Hire Calling

A couple of charts

David Manaster — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:49:58 -0400

I'm a visual learner, and I get excited by good charts that communicate a lot of data in a simple way. In fact, every month I look forward to the last page of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership's last page of data.

I just got a preview of next month's issue, and here's are a couple that I found interesting:

The first is from the Employer Brand Institute’s Employer Branding Global Research Study of 2,025 employers around the world. I find it interesting that only 16% of them feel that they have a clear strategy around employer branding.

The second is from a great story that our own John Zappe wrote tracking the progress of the .Jobs domain to date. Growth has clearly been slowing after the initial SHRM push in 2006.

Where is social media going?

David Manaster — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:00:17 -0400

In a comment on RecruitingBlogs.com, Josh pointed out that I have not posted there much, if at all. His comment was an eye-opener for me.

I have always been a supporter of RecruitingBlogs.com, and given the connection that I feel to the community on that site, it was a pretty big shock to see him point out that I had not posted there in over a year. It made me think.

And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. My professional social network is not about ERE.net, RecruitingBlogs.com or any other single site. I feel a strong connection not to the domain name or the social media platform, but to the people on the other end of the conversations that I have, wherever they are.

For instance:

I connect with Dennis via email, instant messenger, Twitter , FordyceLetter.com, RecruitingBlogs.com, and occasionally I am lucky enough to see him in person at industry events.

I connect with Susan mostly on Twitter, but also by phone, on Facebook and in person.

I connect with Shally via email, instant messenger, ERE.net, Jobmachine.net and in person.

I connect with Bill on FordyceLetter.com, RBC, Twitter, and XtremeRecruiting.tv.

I connect with Michael mostly on his show, but also by email, instant messenger, and Twitter.

My connections with these people and many more - that's what my social network looks like. It's a bunch of people that I want to listen to, interact and converse with, and it does not really matter where I do it. More and more, those interactions span across multiple online networks, and they involve in-person or phone conversations as well.

If I were to turn off my presence in any one of those networks, my interactions with each of these individuals would be poorer for it.

I'm seeing this in my own life, and I think it's where social media is headed - my connections follow me and I am able to have meaningful interactions with them regardless of what site I am on, or even if I am not on any site at all.

Taleo acquires Vurv

David Manaster — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:03:08 -0400

Since getting started in this industry over 10 years ago, I've been amazed by the never-ending stream of companies trying to build better mousetraps in the Talent Management (aka Applicant Tracking) space.

I understand why it's a tempting niche - customers routinely report that they are unhappy with their existing software and want better alternatives, but somehow the profits never seem to arrive for most. Industry watchers have been predicting consolidation for years.

Today, Taleo (profile; site) announced that they acquired Vurv Technology(profile; site) for $128.8 million in cash & stock. The deal combines two of the strongest players in the space, so the consolidation is finally underway - at least among the major players.

For the record, Jason Corsello called this last week. Corsello: 1, Anonymous cowards in the comments: 0.

Ch-ch-changes at FordyceLetter.com

David Manaster — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:00:21 -0400

It's a long-term goal of mine to expose more independent recruiters to the 30 year old gem that is The Fordyce Letter - the bible of the profession.

A big part of making that happen is FordyceLetter.com.

At the end of March, Jason left the FordyceLetter.com to go spend more time with his true love. I don't blame the guy - RecruitingBlogs.com is a great site and he is doing some very creative things with the community there.

We've seen some amazing things happening on FordyceLetter.com in the last few weeks - in particular blog posts and videos by people like Jeff Skrentny, Dave Staats, Bill Vick, and Dennis Smith. Every one of these people has years in the recruiting trenches, is passionate about the profession, and knows recruiting inside and out. They embody the spirit of what Paul has been writing about for years.

I feel fortunate to have them writing on the site, and the readers apparently agree - since they've begun writing traffic has been way up.

There is more to come.

If you are a recruiter that is interested in writing on FordyceLetter.com - particularly if you are someone with deep experience running a desk - drop me an email.

Amybeth's going to Web 2.0!

David Manaster — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:04:27 -0400

O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conference is in San Francisco this week. For those living in a cave for the last couple of years, there is a huge amount of excitement, confusion, and sometimes hostility over the new tools and possibilities that have arrived with these new technologies. How useful are they today? How useful will they be? Which ones are the "good" ones? Inquiring recruiters want to know.

To me, it's beyond debate that we are experiencing the biggest burst of creativity on the Internet since the bubble burst in 2000 (arguably before).

ERE is sending one of our favorite researchers, Amybeth Hale, to the conference to see what she can see and report back on the implications of Web 2.0 tools for recruiters.

