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U.S. Cellular is helping employees losing jobs in the sale of some segments of its business to Sprint by setting up a transition portal.

A recruitment advertising/communications agency called Shaker helped develop the portal, aimed at 765 “associates” impacted; Kensington International, an outplacement firm, also partnered.

U.S. Cellular is also working with a group called Skills for Chicagoland’s Future. It’s a non-profit that provides placement and training services.

Back to the portal: it includes information on negotiation strategies; resume and cover-letter tips; interviewing assistance, and social networking guides. Let’s take a brief look inside. (more…)

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Remember George Costanza from the old Seinfeld show? He had problems with jobs and women, which makes sense to anyone who believes job seeking is like dating, which is pretty much most everyone who has done both.

For you doubters and naysayers, proof is on the way from none other than eHarmony. Late next year, the company, which insists it takes a “scientific approach to matching,” will launch a career site employing the same principles as its dating site.

A company executive told The Washington Post, “We have 29 dimensions that we match on for marriage. It would not surprise me if we have even more for a worker relationship.” Relationship-seekers answer about 200 questions before eHarmony computes a profile and does its magic. Not coincidentally, among the questions are a number related to work and career. (more…)

That marriage of employee referrals with social media first mentioned on these pages three years ago and chronicled with new launches and updates many times since continues, as SuccessFactors works on a social-media/employee referral tool as part of its recruiting product.

This system suggests people who your employees might know — using their Facebook and LinkedIn contacts — who might be a fit for an open job. Employees can then send those people a note. The tool also, graphically, can show you any money an employee may have earned for a referral (e.g. $500), as well as a cumulative total.

This took about six months to make. Meanwhile, in August, SuccessFactors, an SAP company, expects to launch an improvement to the tool, where an employee can more easily distribute jobs on social networks, including Twitter, to their social media “friends” and contacts.

SuccessFactors’ social referral updates (and onboarding updates too) is just a taste of the many recent new launches and updates, such as: (more…)

The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you’re playing by somebody else’s rules, while quietly playing by your own. –Michael Korda

Losing a great candidate is a painful and disheartening experience. I for one, beat myself and wonder what I could have done differently as I do a cerebral post mortem. Sadly, it is the occupational hazard with which we live daily and it is a part of the game of recruiting. With that in mind, we all need to learn from our mistakes and do our best not to repeat them.

Losing great candidates will never go away completely. But we can look to some ideas and insights that will help that event to become less frequent. Please consider the following points and know that if you do lose a candidate, you played the game as well as possible. (more…)

There are many strategies to build a healthy employment brand: promoting jobs with social media such as your Facebook page; LinkedIn ad impressions; hiring events; recruitment videos of your CEO, and so on. Celebrities have not really been part of employment branding strategies. That changed with Google as is showcased in the new Vince Vaughn movie The Internship. We may be seeing another strategy developing that is out of box and a breath of fresh air. (more…)

This video from Code.org, pointed out to me by my friend Julia Gometz, provides an awfully strong message that being a computer coder is fun, meaningful, and accessible — as in, you don’t have to be a genius to do it.

Stars include Bill Gates, Chris Bosh, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Talking about millenials is a hot topic. Whether it’s how to hire them or ways to work with them, love them, or hate them, analyzing gen Y seems to be an area of continual fascination. And now thanks to Time, this issue is in the spotlight once again with this week’s cover story titled “The Me Me Me Generation,” which features the provocative subtitle “Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.” As a member of gen Y myself, I was curious to find out what the article, written by Joel Stein, had to say. Although it points out some troubling statistics, overall the verdict was optimistic. Here are three thought-provoking ideas: (more…)

During a trip to a suburban mall near Cleveland, I saw a man wearing a jacket with a logo for Hyland Software, a business-to-business software developer whose global headquarters are located nearby. In the B2B world, Hyland has a reputation of being a stellar employer with a fun streak. As evidence, it has a giant tube slide in the middle of its headquarters and has earned several top workplace awards in recent years.

