Recruiters World

Celebrating 5th year of RecruitersWorld Blog :)

2012-01-02T06:17:00.000-08:00

Hi All ,

Wishing you a Happy and Great New Year 2012..

Thanks for the support and guidance given for this blog running for this 5th year , it is all you,recruiter community support , i never would have thought it has helped so many recruiters , what i shared is just a small drop hope that somebody who excels in recruitment is a big success to this recruiter blog

I should thank people who have been giving advice on mentioning about copyrights where i shared details from the web on certain details which are not my own stuff even im dumb recruiter myself trying to learn myself everyday even some people notificed me as well through mails how dumb i m ,thanks again for showing me about it ,will learn and grow from where i did some errors/mistakes ,still a long way to go

My heartiest thanks to all of you in supporting this blog .Please do share some more info as im nowadays less of stock if some one shares i will put in this blog mentioning concern person name so he/she gets acknowledged ....

No better word to say from my bottom of my heart again a BIG THANKS TO YOU ALL

Regards

Balaji Govindarajan

How to identify Good job boards?

2011-08-20T21:46:00.000-07:00

Today when i was doing google search on word"Job Board" i was able to search results of different job boards on general and specific boards meeting the needs of industry,while this i was thinking backwards 10 yrs ago the job boards are few and costly and we always want to utilize the job posting effectively because every posting cost a dime and my boss looks red face when he doesn't see any output on the job posting,so we carefully coin words in job posting ,research on job description,giving attractive subject line so to attract potential talent,i remember myself spent lot of time in researching for job description as it is one tool which attracts passive talent,triggers non looker for job to admire for job ...It was fun and exciting those times ..

Now seeing lot of job boards catering to every single soul on the planet for jobs /looking for jobs ,but the question comes to me how much board are we to subscribe ,it is million boards and being recruiter needs to do thorough analyze on job boards befor buying it. It all looks attrative but once starts using it whether it is boon or bane need to checked

I figured some points on identitying job board where i ran through my thoughts ,let me share your points as well for the benefit of recruiting life

1) Look and Feel :
A board which has clean design without too many pop ups and easy navigation of the web

2) Is if recruiter friendly :
I seen some job board where it takes million pages to do a job posting asking hundred questions rather it is friendly to give contact details of recruiter and make it KISS process(Keep it Short and Simple)

3)Search Capabilities:
Is the job board able to understand search strings and share results most matching rather than throwing garbage

4) Connected to Social Media :
Today most boards give details of passive candidates connected with linkedin and other social media
network,do need to validate the board is it connected any of social media networks

5) Job Posting is simple :
Also need to check the job posting process is simple where boards have complicated process of posting which takes almost half hour to complete which is not healthy job board ,best to drop the job boards

6) Job Board Life :
Check how long the job board ,more the oldness of board it is better to invest as it understand recruitment business well

Job Posting -Lazy Guy Approach /Sourcing -Smart guy approach - Which one you prefer ??

2011-06-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

Posting - Lazy Guy Way

Posting jobs online is a sit-back-and-wait talent attraction strategy wherein there is no action taken other than that of publishing the job to various sites.

If identifying, attracting and hiring top talent is critical to any company’s ability to create and maintain a competitive advantage, does it make sense to rely heavily on a method of talent attraction that involves little-to-no effort?

Posting jobs online anywhere – whether it be on a corporate site, LinkedIn, Facebook, or a niche job board – is essentially the lowest level of effort anyone can take towards the goal of hiring your next game-changing employee.

Even i do some times being lazy way ... :)
Why it is done Job Posting ? :

1.Posting jobs a passive strategy

2.Posting jobs offers no control over candidate qualifications

3.Job advertisements only attract candidates who are actively looking

4.Posting jobs isn’t social!

Statistics out of Job Posting are

•32% passively looking

•34% not looking

•20% casually looking

•14% actively looking

The real issue at hand is that with job posting, you are essentially missing the other 86% of the workforce.

Sourcing Way/Smart Guy Way :

I always want to be to be this way ,some times you have no option to take lazy boy approach of Job Posting This is excellent approach and active way of bringing and identifying candidates ,when you start to source ,your right brain works in magic,lot of innovative ways of sourcing will flow ,in search strings,targent companies,education,location etc

When you create and execute searches to source for potential candidates, you are actively “hunting” for talent – targeting people with specific qualifications and experience, who live in specific areas – regardless of their job search status

If someone responds to a job posting you posted recently and they enter their information into your ATS/recruiting CRM – they are most likely actively seeking a new job, although there is a chance you could also be collecting a casual job seeker.

Statistically, many people who respond to job postings are not actually qualified for the position they applied for. If they are not a match for any current openings, it is likely they will find a position with another company with a position they are actually qualified for.

But you still have their resume in your ATS.
Alternatively, their resume may still be posted in an online resume database somewhere (many people either don’t or forget to take them down after they take a new job). In fact, my own research has shown that approximately 75% of all resumes on the job boards are over 30 days old. So if you think that all of the resumes stored in online resume databases are of active job seekers, you are quite wrong.

Statistically, the majority of resumes in online resume databases are of people who are likely to be not looking or passively looking.

In about 3 months to 2 years’ time, those active job seekers turn into people who are likely to either to be not looking at all for a new position, or who may be satisfied with the new position they took, but open to better opportunities (passively looking).

Unlike job posting, when you are searching for resumes, you can actually specifically target people who are not likely to be actively looking.

ATS Searching

ATS with poor/limited candidate search capability is like having a well-stocked wine cellar that you can’t access because you don’t have the key to the door. Or even if you had the key – you had no way of finding the exact bottle you were looking.

Finally :

Will there ever be a time when jobs aren’t posted online?
I’m not sure if we will ever get to that point, because it could be argued that posting jobs online is a logical thing to do and is certainly a part of a balanced “diet” of recruiting methods, and it can produce results.
However, if you or your organization relies heavily on posting jobs to find the right candidates at the right time, let alone the best candidates available, I believe you are at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Job posting is essentially like trapping: set the snare and do nothing but wait (and hope!) for the right person to stumble by – an inherently passive, hope-based strategy that affords you absolutely no control over what wanders in. To make matters worse, the only people who will search for or even “see” ads for jobs are those who are actively or casually looking, which is the smallest slice of the talent pie.

That’s right – you simply can’t snag those highly sought after “passive” candidates via posting jobs online.
On the other hand, as a truly active strategy, sourcing candidates affords everything that job posting fails to: control over candidate qualifications and the ability to specifically target and engage passive and even non-job seekers socially. Instead of waiting for the right people to come to you, you simply go out and find them, without a care for whether they woke up that morning thinking about finding a new job or if it was the furthest thing from their mind.
I am aware of many companies that spend quite a bit of time, effort and money on their job posting efforts, including “interactive recruiting solutions.” It makes me wonder if as much time, energy, and money is being spent on enabling their proactive sourcing capability, which would afford them with significantly more control over candidate qualifications and quality, as well as more truly social engagement with the highly coveted “passive” talent pool.

When assessing job posting solutions and efforts, I believe the less obvious but true value of job posting lies primarily in the collection of active candidates and the ability to cultivate them over time through regular engagement (electronic and over the phone) into more experienced/qualified candidates who will inevitably become passive/inactive job seekers.

P.O.S.T way of Sourcing

2011-03-05T20:47:00.001-08:00

This POST planning mainly to create roadmap for sourcers to do better sourcing

The P.O.S.T. method consists of four progressive steps that can be formed into questions to ask yourself as you move forward:

1. People. Who is your target audience? What group(s) of people are you trying to reach? If you do not know whom you are trying to communicate with, then nothing else really matters.

2. Objectives. These are your goals. Why are you trying to reach your target audience? Are you pipelining, or do you have specific reqs for which you are sourcing? How you answer this may affect whom you desire to connect with in the first place. Do you have specific things in mind when thinking about the objectives you are looking to achieve? Being specific in this part of P.O.S.T. is important, because it will help you define the components of the next step, which is…

3. Strategy. These are the steps you will take to reach your objectives, which will put you in touch with your target audience. These too need to be specific progressive items that will help lead to the achievement of your goals, which will ultimately get you connected with your audience. Simply putting “Search the web for resumes” or “Set up a corporate Twitter account” won’t do. Will you use search agents? What about your ATS or your CRM? Will you need to dig deep to find phone and email contact information? Will Twitter be managed by just you, or a team of people? Do you want to automate any of the process? Think about specific points that are quantifiable – this will help keep you on track to achieve your goals.

4. Technology (or Tools). What resources will you need to use or invest in to work your strategy in order to achieve your objectives? Often, this is the first stop for people when planning – but it should be the last! Think of it this way – no matter how much you try, you cannot open a can of tuna with a spoon. Even if that spoon is your favorite utensil in the kitchen, it is an inefficient way to open a can. You instead need a can opener. Tools – including computers, telephones, paper directories, online resources, etc. – should be the last component in your P.O.S.T. planning because by their very definition, they are devices used to assist in carrying out a specific function. In this case, your strategies. Choose tools because they are the most efficient ones for the task, not just because they’re your personal favorites.

Make a Difference when getting passive candidates either Job Description or Job Ad

2011-02-13T08:39:00.000-08:00

We all post jobs but we always find difficult in getting matching candidates to the role because we miss one thing the difference on Job Description and job Ad

We don't realize this ,differnece between Job Ad and Job Description :

Job Ad - , Marketing collateral used to attract applicants to a job opportunity.

Job Description : It is a business document created for internal use (i.e., candidate assessment, legal compliance, performance reviews, etc).

The problem is that everybody is posting job descriptions and nobody is posting job ads. That’s why cyberspace abounds with dull job requirements and is devoid of compelling job opportunities. Is it any wonder the response rate from “quality” candidates is so dismal?

It’s like a business trying to attract customers with its market analysis instead of with a demographically targeted and creative advertising campaign. How effective would that be?

Here are the three kinds of challenges we have here of posting job descriptions instead of job ads:

a) The Dry List of to do more than what it excited to do...
b) A Blind Format
c) Targeting All/Unknown Audience

These things are done are not done only beginner recruiter,it is done by experienced recruiters out of desperation to fill candidates,because we stop our right brain thinking and using left brain to do this.... I mean creativity is lost that is why we miss the boat

Let me explain what is all about in a detail

The Dry List of to do more than what it excited to do. :
Job descriptions read like an arduous list for what employers want and say nothing at all about what career-minded individuals want. The high caliber of talent you want to hire is not inspired by boilerplate job descriptions and endless bullet points of must-have requirements. While requirements are an essential component of a job description, they have no place in a job ad. I have covered this topic in great depth in my post aptly titled

-A Blind Format
The format of a traditional job description doesn’t pique the curiosity of passive candidates. The most important decision-making criteria to them are nonexistent or only vaguely hinted at. It requires a herculean effort in reading between the lines to speculate how having the job might translate into a career upgrade. Because a job description is a business document intended for internal use, its format obscures the value proposition inherent in the opportunity. In short, a job description masquerading as a job ad speaks to the wrong audience.

Targeting All/Unknown Audience
a job description is a business document. It doesn't have any “curb appeal” for your career-minded target demographic. It doesn't describe what these individuals care about most: what your opportunity has to offer them. During the recruiting outreach stage, you're the seller (and usually a desperate one at that); and the individuals you seek are the buyers.

A well-conceived marketing strategy, you have to understand the buying patterns of the demographic you’re trying to influence. With job advertising, you want your offer to appeal to top performers. Luckily, what top performers want is predictable — it’s etched in stone. Every top performer looks for the following criteria in a job opportunity — otherwise you are not talking to a top performer

Top Performer looks for
-Challenge
-Important work
-Major Responsibility
-Roadmap for Success
-Recognition
-Talented Team
-Excellent Organization

Next time when you get call from your client/internal team think what you have to do get candidates-Job Ad/Job Description....

Always use Right Brain and dont get panic attack when you dont get candidates ....

First thing analyze the job and take more time to research on job boards and similar sites to know more about technology/job will help you to get better candidates and be always talk to candidates with information about the role and also be a advisor to the candidates and please dont do customer care representative talk as they are getting it from every other recruiter .Be always a solution provider to the candidates

Happy Hunting......

2010-12-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

Today scenario of every job role,the intense need of resource need either internal recruitment or agency recruitment,speed to fill resource is so desperate ,most recruiters wants to fill it ,miss out lot of potential candidates .

Their were lot of times i used to get recruiter calls for SAP BI positions /Oracle Apps positions asking my interest ,which i look puzzled on whether recruiter had my profile on read/ don't read through the profile .

They miss the whole profile due to this search key Ctrl+F key

It is so novice on recruiter part,we can't say that only junior recruiter do like this mistake,in my personal opnion even ,more experienced in recruitment do these blunders,claiming they are smart in recruitment.This is what we call tragic recruiter/doomsday recruiter who is wrongly placed in recruitment industry.

Let me share my experience on this , i don't know whether the person who called me said he worked as Senior role in Recruitment department in large organization couldnt distinguish between recruiter profile to Oracle HRMS profile,what he lacked is ,he didnt research what is Oracle HRMS and secondly what job Oracle HRMS Functional Consultant role is .What hurts me that he is setting bad example to other recruiters too in not reading through the profile or researching it

He called me for this role and he claims that i have 5 yrs of experience e in Oracle HRMS seeing my profile,never i claimed myself to understand myself i m in recruitment not a Functional consultant and it took more then 15 mins to explain him what im and not functional consultant.

Now i feel it's time to tell you what is Oracle HRMS all about for recruiters to understand .Do reply if you want any more clarifications on Oracle HRMS ,i will help you...

Here i will tell you what Oracle HRMS is all about .

" Oracle HRMS is ERP tool of Oracle Apps/Oracle Applications which handles Human Resources domain . In this it has these below modules
1. Core HR
2. Payroll (Includes Standard Benefits )
3. Adavnced Benefits (OAB)
4 Talent Management (Performance Management)
5 Oracle Time and Labour(OTL)
6. Oracle Learning Management(OLM)
7 iRecruitment
8. Self Services HR(SSHR)"

Current version of Oracle HRMS is 12i, very few companies in the world have completed successful implementation of Oracle

HRMS 12i and others are in the process of implementing this version .

As recruiter .Need to check if the candidate is Oracle HRMS 12i Functional Consultant

1) He/should have experience in AIM Methodology(Application Implementation Methodology)
It is defined as "A methodology is a set of guidelines or principles that can be tailored and applied to a specific situation."

2) This are set of process Functional consultant follows in the project,need to ask for
a) BP-Business Process
b) RD-Requirement Definition
c) BR- Business Requirment Mapping
d) TA-Technical Architecture
e) MD-Module Design & Build
f) CV- Data Conversion
g) DO-Documentation
h) TE-Business Sytem Testing
i) PT-Performance Testing
j) AP- Adoption & Learning
k) PM-Production Migration
l) CRP-Conference Resource Pilot,CRP1,CRP2
m) Final Delivery of product

From now on as recruiters can distinguish who is Oracle HRMS Functional consultant is always .

This is what Research in Recruitment or R-in-R process.
If you have prepared yourself well,battle is half won in finding candidates .

Keep it as habit of researching skills before you start sourcing profiles or might wasting time in talking to wrong candidates....

How fastness are we in getting profiles through Social Media Network ?

2010-11-13T19:37:00.000-08:00

Using social network is becoming a buzz work to all recruiters at any point of discussion either on having coffee or at the meeting desk,how many resources are we able to get through Linkedin,Twitter ,Facebook etc.

Their was a time when i was working on challenging role,it was skill which is not on portals,and it really took time ,i used to be approached my colleagues,boss anytime of the day on this subject believing in me i do great stuff on this skill,even i believed the same ...i had a word saying "Still my search on " which was hard pressing for me to say that because i used to get profiles through linkedin on most skills and this time was making me really hard on meand i have look myself why it is not working on me ,bit of luck needed to get these profiles,

On my searched and research i found through Linkedin that i was able to understand about other global locations on these resources,earlier i was focusing on one location but the response from other locations makes me to understand where their is large number of resources to be tapped on similar skill in other countries and need to think ways and means to bring them  ..This is what ultimate power of Social Media Network.

Social Network is used for

- Analyze

- Strategize

- Attract the talent

Challenges in Social Network   on candidate Response time :

By social network when posting ,recieving resumes takes time from 1 hrs to 365 hrs depends on the need and attractiveness of job posting, i still remember inspite of attractive posting and explaining role,i used to get negative responses,one thing we all should understand social network is not job portal ,is more of network site and we are try to understand how many resources are mapped in those technology,is purely on knowledge basis
  

But most recruiters started using as portal to get resumes and don't understand we are building relationship or network ,simple terms we are building new friends.

Building friends as old saying "Your planting a seed and it has grow as per nature to become tree and not planting a tree and growing next day as recruiters thinks ",u post a job and next minute we are filled with resumes in our inbox,

Please and always keep in mind:Social Networks sites is not job sites,it has timelines and all it needs patience and continous job posting,we all have habit from portal,post once and relax,when you are posting in Linkedin,keep it has habit,you need to post a job minimum a 3 times and max is 6 times in a day of every job posting,if you do like that as an habit you will get resumes ,otherwise it is not good tool for any recruiters,i meant it when you are posting jobs in Post jobs section and not in Inmail section,if you do continous mails to same person he puts you under spam list,we have to be careful on this,never post multinple times to candidate directly through inmails,he wont reply back again

So next time when you are using Linkedin etc,keep in mind we are building good relationship and not pulling resumes....

Enjoy Sourcing...........

Which is better ? AI Resume Match or Human Searching ????

2010-09-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

We have been as Recruiters using searches using strings,operators,names,location,companies for our sourcing practices.

With wide spread of ATS software or third party software to reduce our
load of searching resumes and going downtime in getting matching/to be matched resumes by this softwares.

Is it Man Vs Machine kind of approach going on ...
Does it benefit or doom and secondly questions are they really 100% match correct-still the definition of 100% accuracy is not been defined yet ,but it happens it certain times not always.I have been able to find key points where AI goes high or certain times AI is not so good..

Let start here on basics

A software doesn't think on it own .let say for example a easy skill
"C++ Developer".A ATS will take this two words gives search results of 10,000.
But if it like this a role of "Argus Clinical Trial Manager",it would give resumes of 5000 with like this

1) A person working on Argus tool
2) A Manager working on clinical department
3) Some doctors/technicians
4) Few resumes matching on this skill

So all together you get 5000 resumes ..This is what is AI does.This is an recent example which i m showing ,it was fighting between me and ATS
I can't conclude saying ,ATS is not really worth,but it is worth if we and ATS go hand and in hand ,they are some easy junkies recruiters make their life easy like saving search strings in ATS which works for 24 hrs and throw resumes ,in this any recruiter out of his luck or God's will get valid profiles and closes the day saying "I'm top notch recruiter" and i bless you all with my strengths....
In my early days of my recruitment career, i have seen recruiters closing positions like this and company looks at him as GOD of recruitment,i used to wonder how these guys done,ya agreed it is smart way of recruitment but it is a way of laziness on recruiters they can't help other recruiters when they face challenge or experiement with search strings,

All these things had made to write this blog for recruiters.I'm happy to you all the recruiters who have been supporting me on this blog and i feel i have some space in heaven because this blog has helped some recruiters too... :)

A valid point here is Matching resumes is equally fraught with issues. Two candidates of similar skills, experience, and capability often have very different resumes. After all – the people we are looking to hire are not professional resume writers, nor should we expect them to be. Experienced sourcers and recruiters can “read between the lines” using cognitive processes and interpet resumes for skills, experience, and capabilities that are not explicitly mentioned in the resumes. This is something that an AI matching application may claim to do, but is hard pressed to prove. Let’s remember – AI matching apps can only work with text they are given – both the example resume or job description and the resumes it searches for. Although the people who program these applications can draw relation between multiple words/terms that can represent the same thing, they cannot possibly account for the unpredictable variety of ways in which a person can express – explicitly or implicitly – skills, experience, and capability.

This is what i said above with an example .

But one thing you should always keep in mind is that that all of these vendors with AI matching engines are SELLING you a product. They know that creating effective Boolean search strings can be hard to learn so they want to sell their solution as something that relieves sourcers and recruiters of having to run searches to make matches.

In my opinion, an ideal solution for most staffing organizations would include a resume/candidate database/ATS with BOTH a fully configurable search interface that supports full Boolean logic and ideally extended Boolean (with at the very least configurable proximity and variable term weighting), AND an AI matching engine – not one at the expense of the other. AI resume and job matching is great, but it is not a magical solution that replaces the human cognition of talented sourcers and recruiters. While AI matching apps may help junior recruiters, or those people who simply aren’t “wired” to run Boolean searches, it is not something anyone or any staffing organization should trust with making all of their matches. That would be scary!

This are all my views on AI and Human ,i may be right not right too ,do share your experiences on this which helps recruiters as whole .....

How to Search profiles in FaceBook ????- Hard and Sweet Search

2010-07-11T02:29:00.000-07:00

It's been time i 'm away out of blog for sometime attending work activities.One day i was using Facebook,my recruiter thought starts using search ,hurray it works out and want to share the same on Facebook.Before i start here some titbits about Facebook

Facebook is one thing not more searchable as like Linkedin,but really helps when your are out of search, facebook comes like small dagger when you want to continue fighting the search.It may look strange why i say this because here patience needs more in searching .Here you can use any of search ways

1) Co Worker Search

2) Profile Search

3) Yahoo’s Link domain Search

As caution,never give your search practices saying facebook is not good.I would say it helped me when i put my mind and action in getting not a candidate and facebook has groups where you be member immediately not like Linkedin groups waiting for some moderator give yes or no as your life is on owner/moderator hands.This one i hate in Linkedin as if i leave my life to some owner whether to give accept/reject on group .In that way Facebook is friendly and open to access except very little groups needs permission otherwise very friendly.And secondly i want to give more joy to you.Facebook is bundle of passive candidates,only thing needed is persistence and be friendly to get people .Always have attitude when sourcing in Facebook
"NEVER GIVE UP ATTITUDE".

Not to disturb on my talk on my facebook happiness .Let talk Search here ....

1) Co Worker Search
This is a basic search interface,you can specify a company and search for “coworkers,” even if you’re not employed at the company you are searching for. Simply enter a company that you suspect might employ people that you would like to target.

2) Profile Search
This is advanced search interface you get more fields to search, but you are limited to searching only your “networks and friends,” OR people you can “see” that live in the same area that you specified on your Facebook profile – even if it’s only in the “Education and Work” section of the “Info” tab of your profile.

Notice “where they work” – it is very important to realize that many people do not fill in their address on the “Contact Information” section of their profile on Facebook (I didn’t), and if they do, they can choose to make it so that only the people they specifiy can see it (which probably won’t be you if they don’t know you and you’re not already “friends”).

3) Yahoo's LinkDomain Search
Here one more search adds with you in Facebook is Yahoo search.t’s certainly a nice feature, but if you want to specifically search for and target people on Facebook, Yahoo has a much more effective search capability – linkdomain.

Yahoo’s linkdomain command allows you to search for and find websites/pages that link back to a specified site. For example, we can leverage Yahoo’s linkdomain functionality to search for websites/pages that link back to Facebook groups and pages.

Let your imagination and creativity run wild – using Yahoo’s linkdomain search functionality you can target Facebook groups of minority groups, industry groups, skill groups, etc.

I found some interesting on Facebook but also wish you recruiters try your hand on facebook and share your experience . My favourite is on Profile Search because its easy to see smiling faces more then Linkedin profiles
with no smiles/artificial smiles including my profile ...:)

"FACEBOOK IS SO COOL "

Basic Boolean Search Strings in Twitter

2010-04-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

Twitter Search

Twitter search is fairly straightforward. Because it's real time searching that we're doing here, don't expect to get number of results since that's fairly pointless in this situation. Just expect to get results from the last few seconds back, and you get the full tweet.

Twitter search defaults to AND, and it recognises the OR option, but assumes that NOT is a search term, although the minus sign works in place of it. Unfortunately phrase searching isn't an option which is annoying, except that there is if you use the advanced search option.

Search using hashtag (#) is a useful option, as long as you know what tags to use. A hashtag such as #uksnow is a neat and easy way to collate a series of tweets together on one subject, such as a conference for example. A search on said hashtag will then result in a series of tweets discussing that subject. This works in both basic and advanced search in the same way, with the same results.

Language search options. In theory in the advanced search option it's possible to search by language from the pull down menu. In practice this simply doesn't work. I'd expect a search for dog written in Icelandic to produce zero results, but I simply get a set of results containing the word dog. Trying the same search and attempting to limit to other languages also doesn't produce the desired effect. I have to say that I think this option is busted.

People search options. Both search options allow search by an individual with the function from: so from:philbradley provides a result listing all of my tweets, though you could get the same information from my profile page. However, you can then add in other search terms to limit results to my tweets that also contain a particular word. Unsurprisingly it's possible to search for tweets to a particular person, so to:philbradley shows tweets to me and adding in more terms limits the search to those tweets that also contain the searched keyword. Finally in this section it's possible to search for references to an individual using the @name option, so @philbradley will list replies to me but also Retweets (RT) as well.

Location based search options. This is another oddity. The concept is simple, working in both basic/advanced search, in that you can run a search for your keyword, a location, and a distance. A search for internet near:exeter within:15mi will provide results for the keyword in a radius of 15 miles of Exeter. I think the location is taken from profiles, either as named or as a geo-location (I've seen a few iphone references for example.) This is of course useful, but because it's seemingly based on users, we have a problem here. A location search sometimes appears to result in replies from a person who lives in the same county as the specific location listed. The problem is compounded when two places have the same name, such as Essex in the UK and in the US. Twitter has defaulted to the US variant, and Richmond in Virginia is the default option rather than any of those in the UK. However, if we run the search as near:richmonduk we get a response based on Richmond near Darlington, but a search for near:essexuk results in an error message. While not exactly broken, I would have to say that searching by location is flawed.

Search by date. This option lists Tweets since a particular date using the function since:2009-03-11 (note the American dating system if you're not from those parts) or before a particular date using the function until:2009-03-12 This works well in both basic and advanced search.

Attitude searching. This is very nice indeed - very simple concept based on the emoticons :) for positive, :( for negative and ? asking a question. Unfortunately it's not possible to search for other symbols such as $ or % which is a real shame.

Tracking conversations. This hardly works at all in Twitter search, and not at all in the basic search option. In advanced search it's sometimes possible to see one avatar overlying another with a 'show conversation' option. This will then attempt to display a conversation between two people, but it doesn't always work since it sometimes displays a link between two individuals, but not necessarily related to a single conversation.

