CyberSleuthing!

Social Media Phase of Arbita Recruitment Genome Project

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:02:10 -0400

The next major leg of the groundbreaking Arbita Recruitment Genome Project is about Social Media. The Genome Project is a multi-year project by Arbita to map the building blocks of successful recruiting strategies. Participants who complete a survey get a complimentary advanced copy of results.

Take the Recruitment Genome Social Media Survey now!

This report is important to you because:

Our industry has long needed a concerted, consensus-based approach to answer the question of what works and what is just hype. Through this report we intend to find some consensus around which technologies are appropriate based on real results, not just on speculation.
The answer to "what works" in recruiting must come from a community not from one single person's biased voice. New ideas are great. Innovation is necessary. But so is testing and validation, and not just in one environment. If a solution works only in specific, rare or controlled situations then it is not a best practice.
Our service economy has given way to a knowledge economy. Knowledge comes from people and that makes recruiters critical to an organizations survival but the recruiting industry has not yet dealt with this shift. The recruiters role will become increasingly valuable as job seekers become more sophisticated at finding connections and networking for their next job.
Most survey respondents believe Internet recruiting is so key it must be kept in-house but half felt team is inadequately trained. Just going out and buying any training is not the solution. First we need to better understand the gaps shared across many organizations, then we can devise the best ways to fill those gaps.
Companies' recruitment goals are not strategic when their staffing leaders highly value Internet recruiting, yet half feel sourcing skills are deficient and are not allowed to spend on developing recruiters' skillset. It is not a leader's job to know how best to do all the jobs but to make everyone's job better.

Take the Recruitment Genome Social Media Survey now!

Participating is easy. Simply complete a short survey (15 minutes or less) about your current and anticipated use of social networks for recruiting and business development in the coming year. As our thank you for participating, you will receive a complimentary copy of our final analysis, as well as updates along the way.

One of the most significant trends uncovered thus far by the Recruitment Genome Project was the overwhelming expectation by recruiters to increase their use of online social networks for recruiting and business development in 2010.

The project is now drilling down deeper to answer pertinent questions including:

How are online social networks being used for recruiting and business development?
Which social networks are the most useful?
Do companies have effective strategies for using the major social networks, niche and regional networks and blogs?
How will investment in social media for recruiting change?
How will recruitment compliance and social media mix?

Take the Recruitment Genome Social Media Survey now!

A white paper of the project's first survey, "Act While Others Wait: Savvy Recruitment Marketing Strategies Now Ensure Success While Others Wait for Better Times," can be downloaded here.

"Companies every day waste millions of dollars on recruitment initiatives because they haven't decoded the recruitment genome," says Don Ramer, Arbita founder and CEO.

"They engage in sourcing, job board advertising, employment branding campaigns and more activities with no firm understanding of which initiatives are successful and which are not."

It's not their fault; no one has tried to decode the recruitment genome in earnest - until now.

As with the Recruitment Genome Project's first trends report, the new research will be analyzed by the most accomplished industry experts. Analyst briefs, research reports and other materials will conform to the highest academic standards and focus on providing companies with pragmatic information to improve recruiting initiatives.

Remember, click here http://j.mp/9ZW433 to take the survey today!

How to Source from Facebook Status Updates

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 14 May 2010 14:31:09 -0400

This little gem of a sourcing tip was brought to my attention by my friend and colleague @joshuakahn, a brilliant social media thinker from Best Buy. (Here's his original post)

Josh writes about Will Moffat who built a tool called Facebook Search. It allows you to search status messages from Facebook: http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/

This works because unless you change the default setting, your Facebook status messages are public, and searchable. And guess what, a great number of people don't change their default settings, making Facebook statuses almost as public as tweets.*

While Will's example is about finding people "playing hooky" we can use this as a highly targeted sourcing technique by searching for the natural phrase "working at COMPANY" where COMPANY is the name of a competitor whose talent you want to source. For example, if you want to find people from Microsoft, try this:

working at Microsoft

Conducting diversity searches? You could change the "gender" radio button to find only status updates from females. Notice that I did not need to use quotation marks nor Boolean syntax in the above example. In fact, I tried it with quotations and didn't see much change in the results. Give this a try, use other company names and drop me a note to tell me what you find!

* A little privacy note here - you can post status updates just to specific lists so for example your co-workers don't get your family photos and your friends/family don't get your boring work updates.

This and other Facebook Tips can be found on our free Sourcing Tip of The Day RSS Feed.

The importance of Synonymous Job Titles in your Sourcing Strategy

Shally Steckerl — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:49:36 -0400

Showing up to the requisition intake meeting from a position of immediate value is one of the fastest and most effective ways to gain your hiring manager's trust and build your credibility. Recruiters can do this by bringing with them a few key pieces of information they can confirm or validate with the hiring manager. Job titles from competitors or from organization which hire similar talent are an important criteria in developing the sourcing strategy. But where can you quickly get job titles in preparation for your hiring manager meeting?

There are numerous sources for researching job titles. Here are my favorites:

http://www.indeed.com: This vertical search engine harvests and collates job postings from multiple web destinations. Indeed is particularly useful when you have a large selection of fairly unique keywords in your position description. In the search box type in the skills or keywords listed under "must haves" in the requisition. After you search, look on the left side where you will see a navigation bar displaying a section called "Job Titles." Click the arrow to expand that section and also click on the "more' link at the end of the list, and you will find an expanded list of job titles companies use when they post jobs containing some of the same keywords for which you searched.
http://www.linkedin.com: Depending on who you ask, an estimated 54% of recruiters already use LinkedIn extensively as a search engine but this professional networking destination also provides some neat competitive intelligence, particularly the job titles that companies utilize. This is a great source when you have a short list of competitors or "similar companies" and want to know what job titles those particular companies use. Under Company Search search using the name of each company and you should see a company page. On the right hand side of that page you will see some insights from your network about that company, including a list of the top five job titles people from that company use on LinkedIn. If you want to find out more you could use the advanced people search to find for all employees of that company listed on LinkedIn, and enter a keyword or two from your job description. While this may require a bit of manual digging and scanning some pages of results you will uncover their internal job titles and possibly also obtain some department names and other useful competitive intelligence.
http://www.simplyhired.com: This vertical search engine and competitor to Indeed also shows you job titles, but in addition combines with LinkedIn to show you people you may already know who have your target job title at your target companies.
Google Sets http://labs.google.com/sets: Typically used to generate keyword suggestions based on a set of terms you provide, you can also use this to expand your list of job titles. Start with a handful of closely related job titles and you will find some additional ones you may not have already considered.
http://www.jigsaw.com: this business directory has a free version you can use to validate the job titles used by the approximately 21 million people listed. Both private as well as public companies show up. Search for a company name and you will see a list of departments (such as Sales, Finance/Accounting, Engineering, HR, IT, etc.) or levels (C-level, VP, Director, Manager or Staff). Clicking on any one of those will give you a sortable list of job titles as they appear in those individual's business cards.

