A great way to do so is through creating joint venture events.

I recently was asked a question about how can you ensure when running events, teleseminars, webinars or seminars with people how do you ensure that you comply with Data Protection requirements and your data base of contacts.

Here is an element of our ounline marketing strategy I implemented for a not for profit organisation I am involved with, where several of us on the board wanted to invite people to register to learn about the organisation and also register for events:

1. We all advised our own lists either through email newsletters, articles on our blog (where we had one) and through email distribution lists to our personal network contacts - this meant we did not have to share our own contacts and data bases

I have frequently written and spoken on legal issues relating to the use in employment decisions of applicant and employee Internet activity such as blogging and using social network sites. However, this is a novel legal issue, and as is usually the case with such issues, legal "experts" like myself have been forced to make educated guesses as to how these issues might be decided by the courts.

This situation is now changing, as courts are beginning to rule on these issues. A prime example is a recent federal court decision involving a high school teacher who was terminated because of his MySpace Activity.

For this blog's coverage of the issue, see:

Firing Bloggers Part IV -- More Bad Examples and parts I-III, linked in that post.
Employers Using Facebook for Background Checking, Part III and parts I and II, linked there.

The case is Spanierman v. Hughes, 3:06CV01196 (D. Conn. Sept. 16, 2008). In it, the federal court granted summary judgment to the employer, striking down the teacher's claims that he was denied due process,equal protection under the law, and his rights of freedom of speech and association by being terminated for having a decidedly unprofessional online relationship with his students. Read on for more details:

Article by George Lenard, the originator of George's Employment Blawg, has over twenty years of experience in all aspects of labor and employment law, including preventive law as well as litigation. His special interests include employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and noncompetition agreements. He is currently a managing partner with Harris, Dowell, Fisher & Harris, L.C., in St. Louis, Missouri, and lives in the suburb of University City with his wife and family.

Seven signs you should run away.... far, far away....

1. The recruiter can't say the name of your company correctly. Sounds obvious, but a great recruiter will know the companies in your industry inside and out.
2. The recruiter doesn't understand what your products are or what they do. This is where using a niche recruiter really pays off. For example, a medical sales recruiter will know the products, the issues, and the goals for all jobs in medical sales, clinical diagnostics sales, laboratory sales, medical equipment sales, pharmaceutical sales, biotechnology sales, imaging sales, pathology sales, DNA products sales, surgical supplies sales...get the picture? This kind of understanding will provide you the best value for your money.
3. The recruiter doesn't have a website that is professional and up-to-date. This is no small thing. A recruiter needs a significant presence in order to attract the talent you need. Great talent isn't going to waste time with someone who isn't likely to help them.
4. The recruiter won't be returning calls on Fridays and Mondays (this may be in the fine print, but it is their rule) . Problems, questions, and candidates aren't limited to Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
5. The recruiter doesn't have a resident expert on his/her team who has hired, trained, managed and fired sales representatives in a multi-state region. Without this experience, how can she understand the challenges that you have? With this experience, she can be a powerful ally for you.
6. The recruiter can't be creative about how to meet your needs or your budget. If he can't even work with you in the beginning, how will he work with you through the process?
7. When you call, [the recruiter says] - Oh, Bob? Oh, um, Oh- Yes - Bob - How are you? At least work with someone who knows who you are, is excited to speak with you, and who is focused on helping you and your company.

Article by, Nor

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates seeking entry-level jobs and other career opportunities.

This first list targets key job, career and personal issues relating to finding, hiring and retaining this new talent group as they enter the workplace.

Postbetter feedback based on client hiring experiences provides the basis for the report.

Julie Mattson and Jackie Nerhus of Katun Corporation in Minneapolis have this to offer: "Millennials are very engaged in their jobs and in the community, they like to have a voice in how things are done and look forward to giving and receiving frequent feedback."

Glen Gardner of The Vortechs Group, a tech recruiting company in Cincinnati, talks about connectivity: "To find top performers I look for people who blog, who have a website, who publish on others blogs, participate in usergroups and use open source code."

One of the people I heard from as a result of the article was Leon Quinn who I met when hosting a social media workshop for Leitrim County Enterprise Board.

Leon is a webdesign and multimedia consultant and here are his tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn.

"I've been a LinkedIn user since December 4th 2007 following the advice of Johnny Beirne, the then Innovation Officer in Leitrim County Enterprise Board who is also a firm advocate of using LinkedIn as a business networking tool.

Initially I passed it off as just another time consuming Social Networking site á la Facebook or MySpace and didn't intend bothering with it too much. Perhaps one of the reasons I stuck with it was because I was involved with a local IT Network also run by Leitrim Enterprise which later evolved into a full Network for all Leitrim Businesses the members of which all have a profile and even a group on LinkedIn.

