With the launch of Google’s latest efforts to socialize the web–Google Plus–there have been a lot of changes across the board. A few weeks ago core apps like Google Calendar and Google Docs got a face lift, as did the Google Search page and a number of product pages as well.
No doubt in the coming weeks we will have to recalibrate a few things. In the meamntime, the iGoogle set-up files for anyone who wants a recruiter-specific template have been updated too.
A number of new custom search engines have been added under the Sourcing tab and some new finds have been added to the Lookups tab. The Video tab has been expanded to include a lot more tutorials from favorites like Ryan Leary [BooleanBar.com], Chris Hoyt [RecruiterGuy], Jim Stroud, Bill Radin and others.
An excellent primer from Mark Stelzner of Inflexion Advisors via Laurie Ruettimen, founder of New Media Services. Worth an hour of your time…
Jobmagic has joined the growing number of vendors offering social media recruiting tools.
The company, the successor to job-match provider Vitruva, released a tool set for recruiters and employers that simplifies the distribution of jobs to social networking sites and spiffs up their appearance with logos, pictures, and even embeds You Tube videos.
Most of the features automate the job distribution to social and business networking sites and via Twitter channels. The graphic elements and the interactive components are differentiators in this growing area of social media servicing.
A Jobmagic posting can include a mini-profile to give candidates some confidence that there’s a real person somewhere out there who just might look at their application. Even better is a contact button that connects recruiter and candidate. I couldn’t find out how that’s done. IM would be really cool, but it’s probably a post to the recruiter’s or the company’s Facebook wall.
Somewhere out there, the Vitruva matching engine comes into play, alerting candidates in the Jobmagic system when they’re a good match to a job.
The other features of what Jobmagic is calling Social Media Optimization post the enhanced job listings to the various social networks, focusing, as you might expect, on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Jobvite launched a similar service not long ago. It does many of the same posting duties as Jobmagic, without the heavy branding emphasis. However, Jobvite leverages the network connections of recruiters and employees to seek out referrals in its own version of job matching. The bigger difference is Jobvite’s metrics, which can track where every candidate comes from and the referral chain that snared them. There’s even a free version called Jobvite Share.
If you don’t need all that horsepower, but want to do more than simply upload jobs to the social nets, Jobmagic looks like it has the chops to make the task easier while adding some creativity to your typical job posting.
The #socialrecruiting summit was a real blast and we’re looking forward to seeing you at the next one in Seattle (more details coming on that later).
Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:
- Nix the Laundry List: Job Ads That Kill
- Enough with old school thinking about job hopping
- How to Source from Facebook Status Updates
- Who is entitled to the fee?
- Concerns about data stored on US-based servers?
- 7 Habits of the Highly Effective Social Recruiter
1. Nix the Laundry List: Job Ads That Kill
Kevin Jenkins writes about job descriptions as de facto recruiting advertisements. He posts, “Requirements intensive (i.e., laundry list format) job ads serve no purpose other than to undermine your recruiting effort. They are pointless; that’s because a properly written job responsibilities section always delineates the skills needed to perform the work required and it does so much more effectively.
What do you think about these sorts of advertisements?
2. Enough with old school thinking about job hopping
Sandy Jones-Kaminski writes about how the old ways of thinking about job hopping are wrong. She says, “If a recruiter, HR person or hiring manager at a company you’re interviewing with gives you a hard time about the brevity of your employment with each company you’ve work for in, say, the past 5-10 years, politely thank them for their time, and either find another avenue into the company of your dreams, or just keep looking because in all likelihood that employer is not going to provide the right environment for YOU anyway.
Is old thinking about job hoppers holding your company back or is it simply a way to protect from unnecessary turnover costs?
3. How to Source from Facebook Status Updates
Shally Steckerl talks about sourcing via Facebook status updates. He writes, “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/
Give it a shot for your next search.
4. Who is entitled to the fee?
A forum member asks, “Our client ask us to find a contractor (HR professional)We produced a candidate that the client wants to hire, turns out unbeknownst to us, this candidate was in through another agency and offered the role and turned it down because the hourly rate offered to her was low.
“Now 5 months later we surfaced the candidate at a much high rate for a role that is 80% similar to the original role plus 20% more additional projects.
“Are we entitled to represent this contractor or advise our client to go back to the other agency.
What is your take?
5. Concerns about data stored on U.S.-based servers?
Another forum member asks, “We’re looking for a new system, and a number of the most popular are provided as a web based SaaS (Software as a Service). THis means the data is stored on the providers servers – and most are in the US.