RSS feeds. Both basic and advanced search options allow for RSS feeds for any search, which is clearly useful. However, only the advanced search option allows for results to be tweeted in turn, for no good reason as far as I can see, other than the discontinuity between search engines.

Operator Finds tweets...

twitter search - containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator.
"happy hour" -containing the exact phrase "happy hour".
love OR hate -containing either "love" or "hate" (or both).
beer -root -containing "beer" but not "root".
#haiku -containing the hashtag "haiku".
from:alexiskold -sent from person "alexiskold".
to:techcrunch -sent to person "techcrunch".
@mashable -referencing person "mashable".
"happy hour" near:"san francisco" -containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco".
near:NYC within:15mi sent within 15 miles of "NYC".
superhero since:2010-04-24 - containing "superhero" and sent since date "2010-04-24" (year-month-day).
ftw until:2010-04-24 - containing "ftw" and sent up to date "2010-04-24".
movie -scary :) - containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.
flight :( - containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.
traffic ? - containing "traffic" and asking a question.
hilarious filter:links - containing "hilarious" and linking to URLs.
news source:twitterfeed - containing "news" and entered via TwitterFeed

Note : This are the references which i found on the internet sole purpose to make recruiters aware of latest trends in recruitment,any material found similar is regretted as these are findings on my google searches nothing from my end

How good/bad use of effective Job Description/Definition

2010-03-27T03:04:00.000-07:00

I have been seeing everyday lot of recruiters posting job ads in job boards,group,social networks without any proper job description/jd.I wonder it would be possible for them to get right profiles...

Yes,their is always people in recruitment who won't agree as most think to submit resumes (Doing courier delivery,post man job of sending resumes to the client mail box) and some say,yea i got resumes through one line job posting as one line.Is this a creative way of recruitment.
Nope.It is not..

I feel most recruiters don't get into research in job/skill before posting.It shows how lazy recruiters they are,by this they can escape day but it will not cut ice,most profiles get rejected because of

1) job description is not clear,so you get junk resumes
2) candidates they say they have but doesn't have,recruiters are clueless to ask right questions to determine he/she is right fit
3)Recruiters don't understand job description or take time to research on it

Here is, of course, an argument that says what does it matter what you post? After all, people don’t read the ads anyway. Apparently they just scan them for job title, salary and location and then hit the ‘apply’ button. But what kind of candidate doesn’t actually read about the job they are applying for? The desperate? The ones with no eye for detail? The ones devoid of decent listening skills? Certainly not the good quality ones I would wager. But then so many recruiters make it difficult to want to read their job advertisements in the first place because they are just so deathly dull and boring. Particularly the ones that seem to think that a job description IS a sales tool.

I firmly believe that when it comes to advertising, any advertising, you get out what you put in. If recruiters let their people blindly cut and paste job descriptions and fire them scatter gun style then yes, they will get a response, but it will invariably be of extremely poor quality – and that will apply whether you put it on a job board or a link to it on a social media site.

Allure, intrigue, excitement, opportunity, challenge and reward, the feeling that the ad is talking to the job seeker, personally - all are essential ingredients to anyone who wants to get a good response from their recruitment advertising.

What is Mobile Recruiting ??

2010-02-06T20:11:00.000-08:00

Definition :

Mobile Computing is about finding and connecting with people who use mobile phone, not about recruiting from or through your mobile phone.

Mobile allows an employer to connect with candidates like never before. A connection based on relevance, engagement and consumer opt-in. With more than 4 billion handsets in the world, mobile is rapidly becoming the media of choice for savvy recruiters across the globe

As Online Talent Acquisition and Sourcing has become more mobile, so has the need to use the more direct means to attract qualified andidates. SMS Text Messaging is a non-intrusive way to send a targeted recruitment message without the need for the candidate to respond or put a resume together.

Furthermore, as Mobile recruiting advances many predict the text resume will be a thing of the past. In fact, many experts believe that candidates will instead one day create "digital profiles" that would include a summary of work experience, education, project/work accomplishments, budget performances, direct report relationships and other psychological / behavioral traits that can sent / received via a mobile device.

The relationship with the right candidate is a long term endeavor. Even after the "right" candidate has been sourced, companies still have a considerable challenge. Companies want to know the candidate's competencies, leadership skills, quantifiable accomplishments as well as personal strengths / weaknesses before even calling that person in for an interview. This oftentimes cannot be accomplished through a text resume. Its no longer a matter of whether a candidate "can do" the job but how.

The relationship with the right candidate is a long term endeavor. Even after the "right" candidate has been sourced, companies still have a considerable challenge. Companies want to know the candidate's competencies, leadership skills, quantifiable accomplishments as well as personal strengths / weaknesses before even calling that person in for an interview. This oftentimes cannot be accomplished through a text resume. Its no longer a matter of whether a candidate "can do" the job but how.

This is particularly true of senior level candidates who wish to remain anonymous yet still wish to be kept abreast of new opportunities in their area of expertise. These resume videos typically function as a canned interview and give the potential employer a much clearer idea of the candidate's qualifications, confidence and mannerisms than a text resume.

Advantages of Mobile Recruiting

1.Candidates use the web on their mobile phones privately while waiting in line, going to lunch, taking a coffee break, where their employers can't watch them!

2. The average response rate to a mobile call to action is 12%, versus 2% for traditional media

Tools for Mobile Recruiting

SMS - Short Messaging Services
Short Codes -here are many web-based SMS/texting applications on the market today

Other Messaging Applications are
-Joopz
-3Jam
-networkText
-Tatango
-Trumpia

If you are Outlook user,Outlook 2007 can be integrated with SMSOfficer tool where you can send messages to users directly from Outlook inbox.

Think of SMS as not a replacement for the email or phone (voice) but as an additional tool within a recruiter’s toolbox. Recruiters, more than ever, are often connecting with professionals who are unable to answer their phones, huddled in team meetings, commuting, at the airport, away from their PC’s or laptops, etc. Using coordinated SMS updates, recruiters are able to seamlessly and non-intrusively manage multiple candidates through the recruitment process. Bottom-line, SMS is an effective tool for connecting with candidates anytime, anywhere, when email and voice are not convenient.

Note : This are the references which i found on the internet sole purpose to make recruiters aware of latest trends in recruitment,any material found similar is regretted as these are findings on my google searches nothing from my end

What Recruiters do to loose Passive candidates !!!!

2009-12-06T08:40:00.000-08:00

It happens most times that i couldn't reply to candidates messages or i miss it.It really makes me think that i missed that candidate so easily when the role that passed by and i didn't care to reply earlier .
We know that candidate won't respond properly next time when you talk about exciting opportunity ....

Let see what are the effects of missing candidates on not replying...

The 15% Factor
This number is thrown around a lot but I've heard it's pretty accurate - that only 15% of jobs are available through recruiters. Whether that is 15% of all jobs or 15% of manager/above jobs, I'm not sure. It makes sense when you remember that recruiters (rightly) are paid either a healthy percentage of your first year salary. They usually earn it - and then some. So it makes sense that recruiters do not make up a larger % of the effort. It's expensive.

So what are the implications of this? .Your job search strategy should include an effort with recruiters that is consistent with their influence, right? So, if your communication and networking effort toward recruiters is bigger than 15%, you could be wasting time and, importantly, filling up the in box of recruiters.

As recruiters, we often walk a fine line between full disclosure and holding our cards close to the vest.

We always go by the Murphy Law !!!! ....

Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong

1. “This deal is a slam dunk.”
I think not. Fast and easy deals are usually neither. If you think you are working on a slam dunk hire, go back to the drawing board and look at everything that can possibly go wrong. Look at the candidate’s commute, compensation, title, job stretch, and everything else that relates to the candidate, the job itself, and the fit between the two. If you still think it’s a slam dunk hire, have another recruiter grill you on the details. If there is something you are not seeing, it is better to find out before the deal falls apart than after.

2. I’ll start recruiting now and get the requisition signed next week.”
If there is one thing recruiters can’t waste, it’s time. Recruiting for a position that has not yet been approved is a fool’s errand and I suspect most of us have done it at one time or another. I suggest you tell the hiring manager that you would love to help them but that you really must spend your time on what has already been approved and will be more than happy to provide recruiting resources as soon as the requisition has been signed. I suspect they will understand.

3.Let’s only look at passive candidates.”
I’d be very careful here. Passive candidates are great, but when you need to move quickly, or need multiples of the same type of employee, passive candidates should only be a part of the total sourcing strategy, not the whole thing

4.This candidate isn’t worried about compensation, just opportunity.”
This is big trouble if ever big trouble existed. Candidates who talk about everything from opportunity to growth to the value they can bring to the organization have probably spent too much time reading books on how to find a job. In my career, I have never had things go smoothly at offer time when the candidate told me they were not concerned about compensation. Everyone is concerned about compensation. I suggest that you consider this line of thinking a red flag and be sure to nail down the compensation issues before you try to take this deal to the bank.

5.Trust me, I would never accept a counteroffer.” Or so says the candidate.
This one is enough to make most experienced recruiters cry. Taking a candidate for his or her word on this issue is the clearest example of begging Murphy to run over your deal with a truck. I suggest that you always prep candidates on counteroffers and be sure to doubly prep the ones that tell you with a calm and professional assurance that they would never accept a counteroffer.

6.“This candidate does not mind a 90-minute commute.”
Be very careful of this one. Commutes are quality-of-life issues, and long commutes get old very quickly. Unless it is a very unusual situation, I recommend you have the candidate interview at times that will have them traveling into the office and going home during rush hour. You also might want to look at past commute scenarios, because a candidate with a history of only 20-minutes commutes has no real concept of what a long and difficult commute is all about. The last thing you want is to hire the right candidate and have them leave in six months because the commute was too difficult.

7. “This new ATS will change our lives.”
Applicant tracking systems can do great things for the organization, but they won’t make your recruiters more aggressive, they won’t make your organization look better to candidates, and they won’t help to close deals. What they can do, according to Scott Schoenick, senior consultant with Taleo, is “empower a staffing function with speed, automation, and decision-support capabilities that are integrated into the real work of staffing.”

8.“I can’t call in there; that would be stealing.”
Don’t let this belief limit your success as a recruiter. I hate to open up old wounds on poaching and ethics, but I will say this: You can’t steal employees, since no one owns them in the first place. This is a free market, and the best people are almost always open to a call that outlines an opportunity. If you know someone who can do the job, give them a call, as this is a great chance to demonstrate the value you bring to the organization. Here is a simple rule of thumb: If your sales force is trying to acquire their customers, you should have no problem acquiring their employees.

9. “My company is not a company you have to sell to candidates.”
Wrong. Every company has to be sold. Candidates have many options in terms of places they can work. I do not care what company you’re working for. If it disappeared off the earth tomorrow, all of your people would find other positions, become adjusted to new organizations, and move on with their lives. I suggest that you sell the organization all throughout the interviewing process and have the hiring managers do the same. This way, the hiring decision is also your decision and not just the decision of the candidate.

Becoming a better and more effective recruiter is not as complex as it seems. It is really just about learning how to source and hire great candidates on a consistent basis. We all make mistakes from time to time and those mistakes usually cost us something

Crowdsourcing in Recruitment !!!!

2009-11-05T08:53:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS CROWDSOURCING?
The word “Crowdsource” was apparently firstcoined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 in an article for Wired magazine, it is very much associated with “Web 2.0” ways of doing business where the internet moved from being a very large notice board to users generating much of the content.
In essence “Crowdsourcing” means applying the thought of a large number of people to solve a problem or inform an issue. A good starting point for anybody wanting to see what is out there in terms of crowdsourcing".

CROWDSOURCING IN RELATION TO RECRUITMENT?

Actually we would argue that in relation to recruitment crowdsourcing isn’t new! For many years executive search firms have at the start of each new assignment set their researchers the task of speaking to lots of industry insiders to get their views and steers on who they might subsequently approach as candidates – i.e. consulting “the crowd”. But of course that wasn’t really crowdsourcing as we view it in 2009 because the “crowd” was small and restricted to who that search firm either already knew or could get to know fairly quickly.

There needs to be quality control over referrers and their referrals. Lots of poorly networked or irrelevant referrers are pointless and allowing / encouraging referrers to spray out lots of messages to “potential candidates” is just spam and will get the business a poor reputation.

Confidentiality in relation to employers,referrers and candidates is really important. Sometimes employers don’t want to identify themselves, sometimes referrers won’t want to be identified in their referrals and referrers should never be able to see the progress of a candidate’s application (and indeed whether they even made an application).

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR IN CROWDSOURCED RECRUITMENT?

If you are an employer considering recruitment using a crowdsourcing / referral platform that you may want to think about these points:

• Does the provider have a critical mass of referrers in areas that are really relevant to us / this appointment?
• Quantity can be good but quality is always more important. Is my employer brand going to be damaged by referrers spraying
around messages about our vacancy to people who aren’t relevant and will probably view it as spam?
• Is appropriate confidentiality going to be maintained?
• Is the reward to the successful referrer meaningful?
• Am I going to get better access to appropriate candidate pools and / or save money and / or save time?

Note : This are the references which i found on the internet sole purpose to make recruiters aware of latest trends in recruitment,any material found similar is regretted as these are findings on my google searches nothing from my end

ReVisiting Sourcing Rules !!!

2009-09-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

I had lot of discussions and debates with recruiters . One thing you know really made me down/sad is without portals ,most recruiters feel very insecure .I feel recruiters have been addicted to that portal searching....
So i felt that let me go back to basics of sourcing to make them feel secure and work effectively ..

To start with let me quote the phrase of Abraham Lincoln which reply implies the Rule 1 which i have mentioned

"Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first 4 hours sharpening the axe.”

In my start of recruiting career,every requirement that lands on me immediately jump on portal to put keywords and search instead of giving myself to think ..
Over the period i found that this is bad practice of recruiting !!!! .
So i framed 10 Rule Strategy for Sourcing

Rule 1
Think Before You Search
Too many sourcers and recruiters are unknowingly picking up dull axes and begin taking swings. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried chopping down a tree with a dull axe, but it’s neither efficient nor effective, and requires considerably more effort than necessary. If you just take the time to think, develop some semblance of a search strategy, and experiment with various searches (sharpen your axe!) – you can get to more relevant results more quickly.
For many hiring profiles, you should spend at least 10 -20 minutes thinking about and researching your search strategy, as well as experimenting with search strings and reviewing the results for relevance before you start using the results to begin making calls.
Here is how you can sharpen your axe before you take your first cut: 1) Analyze, interpret, and fully understand the job opening/position requirements 2) Adhering to the Rule of Candidate Sourcing, take your understanding of the position and intelligently select titles, skills, technologies, companies, responsibilities, terms, etc. to include (or purposefully exclude!) in a query employing appropriate Boolean / Extended Boolean operators, query modifiers, and semantic search techniques 3) While reviewing the results of your initial searches to assess relevance, scan the results for additional and alternate relevant titles, search terms, phrases, and companies that you can incorporate into your next search 4) Based upon the observed relevance of and intel gained from each successive search, modify the search strings appropriately and run them again 5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 until an acceptably large volume of highly relevant results is achieved

Rule 2
Do Not Overanalyze Resumes
People you are trying to find and recruit are not professional resume writers. Whether they are software engineers, project managers, or database administrators – they are NOT professional resume writers, nor do I think we should expect them to be.
Writing a great and 100% complete resume isn’t easy. What IS easy is to forget is some of your responsibilities and every little detail of your professional experience (applications, environments, etc.). Candidates may not think to express every last bit of their experience in their resume – and if you’re looking specifically for one of those little bits and it’s not there – it’s all too easy to assume that the person who wrote the resume doesn’t have the requisite experience you’re looking for. Don’t make assumptions about candidates from their resumes – give them the benefit of the doubt. Ever hear the phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover?”
Resumes are by nature imperfect and are poor representations of a person’s experience and capabilities, so I suggest you apply what I call the “10 second rule:” Don’t read resumes – scan them. If you can’t absolutely disqualify/rule out a candidate based on reviewing their resume in 10 seconds, pick up the phone and call them.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised. You’ll call people you would not likely have called before, and you’ll find out that some of those candidates actually DO have the skills and experience you need – it just wasn’t obviously or explicitly expressed in their resume.
~~Always remember – you (and/or your clients) hire PEOPLE, not PAPER~~~.

Rule 3
Do Not Run Overly Generic/Basic Searches
If you run generic searches with perhaps 1 title and a couple of basic keywords – you’ll be sure to get correspondingly generic and basic results. I’ve heard many a recruiter complain about getting “too many results.” People making this mistake unknowingly increase the size of the Hidden Talent Pool of candidates they don’t find.
Don’t rely solely or heavily on title-based searches. Not all companies use the same titles for the same roles and responsibilities – so making this mistake contributes to you populating Hidden Talent Pools with every candidate that matches your hiring profile or job order but has a title that you didn’t think of and include in your search. See best practice #1 above.
Don’t rely solely on using skill/tech terms (e.g., Java, Oracle, Accounts Payable, SOX, etc.) when creating your Boolean search strings. Technical terms such as programming languages, operating systems, and databases will only give you results of people who mention those terms in their resumes. Mentioning buzz words does not imply any degree of responsibility or capability.
The most effective searches reach beyond skill/technology term matching and into the realm of semantic search by include responsibility terms (administer, configure, create, manage, reconcile, coordinate, design, etc.) and environmental terms (enterprise, host*, etc.) where applicable. This is the first step in moving beyond simple buzz-word bingo.

Rule 4
See Each Resume as More than a Potential Match for the Position
Any source of candidates you have access to can be leveraged in much the same way as LinkedIn can – every person is actually a conduit to a larger network of people. So even if a particular resume or social media profile you’re reviewing doesn’t appear to be an ideal match – they actually might be (see #3 above), and they may know someone who is.
If you find yourself scanning a search result that appears to be under- or over-qualified – remember to not make assumptions about candidates based on their resume/profile, and also be aware that people who are in fact too junior or too senior for your current needs might fit future needs. Additionally, people who are either too junior or too senior for a particular position might work with or know someone who is an exact match

Rule 5
Run Multiple Searches Across Multiple Sources
Now matter how strong your sourcing skills are or how many times you’ve recruited for the same position, you should always run multiple searches. It’s impossible for one Boolean search to find all qualified candidates.
It is also critical to leverage every resource you have available to you. You may be in love with LinkedIn, but the best candidates for that special position you’re working on may be tucked away in your database/ATS, or on Twitter!
If you think you’ve exhausted a particular source of candidates – believing that you’ve found all of the available matches and cannot find any more – you’re wrong. Invariably you’ve left behind Hidden Talent Pools of people who do match your positions, but you could not find them because your Boolean search strings and perhaps even your entire search strategy made it impossible to do so.

Rule 6
Search All Resumes
I’m aware that there are MANY users of resume databases (online or internal) who focus specifically on resumes posted/entered in the last 30 days, assuming these are the candidates to target because they are “on the market.”
You do NOT know anything about a candidate until you establish contact with them. Just because their resume was posted yesterday, it does not mean they are “actively” seeking a new position. I’ve spoken to many people who happened to recently post their resume into my own database on on a job board, and once I made contact, they explained they were just “checking to see what’s out there.” Doesn’t dound too “active” to me!
Also, just because a resume is 3-6+ months old – you have NO idea what their job search status is. You cannot safely assume they are not looking and are “off the market.”
They could be #1 Still passively looking, having not found the right match yet, #2 Available because they are finishing up a contract position they took 3-6 months ago, #3 In a new position, but extremely unhappy because it’s nothing like they were led to believe it would be, #4 In a new position, but their a) boss is leaving, b) position is in jeoparduy due to layoffs, c) division is being acquired, etc. – you get the drift.
Ultimately, you should want to find the BEST candidates possible, regardless of silly job search status labels (active, passive, blech!). Everyone is a candidate!
Never limit yourself to only searching resumes posted in the last 30 days – some of the best passive and active candidates have resumes 31 to 365 + days “old.”
And most people don’t call them.

Rule 7
Don’t be a Sourcing Snob
Despite popular opinion to the contrary, job board resume databases are not filled with desperate, low quality candidates. In fact, it’s statistically impossible. There are plenty of “A” candidates available in each and every job board resume database – major or niche.
If your experience suggests otherwise, perhaps it’s your searches or your search strategy. If you go fishing in the ocean and don’t catch the particular species of fish you were hoping to, would you be able to assume that there were no fish of that type in the ocean that day? Of course not. Just because YOU didn’t catch the fish you were looking for, it doesn’t mean they weren’t there to be caught.
And if you’re the type who believes that the job board resume databases are filled with “active” candidates, you might be surprised to know that approximately 75% of all resumes in the major job boards resume databases are dated over 30 days old. Some are 2-4+ years old. Are they still “active” candidates? Do you think anyone’s calling them?

Rule 8
Don’t Submit the First 2 -3 Candidates You Find/Speak
Their is always response from recruiters why i can't submit candidates whom i speak first....
Well, ask yourself this – what’s the statistical probability that the first 2 people you find and speak to magically happen to be the BEST candidates you can possibly find? Or the most closeable and controllable?
Recruiting candidates should not be conducted on a FIFO basis, but on a BIFO (Best In, First Out) basis. Find and speak to 10-15 candidates and then Submit

Rule 9
Seek to Continually Improve Your Candidate Sourcing Skills
As a sourcing/recruiting professional, one of your goals should be to get better at what you do on a daily basis. Not just meeting your objectives and KPI’s – but actually improving your sourcing and recruiting skills and ability.
As a sourcer/recruiter, you can perform deliberate practice, which is specifically designed to improve performance by getting you out of your comfort zone and continually stretching you just beyond your current ability. Ever hear the cliche of “if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse?”
Unfortunately, when most people “practice” on the job, they are just doing what they’ve always done, going through the same old motions – which does nothing to improve performance. Unlike many professional athletes, most business professionals (including sourcers and recruiters) do not go to work every day specifically trying to get better at what they do. It’s something many people may talk about, but very few people actually do.

Rule 10
Spend 80% of Your Sourcing Time Using High-Yield Sources
I feel there are many sourcers and recruiters spending too much time focusing on instrinsically low-yield candidate sources.
For example – some people spend countless hours searching the Internet for candidate leads at the expense of not heavily/effectively leveraging their internal resume database/ATS. While you can certainly find great people on the Internet, the Internet is not indexed specifically to enable sourcing and requires many tricks and tweaks to yield relevant results.
If you have access to an ATS or internal resume database – it’s specifically designed to store and retrieve resumes, and probably has more local and more qualified candidates than the Internet, and might actually have a better seach interface enabling more precise searching to find more of the right people more quickly.
To top it off, your ATS/CRM is filled with people that have already expressed interest in your company (at some point in time) and with candidates that you or other sourcers/recruiters found elsewhere and entered in! And when it comes to finding candidates on the Internet vs. the job board resume databases, see these 2 articles for an eye-opening apples-to-apples comparison of Monster vs. Google search results, see Monster vs. Google Round 1 and Round 2. Facts are facts, folks.
High yield sources of candidates are #1 Highly Searchable, and #2 Deep on candidate data. Of the social networking sites out there, LinkedIn is the most searchable and has the deepest candidate data, and you don’t need more than a free account to leverage it like a rock star. Also – if you have access to any of the major job boards – they have highly effective search capability, actually have a larger percentage of “passive” job seekers than “active” and they have some fantastic candidates

Advanced Operators in Linkedin Sourcing !!!!

2009-08-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

In my earlier blog I was discussing about Linkedin Sourcing Techniques

Here now it is about Advanced Search operators and the search strings formats

Ok ..Let’s proceed to Advanced Operators........

Here is the page of Linkedin Advanced Search

Advanced Search:

If you want to run an advanced search, click on the “Advanced” link next to the People Search box on the top right hand corner. Find the right person by entering options in the following fields:

•Keyword: Enter any keywords that you are looking for in the member’s profile.

•First Name: Search for a member by first name.

•Last Name: Search for a member by last name.

•Location: Limit your search to members either in a particular area, or willing to travel there.
ZIP code search results show members in the surrounding metro area, not just that ZIP code.

•Title: Search for members with a particular title. If you check “current titles only”, only members who currently hold that title will be returned. If you check “past only”, only members who used to hold that title in a previous position will be returned. Look at the advanced tips below to learn how to use Advanced Operators here.

•Company: Search for members at a particular company. If you check “current companies only”, only members who are currently at that company will be returned. If you check “past only”, only members who used to be at that company will be returned. Look at the advanced tips below to learn how to use Advanced Operators here.

•School: Search for members that are at or went to a particular school or university.

•Industry: Searches for members in one or more primary industries. You can select more than one industry at a time.

•Groups: Searches for members that belong to one or more of your groups.

•Location: Limit your search to members either in a particular area, or willing to travel there.
ZIP code search results show members in the surrounding metro area, not just that ZIP code.

•Interested in: Search for types of members you would like to find: all members, potential employees, consultants/contractors, entrepreneurs, hiring managers, industry experts, or deal-making contacts.

•Joined: Search for members who have joined LinkedIn within a specified period of time. This is perfect for a search that you will be running on a frequent basis, as it displays the more recent additions to LinkedIn who fit the criteria.

Sort by:
•Relationships and recommendations:
•Shows results by degrees away and, within each degree, shows the most-recommended members first

•Relationships:
•Show the people “closest” to you first (your connections are first, then people connected to your connections, then their connections, then people in your groups and so on).

•Relevance:
•If you’ve entered a value in the top keywords field, this will return the member for whom that keyword or keywords are the most relevant.
•Once you’ve returned search results, use the refinement options in the “Modify Your Search” section, and make changes without leaving the page.

Find below Operators names for Linkedin .. This is important .

Let me show you demonstration using Advanced Search operations

Here below

Search String Format for Manager search in Linkedin .
Please have closer look on search string used below...

ccompany:lockheed ctitle:manager country:”united states” zip:20001 radius:25

The result will be

Combining Boolean Operators with LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators

Combine “regular” search terms and Boolean operators along with LinkedIn’s advanced operators. For example, let’s shoot for an Exchange admin/engineer with an MCSE, and a current title of engineer in a 25 mile radius of 94131 in San Francisco:

SourceString for Exchange Administrator
(Important .Please see the OR operator how it is added)

Exchange ctitle:engineer (admin OR administrator OR administration OR administer OR administered OR maintenance OR maintained) (server OR servers) (mail OR email OR messaging) (MCSE OR “Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer”) country:”united states” zip:94131 radius:25

Here is a snippet from one of the results:

LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators in “OR” Statements

Be careful when attempting to use some of LinkedIn’s advanced operators in OR statements.

For example, here are two different ways of trying to search for people with a current title of 1
or more specific titles

Here below the sample for you ...

