One source says LinkedIn expressed an interest, another says they withdrew it, and a third states that Monster or Bank of America made it up - hoping to drum up interest.

Only a few people know if LinkedIn has or had an interest -and it doesn’t really matter. LinkedIn shouldn’t acquire Monster, or any job board for that matter.

Wait! Some say LinkedIn has already become another job board, so why wouldn’t an acquisition make sense? Wouldn’t an acquisition of a job board increase their membership and open up a segment that has a lot of room for growth?

LinkedIn would face several challenges with an acquisition of any job board. Why?

• LinkedIn changed the recruiting landscape in less than 10 years. Compare this movement to what has happened in the job board space during that same time.
• Sure, recruiting solutions is significant makeup of LinkedIn’s revenue but to make a blanket statement about LinkedIn becoming a job board is short sighted.
• Reputation.  LinkedIn has earned a reputation as one of the top online recruiting channels and sources.
• Diluting price vs. value.  There is a large pricing gap between LinkedIn and job boards and an acquisition could cause some internal conflicts and client confusion with their value proposition and pricing.
• Job boards are still job boards.  Yes, I know job boards have attempted branding themselves as so much more than job boards.  This hasn’t played out well for most of them.
• LinkedIn has set its’ targets on replacing things like Resume’s, business cards and rolodexes – with business intelligence.  A job board acquisition doesn’t align with these strategies.

There is massive differentiation with LinkedIn’s strategy and their success – in comparison to that of a job board. Consider the following:

• In March 2012, LinkedIn was ranked as the 31st most-visited website worldwide  with 102.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore.  ComScore also measured 9.4 billion page views.
• 3 out of 4 members use LinkedIn for everything business, from keeping up on trends to reading business news.
• The LinkedIn “share” button is now on 400,000 sites worldwide, enabling professionals to share news articles and other content with their networks on LinkedIn. Referral traffic from LinkedIn grew 45 percent between Q3 and Q4 2011.
• LinkedIn members did nearly 4.2 billion professionally-oriented searches on the platform in 2011 and are on pace to surpass 5.3 billion in 2012.
• More than 60,000 developers are using LinkedIn APIs to create innovative tools and services for professionals, averaging over two billion API calls per month as of March 2012.
• LinkedIn members are sharing insights and knowledge in more than one million LinkedIn Groups.
• More than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.

Still think LinkedIn is a job board? Here’s an infographic that might change your mind.

LinkedIn isn’t perfect, and there are still a lot of people playing the social network vs. professional network confusion card (cluelessly).  If I were at LinkedIn, the only “job” site acquisition that would get my vote would be for an aggregation site – for very different reasons.

This upcoming week is an interesting one for Monster, as the company prepares to send financial information to interested parties for a potential sale. Analysts have identified several possible avenues for Monster including an outright sale, the sale of a stake or some of its territories, or a leveraged buyout.

Take a stroll down memory lane from the early 90′s through today with the history of Monster.com – with the infographic below from PCRecruiter.

Infographic by PC Recruiter

That was one of the topics at the webinar last week “recruiting secrets overheard in a dark alley”, in addition to not believing everything you see online.  The slides to the webinar are below, and we’re working on including the recording which will be added soon.

Here is an example used which included 4 recent headlines (none of which are true in my book) and I’m sure could somehow be justified or validated depending on how the data is sliced.  They all completely contradict each other.

• Facebook is the #1 recruiting source, accounting for 78% of hires
• Employee referrals are the #1 recruiting source, accounting for nearly ½ of all hires
• Job boards are not dead, they are alive and well – accounting for nearly 40% of all hires
• Nearly 2/3 of hires found their job through “internal sources”

And as I stated during the call, even though Bush had some issues pronouncing the word nuclear, he could have figured this out..

As far as the webinar, we included a list of questions as part of the registration which included hundreds of recruiters from 20 countries and 49 states.  We also asked a couple of questions (via polling) during the webinar, which are listed below but are not included in the slides.