“Here in Canada we have to guarantee the privacy of those whose information we have, and that we’re complying with all the provisions of Canada’s privacy legislation. But when our data is stored on a server in the US, my understanding is the Patriot act trumps Canada’s privacy legislation. So we’d be making privacy promises we can’t keep.
“Anyone else looked into this issue or have any thoughts?
6. 7 Habits of the Highly Effective Social Recruiter
The final word comes from Omowale Casselle goes Stephen Covey on us and talks about effective habits for social recruiting. He writes, “As more and more companies begin to utilize Social Recruiting to achieve their broader strategic recruiting objectives. An important consideration is, what makes an effective social recruiter?
1. Be Present-This means establishing a presence on sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & niche) that are important to your target audience. The key is to strike the right balance between heavily trafficked and niche sites. For each site that you join, you are going to have to spend lots of time establishing your presence.
Check out the rest of the post and seven habits and let him know what you think!
To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.
You want to be a G-Recruiter?
Consider it if you’re an independent, or work where Outlook is considered an ATS, or you track candidates on Post-Its and file resumes on your hard drive in the folder called “RESUMES.” Or you’re simply tired of working the way someone else thinks you should.
G-Recruiter, as its maker Amitai Givertz describes it, is a mash-up of free Google tools that automate most routine and many mundane recruiting functions. “G-Recruiters are people who combine Google’s free services and related tools to replace conventional recruiting products and services,” he proclaims on the G-Recruiter website, built, appropriately, on Google sites.
Using Google desktop, a browser (preferably Firefox), and such free Google services as Gmail, search, Google Docs, and its RSS reader, Givertz has built a powerful recruiter desktop that can be customized to the user’s tastes and needs. Remarkably, everything is free. Just as remarkably, Givertz has packaged all the essentials for easy downloading, and has posted a series of tutorials and videos that show you how to make everything work.
You do need some computer chops to assemble the pieces and customize it, but you don’t need to be a geek to do this.
“Nobody in their right mind would want to go through what I went through (to build this),” he confessed. “But it’s done, so it should be painless.”
Because this is a labor of love, rather than one of profit, you won’t find a step-by-step manual. Plan on spending a little time tinkering, especially if you’re not all that familiar with things like RSS, email filtering, or iGoogle. I promise you, these are easy tools. And if you do need help, there’s a Google Group full of G-Recruiters eager to assist.
What you have for your investment of time is a recruiter dashboard that can automatically conduct candidate searches, retrieve resumes, filter and file them, while you do other things. Inbound resumes are automatically processed, sorted, and the candidates sent an acknowledgment.
That’s just a sample. As your skill with the tools grows, you’ll find yourself adding elements and fine-tuning to streamline the work process to best fit your needs.
“What I’ve done is create a Frankenstein,” Givertz told me the first time we discussed G-Recruiter. “I heard about using Google at SourceCon and I thought I’d give it a try.” Piece by piece, over the course of a year, he cobbled together the parts that would become G-Recruiter.
He used Google because it was familiar to him (and nearly everyone else in the world), it is free, it has multiple tools, also free, continues to develop new ones, and it operates in the cloud, meaning everything is portable and nothing has to be maintained by the user, the way, say, a proprietary program would have to be.
When other recruiters saw what he had built, Givertz began giving it away. It wasn’t long before a community of G-Recruiters arose. Now they share tips, problems, and solutions. And they sing the praises of Mr. Recruitomatic and his desktop.
Typical is this from cloud recruiting evangelist Michael Marlatt: “Ami is doing some fantastic things around leveraging Google applications as a “one-stop-shop” (free) recruiting desktop that has yet to be matched by anyone in the industry. Impressive stuff…”
It was Marlatt’s 2008 SourceCon presentation that set Givertz on the path to becoming, as he says, “A bona fide cloud recruiter and G-Recruiter.”
Givertz funds his project with donations and a $15 a head charge to get a recording and copies of handouts from his G-Recruiting webinars. (You can attend them, for, what else, free.)
Whatever that doesn’t cover, he pays for himself. His other job is running AMG Management Advisors, a salesforce development and talent management firm, that among other services, conducts specialized candidate searches. His other, other job is running Brown Bag Recruiter, a recruiter training site, that, like most everything Givertz does, is mostly free.
This tutorial demonstrates one of many online tools shared in the webinar series Untangling the Web: Recruiting with Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and most everything in between…