Exchange (ctitle:engineer OR ctitle:admin OR ctitle:administrator)

That syntax does not run - here is the message you get:
LinkedIn appears to prefer enclosing the OR statements in quotation marks, like this:
exchange ctitle:”engineer OR admin OR administrator

Sorting and Modifying Your Results

After you execute your “hand coded” search using LinkedIn’s advanced operators, you have the option of sorting the results by the usual values and you can also modify your search as you can if you had constructed your search using LinkedIn’s advanced search interface.

Conclusion

If you like being able to “hand code” Boolean search strings, it’s nice to know that we can effectively take advantage of nearly all of LinkedIn’s major search options/parameters (such as current/past company, current/past title, zip code radius, industry, etc.) by combining LinkedIn’s advanced operators with Boolean strings to get precisely the results we are looking for.
Although you can save searches via LinkedIn’s “save this search” feature – if you are using LinkedIn with a free account, you are limited to saving 3 searches. An added benefit of being able to craft complete search strings using LinkedIn’s advanced operators is that you can create your strings in Notepad or Word and save them for future use as well as quickly modify them (copy and paste a search, then change paramaters without having to retype the entire string).

I hope this helps you ….

HAPPY SOURCING !!!!!

Twitter Sourcing Techniques

2009-07-21T07:13:00.001-07:00

Twitter Definition :
Its Micro- Blogging.It is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user.One of the biggest values of Twitter is the relationship building/ networking, and connecting. Its a very powerful marketing & community building tool.
The messages on twitter can be sent via text or instant messaging, e-mail, MP3 or the web. Twitter can be used to quickly get out the latest news and really useful information. A new position in the co.; referral programs, employee news etc.
How to use Twitter for Recruiting?Here I found some tips which you can try and get yourself experience this tool
1) search.twitter.com (Formerly Summize)- It searches tweets from any twitter users.
So lets search who's talking about "ASP.NET" with in 50 miles of 07645(my work area) zip code in the last two months and I always see job ads form career builder so I would negate that.
So inputting"ASP.NET -CareerBuilder.com since:2008-06-01 near:07645 within:50mi" I get so many people "tweeting" about ASP.NET. Isn't that interesting
If you aren't familiar with boolean operators for twitter use the Advanced search tab in home page OR maybe you want o get familiar with the search operators in twitter
Now it doesn't end there as you can RSS (Feed for this query ) to your reader and automatically see twwets talking about "ASP.NET" your company , about you ....
2)TweetscanBoolean search: -, OR, and quotes works for Tweetscan
Include/Exclude users by putting the username or -username in the User Search box.
3)Tweetbeep
TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter. It gives you twitter alerts by email when a tweet matches your search
4) twithire.comA Free Job Board for Twitter. On logging in twitter;n you choose a category and generate a key which links you to your twitter page where you enter the Job Title, Company name, Location and URL for the actual posting.
Twitter must be boring for many as why the heck I want to know what you had for breakfast today but there's more to it about getting personal, networking, socializing, employee/ment branding ,news update etc.Using Twitter for Active Candidate IdentificationIf you’ve ever found yourself wondering if you should and how you can leverage Twitter in your ACTIVE talent identification efforts, you’ve come to the right place.While Twitter is an intrinsically shallow source of human capital data (140 character Tweets and 160 character bios), unlike Facebook - it is quite searchable. In this post I am going to review and compare 6 effective methods of searching Twitter for ACTIVE candidate identification: Twitter’s Advanced Search, Power Twitter, TweetDeck, Twellow, TweetGrid, and X-Ray searching Twitter
Searching Twitter with…TwitterTwitter’s advanced search interface and functionality is quite robust, supporting standard Boolean search with AND (any space is an “implied AND”), OR, NOT (via the - sign), and phrase searching, as well as special search operators such as the hashtag (#).Three of the most useful search features of Twitter are hashtags, geocoding, and RSS feeds. When it comes to trying to find people with specific skills who live in specific places, being able to track groups/conversations via hashtags and to search by location is HUGE. Also, it’s highly convenient to essentially convert a search into an RSS feed that you can keep tabs on.
Searching Twitter with the Power Twitter Extension for Firefox
If you use Mozilla’s Firefox Internet browser, you can harness the power of Twitter’s search functionality right from your browser with the Power Twitter add-on.
Once you download and add Power Twitter to Firefox, you can conveniently type your searches into the Power Twitter search bar located at the top of your browser window:
Searching Twitter with TweetDeckTweetDeck is a fantastic application . Not only does it allow you to easily track Tweets, replies, and direct messages - you can also use it to run searches and keep tabs on the results in real-time.
TweetDeck supports AND, OR, NOT (- sign), phrase, (quotation marks) and hashtag (#) searching. Click on the image below to view a short video of how to execute searches for candidates using TweetDeck (please be patient - it might take a few moments to load):
Searching Twitter with TweetGridTweetGrid is an interesting application that allows you to create a Twitter search dashboard that updates in real time. TweetGrid supports AND, OR, NOT (- sign), and phrase searching (quotation marks). It also allows for reliable location searching via geocoding and the near/within operator combo. Here is the full list of TweetGrid search operators/functions.
With TweetGrid you can configure and create a search dashboard to track and display the results of multiple searches - you can choose how many searches you’d like to track.
Searching Twitter with TwellowTwellow is a solid Twitter application that affords users a number of benefits. Searching Twellow to identify potential candidates can be accomplished using Twellow’s own take on the standard Boolean search operators: AND (&), OR (), NOT (-sign) and phrase searching (quotation marks).
What’s great about Twellow is that unlike Twitter’s Advanced Search, Twellow searches text in Tweets AND in the bio and location fields. Additionally, Twellow also supports field-specific searching with the @ operator - allowing you to target words and phrases in the name, screen_name, location, bio, and extended_bio fields. Click here to see a complete list of Twellow’s search operators.
TwellowHoodBefore moving on, I wanted to show you an interesting feature of Twellow that involves an interactive map that you can click on to zoom-in to explore locations in the U.S. and Canada to find lists of people on Twitter by city.
X-Ray Searching TwitterIf you don’t want to use someone else’s Twitter application to search for people on Twitter, you can always try and use an Internet search engine to X-Ray Twitter for the information you need. Thankfully, Twitter is very “X-Rayable.”
For example, let’s say you’re targeting people who mention PHP and who live in the Atlanta area. You could go to Google and enter this:
site:twitter.com atlanta php ~develop -jobs
Here’s a snippet of the page 1 results (over 400 total results

Note : This are the references which i found on the internet sole purpose to make recruiters aware of latest trends in recruitment,any material found similar is regretted as these are findings on my google searches nothing from my end

Linkedin Sourcing Techniques and Methods

2009-06-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

LinkedIn is one of the most searchable social networks, and with many users filing out their profiles with as much detail as a resume, LinkedIn offers the deepest occupational and professional data of any of the social media sites. As such, it is extremely important that sourcers and recruiters learn how to master all of the various ways you can search LinkedIn to find potential candidates.

LinkedIn’s Search Interface

LinkedIn’s search interface is quite robust, supporting full Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT) for both keyword and structured field search (current/past title, current/past company, and school), allowing you to create complex and precise search strings. Interestingly, I haven’t hit the limit of LinkedIn’s search capability yet in terms of the maximum number of characters/words it can accept - it appears bottomless. Also of note is that even with a free LinkedIn account, you are able to save up to 3 searches.

X-Ray Searching LinkedIn

The vast majority of LinkedIn profiles are “public,” meaning that they are published on the web. In fact, I believe that when anyone creates a LinkedIn profile, the default/recommended setting is “Full View,” which automatically makes the profile available for Internet search engines to index them and make them available for searching. Only if someone takes the time to go into their “Account & Settings” and change their “Public Profile” to “None/off” would they not show up in web (Google, etc.) searches.

If a LinkedIn profile is published to the web, it can be found by using Internet search engines. This means that anyone can leverage a search engine such as Google and use the site: command to X-Ray search LinkedIn for all public profiles - whether they are in that person’s network or not.

This is especially helpful for those who have relatively small networks and for those who do not pay for premium access to Linkedin. When X-Raying LinkedIn, LinkedIn doesn’t “know” who you are, so it cannot limit your search results to only those people in your network. Also, with a free account, users are limited to viewing the first 100 results of any search when using LinkedIn’s search interface. Using a site like Google to X-Ray into LinkedIn, you can view up to 1000 results

Focused X-Ray String for Google

Instead of trying to exclude a long list of false positive non-profile terms, this string is designed to retrieve results by targeting ”in” or “pub” in the urls of LinkedIn profiles –

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory
X-Ray String to Search for Current Title

This string employs Google’s wildcard (asterisk) operator to target the phrase on LinkedIn profiles where current title is listed:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory “current * TITLE”
Unlocking “Private” Profiles

When searching from within LinkedIn, you will inevitably at some point encounter a result of someone that is not in your LinkedIn nework - there will be no name listed:

Check this link ,here it teaches how to unlock Linkedin private profiles

http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/LinkedIn_Unlock_Private_Profile.swf
Advanced Operators

In addition to supporting the standard Boolean operators, LinkedIn has their own set of unique ”advanced operators” that allow you to “hand-code” search strings that control most of LinkedIn’s structured fields (current/past title, current/past company, school, industry, joined, and location) without having to use the advanced search interface. In my opinion - this is one of the coolest and most useful aspects of searching Linkedin.

Check this link ,here it teaches how to use Advanced Operators in Linkedin
http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/LinkedIn_Advanced_Operators.swf

Conclusion

When it comes to searching LinkedIn to find candidates, you have several options - be sure to master and employ them all!

Here’s a breakdown of the Pros/Cons of each:

LinkedIn’s search interface:

Pros:

* Full Boolean logic in keyword, title, company, and school fields
* Ability to create insanely long and precise search strings

* Can search structured fields including current/past title, current/past company, school
* Precise location search, down to 10 mile zip code radius

Cons

* No root-word/wildcard search (LinkedIn, are you reading this?)
* You can’t see people who aren’t in your network (by design, I know)
* You’re limited to viewing the first 100 results with a free account

X-Ray Searching LinkedIn:

Pros:

* You can see ANY public profile, whether they are in your network or not
* You can view up to 1000 results
* You can leverage configurable proximity search (via Exalead) to find people on LinkedIn based on what they DO, not just what they say

Cons

* No support of full Boolean logic (via Google)
* Limited to 32 search terms (via Google)
* No structured field search (current/past title, current/past company, school)
* Limited to metro area search (no precise zip code search)

LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators

Pros:

* You can hand-code search strings using both Boolean operators and LinkedIn’s advanced operators to search for keywords and structured field data, controlling practically all of LinkedIn’s search fields
* All of the benefits of using LinkedIn’s search interface
* You can save your searches in Notepad and simply copy and paste them any time you need them, as pseudo-saved searches

Cons

* All the limitations of searching within LinkedIn (can’t see out-of-network results, limited to 100 with a free account)

What is Retained Search Recruitment and Contigency Search Recruitment and their advantages and disadvantages

2009-05-05T22:55:00.000-07:00

Retained Search Recruitment and Contingency Search Recruitment:

Retained Search :
A retained search is an employee screening process used by recruitment companies. It is designed to enable highly skilled professionals to find opportunities in the work environment.

Recruitment companies that use the retained search process are able to offer employers highly skilled candidates with proven track records.

Retained search is preferable in cases where a company has a pressing executive level need that requires a candidate who will hold key leadership responsibilities and whose services are integral to overall organizational success. Given the strategic importance of these positions, there is often a degree of urgency, and often confidentiality, that accompanies this type of search.

The retained search process includes
• Set criteria in order to obtain the best candidates for any given role.
• To begin with, the recruitment company obtains a thorough understanding of the company they are recruiting for. This provides them not only with an idea of the type of company, but also with a better understanding of the job role involved. This means that the candidate will get a better idea of the role that is being offered.
• The next step is the preparation of the candidate that employers are looking for.
• When both the candidate and the employer are aware of the expectations from both sides, a better fit for the job role can be found.
• The agency scouts out organizations and areas where the best candidate can be found.
• They also use a large research database of candidates specifically for the retained research procedure.
• The employee candidate may already be employed and may not be considering a move, but the opportunity is made available in case the candidate is interested.

The next step in the retained search process is screening.
• Potential candidates are contacted, and their work records and qualifications undergo a screening process.
• They are also be made aware of the opportunity available and asked about their interest in the job offer.
• If the candidate is open to an offer, then an intensive evaluation process begins.
The recruitment agency conducts interviews and makes assessments by evaluating past performance in similar work environments. The future potentiality of the candidate is also evaluated, as well as the compatibility of the employee and employer.
Only when all the retained search evaluations and assessments have been made will the employer be contacted with potential candidates. The employer will usually be given three or four candidates for consideration. If the process if successful, then follow up procedures will be used to evaluate the progress of the candidate.
The retained search is a highly intensive recruiting tool. It saves time for both the employer and the candidate. By maintaining a research database of potential clients for employers, the recruitment agency can find a fit more quickly. A recruiting company that uses the retained search method only accepts a limited number of assignments in order to give each one full consideration.

Contingency Search
A contingency search by definition means that the search firm will only collect a fee if they find and place a suitable candidate for the position in question. This type of search may or may not be structured contractually with the client company and it is 100% “back end” loaded. Therefore, regardless of the number of qualified candidates presented, if none are ultimately hired, the search firm in question earns nothing. A strict contingency search means that there is no exclusivity to the arrangement and therefore the client company is free to use other search firms or source other candidates on their own. This arrangement begs the question as to whether the search firm actually has such a “client” given the absence of any stated or written commitments for exclusivity. It also explains why contingency searches are often given less energy by recruiting professionals because of the increased risk of no return on invested energy and resources.

In a contingent search, the search process is usually less structured and less about a precise candidate “fit” and more about getting potentially qualified candidates in front of the client so that the client can make his or her own final assessment. Often candidates in such searches are drawn from a search firm’s existing database or from public job boards. While these methods can certainly uncover good candidates, such approaches leave a vast pool of talented passive candidates untapped. With less time spent on securing a clear job description and the candidate sourcing methods that are often employed in a contingency search, the chance of a candidate/client mismatch is significantly increased. Many good candidates get hired for the wrong reasons and therefore care should be exercised when embarking on a contingency search to in sure that there is a well-defined job description clearly communicated to and understood by the recruiter conducting the search. Fees for contingency search usually average around 25%, although this varies widely depending on geographic location being sourced, the industry and specific talent being recruited, and the number of positions being filled.

CONTINGENCY FIRMS VERSUS RETAINER FIRMS

Contigency Search
Frequently represent individuals seeking placement.
Are usually in competition with other similar firms or agencies for the placement.
Professional staff is usually compensated on commission for placements made.
Usually search for lower level organizational positions including but not restricted to individual contributors.
Tend to spend little time on initial research and specification; often never meet company management or prospects.
Focus primarily on applicants/candidates actively seeking employment; recruiting is placement-oriented.
Search consultant works concurrently with a multitude of open job orders.
With no guarantee of payment for services performed, the consultant cannot afford to invest much time in a search beyond basic recruiting and submission of resumes.
Will present most candidates within 1-2 weeks of obtaining job order; may submit substantial paperwork to increase probability of a placement by pushing for interviews and hoping for interest on both sides.
Contingency search requires considerable Human Resource involvement in screening, interviewing and evaluating candidates presented.
Under no obligation to guarantee or produce results due to contingency fee arrangement (paid on placement only).
Fees range from 15-33% of compensation and are paid by company on placement (or shortly there after).
Decision to pay a fee is usually made by Human Resources and is budgetary motivated.

Retainer Search :

Represent Companies employer only.
Conduct search assignments on an exclusive contract basis only.
Professional staff is usually compensated on salary and bonus with incentives for client business development.
Usually work at middle to senior management organizational levels.
Must know client organization and position responsibility/requirements thoroughly before initiating search. Typically document this in a position description.
Recruiting efforts are strategically focused on a broadly targeted range of potential candidates, most of whom are not active in the job market; recruiting is process and result oriented.
Typically the search consultant is personally committed to 3-5 assignments at any given time and is responsible for the success or failure of each.
Search consultant typically invests 40-160 hours per month per client assignment in recruiting, evaluation, screening and client interaction.
Usually recommends 3-10 highly qualified and ranked candidates to client company in 4-8 weeks.
Requires minimal Human Resources and General Management time investment until interview process begins.
Reputable firms offer a professional guarantee of candidate success and are committed to thorough and ethical practices and results including an off limits policy.
Fees range from 25-33% of compensation (or flat quote) plus expenses and are paid by company in installments
Authorization for search is usually made by company General Management and Human Resources Management with rigorous selection criteria.

SIMPLE BOOLEAN SEARCH FOR TECHNICAL RECRUITERS

2009-04-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

This Boolean search strategies is being offered for free to enable technical recruiters to more effectively mine the Monster resume databases.

CAUTION: The concepts below also apply to other databases, but NOT all Boolean search engines were created equally. Some require that AND/OR be in all caps (Monster do not). Some don’t even use ‘and/or’, but use ‘+/-’ instead. I need to really stress this point,

I. THE ROLE OF PARENTHESES IN BOOLEAN SEARCHES
It makes a difference how you group the numbers below by putting in parentheses:

1+2x2=$5 million? $6 million?
1+(2x2)=5 Here we did the “multiply” first, and then the “add”…..Multiply is similar
to “and”
(1+2)x2=6 Here we did the “add” first, and then the multiply. ”Addition” is similar
to “or”
Parentheses will help us group search terms for effective searches

II. EXAMPLES OF WRITING A BOOLEAN EQUATION
JavaScript or C++ and SQL ?????, without parentheses or a ‘rule’ that says do “and” first & then “or”, or vice versa
JavaScript or (C++ and SQL) resume must have JavaScript or either C++ and SQL
(JavaScript or C++) and SQL resume must have JavaScript or C++ and SQL

III. STRING SEARCHES
As an exercise, go to any resume database and pull up a resume at random. Look over the resume and see if you can pick out a word or a group of words [WE CALL THIS A
“STRING”, because it is a string of letters in the alphabet in a specific order] that you think would be UNIQUE to this particular resume and this particular resume ALONE

If you are searching resumes for the word “JavaScript” but you enter just “Java”, you won’t find it. If you enter JavaScriptx, you won’t find JavaScript because you entered
a different string of characters. If you’re trying to locate “Brent Vaughter” but enter “Vaughter Brent”, you’ll never find Brent. If you’re looking for just “Brent”, but enter “tBren”, you won’t find him. The search string was not correct or the characters were not in the exact order necessary to find him.

IV. EXAMPLE OF AN IT/SOFTWARE SEARCH STRING
JavaScript AND C++ AND SQL is the same if you put in the following parentheses:
(JavaScript) AND (C++) AND (SQL)
Sometimes resumes will have JavaScript mis-spelled as 2 words: Java Script, so to
make sure we don’t miss these resumes, we change the above search string to:
(JavaScript OR Java Script) AND C++ AND SQL
V. DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR
Suppose you had to find candidates in a database for the following job description:
1. Must have hands on experience with data modeling or design of a database.
2. Must have experience in Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.
3. Strongly prefer a working knowledge of either C++ and/or Java.
4. Database experience with back-up, tuning, stored procedures, and security.
5. 1 year experience with XML
You’ll have go through several trial-and-error passes to come up with the right search.
Here are possible Boolean Search Strings:
Pass #1 - Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and modeling and design and back-up and tuning
and stored procedures and security.

Notes on Pass #1: Above equation would find the perfect candidate, but highly unlikely
since the perfect resume would have to have been written. Candidate may have all the
above skills, but if they forgot to include ANY ONE of the above OR if they ASSUMED
that the recruiter would intuitively know that the candidate had the skills but just didn’t
list them on the resume, this resume WOULD NOT be surfaced out of the database. For
example a Database Administrator might have back-up and tuning in their background,
but just didn’t put it on the resume. We can solve this by Or’ing together the requirements
in bullet #4 above…... We can also drop Microsoft from the above equation.

Pass #2 – (SQL Server 7.0 and modeling and design) and (back-up or tuning or
stored procedures or security)
Notes on Pass #2: Not everybody is going to put “modeling” AND “design” in their
resume, so let’s OR those together in the next pass.

Pass #3 – SQL Server 7.0 and (modeling or design) and (back-up or tuning or stored
procedures or security)
Notes on Pass #3: After running several searches using the above Boolean search string,
we find that many of the resumes are those of Java and C++ programmers, and they only
dabbled at one point in their career in the things of the world of databases. These people
never had the title of Database Administrator. Our client is looking for a strong, databases-
are-all-I’m-interested-in kind of person, so we need to add Database Administrator.
But some resumes may have Database Administrator on them and not DBA and vice
versa, so we need to include BOTH by OR’ing these two terms together.

Pass #4 – (Database Administrator or DBA) and SQL Server 7.0 and (modeling or
design) and (back-up or tuning or stored procedures or security)
Notes on Pass #4: This is a pretty good search string, but we still aren’t getting many
hits. It turns out that SQL Server 7.0 has only been out for 1 year and there aren’t many
folks who have that. There are plenty of SQL Server 6.5 candidates, but the client FIRMLY
only wants those who have SQL Server 7.0. So now we need to get creative on how else
to find people with SQL Server 7.0 experience…………There are several alternative
ways we can find these people: 1) ‘SQL Server’ – some resumes will leave off the 7.0
even though they have it. 2) ‘SQL 7’ – some resumes will shorten the phrase by leaving
out the word ‘server’ (remember a search string engine is only looking for a very specific
‘string’ of characters is a very specific order). 3) ‘SQL Server 6.5/7.0’ DBA’s who have
had both 6.5 and 7.0 experience will frequently list their experience in this ‘/’ format. 4)
‘5/7’ - Monster doesn’t recognize non-letters or numbers, and so ‘6.5/7.0’ looks like ‘5/
7’ to Monster, so if we find the string, ‘5/7’, we’ve got a pretty good shot at finding the
right person. Now if we combine or OR all of these together, our odds go up as we
implement this in Pass #5.

Pass #5 - (Database Administrator or DBA) and (SQL Server 7.0 or SQL 7 or SQL
Server 6.5/7.0 or 5/7) and (modeling or design) and (back-up or tuning or stored
procedures or security)
Notes on Pass #5: This isn’t the end of ways to approach this search, but it gives you a
good start. Once we find these resumes, then we start prioritizing those which also have
C++ or Java (7/10) and those that have XML (5/10). Both of these are druthers.

VI. JAVA DEVELOPER JOB SPEC – (2-3 years experience person)
• Experience in java development.
• Experience in C++ development.
• Experience with ASP and/or JSP.
• Exposure (???) to relational databases (RDBMS) such as Access, SQL, Oracle,
and/or Sybase.
• ??? Experience with ODBC and/or JDBC???.
Pass1
Java and C++ and (ASP or JSP) and (RDBMS or Access or SQL or Oracle or Sybase) and (ODBC or JDBC)

Notes on Pass #1: Monster does not recognize “+” signs. Therefore Monster won’t
search for just ‘C++’**, because to Monster it looks just like ‘C’. There are several
ways around this:
1) many , but not all, programmers who have C++ experience have C also, and they usually note this on their resumes as ‘C/C++”. Monster still doesn’t recognize the ‘++’, but it certainly will identify the ‘C/C’ which is good enough to get you to C++!
2) most companies will accept Visual C++, so this can be represented as ‘Visual C’ or as ‘VC’ (for VC++). 3) C++ is an older generation programming language, at least as compared to Java. C++ is harder to program, but it generally runs faster than Java. Java is faster and easier to use BUT now it’s speed is approaching that of C++, making Java the “hot” skill, so many programmers do have C++ experience but they don’t put it on their resume because because it’s not the latest “craze”. So if you find Java, you often find C++ if you call the person and ask.
**It is best to leave the “++’s” in your search equation, because you may cut and paste
this string into Headhunter, Copernic, or some other search engine that does recognize “++”.

Pass #2 – Java and (C++ or C/C++ or Visual C++ or VC++) and (ASP or JSP) and
(RDBMS or Access or SQL or Oracle or Sybase) and (ODBC or JDBC)
Notes on Pass #3: ASP (Active Server Pages) and JSP (Java Server Pages) are software
tools that allow a web page to interact with a database. Most, if not all, databases are
RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). Access, SQL, Oracle, and Sybase
all belong in the RDBMS category. So we could conclude that a) if a person has ASP or
JSP it means that b) they are interacting with a database and that if they are interacting
with a database that c) it is highly probably that it is a RDBMS database, and if it is an
RDBMS, it is highly probable that it is one of the ones listed above. Also remember that
the job spec only required an “exposure” to an RDBMS.
All this is being stated so that we can ELIMINATE some of the above terms and pick up
more resumes to choose from out of the database..
We could also probably eliminate ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity) and JDBC
(Java Data Base Connectivity) because both of these software tools are used to access
databases, and we have already established that a person having ASP or JSP is accessing
databases, the odds are good that they person is using either ODBC or JDBC, but if they
didn’t put it on their resume, that resume will not be surfaced out of the database. However
it is true that a person may be using something besides ODBC or JDBC to access
databases, such as ADO, RDO, or OLE. If the client is really set on ODBC and JDBC,
then you might have to leave it in the Boolean search string above. This type of situation
gets into the fuzzy judgment call area, or it may mean you have to play around with
different combinations of search terms. This process is truly one that exercises both your
right and left brain.
Some resumes won’t have ASP or JSP. Instead some will spell it out as Active Server
Pages or Java Server Pages, so if we only look for ASP or JSP, we’ll miss these folks. To
fix this, we’ll OR in some additional terms as shown below in Pass #4. Also in #4, we’ll
take out all the database access references in order to glean more good qualified resumes.
Pass #3 - Java and (C++ or C/C++ or Visual C++ or VC++) and (ASP or Active
Server Pages or Java Server Pages or JSP)
Notes on Pass #4: Now we have a pretty good search string for Java developers, but when we run Monster and get 499 resumes, we realize that it is going to be very time
consuming to go through all of these, so we need to look for ways to cut this number down without sacrificing good resumes. One way to do this is to scan down the list of job
titles for the various resumes without opening any of the actual resumes. With the above search (and I have personally encountered this many times) you will get the following unwanted’s: :

1) recruiters-”I have recruited Java, C++, ASP, JSP, etc software engineers”:
2) managers or directors or president or vice president (remember, you are looking for a 2-3 year experience person and these words are unlikely but not impossible
to appear on the target resumes.
3) business analyst – “ I did business analysis
on projects where software engineers (NOT ME THOUGH) were using Java, C++, ASP, etc.” As you scan down the list of titles, you’ll find others you want to exclude.

