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Last we caught up with Dice, it had beat analysts’ expectations, and since then has enjoyed the competition over tech talent that doesn’t seem like it’s abating. Now, it’s announcing it’ll expand its reach through a deal with Dow Jones.

For one, Dice is buying the assets of FINS.com. FINS is a financial-careers oriented site, which dovetails with what Dice is involved with via its eFinancialCareers site. (Many people think of Dice as just its flagship tech site, but it also has sites for clearance jobs, healthcare jobs, and more.)

Dice is also partnering with Dow Jones & Company to operate its career centers, for both WSJ.com and MarketWatch.com.

During a six-month transition, Dow Jones will operate FINS.

The social recruiting hype went huge and has not burst, but mobile has followed a stealth, almost, cult adoption. Over the next 12 months the continued convergence of mobile and social will catapult mobile to the front of recruiters’ minds.

As an industry, recruitment is suffering the growing pains of mobile web. You know you need to support mobile, and reap the rewards of the powerful digital marketing and engagement channel, but it is not clear what the objective is, or how to go about it.

Is mobile the ultimate connectivity tool providing employer information and candidate communication? Or is it the new way to apply for jobs? Maybe it is the next best referral tool? Perhaps it is the ideal back-office device allowing the candidate database to be carried in your pocket! Perhaps the true jackpot mobile recruiting solution is still waiting to be discovered.

Recent research shows that 31% of the global $5.3 billion mobile advertising spend is to achieve market presence, while 25% is for lead generation. If recruitment followed the same pattern, this would be 31% for employer branding and 25% to attract applications; but today most companies have pushed mobile off the agenda in place of social media. The problem with this typical approach is social media is rapidly morphing into mobile! keep reading…

Did you hear News Corp. may buy Monster? How about how Manpower is pitching webinars to keep HR professionals out of jail? And, if that’s not enough to get you reading this, then try the cliche-riddled video entitled S*** Recruiters Say.

To answer our first question: We hadn’t heard the news about News Corp. and Monster since 2005 or maybe 2006, when we hacked old Rupert’s voicemail. Back then, his password was $$$$, which got us a few messages from Andy McKelvey explaining how you do this thing with the calendar and everybody gets rich off the options.

Now cometh The New York Times to report that in the breakup of News Corp., it might assign things it doesn’t own to a new publishing division. We are not making that up. The Times said: keep reading…

The site that “aims to do a bit of everything” is doing a bit more this morning. And it’s an interesting something more that takes its cue from direct hire recruiting.

Launching this morning, and only in metro New York, is GetHired‘s Job Seeker Spotlight. Five lucky, handpicked job seekers will get profiled in an email being sent to recruiters and hiring managers for their review. If they like what they see, they can reach out to the candidates and invite them to become applicants.

“The Job Seeker Spotlight is a conduit for job seekers to stand out and have hundreds of hiring managers learn about them in just a few hours, at no cost,” says Suki Shah, co-founder and CEO at GetHired.com.

It’s more of a macro match-up than anything really granular. Candidates are selected because of the thoroughness of their GetHired profiles, their locale, and their varied industries. Up to five a day will be featured, and, says GetHired’s Allison VanNest, all are quality candidates. keep reading…

Just about all of us are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow was a mid-20th century psychologist who studied the behavior of high-performing individuals. In a 1943 paper, he suggested that people make fundamental and predictable decisions based on different behavioral needs. These needs range from primitive; e.g., requiring water or food to being completely fulfilled. He separated these states into five distinct levels and referred to them collectively as a hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow, a person couldn’t move to a higher level unless the needs of the lower level were satisfied first.

While this is interesting stuff, the point of this article is to suggest that both people and companies have similar underlying needs, and when these are at cross purposes, hiring top people is inefficient, ineffective, and problematic.

