Computers, not humans, are ever more likely than people to be frontline resume readers, according to a nationally syndicated article from Philadelphia Inquirer/McClatchy (and published in the L.A. Times) titled “Job seekers learn to tweak their resumes to dazzle a computer.”

Writes author Jane M. Von Bergen: “The number of resumes generated for many job openings is so overwhelming that many companies are using computers to find the most promising candidates.”

As a result, job seekers are turning to services that help them tweak their resumes so they can end up at the top of a list generated by a company’s computerized talent-management system.

An example of one such system comes from Wayne, Pa.-based Kenexa Inc., a leader in the field.

And Danville, Calif.-based Preptel markets its Resumeter™ Résumé Optimization service.  Resumeter™ enables individuals to customize a résumé for each job opening.

In 2011, companies worldwide spent $3 billion on talent-management systems that scan and sort resumes, schedule interviews, track follow-ups and incorporate social media, according to Bersin & Associates, a California consulting group that tracks the industry.

“Computers have a very specific way that they look at resumes,” said Preptel founder Jon Ciampi.  For a subscription of $25 a month, Ciampi’s two-year-old company will help a candidate reconfigure a resume so a computer can better spot the qualifications that make that candidate a good match for the job.

To communicate with nonhuman recruiters, keyword matching forms the basis of that communication, just as it does in Web searches.

If the employer wants a programmer who knows the Java computer language, it’s easy enough to search resumes for the word.  But included may be a resume from a not-so-computer-literate barista at Philadelphia Java Co.

When it was first developed, this type of software could find the content in a resume, but it didn’t find the context.

Over time, algorithms have become more able to find context.  A computer can look for other resume words indicating a programmer, such as other computer languages. The more matches, the higher a resume rises on a “relevance” list.

For more information on this subject, check out this eFinancialCareers article titled “How Candidate Optimization Might Increase Your Chances of Getting a Job Interview.”

“One decade ago, six men started this company in a stuffy, spare residential bedroom office in Corona,” recalled Crescent Solutions co-founder and CEO Brian Fischbein.  He saluted his original “bedroom office” crew, all of whom are still with the company.  They are Mitch Balzer, Eric Strength, Brian Albano, Jeff Sarubbi and Keith McDonald.

Today, noted Fischbein, as a result of hard work and determination, the company has grown into a $45 million, 500-employee industry powerhouse with offices in six cities supporting a veritable Who’s Who of Fortune 500 clients (including Oracle, Broadcom and Intuit).  Crescent Solutions annually fills hundreds of positions in 100-plus firms.

In addition to the company’s west coast headquarters in Irvine, Crescent Solutions has offices in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Lake Worth, Fla., Columbus, Ohio and Atlanta, Ga.

“This milestone signifies how far we’ve come and the progress we’ve made simply by putting relationships – our employees and clients – first … then business second,” said Fischbein.  “Our staff is our top priority, and we’ve never lost a client that we didn’t want to lose.”

“It’s a great time to be in staffing, and IT staffing is red-hot right now,” said Fischbein.  “The problem we face is that there are now more jobs available than there are qualified people to fill them.”

Crescent’s Florida Roots

The company originated among a group of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity brothers on the campus of Central Florida University, where Fischbein studied in the late 1990s.   Following graduation, most of Fischbein’s friends launched their IT recruiting careers at recruiting and staffing industry leaders Technisource or Aerotek.

Early in 1998, Fischbein headed to California to open an office for Technisource, where he worked through 2002.

“It was then that I decided I needed to make a move and do something better!” he recalled.

He had bought a house in Corona in 2000 and in 2002 left Technisource to start Crescent out of his home’s spare bedroom.

“The economy for IT positions was way worse than it had been in a long time,” said Fischbein.  “We were cold calling anyone and everybody…two hundred phone calls a day.”

In October 2002, not a single Crescent candidate got a job offer.  Brian had borrowed against the equity in his house and was facing a depleted savings account.  “We couldn’t even pay the electric bills,” he explained.