Pass #4 - Java and (C++ or C/C++ or Visual C++ or VC++) and (ASP or Active Server Pages or Java Server Pages or JSP) and not (recruiter or manager or director
or president or vice president or business analyst or sales manager or student or human resources or HR or marketing manager or business development)

Notes on Pass #5: This should give you a good search string, but always understand that anywhere along each of these steps you’ll probably need to tinker with the search criteria in order to get the best results for your search. The above string might knock down your list of 499 resumes to go through, down to maybe 130. Big time savings

VII. MISCELLANEOUS SEARCH STRATEGIES:
1**Looking for a Java developer and use: Java and consultant and developer and software engineer. Won’t find very much because the person will have to have all 3 titles in his resume, consultant, developer, and sofware engineer
because you “and’ed” them together. It is better to OR these 3 terms together and put a parentheses around them and then “AND” that with Java.
2**If you want to find a Java developer in the Dallas area, use the area codes: Java and (214 or 972). For smaller states, you don’t need to use area codes. For example if you are looking for someone in a small state like MA? Forget
area codes, but include surrounding small states like RI and CT. LincMad.com makes an excellent area code map.
One note of caution here: especially in Monster and Headhunter, many candidates submit “confidential resumes”
which obviously don’t have phone numbers on them, so if I’m looking for a candidate in Dallas Texas (area codes 214 & 972), the above search criteria would miss many qualified candidates.
3**Headhunter.net allows you to enter a very long search string, but you only get one pass at it. Monster.com allows
you a shorter search string, but you can enter subsequent strings that allow you to subrange down to the exact resumes
you need. One caution in using Monster, if for example, you enter Java as a search string, and are looking at the
whole U.S., you will get 500 resumes or hits. If you then enter Java and specify that you only want to look in Texas, you’ll get 500 resumes. Hmm, something is wrong here. Either all 500 Java programmers in the U.S. are in Texas and
zero Java resumes are in the other 49 states, OR something else is going on. If there are 5000 Java resumes in the U.S.
or 5000 Java resumes in Texas alone, Monster is going to pick 500 resumes for you, and you are not going to see the
other “hidden” 4500 Java resumes. So when using Monster, make sure that the search string that you can fit into the FIRST PASS narrows down the number of resumes to 499 or less. You can do this by adding more restrictive search
terms or you can tell Monster to search for resumes received in only the last 3 days. Either way you do it, you need to be at 499 or below on your first pass with Monster.
4**Sometimes you will be looking for a Java or C++ programmer and find a resume with great experience in both Java and C++, for example. Then when you read the resume more carefully, you find out that the person has no web
development experience. But how can that be? Embedded application person. More specifically, an embedded application is one in which, say, an Intel Pentium III microprocessor is ‘embedded’ into a microwave oven. This is an embedded application. A Java or C++ programmer will write a software program that is transferred to the inside of the microprocessor, never to be changed or modified again! If you take this same Intel Pentium III microprocessor and put it into a Sony laptop computer, this is a computer application. So let’s write a simplified boolean search string that will filter out these embedded/non web related resumes as follows: (Java or C++) and not embedded.
5**Use of the asterisk or ‘wildcard’: If you entered “Java programmer” as a search term, you could possibly miss
great resumes where the person never used the word “programmer” on his resume, but instead had a statement like,
“I’ve been programming in Java for 5 years”, or “I’ve programmed with Java for 5 years”. In both of these cases
if the resume used the words “programming” or “programmed”, the resume would not be surfaced, because the search string would ONLY be looking for the word “programmer”. However if you used the following search string:
Java program* , this would pick up programmer, programmed, and programming

6** There is also the double asterisk. Monster is fuzzy about their status using this. I don’t know if other databases have this feature. But the double asterisk is supposed to pick up ‘stem’ words. For example, fly** would also pick up
all the words that “stem” off this word such as flying, flew, flown. Another use of the single asterisk is: sales and manag* which will also pick up manager, managing, and management. (Note, if we had used manage* instead of
manag* above, we would have missed managing.)
7**Another way of picking up a 2-3 year experience Java programmer is to use: Java and (programm* or software engineer or software development engineer or software consultant or software developer or web developer) and
not (manager or director or vice president or CIO or CTO or president). Sometimes you need to OR together all the possible titles a software developer might have, put parentheses around all of this, and then AND it with something
else you’re looking for, or as in the case above, things you are NOT looking for.
8**Mis-spelled words: It’s tough enough finding the right resume using the right combination of search words, but our job is made even tougher when some technical terms are consistently mis-spelled. Two I can think of off the top of my
head is JavaScript (one word) which is often mis-spelled as two words, Java Script. So if you’re only search using JavaScript, you’ll miss all the people who had Java Script on their resume. Same thing with a software test/software
QA tool call Winrunner, which is often incorrectly listed on resumes as Win Runner. To correct both of these problems in a search string, you could use (JavaScript and Java Script) and (software engineer or software consultant)
and for the other one, you could use (Winrunner or win runner) and (software test or software QA).

For the recruiters community :
Here I shared some basic Boolean search techniques and strings .I appreciate recruiters if you could share your search strings and Boolean searchs which we can help all recruiters which makes their work simple……

Guerilla Recruiting Strategies and Methodologies

2009-03-15T23:48:00.000-07:00

Guerilla recruiting is a style of recruiting that makes use of the tactics and strategies used for centuries in guerilla warfare. It is a highly focused form of recruiting that is fully integrated and driven by the fundamental motives of the organization. It is typically deployed by an organization that is inferior both in numbers and tools against a larger, more mechanized competitor, but that is not always the case.
Unlike traditional recruiting, which merely supports the business; guerilla recruiting takes responsibility for contributing to and driving the organization's performance. It is a no-holds-barred style of recruiting where every weakness in the competitor is identified and exploited using minimal yet highly focused efforts. The battle that guerilla recruiters are fighting is not for talent, but rather for market share, revenues and survival.
. In guerilla recruiting you attack competitors where they are vulnerable, even if you have no direct need for that talent — because while your competitors counter to repair the damage inflicted, they leave other more desirable talent unguarded. Every weakness must be attacked until the competitor is weakened and can be annihilated, enabling your organization to pick up market share and revenues without the costly expense of a merger or acquisition.
Characteristics of a Guerilla Recruiting Force
A Guerilla recruiting force is a small, very elite group of professional recruiters that often augments a traditional recruiting function. Their actions are not subject to requisitions and budgetary constraints, although they are held accountable for producing a hefty return on investment
Their strengths are in competitive intelligence, tactical planning, and flawless execution. They use the competitor's strengths and weaknesses against them, customizing their plan of attack to each competitor's current circumstances. In particular, they leverage the gaps in employee expectations and employer deliverables.
The guerilla recruiting force:
· Is viewed as a weapon.
· Utilizes the cover of society to mask its presence.
· Plays on the aspirations of talent using sympathy, cooperation, and assistance.
· Does battle on enemy grounds.
· Is laser focused.
What Are the Major Steps in Building A Guerilla Recruiting Force?
Guerilla recruiting is not for the faint of heart or those not adept at dealing with corporate politics.
Guerilla recruiting is about hiring to hurt, about knowingly and purposely inflecting harm on a competitor's ability to do business. Therefore, the primary action that must be taken when building a guerilla recruiting force is to recognize the political nature of the activity and make sure that everyone involved can stomach the gore that will ensue until victory is reached.

With the groundwork in expectations laid, the major steps include:
· Establishing a charter for the force that exists outside that of the traditional
· recruiting function, and possibly outside the human resource department.
· Selecting a leader and key players who have a proven ability to work in unison on
· projects requiring extreme mastery of details.
· Identification of primary business goals and prioritization of external forces capable
· of blocking achievement of those goals.
· Development of a defined process and arsenal of tools to power competitive
· intelligence.
· Establishment of a discretionary spending fund used to finance covert recruiting
· activities.
Critical Success Factors
Success in running a guerilla recruiting force is largely dependent on flawless execution of a short list of success factors. These factors include:
An unrelenting focus on execution based on the perceptions of the target talent versus that of the internal manager or employer.
The identification and internal senior-level support of a guerilla recruiting leader who is resolute, loyal, self confident, capable of handling retaliation, honest, well-informed, and respected.
Dedication by senior leadership to adjust corporate culture, management styles, and corporate infrastructure to meet the changing demands of the talent population.
Dedication by senior leadership to fully support and continue guerilla recruiting activities until victory is achieved with resources needed.
Critical Failure Factors
· Lack of organization and prioritization of guerilla recruiting strikes.
· Existence of hidden agendas or actions outside those sanctioned by the primary
· business goals.
· Use of deceit and trickery as means to secure recruits (this may cause the organization
· more harm than that inflicted on competitors).
· Failure to understand and manage to gaps in what talent expects and what employers
· are capable of delivering.
Examples of Guerilla Recruiting Strikes
Ø One Midwest firm heavily dependent upon high-end customer service talent recruited employees whose demographics matched the target customer profile of competitors to become customers of the competitors for the purpose of identifying which employees were top performers. After establishing a rapport with high-end associates, the employees later used their relationship to identify the associates' decision-making criteria, which was relayed back to the recruiting force and used to deliver customized introductions.
Ø One national insurance firm routinely visited the parking lot of a competitor's regional training facilities with a video camera to record the license plate numbers of employees who showed up on days the competitor was offering certification classes. The firm then used state motor vehicle databases to identify the employees' names and contact information.
Ø One national hotel chain recruited a large task force of retired people interested in travel to scout talent at competing organizations. Recruited scouts were given specific tasks to execute that would see how employees at competing organizations handled certain circumstances. In exchange for their identification and assessment of talent, the hotel chain partially subsidized its scouts' travel.
Ø A regional health services firm transitioned an oversupply of medical technicians following the relocation of a facility into a short-term temporary staffing function which sold services to other regional competitors. While onsite, the technicians were charged with evaluating and reporting back to the guerilla recruiting force which talent was worth recruiting and what their likely concerns or motivations were. Once the key talent at competing firms was mapped, the temporary staffing technicians were reabsorbed into other operations in a manner that looked growth related.

POWER HIRING AND RESUME PARSING

2009-02-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

POWER Hiring we spend much of our time ferreting about in other people’s hiring processes to see what works best and what works least best. We then collectively develop plans to make both the best and least best a bit better. One thing we’ve discovered is that too much time, money, and effort are spent chasing active candidates
Let’s take an example to represent the active candidate pool. This is 15% of the total. The body represents the 85% passive candidate pool. Another five to six percent of the active pool are represented by temporarily active candidates. On the figure, it’s where the head and body overlap. These are the people who get frustrated at work one day and look for a new position the next. If they don’t find anything compelling, they take themselves off the market. This simple model is a good way to think about your sourcing programs. Of course, cost per hire increases as you move into the passive candidate pool. It takes more effort to find and hire these candidates But if you set up your sourcing systems properly, you can minimize unnecessary expense
Here are some ideas to consider:
Move faster.
The best are snapped up quickly, so be quicker than everyone else.
Better, more compelling and more visible advertising. Advertising should treat candidates as customers, addressing the needs of the best, not the rest. This is the only way you’ll get top people to respond. Read your ads to see who you’re really targeting.
Use better filtering methods to focus more on performance characteristics, rather than just skills. The best candidates deliver more results and get more promotions, so make sure your screening tools look for achievement terms when ranking resumes. Achievement terms could be things like awards won, recognition received, promotions, or just more action verbs in the resume (e.g., built, created, developed, completed, achieved, won, led, overcame, President’s Club, Rookie-of-the-Year, promoted, etc.). Engenium is a search engine that allows you to do this quickly. RecruitMax has this powerful search engine built into its applicant tracking system. ePredix offers a series of screening questionnaires that accurately identifies these achievement traits. This will help speed up the process by identifying the best quickly.
You need to make sure that all top candidates from the active pool speak to a recruiter within hours after applying. Since they’ll be off the market quickly, this will allow you to hire more of them when they do become available. Time per hire is a good overall metric, but when you’re going after the best, hours and days count. Consider adding a “speed-to-hire top candidates” to your management metrics. Then develop a fast-track system that recruiters and hiring managers use whenever a top candidate enters into the pool. This means a phone call from a recruiter within hours, a phone or in-person interview with a hiring manager within a day or two, and an offer within a week. If the candidate is interviewing with other companies, move even faster. You might be able to slow the process down for more complex or higher-level jobs, but getting these candidates quickly to talk to a recruiter is still very important. The best candidates need more information and more personal hand-holding. This is where recruiters must excel. They must be able to influence the candidate at every step.
Like most of you I’m not a big fan of resume databases, since it takes too much time to find good candidates who are still on the market. However, resume agents that give you just the new resumes on a daily basis can be a source of top candidates. Make sure you fast-track a candidate the minute you see a strong resume. This means calling the person by 10 a.m. on the day it’s received. If you do this as part of a daily regimen, you’ll not only find a few good candidates, but also drive down your speed-to-hire.
The key in every case is to quickly identify the best candidates then implement some type of fast-track processing system.

Working the passive candidate pool is significantly different.
In this case, time is not the critical variable?? candidate quality is. How you find, network with, cold call, influence and close these top passive candidates requires much stronger one-on-one recruiter skills.

We’ll get into some of these in my next article, but in general you must make sure that all of your active sourcing channel programs are optimized to get the best results possible.

If you still can’t find enough top people, then you need to quickly move to recruiter-intensive passive candidate sourcing techniques.

Hiring the best, whether they’re from the active or passive pool, always requires a recruiter to intervene. So despite all of the tools, techniques and tactics available, I strongly believe that if you’re not an employer of choice, the quality of your recruiting team will ultimately determine the quality of the people you hire.

Resume Parsing
Resume parsing is a process of capturing resumes online by extracting data in an intelligent way. parsing benefits recruiters by providing them with means to automatically gather resume information, taking this data from Word documents and emails.

Recruiters Blog completed a year -HATS OFF to you all !!!!

2009-01-18T20:53:00.000-08:00

Hi Friends ,
Wishing you a Happy New Year 2009.Hope this year gives you success and joy . When i started this recruiter blog,i never felt it would have reach to the maximum extent to all recruiters and HR professionals around the globe...
GREAT THANKS TO YOU ALL !!! HATS OFF .....
I salute to you people,it is your your suggestions and valuable points made this blog to improve further .It is a wonderful opportunity in writing a recruiting a blog and a one place where recruiters interact and share your experiences...
Your advice and support to get on this blog for another year and a milestone ahead ...
Thanks to you all .No words to say .It is your guidance and thoughts that made me to do more and wish to enhance further in this blog.
Need all your support and guidance for this year ahead

Thanks again,

With Best Regards
Balaji (Bob)
Author, Recruiters World Blog

Top Common Secondary Sourcing Mistakes

2008-12-09T22:06:00.000-08:00

1 Overanalyzing resumes
Resumes are by nature imperfect and are poor representations of a person’s experience and capabilities, so apply what I call the “10 second rule:” Don’t read resumes - scan them. If you can’t absolutely disqualify/rule out a candidate based on reviewing their resume in 10 seconds, pick up the phone and call them. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

2 Running overly generic/basic searches
You’ll get correspondingly generic and basic results, typically what I’ve overheard people refer to as “too many.” People making this mistake unknowingly increase the size of the Hidden Talent Pool of candidates they don’t find.

3 Making assumptions about candidates from their resumes
Ever hear the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover?”

4 Not spending at least 10 minutes thinking about and researching your search strategy before you start running searches and making calls
You should always take time to analyze your search criteria to assess the possibility that your search terms may not find all qualified candidates, and in fact might actually be eliminating viable candidates. I have found that the more time I spend on the front-end of a search, the more relevant my results become, which in turn increases my productivity by enabling me to find more and better candidates more quickly. Imagine that!

5 Seeing each resume only as a potential match for the position you’re working onAny resume database you have access to can be leveraged in much the same way as LinkedIn can - every person is actually a conduit to a larger network of people. So even if a particular resume you’re reviewing doesn’t appear to be an ideal match - they actually might be

6 Assuming 1 search finds all qualified candidatesIt’s actually impossible. Trust me.

7 Searching only resumes posted within 30 days when searching major job boards.Did you know that 75% - 80% of all resumes on the major job boards are dated over 30 days old? You should never limit yourself to only searching resumes posted in the last 30 days - some of the best passive and active candidates have resumes 31 to 365 + days old online. And most people don’t call them.

8 Not calling candidates that appear to be under- or over-qualified people who are in fact too junior or too senior for your current needs might fit future needs. Fourth, people who are either too junior or too senior for a particular position might work with or know someone who is an exact match.

9 Submitting the first 2 -3 candidates you find that fit your job/hiring profile and moving on to the next open position Sound crazy? I can hear someone asking, “Why shouldn’t I submit the first candidates I find that fit the requirements?” Well, ask yourself this - what’s the statistical probability that the first 2 people you speak magically happen to are the best candidates you can possibly find? The most closeable and controllable? The most “affordable?” Recruiting and staffing should not be conducted on a FIFO basis, but on a BIFO basis. You saw it here first. Think about it.

10 Thinking that after searching a particular source of candidates (your ATS, a job board, the Internet, LinkedIn, etc.) that you’ve found all of the available candidates and cannot find any more.You’re wrong - invariably you’ve left behind Hidden Talent Pools of people who do match your positions, but you could not find them because your Boolean search strings made it impossible to do so. Being aware of this is a major step on the path towards secondary sourcing enlightenment.

11 Thinking that the major online job boards have poor quality candidatesRead this post on not believing the hype that the job boards have low quality candidates.

12 Relying solely or heavily on title-based searchesNot all companies use the same titles for the same roles and responsibilities - so making this mistake contributes to you populating Hidden Talent Pools with every candidate that matches your hiring profile or job order but has a title that you didn’t think of and include in your search. See mistake #4.

13 Not using the NOT operatorIt’s the least utilized, and in my opinion, actually the most powerful standard/basic Boolean operator - it’s not just for getting rid of stuff you don’t want. I will dedicate an entire post to the NOT operator in the near future. Puns intended.

14 Only using skill/tech terms (e.g., Java, Oracle, Accounts Payable, SOX, etc.) when creating Boolean search stringsThe best searches don’t rely solely on skill/technology based terms, but also include responsibility terms (administer, configure, create, manage, reconcile, coordinate, design, etc.) and environmental terms (enterprise, host*, etc.) where applicable. This is the first step in moving beyond simple buzz-word matching.

15 Spending 80% of your time using low-yield resources that can only provide 20% (or less!) of the potentially available resultsFor example - spending hours searching the Internet for candidates and not heavily/effectively leveraging your internal resume database/ATS. While you can certainly find great people on the Internet, the Internet is not indexed specifically to enable sourcing and requires many tricks and tweaks to yield relevant results. If you have access to an ATS or internal resume database - it’s specifically designed to store and retrieve resumes, and probably has more local and more qualified candidates than the Internet, and might actually have a better seach interface enabling more precise searching - see this post as a dramatic example of this point. Also - if you have access to any of the major job boards - they actually have a larger percentage of passive job seekers than active and they have some fantastic candidates

The Future of Internet Recruiting

2008-11-10T23:06:00.000-08:00

1. SHIFTS IN TRADITIONAL "JOB BOARDS"
A SHIFT TO SEARCHING FOR PASSIVES, NOT ACTIVES.
Most people placing resumes on the current job boards are "actively" seeking employment. However the most desirable candidates are currently employed top performers who are much less likely to post their resume on a large job board. Job boards and e-services will have to be able to demonstrate the percentage of "passives" and top performers in their databases. Also as a result, information only "learning sites" will be become popular tools in drawing employed top performers "close to" the jobs site.
FOCUS ON QUALITY, NOT VOLUME.
Currently little effort is made to show the quality of the applicants on a job board. As recruiters become more sophisticated, they will demand a smaller volume of resumes and a higher quality of candidate. Because online recruiting automatically generates easily usable recruiting data, recruiting will shift from being "an art" toward a more "scientific model" where data and proof replace "hunches" and traditional practices. Only the Internet services that provide a feedback loop (demonstrating the performance of the person after they are hired) will survive.
PROOF THEY WORK.
Most e-recruiting services offer promises and exciting technology. As users become more sophisticated they will demand hard data proving that the service results in fast, high-quality, and low-cost hires. As more data is collected on which elements of the Web (job boards, niche sites, personal web sites, listservers or chatrooms) produce the most top performers, low-quality sites will wither.

SEARCH ENGINES WILL REPLACE MANY JOB BOARDS.
Job boards make it easy for managers and recruiters to find a large number of candidates all in one place. But often they are little more than online resume books. As robotic internet search engines become more sophisticated and easier to use, continuous 24/7 searches (using search engines) will yield more targeted, current and higher quality candidates that most job boards can. As managers get more skilled at using search engines, they will create their own customized candidate pools.

A SHIFT FROM LARGE SITES TOWARD NICHE SITES.
Specialized sites that focus exclusively on high-quality recruits will become the norm. Employee referral, corporate alumni, university alumni and "smart" tools that "learn," like PureCarbon, will increase in importance.

THE PRIMARY USERS WILL BE MANAGERS.
Currently most Internet recruiting is done by recruiters and HR people. However, as companies become more geographically dispersed, firms will find that responsibility for most corporate recruiting will need to shift closer to the customer (to the line manager). As the Internet becomes easier to use, managers learn that they can easily do their own recruiting and they will supersede HR people as the chief customers for online services. With managers as their customers, vendors must focus on speed, ease-of-use, and competitive advantage, while legal and equity issues will decrease in importance.

A MORE GLOBAL FOCUS.
Currently most job boards are U.S.-focused, while most of the talent in the world resides outside the United States. As technology allows more workers to work "at home" for companies that are located in other countries, the importance of global "remote" recruiting will increase.

EXCLUSIVE AVAILABILITY.
Firms gain no competitive advantage using most the recruiting services and job boards because their use is unrestricted and thus competitors have the same access as you do. Optional agreements limiting access to a select few firms in an industry will soon become available

2. SHIFTS IN OTHER e-RECRUITING SERVICES AND TOOLS
EXECUTIVE SEARCH WILL BE DONE PRIMARILY THROUGH THE INTERNET.
Executive search firms have been slow in realizing that executives and top-level professionals are easy to find on the internet. As executive search professionals become more internet savvy they will find that more than 50 percent of executive search can be done over the Internet because the internet is a superior finding, communications and selling tool.
FINDING IS EASY, CONVINCING IS THE CHALLENGE.
As more and more individuals around the world begin to utilize the Internet, finding individuals and developing a "who's who" database that would include all "potential candidates" will become increasingly easy. As more association membership lists, conference attendance lists and internet "Yellow Pages" go online, finding candidates will become increasingly easy. The difficult are part will shift towards convincing them to apply and selling them on saying "yes to a job offer.

RESUMES WILL FADE AS IMPORTANT SCREENING TOOLS.
Currently resumes are the "currency" of recruiting. As more individuals develop their own personal websites containing actual samples of their work (in personal portfolios) fewer recruiters will rely on resumes that are often inaccurate and out of date when they are found on job boards. Fast and easy "profilers" (a few job specific questions) will replace resumes altogether for high demand jobs and people

NEW TECHNOLOGIES WILL EMERGE.
When the Web becomes faster and access becomes more universal, the use of currently available tools like online assessment, online job simulations, video interviewing, instant reference checks and cultural "fit" assessment will become more universal. New communications technologies (instant messaging, cell phone e-mail) and "push" strategies will allow firms and recruiters to build ongoing relationships with potential recruits long before any specific position opening occurs.

KEYWORD SEARCHES WILL BE REPLACED BY SOPHISTICATED FUZZY SEARCHES.
Most internet search engines (and resume sorting engines) rely on keywords to find their targets. As sophisticated "fuzzy logic" search engines become more sophisticated, the currently high "error rate" will decrease dramatically.

3. CHANGES IN e-RECRUITING STRATEGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES
FIRMS WILL BID FOR TALENT.
It is already possible for individuals to place themselves "up for bid" on several Internet sites. As workers get bored or disenchanted with their current job, they will easily be able to enter the free (bid) market in search of new opportunities. In addition, recruiters will no longer be able to "fool" applicants with "low offers," as the public bid process will make the value of any worker easy to ascertain.

BRANDING REPLACES THE SHORT TERM APPROACH.
In addition to filling today's "reqs" firms must also simultaneously work on developing a longer-term "great place to work" brand strategy. The employment "brand" strategy is designed to build the image of the firm to such a point that all of the top performers will automatically put our firm on their "short list". By utilizing PR and "employer of choice" advertising on the Web, a firm can not only assure a steady pipeline of applicants, but they can also help to sell its firms product and help to build customer relationships.

FROM MASS MARKETING TO PERSONALIZED MARKETING.
The recent shift in power from companies to candidates has led to the "free agent" attitude among workers. This individual power will mean that recruiting strategies will need to shift towards a "market research model" so that firms can identify the unique needs and expectations of every applicant. Online market research tools and technology will allow recruiters and managers to "personalize and mass customize" their recruiting strategies and tools to the unique needs of any business unit or region. Online customer satisfaction and candidate feedback tools will allow recruiters to constantly adjust their approach in order to improve our recruiting success.

RELATIONSHIP RECRUITING WILL REPLACE "COINCIDENCE" RECRUITING.
Most hiring currently relies on the "coincidence" that the top candidates are coincidentally available on the same days we have a job opening! As workforce planning models become more sophisticated and as they integrate with external databases, firms will be able to more accurately forecast their hiring needs. Better forecasting will allow the recruiting model to shift from one where we "react" to a newly opened requisition to a more strategic approach where we continually source and then hire the best people whenever they become available.

FACE-TO-FACE RECRUITING WILL DIMINISH.
The growing use of ATMs and the Internet has dramatically reduced the need for face-to-face banking and financial transactions. In a similar vein, the growth of email, the Internet and other technologies will allow us to find, assess, and "sell" candidates around the world without actually meeting them face-to-face. As more and more employees and independent contractors work out of their home it will be possible for top firms to "cherry pick" the best talent from any region around the world. Individuals will be able to live in any country or place they choose and still work for a firm that may be located on a different continent. as well.

