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Inside Recruiting Mar 17, 2015
Do You Know How to Assess EQ?

When assessing a candidate's potential, its easy to focus solely on verifying their technical and functional skills -- probably too easy. In the world of hiring, there is definitely a tendency to emphasize assessment criteria that are tangible, easily measured, and readily verifiable. It's the path of least resistance. The irony is that these "tangible" skills have only a small bearing (11...

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Inside Recruiting Mar 13, 2015
"Do the Decent Thing": Candidates Are People, Too

There's a lot to complain about when it comes to the world of recruiting: shoddy tools, obscenely high volumes, a shrinking talent pool, etc., etc., ad nauseam. But for Chris Hague, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) director at TempWorks Staffing Software, the single biggest problem in recruiting today is the lack of follow-up. "My bugbear is really what happens to afterwards, when...

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Inside Recruiting Mar 12, 2015
Is It Time to Introduce a New Class of Employee?

There are currently 16 million "freelancers, consultants, and other independent workers" in the U.S., according to a study conducted by MBO Partners. Moreover, this same study predicts that, by 2020, these workers will account for the majority of the U.S. workforce. Within the next decade, MBO's study says, the U.S. will have between 65 and 70 million independent workers in the workforce. That...

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Inside Recruiting Mar 12, 2015
Have You Upgraded Your Talent Strategy to Version 2.0?

The traditional workforce, the one that we all know and love, has until recently been largely composed of colocated workers. By this, we mean mostly full-time employees working in the same building and collaborating on projects face-to-face. Call this "Workforce 1.0." As we can see, however, the world -- and the workplace practices of the world -- is quickly evolving.  Many modern-day...

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Inside Recruiting Mar 12, 2015
The Power of a Unified Brand

If you align employer and consumer branding, you'll see benefits that impact every level of a company. Universum conducted a survey of over 2,000 senior executives, including CEOs, HR and recruiting heads, and marketing professionals, on the topic of employer and consumer branding. The insights Universum gained point to new shifts in marketing and branding that will impact companies for years to...

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Inside Recruiting Mar 12, 2015
Does Unconscious Bias Damage Your Hiring?

In light of the continued challenges organizations face in their talent retention efforts, I was drawn to a recent study from Korn Ferry. The study found that an overwhelming 84 percent of respondents believed that a lack of attention to diversity and inclusion is a key driver of employee turnover. We have always known that lack of diversity is a problem, but the link between diversity and...

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Inside Recruiting Mar 11, 2015
The 5 Must-Have Qualities of a Modern HR Pro 

There are currently 275,000 members of the Society for Human Resource Management. These several thousand people all have to wear multiple hats: they must be adept at employee relations and employee development, knowledgeable about workplace regulations, and walk a fine line between protecting the needs of the employees and the needs of the organization. With all these HR professionals floating...

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Inside Recruiting Mar 10, 2015
Is Passive Recruiting Dead?

For many years, the headhunting process was a dark art, performed by high-powered private-investigator-type recruiters. Their weapons of choice were little more than landline telephones, corporate directories, endless cups of coffee, and private networking meetings. They were elusive creatures: you couldn't find them, but they found you. Social media and mobile technology changed all that....

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Making Your Employee's First Day Their Best Day

An employee's first day on the job can sometimes be their worst. It's often filled with paperwork and onboarding activities, and they rarely get a chance to actually work. The first day of a new hire's job is often not indicative of what it's really like to work at the company. Despite the highly developed skill set a new hire may have -- say, a highly skilled programmer entering their...

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A Perfect Storm, but in a Good Way: Millennials and the Rapidly Modernizing Workforce

Generally speaking, whenever I discover that yet another company is releasing a study on "millennials in the workforce," I roll my eyes. Great, I think to myself. Another chance for a bunch of bored researchers to tell me about what kind of person I am purported to be. Not so with IBM's latest report, "Myths, Exaggerations, and Uncomfortable Truths: the Real Story Behind Millennials in...

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Should You Fire That Bad Hire?

It may seem like the tempting and practical solution, but quickly firing bad hires may not be a sustainable solution when you look at the figures. For example, the typical hiring process using structured interviews and tests is perhaps 50 percent reliable, and that statistic is borne out by a Leadership IQ study which found that 46 percent of new hires fail in the first 18 months. If you...

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How to Find Tech Talent in a Shortage

Recruiters in the IT space are feeling the strain of a skills-based talent shortage. More and more IT professionals with specialized skills are needed, and there's not enough talent to go around. Although tech talent may be hard to find, recruiting the best is possible by leveraging the power of big data and analytics. Predictive analytics use statistics, data, and algorithms to determine...