A very simplified business version of Maslow’s hierarchy is shown in the diagram. The idea behind this is that when assessing a candidate’s motivation for work, it’s most likely one of three core needs: economic, social, or achievement. These are shown in the diagram. The problem is that while companies all want to hire those with the need to achieve, they only consider those who first have an economic need to apply, and second,  those among this group who the screeners believe also fit some idealistic and unspoken personality and first-impression standard. I’d suggest that this two-step, bottoms-up process, is at the root cause of why companies can’t hire enough top people. keep reading…

Sometimes I’m asked about the graphic of sheep on my website. Sheep will follow other sheep — regardless of the danger — and the flash analogizes the importance of breaking the herd mentality. A great example of herd mentality is an event at many rodeos called Mutton Bustin. There is a sheep held in the middle of the arena whose sole purpose is to get the other sheep to run to it. This is one of the best examples of herd behavior I know.

When it comes to recruiting and hiring processes many recruiting leaders look at the hiring practices of successful companies and assume the same will work for them. We often hear about successful companies like Google that are able to attract great talent. Many of us hear this and immediately want to emulate their hiring process. Is this an effective strategy?

Will Deep Pockets Get You the Best Recruiters? keep reading…

Beyond what I mentioned yesterday, here are some more bits o’ news and chatter from the SHRM conference in Atlanta.

Beyond.com, which runs local and niche sites like Phillyjobs.com, launched its version of “communities.” I’ve grown a tad skeptical of that word as its meaning has become as broad and vague as the word “empowerment.” But regardless of whether what Beyond is doing is truly a community, the portals/pages associated with them are actually pretty impressive. Here’s the one for the legal field, which involves articles, job listings, links to similar communities, and the ability to “follow,” a la Twitter. Beyond’s CEO tells me he’s trying to establish a third place — with LinkedIn being a professional site, Facebook a personal site, and Beyond.com a career and personal development site.

Speaking of communities: keep reading…

These are exciting times for the online recruiting industry: acquisitions (Jobs2Web, Bullhorn), IPOs (LinkedIn), and flame-outs (BranchOut). The majority of job boards I talk with are experiencing very strong business (and revenues), despite a frustratingly slow recovery. But there’s been a fly in the ointment (well, more than one, but I’ll leave those for another time).

Monster is having problems. A slumping stock price. Confusion in the boardroom. A publicly stated desire to sell itself. All this despite the fact that the company has an impressive client list, continues to launch new products and services (BeKnown, 6Sense, SeeMore), and employs many bright and capable people.

So the other day, I began wondering: what might happen if Monster vanished? No sale, no resurgence in health — just an ever-increasing death spiral that left the company bankrupt and unable to compete. Yes, I realize this is extremely unlikely. b=But it’s interesting to contemplate, nonetheless. keep reading…

Out here in Atlanta, the Society for Human Resource Management is having its annual conference. SHRM’s event, in case you’ve never been, is a big one, drawing more than 13,000 people, and featuring speakers like Condi Rice (fresh off her show-stealing Utah event) and Malcom Gladwell.

Here’s just a taste of the chatter from a few of the HR/recruiting vendors here. keep reading…

A recent survey reported that nearly half of all employers conduct social media background checks on job candidates. This practice has included requiring candidates to disclose their usernames, passwords, and other credentials that provide access to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, blogs, e-mail, and other Internet content for the prospective employer’s review.

Federal and state legislators have responded with a flurry of efforts to prohibit employers from requiring candidates to disclose their social network credentials. These efforts have included calling for federal investigations about the practice, introducing bills in Congress that would prohibit the practice, and numerous state legislators introducing and passing legislation that prohibits employers from requiring candidates to disclose their access credentials to the content posted on social media cites.

What should recruiters and hiring managers do? keep reading…

Compared to the extremely high levels of creativity and innovation that are found in marketing and product branding, the sourcing aspect of corporate recruiting would have to be given a grade of “F” when it comes to creativity and trying new sources. Using the benchmark standard, the CareerXroads annual survey of external hire sources, more than 90% of corporate hires come from traditional and well-established recruiting sources (i.e. referrals, job boards, the career site, direct sourcing, college career centers, social media, and career fairs). With the exception of possibly social media, you could hardly call any of these major sources “creative.”