Web 2.0 e-Recruitment

2008-10-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

When Internet Recruiting 1.0 was >>>
- Resume Databases
- Job Postings
- Corporate Websites
- ATS Technology
Internet Recruiting Web 2.0 is now
o Data Portability
o Social Media
o Wireless
o The Long Tail
o Meta Search and Deep Web
o Open Source
o Social Networks
o RSS
o Word of Mouth

Internet Recruiting Trends
Optimization
The Social Web
Talent Communities
Recruiting Conversations

Information Management is based on
Pulling ,
Pushing,
Digging, Hacking

Which involves
v Workforce Planning
v Candidate Profiling
v Employer Branding
v Sourcing Strategy
v Screening/Assessment
v Candidate Assessment
v On boarding/Engagement
v Performance Management
v Retention Programs

Data is
Ø Ownership
Ø Privacy
Ø Security
Ø Compliance
Ø Integrity

Cyber Sleuthing is based on
v Research
v Competitive Intelligence
v Candidate Sourcing
v Screening

Tools and Technology holistically used to

- Resume Extraction

- Job Distribution

- Widgets & Gadgets

- Sticks & Stones

Is the future bright for Web 2.0?
Without doubt the way people recruit and hunt for jobs is changing rapidly. Job seekers have greater access to more jobs, and, recruiters have greater access to more candidates.
But does all this change mean that employers will more easily find more of the right candidates to fill job posts and that job seekers will more easily find the right jobs to help them lead a fulfilling career?
But what will happen when Google and Microsoft provide Word or equivalent as a free web based package. At that point, it would mean that pretty much every CV becomes web based, indexed and searchable, assuming of course permission is granted. But permission of course will be very simple and in some cases, people will not even consider the implications of this. Google and Microsoft will I am sure make sure that people do not make personal information public but by doing this, people will become more trusting – and so they should!!
So, we move from X million to X zillion CV’s available on the web. This then creates two recruiting opportunities.
Recruiters will be able to do more searching and find genuine passive candidates.
The search engines will be able to match jobs to people in lots of ways.
Say for example you are happy for Google to market your details for very specific job related searches by recruiters. We could end up with Poogle, the (vertical) people search engine [OK, it’s a crap name], complete with Adwords that show best-matched people. And maybe the recruiter will have to pay to click on the ads; maybe the person will pay to market themselves. Maybe the recruiter pays to download contact details only once they have seen further details; a myriad of options as ever.
Much talk about Web 2.0, many opinions about what will happen, but plenty of ideas from many places.

Snack Vendor -- or Undercover Job Recruiter?

2008-09-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

It was a humid June morning on David Perry's fourth day of masquerading as a snack-food vendor inside an industrial park. He had one day left on the canteen truck he'd rented for $500.
The executive recruiter, wearing a hairnet and an apron, finally got a customer to tell him what he needed to know: the identity of a technology guru a client had hired Mr. Perry to poach from a competitor.
Mr. Perry's client didn't know this person's name. So for days, the recruiter had been asking every coffee, cigarette and sandwich buyer who the "genius" was behind the large, publicly traded company's top-selling piece of software. Finally, an unsuspecting patron spilled the beans, and Mr. Perry got his man. "It was real hard detective work, but it was fun," he says.
Executive recruiters typically rely on networking and corporate contacts to court prospects. But for those like the 48-year-old Mr. Perry -- a small subset of the multimillion-dollar industry -- chasing down top talent for the corner-office and other hard-to-fill jobs is a sport. They are maligned by traditional recruiters, but their tactics -- which can be unconventional, paparazzi-like and some say borderline unethical -- can lead to lucrative careers and long lists of loyal clients
How else can you get at these people?" says Mr. Perry, whose search firm, Perry-Martel International Inc., employs three researchers, plus his wife, Anita, who handles miscellaneous tasks. "They're behind steel gates."
Once, after dozens of failed attempts to reach through normal channels the CEO of a technology firm, Mr. Perry says, he hopped a plane and sneaked into the basement of his quarry's New York workplace and gave a janitor $100 and a self-addressed envelope. The Ottawa-based recruiter says he was counting on his target's having a private washroom with a phone -- and asked the janitor to send him its number. Mr. Perry says those digits arrived in the mail a few days later. Soon after, he scored a meeting with the executive, who agreed to take the position Mr. Perry was hawking: CEO of a large, publicly traded software company in New York.
In 2006, Peter Polachi, co-founder of Polachi & Co., a small search firm -- and another aggressive recruiter -- went after an executive whose online corporate bio described his love of fly-fishing in a particular river in Montana. After calling several outposts along the waterway, he found a guide who'd led the executive on numerous expeditions and was able to pinpoint this man's regular spot. "I know how to fly-fish, so I just 'happened' to bump into him," Mr. Polachi says. Though he succeeded in hooking the executive long enough for him to listen, a noncompete agreement prevented the person from changing jobs.
Three years earlier, Mr. Polachi pressed the assistant of a sought-after CEO on why the executive was too busy to take a call. The assistant blurted out that the executive kept such a tight schedule that he got up before dawn every morning just to have time to get his shoes polished. Mr. Polachi, based in Framingham, Mass., drove to New York and, on a hunch, took a seat the next morning at the shoeshine stand in his target's office building. The executive arrived minutes later and noticed a copy of his company's most recent annual report resting on his neighbor's lap. The CEO "struck up a conversation with me," says the headhunter. "At end of day, he was recruited."
Many senior executives who've been snagged using these extreme methods won't talk publicly about their experience. But clients and associates of Messrs. Perry and Polachi confirm their accounts.
"You're talking about a guy with an exceptionally high batting average," says Steve Panyko, who hired Mr. Perry to handle more than a dozen searches while serving as president of CML Emergency Services Inc., a telecom company that was sold in 2006. He has since retired.
Tod H. Loofbourrow, president and CEO of Authoria Inc., a global talent-management-software provider based in Waltham, Mass., credits Mr. Polachi with recruiting more than half of his firm's 12-person executive team.
The $500 Meeting
Not all ruses pan out. Mr. Perry once showed up at an executive's company Christmas party wearing a crisp white button-down shirt and black dress slacks -- just like the waiters working the event. Grabbing a tray, wine bottle and bar napkin from the kitchen, he walked the room until he found his target. Mr. Perry whispered to the man, "This message was left for you," and handed him a blank envelope. Inside was a note promising a $500 check toward the executive's charity of choice if he'd agree to meet the following day. Mr. Perry got the meeting and sent a check to a Chicago-based children's nonprofit. But during the face-to-face, it became clear that the executive was a poor cultural fit for his client, a large, Midwestern technology firm.
Some professionals say they're flattered by the recruiters' efforts to court them. "I like an aggressive person," says Brian Clark, who was recruited by Mr. Perry in the mid-1990s to a small technology company in Ottawa. Mr. Clark recalls Mr. Perry calling him every day for two weeks pitching the job. He wasn't interested in working for a start-up but finally budged after Mr. Perry mailed him a $600 plane ticket, leaving that week, to the potential-employer's office.
Mr. Clark, now vice president and general manager at Jade Software Corp. in Atlanta, later hired Mr. Perry to recruit talent for him. In 2002, the headhunter set his sights on Blake Carruthers for a sales position at Jade. When Mr. Carruthers failed to return the recruiter's numerous calls, he found himself face-to-face with Mr. Perry on a remote mountain-bike trail. Mr. Carruthers was about to traverse an intricate 15-mile path with a group of hardcore bikers. "I thought that maybe he was trying to lose some weight," says Mr. Carruthers of his double-take upon seeing Mr. Perry on a bike. It worked, though: He took the job.
That was the second time that Mr. Carruthers ran into Mr. Perry on a mountain. A few years earlier, the sales executive was skiing on an expert-level hill at a Quebec resort when he spotted Mr. Perry, an amateur skier, his arms flailing for Mr. Carruthers's attention and seemingly stuck halfway down the slope. "Within 30 seconds he goes, 'I got this opportunity I want to talk to you about,' " recalls Mr. Carruthers, who had been dodging the recruiter's phone calls.
Companies that Mr. Perry and Mr. Polachi poach from aren't as thrilled and consider rogue recruiters a menace. Mr. Perry says he has received more than 40 cease-and-desist letters, plus threats of lawsuits from employers he's lured talent from during his career. Some might argue that his job involves trespassing, but so far he hasn't been arrested.
Many in the recruiting industry also take issue with the brazen approach to headhunting. "It cheapens the reality of the hard work that goes into executive search," says Peter Felix, president of the Association of Executive Search Consultants, an industry group with 6,000 recruiter members in 70 countries.
"If you're in the business of recruiting leadership candidates, you have to bring tact, grace and integrity to the profession," adds Joseph Daniel McCool, who wrote "Deciding Who Leads" about the recruiting industry. "Reaching somebody in the bathroom, that's not the image that most search professionals would gravitate toward," he says.
Mr. Perry, whose Tudor-style home rests on one-and-a-half acres in the posh neighborhood of Gatineau, Quebec, says he earns about $500,000 a year.
Lucrative for Some
The average for recruiters who work on retainer at the partner level ranges from $350,000 to $400,000, says Brent W. Skinner, a director of executive-search research at Kennedy Information Inc. i n Peterborough, N.H. "But the ceiling can be much, much higher for exceptional performers in lucrative niches," he adds.
Mr. Perry charges clients about a third of the total first-year compensation for the jobs he fills and insists his recruiting style works. In 22 years, he says he has completed 991 searches for jobs paying roughly $170 million in salaries.

A Bad Recruiter Networking

2008-08-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

In our daily life as recruiter these are certain flaws we make it in the name of networking .This is to help others to do a proactive networking rather termed as bad recruiter….

Here are the ones we do it regularly
Contact collectors
They use their so-called "network" to establish their credibility in the industry and people actually congratulate them for it. These are the people that try to connect with you via some networking tool, but there's never any exchange of info. You are a number to them ("Let's all congratulate so-and-so on their one-thousandth person in their network"). I don't connect with these people. Really, how valuable can their "network" of 1500 people be, given that they asked me to join and I don't know them? One thing I have noticed about the people that do this is that they try to establish their industry in other ways too (creating cool sounding titles that don't exist, working feverishly to book speaking engagements). There's a credibility issue there. .
(Need to take notice ,very much important ,even me included …J )

Do-my-job-for-me
These one check it out. I get an e-mail from someone I don't know asking for help with a position they are trying to fill (not a recruiter position....one of their open requisitions). Without much lead-in, they dump the job descriptions on you and let you know that "any help would be greatly appreciated"
These are the folks that know that they should be in contact with you but they don't know why. The mails are awkward and sometimes overly complimentary. They want to keep in touch with you but they don't know how. They are probably more selective than the contact collectors, but they don't know what they are driving for.
Here's is the philosophy on networking and some tips for effective networking

¨ Effective networking is a relationship. A network of any value is a connected group of trusted individuals. That trust comes from knowing them. In the internet age, you can find just about anyone online. So unless your own network is trusted, there's little value. The way I think about these relationships is like this:
what's in it for me + what's in it for you) X (trust through knowing you) = relationship
the what's in it for me/you piece gets established straight away.
This is how you share. You obviously want to get something out of the relationship, but
you need to offer something too. That gives you a platform to build from. It
makes you a "contact". The exchange of valuable information between the 2
people is what makes it a "relationship". That is a building process.
¨ Have a point.
Even if you are just contacting the person to ask a question. I get mails all the time from folks who want to "synch up". My question: "about what?" Points are good. Everyone should have one. I certainly don't mind answering questions from anyone if I have the info
¨ Know what's in it for them, but don't force it on them.
If someone contacts me because they want information on how I do something, they should be able to articulate what I can learn from them as well. Frame it as sharing: "I'd love to get your thoughts on XYZ. We are doing some exciting things with regard to ABC if you are at all interested in hearing about that". I do a lot of this kind of sharing with people and I find it really valuable. It justifies the time investment.
If your first contact isn't quid pro quo, be a giver...you can be a taker later.
I get mails from people saying "Hey Heather...you are fabulous...and by the way, I thought you would be interested in this article". I love that! The ones who I've never heard of before that want me to help them fill their open position...well, those mails get deleted
Note : We as recruiters that we tend to do it out of responsibility on us and client urgency to fill the positions .. It is not to say that way we are doing is wrong ,we need to use network in such a way that the relationship doesn’t get lost .

Principles of Recruiting and Talent Management

2008-07-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

Basic Principles of Recruiting and Talent Management
The following is a list of basic principles, laws, or guidelines to help you design and implement effective recruiting strategies and approaches:
1) A well-defined strategy.
The foundation of any recruiting effort is a clearly defined and communicated strategy that illustrates the brand message, target candidates, primary sources, and most-effective closing approaches (the who, what, when, and how). Poorly defined or communicated strategy elements results in wasted resources and weak hires. In addition, the best strategies have the capability of “shifting” as the economy and the demand for candidates change.
2) Pipeline approach.
The most effective recruiting approach is to build a steady stream of applicants (a pipeline). In order to build a continuous “talent pipeline,” use a “pre-need” approach that includes workforce planning, branding, continuous sourcing, and onboarding.
3) Competitive.
The most effective recruiting approaches are compared against and are clearly superior to those of a firm’s talent competitors. Because competitors will quickly copy your most effective approaches, a continuous side-by-side assessment of “yours versus theirs” is necessary. A sub-principle applies to candidates: because the very best are always in high demand, if you don’t have to literally “fight” for a candidate, in most cases, you do not have the best candidate in the field.
4) Employment branding.
The approach with the highest impact and the only long-term recruiting strategy is employment branding, the process of building your external image as an excellent place to work. By proactively making it easy for potential applicants to read, hear, or see the factors that make working at your firm exciting, you can dramatically increase the number and quality of your applicants over a long period.
5) Global.
For jobs that require top talent, the process must have a global recruiting capability. This is because the very best talent is unlikely to live within commuting distance of your job.
Target employed “non-lookers.” The best recruiting processes are designed to identify and successfully hire currently employed top performers. This means that the process needs the capability of identifying and convincing employed individuals who work at your competitors and may not be actively looking for a position. Unfortunately, most corporate recruiting approaches are designed to attract “active” candidates.
6) Speed.
Making fast hiring decisions is essential whenever a candidate in high demand decides to make a job switch. Top candidates must be hired using “their” decision timetable. Research shows that top candidates are off the market in less than half of the normal corporate time to fill.
7) Sourcing is critical.
If you don’t utilize sources that attract a high percentage of top performers, it is unlikely you will make a quality hire. After employment branding, effective sourcing is the most critical element of the recruiting process. Generally, the most effective source is employee referrals. Other effective but under-used sources include recruiting at professional events and contests. Using ineffective sources means that you must spend inordinate amounts of time and money on candidate screening in order to avoid a weak hire. The source that is used must be shift, depending on the type of candidate required for that position. Unfortunately, many recruiters use the same exact sourcing scheme for every job.
8) Data-based decisions.
Base decisions on sources, screening tools, and which individual to hire on facts and data, not emotion or even common practices. Making decisions based on objective data helps eliminate biases and causes the recruiting process to produce more consistent, reliable, and high-quality results. It’s also true that in a fast-changing world, “what works” changes quickly so recruiting practices become obsolete quickly. Unfortunately, rather than being a small part of recruiting decisions, emotions and “it’s the way we’ve always done it” tend to dominate corporate decision-making.
9)Build a recruiting culture.
The most effective approaches build a corporate-wide “cultural of recruiting” where every manager and employee is a recruiter. Because of their continuous contact and interaction with outside talent, everyone must play an important supplemental role in identifying talent and in spreading the employment brand. The most effective recruiting strategies convince employees to be 24/7 talent scouts, making every employee a recruiter.
10) A candidate-centric approach.
Focus the process on the candidate’s needs, their job selection criteria, and the candidate experience. A significant part of recruiting is “selling” the candidate on applying for and accepting the job. At least in part, recruiting must follow the customer relationship management (CRM) and the sales and marketing models. Often, the number-one reason why candidates reject job offers is the way that they were treated during the hiring process. It’s also important to note that candidates may be current or future customers, so treating them poorly can directly impact future revenue.
11) Prioritize jobs and targets.
Effective recruiting processes maximize resource utilization by identifying and focusing on the positions with the highest business impact. That generally means revenue-producing and revenue-impact jobs, as well as jobs in high margin and rapid growth business units. The process should also target high-impact individuals known as top performers, innovators, and gamechangers.
12) Managers are the delivery system.
Although corporate recruiting designs the process, managers “deliver” and execute a significant part of that process. As a result, hiring managers must understand its elements and support its precise execution. You must effectively demonstrate to individual hiring managers that they will suffer whenever a bad or “butts in chairs” hire is made. Therefore, recruiting must make a strong business case to individual hiring managers that convinces them of the importance of executing the process precisely. The most effective way of influencing hiring managers is by converting recruiting results into their dollar impact on that individual manager’s revenue and profit.
13) Diversity.
An effective recruiting process must include enough variation and personalization to meet the unique needs of diverse individuals from around the world. Diversity and inclusiveness are becoming not just legal terms but critical components in building global sales.
14) Selling applicants.
The very best recruiting processes builds “relationships” with potential
applicants over time in order to increase their level of trust and interest. Unfortunately, no amount of benefits or job features will be convincing to high-demand applicants without this level of trust. Because all candidate-screening processes have flaws, stretching out the assessment process over time allows you to learn more about the candidate and decrease the chances of making a bad hire. The best approaches are designed to take advantage of the fact that a target candidate’s willingness to consider a new job changes quite rapidly, as a result of changes in their own job and organization.
15) Technology.
The best processes rely heavily on technology and the Web in all aspects of the recruiting process. Technology can improve screening, increased hiring speed, cut costs, and provide the firm with the capability of hiring globally.
16) Integration.
Recruiting processes must be integrated with other HR processes. Those recruiting processes that operate independently rather than in unison with other HR functions like relocation and compensation will produce diminished results.
17) Talent shortages.
Although industries often face talent shortages, individual firms can actually have a surplus of candidates if they have a strong employment brand, a great referral program, and a candidate-friendly hiring approach. For example, handsome movie stars seldom have difficulty getting “dates” even when the average “Joe” can’t find a single one. Talent shortages are relative and depend on your image and what you have to offer.
18) Remote work options.
Offering candidates remote work options dramatically increases the candidate pool. Firms that have the capability of managing candidates who work from remote locations have a distinct competitive advantage. They can attract the top performer who doesn’t live in the area, who desires working at home, or who isn’t willing to make a long commute.
19) Metrics and rewards impact recruiting.
Every aspect of recruiting improves dramatically when managers and employees are measured, recognized, and rewarded for their contribution to recruiting. By convincing senior management and HR to place metrics and rewards on key aspects of recruiting, you send a clear message about its importance.

7 Mistakes Internal Recruiters Make & Why We Hate HR ???

2008-06-08T01:49:00.000-07:00

7 Mistakes Internal Recruiters Make

In an increasingly competitive business climate, companies are scrutinizing their HR departments like never before. Internal recruiters need to take a hard look at how effective they are at filling key positions, and they need to get past the conventional recruiting methods that are holding them back. From a headhunter's perspective, here are seven mistakes internal recruiters make.

1. They don't recruit.
Because of the sheer volume of "resume flow", internal recruiters don't identify and pursue the people they want. Instead, they take what comes along. That is, they limit their hires to the those people who "come to them". Corporate recruiting has become a paper-shuffling, passive process. Recruiters need to act more like headhunters. A company should have two tiers of recruiters: those who handle applicants, and those who actively pursue the top people in the field.

2. They rely too much on ads.
The best candidates are lost to headhunters and to employers who leverage personal connections to attract them. Internal recruiters need to spend less time on advertising so they can devote more time to active, personal contact with people who can lead them to top performers.

3. They know too much about HR and too little about their industry.
The typical recruiter spends more time reading HR journals than trade and professional publications that are read by the people they want to recruit. Recruiters can develop a real edge by learning more about their industry than about HR. It's important to remember that HR is not an end in itself -- it's an interface to a company's professional community. By developing expertise in their industry, recruiters create a more effective interface.

4. They spend too much time sorting resumes.
The typical explanation for why HR recruiters have no time to recruit actively is that they have too many resumes to sort. This very real problem is solved easily: stop soliciting and accepting resumes. Instead, solicit the right people through good contacts, starting with people in the department you recruit for. A recruiter who spends more than 20% of her time in the HR office isn't recruiting. Get out there and get active in the community you recruit from.

5. They let managers get away with murder.
Managers hate to recruit. But a manager's first job is to find and hire great people. One of HR's missions should be to "put the recruiting back in the manager's job". Move your desk out of the HR office and into the department you recruit for. That's how you can daily influence the hiring manager's recruiting activities.

6. They waste candidates' time.
Good candidates don't have time for applications, tests and screening interviews before they talk with the hiring manager. All these preliminary hurdles have become necessary because recruiters are processing unknown candidates rather than recruiting people they know can do the job. It's an insult to extend an invitation then to make the candidate jump through hoops before he meets the manager. How to avoid this? Do your homework about the candidate before you contact him. Yep: this involves an entirely different recruiting approach. (See 2, 3 and 4 above, and see Respecting The Candidate.)

7. They let the Internet waste their time.
Every day, thousands of people submit resumes in response to job postings on the Net -- for jobs they know nothing about. In essence, they're sending you junk mail, and you're forced to sort through all the garbage. Don't let the Net use you. Use it as a research tool to help you learn about (and participate in) the community you want to recruit from. Instead of running ads, spend time on the sites and in the newsgroups where your recruiting targets go -- and get to know them. Then you can start recruiting the people you want, rather than processing the people who come to you.

Why We Hate HR ???

Here's why.

HR people aren't the sharpest tacks in the box. We'll be blunt: If you are an ambitious young thing newly graduated from a top college or B-school with your eye on a rewarding career in business, your first instinct is not to join the human-resources dance. (At the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, which arguably boasts the nation's top faculty for organizational issues, just 1.2% of 2004 grads did so.) Says a management professor at one leading school: "The best and the brightest don't go into HR."

Who does? Intelligent people, sometimes -- but not businesspeople. "HR doesn't tend to hire a lot of independent thinkers or people who stand up as moral compasses," says Garold L. Markle, a longtime human-resources executive at Exxon and Shell Offshore who now runs his own consultancy. Some are exiles from the corporate mainstream: They've fared poorly in meatier roles -- but not poorly enough to be fired. For them, and for their employers, HR represents a relatively low-risk parking spot.

Others enter the field by choice and with the best of intentions, but for the wrong reasons. They like working with people, and they want to be helpful -- noble motives that thoroughly tick off some HR thinkers. "When people have come to me and said, 'I want to work with people,' I say, 'Good, go be a social worker,' " says Arnold Kanarick, who has headed human resources at the Limited and, until recently, at Bear Stearns. "HR isn't about being a do-gooder. It's about how do you get the best and brightest people and raise the value of the firm."

The really scary news is that the gulf between capabilities and job requirements appears to be widening. As business and legal demands on the function intensify, staffers' educational qualifications haven't kept pace. In fact, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), a considerably smaller proportion of HR professionals today have some education beyond a bachelor's degree than in 1990.

How to Use a Balanced Scorecard in Diversity Recruiting !!!!

2008-05-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

In the early 1990’s, Dr. Robert Kaplan of the Harvard Business School developed a new approach in strategic management called the ‘balanced scorecard’. The balanced scorecard is a management system used to assist organizations in measuring their vision and strategy from both a financial and non-financial perspective. It provides feedback on internal business processes and external outcomes to provide a foundation for assessing strategic performance. The balanced scorecard suggests four individual views of an organization to develop metrics, collect data, and provide analysis – Learning and Growth, Business Process, Students and Parents, and Financial.
How does this work?
An organization must identify what their objectives are and how they wish to measure them from the four perspective quadrants – Learning and Growth, Business Process,Students and Parents, and Financial.
There is an old adage that says, “What gets measured gets managed.” For example, an objective that many institutions have is to increase minority enrollment. In order to address that objective, an organization must
1. Identify the area of the institution which an objective will address such as
financial, business process, students/parents, or learning and growth.
2. Identify the metric that will be used to measure the objective such as percentage increase, total number of students, quality of information received, etc…
3. Identify the target value based on the metric and that will be the success factor for the objective.
4. Identify the objective owner or sponsor that is responsible for execution or
management of the strategic initiative.
The balanced scorecard provides an institution with a comprehensive tool to measure their performance both short and long term. It empowers management with the ability to keep a pulse on “how things are going”. It is recommended that once a balanced scorecard strategy is implemented, that it is revisited often initially until the organization
is very familiar with the process. Many organizations begin by revisiting the scorecard every quarter for the first year and then annually thereafter. Either way, the balanced scorecard will answer the important question – “how are we doing?”
Note: Check the Balance Score Card Implementation process

http://docs.google.com/View?revision=_latest&docid=dgfrh8ns_0cwv3znqt&hl=en

Candidate Control- The Key to Recruiting Success and Recruiting Strategies for Graveyard Shift

2008-05-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

Like any other professional service that deals with the public, recruiters continuously struggle with the issue of control. The same way doctors wrestle with “patient control” and lawyers boast about “client control,” so recruiters agonize over “candidate control.”

If you look at recruiting realistically, you’ll recognize that you can no more “control” the actions of another person than you can control a speeding vehicle .

The best you can hope for is that you’ve selected the right vehicle for the trip and that your preparation, training and reflexes will guide you safely towards your destination. Your degree of control, in other words, is relative to a variety of external factors, the most important of which is the candidate’s true motivation for change

Revealing the Source of Discontent

• Personal. The candidate’s relationships with those at work are unfulfilling. Perhaps the peers and/or supervisors are incompatible with the candidate, or they have different goals. Or maybe there are vast differences in political, religious, socioeconomic or educational backgrounds. Or the overall corporate culture seems out of synch to the candidate, or the “feel” or “look” of the company’s surroundings leaves something to be desired.

• Professional. The candidate’s ability to achieve career goals or technical fulfillment is stalled, or unattainable. As recruiters, it’s on the professional aspects of a candidate’s employment equation that we most often (and erroneously) focus our attention.

• Situational. The candidate’s dissatisfaction has nothing to do with the personal or professional aspects of the job; rather, the dissatisfaction is tied to circumstances. For example, the candidate’s commuting distance might be intolerable, or the air quality or school system in the candidate’s city might have deteriorated; or the candidate’s spouse might have recently accepted a job in a different city.

The point is, there may be a hundred different value-related reasons behind a candidate’s apparent discontent. As recruiters, it’s our job to develop an awareness of the factors that motivate a candidate to explore his or her options—and to offer viable career solutions.

Unless you’ve pinpointed the precise motivation behind a candidate’s interest in interviewing for another position, you’ll have no leverage in the job-changing process. And worst of all—if the candidate has no real motivation for making a change—you’ll find yourself as a mere facilitator in a tire-kicking exercise, in which your efforts will serve only to satisfy a candidate whose only interest is to extract a counteroffer. …….

Recruiting Strategies for the “Graveyard Shift”

Recruiting for the graveyard shift – normally ranging anywhere between 3 pm to 6 am – is a major cause of headache for companies in general and recruiters in particular. Most commonly, this is cited as the cause of high turnover the world over..