In November, their luck turned, beginning with Brian’s marriage to fiancée Sara.  “Pregnant on the wedding night,” noted the smiling Brian, today a father of three.

November 2002 was also significant for Crescent Solutions’ business prospects – every candidate they put forth got hired.  Crescent Solutions was on the way.  Company revenues were $450,000 in its first year and by 2007 were running at a $30 million pace.

Named to Inc. 500/5000 Fastest Growing List

Examples of Crescent Solutions’ success over the years include being named to the Inc. 500/5000 list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies (2007, 2008 and 2009), recognized as the Most Dependable Staffing Agency in California (American Staffing Assoc.), and listed among the best companies to work for in Orange County, Calif. (OC Metro and the Orange County Business Journal – 2009).  In addition, Brian Fischbein’s entrepreneurial spirit was showcased as a 2006 and 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist and 2009 Entrepreneur Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist.

The staffing industry places individuals into temporary, contract and permanent paid working positions within firms around the world.  According to the American Staffing Association, the industry generated approximately $109.8 billion in sales in 2011 and is projected to do $130 billion in 2012, with a 10 percent growth rate.  In 2012, Staffing Industry Analysts’ Timothy Landhuis projects that IT staffing revenue alone could be as much as $23.5 billion.

Crescent Solutions focuses on meeting the needs of both candidates and employers, providing programmers (.NET, Java), engineers and developers in the practice areas of IT strategic planning, security, data center and information management, business applications, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services, supported by project management and consulting services.

Industries Crescent Solutions serves include healthcare, government, aerospace, retail, automotive, manufacturing, education, pharmaceutical/biomedical, information technology, consulting/business services, legal/accounting, creative/marketing, gaming, media/entertainment, communications, financial services, transportation and energy/utilities.

“Mitchell uncovers and presents great opportunities — both full-time and consulting — at brand-name companies and startups. Working as a consultant for Crescent was both enjoyable and rewarding. I highly recommend Mitchell for your recruiting needs — as a customer or as a candidate!” 

– Michael A. W., Principal Consultant, Groundbreaker

Mitch Balzer helped co-found Crescent Solutions in May 2002.  As the company’s chief operating officer (COO), Mitch reports to CEO Brian Fischbein.  Mitch is responsible for the company’s day-to-day operating activities, including revenue and sales growth, expense, cost and margin control, and financial goal management.  He is also the company’s vice president of sales.

The Crescent team focused this month’s Employee Spotlight on Mitch, who responded to our questions with his usual alacrity.

Q. What is your role at Crescent Solutions?

A. I’m the COO and VP of Sales at Crescent

Q. How long have you been at Crescent?

A. I’ve been with the company since day 1 when I moved with Brian and his wife out in Corona and worked out of the spare bedroom of his house at the time.  It’s was a 12 foot commute which was nice.

Q. What is your favorite Crescent memory? What is your Best day at Crescent Solutions?

A. The best days at Crescent were in late 2002 when we finally started to gain some momentum and we were literally able to keep the lights on another month.  It was touch and go, but we were never going to quit even if it meant selling the house at the time.

Q. Do you have a Nickname?

A. Balz/Balzer/Grumps

Q. What are your passions/interests outside of work?

A. Well, most people know I’m a pretty avid golfer, but the most important part of my life is my family and we will be welcoming our first child in late June… super excited.

Q.  What is your most rewarding/proudest moment since you joined the company?

A. Looking back from where we are today versus when we started, we’ve all grown up with families kids and even more special is where Crescent is today and where we are headed.  We have a really solid team in place and I’m really excited to see where the next few years takes us.

Q. Do you have a funny work/contractor/client/vendor story?

A. Ironically, in the last few months I have placed three people I originally placed back in 1998-2000, before we even started Crescent.  It goes to show you how small the IT world really is.