Hyland also has a quirk in its interview process. Candidates applying online are required to write and submit a poem. Not an essay, not a biography — a poem. How does that strike you? (more…)

There have been several recent articles on the importance and, in some cases the lack of attention on, the candidate experience. One article goes so far as to call out the Candidate Experience Award winners and question why they are silent on the topic.

As the chairman of Talent Board, the nonprofit organization that delivers the Candidate Experience Awards each year, there is plenty I can say about the power of a positive candidate experience, and the amazing value and efforts that many employers, including some of the most well-known employment brands, are implementing to gain a competitive advantage and treat candidates with the respect they deserve.

Employers care, and they should. (more…)

Putting candidates on the spot with weird questions that have no real answer has been a hallmark of Silicon Valley recruiting for years.

Google made Glassdoor’s list of oddball questions with this one: “How many cows are in Canada? Salesforce made the list, asking, “If you could be anyone else, who would it be?”

Now, though, Rocket Fuel has kicked it up a notch, with a recruiting billboard along heavily traveled Rt. 101, the Valley’s main artery. It lists the company’s Internet address with an X. To get to page X, you need to solve this puzzle:

X=The largest 15 digit perfect square palindrome. (more…)

I’ve talked before about efforts to employ people with Asperger’s. But perhaps no Autism-related effort will be bigger than one announced today by SAP, simply because SAP, with 200,000+ customers, is just so big.

SAP says it’ll be hiring autistic software testers, programmers, and data-quality-assurance specialists. It’s going to do it through a partnership with Specialisterne, a Denmark-based firm operating in Europe and the U.S.

SAP had used the organization, where a majority of employees have autism or a related diagnosis, to do a pilot project in India and Ireland. U.S., Canada, and Germany will be on the docket next.

Specialisterne Founder Thorkil Sonne says “SAP is the first multinational company to partner with us on a global scale.” He expects others to follow its lead.

Last week, I found myself wearing down several hours sitting in an airport by catching the latest and greatest in the HR/employment sphere through LinkedIn, when I stumbled onto an article by Dr. Charles Handler titled “Employment Tests Are Becoming Irrelevant for Predicting Job Success.”  I was intrigued. After all, I am a consultant for a company in which a core area of our business is from said employment tests. Especially with that title, shock value achieved.

The article brings to light a number of interesting ideas about big data via social media and how it stands to influence the way we look at pre-employment. However new and edgy gathering such data via social media may be, it isn’t without its flaws.  Furthermore, if someone has to stand up for employment tests, I begrudgingly accept.

From the first excerpt, “The Impact of Publicly Available ‘Free-range’ Data,”

People born in the past decade or so, along with all persons to come, will begin accumulating a personal digital fingerprint that will be associated with them from cradle to the grave … We are even starting to see research that suggests we can gauge an individual’s job success from social media data such as one’s Facebook usage. (more…)

You post, you tweet, you activate social media, yet all the work you do to attract talent can go to waste if your applicant tracking system is too burdensome for candidates and your recruiting team. If you choose a strong applicant tracking system, your results will improve, candidates will have a great experience, and hiring managers will see more on-target resumes. A poor decision will have serious adverse effects costing you unhappy hiring managers, lost candidates, money, time, and frustration.

The following is a primer on things to take into consideration when making your decision on an applicant tracking system. It takes time and research, but the payoff will be well worth the effort. (more…)

Is your “six seconds of fame” enough to land you a job?

As a professor and a corporate recruiting strategist, I can tell you that very few applicants truly understand the corporate recruiting process. Most people looking for a job approach it with little factual knowledge. That is a huge mistake. A superior approach is to instead analyze it carefully, because data can help you understand why so many applicants simply can’t land a job. If you can bear with me for a few quick minutes, I can show you using numbers where the job-search “roadblocks” are and how that data-supported insight can help you easily double your chances of landing an interview and a job.

Toby

We pause now, before beginning our workday, before we plunge into this post about Mars and Monster, to pay homage to television’s most real unreality comedy show, The Office.

