved, and it’s downright overwhelming.
I think we’re starting to see newer technology that leverages some of the newer principles of how to use the Web (blogging, social networking, social media, etc.) targeted to HR, and if that’s done successfully, with easy-to-use tools that don’t require huge cost or time investments on the part of companies, things will change.
Jason: What do you see as the top 2-3 areas of improvement with online recruiting?
Ben: The overarching issue with online recruiting is that it’s not built around active communication between employers and candidates (and prospective candidates). Online recruiting isn’t built to representative how people interact. It’s evolved into a much more transactional model, which has its merits, and you can understand in the early days of the Web why things went in that direction. But times have changed online, and they’ll continue to change at a very quick pace; online recruiting hasn’t caught up, and while I don’t go starry eyed into the night with dreams of “social networking for jobs” or assuming that every Web 2.0 concept is perfectly suited for recruiting, the fact is that online recruiting has to become more conversational and open, and less process-driven.
Jason: When did V1 launch? What upcoming changes are being made with the V2 Standout Jobs product? When will they be available?
Ben: We launched the product at the end of January, 2008. Since that time we’ve made numerous improvements - iteratively adding features, fixing others - and generally responding to our clients’ needs and following our product roadmap. As for V2, who said anything about V2? *chuckle*
What we’ve built to-date is a good platform for allowing HR to quickly and easily create a branded career site. We’ve started opening the doors for more communication of a company’s culture, and more interaction between companies and people. There’s definitely room for more, ultimately to fulfill on the goals of helping company’s representative themselves more effectively and communicate more actively with candidates (prospective or already in the pipeline.) I can say this - we move very quickly - it’s what makes a startup so exciting, the ability to iterate quickly, launch new things fast, test the market and get feedback. I can’t promise dates for anything new, but you can expect lots of news in the next few months.
Jason: How can our readers, Recruiters, HR professionals, and businesses contact you.
Benjamin Yoskovitz
CEO & Co-Founder
tel: 514.582.4749
email: ben@standoutjobs.com
website: http://www.standoutjobs.com
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Recruiting, Social Media, and Friends. Twitter Rocks!
Posted by JasonFrom Jason Buss (@jjbuss).
What all started with my first tweet - has continued to evolve into something so much more than answering that simple question - “what are you doing”?
After talking with a good friend earlier this year (@seerysm) about twitter, I decided to give it a try. So I started with a few followers, continued tweeting, networking, and talking with many great people. I even posted a few stories on my blog about twitter, including:
- 6 Benefits of Using Twitter as a News, Networking, and Marketing Tool
- Twitter vs. Plurk: What the Tweeps are Saying
- Social Media and Networking: Ten Twitter Tools
Until… Last night, when I had the opportunity to meet with many thought leaders in the recruiting industry (Don Ramer, CEO & Founder of Arbita; RecruitingBlogs.com founder Jason Davis; and LinkedIn Guru and Six Degrees from Dave’s own Dave Mendoza, and The Recruiting Roadshow’s John Sumser to name a few).
Even more special than that are the stronger relationships, and new friends with those that I have interacted with online for months. A big shout out to @marenhogan, @MNHeadhunter, and @txaggie94).
Other tweeps I met: @ttierney, @jokahn, @recruitingblogs, @jphogan, and @johsumser.
A special thanks for the opportunity goes to Paul DeBettignies, Co-Founder and Coordinator of Minnesota Recruiters.
Twitter and many other social media tools have tremendous benefits. Like most things, you’ll get out of it what you put into it.
Tweet on.
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Joongel.com: Plug-in Makes Social Searching Easier
As a follow-up to my posts on Going Green With Your Career, and HR going green, I just ran across a post on How to Use Green Social Media.
Last but not least… Is Facebook a Movement or a Business?
Is it time to roll the dice?
Research and Markets: How to Prevent Damaging Employee Lawsuits: The Employer’s Practical Legal Guide About Current Employment Law
Atomkeep celebrates 1 month of service.
This Web 2.0 service allowed users to synchronize their profiles between major social networking web sites, job boards, blogs and other sites. Removing personal data redundancy on the Web, it gives an ability to modify profile information, such as name, address, and numerous other fields, and have those updates show up in all of its supported social networking and other web sites.
Once launched, total of 3 sites were supported: LinkedIn, Monster and facebook. But only one month later, Atomkeep supports now long list of 21 sites among which are popular Mixergy, Twitter, Pownce, Disqus, YouTube, Yelp and many others.
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5 Strategies to Use LinkedIn for Recruiting Talent
Posted by JasonBy Jason Buss.
LinkedIn continues to grow substantially, with record users and site visitors month over month. With over 21 million professionals worldwide representing 150 countries, LinkedIn received 9.5 million unique visitors in June. Year to date, traffic is up 77%.
While using LinkedIn as a recruiting tool is not new, I recently spent some time with a group of recruiters discussing the sites advantages, highlighting :
- Competitive intelligence, and research. LinkedIn is a great tool for researching companies. Uncheck the “current companies only, see who has left the organization, the average length of tenure, and possible trends. Think and search creatively, you may be surprised at the amount of information you can find. Since a majority of users set their profiles to public, you can also build a search string to search LinkedIn profiles using Google. It can take some creative searching, but there is a tremendous amount of information just waiting to be mined.
- Build your network with candidates. Connect with strong candidates immediately after you speak with them. There are several advantages to this, including: building a candidate community with top talent, following changes when they move or get promoted via network updates (stay connected, send a congratulatory note), you’ll see all of the names and titles in their networks.
- Pick up the phone! Your competitors and search firms are. You are wasting your time if you solely rely on the e-mail functionality. Sounds simple, but quite likely an under-utilized tactic in corporate recruiting.
- Network with Recommendations. Top performers know and network with top performers. Use recommendations on an individual’s profile to network and build leads.
- Use the “download as a PDF” tool. If you don’t have a Resume for a lead, download their profile with the PDF tool on LinkedIn. Share their profile with a Manager - are you on track? What’s missing from the profile they might be looking for in an ideal candidate? Is this lead with pursuing.
In addition to these 5, there are many other possibilities in using LinkedIn for recruiting talent. While many sites in the recruiting space have declining traffic, LinkedIn is just one tool, with many advantages including it’s growth and momentum.
Most recruiters are using it - and all have access to it. Get creative and get more out of the site than your competitors are.
Interested in building and growing your network? Connect with me, and add (bussjj (at) gmail (dot) com) as the e-mail address. And, click here to join 2,000+ HR and Recruiting Professionals on The Talent Buzz LinkedIn group.
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