What to AVOID
However, before going into what-to-dos we found it imperative to discuss what strategies should NOT be employed to attract talent for night shifts.

Many companies, after long deliberations, think of providing a sign-on bonus for hiring employees. This is a mistake as the sign-on bonus not only risks portraying your company in a desperation mode but provides only short-term motivation for the new hires. Once the sign-on bonus money is spent the new hires do not have sufficient motivation to work for you.

Another strategy is to have people rotating from day to evening shifts. This is generally not a good idea from a health or safety standpoint in that it disrupts sleep cycles constantly, leading to fatigue and the inevitable injuries, material loss, errors, etc. If you start requiring this, you will undoubtedly lose a lot of your desirable day people.

Therefore, don’t provide short-term incentives if you are looking for a long-term commitment.

Attracting and Hiring Talent
Attraction and retention of employees for the graveyard shift are two different tasks and strategy evolution should be approached in two different ways. Let’s take talent attraction first.

Here are 3 strategies to ensure optimum talent attraction:

1. Assuming the second shift begins at 3pm, you have some thinking to do. People looking for second jobs generally can't get to work until after 5pm. You can consider breaking the shift into two, say 3-7, for which you can try and attract students or moms, and 7-11 shift for permanent part time. Of course, this means screening and hiring more candidates but is a sure shot way to ensure business productivity.

2. You can also include a meal or McDonald's gift certificate so that they don't have to stop and eat on the way. This is not a short term incentive as the sign-on bonus but a long-term motivating factor for employees to consider working for your company.

3. Some companies offer a shift premium plus a four day workweek at 10 hours per day. The three-day weekend is a great incentive if you can work it into your schedule. This is a good strategy as many employees often site this as a major incentive to stay on second shift even when offered first shift.

Last, but in no ways the least, be sure, to include your incentives and benefits in your ads and other recruitment endeavors to ensure high apply rate.

Employee Retention Strategies
Taking this from an employee perspective, the people who have already worked in the “graveyard shifts” know what it means to be there. Here are a set of common grouses of the employees (they reflect the concerns of employees of all parts of the world):

1.They believe that graveyard shifts are managerial "stepchild" in most places. They feel management does not show as much interest in these employees as they do in the day shift.

2.People know that they’d have to give up a lot of social life in this shift.

Best ways to tackle these concerns are to address them directly. Ensure that these employees get the same training opportunities and motivation as their counterparts in the day. Have the same physical visits from management to show interest in the employees and their growth.

In addition, make it the "fun" shift to work. Have lots of social events, potlucks, and other events to promote bonding among the employees. Have a TV/VCR to tape their favorite shows while they work. Morale is a special issue with this shift, so work hard to make it good.

Address other issues as well
These are not the only ways to retain the employees. Address issues that don’t fall into the ambit of the shift-grouse but still matter to the employee. Child care is big issue on this shift. Arrange for extended-hours child care with a local provider, or on-site and see if that improves the quality of the employees.

Consider offering special tuition reimbursement for this shift only. This will entice students to your jobs, entice employees to start school and simultaneously upgrade the quality of this workforce. A word of caution: don't make the requirement that the courses be directly work-related or you’ll only alienate the employees from the management.

Offering from Oracle HRMS –iRecruitment Module for Recruiters

2008-04-04T03:42:00.000-07:00

Oracle Corp. the world''s largest enterprise software vendor, has announced the availability of Oracle iRecruitment, a new module for the Oracle(r) Human Resources Management System (HRMS), a key component of the Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle iRecruitment is a full-cycle recruiting solution focused on the manager-recruiter-candidate hiring relationship that fully automates the entire recruitment process.
The integration of Oracle iRecruitment with the Oracle HRMS and Oracle E-Business Suite allows users to leverage existing capabilities delivered by the Oracle E-Business Suite while taking advantage of the functionality created by this new offering.
Oracle iRecruitment delivers to both managers and recruiters the ability to manage all aspects of the recruiting cycle via a self-service interface.
These functions include the ability to:
- create requisitions;
- define job postings for internal and external publication;
- attract and search for appropriate candidates;
- manage applicants through the entire interview and selection process;
- submit job offers to candidates;
- automate the entry of new hires into the Oracle HRMS, with no re-entry of data, following
offer acceptance
Oracle iRecruitment also allows internal and external candidates and applicants to submit, monitor and progress their application through the Oracle iRecruitment candidate portal.
These include searching and applying for jobs, specifying match criteria and creating alert mechanisms for future opportunities, maintaining a profile or resume for application purposes, monitoring and progressing applications through the recruitment cycle, reviewing and responding to offers extended and completing necessary details to finish the hiring process. Another key capability available within the application is the ability to relate the evaluation of hiring successes to organizational recruiting techniques through a common performance assessment process. This allows users of Oracle iRecruitment to continuously improve their processes to achieve a high standard of hiring practices. Additionally, Oracle iRecruitment delivers multiple integrations to third party applications.
These include the ability to initiate and review background checks during the recruitment cycle, post job opportunities to external job boards through the HR-XML standards and extract candidate details from electronic documents (i.e resumes, cover letters, etc.) to create candidate profiles. "Oracle iRecruitment is the industry''s first complete solution for managing the entire recruitment cycle process from end to end with full integration to Oracle HRMS and the Oracle E-Business Suite.
Furthermore, Oracle iRecruitment delivers easy to use interfaces that enable managers, recruiters and candidates to efficiently and effectively fill opportunities while reducing costs and delays in the hiring process."

ORACLE AND MOHOMINE TO STREAMLINE EMPLOYEE RECRUITMENT PROCESS
Oracle has alliance with Mohomine, Inc., a leading provider of software for integrating text into enterprise applications. The integration offers mutual customers a streamlined process that reduces the number of resources needed to reformat and enter resume data during the recruiting cycle, thereby ensuring valuable talent is not lost in the process. Integrating with Oracle9i(r) iRecruitment, a key component of Oracle's Human Resources Management System (HRMS) and the Oracle E-Business Suite, enables Mohomine to deliver resume content parsing for documents written in various styles and formats from within a single human resources environment.
Mohomine is extremely pleased to be able to offer Oracle's customers our industry-leading resume extraction technology," said Neil Senturia, chairman, at Mohomine. "Most often the success of a company is dependant on its ability to hire new and valuable talent to remain cutting-edge. We are pleased that Oracle recognizes this, and sees the importance in extending our technology to their Oracle HRMS customers."
The diversity of resumes creates several problems for organizations including costly manual data entry, long turnaround time for data capture, poor online application experiences for candidates, and lack of access to pertinent data. These prohibitions result in high costs associated with processing hardcopy and online resumes. Mohomine's Resume Extractor™ automates and simplifies the process of attribute extraction from resumes by utilizing state-of-the-art pattern recognition technology with "learning-by-example" techniques from within a single system environment.

The Oracle and Mohomine solution reduces the manpower, time and costs it takes to identify valuable candidates and is able to:
- Accept various input formats including Word, PDF, Text, HTML, RTF and email/POP access; - Output resumes into parsed XML, using HR-XML standards;- And, integrate easily with Oracle iRecruitment through the Internet "Oracle iRecruitment offers an end-to-end recruitment process that enables managers and recruiters to identify the best candidates," said Joel Summers, senior vice president, HRMS product development, Oracle Corp.
"The combination of Oracle iRecruitment and Mohomine Resume Extractor greatly enhances the end-user recruitment experience by simplifying and automating the resume processing aspects of candidate profiles."

Resume Mirror :
Is a Certified Partner in the Oracle Partner Network. By collaborating with Resume Mirror, Oracle is able to offer its HCM customers multiple ways to simplify their recruitment process and help ensure the data collected from resumes is accurate, timely and reliable. As collaboration software, EAM helps an Oracle HCM customer further leverage their investment. Adding EAM to either PeopleSoft eRecruit/Candidate Gateway or Oracle iRecruitment reduces costs, increases organizational productivity, improves data quality / security and enhances an organization’s ability to compete for top performers in a tight talent market.

Validated Software Partner for iRecruitmentResume Mirror’s Enterprise Applicant Manager (EAM) solution integrates with Oracle iRecruitment. EAM helps enterprises identify top talent by structuring applicant information from the full range of submission methods—fax, e-mail, paper and Web forms—into a standard format for automatic data exchange with Oracle.
Validated Software Partner for PeopleSoft eRecruit / Candidate Gateway Resume Mirror’s Enterprise Applicant Manager (EAM) solution integrates with the PeopleSoft eRecruit portal v8.8 and 8.9. EAM helps enterprises identify top talent by structuring applicant information from the full range of submission methods—fax, e-mail, paper and Web forms—into a standard format for automatic data exchange with PeopleSoft.

Recruiting Guru -Lou Adler on Passive Recruiting and Networking

2008-03-09T08:18:00.000-07:00

To get better at recruiting passive candidates, you first need to assess yourself (or your team, if you're a recruiting manager) against some best practices
“you don't need to be fearless to make cold calls — you just need to be better prepared.”
There are five basic metrics you need to track to see how well you're doing recruiting passive candidates. Daily tracking is part of this, since it allows you to quickly determine how well your changes are working. For our purposes, passive candidates are people who are not actively looking for work — so you need to call them.

Five Metrics :
-Number of cold calls made per day
-Percent returned calls
-Percent yeses
-Percent worthy candidates
-Number of worthy referrals per call

Number of cold calls made per day.

Whether you're using a list developed using ZoomInfo, competitive intelligence, or some Shally Steckerl Internet data-mining technique, you should be able to leave 30-50 calls per day. Try to limit these calls only to worthy people based on their names, companies, and titles. Worthy people are those who are either potential candidates for your open position or those who personally know someone who would be.

Percent returned calls.

This is a critical metric. Calling people who don't call you back is a waste of time, so you'll need to shoot for at least 50-60% call-backs — and 75% if you're really good at leaving messages. Later in this article, I'll provide some ideas on how to improve your results in this area. Read the first paragraph again and substitute the word "job" for the word "article" for a quick hint on how to get started here.
Percent yeses.

When the person returns your call, you must get them to say yes to your offer. Here's my standard offer which will guarantee 90% "yes" responses: "Would you be open to explore a situation if it was significantly better than what you're doing today?" If you're getting less than 75% "yes" responses, you need to re-work your pitch.

Percent worthy candidates.

Remember that a worthy person is one who is either a top-flight candidate who is interested in your job or knows someone who is. I suggest you minimize your calls to people you're not sure are worthy. This means you must limit the number of calls you make directly from the initial cold list. To work a cold list, just call the best 15-20 people based on their titles and companies. Once you find a few good people in this initial group, don't call anyone else on the list. Just recruit and/or get referrals from this initial group. The key is to get pre-qualified, strong referrals from the initial people called. This way, all subsequent calls will only be to worthy people.

Number of worthy referrals per call.

The secret of passive candidate recruiting is getting great referrals of more worthy people. If you're good at networking, you'll be able to obtain 2-3 worthy referrals from every worthy cold call. Getting names from unworthy people is a waste of time.

Few Networking Rules :

A few good names are all you need to get started

You need to create instant interest when you first connect on the phone
So don't describe the job first, or ask how the person is doing. Instead ask, "Would you be open to exploring a situation that's clearly superior to what you're doing today?" If the answer is yes, tell the candidate you'd like to first review their background before you get into any details about the job. This prevents the person from saying they're not interested. This is a very critical step. Getting the candidate to respond first establishes credibility and leaves the recruiter in the driver's seat. Don't ever discuss the job first, other than in vague terms. Something like, "We're looking for a senior project position in marketing," is okay.
Even if the candidate is unqualified or uninterested, the initial five to ten minute dialogue increases the likelihood of obtaining a good referral.
Whether you're networking with a current employee, a candidate or some other contact, the objective is to get a few names of some top people from each person.
Never ask the person who she knows who's looking. You won't get anybody good this way. You don't want people who are looking; you want great people who are open to exploring a better situation. Instead, get the names of previous best coworkers in the same department, or a previous boss or subordinate who the person thought was great. Try to get three names from each person. Ask for names of people who might know someone else. Once you have the name, ask the candidate to describe the person. Find out why she considers the person highly qualified. Asking questions this way allows you to pre-qualify the candidate before you even make the call. You can save lots of time when you're only calling top people to begin with.
Backtracking is a creative way to find more good candidates.
It's based on the concept of one degree of separation. To start, ask yourself who would know the person you need. Then network with this person. This type of networking is quite effective, because people will more openly refer a good person to you if they're not working in the same company, or if they know of the person in a non-work related way. To obtain lots of ideas on where to network, conduct a brainstorming session with all members of the hiring team. Start with this target list of categories:
-Competitive and source companies
-Customers
-Vendors
-Trade and professional associations
-Academic relationships
-Potential social connections including hobbies
-Online discussion groups
-Conference presenters
When you first contact a person to network, make sure the job is compelling.
No one will refer a person to a boring job, unless it's someone they don't like.
Call or join the trade associations of people you want to attract.
Material control people belong to APICS.
Electrical engineers, it's the IEEE.
Financial managers belong to the Financial Executives Institute and the CPA Society.
Property Managers belong to IREM.
Get in touch with the local chapters and start spreading the word.
Send letters to the officers of these groups.
We've discovered that these are some of the best people.
One way to narrow down the list quickly is by targeting industry-specific trade conferences as a source of names.

These people are already recognized as experts in their field, so it's a terrific way to network with top people.

The Encyclopedia of Associations is a great place to start to get the names of appropriate trade groups and professional societies. You can also get these names from the resumes you receive from your ads.

Voice Mail Techniques Goal: Establish Credibility and Create Interest
The Direct Recruit.

You'll get better results if you recruit the person directly rather than be evasive. Say, for example, "I'd like to discuss a senior-level position in marketing with you." People are more likely to call back if there's something in it for them personally. Be vague about the title. "Senior level" or "executive level" work well.
I'm the Expert.

Build up your reputation as someone worth knowing. "I'm not sure if you've heard my name before, but I'm recognized as a leading recruiter in the Java space. During a recent meeting at the ______ conference, your name was mentioned twice to me as someone I need to connect with regarding a search for a senior-level developer." People are more likely to call back if they can network with someone who is well-networked. Even if the current job is not a perfect fit, something in the future might be, so establish yourself as an important person to know.
The Name and Info Dropper.

Mention someone or something important that the candidate will recognize. "I was just talking to the CFO at ___ regarding an interesting take on the new Sarbanes-Oxley ruling. This came up as part of a search I'm conducting for a senior-level financial executive for a Fortune 200 company." Knowing important people and current issues gives you more credibility.
Confidential Referral.

On ZoomInfo, you'll find candidates' former companies. Mention this in your voicemail. "I was just talking with a marketing director at (prior company) and your name was brought up in the conversation as someone I need to call regarding a search I'm leading for a senior-level manager." When the person calls back and presses for the name, mention that you automatically treat the names of people who provide names to you as confidential, and you'll do the same for this person.
Direct Referral.

If you have permission, just mention the person's name. This will yield close to 90% call-backs if the referring person is credible. Since more than 50% of your calls will be like this, you should be able to get your overall call-back yield over 75%. "Karen Jones says, 'hi,' and insisted I call you on a search I'm conducting for a senior-level person in ERP systems design."
The Creative Pesterer.

Keep on calling and leaving messages at different times with fun messages. Eventually, the person will either answer the phone or call you back just to get rid of you. "I don't want to bother you too much, but I know you'll buy me dinner once you hear about a search I'm leading for a senior management position in engineering."
The Follow-Up.

Use this as part of an email or direct mail campaign. Using ZoomInfo's Job Cast and other tools, you can find email addresses for many people on your initial cold list. Send them a compelling summary of the job and mention that you will follow up with them in a few days directly on the phone. If you have their regular mail addresses, you might want to send a real letter.

‘Social Network’ Recruiting

2008-02-23T19:08:00.000-08:00

This is defined as Software and online services help recruiters
mine their contacts for candidates and referrals.
Social networking technology” refers to software and web-based services that enable users to leverage their personal relationships for networking, hiring, employee referrals and references.
Social networking took off in 2002 with Friendster. MySpace, which has since reached critical mass and was acquired by News Corp. last year for $580 million, and Facebook, born out of a Harvard dorm room, followed. And in the past year, the space has turned into a packed, wall-to-wall party: SnowboardGang for snowboarders, Pearl Harbor Stories for survivors and their friends and family, Zebo for people who like to list what they own, even Hamsterster for hamster owners.

Here the partial list of Social Networking :
Catster (www.catster.com) A site for cat lovers and their friends.
Dogster (www.dogster.com) A site for dog lovers and their friends.
Hamsterster (www.hamsterster.com) A site for hamster and gerbil lovers and their friends.
Zebo (www.zebo.com) A site for people to list what they own.
SnowboardGang (www.snowboardgang.com) A site for snowboarders.
Friendster (www.friendster.com) A social networking site.
LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) A site for professional networking.
WiredBerries (www.wiredberries.com) A site for women interested in health.
Vox (www.vox.com) A private blogging site run by Six Apart, which also runs LiveJournal.
Windows Live Spaces (www.spaces.live.com) Microsoft's social networking and blogging site. Yahoo 360 (360.yahoo.com) Yahoo's social networking and blogging site.
AOL Hometown (home town.aol.com) AOL's social networking and blogging site.
Yelp (www.yelp.com) A site for people to review local businesses.
Bebo (www.bebo.com) A popular social networking site for teens in the United Kingdom.
Cyworld (us.cyworld.com) Founded in South Korea, the social networking site launched in the United States this year.
deviantART (www.deviantart.com) A social networking site for artists.
Mojizu (www.mojizu.com) An online community for artists and their characters.
XuQa (xuqa.com) An online social networking game.
myYearbook (www.myyearbook.com) A social networking site.
Consumating (www.consumating.com) A snarky online dating social networking site.
Last.fm (www.last.fm) A music and social networking site.
MOG (mog.com) A music-oriented social networking and blogging site.

The real power of social networking technology is its ability to reach passive candidates for jobs requiring specialized skills and experience. With U.S. unemployment rates for workers with college degrees at less than 2 percent, recruiters are using networking technology for hard-to-fill positions

Targeting candidates
Till date organizations have found the most value in using social networking sites as sources of candidate information. “Right now they’re furthering the research you can do.
The advantage is they are frequented by people who are Internet savvy, and people who are willing to give out information, including their resumes. “In some ways, those are the customers of job boards".

Sharing Jobs:
Julie Craft, Vice President of the Publisher Network for Simply Hired, the largest search engine for jobs, agrees that social networking sites haven’t yet delivered on their full potential as far as employee recruitment, but she points out that online social networking hasn’t really been around that long. For the most part, 2006 was about assessing what these sites could deliver, she says, indicating that 2007, particularly the second half, was pivotal, and that 2008 will see some major advancements.
Among the changes Craft has seen recently is an increase in the number of employers going to MySpace and setting up recruiting pages.
Simply Hired has a relationship with the site. In June 2006, it launched MySpace Jobs, which Craft says has been a success.
MySpace members can search for jobs while at the site, and some rely on this method. But a key element of the arrangement, one that is no doubt driving success, is that Simply Hired provides all MySpace members with targeted jobs that appear as job widgets on their individual MySpace pages.
By putting appropriate jobs in front of MySpace users, Simply Hired aims to pique their interest. The strategy seems to be working.
“The click-throughs have grown dramatically,” Craft says. “And we aren’t promoting it.”
She attributes interest in part to curiosity. A job in a person’s geographical area, that’s a fit from a career standpoint, is difficult to ignore when it’s right there on the page, she says. And it doesn’t matter whether the person is actively seeking a job.
“The power of the social network is to attract the passive candidate,” says Craft.

Leveraging technology
Simply Hired is also tapping into the Facebook community. In 2007, it launched Workin’ It, an application on Facebook that allows members to build mini-resumes and/or highlight accomplishments.
The mini-resume aspect of the two-part tool allows people to share their education, work experience, and skills in an abbreviated format for networking purposes. Using Workin’ It, members can also give gold stars, or recommendations, to other people on Facebook. The “gold star” feature allows people to collect their kudos from managers, colleagues, and others and display them all on one page. The page of gold stars can be printed and brought to an interview, says Craft, or it can be used as part of a job-search portfolio.
As with its MySpace arrangement, Simply Hired is not promoting the Facebook application. Even so, Workin’ It boasts approximately 800 active daily users. “It has grown exponentially, so this is all viral,” Craft says.

If there is such interest, why aren’t more organizations doing more with social networking sites?

Craft foresees an increase in the number of employers that use online social networks for recruitment. “I think the education needs to continue, and it will continue,” she says. Employers, and HR specifically, are not that technologically savvy, she explains; applications have to get easier to understand so that it’s a no-brainer to invest a slice of recruiting dollars in social networking. Simply Hired expects 2008 to be the year when this change occurs.
But what about the issue of candidate quality? Craft finds that in the past year there’s been a shift in social network users, and it’s largely a matter of educating employers. “I think they’d be surprised that these are executives,” she says.

In fact, Craft believes social networking sites may actually offer more potential than professional networks. “People are finding value. It’s a less threatening, more relaxed environment. You can see the whole person, and you can see them in a different light,” she says.

According to Craft, the personal aspect of social networking fits with today’s job environment, where work and lifestyle go hand-in-hand.

“We believe and we know that social networking is a great place for a job seeker, and for employers to recruit,” she says.

Internet Sourcing Technique -Flip Search Technique

2008-01-12T19:31:00.000-08:00

Internet Sourcing Techniques
The search strings for each of these search engines will vary and therefore to maximize your search please do read the tutorials in advance from the respective search engines site.
What techniques to use and when and under what circumstances to use will depend on how well you master each techniques. To achieve optimum success one must also have a fairly good idea about the recruitment industry, the specific job requirement, the key words within the requirement and also differentiate the "mandatory skills" from "good to have skills."

Some of the most common internet search techniques are as given below.
X-RAYING: A method of looking inside a specific web site to find what's there. Using this technique, recruiters can find documents and web pages that aren't directly accessible via links on the main public home page. When you 'x-ray' a website, you effectively get to examine every document that resides there so long as they are not behind firewalls or password protected.Example: To find any “software engineer” - could be a document/file or a word/phrase within a document that resides within the website Oracle.com.In Altavista search - host:oracle.com AND software engineerIn Google search - site:www.oracle.com AND software engineer

FLIPPING: Flipping is an effective method used to find the relationships between web pages based on how they are hyperlinked together. This search is especially useful for finding people who have links to the company or have worked for a specific company.Example: To find any “software engineer” – could be a document/file or word/phrase that links back to Oracle.com.In Altavista search - link:oracle.com AND software engineerIn Google search - link:www.oracle.com AND software engineer

PEELING BACK: As the name suggest Peeling back is the process of “retracing the path” of the url especially when one gets an Error 404 (File not found). This process is engage so as to locate the information elsewhere on the site or locate the specific “root” folder where one can find similar or additional data specific or related to the search.Example: By peeling back or keying backspace starting from the point where the url ends we can then access the people link from the ce.uta.edu homepage and find the names of all the faculty members.
url: http://www-ce.uta.edu/people/faculty/hoyos/research.html

HARVESTING OR MINING:Harvesting involves reviewing a document, such as a resume or home page, and finding key words, links, references and locations that assist with subsequent searches.

SEARCH STRINGS USING BOOLEAN KEYS:By constructing complex search strings and conducting the search in major search engines one can hone in on the exact information/resources with great accuracy.
Some of the commonly used key words for a search string are given as below.
Common resume Words:
Resume, Homepage, CV, Vitae, Bio, Qualifications, Objective, Experience, Education, References, "Work History", "Technical skills", "Project duration"Common words to avoid: Submit, Opening, Recruiter, Send, Benefits, Requirements, Opportunity, Apply, Job, Jobs, Careers, Eoe, Reply, "my client".

Example on how to construct a complex search strings:Requirement:
A project manager with PMI certification or a 6 Sigma black belt having atleast 5 years of project management within an Investment bank in the areas of Equities connectivity or trading software development. Must have good technical skills in J2EE, EJB, Websphere, XML and DB2.
the search engines mostly used by experience recruiters.
Some recommended search engines on the Web:
http://www.google.com/
http://www.live.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://www.metacrawler.com/
http://www.atlavista.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/

Google:(intitle:cv OR inurl:cv OR intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) "project manager" Java "investment bank" ("equities connectivity" OR trading software) -inurl:efinancial *Search result: 87 pages

Yahoo:(intitle:cv OR inurl:cv OR intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) “project manager” Java "investment bank" "equities connectivity" OR trading software -eoe -opening -post -preferred -reply -send –submitSearch result: 1,740 pages

Live Search:(intitle:cv inurl:cv intitle:resume inurl:resume) prefer:resume “project manager” Java "investment bank" "equities connectivity" trading software -job -jobs –careersSearch result: 10,038 pages

The search results from the above three searches gives us different amount of results and the task of sieving through the hundreds of pages sounds rather a dauting task. However, the strings above could still be further refined so as to achieve a much more specific results. For example by including SCJP or Sun certification or SDLC, etc I believe one can derived at a much more accurate results

How To Flip SearchThe use of Flip Searching or Flipping is a technique to mine the Internet for potential candidates. A Flip Search is a simple search that can be performed in some of the major search engines for example http://www.hotbot.com/ and http://www.altavista.com/. The search simply finds people who link to a specific site. The uses are endless. For example,
John is looking for ORACLE Programmers. This technique can be used to find the various sites that are linked to oracle.com. In theory, John will find people who have on-line resumes with Oracle skills because they may have linked to Oracle on their online resume.
So to do the search visit http://www.altavista.com/ and enter the following: "link: oracle.com" The results once again will be all the sites that have linked to Oracle.com. Surf through the results and you will find individuals resumes.

Boolean Operators Search engines can be considered as a cluttered resume database. Using detailed searches with Boolean search operators can drill down and find the information you are looking for faster. These operators are used to weed out irrelevant pages thereby narrowing your search results to find exactly what you are looking for.
Each search engine is unique and we recommend to review the help section on each of the search engines to determine what Boolean operators are supported.