Here are  5 examples of the responses from attendees, the practitioners:

• 71% of recruiters have not hired 1 person via twitter
• 64% of recruiters have not hired 1 person via Facebook
• 82% of recruiters HAVE hired from LinkedIn, and
• A vast majority would refer fewer than 10 people they know to a job (re-defining referrals)
• 50% do not have a personal or company twitter account which primary use is for recruiting

So what’s the #1 recruiting source? LinkedIn was the #1 most effective recruiting source selected.

I’m not saying social recruiting doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t make sense.  What I am saying is the headlines floating around are at times, laughable.  That, and we still see time after time anti-social recruiting attempts at social recruiting.

Enjoy the show..

Data sources include: CLC Recruiting, International Association of Employment Websites, Applied HRM Research, Workforce, Branchout, LinkedIn, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, The Sourcing Institue, Journal of Applied Business Research, Google, Foursquare, Google+, Slideshare, YouTube, Forbes, ERE, TechCrunch, Mashable, iCIMS, SilkRoad, jobs2web, JobVite, Workforce.com, Corporate Executive Board, Webinar Participant Polling – Recruiting Secrets, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, SlideShare, TechCrunch, YouTube, Mashable, Pinterest, Comscore, Xavier.edu, International Personnel Management Association.

The irony is that very few organizations are having real, sustainable successes as a result. When surveyed, a majority of the registrants and attendees (representing 20 countries & 49 states) have yet to make consistent hires as a result of sites like Facebook and twitter, yet when polled, 82% have made hires from the recruiting giant LinkedIn. More about this topic later.

As part of the set up, we researched a majority of the popular social media sites and online channels to provide a list of the most recent stats we could find. Think mobile isn’t growing? There are more iPhones sold in a day than there are babies born! Most of these stats were collected over the past 2-3 weeks so should be recent.. Enjoy!

Twitter Stats

• 500 Million accounts
• 40+ Billion tweets
• 175 Million tweets a day
• 70% of companies ignore complaints on twitter
• 909 employees
• 11 new accounts created every second, over 1 million new per day.

Facebook Stats

• 850+ million members
• 31% check in once a day
• Avg of 20 min per day
• 2.7 billion likes per day
• 100 billion connections
• 20 million apps installed daily
• 250 million photos daily
• 425 million access via mobile

Pinterest Stats

• 10.4 Million users, faster growth than any site – ever.
• Retaining and engaging 3x better than twitter “was”
• 80% of users are women, 60% have attended college, 50% have kids
• Demographics:
• 18-24 years (17%)
• 25-34 years (30%)
• 35-44 years (25%)

Google+ Stats

• 90+ million users
• g+ button is served 5 billion times a day
• g+ users:
• 44% of users are single
• 29% female / 71% male
• 20% are students
• Avg of 6 minutes on site

YouTube Stats:

• 4 billion videos viewed, every day, 1 trillion is 2011
• 24 hours of video uploaded, every 24 seconds
• 2.9 billion hours a month on the site, 326,294 years
• 800 million users per month
• Auto speech recognition tech translates video and captions into 43 languages

• 3+ billion searches daily
• 124 languages
• 20% of searches are local

SlideShare Stats:

• Largest social “content” network
• 60 million visits a month
• 400,000 new presentations uploaded per month
• Top 200 web sites
• 110,000 “recruiting” documents
• LinkedIn acquired SlideShare last week

LinkedIn Stats:

• 161 million members
• 2 million company pages
• 4.2 billion searches in 2011
• 22% of traffic from mobile (last week of March)
• More than 1 million groups
• 35% of students search for jobs on LI, 700% increase since 2010

Mobile Stats:

• 5.9 Billion subscribers
• 8 Trillion SMS messages sent in 2011
• 11+ Billion apps downloaded, 1 in 4 never used again
• The number of mobile searches quadrupled in the last year
• 8.49% of global web site hits come from mobile

Foursquare Stats

• 23 million users
• 2 billion check-ins
• Users and check-ins have doubled in 6 months

Sources: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare, SlideShare, TechCrunch, YouTube, Mashable, Pinterest, Google+, and Google.

The knowledge you have at your fingertips within seconds matters, and that is the case with these 4 tools for recruiting and sales professionals.  Each one of them is about connecting and engaging with your networks (or leads).

