Planing on doing some international recruiting? LinkedIn should be a part of the equation. Thanks to Link Humans, a social media marketing agency, for compiling a list of the top 10 countries per continent on LinkedIn. The firm says the figures were taken from LinkedIn’s own advertising engine which Link Human nots as, “not entirely reliable as well as official figures released with investor updates”.
Archive for the ‘social recruiting’ category
Acqui Hiring Gives Big Companies an Edge in Hiring Tech Talent
April 4th, 2013Rather than attempting to poach young tech talent away from their startup companies, major companies are increasingly turning to a form of acquisition known as “acqui-hiring,” the New York Times reported earlier this month.
In acqui-hiring, a larger company acquires a company while hiring the key personnel that attracted attention to the start-up in the first place. For example, Yahoo bought Summly, a mobile news reader app with a five-person staff and no revenue for $30 million. Apple purchased WiFiSLAM, a company that focuses indoor Wi-Fi and has just a few employees for $20 million.
You may wonder why these tech giants are purchasing the smaller startups outright instead of just hiring the founders or engineers themselves. This is especially perplexing when the buyer shut down the original product and has the new hires begin working on new projects. What’s more, non-compete arrangements are difficult to enforce in California, so there should be no problem poaching top-notch talent instead of buying their entire company just to gain access to their expertise and ideas.
A few factors will explain this acqui-hiring phenomenon. Talented engineers will not want to appear that they are being disloyal to the startup, let alone to the angel investors that helped them get started in the first place. Accepting a buyout lets the engineers continue to work on their innovative ideas while allowing the founders, investors and employees to reap large rewards.
There are also some tax advantages when a tech giant resorts to acqui-hiring. If a young tech company founder accepts a signing bonus to work for a bigger firm, he has to pay more taxes than if he sold his start-up for the same amount as the bonus.
Increases in acqui-hiring serve to indicate just how competitive the tech hiring market is for promising young talent. Larger tech companies are increasingly willing to buy other companies just to acquire the human capital.
Small and medium-sized business won’t have the resources to acqui-hire. This means that in order to compete with larger players such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo, smaller firms need to utilize other innovative and efficient methods to acquired the best talent out there.
For example, companies need to leverage all aspects of social media in their job recruitment process—by relying not just on LinkedIn and Facebook, but also Twitter, YouTube and blogs to spread the word. Smaller companies also need to pay attention to “simple” details like how long it takes to fill out an online application for employment. If it takes 60 minutes to fill out the application rather than a more reasonable five minutes, for example, promising tech talent will likely go elsewhere to seek work.
As more and more large companies turn to acqui-hiring to expand the products and services they offer, small and medium-sized businesses will need to step up their game in terms of recruitment if they want to remain competitive in the technology sphere.
Rather than attempting to poach young tech talent away from startup companies, the big players in the tech sphere are increasingly turning to a form of acquisition known as “acqui-hiring,” the New York Times reported earlier this month.
In acqui-hiring, a larger company acquires a smaller company while hiring the key personnel that attracted attention to the start-up in the first place. For example, Yahoo bought Summly, a mobile news reader app with a five-person staff and no revenue for $30 million. Apple purchased WiFiSLAM, a company that focuses indoor Wi-Fi and has just a few employees for $20 million.
You may wonder why these tech giants are purchasing the smaller startups outright instead of just hiring the founders or engineers themselves. This is especially perplexing when the buyers shut down the original product and have the new hires begin working on new projects. What’s more, non-compete arrangements are difficult to enforce in California, so there should be no problem poaching top-notch talent instead of buying their entire company just to gain access to their expertise and ideas.
A few factors explain the acqui-hiring phenomenon. Talented engineers will not want to appear that they are being disloyal to the startup, let alone to the angel investors that helped them get started in the first place. Accepting a buyout lets the engineers continue to work on their innovative ideas while allowing the founders, investors and employees to reap large rewards.