Once you gathered all the variations of job titles, rank them as best you can based on your experience and intuition. Print the list out in and bring that list with you to the meeting with your hiring manger - or send it to them via email before your call. Together you can go down the list and strike out any job titles that are inappropriate. This process may also cause the hiring manager to brainstorm a few other job tiles derived from your list, or even entirely new ones your research did not dig up. The end result should be a nice list of ten or twenty job titles you can use when you search against all kinds of databases on the Internet.

If you liked this post stay tuned, my next one will be about that other critical component of your requisition intake meeting, the list of companies to target for your sourcing initiatives!

Don't forget to subscribe to our free Sourcing Tip of The Day RSS Feed: https://aces.arbita.net/tips/rss.

You can also get the Sourcing Tip of The Day if you follow us on:

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Free white paper on recruiting via twitter

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:13:03 -0400

Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter these days, but many recruiters are still trying to figure out the best use of this popular micro- blogging and social networking application. Having recently returned from SourceCon I can tell you that not only was Twitter a hot topic, but also that there were more questions than answers.

Based on Glenn Gutmacher's webinar (attended by over 1,000 recruiters and sourcers) we put together a white paper that helps recruiters understand how to save time and use this site effectively: "Twitter for Recruiters: How to Minimize Your Time & Maximize Your ROI," available for free download now.

The white paper shows you how to use Twitter the right way and benefit from it, including:

Getting started: How should you optimize your profile and set up your background image?
Knowing what to tweet: What should you tweet? What NOT to tweet? What should you retweet?
Searching effectively: How can you use Advanced Twitter search, Google and other search engines and third-party sites to find candidates?
Jumpstarting your network: How can you quickly build a large network of relevant followers?
Organizing your work: How can you spend as little time as possible to get the maximum results from Twitter?

If you weren't sure that Twitter could benefit your recruiting practice, download this complimentary paper now and see for yourself how using it the right way can help you work efficiently and see a return on the investment of your time and effort. The tips and tricks included will change the way you use Twitter.

Facebook Tip – Should you have 2 profiles on Facebook? Heck no!

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:21:04 -0500

We strongly advise you not to have two Facebook profiles. When someone searches for you by name they will have no way of knowing which profile of yours to connect with, even if you name them “work” and “personal” because your contact will just choose one and you have no control over which you choose. It also creates bland blurr and confusion. If you are worried about people hijacking your wall with their spam, you can prevent your connections from posting things to YOUR wall. You can select your facebook privacy settings here. The sections you control include

Profile Information: specify down to the individual person level who sees which kinds of your data (select "Customize" in each menu)
Limit viewability of "Photos Tagged of You" (also under Profile tab): select "Customize" in menu (see screenshot at right)
Search: Determine who can find you when searching. We recommend you set to "Search Visibility: Everyone" and select "create a public search listing" checkbox for maximum visibility
Newsfeed & your Wall: Limit who sees your posts and comments, and whether you appear in social ads. When you post somethign you can even post it to just a group for example so its a great idea to set up lists of friends and give them each separate levels of access (see last bullet bellow). Also realize your Facebook applications may publish automatically unless you edit that here.
You can also control the relative flow of content into your pages from certain friends o Use Notifications tab to be email-alerted for certain kinds of actions.
Finally, you can use the Friends tab to set categories of friends and control the flow of information as well. E.g. create a “Colleagues” list whose members can see your basic data but not your personal photos or wall posts, etc. You could for example make it so when you post something it goes only to "Colleagues" if its a business update but your "Buddies" get to see your vacation photos, etc. I have 11 groups ranging from my high-school friends to fellow alumni of my alma matter, my Peace Corps crew, family members, and of course the VIPs I follow online.

Cold Calling: How many cold calls are needed to make one hire?

Shally Steckerl — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:59:12 -0500

On average it takes about 140 passive candidate leads to get one hire. Sometimes this number can be as low as 20 or so, or even as high as 200, but the 140 seems to be the mean for cold calling experienced individual contributor and mid-management level candidates across a variety of industries. Besides differences between industries this number also varies because of differences in how well you manage the process, how good you get at finding alternative was to reach people, how effective you are at converting suspects into prospects, and how diplomatically you manage your hiring managers or clients. It breaks down like this:

1. You should be able to reach about 25% of the cold passive leads you attempt to contact. These are leads not candidates!
Of those about 25% should be interested. These are the "so called" passive candidates (or in other words prospects who have no reason to be expecting your call) so most of them will just not be interested. However, the better you get at quickly establishing rapport the higher this percentage can go. Personally I've managed recruiters with ratios upwards of 50% here, that is to say one out of two connections with real live peopel turned into interested prospects.
Of those interested, since these are highly targeted passive candidates (remember that you went seeking specifically for them), they are well qualified so about 50-60% should end up being submitted, and about 80% of those you submit for consideration should be accepted.

Did you know that we have all sorts of tips about sourcing, cold calling and recruitment marketing available free as an RSS subscription?

Search Hack - Reverse Image tracking

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:52:16 -0500

TinEye is a reverse image search engine that is extremely useful in helping us source for people with a particular certification. Say for example you want to find folks who are MCP (Microsoft Certified Professionals) - all you need to do is first find the relevant logo for that particular certification. You can do this by simply pulling up the page of someone you know who already has that logo, or conducting an image search on any image search engine. My favorite way to do this is Zuula because image searches from Bing, Google Flickr, Yahoo, Exalead, Pixsy, Photobucket, SmugMug, Picasa and Stockxchng are all available with one click like this.

Once you have identified an appropriate logo, for exmaple the one you see to the right which was located at this URL, you just need to obtain the address of that image. To do that right-click on the image it and select Image Properties from your browser This reveals information like dimensions, depth, image type (JPEG, GIF and PNG are very common) and file size. The one you want is address. Highlight it with your mouse by clicking on it and either typing CTRL-A or pressing down the mouse button while you drag it across the entire address. Now enter CTRL-C or just right-click on the highlighted address and select Copy, and you have the image address or URL. Keep this one handy if you plan to use it again!

Now take the URL to TinEye and paste it in the box on the right containing the greyed-out "paste URL here (page or image)" and hit the search button. With this example TinyEye shows 3,435 pages where you can find that same logo! Not everyone of those will be a resume of course, but a quick visual scan of the pages listed will easily reveal some very useful results.

But don't stop at certifications! You can also find people based on product logos, company logos, application logos and icons, people's photos, building or location photos, and much much more. Go on, try it out! The eye is the limit!

Psssst.... If you like this and you use Firefox Add-Ons there's a TinEye extension here :)

Hat tip to Russ Moon for pushing me to generate a video about this for his (and John Turnberg's) Firefox Lab at Sourcecon 2010!

How do you get better results on Twitter?

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:20:57 -0500

There's no one fixed magic formula or silver bullet for what is going to go viral on Twitter but here's a few things I've learned along the way both in managing our teams tweeting and working with our clients, and also from the collective intelligence of the many experts we follow.