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3 Recruiting Claims You Shouldn't Believe

Associate Professor Emeritus of Baruch College Aaron Levenstein once said, "Statistics are like a bikini: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." Between manipulating sample sizes, asking leading questions, and presenting findings in a deceitful way, people have plenty of tactics for making statistics say whatever they want them to say -- and sometimes, the stats are...

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A Sorority Sister's View on IT Recruiting

Melanie Batenchuk is the chief of operations and brand management for a boutique IT firm in the Washington, D.C., area called Scope Group. She wrote an article recently for a national sorority website that prompted us to do a QA with her about millennials, recruiting, and the IT field in general. Recruiter.com: Describe Scope Group and your role there. Melanie Batenchuk: I joined...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 27, 2015
How to Create a Company Blog That Attracts Talent

You've tried every tool in your recruiting toolbox to attract talent to your company. You've added candidates on LinkedIn, attempted to recruit talent on Twitter, and even spruced up your job descriptions. Unfortunately, none of these tactics have helped you attract the talent you desire for your open positions. However, there is a solution that many recruiters forget when attracting...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 27, 2015
When It Comes to Determining 'Fit,' It's About What You See and Hear — Not What You Ask

With apologies to Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a recruiter in possession of a role to fill must be in want of a candidate who "fits" that role. But "fit" is such a strange thing -- a pressing concern in any hiring matter, but also a vaporous notion, a concept we all kind of know and understand but can't always articulate. It has something to do with skills and...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 27, 2015
3 Game-Changing Recruiting Trends for 2015

There is a significant amount of change and volatility in the talent management arena. Fortunately, however, there are also a myriad of statistics, reports, and analyses to help guide you through the fog. In particular, my attention has been drawn to three specific trends which, when considered together, indicate that we are at a game-changing point in the talent management story. I have...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 26, 2015
Executives Know Recruiting Is a Problem — So Why Aren't They Trying to Solve It?

In a new study, iCIMS calls it "the elephant in the room": the fact that CEOs and CIOs know recruiting the right people is critical for company success, and they know that talent acquisition is one of their companies' biggest challenges, but despite this knowledge, they aren't taking the steps necessary to improve recruiting efforts and address the challenge of finding the right people. "The...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 26, 2015
Interview: Theory Meets Reality

We've really woven an intricate interview web, haven't we? We've developed all kinds of interview methods for candidates to obsess over — structured, unstructured, phone, video, face-to-face, behavioral, stress, technical, panel, case, peer, group, lunch, brunch — and, as a result, we're giving them headaches. Interviews spark fear in 92 percent of the talent pool, and that...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 26, 2015
Financial Services Industry Faces a Recruitment Crisis

A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) finds that financial services CEOs overwhelmingly feel there is a lack of talent available to hire. This lack could ultimately affect the long-term growth and success of businesses in the financial industry. The report, "A New Take on Talent," is based on a survey of 410 financial services CEOs across 62 countries and finds these CEOs challenged by...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 24, 2015
To Improve Your Recruiting Efforts on College Campuses, Ask Yourself These 4 Questions

Walk into any job fair on any college campus in the U.S., and you'll likely find throngs of eager students searching for the careers of their dreams. (You'll probably also meet a number of gloomy undergrads shuffling through the crowd, burned-out on the "real world" already -- but that's a story for another time). The question, however, is whether the students at this particular job fair, at...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 23, 2015
4 Ways to Audit Your Candidate Experience

Let's be honest: the hiring process is stressful for everyone involved. However, the candidate experience goes especially overlooked too often, and strong candidates are deterred by negative experiences during the hiring process. Positive candidate and new-hire experiences are essential, not only to attracting and retaining top talent, but also to a company's overall brand. According to...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 19, 2015
6 Ways the Great Recession Changed Hiring

With the world economy starting to mend in the wake of the Great Recession -- for the most part -- it's probably now worth taking stock of some of the impacts this recession had on the hiring landscape. Are there any long-lasting legacies changes that recruiters, employers, and job seekers should be aware of? Below, I outline several things that have changed in the hiring and labor markets...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 18, 2015
Everyone Is an Acquired Taste 

When it comes to a good glass of wine, not everyone likes the same levels of dryness or sweetness. It takes time, trial, and error to find your perfect wine. Similarly, it can take the same sort of time, trial, and error to find your dream candidate. Without an ATS, this struggle can be even harder. You are left to find the perfect combination of dry and sweet -- functional and cultural fit...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 18, 2015
Don't Just Onboard, Reinforce: HR's Role in Cutting Ramp-Up Time for New Sales Hires