There are also some tax advantages when a tech giant resorts to acqui-hiring. If a young tech company founder accepts a signing bonus to work for a bigger firm, he has to pay more taxes than if he sold his start-up for the same amount as the bonus.
Increases in acqui-hiring serve to indicate just how competitive the tech hiring market is for promising young talent. Larger tech companies are increasingly willing to buy other companies just to acquire the human capital.
Small and medium-sized business won’t have the resources to acqui-hire though. This means that in order to compete for talent with larger players such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo, smaller tech firms need to utilize other innovative and efficient methods to discover and acquire the best talent out there.
For example, companies need to leverage all aspects of social media in their job recruitment process—by relying not just on LinkedIn and Facebook, but also Twitter, YouTube and blogs to spread the word. Smaller companies also need to pay attention to “simple” details like how long it takes to fill out an online application for employment. If it takes 60 minutes to fill out the application rather than a more reasonable five minutes, for example, promising tech talent will likely go elsewhere to seek work. Essentially they need their hiring process to be smooth, efficient and inviting.
As more large companies turn to acqui-hiring to expand the products and services they offer, small and medium-sized businesses will need to step up their recruiting games if they want to remain competitive in the technology sphere.
Tips on Avoiding Bad Hires
February 15th, 2013With advances in technology, human resources managers and recruiters have access to streamlined methods to locate and recruit potential job applicants. However, almost half of all new employees are not meeting the requirements of their jobs in the first year and half of employment, according to data from hiring managers reported in research carried out by Leadership IQ.
The hiring system is failing, according to a recent article in Business Insider, which cites statistics showing that a bad hiring decision can cost an organization from 20 percent to 200 percent of an employee’s annual salary. What’s more, bad hires result in lowered office morale and hinder productivity. Once bad hires get involved in office politics, it can be more difficult to fire them.
The problems only get deeper: workers who see their top managers making mistakes in hiring people can lose respect for the company and its procedures. They may wonder if the company has lowered its standards or if hiring managers are just asleep at the wheel.
Recruitment and applicant tracking systems certainly have made it far easier to manage a tidal wave of hopeful job candidates. Recruiters and HR personnel should always still be aware that hiring is a constantly evolving space. Old methods employed by hiring managers may not work as well anymore to truly secure the best talent in any given industry. While harnessing the latest trends, like social media, can be benificial to finding promising candidates, empoloyers need to make sure that there is room for human judgment as well through all stages of finding new hires.
Savvy job seeks may employ less than truthful tacticts if they are desperate to get a foot in the door at your HR department. Software helps disorganized applicants churn out stellar-looking resumes. However, aspiring workers can hire a resume consultant to bolster their appearance with the latest keywords that HR departments use to help them select which resumes are worth looking at and which ones are destined for the garbage can.
Once a manager has a set of resumes to examine in-depth, the filtering process may have problems. Some HR workers, frazzled by the workload they face, may select applicants at random from the stack of “good” resumes instead of evaluating each one on its merits. Or, even if they do take time to give each filtered resume a fair shake, they might focus on past experience rather than seeing which applicants can think on their feet and solve problems during an interview.
It’s also important to remember that extroverted people tend to do better in interviews, and a biased interviewer may not see that a less gregarious person is far more qualified for a position. If you are going to use keywords to filter resumes, make sure that you aren’t accidentally omitting terms that you do want to see. For example, using only the word “manager” might keep you from seeing a narrative resume that talks about how a person managed people or worked in management.
Once human resources managers and recruiters recognize the need to change the way they discover, filter and evaluate job applicants to fill key positions in their organizations, they will be well on their way to limiting the amount of bad hires they make. This requires both utilizing the best technology available to filter incoming applicants, as well as employing savvy hiring managers to make integral decisions when required.
With advances in technology, employers have access to streamlined methods to locate and recruit potential job applicants. However, almost half of all new employees are not meeting the requirements of their jobs in the first year and half of employment, according to data from hiring managers reported in research carried out by Leadership IQ.