But first, why is this important? Or better yet, is Twitter still relevant or is it "dying" already?

Twitter members are learning how to use it and finding both their voice, and their pace, as well as ways to manage overload. You can see for yourself that engagement is up when you find more members with completed bios, location and links to their LinkedIn profile, Facebook account, blog or company page.

So...yes, Twitter is still important and relevant. From HubSpot's third State of The Twittersphere Report we learned that:

Twitter user growth slowed from its peak of 13% in March 2009 to 3.5% in October.
Twitter is experiencing a decline in traffic to Twitter.com, as reported by ComScore, Quantcast.com and Compete.com.
BUT... though growth may be slowing, the average user appears to be more engaged than before. Today the average Twitter account has 300 followers; in July, it had 70.
The average account now follows 173 accounts; in July it was only following 47
The average account today has posted 420 updates; in July that number was 119

OK so you are sold on the concept and you know that you want to use Twitter. Now what? Well, like I said above, there's no formula but here's some tips that may help - and be on the lookout for as we find more we will publish them. (Also check out our Twitter GuruGuide for Recruiters)

What time should you tweet?

Tweets sent in afternoon and early evening get more clicks
Among weekdays, Thursdays enjoy the highest click through rates
Monday and Friday afternoon tweets tend to be re-tweeted most often than tweets at other days/times

How else do you get more re-tweets ?

Tweets with links get re-tweeted more often, which this is great, but...
The more links to jobs you post, the less likely people are to click on them overall so moderating is key
Use higher language - tweets that are complex, brainy, or using "bigger" words get re-tweeted more than simpler ones
Inclusive language such as "we" and "you" gets more re-tweets
Self-mentions get re-tweeted the least
Describing relationships and affiliations will also increase your re-tweets.
News and instructional tweets are more often re-tweeted than product, opinion or small-talk posts

So while we can't tell you what is going to go viral, your chances increase if you start your tweet campaigns on Monday or Friday afternoon, tweet in the afternoon or early evening most of the time, send our your links on Thursdays, be more selective on what links you share and make them about news or something educational

P.S. Check out these additional Twitter resources!

Hat tip to HubSpot's Dan Zarrella and his PubCon presentation

What recruiters need to know about SEO

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:09:11 -0500

For some in recruiting, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just another acronym in this already jargon-laden industry. However, SEO is a proven recruitment marketing tactic that has been around for years and should be incorporated into a company's recruiting strategy to increase applicant traffic to the corporate career site.

Each month about 775 million searches are conducted on Google, about 226 million of them job related. That means that just under a third of the questions being asked on Google are related to job search. Is your recruitment brand being well represented?

Nicole Bodem, Arbita's Director of Search Engine Strategy, recently completed and released a very insightful and illuminating white paper about Search Engine Optimization for recruitment.

In the white paper she discusses:

Five key elements to SEO success: What are the only five principles you need to know about SEO?
Pros and cons of SEO: How SEO can be a very cost effective marketing method, even though it's not a panacea.
Myths and realities of SEO: Can a service provider guarantee a first-page ranking?
Five questions to ask a potential SEO vendor: Separate the contenders from the pretenders with these questions.

Pick up your free copy and take the mystery out of SEO: http://bit.ly/4dt0wD

Jason Elias demonstrates his "Top 10 Way Staffing Firms can Increase Billings in a Down Economy"

Shally Steckerl — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:44:00 -0400

Staffing firms can increase their billings with Jason Elias creative ideas. Jason runs a successfull niche search firm in Australia, where the economy is getting hit as hard (or harder?) than ours.

Jason is Australia's representative to the global NPA organization. Not only is he an experienced attorney, and a well established recruiter, but also has an easy presentation style making it a pleasure to watch him present.

He sent us this summary of the top ten ways he's increase is revenues for his own business in the midst of the worst recession we've faced in 30 years:

Top 10 Ways to Generate More Recruiting Business in a Down Economy

1. MARKET EXPERT
Be perceived as the expert in your niche - find out simple ways to be raise your profile as an expert in your space not merely a recruiter. Be the "go-to" guy for your area of specialty.

2. PLAY THE GAME
Wouldn't it be great if you knew in advance which candidates will result in a placement and which one will just make up the 90% of those you spend time on but cannot place? Recruitment is a 100/zero-sum game, understand the rules and use them to your advantage by maximizing value of your time and leveraging your efforts.

3. REINFORCE YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION
More than any time in recent history, recruiters need to demonstrate their value. Not only are you competing against other agencies but many companies are convinced they can do a better job themselves. Combat this perception by tactics designed to reinforce your value proposition.

4. EXAMINE ALTERNATE PRICING
Just because most recruiters charge as a percentage of salary does not mean it is the best way. Pricing is a great way to differentiate your offering. This does not necessarily mean discounting just offering some interesting alternatives including unbundled services. Hear how cancellation fees will make sure you get paid for your time, every time!

5. OFFER CLIENTS TO UPGRADE THEIR TALENT
Learn how to get placements even with so-called hiring freezes, through encouraging clients to outmaneuver their competitors to upgrade their talent pool in the aftermath of the "war for talent".

6. HOW BEER CAN DELIVER YOU EXTRA SALES
Learn how to use the "pint glass" to monitor your pipeline and learn how to pick up new business using a variety of dynamic techniques.

7. MAINTAIN A HIGH PROFILE
Be front of mind when a client has a requisition to outsource. Learn some simple ways to improve your profile and exposure.

8. IF YOU CALL CLIENTS JUST TO "TOUCH BASE" - YOU WILL STRIKE OUT
Differentiate yourself from cold calling recruiters. Offer something to your clients, don't just ask them for requisitions.

9. RE-EVALUATE YOUR METHODOLOGY AND SYSTEMS
When the recovery arrives, we will be too busy to examine the way we do things. Now is a great time to look at improving systems and efficiencies. It is also a great time to deal with vendors who are also feeling the economic downturn.

10. HALF A LOAF IS BETTER THAN NONE
Learn how splitting with other recruiters can provide increased fees, more client loyalty, a marketing advantage and market intelligence you cannot find anywhere else.

Jason will be revealing the details on each of these tips and a few more on Wed. night at 8pm Eastern (that's Thursday, 27 Aug. @ 10am in Australia). Join him for only $99 and he promises that if you implement even one of his tips you'r more than make up for the admission price.

Cheers, Shally
LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Facebook

P.S. Follow me on Twitter

Why is Semantic Search Important to Recruiters?

Shally Steckerl — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:41:23 -0400

There is just too much confusion about so-called “Boolean search” so I’d like to clarify a few basic things:

The Booleans are simply: AND OR NOT. There, now you know Boolean search.
When recruiters talk about “Boolean search” what they are really talking about is creating search strings using sometimes advanced commands or complex search syntax to query specific fields inside of databases.
Well, that’s the end of my list.