Q. Any Interesting Mitch-isms?

A. I have reached the end of the Internet.

For further information, contact Stephanie Phillips, Crescent Solutions’ Mission, Vision, and Values Director: 949-724-0304 Ext: 250 (O) | 626-806-2367 (C) 

“SQL Master Data Services 2010 vs. SharePoint Managed Metadata Services for Enterprise Taxonomy Stores” will be the theme on Wed., May 16, 2012, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. when Crescent Solutions hosts the May event for the OC SharePoint User Group (OCSPUG).

The event will be held at Crescent Solutions’ headquarters, 17871 Mitchell Avenue Ste. 100, Irvine, Calif.

SQL Master Data Services (MDS) is a little known product that provides a very compelling feature set that rivals and perhaps trumps SharePoint’s Managed Metadata Service (depending on the use case) in providing an enterprise taxonomy store. In this crossover presentation and demonstration, the group will aim to cover the following topics:

• What is SQL MDS?
• How does it compare to SharePoint’s Managed Metadata Service as an enterprise taxonomy store?
• How can MDS be integrated with SharePoint and other applications?
• SQL MDS + SharePoint Workflow Integration.

More details at http://ocspugmay.eventbrite.com and http://www.crescentsolutions.net/calendar.php

For further information, contact Stephanie Phillips, Crescent Solutions’ Mission, Vision, and Values Director: 949-724-0304 Ext: 250 (O) | 626-806-2367 (C)

As three key trends – Coud Computing, Social Networking and Big Data – emerge in the IT world, the role of the CIO is continuously evolving.

SearcCIO has published an informative white paper on this topic: “Top 3 Trends That Could Influence CIOs.”

Rather than an IT organization aligned with business — the past decade’s holy grail — the IT organization of the future will be structured as a fully integrated business services organization, according to Andrew Home, managing director at the Corporate Executive Board Company (CEB).

This expert e-guide explores how CIOs can take advantage of these business and technology drivers to advance both their companies and careers. It offers key tips on how to handle developments in important area, including:

Consumerization of IT

Social networking and mobile technology are falling under a catch-all term — Consumerization of IT.  Just as enterprises are trying to figure out how to develop social media services and avoid the pitfalls of social media projects, large organizations are experimenting with mobile collaboration services for employees and customers.

Shared Services

The cloud is pushing CIOs and IT departments into being general managers of business services and shared services.  Because shared services reside on shared infrastructure, CIOs are going to spend more time acting as services brokers of internally and externally integrated services.

Data Analytics

Among technology areas, perhaps the most difficult one to create is that of data analytics services.  Enterprises have vast amounts of information but need new services that can decipher which data is most relevant to the business — or better yet, can help create new business service offerings based on that data.

Do you plan to hire people in the following categories during the stated periods of time?

• Contractors/consultants–
  • Within 30 days: 26.9 percent
  • Within three months: 19.2 percent
  • Within six months: 3.8 percent
  • Within 12 months: 3.8 percent
  • No hiring plans at all: 46.2 percent

• IT Staff–
  • Within 30 days: 25 percent
  • Within three months: 21.4 percent
  • Within six months: 7.1 percent
  • Within 12 months: 3.6 percent
  • No hiring plans at all: 42.9 percent

• IT Middle Management–
  • Within 30 days: 11.5 percent
  • Within three months: 7.7 percent
  • Within six months: 3.8 percent
  • Within 12 months: 3.8 percent
  • No hiring plans at all: 73.1 percent

• IT Senior Management–
  • Within 30 days: 8 percent
  • Within three months: 4 percent
  • Within 12 months: 4 percent
  • No hiring plans at all: 84 percent

• IT Executives–
  • Within 30 days: 3.8 percent
  • Within three months: 3.8 percent.
  • No hiring plans at all: 92.3 percent

Note: Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding.