How Amybeth and I connected on this is a Web 2.0 story all it's own - she's posted about it on her blog.

Update: There seems to be a bit of confusion about Amybeth's role - she's not joining our team, she's just going to be reporting from the show as a freelancer!

SMA Conference / Chad & Cheezhead

David Manaster — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:34:42 -0400

I am in Nashville for the SMA Conference. I am heading down to the event in a few minutes, but I've already heard that they had to stop accepting registrations at 1,500 attendees.� SHRM is a machine!

I will try to post some thoughts from the show over the next couple of days, but in the meantime here are Chad & the Cheez sounding off about the ERE Expo.� Thanks guys!

My interview on XtremeRecruiting.tv

David Manaster — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:20:19 -0400

Last week I did an interview with Bill Vick , and he just put it on his site. Bill's a smart guy, and in the course of the interview he had a great observation about social media favoring independent recruiters vs. corporate recruiters that I intend to blog about some more.

I'm pretty goofy-looking on my best day, and that headset didn't help.

Enjoy!

Flash
| QuickTime

Share..

by: vPIP	Embed (copy & paste):	close

Neal Bruce

David Manaster — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:30:24 -0400

I got an email from Neal Bruce yesterday saying that he would be leaving Monster and moving on to bigger and better things.

For those of you who have not met Neal, he has been Monster's public face to the industry.

I'm not sure how much - or even if - Neal's departure will affect Monster's bottom line, but it's a big loss for the company nevertheless. He did a great job of humanizing what had become a huge faceless organization.

Before Neal, Monster was effectively estranged from it's customer base, who only heard from the company's reps when it was time to renew their packages at ever-increasing prices. Neal provided an outlet - someone in management who had actually done recruiting himself, went to industry events and had a personal relationship with many of the bloggers, writers and leaders in the industry.

It's looking like Neal may start to blog. I hope that he does, beause I would like to hear more from him, whatever he decides to do next.

For Monster's part, I hope that they recognize that Neal's departure is leaving them with a big hole.

I am hopeful.

Sal Iannuzzi, Monster's CEO, came out to ERE Expo last week, and he had the chance to see up close and personal what the buzz of the industry is. I have not seen someone anywhere close to that level of executive management come to an industry event since Jeff Taylor.

I am sure that there are plenty of people inside of Monster that think that Sal has better things to do then spend time at industry events, but I disagree. Whether it is at ERE Expo or other events in the industry, Monster needs to engage and be more responsive to its customers, and Sal need to hear from his customers first-hand.

Startup presention video

David Manaster — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:52:31 -0400

At ERE Expo we ran a session for startups in the space to give their elevator pitch to the crowd.

The four presenting companies were:

Charlie O'Donnell, Path 101
Ben Yoskovitz, Standout Jobs
Clint Heiden, VisualCV
Dan Arkind, JobScore

I was disappointed that more people did not choose to attend the session, but those who were there got the chance to hear some solid new ideas. Matt is saying that Path 101 and VisualCV were the two most likely to succeed, and the folks at Workforce agreed.

Watch the presentations and judge for yourself!

Post-expo thoughts

David Manaster — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:36:46 -0400

The latest ERE Expo is over, and the reviews are starting to come in.

Here are a few of my thoughts from the show:

It's been said before, but can never reall be said too many times. Networking, networking, networking is where some of the most valuable and unvarnished information gets passed along at these conferences, and it's why the ERE Expo gets more valuable as it gets bigger. As a company, it is our challenge to make sure that the events don't lose their intimate feel as they get larger.

Twitter was one of the experiments that we tried this time around as a tool to make the show more personal, the feedback more immediate, and to foster more personal connections. I was pleasantly surprised. We created the ereexpo Twitter account a week before the conference and by the end of the show over a hundred people became followers. That's a small fraction of the attendees, but I think that those that did sign up added a new level to how they experienced the event. Also, I think that those that did not try Twitter themselves benefitted from the people who did, because we posted their thoughts on screen in front of the entire audience in real time.

Even better, there were recruiters who could not make it to the Expo that were able to get a sense of what was going on in real time because of Twitter. It felt like Shannon and Amybeth were there in person!

This was a breakout year for video at the Expo. We encourage attendees and Bloggers to bring their cameras and post videos online. This year, we even had five cameras of own that we let people borrow. There were people with cameras running around everywhere and you can see some pretty cool stuff here and here.

The poker game was a huge success - it raised over $13,000 for the ERE Foundation. Thanks for coordinating everything and getting the word out Jason!