"Can you imagine hiring a engineer who couldn't code or contribute anything to development for  six months?" asks Christopher Faust,  CMO of sales-execution software provider Qvidian. The answer is probably "Absolutely not," unless your approach to hiring is highly unorthodox. And yet, when hiring sales team members, organizations routinely expect that their new hires will contribute...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 17, 2015
Reshoring: Plenty of Reasons Why Manufacturing is Coming Home

What was once just a glimmer of hope on the manufacturing jobs horizon has, in recent years, begun to sparkle, as the "reshoring" of jobs back to the U.S. has gathered momentum. Now there is clear and growing evidence of a trend toward reversing the loss of manufacturing and its associated jobs through the previously relentless outsourcing of jobs to China, India and...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 17, 2015
Get Your Onboarding Together, Reap the Engagement Benefits

How effective is your onboarding? Chances are that the answer is a resounding "meh": 40 percent of organizations say their onboarding is either not at all effective or only slightly so, 33 percent say it's moderately effective, and only 27 percent say it's very effective. This lack of effectiveness is doubly troubling when we consider that onboarding is one of the most important aspects...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 16, 2015
4 Negative Personal Traits That Can Produce Positive Performance

Many of the personal traits that we think of as negative are not inherently negative, but negative in certain situations only. This means that, with an appropriate shift in perspective and situation, a seemingly negative trait can produce positive performance. Being able to turn negative traits into positive performance is both empowering for the person involved and incredibly enabling for...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 14, 2015
Valentine's Day Cards and HR Best Screening Practices: an Unexpected Mathematical Equivalence

A Valentine's Day card appears on your desk, in your email inbox or in your home mail box.  What you may not realize is that what you experience from that point on is virtually identical with or equivalent to some of the key stages of recruitment screening. I intend to show that these recruitment stages, in turn, and the sending and receipt of a Valentine card, are governed by principles of...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 12, 2015
Hiring for Tomorrow, Instead of Today: a Look at Challenge-Based Recruiting

Joanna Weidenmiller, CEO of candidate assessment purveyors 1-Page, is not the first person to point out that 2015 will be the "Year of the Candidate" -- the war for talent's been escalating for a while now, and Jobscience CEO Ted Elliott told us in December that 2015 would be a year in which demand for employees increases as the supply of candidates decreases (not that he was the first to...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 12, 2015
'Non-Cooperative': a Dangerous HR Buzzword?

Police, the military, private security services, and the latest, super-agile Google/Boston Dynamics spooky mini-tank-like robo-dogs have, as part of the specification of their present or future mandates and tasks, guidelines on how to deal with "non-cooperative" individuals or the capacity and potential (if not also the authorization) to do precisely that. It is reported that, in some...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 11, 2015
The Surprisingly High Value of Company Perks [Infographic]

Depending on whom you ask, company perks are either an invaluable piece of both talent acquisition and retention strategies, or they're a nice bonus -- definitely good to have, but not as important as, say, salary, or office culture, or great management. I myself have dealt with plenty of irate readers in the comments on posts I've written about perks. Some have told me I was crazy to imply that...

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Inside Recruiting Feb 10, 2015
5 Common Interview Questions That We Should Retire

Maybe they have been superseded by better alternatives, or maybe they serve no purpose, or maybe they have become so cliché that everyone knows the right answer, but whatever the case, some interview questions just need to be retired. Here are five of the most common questions we should get rid of: 1. "How Would You Deal With..." Hypothetical questions that ask the candidate to...

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The Use and Misuse of Your Unconscious Psychological Assessment Tools

Among the most important tools you bring to and use on your job are ones you may be unaware of having and using—especially when your job requires you to assess others, their skills and their tools. These unrecognized tools are "unconscious"—not in the way a carpenter's steel hammer is unconscious, but in the Freudian sense that even if you are fully or dimly aware of their existence, your...

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Are You Truly Giving Candidates a Great Experience?

Candidate experience matters: a bad one can damage a company's brand and profit margins alike. In 2012, CareerBuilder reported that 78 percent of candidates who had a bad experience with an employer would share that experience with friends and family; 32 percent of candidates would be less likely to purchase products from companies that gave them poor candidate experiences. But if you spend...

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Exploring Employee Referral Programs: Big Talent Pool, Short Timeframe

When it comes to sourcing candidates, a solid employee referral program (ERP) is one of the most effective places to start. Jobvite discovered that implementing a strong employee referral program in its recruiting process increased employee satisfaction; it also found that 46 percent of employees hired via referral stay for more than a year, 45 percent stay beyond two years, and 47 percent stay...