Boolean Key
AND - The AND operator delivers results with the terms you requested. For example, searching resume and oracle will return pages with both terms - resume and oracle.
OR - The OR operator delivers results with either of the terms you requested. For example, MCSE OR M.C.S.E.
NOT - The NOT operator will not deliver certain words in your search results. For example, Java NOT coffee will deliver closer results for JAVA Programmers and not Java Coffee.
NEAR - The NEAR operator locates words that are located in close proximity to other words. For example, Java NEAR Programmer. Not every search engine supports this operator.
( ) Parentheses - The ( ) operator allows you to group terms and build longer search strings. For example, NOT (submit AND employer) will avoid pages with both names.
* - The * operator is a wild card. Adding a wild card will find words contain the wild card. For example program* will help so you do not have to run separate searches for words similar like: programmer, programming, program

Example of Complex Search String
resume AND (java or JavaScript) AND program* AND (New York or NY or 212) AND NOT (coffee or submit)

One warning about this Flip Search tactic:
Flip searching may pull up company directories, email lists, and other company related information. In some rare cases, you may flip search yourself into a companies internal intranet. Flip Searching by some has been view as negative and others as a brilliant strategy. My personal stance, anything published on the Internet is public information for the world to view. Companies should be cautious on what content appears on their site. As far as restricted areas and internal intranets, this is private information and people accessing or hacking into these areas is blatantly unethical. Also, a word for those who might be tempted... you leave an electronic footprint on every page and site you visit.Flip Searching is a powerful tool that can uncover many hidden resumes and candidates. Performing the searches on various search engines will give different results. Trying adding different companies and skill sets to uncover different results

Emotional Intelligence

2007-12-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is about how individuals manage both themselves and others. It is about understanding and gaining an accurate insight into an individual’s motivation to succeed. This includes how to make decisions, why people behave the way they do, and how to maximize one’s performance. This is the key to human capital management.

What Exactly is EQ?
In the same way that we know that IQ (or intelligence quotient) is a valid and reliable indicator of a person's mental strength and capability,
Today we have the EQ (or emotional quotient) as a valid and reliable indicator of a person's emotional strength and capability.
IQ tells a person how intellectually smart he/she is;
EQ tells a person how emotionally smart he/she is. In the new workplace, you particularly want to know that. Your business and your future depend on EQ.
In the new workplace, EQ beats IQ every time. We demonstrate IQ when we speak, write, solve mental challenges. IQ is fairly stable by around 17-18 years of age and does not change.

THE NEW WORKPLACE FORMULA:

High EQ means Clear Thinking + Healthy Emotions + Appropriate Actions

I like to look at EQ as perspective. It is the ability to reframe life's events. Obviously, in the new workplace, this is a central competency.

EQ comprises a collection of so-called ``soft" skills, including self-awareness, an understanding of how your mood and behavior affect others; impulse control, including how you manage stress on the job; initiative, whether you can be counted on to report to work on time, manage your own time, and meet expectations; and the ability to motivate and lead others.

Emotional Intelligence Effects in Business :

The following 19 real effects on emotional intelligence contributes to
the bottom line in any work organization.

1. The US Air Force used the EQ-I to select recruiters (the Air Force’s front-line HR
personnel) and found that the most successful recruiters scored significantly higher in the
emotional intelligence competencies of Assertiveness, Empathy, Happiness, and Emotional Self
Awareness. The Air Force also found that by using emotional intelligence to select recruiters,
they increased their ability to predict successful recruiters by nearly three-fold. The
immediate gain was a saving of $3 million annually. These gains resulted in the Government
Accounting Office submitting a report to Congress, which led to a request that the Secretary of
Defense order all branches of the armed forces to adopt this procedure in recruitment and
selection.
(The GAO report is titled, “Military Recruiting: The Department of Defense Could
Improve Its Recruiter Selection and Incentive Systems").

2. Experienced partners in a multinational consulting firm were assessed on the EI
competencies plus three others. Partners who scored above the median on 9 or more
of the 20 competencies delivered $1.2 million more profit from their accounts than
did other partners a 139 percent incremental gain.

3. An analysis of more than 300 top-level executives from fifteen global companies
showed that six emotional competencies distinguished stars from the average:
Influence, Team Leadership, Organizational Awareness, self-confidence.

4. In jobs of medium complexity (sales clerks, mechanics), a top performer is 12 timesmore
productive than those at the bottom and 85 percent more productive than anaverage
performer. In the most complex jobs (insurance salespeople, account managers), a top
performer is 127 percent more productive than an average performer. Competency research
in over 200 companies and organizations worldwide suggests that about one-third of this difference is due totechnical skill and cognitive ability while two-thirds is due to emotional competence. (In top leadership positions, over four-fifths of the difference is due to emotional competence.)

5. At L’Oreal, sales agents selected on the basis of certain emotional competencies
significantly outsold salespeople selected using the company’s old selection
procedure. On an annual basis, salespeople selected on the basis of emotional
competence sold $91,370 more than other salespeople did, for a net revenue increase
of $2,558,360. Salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competence also had
63% less turnover during the first year than those selected in the typical way

6. In a national insurance company, insurance sales agents who were weak in emotional
competencies such as self-confidence, initiative, and empathy sold policies with anaverage
premium of $54,000. Those who were very strong in at least 5 of 8 key emotional
competencies sold policies worth $114,000

7.In a large beverage firm, using standard methods to hire division presidents, 50% left within
two years, mostly because of poor performance. When they started selecting based on
emotional competencies such as initiative, self-confidence, and leadership,only 6% left in two
years. Furthermore, the executives selected based on emotional competence were far more
likely to perform in the top third based on salary bonusesfor performance of the divisions they
led: 87% were in the top third. In addition,division leaders with these competencies
outperformed their targets by 15 to 20 percent. Those who lacked them under-performed by
almost 20%

8.Research by the Center for Creative Leadership has found that the primary causes of
derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary ones
are difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal
relations.

9 .After supervisors in a manufacturing plant received training in emotional
competencies such as how to listen better and help employees resolve problems on
their own, lost-time accidents were reduced by 50 percent, formal grievances were
reduced from an average of 15 per year to 3 per year, and the plant exceeded
productivity goals by $250,000. In another manufacturing plant where supervisors received
similar training, production increased 17 percent.
There was no such increase in production for a group of matched supervisors who
were not .

10. One of the foundations of emotional competence -- accurate self-assessment – was
associated with superior performance among several hundred managers from 12
different organizations.

11. Another emotional competence, the ability to handle stress, was linked to success as a store
manager in a retail chain. The most successful store managers were those best able to handle
stress. Success was based on net profits, sales per square foot, sales per employee, and per
dollar inventory investment.

12. Optimism is another emotional competence that leads to increased productivity. New
salesmen at Met Life who scored high on a test of “learned optimism” sold 37 percent
more life insurance in their first two years than pessimists .

13. A study of 130 executives found that how well people handled their own emotions
determined how much people around them preferred to deal with them.

14. For sales reps at a computer company, those hired based on their emotional
competence were 90% more likely to finish their training than those hired on other
criteria.

15. At a national furniture retailer, sales people hired based on emotional competence had half
the dropout rate during their first year .

16. For 515 senior executives analyzed by the search firm Egon Zehnder International,those
who were primarily strong in emotional intelligence were more likely to succeed than those
who were strongest in either relevant previous experience or IQ.
In other words, emotional intelligence was a better predictor of success than either
relevant previous experience or high IQ. More specifically, the executive was high in
emotional intelligence in 74 percent of the successes and only in 24 percent of the
failures. The study included executives in Latin America, Germany, and Japan, and
the results were almost identical in all three cultures.

17. The following description of a “star” performer reveals how several emotional
competencies (noted in italics) were critical in his success: Michael Iem worked at
Tandem Computers. Shortly after joining the company as a junior staff analyst, he
became aware of the market trend away from mainframe computers to networks that
linked workstations and personal computers (Service Orientation). Iem realized that unless
Tandem responded to the trend, its products would become obsolete (Initiative and
Innovation). He had to convince Tandem’s managers that their old emphasis on mainframes
was no longer appropriate (Influence) and then develop a system using new technology
(Leadership, Change Catalyst). He spent four years showing off his new system to customers
and company sales personnel before the new network applications were fully accepted (Self-
confidence, Self-Control, Achievement Drive)

18. Financial advisors at American Express whose managers completed the Emotional
Competence training program were compared to an equal number whose managers had not.
During the year following training, the advisors of trained managers grew their businesses
by 18.1% compared to 16.2% for those whose managers were untrained.

19. The most successful debt collectors in a large collection agency had an average goal
attainment of 163 percent over a three-month period. They were compared with a group of
collectors who achieved an average of only 80 percent over the same time period. The most
successful collectors scored significantly higher in the emotional intelligence competencies of
self-actualization, independence, and optimism. (Self actualization refers to a well-
developed, inner knowledge of one's own goals and a sense of pride in one's work.)

Recruiting people with the 'Right Stuff':

The cluster of abilities that forms Emotional Intelligence has been shown to be strongly correlated with Superperformance at work. We all know people who are intellectually very bright but just don't work well with other people. Or their personal lives are so chaotic that it becomes difficult for them to work. On the other hand there are the people who don't show much evidence of intellect but whose lives are happy and successful. They have warm relationships, make good leaders, work productively and are financially stable. Now we know that it is their emotional intelligence that makes this happen.

Benefits -
The new recruit gets up and running faster than usual
They integrate easily into a new team
They quickly learn the 'political' networks in the organisation and negotiate for resources effectively
Significant savings are made through not having to give excessive training or spending on rehiring when the person leaves before you have broken even on their recruitment costs.

How it works -
Once the selection procedure has come down to a short list the applicants are given an EQ Profile to complete. This is then discussed with them during the final interviews. The levels of their intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, adaptability, stress tolerance and general mood can be seen from the profile. This can also be compared with the team profile of the group they will be joining, if there are mismatches that do not bring a new and needed strength into the team the recruit is unlikely to settle in productively.

Talent Acquisition Strategy and Recruitment Life Cycle (RLC)

2007-12-26T04:51:00.000-08:00

Talent-Acquisition Strategy

The life cycle of talent and develop connections with specific individuals at each stage in that cycle. In other words, an effective recruiting strategy is a continuous process that begins before a person is hired and continues even after they leave the organization. In fact, there are five different stages in the talent life cycle:

TheProspect
The Candidate
The New Hire
The Retainee (a Retained employee)
The Alumnus/Alumnae.

Let's take a brief look at each of them.

The Prospect

Often called a "passive job seeker," this individual is not a job seeker at all. They don't come to employers; employers have to go after them. Equally as important, employers have to convince them to go from the devil they know -- their current organization, boss, and commute -- to the devil they don't know -- a different organization, boss, and commute. Making that case requires a lot of persuasion, and that persuasion, in turn, takes time. The keys to success during this stage of the talent life cycle, therefore, are timing and continuity. Employers have to begin early with individuals who are likely to become great candidates, and they have to work on those prospects without let-up until they actually do.

The Candidate

The talent life cycle focuses on prospects to build inventory; it focuses on candidates to fill specific openings. To access the best candidates, however, organizations must devise a recruiting process that has a single, compelling outcome: it must create an expectation that comes true. First, the recruiting process must cause organizations to develop and project a brand with the power to attract top active job seekers and passive prospects and, then, that same process must produce behaviors, information flows and interactions that make the brand real and credible. Talent is transformed from prospect to candidate by offering a better employment experience, but since it's impossible to sample employment before it happens, the recruiting process becomes a surrogate for that experience. In other words, the better the process, the better an employer's chances of accessing the best candidates for its openings.

The New Hire

Most organizations end their recruitment process with a candidate's acceptance of their offer. For top talent, however, the process must continue in two phases: phase one covers the time between offer acceptance and the first day of work, and phase two includes all of the activities typically associated with onboarding. Phase one is critical because most of the best candidates will be working, so they will have to give notice after accepting an offer. During that two-to-four week period, they are especially vulnerable to a counteroffer from their current employer and better offers from other recruiters. For that reason, employers must stay in touch with and keep selling new hires until they actually walk in the door. And that's when phase two begins. Employers have only one chance to make a great first impression with a new hire, and that first impression will color both their performance and their retention for a very long time. As a consequence, the onboarding process must be as thoughtfully designed and executed as the recruiting process, and it must achieve the same goal: it must make the new hire's expectation (of their new employer) come true.

The Retainee

While the old adage -- people join organizations and leave supervisors --remains a fact of life in most enterprises, it is not an excuse for abandoning employees to lousy leadership. Indeed, I believe it is the job of recruiters to teach hiring managers how to be CROs or chief retention officers. Why? Because high attrition rates seldom get laid at the doorstep of managers; they get dropped at the feet of the HR department, in general, and recruiters, in particular. Recruiters, however, have very little influence over the actions of new employees after the first 100 days of employment; at that point, their supervisor's behavior plays the predominant role. So, it's in recruiters' (and their organizations') best interests to ensure that the supervisor's behavior is all that it can and should be. Ironically, that involves two of the key functions that recruiters perform all of the time: assessment and selling. In other words, recruiters have to teach supervisor's how to assess what will make an individual feel challenged and motivated in their work and how to sell the organization's (and their) commitment to delivering that opportunity on-the-job.

The Alumnus/Alumnae

With some notable exceptions, most organizations still ignore their former employees. Whether it's the lingering effect of a 1950's view of employee loyalty or simply a lack of resources, they source far and wide for unknown prospects and avoid a pool of prospects they know very well: their alumni who are working for other organizations (including their competitors). In today's world of work, however, people will move from organization-to-organization to optimize their opportunity for growth and advancement. In some respects, these departing employees are exactly the kind of talent employers most want to hire: they take personal responsibility for their own development. For that reason, an organization's recruiting strategy should also include maintaining contact and nurturing relationships with alumni, so that -- after they have been honed into more capable prospects elsewhere -- it can recruit them back into its organization.

What's readily apparent about this life cycle strategy is that it's simple, obvious and, sadly, often ignored. While there will always be circumstances that demand ad hoc responses to staffing requirements, recruiting is most successful when it's planned and executed according to a carefully defined and comprehensive strategy -- a strategy that provides a genuine and sustainable competitive advantage

Recruitment Life Cycle

Client Needs Assessment:

Fully understanding your needs is the cornerstone of effective recruitment search and placement. We strive to meet all of our client managers face-to-face so we completely understand the specific position, the work environment and the corporate culture.

Recruitment of Skilled Candidates:

We use many methods to generate a skilled pool of talented individuals to meet your needs. Typical sources include:

Employee referral

In-house database search
Recruiter partner network
Internet recruiting

Screening and Placement:

Once identified, our candidates go through a comprehensive recruiting process that incorporates the following steps:

Phone Screen
Face-to-face in-house interview

Soft skills evaluation
Technical evaluation

Technical testing
Reference checking
Background and drug testing (as required by client)

On-going Performance Monitoring:

Once on assignment, Accelerated Innovators conducts on-going performance monitoring with you and the employee to ensure satisfaction between both parties

Applicant Tracking system (ATS ) !!!

2007-12-16T18:47:00.000-08:00

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software application that enables the electronic handling of corporate recruitment needs. Most include a corporate career site, allowing companies to post jobs onto their own website, as a way to attract candidates. Candidates may apply for specific jobs or generally to the company. Effective solutions store this candidate data inside a database to allow effective searching, filtering, and routing of applications

The largest organizational benefit of an applicant tracking system is improved productivity of the recruiting team. Electronic handling of requisition and candidate data allows significant opportunities to reduce inefficiencies through automated processes. Further, the improved organization of candidate information allows quicker decision-making. All of this leads to reduced cost and time per hire.

Applicant tracking systems designed with recruiting and staffing firms in mind differ somewhat from those with a corporate HR orientation. These typically include more robust reporting tools, as well as more comprehensive tools for contact management and client and candidate management. These additional functions make them particularly well-suited for contract staffing firms and/or firms with higher employee turnover.

An applicant tracking system should include:

OCR Resume ScanningLetter Generation
EEO ReportsAbility to schedule/track interviews
Job Descriptions Statistics: Activity, Recruiter, SourcesRequisition AnalysisCost AnalysisApplicant ProfilesMailing LabelsOn-Line Notes

Applicant Tracking Systems are a subset of TMS systems (Talent Management System) and are very popular in the ASP or SaaS model (Software as a Service), although some systems are self-hosted. In the UK, this is often referred to as Managed Service Delivery. The market space for these systems ranges from those costing a few hundred dollars into the millions of dollars depending on the complexity and scope of the need. Training for end users is a key process for project success, as are appropriate reporting metrics and careful testing of each important functionality.
The first open source ATS is CATS Applicant Tracking System, which is licensed under a modified Mozilla Public License.

An alternative to an Applicant Tracking System is a Talent Platform which provides solutions for the entire employee lifecycle, both pre- and post-hire.

ATS Softwares for your Display

Catch the Best (http://catchthebest.com/ )
A collaborative applicant tracking system (ATS) built just for small businesses. Basically, that means it gives you a place to track your job postings and the applicants for your open positions, but without all the extra junk (and extra cost!) that you get from the guys trying to sell you an "enterprise-class" product.

Selectech®
Workforce Management (http://www.ercdataplus.com/applicant_track.php )ERC Dataplus: Screening, hiring and retaining the workforce you want - efficiently!SM Selectech® Workforce Management is modularly designed and OFCCP-compliant and is the most advanced, comprehensive, scalable solution available. It guarantees to lower the time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and improve the quality of each hire. Unique functions include self-service, variable process flows, industry-specific question libraries, validated assessments, interviewer training, scheduling, job posting, and on-boarding. It also includes Selectech® Interview InsightsTM, a conversational interview technology drawing applicants into a discussion about their skills, challenges, and goals.

HireTouch (http://www.hiretouch.com/ )HireTouch is the first applicant tracking system that allows you to efficiently manage your hiring process for both exempt/non-exempt applicants and candidates from one centralized system. This easy-to-use and flexible Web-based solution adapts to your hiring process and services all locations. Eliminate burdensome paperwork by automating correspondence, evaluations, background checks with e-Signature capture and new-hire on-boarding. Take your hiring process to the next level by reducing time to hire and increasing efficiency with hiring process automation, centralized applicant tracking and full reporting. These lower costs will help you realize a higher return on employee investment.

Applicant Tracking – From $49/month – FREE 30-day Trial – NO SETUP FEES (http://www.iapplicants.com/ )iApplicants was designed and priced specifically for companies with 20 to 1000 employees, and creates your own custom looking Career’s Website in just 3 business days! iApplicants is: simple to use, integrate your hiring assessments, ask pre-screening questions specific to the job, tracks and reports EEO data, and provides analytics tools for tracking the source of both visitors and applicants. iApplicants will help you generate new applicants for free directly from the major search engines and lets you auto post to craigslist.org, google.com/base, indeed.com, simplyhired.com and others.

INSZoom(http://www.inszoom.com/) This is immigration software provides global and domestic immigration compliance, case management and I-9 compliance (E-Verify) products for law firms, corporations and universities worldwide. Our software as a service model offers customized enterprise solutions for immigration case management and compliance, reporting, HRMS integration and website marketing.

Pointwing (http://www.pointwing.com/) VCG recently launched Pointwing, its all new staffing and recruiting software platform.Pointwing is a highly customizable application built using service-oriented architecture and the latest Microsoft .NET technology. It includes 2-Way Outlook Integration ,Email Marketing ,Full Featured Email ,2-Way Calendar Synchronization,Go Mobile,Easy Account Management ,Rate Negotiator etc.Other Modules are :Pointwing Front Office Module,Pointwing Customizer Module,Also visit http://www.vcgsoftware.com/ .

People-Trak Applicant Management (http://www.people-trak.com/hr_functionality.asp?subid=am )People-Trak defines HRIS with the most powerful combination of features and ease of use. Automate personnel management, recruiting, performance management, attendance, benefits, and more in a single integrated solution. Alchemus (http://www.inetgen.net)Alchemus: An Applicant tracking system (ATS) and Work Force Management web-based application that automates the key business processes of Professional Services Organizations, Employment Agencies and HR Departments. It emulates the workflow of staffing, recruiting and workforce management from getting a requisition to applicant tracking through making an employment offer and invoicing. Alchemus allows all the necessary players across the enterprise to participate and contribute in streamlining your business process

Applicant Tracker (http://www.acentre.com/applicant_tracking.html )Applicant Tracker, a Lotus Notes Domino applicant tracking solution, automates and facilitates your entire hiring process, whether you're an organization of 50 or 5000 employees.

Arithon (http://www.arithon.com/ )Arithon is a complete recruitment solution designed and sold by an international team of ex-recruiters. Offering the latest in ASP hosted technology, and running on an Oracle 9i platform, Arithon provides a fast, functional and feature-rich product at a sensible price, making it ideal for the start-up or fast-growing agency.

askSam Resume Tracking System (http://www.asksam.com/rts/ )An askSam product designed to organize resumes, job orders and requisitions.

Aspirant (http://www.fscbizsolutions.com/Aspirant.htm )Aspirant is a powerful applicant tracking system that integrates seamlessly with your corporate web site. Aspirant helps recruiters select the most qualified candidates rapidly. Features include applicant tracking, requisition tracking, automated resume ranking, job posting to your corporate web site and Intranet, criteria-based resume searches. Candidates can update their resumes online. Aspirant also interfaces with our HR software (sold separately).

Automated Business Designs (http://www.abd.net/ )ABD offers staffing software for contract, direct-hire, and medical placement. Ultra-Staff’s Front Office features search and match, contact management, document management, and managerial reporting. Ultra-Staff's Back Office is an integrated pay/bill system.

Berkshire Associates Inc. (http://www.berkshireassociates.com/ )Berkshire Associates Inc. is a progressive human resources consulting and software development firm, specializing in affirmative action and internal compensation analyses. For over 23 years, Berkshire has been committed to helping companies find cost-effective solutions to everyday human resources challenges. We offer outsourcing and software solutions to meet the needs of any size company. BALANCEtrak™ PREMIUM meets the client’s need to capture applicant data easily in a timely manner and automate the entire hiring process with no paper to shuffle.

Bond International Software Group (http://www.bondadapt.com)pioneer/ in the development and provision of staffing software, support and consultancy services to the staffing and recruiting industries.

Bond StarSearcher Applicant Tracking System (http://www.starsearcherats.com/ )Applicant tracking software from Bond International Software is designed to fill mid-sized companies' growing need for an automated system of tracking applicants through the entire hiring process. You use accounting software to manage your financial assets, but what about your most valuable assets, human capital? StarSearcher allows you to sort through the deluge of resumes in seconds so that the stars reveal themselves – and go to work for your company, not your competition. Sold exclusively through the Microsoft Partner Channel, StarSearcher Applicant Tracking System is built on Microsoft technologies such as SQL, Outlook and Office and integrates with Dynamics GP. StarSearcher offers a complete, versatile and affordable ATS solution that can easily automate all aspects of the hiring process: gathering job requirements, auto-posting to website, qualifying job applicants, processing resumes, matching candidates, hiring manager portal and more.

Brightmove (http://www.brightmove.com/ )BrightMove ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is a powerful web based applicant tracking software package designed to make the recruitment process easier. Our applicant tracking software is designed from the ground up to simplify the HR professional’s everyday life. BrightMove ATS (Applicant Tracking System) will lower the cost of recruiting for your company and make your recruiting staff more productive.

Bullhorn Staffing Software (http://www.bullhorn.com/Home.8.0/BHContent_HomePage.cfm )Bullhorn delivers an integrated web-based front office staffing solution. BullhornSTAFFING is a web-native platform for the Staffing Industry and is recognized by industry leaders as one of the most powerful, flexible, and easy to use systems across a wide range of business types, sizes, specialties, and disciplines.

CATS Applicant Tracking System (http://www.catsone.com/ )CATS is industry's first open source applicant tracking system (ATS). Built on the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), it can be installed and running in 5 minutes on a Unix or Windows platform. It features built-in applicant tracking, resume search, CRM, and a reporting dashboard for staffing agencies and corporate HR departments.

Conrep ATS and a complete PSA solution (http://www.conrep.com/index.htm?source=hr-guide )Conrep's PSA software (includes Applicant Tracking System) provides end-to-end solution for consulting, staffing, recruiting and professional services organizations. Conrep improves all aspects of your business: workflow, tracking and controlling. It's easy-to-implement, web managed solution increases organizational efficiency, maximizes resource utilization, facilitates team collaboration, fosters individual responsibility and productivity.

CVManager-Applicant Tracking System - Resume Tracking (http://www.cvmanager.com/ )CVManager is a powerful applicant tracking system that integrates seamlessly with your corporate web site. CVManager helps corporate recruiters select the most qualified candidates rapidly. Features include applicant tracking, requisition tracking, automated resume ranking, job posting to your corporate web site and Intranet, fully customized input forms and pre-screening questions, criteria-based resume searches, letter generation, response tracking and multilingual capabilities. Candidates can sign up to receive new job opening notifications and they can update their resumes online. CVManager also enables recruiters to manage all content of their career section.

CVTracer Software (http://www.cvtracer.com/) CVTracer Software provides web-based, workflow automation solutions designed for recruiting organizations. CVTracer offers software in which serves as the recruiter's desktop to handle everything from resume processing, applicant tracking, and customer management to corporate career site integration. These are easy-to-use systems allowing your entire organization to share a single, 360-degree view of your clients, candidates and requisitions. No software or hardware installation is required, only minimal training is needed, and implementation can be completed in days.

FlashRecruit (http://www.vectrics.com/ )FlashRecruit is an Open Source Job Board and Applicant Tracking software application. Built for industry standard J2EE application servers, FlashRecruit is enterprise ready and will scale with your business. FlashRecruit leverages standard Java enterprise components.

Genesys (http://www.genesyshcm.com/ )Founded in 1981, Genesys is a proven provider of web-based HCM solutions configured to each workplace. The Company's suite, PeopleComeFirst®, streamlines HR, benefit administration and payments, payroll processing, self-service, tax filing and garnishment processing. Genesys provides unprecedented choice, flexibility, and satisfaction to its clients. Available as SaaS, HRO services or licensed in-house software.

Gopher Applicant Tracking Recruiting Staffing Software (http://resume-software.com/ )BlackDog Inc. has provided industrial strength staffing software to professional recruiting firms all over the world. Custom designed specifically for the executive search industry, GOPHER has become the leading recruitment tool of choice for recruiters wanting to dramatically increase productivity through effective applicant and resume tracking software, allowing instant access to crucial candidate and client data.

Greentree Systems (http://www.greentreesystems.com/ )Vendor of applicant tracking and resume scanning software located in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Hirebridge, LLC (http://www.hirebridge.com/ )Hirebridge brings affordable web-based job posting and applicant management solutions to small to midsize corporations and staffing companies.

HireDesk (http://www.hiredesk.com/ )HireDesk provides on demand Web-based recruitment solutions for all types of recruiting disciplines, including executive search, permanent placement, temporary staffing, contract staffing, and multi-discipline environments. Today, HireDesk helps recruiters at over 500 organizations worldwide to build and manage relationships, increase daily productivity, and grow the business. details.