Search syntax has been around since the beginning of databases. Each “database” (lumping in Monster, Goolge, LinkedIn and Facebook under that term) has its own set of field search commands. When searching a database what we search are “fields” like for example “Company Name” or “Email Address” and so on.

You use fields to search your Outlook when you ask for people with a specific name or when you query by “job title” on Monster or LinkedIn. The three “big search engines” (soon to be two if you read the rumors about Yahoo using Bing for search) also use fields, and they share some in common such as intitle, inurl, site, and filetype. That’s what recruiters and sourcers often misconstrue as “Boolean search.” In fact, the only Booleans used are the assumed AND between every search term, the occasional OR as with (intitle:resume OR inurl:resume), and the rare use of the NOT or AND NOT when applying negative search terms such as -jobs or -submit.

Search can be as simple or complex as we want it to be, but at the end of the day we are limited only to words in the fields of a database. That is, until the promise of Semantic Search.

The Problem With Search Engines Today

Most people agree that the biggest problem with online recruiting today is too much available information. Without a good search engine, you simply get lost in all the information. Unfortunately, today’s search engines are still inefficient, delivering mismatched information and requiring complex search string knowledge to use effectively. In an ideal world a search engine would function like a human, understanding the underlying meaning of the user’s search and then matching the search results accordingly. Many expert communities talk about Semantic Search applications being the most likely technology to deliver this kind of result, but few take the time to explain it in plain language. This whitepaper explains Semantic Search for candidate sourcing.

Click here to download my new free white paper on Semantic Search for Recruiters!

Major search engines constantly experiment with ways to simplify search, moving away from complex Boolean queries and the use of advanced field search syntax, in an effort to assist users in quickly finding what they seek. These efforts only begin to approach true semantic search capabilities and today are limited to providing only a basic understanding of associations and concepts related to a search. In contrast, Semantic Search technologies look for the concept that is being searched for rather than specific keyword(s)’s or synonym(s)’s occurrence in a document. The application of semantic technology shifts search from browsing for relevant documents to discovering relationships between content and delivering actionable information with insights. In short, Semantic Search applies grammatical analysis, logical interpretation, and linguistic morphology in the identification of concepts from unstructured data. This is different from the concept of a Semantic Web, which consists of highly structured data such as XML.

What Is Semantic Search?

Semantics is defined as the field of study that focuses on meaning. Meaning, that is, as it is inherent in symbols, words, phrases, sentences and larger blocks of text. In simple terms, a perfect semantic search engine would instantly and automatically take into consideration the meaning behind your question or “search string.” For example, it could disambiguate results that lead to people's profiles from, say, the text in employment advertising: it would serve up only the profiles to recruiters and the employment ads to job seekers. Perhaps an even simpler example would be to tell the difference between Apple the fruit, Apple the company (or products), and Apple the record studio. Search for just Apple in Google and most of the top results will be about the company, not the other two, because most Google users search and click on results about Apple Inc. (and/or its products). This is how antiquated statistically-based, popularity-driven search devices like Google’s “page rank” work. This is not semantic search at all. Popular pages are not necessarily credible, nor are credible sources always incredibly popular.

One of the largest problems with implementing Semantic Search has been that it is difficult for the computer to know who you are (or in the example above, if you are a job seeker or a recruiter) unless the search engine can learn from your behavior and your previous selections, or you are able to manually indicate a category for it to narrow down your results into categories of meaning. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live have been applying technology in an attempt to learn individual search behavior by looking at what people click and where they are located (based on their IP address). Again, however, this only approximates meaning, but does not truly understand it. Another way so-called Semantic Search engines have tried to solve this problem is to ask the user to tag, catalog, sort and otherwise try to “train” the search engine, which is far too time-consuming for the average person.

The Semantic Search technology which exists today can be categorized into three main approaches:

Lexicon and Ontological Based Search
Statistical Analysis and/or Pattern Matching Search
Contextual, Vertical and Faceted Search

Read my white paper to find out which search engines fit into the above categories and how each of those categories affects how you conduct your research.

Read my white paper to find out which search engines fit into he above categories and how each of those affects how you conduct your research.

So why is this important to recruiters?

Well, if a computer knows what you mean right away, without having to learn from you or be trained by you, it would give you only relevant results and not show you all that other junk you have to manually sift through in today’s search engines. We’re getting there, but we’re not close enough yet.

The power of Semantic Search becomes clear when you imagine trying to fill a position for a Programmer working on mobile phone games, using the OpenGL programming language. The likelihood of a recruiter knowing which keywords to search with to find all likely candidates is extremely unlikely. However, with Semantic Search, it is unnecessary for the recruiter to know which keywords to search on, because the search engine automatically finds the words needed, making the recruiter a subject area expert on every search s/he does.

Download the free white paper and arrive at your own conclusions about how this affects our future. I'd love to "hear" your thoughts and opinions here on this blog!

Cheers, Shally
LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Facebook

P.S. Follow me on Twitter

Act While Others Wait – the Arbita Recruitment Genome Report

Shally Steckerl — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:23:26 -0400

In May 2009, Arbita revealed the first survey results from the Recruitment Genome Report. The purpose of this multi-year research project is to define the most effective recruitment practices from among the thousands available.

Below are my thoughts about the results, but you can download the full 11-page report for yourself here: http://www.arbita.net/Offer/Recruitment-Genome-Report-Download.html

Why is this important to staffing leaders?

There are so many tools and services in our industry, each vying for your attention and promising to be the only solution you need. However, many of them are mostly "bells and whistles", providing little value to your organization's employment brand or recruitment effectiveness. Don't be alarmed - such is the case among vendors in every industry, not just in recruitment. Our industry has long needed a concerted, vendor neutral, consensus-based approach to answer the question of what works and what is just hype.

Our job as recruiters has always been incongruous. We must be masters of basic human psychology, well-versed in business rules and requirements, savvy in the use of tools and technology, and cognizant of the nuances of the industry and its unique business "ecosystem." All the while, we receive little thanks from the customers we advocate, both our hiring managers with urgent job openings they have a hard time filling, and our candidates who depend on us to champion their cause and provide a good match. Both appreciate us only when we are most desperately needed, and otherwise tend to categorically dismiss us regardless of how often we prove our value.

It doesn't help that the recruitment industry changes so dramatically from day to day. Modern recruiters must truly be project managers. No individual could learn how to handle the multitude of specialties found in all aspects of recruiting on their own in one lifetime. This is why the answer to "what works" must come from a community, not from one single person's biased voice, no matter how experienced or seasoned a leader s/he may be.

The staffing leader's world is extremely complex and not getting easier

Staffing leaders in both corporate and agency roles must contend with the latest and greatest employment branding challenges, online social and professional networks, job boards and resume databases, employment advertising destinations, recruiting exchanges, referral services, leads databases, resume capture and processing technologies, and communication platforms; not to mention contend with organizational requirements around Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) and possibly even Contact Relationship Management (CRM) Systems.