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What's the Ideal Format For a Job Advertisement? [Study]

Do you know if your job descriptions are optimized? Are they designed to maximize readability and (qualified) candidate engagement in the job market? Job advertisements are usually a bit of a gamble, aren't they? Usually, you write a job description, add all the required sections, spruce it up with some lively language, and then hope for the best. Now, however, we have insight into designing...

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Could a 4-Day Workweek Make Your Firm More Attractive to Talent?

Just when you thought it might be safe to go back into the talent market: this CareerBuilder/Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. study suggests that talent shortages are set to persist into 2015 and beyond, especially in IT, healthcare, and marketing, where the average monthly gap between job postings and hires is between 15,000-20,000 per position. You're going to have to further...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 30, 2015
How to Hire an Ethical Hacker

Just to be perfectly clear: we are not talking about hiring hackers to engage in unethical or illegal activity; this article looks at the process of hiring hackers who can engage in ethical and legal hacking assignments. Think of an ethical hacker as "a computer or network expert who systematically attempts to penetrate a computer system or network on behalf of it's owners for the purpose...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 29, 2015
Want to Retain Your Employees? First, Meet Their Impossible Demands

Let's start with some healthy alarmism: there's a good chance that a significant portion of your employees want to leave. Sorry. This is according to research from talent management software providers Saba and market-research firm Harris Interactive, Inc., which found that roughly one-third of employed adults in the U.S. are looking to leave their jobs in the next seven months. Other jobs data...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 29, 2015
Top 10 Predictions for Employee Referrals in 2015

2014 saw employee referral programs gain a lot of momentum as organizations tried to hire the best talent in the employment market without spending too much on recruiting. The biggest recruiting challenge for 2014 was gaining access to the pool of passive candidates, and this is where employee referral programs came in particularly handy. 2014 was also the year that social media finally entered...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 28, 2015
What if a Candidate Has No Social Media Footprint?

Everyone has a social media profile of some kind, right? Actually, no: as of September 2013, 73 percent of online adults were using social networking sites, which means that a significantly large portion of adults (27 percent) are off the Web's radar. What if one of these anti-social media adults becomes one of your candidates? Does it matter if they don't have a social media...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 27, 2015
Why Retailers Are Turning to Supplemental Workforces

Despite a disappointing Black Friday, last year's holiday shopping season wasn't all bad news. In fact, staffing and recruitment solutions provider Corporate Resource Services, Inc., (CRS) says the season was "more boom than bust" overall. Reports from the National Retail Federation suggest that CRS is correct: holiday sales rose 4 percent in 2014 to $616.1 billion. Alongside rising sales,...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 27, 2015
How to Recruit the New Generation of Top Sales Talent

Do you believe you understand millennials? Well, forget what you think you know about young talent and prepare to recruit the next wave of sales professionals: Generation Z. A recent report from Millennial Branding found that Gen. Z is more entrepreneurial than its millennial predecessors. Among those surveyed, 17 percent of Gen. Z respondents said they want to start their own business,...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 26, 2015
How Anonymous Applications Can Help You Diversify Your Workforce

Here's a great example of how not to look for new talent: Finnish startup Sportacam posted a job ad for a backend developer that included some misogynistic and homophobic language. Using this sort of language in an ad is crude, unprofessional, and just plain unnecessary. It can can alienate a large part of your client base -- would any woman or gay man feel comfortable in a workplace that used...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 23, 2015
3 Tips to Boost Quality of Hire During the 'Talent Crisis'

It seems that talent shortages -- or the debate about talent shortages -- are set to persist into 2015, if this recent survey from CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Speclaistis Intl. is anything to go by. The study charts both the demand for and supply of talent over the last 12 months in the U.S. Currently, the average monthly gap between job postings and new hires is sitting at 21,084 for...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 23, 2015
How to Hire Remote Workers Who Will Not Just Survive, but Thrive

It's hard enough to determine whether or not a candidate will be a good fit for a job after an in-person interview, but how can you be sure of candidates you never actually meet? For companies looking to hire remote employees, this is an issue that needs to be addressed, especially since 2.6 percent of the nation's employee workforce (3.3 million people) consider home their primary place of...

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Inside Recruiting Jan 21, 2015
Does GPA Matter?

Human resource professionals and universities have important roles in the hiring process for recent college graduates. Ideally, universities teach the requisite skills and evaluate student learning, while human research professionals screen by the educational institutions' assessment measures and ultimately hire based on a candidate's fit with the demands of a job. The selection process can...

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