The best part, they are all free.

1. The first tool is hachi. This is an incredible site that merges your social graphs and connections from all of your networks. And, in the case of multiple paths, it can compute the smartest path to get there via something called the “Path Score.” Hachi looks at factors like similar company, school and common friends. Example: Path from John via Facebook, who knows Susan via Facebook, who knows Charlie via Twitter.
2. The second is a great app from Sales Loft which I mentioned a few weeks ago – you can find at JobChangeAlerts.com. With the free service you log in w/ your LinkedIn credentials and it sends you a daily email digest every morning of job changes and transitions, promotions, and birthdays from people in your network. It’s a great tool for engaging and connecting with your network.
3. Yes, people still use business cards! Cardmunch, another LinkedIn acquisition, is a powerful app run by humans – not computers. With the app you can take a picture of any business card. Every business card you submit is transcribed, edited and reviewed by multiple workers to guarantee accuracy. They even crop the company logos from business cards. Cardmunch also features 1-Tap LinkedIn Invites, full text search, syncing contacts into address books, and an easy “sharing” feature.
4. Last but not least is the email contextual contact plugin (another LinkedIn acquisition) called Rapportive.  This social CRM tool will show you everything you need to know about your email senders including who they are, any of their social profiles connected to their email address, whether or not you are connected to them, their latest activity, their location, and the ability to take notes or quickly view previous messages from them.

Great tools like these never replace the art, skill, or competence of great recruiters or sales professionals – but they are an asset for engagement and efficiency.  Know of other free tools you’d recommend? Share any in the comments section.

It all started back in 2001, when companies were starting to see business value in diversity as a strategic priority.

The companies participating in the survey and assessment from DiversityInc are rated in four areas, including:

• CEO Commitment
• Human Capital
• Corporate and Organizational Communications
• Supplier Diversity

Only 2 new companies made the list compared to last year, and one was a first-time participant. 20 companies moved up on the list, and 24 moved down.

Congratulations to the PricewaterhouseCoopers for the top spot, and each of the Top Companies in Diversity for 2012, from DiversityInc:

1. PricewaterhouseCoopers
2. Sodexo
3. Kaiser Permanente
4. AT&T
5. Procter & Gamble
6. Ernst & Young
7. Kraft Foods
8. Deloitte
9. Prudential Financial
10. Colgate-Palmolive
11. Johnson & Johnson
12. Accenture
13. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation
14. American Express
15. MasterCard Worldwide
16. Merck & Co.
17. IBM
18. Cummins
19. Health Care Service Corporation
20. Abbott
21. Marriott International
22. KPMG
23. CSX
24. Aetna
25. Cox Communications
26. Dell
27. Automatic Data Processing
28. General Mills
29. Eli Lilly and Company
30. Target
31. Bank of America
32. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide
33. Wells Fargo
34. WellPoint
35. JCPenney
36. Booz Allen Hamilton
37. Allstate Insurance Company
38. Medtronic
39. Verizon Communications
40. Time Warner
41. Toyota Motor North America
42. Northrop Grumman
43. Rockwell Collins
44. Monsanto
45. Chrysler Group
46. The Coca-Cola Company
47. Capital One
48. Lockheed Martin
49. Kellogg Company
50. MetLife

You can check out more specific information on each company on DiversityInc, or check out the Top 50 from previous years.

Irregardless of what you think about the Human Resources Department at your company (or previous companies), ABC News’ 20/20 team wants to paint a picture filled with deception, lies, and company agendas with the episode that aired last week (True Confessions) – titled  ”Confessions from the Corner Office, Ex-HR Exec Tells All”.

If you didn’t see the show, you can watch the 6 minute interview via YouTube with Cynthia Shapiro (referred to as the former company “hatchet woman”.