In fact, because everyone uses them by definition, they can’t be creative — they are simply common. In order to be labeled as creative, sources have to be unique and infrequently used, as well as effective. For example, creative sourcing might include the use of contests, video games, radio, movie theater ads, billboards, and TV ads. Being creative in sourcing is essential for three basic reasons:

1. No competitive advantage – if everyone else uses the same sources as you do, your firm simply cannot gain a competitive advantage over your talent competitors. Being a unique user of an effective source does provide a competitive advantage.
2. Lost in the volume – when literally every corporation uses the same source, your message cannot easily stand out and get noticed, simply because of the volume of recruiting messages.
3. Active only sources – when you focus so much of your sourcing on active sources (i.e. job boards, print ads, and career fairs), you are failing to reach the 80% of employed individuals who are not actively looking for a job (i.e. the so-called passives). Most creative sources reach both non-lookers and active job seekers.

A List of 20 Proven “Creative Recruiting Sources” That Most Are Not Using keep reading…

It has been nearly three weeks since I wrote about BranchOut’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall here on ERE. But because of the speed at which this LinkedIn clone continues to disintegrate, an update seems to be in order. It is actually very impressive to see how fast things can unravel when a service apparently doesn’t deliver any real value and initial growth was only fueled by spammy registration tactics.

Since June 1, BranchOut is losing an average of 4.1% of its remaining monthly active users every single day! Its monthly active users currently stands at 3 million; less than two months ago it peaked at 13.9 million.

BranchOut monthly active users April 29 – June 23 Source - AppData, Facebook

Notwithstanding this impressive arterial bleed, BranchOut’s CEO Rick Marini continues to talk up his book and promotes BranchOut as a LinkedIn for the masses. Only the masses are running away from BranchOut, not toward it. In an interview on CNBC the question of plummeting numbers was asked to Marini, to which he responded that when you have success there always will be criticism … great deflection, but no answer. The guy clearly has had his fair share of media training. Sadly enough my inquiry of May 29 to BranchOut regarding this massive loss of users still remains unanswered.

What Is Exactly Happening With BranchOut?

This is a short history of BranchOut from the perspective of its monthly active users: keep reading…

As the Spring conference season comes to a close, it is hard to believe that in just a few months it will be September and time for the Fall ERE Expo in Hollywood, Florida. And the summer is just getting started! If you do not have this one on your calendar, you should figure out a way to get there, and it’s not just because I will be the conference chairperson.

In my 25 years in the recruiting industry, I cannot remember a more exciting time. As the technology landscape shifts from traditional Web-based applications to the social and mobile web, the recruiting space is leading the charge. It seems like there are new recruiting solutions emerging every week, giving us all opportunities to improve, advance, and evolve our profession. With all of the exciting innovations and new solutions for recruiters, now is the time to get out and interact with your colleagues in the industry to make sure you are part of the conversation.

If that is not enough to get you there, here are few highlights from the agenda to whet your appetite: keep reading…

Stress, hair parts, offer rejections, Groupon’s job seekers, background checking, and disabilities — we weigh in on all of them in today’s roundup.

Speaking of weight: the world’s people weigh a collective 316 million tons, of which 17 million tons is in excess globs of body fat. Who knew? Thanks to the researchers at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, now you do.

Wondering what this has to do with recruiting? Nothing, near as we can tell. (Oh, sure, we could have said hiring a fatty will mean time wasted snacking, since the average American needs almost 250 calories just to maintain the excess weight.) But we just thought this is great water cooler talk.

Now, here’s the skinny (no, we couldn’t, can’t, and won’t resist punning): North America has 6 percent of the world’s population, but carries 34 percent of the weight. Don’t go blaming Canada. The U.S. weighs in as the heaviest nation, where it takes a mere 12.2 adults to equal a ton. From now on, we’re counting how many people get on the elevator with us.