"Our service economy has given way to a knowledge economy. Our economic survival now depends on the exchange of knowledge, not the exchange of services. Knowledge comes from people, and people are at the heart of recruiting. Therefore, our jobs will be even more crucial to our organization's growth and progress in the years ahead. However, the recruiting industry has not yet dealt with that shift."

As a longitudinal study, Arbita's report is not yet complete but the first stage revealed to me a few surprises and confirmed some suspicions. Perhaps the most salient confirmation is that the recruitment industry, by and large, has not yet realized that our service economy has given way to a knowledge economy. Our economic survival now depends on the exchange of knowledge, not the exchange of services. Knowledge comes from people, and people are at the heart of recruiting. Therefore, our jobs will be even more crucial to our organization's growth and progress in the years ahead. However, the recruiting industry has not yet dealt with that shift.

Decreased Spending on Recruiter Development

Social media is bringing forward unprecedented change in how people network online. Networking is a critical component of career progression, and modern means for networking are evolving so fast that without learning from others, a recruiter could waste invaluable time just keeping up with the changes.

Social media is also disseminating what were closely-guarded secrets in recruiting and sourcing practices, thus making information freely and openly available. Information, however, is not knowledge. In fact, I would argue that what is available is merely data, not even information. The key to translating all that data into information and eventually knowledge is to determine meaning. Knowledge is what happens when we use our experience, and experimentation, to interpret information and make decisions on how to proceed. Expert advice in matters such as Social Media, SEO/SEM and Sourcing Skill Development is critical for survival, lest your recruiters waste too much time sifting through data, experimenting with dead ends, and re-inventing the wheel.

"An overwhelming majority of staffing leadership respondents indicated decreased spending on the development of their recruiters' skill set, on search marketing, and on developing a social media presence. This is disturbing to me because we are in the middle of a digital evolution."

Accomplished vendors, consultants and educators don't just make guesses or relate data they picked up empirically. Instead, they synthesize it, separate what works from what does not, and act as trusted advisors providing significant value through their experience encountering pitfalls as well as successes. Another reason I find this result disturbing is the fact that nearly all responding companies believe that use of the Internet is such a key recruitment strategy that they see the need to keep this skill set in-house, yet almost half of them felt their team is inadequately trained and are dissatisfied with their current sourcing capability.

Recruitment Goals Fail to be Strategic

This finding is already clear to me just in reviewing the survey results from questions around recruiter development. What it tells me is most staffing leaders responding to the survey highly value Internet recruiting, and half feel their sourcing skills are deficient yet they are being directed to spend the same or less on developing those skills among their recruiters. Clearly, this means recruitment goals are not being thought through at the strategic level.

It is a widely held belief that recruitment goals should be tied directly to strategic business objectives. Survey results find most respondents agree with that belief, and in addition 70% report being satisfied that their company's recruitment marketing strategy is driving the achievement of overall recruitment goals. However, being strategic about recruitment is not just something we do in marketing. Marketing is a critical component but it is only one of several which need to be executed with synchronicity and efficiency in order to achieve greatness in attracting the right talent at the right time.

Other components include solid team architecture, the ability to directly source a percentage of critical talent that will not respond to marketing, functioning analytics that clearly demonstrate ROI permitting more efficient spend, grassroots social media involvement, search engine optimization, career web sites providing a good user experience that fully integrates with the ATS and HRIS, and sustainability through a center of excellence that champions internal subject matter expertise. Anything short of an integrated strategy involving all these components remains tactical, no matter how excellently it is executed.

I didn't cover all the points in the survey. Other strategic components of a synergistic approach to staffing are detailed in the full report here:
http://www.arbita.net/Offer/Recruitment-Genome-Report-Download.html

AWOL Metrics

I was not surprised to find 38% of survey participants felt they have the right metrics to support their recruitment marketing decision, until I realized what that means in context with the previous finding. How could this exist while at the same time 70% of respondents are satisfied with their marketing strategy? To look at this another way, 62% of staffing leaders feel they have the wrong metrics, so how could 70% of them feel their marketing strategies are satisfactory? How could anything be proven satisfactory when it is not being adequately measured?

The reason is adequate recruitment marketing analytics are AWOL (absent without leave) for most staffing leaders. Even more disappointing is how few leaders expect to improve their metrics in the coming year. Why? Because however critical, measuring marketing strategy is both very challenging and time consuming without the right tools. One example of missing data is that more than half of the surveyed population utilizes direct marketing, yet that method is in no way reflected under their source of hire metrics. Also absent are detailed metrics around responses to search engine marketing campaigns, social networking activity or even results of organic search engine optimization. Via the survey we know smart companies are employing them, but when looking at their source of hire these methods are inadequately represented.

Blogs, SEO, SEM and Social Networks are Underutilized

Measurement is not the only gap, the other large gap is utilization. Only about 15% of respondents are utilizing blogs as a source of talent, yet blogs in all their shapes and sizes are among the largest sources of information online, larger than any one database. Only a quarter of the respondents have effective strategies for optimizing their organic presence in search engine query results, and fewer than that use search engine marketing to have a paid presence among those same results. Just shy of half the respondents have effective strategies to identify talent via social networks, and about the same percentage utilize search engines to identify online talent. It is clear to me that even if they get good at measuring from where their best hires come, employers have still a long way to go in tapping all the best sources of talent.

Job Boards Are Ineffectively Used

Traditional job boards are an area where I would have expected surveyed staffing leaders to have the most established, refined and perfected recruitment practices, yet I was stunned to find almost half were dissatisfied with their performance and less than 10% will spend more on job posting solutions this year. Is this because job boards are becoming less effective? No, it is because employers continue to approach job boards the same way they always have, while the Internet population has grown in both size and sophistication, and become more resourceful. People are seeking ways to connect, not just be "talked at" by an advertisement. Vertical search engines specializing in finding information in only one discipline, such as cooking recipes (allrecipes.com), movies (imdb.com) or jobs (simplyhired.com), are living proof that advertising works when it connects with the community by adding some value.

Employers shouldn't be surprised when response to their job board activity drops because they publish flat, un-engaging, untargeted and unimaginative content, without regard to their readers' interests. Improvements in those areas would increase results.

But job boards offer more than just advertising; they also have searchable databases full of interested job seeking prospects. It may seem a simple function of "enter keyword and find matching candidates" but that approach often misses talent hidden in plain sight. Though it ultimately means the same thing, employees often describe what they do using language different than what hiring managers use to describe their requirements. As a result resumes, blogs, social network profiles and other relevant content seldom contains the exact same language as in job descriptions, and good prospects go unnoticed.

Appropriate Technology

Through my tour of service in the Peace Corps, working in one of the most remote and inhospitable environments in the western hemisphere, the focus was always to utilize "appropriate technology." This term refers to utilization of technology that leverages local resources and is mindful of the population's cultural and social outlook. Rather than forcing the utilization of resource-draining technology just because it is available, staffing leaders would do well to learn from such a highly sustainable approach and utilize the simplest level of technology that effectively achieves their hiring goals.