In the interview, Shapiro shares:

• A warning to candidates about “traps” with pictures of children on an interviewers desk, and an edict from upper management to not hire moms
• The “let me walk you to your car” trick after the interview
• Once you land a job, prepare yourself for a game of survivor where only your boss knows the rules.
• Your vacation plans can get you on the layoff list, because companies move too fast
• Bosses may put you on the layoff list – for the way you look
• Only Executives get to have gray hair – it’s not fair but that’s how it goes
• Being pregnant isn’t always celebrated
• She was paid big bucks to find gray areas around the laws that would allow companies do what they want to do
• The dirtiest secret of all is company being rarely tell the reason they landed on the layoff list
• HR people may kill her for telling this on TV, but they will “create” documentation
• Her best tip for staying off the companies layoff list, be a brown-noser

I’m excited to announce an upcoming recruiting webinar in partnership with Recruiting Trends on May 9th, from 12:00-12:45 EST, titled “Recruiting secrets overheard in a dark alley”, and you are invited!

Click here to register, or you can read below for additional information on this free event, which sponsored by iCIMS.

WEBINAR INFORMATION:
If you look for your best advice from online ‘personalities’ and industry analysts this isn’t the webinar for you. Instead, we’ll uncover secrets ripped from the dirty streets of recruiting and talent acquisition . And don’t worry, you won’t have to use any dirty tricks yourself to make these tips work for you.

If this sounds interesting, you can look forward to hearing talent acquisition myths, trends, and insights, from the alley. I will share some opinions and facts on why the “experts” just might be wrong – in addition to recruiting tips in several areas including:

• Recruiting Analytics
• Employee Referrals
• Social Recruiting
• Online Recruiting & Job Boards

Register now for “Recruiting secrets overheard in a dark alley”, and socially share with your network.  I hope you can make it!

Well, it’s called “engagement” by most HR folks unless you are behind the scenes where it is likely referred to as “productivity” which results to “higher profits”. What’s ironic is 2 of these “popular” HR practices made the list on Inc. in Jeff Haden’s article “5 Things Remarkable Bosses Never Do“.

Feedback from end users of these processes can quickly lead you to one conclusion:  When not deployed with a sound strategy, great execution, and competent leaders – these activities waste time, create bureaucracy and kill a companies culture.  When done wrong, they are perfect examples of the kinds of things that aid company failure.

Let’s take the example of an employee who is an average performer (on his or her best day) who has 20 years of experience with the company, in the same job. Breaking it to him or her that they really have 1 year of experience, 20 times, is never an easy message.

Marcus Buckingham has been quoted as saying, “Most people do not use their talent, at work, at all”. Think about that statement for 20 seconds.

So how can managers tap into their employees talents and strengths? By focusing on effective development activities (on the job, which account for up to 75% of effective learning.

Hopefully that’s not new news and as our buddy Homer Simpson would say, “Doh”!

Whether you are an employee or in any type of leadership role and have responsibility for a team, skip the seminars, conferences and e-learning – and focus on these 5 approaches to development that will deliver the best growth and impact:

1. Job Changes (Internally): Lateral moves, transfers, job changes, promotions
2. Stretch assignments or projects
3. Mentoring or Coaching
4. Formal Job Shadowing
5. Job Changes (Externally)

And remember, if you ever think you are good enough, you have just started your decline.

Atlanta, GA based SalesLoft is a sales intelligence company that has its’ sights set out to create the world’s most sophisticated sales intelligence software.  The company has found that around 3% of people make a change to their headline or title on a monthly basis – and with their new free app called Job Change Alerts you can sit back and have the information delivered to your email.

SalesLoft’s young team of recent GA Tech Grads built the incredibly useful and powerful free app Job Change Alerts – that is an asset to anyone with a LinkedIn network or LinkedIn connections.  I signed up for the free service, which is extremely quick and easy (it took less than 30 seconds).  Once signed up, you’ll receive daily updates on your LinkedIn Connections including:

• New Jobs
• Birthdays
• New Connections

The ability to send just-in-time, related messages to your network (besides I am reaching out because I need something) with little effort is invaluable.  The possibilities are endless for sales professionals, recruiters, job seekers, or any networker.

Ben Franklin wrote “relationships are always in need of constant repair.” Damn, he must have been thinking of JobChangeAlerts.com as a great tool to maintain and cultivate your professional relationships!

