Job Boards Aren’t Dead. They’re Evolving.

Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads just released their Annual Sources of Hire (SOH) Study, which is one of the most referenced and authoritative snapshots of how large, highly-competitive, high-profile firms define and measure the talent supply chain.

The SOH report is a glimpse of where employees – actual hires – were found. This data is important to organizations as they look to find and hire new employees. It is equally important to job candidates as they seek the most effective channels to a new job.

Interesting findings from this year’s study include: Continue Reading

Lessons Learned by Employers Impacted by Hurricane Sandy

Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

Four weeks after Sandy, life is getting back to normal – or is it? Walking the dog around a relatively unscathed block of homes in central NJ (miles from the shore), reminders are everywhere. Tons of debris in front of every home (more than 40 homes); the noise of still more 75-foot oak trees being cut while leaning precariously over homes rends the air; blue tarps draped over roofs (5 homes) that were speared with limbs weighing tons; and a flatbed truck finally easing up behind a flattened neighbor’s car (where my 75 foot oak fell). I check to make sure he doesn’t accidentally take the new car next to it.

Sandy was a storm that has little comparison even to Katrina although we can take some comfort that lessons learned from that catastrophic event seven years ago were likely responsible for preparations last month that saved lives – response speed and pre-positioning among them. Continue Reading

Drop Out, Dive In, Start Up: Are Journalists Missing The Main Point?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

A few recruiters, thinking out of the box, might benefit by looking for prospects who delayed traditional education for learning of a different kind.

Peter H. Thiel, the PayPal billionaire has garnered some serious ink for his initiative in offering some of the best and brightest young minds $100k and a mentor for a two year stint at a start-up. All the recipients of Thiel’s largesse are 20 and under and so missing what would ordinarily be viewed as the ideal time to attend MIT, Harvard, IIT Bombay etc. His plan has come under serious criticism and a bit of fanfare. The latest testament to this controversial initiative was recently featured in the NY Times. Continue Reading

B-School Applicants Decline: Damn Shame or About Time?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

The B-school numbers are in and they aren’t pretty according to this recent WSJ article by Melissa Korn. 69% of the F/T, two-year MBA degree programs in the US experienced significant declines in 2012 while 79-80% of the schools in Asia (Pacific Rim and Central Asia respectively) experienced gains. Globally the drop-off is 22% after a decline of 10% last year.

While some of this can be attributed to a return to normalcy after significant gains by B-schools during the financial crisis, you also have to wonder about the continuing value of the product exiting the many hundreds of schools granting these degrees. Continue Reading

Are You a Mobile Enabler or a Mobile Laggard?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

September marks the start of the 2012 fall frenzy of conferences, niche conferences, un-conferences, expos, seminars, webinars, (and yes, a Colloquium or two). Not every session at every event offers deep dives but the mobile discussion has been noted everywhere this year. One conference, held in mid-September, the second mRecruitingCamp, was totally devoted to the subject. (Michael Marlatt did an excellent job on this one-day niche event.)

Practitioners offering solid case study insights on mobile technology and recruiting included Matt Lavery [UPS], Chris Hoyt [PepsiCo] and Heather Tinguely [Microsoft]. We encourage you to look for their videos. Bottom line, a rapidly increasing percentage of prospects in their pipelines (prospects who are eventually hired) are engaged and in more and more cases applying through mobile devices. Continue Reading

Source of Hire: Is It Even Possible to Track?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

With all the enterprising recruiters who pride themselves on being strictly ‘social’ recruiters, we fantasized what a map would show about the job seeker’s path to a job in the future:

1. First, the candidate would likely tell (some) friends on Facebook they were looking for a new job. (So far so good).
2. A friend might then suggest asking Siri to search Google.
3. And perhaps somebody paid off Siri to forward him to Indeed which led him to Job Central which linked him to a great position on the career site of a firm in his commute range.
4. The candidate then went to Linkedin and found a friend of a friend who worked there and had gone to the same school as he did.
   Wanting to be cool he followed the employee on Twitter, then put him in his “must meet” circle on Google+ and soon found out that he (the employee) would be at a meet-up nearby where they #accidentally-on-purpose-met. Dropping the name of the friend they both knew in common, they found other common ground (they both pinned Italian recipes on Pinterest) and the now new friend and employee agreed to be his referral for an open position.
5. When asked in the application, “How did you find us?”, the candidate put in the name of the referral and, internally, the employee completed his form referring the local candidate. When the recruiter searched his ATS, the software’s [proprietary] algorithm weighted and tagged the referred candidate as a highly qualified match and the rest is history.

Except, the firm’s SOH reporting had switched to last IP address and, since the candidate had come directly from his home computer to the company career site, the ‘unknown’ IP address was coded “Other” for Source of Hire. Fortunately the external service that put the cookie on that particular prospect at the moment he reached Indeed was able to update the ‘source’ field – except, the recruiter altered the field again based on his interview of the new hire and so he changed it to, “Facebook”.

– Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler work full time consulting, educating and discovering how talent and opportunity connect through emerging technology. They can be reached via email at mmc@careerxroads.com, phone at 732-821-6652, or on-line at http://www.careerxroads.com.

The 2012 CandEs: Launching this year’s Candidate Experience Awards

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

Last year, 24 firms were acknowledged for their efforts to improve the treatment of their candidates at the HR Technology Conference (where the U.S. awards will be presented again this year). Kudos to these winning firms: Adidas Group, Automatic Data Processing, Inc., Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, The Bozzuto Group, Cliffs Natural Resources, Covenant Health, Crowe Horwath LLP, Deloitte, Deluxe Corporation, General Mills, Harris Interactive, Herman Miller, IncInfoReliance Corporation, Intuit Inc., Ontario Systems, LLC, PepsiCo, Principal Financial Group, Rex Healthcare, RMS Inc., Sage, State Farm, Insurance, SunTrust Banks, Inc., W. L. Gore & Associates, Whirlpool Corporation.

Subsequently we have seen dozens of articles about the awards and the winners in major publications including the Wall Street Journal and WSJ blogs (see this recent post, the High Cost of Treating Job Seekers like Cattle mentioning the 2012 award launch). Continue Reading

Contrary to Media Reports, Employers Aren’t Asking For Facebook Passwords

This non-starter article from the Associated Press was everywhere in March and, from our point of view, much ado about nothing. Not one public company was named and the authors of this and other articles misled readers into thinking, erroneously we believe, that this ‘trend’ among US firms of all sizes and stripes was real and growing. #Yellowjournalismatitsbest.

We cannot imagine any rational firm requiring candidates to fork over their passwords. Can you just see doing that and then discovering the person was last seen celebrating their pregnancy with their friends? Or, how about forcing a candidate to disclose their recent private status where they were praying (shared only with family and friends) for some less than popular outcomes? #classaction Continue Reading

Job Boards Are 2nd Largest Source of Hire; College is 5th

Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads just released their 11th Annual Sources of Hire (SOH) Study – a snapshot of how large, highly-competitive, high-profile firms find their employees. Tracking and monitoring the sources of actual hires tells companies where to dedicate their hiring resources and tells job seekers where to direct their efforts.

Why track source of hire data? Companies need to know where to spend their time, effort and recruiting dollars. Job seekers need to know where to focus their efforts. This data helps both sides of the recruiting process because it tracks where employers actually hired people – not numbers of resumes received, not dollars spent, but actual hires. The top five sources of hires in 2011 were: Continue Reading

17 Tips to Treat Candidates With Respect

By Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler

1. acknowledging receipt of an application
2. avoiding postings that say little or insult the intelligence
3. eliminating out of date postings
4. monitoring an application against open opportunities
5. staying in touch with relevant information

Continue Reading