Thankful for What We Have . . . and Have Not
I've been homeless. Not technically . I always had the ability to recreate a home over time and never knew the hopelessness of true homelessness.
Job Seekers Beware: Companies Frequently Break Reference Policies
With the national unemployment rate holding steady near 10 percent, it should come as no surprise there is a lot of competition for jobs across the country. What is perplexing, however, is how many people have bad professional references that can derail even the most qualified candidate, according to Heidi Allison, president of Allison & Taylor , the nation’s leading reference checking and employment verification firm. “People spend a lot of time working on their resume, brushing up their interview skills and networking during job searches , but many fail to select their professional references carefully,” Allison said. “We check references for clients and approximately half of our calls to former employers produce an unexpected bad reference. The bottom line is that people need to select their references more carefully.” Allison says there is a common misperception that, when contacted for a reference, former employers will only verify if a person previously worked for them and provide his or her job title
Free New ATS Debuts From Zoho
There’s a new, free, ATS in town. Launched today, Zoho Recruit is a nicely featured candidate management system that’s suitable for smaller employers and staffing agencies. It’s built by the same people who launched Zoho People, a low-cost talent management system we wrote about a while back. Like People, Zoho Recruit handles all the basics, and then some.
Economists Becoming More Optimistic On Jobs
American businesses will stop shedding jobs by the end of March, says a new report from the National Association of Business Economists . The organization’s latest outlook is even more hopeful than the one issued just a month ago. Today’s report says that the U.S. economy will grow at an annual 3.2 percent GDP , half a point higher than the NABE’s October forecast.
Metrics That Actually Mean Something
A few weeks ago John Sullivan wrote an article citing a few disturbing recruiting numbers : 70% of participants are dissatisfied with the hiring process; 46% of new hires turned over within the first year (50% for new executives); and top producers produce 40-67% more than others. Sullivan recommended a variety of solutions. One of them included better assessment tools.
Corporate Recruiters Handbook: 20+ years knowledge in 1 place for FREE
As crazy as it may seem, I really am giving this Handbook away for free. Not only does it include everything I have learn't over the last 20+ years, but it also comes with an e-mail support programme that goes into more detail on a section-by-section basis. For example, if SEO is something you want to know more about, the support programme includes various reports and webinars to take you from the initial assessment included in the Handbook to actually making the changes. So pre-order your own personal copy today at www.hirestrategies.co.uk/handbook . P.S.
Understanding the Available Social Media Recruiting Strategies – Leveraging Your Employees’ Time (Part 2 of 2)
Last week I introduced this series by stating that a majority of social recruiting initiatives currently in progress in organizations around the world would fail primarily because they relied solely on the limited resources of the recruiting function to establish visibility online, engage an audience, and service that audience throughout a multi-stage conversion cycle. This week my attention turns to why the recruiting function cannot — and should not — be the primary executor of social media activities, as well as tips for getting the rest of the organization to help out. A List of Reasons Why Recruiters Can’t or Shouldn’t Do It All There are a variety reasons why recruiters shouldn’t be expected to handle most of the day-to-day aspects of social media recruiting and communications. Some of them include: The volume is unmanageable — given the normal recruiting load, if you need as few as 10 prospects in order to generate a single hire, the total number of contacts and the number of messages that a single recruiter would need to generate a trusted social relationship would quickly become unmanageable
There's gold in them thar CV's
Linkedin are constantly adding more and more features to make search ever easier and Monster are launching the teeth gnashing Power Resume Search. Then of course we have the CV parsing technologies being added to the ATS's and before we know it, the recruiter has as many places to search as they do post. And what about the poor job seeker? What about giving them a Power Job Search? But are we missing the point. Surely half the reason for search is that recruiters have way too many CV's that are irrelevant but they can't get to the good ones that easily. Maybe if something was created for the job seeker it would help them find the right job and stop them just blasting out as many CV's as possible? Maybe not... So is the next step for Linkedin to add more and more CRM type functionality? Do we end up with the ATS being all about "post screen" and being more about shortlist to hire? Or is the ATS going to become less complex and focus purely on processing and reports? Lots of mashing and crossover of functionality in the recruitment process. Imagine trying to track all of this - makes that ROI dream even more dream like.