What happens to playground bullies who grow up to be workplace bullies? And what happens to the companies where they work?

This is the focus of an article entitled "Workplace Bullying Suits on the Horizon."

Successful Bullying Lawsuit and Proposed Legislation
According to the article, a workplace bully was forced to pay $325,000 after the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the jury verdict in one case that involved facts sufficiently severe to qualify as an assault.

Indianapolis attorney Kevin Betz, who represented the plaintiff in that case, is quoted as saying that he thinks workplace bullying is becoming more common.

"'In my father's day, there was cradle to grave employment with one company, which doesn't exist anymore. And it's a lot easier to treat people harshly when you don't have to worry about working with them for the next 60 years,' Betz said."

The problem is considered so severe that there's even an organization, the Workplace Bullying Institute, to address it, and model legislation about workplace bullying has been written and introduced (but not yet enacted) in 13 states.

Continue reading about workplace bullying ...

Article by George Lenard, the originator of George's Employment Blawg, has over twenty years of experience in all aspects of labor and employment law, including preventive law as well as litigation. His special interests include employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and noncompetition agreements. He is currently a managing partner with Harris, Dowell, Fisher & Harris, L.C ., in St. Louis, Missouri, and lives in the suburb of University City with his wife and family.

As the commercial goes, "Be prepared to move throughout the country." Just don't assume that your friendly air marshal will be there for you! [Ding]

An expose written in today's USA Today details that "Since 9/11, air marshals have taken bribes, committed bank fraud, hired an escort while on layover and doctored hotel receipts to pad expenses, records show. They've been found sleeping on planes and lost the travel documents of U.S. diplomats while on a whiskey-tasting trip in Scotland."

They also go on to say that in a number of incidents candidates were hired to be air marshals after a background check revealed past criminal activity which might call into question their ability to perform the job.

True, a few isolated incidents shouldn't cast a shadow on an entire agency, but we're talking about armed individuals who are supposed to protect the flying public and the people on the ground beneath the flights they are on.

Further, the article goes on to say, "A 2004 report by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general also flagged gaps in the background checks. The report cited 504 applicants who were recommended for hire and awaiting offers, noting that nearly a third had potentially disqualifying problems, including past arrests, bankruptcies or disciplinary problems.

'Many (air marshals) were granted access to classified information after displaying questionable judgment, irresponsibility and emotionally unstable behavior,'the report said."

Read the full article here

Something to think about the next time you "fly the friendly skies".

Article by, Nick Fishman and courtesy of EmployeescreenIQ

According to a recent Boston Herald article, "Employers have upgraded job requirements, holding out for higher-level credentials and college degrees for lower-level positions. They've also changed their screening, requiring electronic job applications and expecting computer proficiency even for jobs that don't require computer use."

"Employers also are doing a lot of background digging: criminal, credit and even Registry of Motor Vehicle background checks." (View full article)

We highlighted this trend last June in our Background Screening Trends for 2009 report and continue to see evidence that supports this. In just the past 12 months, we've seen the number of candidates with criminal records increase by nearly 50%. We've also seen an increase in resume inconsistencies.

Article by, Nick Fishman and courtesy of EmployeescreenIQ

Last week, we released the jobs report for October from LinkUp.com which showed that both new jobs and total jobs on the site rose by roughly 300,000 from September. (LinkUp aggregates and publishes jobs pulled directly from nearly 10,000 company web sites). Given the fact that the jobs are real and current (updated daily) and contain no duplicates (since they are pulled from a single source - the hiring company itself), we felt that the data was pretty reliable. But in light of the current economic meltdown and the nation's rising unemployment, the magnitude of the increase from September was not only counterintuitive, it was, frankly, unbelievable. So we dug a little deeper into what might be inflating the numbers.

After some excellent sleuthing work by our team, we discovered that a relatively small number of companies (.4%) are assigning new unique URLs every day to all of the jobs they post on their own site. Our guess is that this allows the jobs to be 'refreshed' daily on other aggregating sites like Indeed and SimplyHired so that they appear higher in the search results. Our system for tracking new and unique jobs on LinkUp is tied to the unique URL for that specific job, so the new daily URLs that these companies assign to their jobs, even if it was on the site the day before, were counted in our system as brand new jobs. We hadn't noticed this before because we deliver search results according to the quality of the match rather than by date of the post. We do this because all of the jobs on LinkUp are, by default, current, open, and available and we take them down immediately when the hiring company that posted the job on its own site removes that listing from its company site. So the 'new daily URL, auto-refresh' technique that distorts search results on SimplyHired and Indeed has no impact on LinkUp. This creates a better service for Job seekers using LinkUp, but clearly has an impact on our monthly report about the number of job listings by state and by industry. It also impacts others as well (see related points here and especially here).