The. ERE. Team. Rocks. We operate virtually so we don't see each other face to face very often. When we do, I feel like there is pretty much nothing we can't take on.

I had three people come up to me during the conference and tell me what a huge difference ERE has made in their professional lives. We're at the point now where there are some people for whom we have been the primary way that they have gotten their professional educationfor their entire careers, and that's pretty damn cool.

Good times.

Awards pics are up

David Manaster — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:15:22 -0400

Here's an ERE Excellence Awards photo that we just uploaded to Flickr.

Check out the rest!

Following the ERE Expo

David Manaster — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:53:35 -0400

Only one day left here at the ERE Expo in San Diego, but for those of you who coldn't make it, we have posted a bunch of articles and videos to our Expo Blog, and there are some moreover at RecruitingBlogs.com.

We've also been experimenting with Twitter at the show. We are almost at 100 followers, and have had some really good thoughts & comments go back and forth between the attendees. I'll have some more thoughts on Twitter in a future post, but for now check it out and follow ereexpo!

We've been taping lots of the sessions, and there are a bunch of attendees running around with Flip cameras, so stay tuned for much more.

Marc Andreessen is waaaay smarter then me

David Manaster — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:01:40 -0400

Seriously, that guy's a genius. He spends all of his time thinking about things that have nothing to do with recruiting, and still has these great insights into our business that I rarely hear inside of it. Oh yeah - he's also built two billion dollar businesses and is working on a third that's a total winner.

From Marc's blog:

I think it was Andy Grove who said that for every goal you put in front of someone, you should also put in place a counter-goal to restrict gaming of the first goal.

So, for example, if you are incenting your recruiters on the number of new employees recruited and hired, you need to also give them a counter-goal (and tie it to their compensation) that measures the quality of the new hires three months in. Otherwise the recruiters are guaranteed to give you what you don't want: a lot of mediocre new hires.

I've been working on a post about Twitter and the ERE Expo this morning, but then I read this and had to share it. More later.

I <3 Dennis...

David Manaster — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:50:39 -0400

...and Dennis <3s the ERE Expo!

Notes about Vendor Watch

David Manaster — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:37:04 -0400

When I posted about our launch of Vendor Watch the other day, I left out some important details:

The editor who developed all of the profiles in Vendor Watch is John Zappe. Some of you may recognize his name from the excellent work that he did over the years covering the recruitment beat for Classified Intelligence.
If you know a vendor that should be included in endor Watch, you can submit it for John's review here.
If you spot an article or blog post that should be in a profile, you can let John know here.

Introducing Vendor Watch!

David Manaster — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:44:43 -0400

I'm proud to introduce ERE's latest service for recruiters, Vendor Watch.

Vendor Watch is an experiment in developing a new kind of database of recruiting industry vendors, combining the best of crowd-sourced intelligence and an editorial filter to fact-check and select the most relevant information. If we've done our job well, it will become the place to find the most succint, up-to-date, relevant information on vendor.

The best way to explain what we have done is to just show you, so check out this profile for CareerBuilder. It has a rich pool of data on the company and their products, starting with a company overview, product overviews, and and basic contact information. Profiles also include a list of the company's executive staff, along with estimate of just how large it is, both in terms of revenue and employees.

Better yet, we have the most recent headlines major headlines about the company, selected from around the web. In choosing the articles to display, we were completely neutral as to the source. In this case, you will see a company press release that we felt was sufficiently newsworthy to include, a blog post about CareerBuilder's possible plans for a relationship with Facebook, and an article from the mainstream media about how competitor TheLadder's ad campaign takes a direct shot at CareerBuilder's services. We've added a brief summary of each and linked directly to the source in each case. What you will not see are the dozens of company press releases that we considered fluff, or the large number of articles that mention CareerBuilder in passing,but did not really add anything new to the body of knowledge. (Yes, I know that there are more than three articles of note about CareerBuilder, but give me a break - its only day one!)

In short, this is a one-stop-shop for information on the vendors in the recruiting industry.

This is all a work in progress, and we are still adding new profiles, new articles, and updating the existing information every day.

We will be relying on the ERE community and the recruitosphere for much of the information in the profiles and for suggestions for new companies to add to Vendor Watch. On the right side of each profile, there is a tool to submit updates, which our editor will then review for relevancy before making the changes go live on the profile. If you've written a good blog post about a vendor, or read an article that you think should be included, let us know!

Feedback, as always, is welcome - just email me at david(at)ere.net or post your thoughts in the comments.