Initial survey results clearly indicate that not every available solution is appropriate to every environment, and that inexpensive solutions are often ignored while costly ones are ineffectively utilized. Wisdom is in formulating an integrated strategy that maximizes resources you already have, and makes use of a mix of appropriate technology you haven't yet considered. My recommendation to staffing leaders is that they reach out to trusted external advisors who have their best interest in mind, and not just listen to vendors hawking their product or service as "the only solution you need." Now is the time to act, while others wait for things to get better, and when your dollars stretch much further than they do in the midst of hiring frenzies.

Are you curious about any of my conclusions? Would you like to challenge them or find different ones of your own? If so, you can get the full survey report here:

http://www.arbita.net/Offer/Recruitment-Genome-Report-Download.html

Cheers, Shally
LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter
P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Why, and How, you can quickly find passive talent on Blogs

Shally Steckerl — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:43:49 -0400

Why are blogs still a very important part of our research repertoire?

When it comes to finding passive candidates, today's unemployment reports are a temporary blip in the talent wars. This Sunday's NY Times featured an interesting article about how hard it remains in certain industries and functions to find top talent and that will apply to every industry as the economy rebounds, the huge Boomer generation ages out of the workforce, and new industries requiring unique skills blossom. In-demand professionals rarely have resumes floating around.

So where can we easily find great talent, now or in the future? Blogs. One year ago, leading ad agency Universal McCann published a report that indicated 184 million blogs worldwide were created, with 346 million people collectively reading billions of blogposts globally. Last year, traffic on blogs totalled 77.7 million unique US visitors, vs. 41 million to Facebook and 75 million to MySpace, according to comScore MediaMetrix. All these numbers continue to rise, turbocharged by blog capability being built into the hundreds of millions of accounts on all the social networking sites.

Those online diaries aren't just personal, they're professional, because bloggers reveal what they do on their blogs. There is no demographic slant: Candidates and prospects of all ages, genders, races and professional interests write blogs, and their readers are linked via their comments. If you know how to search them efficiently, you can not only find experts in any topic area, but you can quickly find their colleagues and other experts they respect.

Not only that, you also get early news on hot products, companies and tools they recommend and/or are working on, plus industry news on companies and sectors in trouble. More than rumors, this is insider information because these are the people in the know. Staffing firms find this useful for new business lead generation as well. Talk about competitive intelligence for recruiting!

You don't even need to know how to blog to take full advantage of this.

If this is something you'd like to learn how to tap, register now for a jam-packed, 90-minute webinar dedicated to blog search that my fellow Master Cybersleuth, Glenn Gutmacher, and I are presenting next Wednesday, March 25 at 1pm EDT

Though intuitive once explained, these breakthrough search techniques are surprisingly little-known. Much of it we have innovated after repeated testing for best results. For example, run this on Google (substitute your target niche for medical device):

received|won.*.deal|contract "our team" "medical device" 2009 -"won't deal"

This just scratches the surface of the dozens of great searches and strategies you can do. Blog searching is the perfect environment to apply Natural Language search techniques that find your targets because they are talking to each other. In addition to that you can utilize dozens of blog-specific search engines dedicated to finding current and relevant content in your target areas, which in turn reveals even more passive talent.

Multimedia search tools can be a great source to find relevant audio and video podcasts. People drop the names of similarly-skilled colleages, product teams, or other insider information in these interviews thus providing you with even more hints to reveal your search targets.

Best of all, you can easily set up search engines RSS feeds, alerts, and other tools to deliver fresh results directly to you so you don't even have to manually perform the searches every day. How's THAT for free and easy?

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Top 10 reasons why mobile recruiting is here to stay and some say if you don't hop on board you'll be left behind

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:27:25 -0500

I started thinking about this list after I wrote a blog post but what really got my juices going are the replies I received after sending out an email invitation to Michael Marlatt's upcoming webinar.

The responses were all over the place, from dramatically enthusiastic to insanely missinformed! What really amazed me though were the misconceptions and doubt that surfaced are out there about mobile recruiting. I had one particular gentleman reply to state "Oh this would never work in IT" and another lady commented that "response rates to mobile direct marketing are declining."

First of all, let me clarify that mobile recruiting is about finding and connecting with people who use mobile phone, not about recruiting from or through your mobile phone. You don't even have to have a web-enabled phone to recruit on the mobile web!

But I digress. I thought... what better way to evangelize how important mobile recruiting is than to borrow from some of Michael's initiative and write a top ten list with the hopes that it would dispell some of these myths:

1. Your prospects 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. Mobile phones are portable, well-connected, relatively inexpensive computers providing the primary or sole Internet connection to a majority of the people across the world

3. You�??ll be left behind if you don�??t go mobile. PEW Internet states the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

4. By 2020 work and play will be seemles. Well-connected knowledge workers will eliminate the industrial-age boundaries between work and personal time

5. Nielsen Mobile reports that...

a. Text messaging (sending & receiving) is up 450%, in the past two years. In the USA 262 million subscribers send over 75 billion text messages a month

b. Mobile Internet extends audience reach of leading sites by average of 13% over PC traffic alone

c. 87 million U.S. mobile users subscribe to mobile Internet services, more than 1 in 10 (13.7%) actively uses mobile Internet each month

6. IT Facts says that there will likely be 100 million mobile VoIP (voice over IP) users by 2011.

7. Mobile more ubiquitous than the PC. GSM World and the CTIA confirm there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions on the planet, vs. just 1 billion PC owners

a. 53% of US cell phone subscriber base (or 138 million people) use text messaging

b. If you are reading this on your mobile, so are your candidates! More than 76% of consumers aged 18-24 communicate via this medium.

c. The bag is open, the cats are everywhere! Mobile subscribers now represent 60% of the world's population and quickly growing

d. Today's teens text more than they talk. Those teens are tomorrow�??s interns and salespeople and managers and CEOs�?�

8. Highly relevant content snacks get passed around, this is viral marketing at its best!

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

b. Open rates for messages are three times that of email (over 90% of text messages are read by the recipient)

c. Click through rates can be up to 25 times higher than email, and the average time to open a mobile marketing message is 30 minutes while email's average is 24 hours.

d. Most forms of advertising will decline in... but not Mobile! www.jackmyers.com reports traditional media will go down 15% in 2009 but mobile up 15% + another 30% by 2010

e. Mobile rich media advertising to near $2.8 Billion by 2012. Where there�??s money there�??s candidates!

9. 12% of US households have abandoned fixed landlines and moved to mobile phones only

10. Google is now reporting that it is seeing a rapid increase in mobile Internet search and usage

OK so I cheated. There are really 20 items on the list :)

I'd really like your reaction to these data points!

I over did it because I'd really like your reaction to these data points! I've also posed a question about these in several LinkedIn groups and I'll report back here under the comments sections with any juicy replies I get there as well as from my other blog post.

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

How to brand your HR and Recruiting department internally in your organization

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:25:49 -0500

This week we held a free webinar for HR and Staffing leaders to give them a few ideas on how to create, improve or promote their department's brand inside their organization.