The hiring system is failing, according to a recent article in Business Insider, which cites statistics showing that a bad hiring decision can cost an organization from 20 percent to 200 percent of an employee’s annual salary. What’s more, bad hires result in lowered office morale and hinder productivity. Once bad hires get involved in office politics, it can be more difficult to fire them.
The problems only get deeper: workers who see their top managers making mistakes in hiring people can lose respect for the company and its procedures. They may wonder if the company has lowered its standards or if hiring managers are just asleep at the wheel.
Recruitment and applicant tracking systems certainly have made it far easier to manage a tidal wave of hopeful job candidates. Recruiters and hiring Managers should always be aware that hiring is a constantly evolving space. Old methods employed by hiring managers may not work as well anymore to truly secure the best talent in any given industry. While harnessing the latest trends, like social media, can certainly be beneficial to find promising candidates, employers also need to make sure that there is room for good old fashioned human judgment through all stages of finding new hires.
It’s good to keep in mind savvy job seeks may employ less than truthful tactics if they are desperate to get a foot in the door at your HR department. Certain resume software solutions can help disorganized applicants churn out stellar-looking resumes. Job seekers can also hire a resume consultant to bolster their appearance with the latest keywords that HR departments use to help them select which resumes are worth looking at and which ones are destined for the garbage can.
Once a manager has a set of resumes to examine in-depth, the filtering process may also have problems. Some hiring managers, frazzled by the workload they face, may select applicants at random from the stack of “good” resumes instead of evaluating each one on its own merits. Or, even if they do take time to give each filtered resume a fair shake, they might focus on past experience rather than seeing which applicants can think on their feet and solve problems during an interview.
It’s also important to remember that extroverted people tend to do better in interviews, and a biased interviewer may not see that a less gregarious person is far more qualified for a position. If you are going to use keywords to filter resumes, make sure that you aren’t accidentally omitting terms that you do want to see. For example, using only the word “manager” might keep you from seeing a narrative resume that talks about how a person managed people or worked in management.
Once hiring managers and recruiters recognize the need to constantly evolve the way they discover, filter and evaluate job applicants, they will be well on their way to limiting the amount of bad hires they make. This requires both utilizing the best technology available to find and filter incoming applicants, as well as employing savvy hiring managers to make integral decisions when required.
Recruiter Roles are Evolving with Technology and Social Media
February 1st, 2013
Facebook’s value to recruiters as a tool for discovering promising new job candidates will get a boost now that the social networking behemoth has announced the release of its new Graph Search feature.
Graph Search, currently available in a limited beta program for testing, is a search engine running inside of Facebook. It is designed to let ordinary Facebook users find answers to queries such as, “French restaurants in San Francisco my friends have eaten at” or “videos of my friends’ birthday parties.”
Savvy recruiters know that they have to keep up with developments in technology and social media if they want to find the best candidates for the positions they are trying to fill. Sites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter offer a treasure trove of information about potential candidates. They enable employers and recruiters to follow connections as they search for professionals to fill important positions.
Facebook’s Graph Search should provide value to recruiters because it will enable them to search the social network for candidates who have profiles that align with employer needs, according to Work4Labs CEO Stephane Le Viet’s recent guest post, “Graph Search And Online Recruiting: How Facebook Is Transforming An Industry,” at Forbes magazine.
Le Viet notes, for example, that the Hard Rock Cafe could use Graph Search to help it fill positions in a new Tokyo outlet by targeting Tokyo residents who have said they like rock music.
Facebook’s value to recruiters becomes even more evident when you consider that you can focus on specific keywords and dive deeper into data about the candidates you discover. The recruiter will see details about the candidate’s education, job history and what motivates and interests them, Le Viet says, without necessarily having to even review a resume.