Congrats to the SalesLoft team for keeping it simple – and building this powerful, free app. Network your heart out.

Meet Josh Tolan, the Founder and CEO of Spark Hire. He’s looking to improve some of the ways candidates and companies meet – and interact.

Spark Hire is headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois and currently has a team of 21 employees. The company raised an initial $1 million in angel funding from private investors, and officially launched the Spark Hire site a couple of months ago.

I recently connected with Josh to take a closer look at Spark Hire, and discuss the sites’ capabilities.

I quickly learned work ethic is no stranger to Josh. He grew up in a North suburb of Chicago and spent an average of 6 hours a day practicing for baseball and working out. He continued his baseball career at Purdue University with some great success. He transferred to the University of California – San Diego, and graduated summa cum laude with a 3.93 GPA and a BA in Economics. During the summer, he worked as a SEO Manager for a lead generation company – where his fascination for the internet continued to grow.

The idea for Spark Hire came to Josh while he was driving from Chicago to California for his final year of college – based on a conversation with a friend on the premise of how much more effective landing a job would be if employers could “see”. As a result of the conversation, Josh pulled over in Denver and began modeling Spark Hire on some cocktail napkins in a hotel restaurant. Josh spent the first half of his senior year developing the business model and creating concepts for the platform.

There’s a lot of noise in the industry about the use of video in the recruiting process – related to discrimination. The reality for candidates is video allows people to demonstrate skills in a way that a Resume would never convey. For employers, Josh would be the first to point out “video” itself is not the basis for a discrimination claim – it is the person on the other side of the table asking the questions. Video – is not the issue. For employers that still have concerns about discrimination claims from video, Spark Hire is integrating features that will give the employer full control of what they do and don’t see.

Some video platforms currently on the market are leveraging third-party APIs for their service. Spark Hire has built its own cloud-based video platform which allows for scalability, customization, and full control.  Their first priority is and always will be the continual improvement of the platform for both job seekers and employers. Aside from a vast number of enhancements and exciting features, other short term goals consist include:

• Releasing the iOS/Android mobile applications which support mobile interviewing
• Internationalizing Spark Hire and supporting multiple languages
• Building a strong inventory of jobs and job seekers
• Creating a PPC/CPM advertising platform within Spark Hire
• Developing synergistic relationships particularly with major ATS companies

Spark Hire is continuously updating their platform with new releases, so users can expect improvements, enhancements, and new features. There’s no shortage of growth plans for Spark Hire either. 2 of the biggest opportunities the company is looking at include pursuing opportunities in the college market where significant gaps exist today, in addition to international capabilities that clients are requesting.

If you are a job seeker or a recruiter and think there are opportunities to make the process of finding a job or making a hire more efficient, check out Spark Hire.

According to Wikipedia, the earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness can be found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392).

Fast forward 620 years to 2012.. We’ve asked around and have compiled the following list of 15 HR and Recruiting “joke” headlines you’d only read on April Fools’ Day:

1. New content and presentations finally delivered at HR and Recruiting conferences!
2. HR & Recruiting certifications create a competitive advantage.
3. Monter.com renames the popular Facebook app BeKnown to “BeUnKnown”.
4. There’s a talent shortage, no really there is.
5. Assessment vendors agree the best odds for making a hiring decision is to just flip a coin.
6. Job Boards resurrect themselves from the dead and become an innovative hiring solution.
7. The .jobs domain is changed to .nojobs.
8. ERP technology platforms now make financial sense to organizations deploying them.
9. Applicant tracking systems recommend a retail / inventory approach to hiring (first in, first out – to first applied, first hired).
10. Compensation practices study shows merit and promotion increases are meaningful to employees compared to the “sky is the limit” approach for external hiring.
11. Employees become an organizations greatest investment, no longer seen as an asset that depreciates on a balance sheet.
12. News flashback, Recruiters use telephones to recruit talent!
13. HR transforms its’ reputation from the “black hole” to “white glove” service provider.
14. Social recruiting is dead.  Wait, was it alive?
15. Job Boards become the highest quality source of hire, beating out job fairs.