Social Recruiting finally went mainstream in 2011 with corporate and agency recruiters embracing LinkedIn and Internet sourcing as a required skill for the modern recruiter, shifting away from job-board advertising to digital headhunting. Here are Social Talent’s Top 10 predictions for 2012:

1. LinkedIn will reach 300 million users by the end of 2012.

As of December 27, 2011, LinkedIn had more than 146 million members, up from the 100 million milestone that the company announced early in 2011. We predict that growth will continue to gain pace throughout 2012 as most developed or developing markets hit membership levels equivalent to 30-40 percent of their working population.

2.  Facebook’s decline in usage will continue throughout 2012 as Facebook Apathy takes a firm hold.

Facebook has had a roller-coaster year.  The first half of 2011 saw Facebook’s total number of users surge to over 800 million with the time on site and average number of page-views growing to dizzying heights.  The second half of the year saw most of those latter gains lost as the average amount of time that each user spent on Facebook dropped off considerably, the largest such decline in the social network’s history.

3.  Video Assessment will go mainstream for Corporate Recruiters.

Video interviewing, video CVs and video assessment have been around for years. Many professionals may have written off the technology as “unnecessary” for the modern HR or recruitment department, but we predict that 2012 will change perceptions of video technology in the recruitment mix.  Faster Internet speeds and an explosion in smart phone usage on fast, wireless networks has put a video camera in the pocket of nearly every potential jobseeker, demolishing many of the previous barriers to video usage in the industry.

4. Twitter will explode as a Recruitment Communication Tool.

Twitter’s power to both interrupt and inform us continued apace in 2011 with steady growth in the network’s user base and time on site. TV networks now display the hashtags of their leading shows on-screen and decide on whether to renew new programs based on Twitter chatter and mentions. In the world of recruitment, most corporate and agency recruiters have finally “got it” and started using Twitter during 2011.

5. Social Media Litigation will become the single largest headache for HR departments.

Most social media experts tell us that we need to be “true” or “honest” on social networks, ensuring that we share at least some of our personal side as we blog, tweet or post on social media sites on behalf of our employers. This is generally good advice but when building contacts is part of your job, aka sales or recruitment, the question of who owns those contacts is going to become an even hotter issue.

6. Mobile will dominate the total spend in recruitment websites/ career portals.

Have you launched a mobile recruitment app yet?  Is your careers page or agency website optimized for mobile?  My answer to this question used to be “when the mobile traffic to my site gets to a serious enough level, I’ll fix it”.   In early 2011, the company website received an average of 5.1 percent of its visitors from mobile devices (topped by iOS at 85 percent of all mobile visits.  By year’s end it was receiving 8.5 percent of total visits from mobile devices (iOS devices still top the list but have fallen to 73 percent of all mobile visits).

7. LinkedIn will move aggressively into the HR software space.

Let’s face it—LinkedIn’s paying customers are nearly all recruiters. I am sure there are many non-recruiters who throw $20 a month at them, but the serious customers are corporate recruiting departments.  LinkedIn barely offer any products not aimed at recruiters.

8. Free or Freemium will become the new ATS pricing model.

The price of applicant tracking software (ATS), aka recruitment management software, has crashed in the last few years. This has largely been driven by the introduction of SaaS as the dominant hosting platform among the main players, but differentiation has become less about price these days as average per-user licenses have hit the $1k mark and is now more about quality of implementation, support and socially integrated features.

9. Third-party Recruitment Platforms will emerge as the New Job Boards.

Job Boards are broken, and they have been so for some time.  But they are not dead—they just haven’t been fixed yet.  From a job-seekers point of view, the act of searching for a job in one place and then being able to apply for it in that same place is simple and for years it worked really well. But the combination of the Great Recession and changing attitudes to Web communication, aka Social Media, have meant that this 15-year-old system needs a re-haul. At the same time, there have been several companies trying to “crack” Facebook for job seekers, noticeably BranchOut and BeKnown (Monster.com’s property).  But we’re still not sure that job seekers are comfortable mixing their personal lives with their professional lives.