The show’s finale aired last night, ending nine years of episodes that anyone who has ever worked in an office, especially a sales office, would instantly recognize as real life snippets slightly disguised. At one point or another, we’ve all had a boss or known of a boss as quirkly lovable as Michael Scott.

And what The Office  did for — or is that to? — HR, but cast it as the stereotype of itself. Toby, the mild-mannered, accidental HR representative of corporate in the Scranton branch office, will forever be who every viewer of working age will picture when HR comes a’calling. (Unless they think of Catbert, who inhabits the opposite end of the HR spectrum.) (more…)

Odds are, you read the title and just said, “not me!” So we’re left with the question, “Is it worth your time to build an employment brand?” Absolutely.

I get it. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and this isn’t exactly a “today’s to-do list” type of endeavor. But building an employer brand is only as complicated and time consuming as you make it. It will also be as expensive as you make it, but it will be worth more than its weight in work.

You will get more out of a properly constructed employer brand than you put into it. And if you believe that time is money, then take note. In a survey of more than 4,700 talent acquisition decision makers, a reported 50 percent savings in cost per hire is associated with a strong employer brand.

I work with small- to medium-sized businesses every day, and many of them don’t have the time, resources, or knowledge base that the big guys do to recruit. That’s where employer brand shines. According to research firm Universum, two of the top three channels that will be the most used for employer brand promotion are the website (92 percent) and social media (80 percent). Most of us have those things and in a smaller firm you often have far more access to the control of those things than you would in a Fortune 500.

Here’s what to do: (more…)

Smarterer has won the 2013 startup competition at the Recruiting Innovation Summit.

The award comes with a $10,000 prize. It was selected by three judges: ERE Media Founder David Manaster, Greylock Partners Talent VP Dan Portillo, and Universum Founder Lars-Henrik Friis Molin. The judging panel considered in its decision the results of an audience vote done via text message (judges and the crowd each received a 50-50 weighting).

Friis Molin says the Smarterer tests are “perfecting themselves” through crowdsourcing. (Here’s more on Smarterer.) He sees it as one of the potential future gold standards in the assessment field. David Manaster said he tried the test and found it as fun as Smarterer claimed. He also said that given Smarterer’s “consumer approach” he also thought the test could be a future gold standard.

It was the elite of an elite group of new tools and technologies rolling out for recruiting departments, including one that would help companies hire teams (vs. individuals); another that would add a one-page candidate proposal to the application process; and another that would help companies create mobile careers sites. And more.

Meanwhile, two other companies were also winners at the event. (more…)

The U.S. EEOC has some new documents out that help when recruiting and selecting people with disabilities.

The info covers cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and intellectual disabilities. (more…)

From the department of where-are-they-know … whatever happened to Mystery Applicant, winner of last year’s competition between startups in the recruiting field?

If you don’t know the company, it automates candidate feedback. So it asks job seekers what they think of your brand, whether they are satisfied with their experience as a candidate, their preferred interests/channels for job seeking and career content about your company, and more. One of its clients, G4S, has used the information it has gathered to improve recruiter skills, and refine its brand messaging

Anyhow, back to what it’s up to. Mystery Applicant has been making sure it is optimized for tablets. It has added a hiring manager module, for hiring manager feedback. It has built “dynamic distribution” — to send different surveys to different subgroups. It’s developing a self-service module for customers to query candidates in more detail — for example, to quickly test a branding message by slipping in a quick question to a survey. Mystery Applicant is building out its diversity reporting functionality.

One of its biggest challenges is that clients want the company to do all sorts of consulting once they see their candidate-experience results, but Mystery Applicant’s Mike Cook says he doesn’t “want to turn into a staffing company.” Among other challenges, he says, are those of any startup: “Never enough customers, never enough money.”

More tech startups than at any time in the last four years will be looking to hire this year, says Silicon Valley Bank, but they worry they won’t be able to find the talent they need.

Even as most leaders and founders of the firms surveyed by the bank for its annual Startup Outlook say conditions in the U.S. are better this year than last, the number of them who report hiring talent is their biggest challenge has grown. Nine out of 10 executives report finding and hiring the talent they need is their biggest challenge. (more…)