By our estimate, the October report, for example, was inflated by 420,931 jobs. (Of course, September and all prior months were inflated by some large number as well for the same reason). The 38 companies we flagged for reassigning new URLs to their jobs each day posted a total of 40,430 actual unique jobs to their corporate sites during the month. But because of the fact that they constantly assigned new URLs to those openings, our systems counted that pool of jobs as 461,361 new and unique jobs. Needless to say, we're both chagrined by the findings and pleased to have identified the culprit. And the fact remains that LinkUp published almost 1 million real jobs from real companies in a single, convenient site with the best search results of any job board on the web today.

Article by Toby Dayton and courtesy of Diggings, a blog about recruitment advertising, media, publishing, HR, work, & technology, among other things.

At times it can be a most frustrating thing to watch. Job seekers for the most part are the same regardless of what skill set, experience, age, and educational background.

What I have learned is most job seekers have no idea how to market themselves. And that is what a job search is, marketing of yourself.

Beginning about 5 years ago I moved from what had been informal giving of advice to doing formal presentations titled "I have a "killer" resume, now what? Tips on being your own Headhunter" to professional associations, user groups, college students, community groups supporting those in job transition, and the StarTribune Career Fairs.

President-elect Obama and most Democrats in Congress support a proposed law, the Employee Free Choice Act, that would dramatically alter union organizing by, among other things, ending the right to a secret-ballot election as a means for employees to democratically self-determine whether to be represented by a union (and which union).

Contrary to its title, this Act will have the effect of restricting employee free choice by leaving employees vulnerable to pressure and coercion by union organizers and fellow employees. It has labor's hopes soaring and business leaders vocally objecting. Continue reading about workplace elections ...

Article by George Lenard, the originator of George's Employment Blawg, has over twenty years of experience in all aspects of labor and employment law, including preventive law as well as litigation. His special interests include employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and noncompetition agreements. He is currently a managing partner with Harris, Dowell, Fisher & Harris, L.C., in St. Louis, Missouri, and lives in the suburb of University City with his wife and family.

Even worse than expected, today's jobs report from the Department of Labor was dismal, with the U.S. economy shedding 240,000 jobs in October. This was the 10th straight monthly decline, and the nation's unemployment rate now stands at 6.5%, a 14 year high. So far this year, 1.2 million jobs have been lost, with more than half of those losses occuring in the past 3 months.

What I am having trouble reconciling, however, is the data from LinkUp.com which shows dramatic increases in the number of job openings from over 9,700 company web sites that post jobs. While certainly not representative of the entire U.S. economy, LinkUp aggregates job listings from enough companies around the country, large and small, to provide some indication of what is going on in the broader economy, and yet there is a complete disconnect. As I pointed out yesterday, the total number of jobs for the almost 10,000 employers rose from 1 million to 1.3 million in October, with gains in virtually every state. Just as surprising, the job openings by vertical showed gains in almost every industry except Banking & Financial, Real Estate, and Restaurant & Food Service.

Again, these are real jobs from companies that are posting job openings on their own corporate web site. They are current, available, and often unadvertised anywhere else in print or online. But they are job openings, while the jobs numbers are actual jobs lost. And perhaps that is what explains the apparent discrepancy. Thousands of companies are laying people off in areas where they need to cut back given the current business climate, while some portion of those same companies, and/or thousands of different companies, have job openings in other areas of their business or are trying to grow their businesses given their own particular circumstances. At a minimum, the 1.3 million job openings found on LinkUp.com in October might provide some glimmer of hope that the unemployment picture may not be as gloomy over the long-term as some economists are predicting. We'll see.

Article by Toby Dayton and courtesy of Diggings, a blog about recruitment advertising, media, publishing, HR, work, & technology, among other things.

Although Smuz had a mention in one of the recruiter magazines, I some how managed to miss the article. So lucky for me that Paul Pickthone the MD decided to make me aware of his product via a comment made on the post about SimplyHired.

What made me want to get in touch with Paul was because his product is uniquely different and works in tandem with SimplyHired and other similar sites. The huge difference is that his has a free cv database and more importantly for those who do not have an xml feed, you can load vacancies manually to smuz, very handy if you are not a programmer like me!

There is an American feel to the site when you set up an account, but rest assured Paul is in fact English and is an ex recruiter, it´s just that he is now living in the States and fortunately for him SimplyHired and Indeed now target the UK and therefore so can Smuz.

So I suggest if you have not opened an account already then you should, one because it is free and secondly it will help Paul develop the UK, because if we help him succeed we reap the benefits.

It is worth noting that the UK cv database is still small, but the more people who know the quicker it will grow of course.

Article by Stephen Fowler and courtesy of Recruitment Views blog.