Hire Ground Software (http://www.hiregroundsoftware.com/ )Hire Ground offers the most affordable and scalable Applicant Tracking Software on the market. We offer both Full and LITE versions so we can offer solutions for any size company. We are the only company that offers a customized skills matrix to filter applicants. We also have standard reporting that can track candidate sources, and time to hire.

HireTrac (http://www.hiretrac.com/ )HireTrac is a powerful ASP applicant tracking system designed for the small to mid-market. No installation, no learning curve - up and running in 10 minutes, with your brand!

Hiring Management Systems (http://www.fadvhms.com/ )First Advantage HMS provides a total solution for managing the hiring process. Powering both salaried and hourly hiring, First Advantage HMS integrates all your critical hiring related services on a single platform. Built on flexible technology, First Advantage HMS adapts and grows as your needs change. And with advanced global capabilities, our solutions can support your hiring needs in 13 languages and with over 100 culture settings.

Hiring Software (http://www.hiringsoftware.com/ )Web-based and PC-based recruiting software that support complete job and candidate tracking and create a powerful career web site.

Hodes iQ (http://www.hodesiq.com/ )Award-winning Talent Management software, Hodes iQ provides corporate recruiters sophisticated recruiting tools that are easy to use. A product of Bernard Hodes Group, an Omnicom Company (NYSE:OMC).

HRLogix Applicant Tracking System (http://www.hrlogix.com/ )HRLogix is the leading provider of Next Generation Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) defined by ease of use, functionality, & cost value proposition. Our solutions turn your corporate web-site into a powerful recruiting tool, while offering a very professional “applicant self-service” to your job-seekers. From job-requisition, on-line screening & scheduling for those qualified candidates our solution can take your organization to the next level in Human Resources.

HRM Direct (http://www.hrmdirect.com/ )Resume Direct eliminates tedious data entry with the most powerful resume parsing, automatic job posting, and OFCCP-compliant EEO data capture available starting from just $250 per month. Find out why more than half the companies that try Resume, buy Resume Direct.

HRsmart.com (http://www.hrsmart.com/ )HRsmart is a global provider of world-class talent management solutions that streamline recruiting, development, and retention processes, giving our clients an edge on today’s competitive markets. Our state-of-the-art technology and proven human capital management practices provide solid performance at attractive prices.

Humanic Design (http://www.humanic.com/ )The Humanic HRMS is a comprehensive business solution-automating core Human Resources functions and quickly putting information into the hands of those who need it most. Integrating essential HR functions like benefits administration with applicant tracking, flex benefits administration, wage and compensation modeling, position control, training administration and employee histories.

Icarian Inc. (http://www.icarian.com/ )Icarian’s Workforce software is an intranet application designed to help a company plan, hire, deploy, and retain talent assets. Icarian Services provides our customers tailored solutions including Strategic Process Engineering, Implementation Services, Education Services, and Customer Support.

iCIMS, Inc. (http://www.icims.com/ )iCIMS provides recruiters with collaborative tools that help them attract, screen, and hire the best talent, giving them an edge over the competition. Ranked the #1 ATS for the past three years, iRecruiter is the fastest, easiest to use, and most configurable Hiring Management Solution available today. With more than 375 clients, iCIMS has the experience of managing the recruitment initiatives for companies of all sizes, and across all industries. From resume gathering to candidate screening to robust reporting capabilities, iRecruiter is both comprehensive and easy, and is capable of fulfilling all of your Hiring Management needs.

ImmigrationTracker Case Management Software (http://www.immigrationtracker.com/ )Founded in 1998, ImmigrationTracker is the leader in fully-integrated immigration case management software for Fortune 500 companies and immigration law practices. It has been enhanced with the suggestions of thousands of American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) members and corporate professionals. ImmigrationTracker is a unique combination of feature-rich software, detailed and secure case tracking, status/work authorization expiration monitoring, I-9 and LCA postings history, PERM and other vital reporting and a flexible and integrated forms package. Adopted by companies in multiple countries, Tracker is the only immigration software offering both online (ASP) and proven server-based platforms, providing IT and HR departments maximum security, plus more certain compatibility with future technology trends. Based in San Francisco, CA, ImmigrationTracker currently supports more than 3,500 users in the United States, Canada and the UK.

JobScore (http://www.jobscore.com)%20a/A free hosted solution that allows you to create listings, score applicants, track progress and generate reports.

Jobtrain Solutions (http://www.jobtrain.co.uk/ )Jobtrain is a leading web-based recruitment management system that helps companies save administration time and reduce recruitment costs through the automation and streamlining of their recruitment processes.

Kenexa (http://www.kenexa.com/ )Kenexa Recruiter® was created as a complete recruiting management system to address this need. As an applicant-tracking system, Kenexa Recruiter® will dramatically reduce your overall hiring costs and streamline and automate your entire recruiting process.

Mangrove Software (http://www.mangrovesoftware.com/recruitment_features.html )Mangrove has the most comprehensive HR, Payroll, Benefits Management, Applicant Tracking, & Self Service Solutions available. We offer payroll processing with check printing capabilities, tax-filing services, compliance reporting, ACH, & our state-of-the-art customization toolset. You can license our full-service product or choose our hosted 100% web-based solution.

matchhire - Recruiting, Staffing and Applicant Tracking (http://www.matchhire.com/ )matchhire is a user Friendly and Affordable Recruiting Web-Based Software to streamline all the hiring procedures of Recruiting Agencies and HR Departments from posting jobs, attracting candidates, processing resumes, qualifying applicants, through qualified hire. Free Trial.

MaxHire Applicant Tracking (http://www.maxhire.net/ )An affordable integrated software solution for professional recruiters and search firms.

mindSCOPE Staffing & Recruitment Software (http://www.mindscope.com/ )Makers of mindSCOPE Staffing & Recruitment software database tracks candidate, client, and job placement status.

MyPaperLess Office (http://www.mypaperlessoffice.com/ )Online paperless recruiting and tracking system

Mploy: Empowered Applicant Tracking, Requisition Management, and Recruiting Workflow (http://www.coolersoft.com/ )Find your candidates, track your jobs, and manage your recruiting process from anywhere, anytime. Mploy provides effortless applicant tracking and requisition management. Also, Mploy empowers you with a flexible workflow system to keep you on track and on time.

myStaffingPro (http://www.mystaffingpro.com/ )myStaffingPro® is a full-featured, web-based, applicant tracking system with advanced applicant screening capabilities providing tools to help you achieve your hiring goals. We offer solutions for companies of any size, with any budget. Features and cost vary by the version selected. All editions are built on the same proven technology.

NewHire (http://www.new-hire.com/ )Employers, get answers to your most important hiring questions - before you interview! Keep track of all applicants from all sources in one easy-to-use online solution. Hiring has never been so simple! Advertise anywhere and direct all applicants to a single customized web page. Your "inbox" will never be flooded with resumes again!

NowHire.com (http://www.nowhire.com/ )ISG's applicant tracking, resume database and hiring management systems streamline and automate your entire workforce procurement and management process, utilizing the Internet, IVR (phone) and/or Employment Kiosks for corporate and hourly recruitment.

PCRecruiter by Main Sequence Technologies (http://www.pcrecruiter.com/ )PCRecruiter Web, used by thousands of professionals worldwide, offers a complete solution for management of contacts and applicant flow. The combination of applicant tracking and contact management creates a powerful center for your entire process, facilitating your entire process from requisition submittal, to req approval, through to on-line job inquiries and hire logging. All of this, plus potent administrative metrics and dynamic candidate questionnaires and assessments. PCRecruiter has the features you'd expect of an enterprise class solution, including bulk email, automated resume parsing, document storage, and diversity tracking.

PeopleCapital (http://peoplecapital.com)%20peoplecapital/ creates a competitive advantage through best practices and superior technology associated with attracting, tracking, and onboarding the world's best talent.

PeopleFilter Technology (http://www.peoplefilter.com/ )PeopleFilter is a web-based Applicant Tracking and Hiring Optimization solution that allows for rapid identification and ranking of the most qualified applicants based on employer-defined job descriptions.

PowerHires - Applicant Tracking for Small Business (http://www.powerhires.com/solutions.php?s=hrguide )PowerHires is the best applicant tracking system for small business. You can be up and running in under an hour. Our free trial and satisfaction guarantee mean you have no risk, so start today! We offer applicant screening, an online job center for your website, and many more features to help you hire better people faster.

powerHR (http://www.powerobjects.com/powerHR.aspx )powerHR by PowerObjects is an innovative, fully customized web based application that automates and streamlines the hiring process. In response to organizations across the country, PowerObjects has developed powerHR to help Human Resources personnel better manage the job application process, by providing a simple way to collect job applications via the web.

PreferredHire Plus (http://www.preferredhire.com/ )PreferredHire Plus is an industry leader in predictive resume screening and processing technology. Our resume management system allows corporate Human Resource departments, as well as staffing firms, to concentrate and refocus their efforts on the strategic vision of their organization by automating the applicant screening and resume tracking process.

RecruitActive (http://www.recruitactive.com/ )UK based provider of e-recruitment software systems and careers microsites for medium and large businesses and organisations.

Recruiter Applicant Tracking Automation System
(http://www.hr-.com/recruiter/recruiter.shtml: an award winning applicant tracking system leads the way through all the stages of recruitment and helps you select the best candidates quickly, efficiently and at the lowest cost. Free demo and eShop.

recruitNEXT Applicant Tracking Software by EON Applications (http://www.recruitnext.com/ )recruitNext offers easy-to-use Applicant Tracking Software, Web-based or desktop, Resume parsing, job posting, advance searching and integrated career center all in one system.

RecruitPro - Applicant tracking software (http://www.24x7softech.com/ )RecruitPro is an applicant tracking system & recruitment process automation software for Recruitment consultants, executive search firms, employment agencies, placement companies

RecruitTrack Recruiting Software (http://www.recruittrack.com/ )Desktop recruiting software system designed to track applicant resumes, employers, job orders, and activity data featuring resume parsing and integration with Outlook.

Redmatch Applicant Tracking and Online Recuiting (http://www.redmatch.com/ )Redmatch is a leading provider of online recruitment solutions for corporations, publishers and staffing companies. Its hosted software solution, Redmatch Recruiter™ helps HR managers and recruiters to find and hire the most qualified candidates, efficiently and quickly. Redmatch Recruiter acts as a seamless extension of your recruitment team, bringing dramatic time- and cost-savings to the entire staffing process. Redmatch Recruiter serves thousands of enterprises globally with a fully branded career web site, efficient hiring manager tools, state-of-the-art Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and seamless job posting to Redmatch-powered and other online career portals.

Relational Systems, Inc. (http://www.winsearch.com/ )WinSearch - providing applicant tracking, resume and complete recruiting relational database management systems for the permanent placement, contracting, and temporary staffing industries. WinSearch is available in Client Server, ASP and Web Enabled versions.

RESUMate - Applicant Tracking Software (http://www.resumate.com/ )Create complete resume database records from text resumes (Word docs, e-mails, etc.) in about 10 seconds-no typing with RESUMate.

ResumeWare (http://www.resumeware.com/ )The web-based resume database and applicant tracking system designed from the ground up to deliver what the best recruiters need to be even more effective.

Sendouts.com (http://www.sendouts.com/ )Sendouts.com provides the award winning Sendouts Pro Applicant Tracking System for staffing firms. Sendouts Pro offers an easy-to-use and customizable recruitment tool that reduces time consuming data entry, improves efficiency and accuracy of searches, and manages the entire workflow process from prospective client to final placement.

SilkRoad Technology, Inc. (http://www.silkroadtech.com/products/applicant__tracking/index.htm )OpenHire is the most sophisticated, cost reducing, web-based job posting and Applicant Tracking System (ATS) on the market today. It streamlines the entire recruiting and human resources management process, giving you instant access to all the information you need to make fast, informed recruiting decisions.

S. Reynolds & Associates, Inc. (http://www.applicantsmartware.com/ )ApplicantSmartware has been the preferred choice of applicant tracking software by many companies who were seeking an affordable solution to automating their staffing function and managing their resumes, staffing requisitions, offer letters, and reports.

SmartSearch (http://www.smartsearchonline.com/index.asp )SmartSearch is a comprehensive system, based on the latest Microsoft development tools and fully browser enabled. SmartSearch is an event driven database application which manages information on Candidates, Jobs, Hiring Managers and Businesses. SmartSearch is a scalable product, we have customers ranging in size from one to several hundreds of users accessing databases as large as 350,000 resumes.

SonicRecruit (http://www.sonicrecruit.com/ )SonicRecruit's web-based Applicant Tracking System delivers the industry's most powerful recruiting tool. Praised by our mid-market and Fortune 500 clients, the flexibility of SonicRecruit offers a wide array of HR solutions guaranteed to refine your hiring process. Backed up by our experienced staff, it's easy to see why SonicRecruit is more than an application.

Staff -n- Track (http://www.staff-n-track.com/ )Staff-N-Track is a full serviced easy to use Applicant Tracking system designed for small to mid-sized companies.

StaffCV Recruitment Software (http://www.staffcv.com/ )Details and case studies related to StaffCV Recruitment Software

Staffingsoft.com (http://www.staffingsoft.com/ )StaffingSoft is an enterprise-wide Applicant Tracking System Recruiting Software featuring a suite of tools that effectively integrate and manage talent recruiting, retention, and management from internal staff, to outside vendors, to candidates globally.

Staffing Software Solutions Account Receivable-Recruitment Management (http://www.bwsi.com/ )TempWizard is an account receivable software for Account receivable management services also a recruitment management software used for contract temp staffing and recruiting.

Stateside Technology Limited (http://www.stateside-technology.com/products.html )ResourceBuilder is a completely new solution for recruitment in the internet age. Recruitment is in the grip of radical change. The driving forces behind this change are the technological improvements, the shortage of skilled staff, increased pressure on budgets and the high cost of traditional recruitment methods. Companies now have to turn around economic slowdown by using the internet to integrate the new online recruitment into their existing business practice.

Swiftpro Recruitment Software, CV Processing, Data Entry Services, Job Boards Design (http://www.swiftpro.com/ )Recruiting software and services that continuously facilita te your recruitment processes, optimize the applicant tracking activities and enhance your overall business performance.

Talent Secure (http://www.talentsecure.com/ )TalentSecure is a web based applicant tracking solution. TalentSecure gives you the control of the applicant recruiting, tracking and staffing process that you have been looking for.

!Trak-It Applicant - Applicant Tracking Software (http://www.applicant-tracking-software.com/ )!Trak-It Applicant - tracks skills, references, schools, training, licenses and past employers plus invitations and routings. Included are over 100 standard reports and letters, most are customizable. !Trak-It Applicant also tracks letter history; routing status; invitation schedules; prints EEO reports; applicant flow; source statistics; activity and recruiter statistics; skill searches and applicant profiles. There is a built in email capability as well as an online web based reference or background checking connection. The Resume Extraction Option extracts information from resumes and transfers it to the searchable !Trak-It Applicant databases. The Web Option allows you to publish your job openings on your web site's job board.

WebRecruiter (http://www.webrecruiter.com/ )Enabling competitive advantage by integrating and automating the recruitment supply chain. WebRecruiter automates and improves your existing recruiting processes instead of forcing you to change your company’s well-defined workflow.

XML Resume (http://www.sovren.com/ )Sovren Resume Parser is the first HR XML.org-certified resume parser, easy to integrate with any technology to process XML resumes.

Does Internet Recruiting Work?

2007-12-14T22:53:00.000-08:00

In a cited research from late 2002, which claimed that only 6% of Americans found their jobs online that year. Dismal numbers considering the fact that by 2002, there were more than 3,000 job boards and literally hundreds of thousands of corporate career and job pages online

First, according to the Society for Human Resources Professionals (SHRM) more than 90% of HR people are now using the Internet to recruit. Our webinar had about 130 participants, mainly HR people. When polled, virtually every last one said that they and their organizations use the Internet to recruit.

CareerXRoads claims that Internet postings now result in 10 times as many hires as newspaper ads. This makes sense when one looks at the Newspaper Association of America statistics since 1975. From 1975 through 2000, recruitment classified advertising in newspapers grew from $348 million to over $8.7 billion. Since 2000, it has declined to under $4 billion. Meanwhile, Internet job posting revenue has grown 242% in the past five years according to Forrester Research.

All that said, are more people finding work through Internet channels than they were in 2002? It would seem so. Of the 130 people polled in our webinar (admittedly unscientific) a whopping 75% claimed that they had landed at least one job in their career using the Internet. Almost the same number had a close friend or family member who found their current job using the Internet.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that as of 2003, 87% of Americans have Internet access from home. Also according to Pew, about 42 million Americans used the Internet to search for work in 2000 and 61 million did so in 2002. However, "Searching for work" does not make its 2005 top 12 daily Internet activities nor is it on its list of the top nine things survey respondents say the Internet has helped them with (relationships with friends and family members top the list).

According to Pew, blacks and Hispanics are considerably more likely to look for work on the Web than whites (61% versus 38% in both cases), which may be good news for your diversity recruiting efforts. Moreover, Pew found that more than 100 million Internet users belong to one or more online communities. Trade or professional groups top that list. Since access to members of professional groups is like gold to many proactive recruiters, the Internet is almost certainly facilitating recruitment in ways beyond just job boards and corporate career sites.

Weblogs, social networks like Linked in, and even Google and other search tools now are used for recruiting. Last month, several ex-PeopleSoft employees advertised their availability on eBay. Add to this the enormous amount of Web-based career activity inside organizations and the experiences cited by our webinar participants begin to sound more representative.

Most of the Fortune 500 now operate internal employment sites. Job opportunities are posted for employees often for a week or more before they are posted externally. Today, many top performing organizations aim to fill half or more of their open positions internally rather than with external candidates, and the majority of the matching may be done using intranets and internal websites. And when external candidates are considered, Web-based employee referral systems are becoming the norm, where employees can refer their friends and colleagues to company job postings and, in most cases, receive a reward if that person is eventually hired.

So it's possible to reconcile the numbers once we look past job boards and career sites as the only avenues for finding work or finding candidates on the Web. The Internet has clearly become an indispensable tool for job seekers and recruiters -- and it has certainly become mainstream. Still, it would be hard to argue that the best scenario for recruiter and job seeker alike is not the old fashioned "who you know" approach. Networking is still king, especially beyond the entry-level. For the Internet to steal the crown, it will have to prove capable of facilitating real relationships, so that the online networks we build -- made up largely of people we've never met -- can translate into recommendations and referrals for jobs. This is already happening on a small scale. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes the norm within five years.

Getting people through Passion !!!!

2007-12-13T22:59:00.000-08:00

Being a recruiter finding people is a major challenge. It may be either right guy or wrong guy but our prima focus of getting people is a big task first when we get requirements from our dear clients ….
but they are people who are not in recruitment or not trained in recruitment always have people on hand- Who and How ??

The people like small shopkeepers ,traders, travel agents always get people whether customers or employees .I never felt any of my next door vegetable vendor went to any recruitment agency for getting his people ….

“All his life he got his men through word of mouth or bring people from his native etc .”

To give me more reality I tell my experience which I had last week when i visited travel agency to get flight tickets, While collecting my tickets I found one ticket booking guy desk is flooded with resumes I waited till he has sorted the resumes I went and chat casually with him initially he was little reluctant and gradually he become comfortable with me ,he mentioned about the resumes on his desk .This travel agency does overseas placements like Middle East, Africa etc. I asked him what kind of opportunities does he get as most consultancies does recruitment for overseas He does for the labourers in construction ,Housekeeping positions in Hotels and Nurses positions in Hospitals in Middle East countries.
Regularly they get the requirements and fill them properly and the most important fact is
"till now their travels didn’t cheat any person ".
This is really good discussion I had with him ..and made me to THINK …….??

That’s really surprising and exciting what makes the guy does more placements then recruiters like us and we all know lot of scandals happens in travel agencies then in consultancy firms

Something sparkling on the Travel Desk Guy is PASSION ……

See how he does recruitment with passion
(Pls find in bold italics for recruiter understanding)

i) He knows the candidate biography and his/her family well
– Hitting the bulls eye ,the candidate never bounce out of the recruiter
hands.

ii) Interacting with the candidates over letters or through candidate friends frequently so he gets prepared with new candidates for the positions that are about to be disclosed by the client or getting the selected candidates to be flown to the client site
- Close follow ups with the candidate,simple to say watch his/her moves like
a spy

iii) He has big network of sub agents all over India to get people on the massive range
– Networking ,self explanatory

iv) Understands the psych of the candidate which helps him to negotiate the salary and agreements
– Check the candidate is he Suspect or Prospect !!!!

v) He listens to candidates talking carefully.
- Listening with attention ,word by word by the candidate just like CBI person

vi) He helps the candidates family when in need of financial or personal support
– This is a rare scenario in recruiter's part

Does we do the same process or we don’t ?

Yes I would say we do all the same things and much more that travel agent has done except financial support to his family like that very few occasions….
Nowadays PASSION has become a buzz word in Management or in our personal life.

“This is the one word we keep hearing and forgetting !!!! ”

Recruiter World

2007-11-19T21:30:00.000-08:00

Who is Recruiter ?

A recruiter is someone engaging in recruitment, which is the solicitation of individuals to fill jobs or positions within any group, such as a corporation or sports team. Recruiters can be divided into 2 groups: those working internally for one organization, and those working for multiple clients in a 3rd-party broker relationship, sometimes called headhunters.

Best Practices in Recruitment

Planning :
Normal practice we have is as the requirement/req comes we jump on sourcing resumes. Any time we have either studied what is the job description or try to find job description is all about .Most of our time we spent on hitting on the wrong candidate or just a sake satisfaction of submitting resumes . This is a total disaster for the client and the consultancy firms. Client is not a person who looks all the dirt.PLS DONT TAKE CLIENT FOR GRANTED BECAUSE HE IS COOL....."NOTHING HE IS JUST WATCHING U CLOSELY..... "
To solve this here is the list of process
1) Study the requirement fully.If you dont have proper Job Description find from Google or from other job sited where they gave detailed \Job Description
2) Look on the Job Description for the key words and write it in a piece of paper dont loose it as it is a saving face of you and also help you shortlist profiles faster not taking a lot of time as your traditional process
3)This keywords you can use it as search strings when using search for potential candidates...
4) Prepare an Ms-Excel Sheet as Candidate format ,I believe all companies has in this mention all the technology of that requirement,Years of relevant experience ,Self Rating etc .Pls do it for each and every requirement and dont carry away as template because you might loose a matching candidate to unmatched candidate in this skillset summary .
5) You can send this skillset format and Basic candidate format to all your potential and active candidates. It reduces lot of calls with the candidate if he is other locations .....

Location:
For example if I get a lot of calls from headhunters who service in Chennai,India I live in Mumbai , which is a very faraway location and may not be interested to move because of scope,interest,environment. It is reasonable to call a potential candidate that live in Chennai or near to, it is unreasonable to call one that live in Mumbai,Kolkatta. Please familarize yourself with the people whom you can approach as u know we do whole nine yards and the candidate after taking offer letter and he backs out with a shock.
In this your client or the candidate is not going to worry only you and me and our company is in shock of the back out.

Description:
It would be greatly appreciated if you could tell me a little more about a position other than some abstract statement such as "it is a financial services company in the Bangalore" or some other generic description. After all, the odds are pretty good that it would be anyway since 90% of all companies in the North are financial services companies. We understand you need to protect your information, but a little more information would be useful. Financial services is a catch-all word. How about telling us if it is a bank, mutual fund company, insurance, mortgage, wall street investment, etc and of course its approximate location.

Position:
Simply, I work for a world-class organization who pays well and takes great care of their employees. Why would I want to make a lateral move? On the remote chance I ever considered it, it certainly wouldn't be for money. Don't tell me the job title, tell me about what the position entails and the culture of the company. I want to know if they are business casual, how they maintain a work-life balance, do they use and contribute to open source, and in your own words why you believe they are better to work for than my current employer.

Contact Information:
One of the more annoying aspects is when a headhunter calls and doesn't leave a direct dial number. Usually if they leave a main number with an extension then I am usually suspect as to how urgent they want to fill this position. When calling also leave your email address. Sometimes your candidates are in all-day meetings but may be able to shoot you a quick message from their cell phones.

Exclusive:
It would also be helpful to know if you are exclusive for the position. In today's job market when the req is given to multiple recruiters, it almost always results in the same individual being called by multiple recruiters. Candidates if they had their paperwork submitted by multiple recruiters will more often than not be rejected by the hiring company. Even for candidates that have no interest in the position or have to spend lots of time hearing about something they already know. I had a friend who lives in Bangalore and was shopping around. He literally got back-to-back calls from six different recruiters for the same position

What is Internet Recruiting ?
Internet recruiting and human resources automated systems are integral to the staffing strategy of every company, in virtually every economic sector. Increasingly, job seekers are turning towards job portals, company websites, and even online news paper classifieds for job openings or job searches. Conversely, recruiting companies and consultants’ world over are depending upon the online medium for advertising their requirements, venue of interview/recruitment etc alongside the approximate pay packet. In short, it has become sort of inconceivable for the people on both sides of this equation.

The biggest advantage with recruiting online is its pace and reach. From a prospective job seeker’s perspective, finding the right job opportunities in such job sites and applying for it is just a matter of few mouse clicks or few seconds. Gone are the days of sending resumes by post, and waiting for an interview call, again through post. With internet recruiting, such long drawn delays are totally eliminated. If some company shortlists a particular resume, the person concerned will get the call up through email or telephone. In other words, the candidate in context could know in less time if his/her resume stands a chance or not. Further, with internet recruiting websites, one could easily search and apply for many jobs online at a time, without having to leave from a single browser window.

From a recruiter’ perspective, internet recruiting provides the penetration that most conventional methods traditionally lacked. It not only lets the job seekers know about the latest openings, and different openings, but also let them understand in detail the profile the company is looking for. By doing so, it enables the company to receive only relevant applications, thereby lot of time in sorting the resumes. When coupled with automated human resources system, the process becomes still faster and robust, as everything from sourcing, screening, grading, and recruiting could now be done from a centralized computer terminal with minimal amount of paper and administrative work.

Internet recruiting and human resources integration, recruiting managers could devote more focus and energy on the mission critical aspects of HR management than having to waste time over mundane paper works and usual administrative tasks. In fact, the role of human resources systems extends beyond recruiting and this includes other corporate activities such as tracking employee performances, making appraisals, managing salary and wage rates, tracking leave entitlements, financial reporting, and facilitating employee management in general as well. In short, such a system not only cuts costs but also save time in a big way.

To sum it up, internet recruiting and human resources system streamlines the recruitment process and post recruitment administration like never before. It is fast, robust, easily manageable, saves time and cost, and above all let the managers focus on their job better.