10. We will share an increasing amount of content and learning via video.

In November 2011, U.S. Internet users watched 21.1 hours of video on the Web, an increase of 35 percent on the previous year and 22 percent alone over the last half of 2011. It is hard to deny that we are all watching an increasing amount of video over the Internet. Facebook marketers and SEO experts will tell you that video is more powerful as a method of social engagement than text and will massively increase the chance of your website/ career site being found online.

Crescent Solutions hosted its first “Man Shower” — a baby shower for some of the company’s expectant fathers — on Tuesday, May 1, 2012, at company headquarters in Irvine.

Congratulations in advance were offered to Derek and Denise Berger, Mitch and Geni Balzer and Lubo and Jennifer Popov — all of whom are expecting the imminent arrivals of their bundles of joy.

The man-gathering featured a lot of really fun male bonding over brew, pizza and Wingstop Restaurants (Irvine) chicken wings. Hand-painted “onesies-of-a-kind” were provided by artist Whitney Hack of the Crescent Solutions Las Vegas team.

Highlight of the party: a game of Bag O’ Diapers Toss.

Go to the Crescent Solutions Facebook page to see more pics.

Be thankful that these people are doing them — otherwise, you might have to.

The Crescent Solutions team thought we’d share highlights from Tynan’s fifth installment in the series: “Dirty IT Jobs: Grime and Punishment.”

Dirty IT job No. 1: B&E artist

“You get a job breaking into facilities to steal data and you think you’ll be doing all sorts of cool crazy stuff all the time. Instead you wind up spending hours looking for a security hole, there’s a couple of minutes of excitement when you get to break in, and then you spend the rest of your time writing reports.”

Dirty IT job No. 2: Big data backup slave

Yes, we know, big data will transform life as we know it. But there’s a dark underbelly to big data that few people talk about: Somebody has to back up, catalog, and restore all that data.

Dirty IT job No. 3: Sexy games producer

You spend all day staring at pictures of naked women and talking dirty in three languages. Sounds like dream job, right?  More sad than sexy–”I had to approach my job kind of like I was an ob-gyn.”

Dirty IT job No. 4: Tech forum flame warden

Becoming the moderator of an online tech forum can be a nasty business. “I can’t escape the feeling that some Internauts hang around Usenet just because they’ve found out that it’s a safe place to act like a jerk.

Dirty IT job No. 5: Orphaned code debugger

Cleaning up after someone else’s programming mess with nothing other than their badly written code as your guide? That’s when things get really dirty.  “You couldn’t pay me enough money to work on vBulletin.  Whoever created that code is some crazy whacked-out psycho.”

Dirty IT job No. 6: Content hussy

There are now more than 550 million websites on topics ranging from apiphobia (fear of bees) to zygomycosis (fungal infections), with everything in between. Someone has to generate copy for all of those sites.  “We frequently get weird writing projects, but the weirdest had to be when we were asked to create an entire website about vaginal discharge monitors.”

(Photo Source: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images North America)

The event will be held at Crescent Solutions’ headquarters, 17871 Mitchell Avenue Ste. 100, Irvine, Calif. An optional Happy Hour (and networking opportunity) will begin at 6 p.m.  Prize giveaways will take place at 8:30 p.m.

Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Agile promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

During the past 20 years, Watkins (@allineo) has programmed, taught and managed teams in various organizations, including the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), Tata Consultancy Services, an Indian CMM Level 5 company, and TBABrazil, a Microsoft partner.

An Agile activist, a Certified Scrum Master and a Certified Scrum Product Owner, Watkins, who graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Brazil’s University of Brasília, developed a software Toolkit that is in the commercialization process.  She regularly presents her tools in developer communities such as SoCalCodeCamp.com, AgileSanDiego.org and SDJUG.org.  She also actively engaged in programs to increase the participation of women in Computer Science through programs like FounderLabs.org, the Microsoft DigiGirlz and through organizing events like the next Customer Development Day or Agile Hackathon in Southern California.

For further information, contact Stephanie Phillips, Crescent Solutions’ Mission, Vision, and Values Director: 949-724-0304 Ext: 250 (O) | 626-806-2367 (C)