Why is branding important to HR internally?

Because with all the restructuring and downsizing HR departments are facing, it is very important to increase your organizational visibility in order to grow your influence and help you stay in business.

To do that, your HR and Recruiting department should not only be well perceived throughout the entire organization, but also have the respect of senior management and not be seen as merely a cost center. Through internal branding and marketing you can ensure everyone knows of the strategic value you and your team have to offer, which could help you avoid budget and headcount cuts. Especially in a down economy, it's important for executives to know recruiting still has value.

Most HR and Staffing leaders have either taken marketing courses in college, or kept up to date on marketing techniques by reading about them, or have earned their departmental marketing know-how by graduating from the school of hard knocks. We at ACES thought that was not enough to ensure survival and achieve success in today�??s difficult environment so we reached out for help from Marketing and Branding Guru, Bret Starr, the Principal & Co-founder of Starr Tincup, an integrated marketing firm for business-to-business software and services companies in the HR space.

What was covered that you may not already know?

Together Bret and I developed a 90 minute course on how to establish and grow your brand by creating a value proposition and getting the word out using tools such as social media. We translated and assembled some strategic and practical advice from both Bret�??s expertise in B2B marketing and my own viral and guerilla marketing experiences into internal HR/recruiting-related marketing. Here are the top three key Takeaways:

1) Put your departmental value proposition on everything you currently use (like your email signature, your LinkedIn profile if you have one, your intranet page, etc)

2) Create a private group on any one of the locations we reviewed (like yammer, Linkedin, or ning) and invite your team and stakeholders to join it

3) Communicate frequently (weekly or bi-weekly) with the members of this group about your activities, achievements, or other information you can share

During the first half of the session Bret defines �??what is a brand,�?? but most importantly what a brand is not, and the difference between brand and branding. He then goes on to explain and who examples of how to create a value proposition which becomes the epicenter of your brand, and how to best market that brand and value proposition through the entire organization. Branding activities such as cohesive communication, exposure to as many eyeballs as possible, permission based list marketing, simplicity of offer, and advertising ideas are detailed.

After that I transition to discuss some ways you can gain public recognition externally and how that translates to increased internal exposure, brand credibility and trust. Chief among the guerilla techniques I cover is how to beef up your profile so it is not just more easily found but also attracts the right kind of people into your network. I�??ll give you a hint: part of the trick is to be clearly approachable, stay authentic, and be more than mono-dimensional.

I then discuss how to leverage LinkedIn as an internal marketing tool using your first degree connections, Answers, Groups, and Polls. Beyond LinkedIn I cover other ways you can build private online groups such as with Ning and Yammer, and how to utilize Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and Unyk to strengthen your group and bolster your brand equity. Finally I dissect the use of blogs as a departmental marketing tool, particularly tying it with inbound automated RSS content.

Feedback from many of the thought leaders who attended this event was so encouraging that we decided to share the recorded presentation (full audio and video) with the whole world. After a brief registration you can view the recording here at no cost.

Please check it out then drop by here and let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

LinkedIn now limits you to 30,000 direct connections

Shally Steckerl — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:13:34 -0500

Last week I reached 30,000 connections and found out that LinkedIn users are now limited to having no more than 30,000 first degree connections. I found this out because now when I try to accept an invitation I am told by the system that I cannot because I have exceeded the limit, and so I would have to remove connections in order to add them.

So for those of you that are approaching or would like to approach a network of that size, you may want to be far more careful in accepting invites from now on because once you reach that limit you will be unable to make any additional first degree connections even if you are the one receiving and not sending the invitation.

There are great points on both sides of the argument of having a high quality network versus a large connection quantity, but today I write about neither. I believe that individuals should have the freedom to utilize their profile however they see best fit their online networking strategy. Suffice it to say that some people wish to have large numbers of first degree connections even if a majority of those are barely even acquaintances, and others prefer only to connect with people they already know.

Passing no judgment on where anyone decides to place themselves along that spectrum, this new limitation is significant and should be openly discussed. Certainly LinkedIn�??s management has made this decision after carefully calculating that a network without boundaries would make it such that geometric growth would significantly impair the user experience for the majority, to the detriment of all.

I assume that is why such a limitation is in place, therefore people who seek large networks must employ a different tactic other than pure growth of first degree connections.

After contacting LinkedIn Management about my concerns regarding being �??limited�?? in my first degree, they confirmed that this indeed was a newly effective limitation, and I was offered the alternative of utilizing my Group as a connectivity conduit.

And you know what? That makes quite a bit of sense! Particularly after I just finished evangelizing on my other blog about �??Top 10 Reasons Why Recruiters Need Their Own LinkedIn Group�??

So here�??s my suggestion to you

Learn from my experience and use your own group to grown your network instead of inviting or accepting first degree connections. As a matter of fact, I even changed my profile to state that I no longer accept invites �?? it now states:

IMPORTANT PLEASE READ: Due to LinkedIn's limit of 30k first degree connections I am unable to accept new connections at this time. However I can share my network with you via the CyberSleuths Group so please join: https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/742/47ED820E8D6B/

I even added that in my contact settings. Under Account Settings in LinkedIn I also opted in to receive individual emails when someone invites me to connect so I can have an automatic reply to stating the above as well.

Beyond the benefits I listed in my other post, there are a few advantages in having people connect to your group instead of connecting to you directly:

There is no limit, therefore you won�??t run into the same situation I ran into with topping out at 30k
You still get to enjoy the benefits of being connected with those people even if they are not in your 1^st degree
Once they join your group you then have their email address, so you can communicate with them either via the group or externally as well
If you are connected to someone via a group you can send them InMail at no cost
The network of members in your group is searchable
Your group can be found in the Group Directory and when people search for your group�??s topic
You can �??Share�?? your group - instead of sending out direct invitations to connect with you personally you can invite people to join your group. If the invitation is rejected there�??s no negative consequence like there is when someone clicks �??I don�??t know�?? on you.

OK so that is my position on this new limit, but I�??d also like to hear from others about how the feel, particularly anyone who is or will be directly affected by this.

LinkedIn Corporate Recruiter Upgrades to Talent Advantage - now with Custom Company Profiles

Shally Steckerl — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:48:46 -0500

It's not just a new name: LinkedIn Talent Advantage offers some cool new functionality that should be of particular interest to companies seeking to use LinkedIn for sourcing and employer branding. FYI, Talent Advantage includes: LinkedIn Recruiter (candidate search across the entire LinkedIn network, multi-recruiter team collaboration/project management, and related communication tools), Jobs Network (targeted job posting and viral distribution), Talent Direct (highly targeted InMail campaigns), Custom Company Profiles and Employer Advertising (targeted online text and display ads).

LinkedIn gave JobMachine a sneak peak last week at what was released today, but I'll focus on a couple that Glenn and I were most excited about.