Jobfox lunch presentation

David Manaster — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:41:33 -0400

JobFox has been doing presentation for recruiters in the New York areas all week. I attended one this afternoon and heard a marketing presentation by CEO Rob McGovern. The following are my notes from the presentation, with a few notes that I made immediately after:

Jobfox is intended for passive job seekers.

It has a huge empasis on their matching technology and conceives of itself as the next major job board, with Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder (Rob's first baby) squarely in the crosshairs. The of a "candidate-centric" board that gives the candidate the ability to pick and choose employers in the same way that employers pick and choose them playswell when compared to thebig boards, who have tilted heavily in favor of the employers who pay their bills.

Jobfox candidate pool has grown 5x since August 2007. Rob did not mention how large the starting point was, which would be necessary to figure out just how relevant those growth numbers are (after all, it means one thing to go from 1,000 resumes to 5,000, and another thing entirely to go from 1 million to 5 million!)

After the session was over , one of the Jobfox sales team said that there were “over a million” candidates in their database.

It was founded in 2004 By Rob McGovern & a team of ex-CareerBuilder employees.

Gives seekers a “career web page” in the same sense that Facebook or Myspace do for personal web pages

Elements of that page:

o Basic info

o Work preferences – presented as a cool cloud tag

o Skills – when clicked, it shows where the candidate learned that skill (not sure if this is self reported or parsed by software?)

o Personality type – there was a bullet point that said that this was a $75 value, which seemed like an odd thing to say…

Borrows heavily from dating sites – employers and candidates can “wink” at each other to show mutual interest.

Typical JobFox customer is already using the big job boards. Not a ton of overlap in that candidate base. I missed the actual overlap numbers, which were based on a study done for Jobfox by Peter Weddle.

Big job Boards use a chronological model to display job postings – this results in a job applications flurry in the first few hours and then response rate drops off dramatically.

JobFox displays matches in a proprietary “scientific match order.” A recruiter can add emphasis to certain criteria by “starring” them.

Salaries are inputted into the system using a double blind system – neither the candidate nor the employer can see the other’s data, but it is used for matching purposes.

Match results page seems a lot like kayak.com – search criteria on the left and a dynamic listing of results on the right. (That’s a good thing.)

Rob intends to raise a total of $100 million in VC. Not sure if those plans are already in motion or if it is in the distant future or what the money will be used for.

70% of customers sign up for an annual contract, as opposed to longer or shorter term agreements.

Candidate pool skews high in the techie demographic – 17% of the Jobfox database. Other fields are represented more in line with the overall population in the US.

Supports Instant Messaging – cool!

Cost of JobFox is $12,000-$80,000 per year depending on the size of customer

Very cool – “Featured Employers” on the service are the most active employers on the system, not the ones who pay for it. Kind of a refreshing change, and I like how it rewards participation rather than straight payments.

Jason Goldberg's second act

David Manaster — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:25:37 -0400

According to Silicon Alley Insider, The Washington Post Company has invested in ex-Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg's new startup, Social|Median.

I regularly get asked by Jobster alumni if I think that their shares in Jobster will be worth everything once the music stops for that company. I always tell them that I don't know.

The old Jobster spent a lot of money and had phenomenal PR - I have never seen a company in this space garner so much attention in such a short time. But once the hype passed, some of the customers realized that they were not as thrilled with the products as they thought they would be.

The new Jobster -- along with Goldberg himself -- seems to have discovered cost-control religion, which is a huge positive. I've heard nothing but good things about Jeff Seely, the new CEO. I have not yet heard any new product announcements or major changes, but I assume that they are on the way.

Moving forward, both Jobster and Social|Median will need to create a lot of value for their users and customers if they want to make money for their investors.

Docstoc.com

David Manaster — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:56:22 -0400

I got an email this morning from Docstoc.com, which bills itself as "a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents."

They were pitching their services for the ERE Expo, and I am not really sure how they can help us with that, but I do see their service as a very useful tool for recruiters. There are already a number of documents on the site that are tagged as being relevent to recruiting.

For an example, take a look at the phone script below for checking candidate references:

Sample Script for Checking Employment References - Get more free documents

I don't necessarily think that the script is the greatest, but I do think that it demonstrates how useful the site can be for recruiters if it turns into a repository for recruiting-related documents.

ERE Expo exhibitor feedback

David Manaster — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:40:56 -0400

Recruiter Life was at the ERE Expo , and they spent some time filming the exhibitors about the show. Here's what they said:

The tradeshow floor at the upcoming ERE Expo in San Diego is full -- there's just no more room on the trade show floor -- but our doors are wide open for more attendees. We have a great speaker lineup, and I hope you can make it and see in person what the buzz is all about!