This will be my last post as the RecruitingFly guy. I have decided to sell the Recruitingfly.com site & blog to the King of all Recruiting Bloggers, Joel Cheesman. I am now his loyal subject.

Fear not though. I will not be retiring from the blogging business. My readers will now be able to browse my musings on the official blog of Jobs in Pods. As that business has taken off, I thought it would be best to concentrate my prose so as to give as much exposure to my jobcasting product as possible. Therefore, I will be refining my topics and concentrating more on information as it relates to the future of recruiting, namely;

• Social networks as recruitment tools
• Using blogs to recruit
• The emergence of employer video & audio
• Other new recruiting techniques

I started this blog to promote other recruiting blogs and raise awareness of myself and my businesses. After 15 months or so, I think I've been able to do that. It's been a fun ride being the RecruitingFly Guy.

The recruiting landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift right now. Jobs in Pods is but a piece of this new dynamic, and so I plan to share it with the online recruiting world.

Stay tuned.

Labels: Pot luck

A lot of money just changed hands for a web site directory. I dont know anyone who uses business.com. Do you?

Business.com has closed another chapter in its long journey from a $7.5 million million domain name bought on a hope and a prayer, selling to RH Donnelley for $350 million (WSJ reporting up to $360 million). RH Donnelley beat out Dow Jones and the New York Times during the bidding. The site had been on the chopping block since late June and drew a lot of attention for outlandish valuations that turned out to be closer to the truth. Continued at TechCrunch

Labels: Pot luck

I just finished listening to this great podcast with LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman. If you get a chance give it a listen. There lots of valuable startup advice and interesting stories. He also talks about his time at PayPal.

Labels: Pot luck

Ok, here's a new tool to help you evaluate a candidates salesmanship skills. Apparently its only for car salesman. Wonder if they will create one for other types of products.

Car Sales Simulator® from Hire the Winners LLC allows any dealer to find and recruit the best salespeople 24/7, by placing car sales applicants into the shoes of a sales rep and getting a profile of their performance before making a hiring decision.

Atlanta, GA PRWEB February 20, 2007 -- The Car Sales Simulator® is changing the way car dealers hire salespeople. Since its launch, two years ago, over 1,500 simulations have been completed by car dealers across the nation. The Car Sales Simulator®
(www.hirethewinners.com) has helped dealers slash turnover costs by putting the proper focus on the hiring process by providing a systematic, cost-effective way for dealerships to identify and hire top sales candidates by having them take a multiple-choice, online assessment featuring video clip simulations of various customer situations. The Car Sales Simulator® measures their aptitude for the car business allowing dealers to see what a prospective, auto sales, job candidate can do as opposed to what they say they can do.

Recognizing the incredibly high turnover rate of auto salespeople (upwards of 50% - NADA 2006 Survey), Hire the Winners LLC has developed a totally new, first of its kind, automotive specific, interactive simulation designed to screen sales prospects, evaluating their suitability for selling cars, identifying the strong candidates while also identifying those prospects better suited for employment elsewhere.

Test-taking job candidates are cast in the role of an automotive sales rep faced with trying to sell cars to virtual, on-screen customers. By watching video sequences and selecting what to say and which questions to ask, job applicants probe the customer's needs; suggest an appropriate vehicle; take them on a test drive; and defend the purchase recommendation amid customer concerns and objections; and even dealing with them when they get a bit testy; all the while interacting with a hard-charging sales manager looking to protect his margins. One misstep by the job candidate and customer's are out the door. If the customers do leave, the applicant has to decide how aggressively to pursue them to get them back in. Like in the real world of auto retailing, the test-taking, job candidate must seek a win-win solution that offers a fair deal resulting in a sale.

On completion of the 25-minute simulation, prospects are graded on their responses and their scores are compared to sales leaders in the auto industry, identifying test takers with real sales skill and aptitude. Results are immediately available to dealers for their review.

Labels: Pot luck

by Liam Dowds

Introduction
I think most of us accept that people are an organisation's most important asset. So why is it that for all of us (employer, candidate - even recruitment agency!) the simple job of people recruiting other people is often a less than pleasant experience?

For the truth is, recruitment is not something many people look forward to getting involved in; nor is it an industry held in particularly high regard. Yet still it remains a vital activity; the process of attracting and then successfully bringing in talent into an organisation. Everyone has need of the service at one time or another: either in our role as an employer or as a candidate. Recruitment, therefore, impacts everyone - personally! So why - if all of us have a vested interest in making recruitment work - does it so often fail to do so?

Consider some of the following:

Service
I think that whilst we may all want to receive good service, we don't always give it! It may be because we're too busy and we lack the time and resources. Yet, if we're honest, too often we fail to give recruitment and the people involved in it, the attention it needs and deserves.

Whether we're the Line Manager, the HR or Recruitment Manager, the candidate or the recruitment consultant; bottom line we don't give each others' interests enough consideration and attention. Usually, we're easily convinced our recruitment problems lie with the other party, rather than with ourselves.

We're all candidates, aren't we?
In particular, not enough consideration is given to where candidates' are coming from; their issues. And this is where a lot of recruitment goes wrong.

It's as if recruitment can only be employer-centric or candidate-centric, but somehow it can't be both.

In most cases, the recruitment process will be skewed towards the needs of the employer, with the candidates' interests often overlooked. This can result in needlessly negative candidate experiences: failure to acknowledge receipt of CV, unexplained delays, a lack of feedback etc. As well as causing unnecessary anxiety to the candidate, it inevitably affects their perception of the company; both as an employer and as a future customer for their goods and services. Not a smart move, in an age when it's increasingly recognised that a company’s "brand values" should be core to everything they say and do.