As potential job candidates spend more of their time on sites like Facebook, it makes sense to look for them there. This is where there personas, skills and interests are truly on display. If the open position relies on the candidate being tech savvy, checking up on how they present themselves via online profiles can be very demonstrative to their abilities. For example, you can see how helpful or knowledgeable a candidate is as he offers (admittedly self-serving) advice to people via Twitter or by posting comments on someone’s Facebook page.
It is a sure thing that social networks such as Facebook will change the way that you look for and recruit job candidates. Users are connected to one another in ways they they may not even realize, such as through shared interests or people in common. This may lead a discerning recruiter to discover candidates who are friends with people already working at the company and whose interests and skills line up with the requirements of the position. It is integral that those at the front lines of recruiting keep up with the latest web technologies – in particular the big social media platforms like Facebook.
Facebook Finally Going to Give LinkedIn a Run for Their Money?
July 18th, 2012
Image from Crunchbase
LinkedIn better board the windows. Social giant Facebook is rumored to be close to releasing a job advertising service later this summer, according to a report by the WSJ. “Facebook Jobs” will be an aggregator that pulls in job postings from third party providers and makes them available in one place and creates a searchable database of jobs for users to browse. If the rumors are true, this could be a wildly popular service for many of Facebook’s 900,000,000 registered users.
The WSJ reports that Facebook plans to use the job postings service to boost engagement metrics initially, it most definitely will look to monetize recruiting as a revenue stream eventually creating a giant, cash-rich competitor for sites like Indeed and SimplyHired as well as LinkedIn and other more traditional recruiting services vendors. This will create another much needed revenue source for Facebook, which is dependent primarily on social ads and virtual payments at present.
With corporate job data, Facebook could the use social fabric it has created on users to target relevant jobs across its expansive network and could potentially provide a powerful global recruiting solution that will almost instantly rival LinkedIn. Many in the talent acquisition community are welcoming the competition as LinkedIn has become expensive and since going public has tried desperately to monetize every bit of their data creating what some call an “unsocial social network”.
Let the games begin.
working on a job postings board that will launch later this summer, according to a report by the WSJ. “Facebook Jobs” will be an aggregator that pulls in job postings by third party providers and makes them available in one place and creates a searchable database of jobs for users to browse.
Newton Applicant Tracking Software Going Social
July 15th, 2012
Newton Applicant Tracking Software Goes Social
Who knew that Newton Software, the creators of popular corporate applicant tracking software, have a skunk works lab outside of the Bay Area churning out new features? A source tells HiringSciences.com that there are at least two (likely more) developers working full time on Newton’s new social suite.
Dubbed Newton Labs, the team is gearing up to release the first of several features that will fulling integrate with Newton’s recruiting software and empower employers to engage and attract applicants through mainstream social channels.
Interesting podcast on June 18th: Can Social Recruiting Cause Discrimination and Equal Opportunity Employment Issues?
June 8th, 2010
There’s been a ton of hype around social recruiting lately. But, there hasn’t been much talk about compliance and the OFCCP and EEOC are so far behind the times that they’re not going to be quick to set any sort precedent in the near term but, they’ll get to it. Clearly, social recruiting should be a part of every company’s recruiting strategy and for the most part, it has.
So, how is social recruiting going to impact compliance? Find out on the June 18th NED podcast when Joel Passen will be interviewing Dr Stephanie Thomas, the Director of the Equal Employment Advisory and Litigation Support Division of Minimax Consulting.
When: Friday, June 18th at 8:30am PDT
Where: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/newton-software
Dial in to listen live: (646) 727-1372
Listen anytime: http://www.newtonsoftware.com/blog/category/ned/
About NED: NED is a series of web-based discussions sponsored by Newton Software, makers of Newton, popular, easy-to-use applicant tracking software. Instead of creating boring white papers and hosting ho-hum webinars, Newton chose to create a radio program that showcases recruiting industry influencers and innovators who share their tips, tools, techniques and knowledge with the recruiting community.