· From an employer branding perspective, the just-launched Custom Company Profiles are worth a look. It lets you showcase certain recruiters by function (as well as other employee profiles), insert a streaming video, poll question, special links, etc. The best part is that you can have different versions of page content that only display desired elements based on the industry, job function, level, location, etc., of the potential job-seeker who visits your company's page. See Burger King Corporation as an example of custom profiles out there today. For those of you at staffing firms, note that Robert Half International is also using Talent Advantage as a platform to find client sales prospects.

· From the sourcing side, TalentMatch generates LinkedIn member profile recommendations geared to your openings within 48 hours of posting your job on LinkedIn and lets you contact them, as well as send job notifications to people in your first and second degree networks to get the word out virally to spur more referrals.

BTW, a few interesting stats about LinkedIn: Of its 35 million members, 530,000 are recruiters. The network is growing by 2 million members monthly, or about one new member per second! The geographic split is about 50/50 for the USA vs. rest of world. Over 900 companies are using at least some paid components of the Talent Advantage platform (this represents thousands of recruiters, since many companies have purchased multiple seats).

Shally's Rant about so-called "Cloud Computing"

Shally Steckerl — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:54:25 -0500

I've been getting lots of calls from vendors who want me to review their product, help them promote it, resell it, link to it from my website, blog about it, etc. In other words, they are trying to convince me that their particular brand of snake oil is the best and will cure all my client's recruitment ills.

But here's the thing, more and more of them are talking about "cloud computing" as if they know what it is. My problem is that most of them are just throwing around the term "cloud computing" cluelessly, like folks used to talk about Web 2.0 (and still do) without understanding the first thing about it. And now those folks are talking about Web 3.0 and they still don't even know the basics of Web 1.0!

Hey, lets face it, "cloud computing" is nothing special, in fact its been around for nearly 30 years, and its just another buzz word. Wasn't it just SasS that we were talking about? Cloud Computing is no more than today's SaaS, and guess what, SaaS is yesterdays ASP (application service provider).

And before that, when I was in college in the 80's it was "thin client." We never outgrew it, we just called it a bunch of different things because the screens are no longer green on brown, and the "services" are taking place on "the internet" instead of on the mainframes. Think client is when the "dumb terminal" (i.e. your modern browser) doesn't run software of your disk but off the mainframe or server (i.e. "the Internet" now a days). See what I mean? So this whole "cloud computing" just means "stuff that runs on the internet not off a disk" which my old VT100 terminal did in 1989...

So, vendors who think you are "champipons of the cloud"... welcome to 1989. Its nice here, I think you will like it. Stick around, things may get a bit interesting when we actually start USING this cloud you keep talking about... oh, wait, that would mean all your systems would need to talk to each other, right? Oops. I guess we're not going to be leaving 1989 quite yet, as we're still yet to figure out this whole "integration" and "portability" headache. Sorry. Call me back when your product does more than hyperlink to another product, how Web 1.0!

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Two LinkedIn Hacks

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:12:16 -0400

In these turbulent times many recruiters are finding it necessary to reduce costs so free sources of leads are becoming more important than ever but the challenge is in learning how to use them all. Subscribers to the JobMachine.net newsletter recently got two LinkedIn tips in their inbox that may save them a bit of money so I thought I should also share them with you here. The first one is Glenn Gutmacher's new and improved LinkedIn hack for Google (BTW for those of you who may not know, Glenn is now a partner in JobMachine and VP of Arbita!). From google.com enter:

site:www.linkedin.com intitle:linkedin YOUR KEYWORDS HERE -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -inurl:megite.com

Yahoo has different way to help you find people on LinkedIn by locating those who link back to their LinkedIn profile from somewhere on their blog, resume or other webpage. At the yahoo.com search box enter:

linkdomain:linkedin.com -site:linkedin.com JOB TITLE "at COMPANY NAME"

To learn just how to use these and similar tips see our LinkedIn recruiting cheatsheet or get more tips by subscribing to our newsletter featuring a new tip every other week. Our upcoming newsletters will include some Web 2.0 recruiting tips but meanwhile check out our new (and free) Twitter resources page and please leave us a comment or question: http://jobmachine.net/sourcer/communities/twitter

You may also be interested in three new webinars we are launching at JobMachine.net. Two are by our newest Adjunct Faculty and long time friend Mark Berger:

And the third is all new information on Web 2.0 recruitment techniques using networks that are far larger than LinkedIn where you can source, network and build your employment brand at little to no cost:

Social Network Recruiting Beyond Linked (Web 2.0)

And with that I'll leave you with my observations from a recent trip to Singapore where I learned quite a bit about Asian culture and recruiting in the Far East. I call it:

If YouTube MySpace I'll Google your Yahoo! (click to read)

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | Skype | Twitter

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Sourcing prospects from local events

Shally Steckerl — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:59:30 -0400

Local events are a fantastic source of leads for prospects in fields where there is otherwise little online footprint. For example, in fields such as Accounting, Finance, Nursing, Law and Medical, among others, you may find individuals who occasionally blog or participate in online communities, but such individuals are not as plentiful as in other industry sectors.

Many continuing education companies employ local experts to teach recertification courses. These courses can be found online but frequently behind dynamically generated content which makes it �??deep web�?? content not picked up buy regular search engines. However, the content of those sites can be easily found with just a little bit of digging around.

Take, for example, Tax Accountants. Lorman.com is offering 98 local training events over the next three months in just about every state in the US and province in Canada. If you are looking for someone in Sales & Use Tax in Arizona, look no further than here: http://www.lorman.com/seminars/seminar_faculty.php?pid=186496&tid=&sid=. Each course lists a bio on the faculty presenting the course, and there are hundreds of people listed in these bios. Simply find the topic or city of interest, and look up the faculty.

Lorman.com teaches other course as well, in areas such as: Employment & Labor, Workers Compensation, Payroll, Benefits, Constructions, Environmental Services, Water Law, Public Works, Land Development, HV AC, Medical Records, Nursing, Insurance, Banking, Collections, Sales, Manufacturing, and a few others.

If instead you seek Financial Attorneys specializing in Probate Law, check out this event

http://www.nbi-sems.com/seminfo/nbi-moreinfo.asp?session-id=46101 and look at this faculty http://www.nbi-sems.com/seminfo/nbi-EvtBio.asp. Or maybe you are looking for Nurses? http://www.crosscountryeducation.com/cce/conferences/bootcamp/faculty.jsp. Or say you work for a Children�??s Hospital and need Coders: http://www.codingconferences.com/pediatric08s.htm or Speech Pathologists like Julianne http://www.audioeducator.com/industry_conference.php?id=1009.

Yeah, it is just that easy.

Oh and sometimes you find not just the instructors but also participants, particularly when the training company publishes �??testimonials�?? such as the dozens found on this HV AC training company�??s page: http://www.americantrainco.com/about_Company.aspx.

Cheers,

Shally

LinkedIn | My Bio | MSN | Skype

P.S. Sign up for our best-ever webinar June 25 1pm EST (next week): "A Deep Dive on Advanced Sourcing Search Strings!"