And it's not as if we don't know that this is what's going on out there; all we need do is look to our own experience as a candidate to recognise it's true!

In fact, if we look at it another way: isn't an employer really only a candidate who happens to be recruiting? Shouldn't all of us, therefore, be treating candidates the way we'd like to be treated as a candidate?

Yet all too often it appears we forget what it's like being a candidate once we're the employer. Forgetting that recruitment is very much a two way process; candidates choosing employers every bit as much as employers choosing candidates.

Treat candidates like customers
Employers, if they're to recruit more successfully, should try to manage their candidates with the same skill, care and attention as they lavish upon their customers. For, as with customers, candidates are no different in that they'll prefer to go where they get the best service.

Simply put: the quality, style and speed of the recruitment process and the message it sends out to candidates, can often be just as important as the salary and job opportunities on offer.

It's a competitive marketplace
Some employers may overlook the fact that they're in a competitive marketplace; competing with other employers, often for the same candidates.

Before an employer can make the choice as to the best person to hire, they must first attract candidates to apply to their vacancy. But that's only the start; since it's likely these same candidates will apply or have already applied to other vacancies with other companies as well.

Important therefore, but often forgotten, is continuing to attract those candidates all the way through the recruitment process. Otherwise, a candidate risks being lost to the competition and the process repeated all over again at great cost both in time and money.

Conclusion
There are many past wrongs with which candidates, employers and recruitment agencies can legitimately use as reasons for blaming each other for the current mess; but it doesn't solve the problem of trying to turn recruitment into a more pleasant experience…for everyone.

However, no matter how galling it may be for those employers previously wronged, it is they who remain best placed to influence everyone else's behaviour - perhaps more so than they realise.

For, ultimately, it is the employer who appoints an agency to act on its behalf and it is the employer who pays their fee. And, as always - money talks!

Employers, I'm convinced, really can exert greater influence than they do. Ensuring the level of service delivered in their name is of an acceptable standard and rigorously enforced. If an employer recruits directly, they need to be confident that the appropriate processes are in place to ensure each party receives good service; both internally between Line Managers and the HR/Recruitment team and externally between the employer and the candidate.

Finally, I don't for a moment suggest these issues are for employers' to resolve on their own. It's also abundantly clear that recruitment agencies as well as candidates need to get their act together and be more honest with each other and with employers'.

However, I'm certain we'll never break the cycle of poor recruitment experience without employers' taking the lead, since they're the only ones with any real influence. For ultimately, it's the employer who calls the shots in terms of deciding strategy, who to use and who to pay! They really do have more influence than they may think.

I'd encourage them, therefore, to take a lead which the rest of us follow; using their influence to promote and reward the giving of good service...to everyone.

Only then will all of us be more confident of receiving (nay, insisting upon!) good service in return.

Liam Dowds is a Director of CIRCLe, the Executive Search & Selection firm behind CIRCLeRecruiter: a web based recruitment service which makes recruitment a more pleasant experience…for everyone.

Labels: Other bloggers, Pot luck

The RecruitingFly.com vertical search engine is now new and improved.

In addition to crawling over 190 recruiting & HR blogs, the site now includes results from mainstram recruiter resources like shrm.org, hr.com and workforce.com. It's also now powered by Google Co-op, their custom search engine technology.

Now when you do a search for things like recruiting software, you'll get results from the full spectrum of sites. Then you'll be able to refine your search by filtering results from blogs, news sources like hr.com, or directories like recruitersnetwork.com.

These new sites represent a powerful new way to search the places where recruiters & HR people congregate. We hope you enjoy this new resource.

ATTENTION VENDORS: you can now add your company web site to our search engine. Click here for details.

Labels: Pot luck

This post has nothing to do with recruiting but I thought it was so cool that I had to share.

There's a wiz kid named Jefferson Han who has created a new kind of touch screen operating system that is blowing the minds of techies everywhere. Just watch the video and see for yourself. If you want to learn more there's a story on him the the February edition of Fast Company.

Labels: Pot luck

File this under the strange but true category...I've heard of dancing with the stars but not dancing for the job!

Candidates for a job at a DIY store were made to dance to a Michael Jackson song when they went for their interviews.

One candidate said he felt "humiliated" as he and other interviewees at the B & Q store in Norwich were asked to perform to the Jackson Five's Blame It On the Boogie.

The interviews, which have been criticised by the GMB union, continued with the candidates being asked to pull funny faces so that managers could take pictures of them.

Although B & Q said yesterday that the dance routine was a voluntary exercise, candidates said this was not made clear to them.

Clive Hagon-Powley was one of eight hopefuls. "The first exercise we had to do was form a circle. Then we had to dance to Michael Jackson," he said.

"After that, we had to pull funny faces while the interviewers took photos.

"What this had to do with working for B & Q I do not know. I should have walked out then but I need a job.

"At 59 years old, the two hours were not among the best times I have had. I worked for the same company for 33 years before being made redundant and this was my first 'proper' interview for a new job. I felt totally disillusioned."

Another of the candidates, Rodney Southern, 35, from Martham, Norfolk, added: "I thought I was going to be tested on maths and English.

"Obviously, that is not important at B & Q – dancing is. If I had not needed a job so badly, I would not have done it.

"I don't mind a laugh and a joke but I didn't expect that at a job interview. I was humiliated."

full article >>

Labels: Pot luck

Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com is now the public face of his new site for baby boomers called Eons. We've been seeing a lot of his commercials on TV lately. It may be a little over the top with the whole "Boom, boom, boom" thing but watch for yourself...

Labels: Pot luck, Videos