Food Stylists Are to Blame

It’s not our fault we eat too much. If those food stylists didn’t make all those dishes look so delicious, who’d eat them? It’s an up-and-coming profession that’s part of the seven awesomeist jobs we never heard of, says Brazen Careerist, a carer site for the under-30s.

keep reading…

As long as I can remember, there has been an ongoing discussion about the lack of transparency in the labor market. An improved transparency should lead to suppliers (job seekers) and buyers (employers) of labor being able to find each other easily. However, improved transparency will remain an illusion until we realize that the dominant recruiting model is precisely what makes for a non-transparent labor market. For the record, this is the passive model of recruiting where we publish a job opening and then wait for applications (post and pray).

Why Put the Burden on an Amateur?

Passive recruitment has the implicit expectation that job seekers are able to find the right job opening(s). But job seekers are certified amateurs when searching for and finding the right opening(s). Why? Because they only once look for a new challenge every two to five years. At this rate, they act like explorers that without any preparation go looking for the source of the Nile. Indeed, life-threatening.

Meanwhile, on the other side we (should) have a professional, the recruiter — who regularly has job openings and whose mission is to find the right people to fill those vacancies. But instead of going out and looking for people themselves they place vacancies on their own career site, on commercial job sites, with staffing agencies, on social media, and even in newspapers. To add to the complexity from the perspective of job seekers, job aggregators collect online job openings and starts front-running all previously mentioned sources … in other words, the jungle where the unprepared explorer must try and find his or her own way.

As a result, passive recruitment has a built-in guarantee for a very inefficient process with an unpredictable outcome. After filling the vacancy the gnawing question remains: Have we found the “ideal” person? And that while the same question doesn’t need to be asked if the recruiter would engage in active recruitment — going out to find the “right” person themselves.

keep reading…

You’ve written a compelling job ad that hits all the hot points. You’ve distributed it widely. You’ve even managed to get it high up on search results pages. Despite all that, the number of applications is disappointing.

What went wrong?

The problem, says CareerBuilder, could very well be technical. Bad links, computer or Internet difficulties, and cumbersome applications are the top reasons cited by interested candidates for not responding to a job posting. keep reading…

From working with recruiters for more than 20 years, I‘ve observed many styles and variations in their recruiting work habits. Some are hunters, some are farmers, and yes, some are clueless. But they all have the same goal: to make hires. I’ve seen some good practices that have been made apparent to me over the years.

Great recruiters don’t just automate the hiring process. They delve into it to find perfect candidates. And they are creative.

Suppose they are recruiting for an “application security analyst.” They search for the industry-related organizations or job certification-related organizations for the position, such as OWASP and CISM, and then search resume databases, LinkedIn, and ATS’s for places it is cited.

Amazing recruiters leave no stone unturned. When they search for a candidate and receive 100 resumes, they review every single resume, even after the position has been filled. That’s because an amazing recruiter knows that these resumes can be used for other positions.

Rock star recruiters learn to partner with their hiring managers and understand their business. keep reading…

In the war for talent, are you sitting comfortably behind the castle walls or conquering new territory? If you’re going to start storming the gates of your competitors, in my Game of Thrones-inspired metaphor, you’ll need the best and brightest on your side. The top talent who can help you build your company into a force to be reckoned with might not have gotten the memo to move nearby. Hiring locally just doesn’t cut it anymore.

If you’re only looking for talent in your own backyard, you’re missing out. Just because you’re missing this top talent doesn’t mean your competitors are as short-sighted. Many recruiters and hiring managers will turn away out-of-state candidates as soon as they see an unfamiliar zip code. If your company doesn’t see talented candidates out of the area as worth the time, those candidates will get swept up by someone else. In the war for talent, now you’re losing.

Times are changing and the conventional wisdom no longer applies. With over 8 percent unemployment, many candidates are giving far-flung companies a try. This could be the best time for you to get in on the ground floor of finding the top talent no matter what their geographic location might be. So let’s break down some of the common myths regarding long-distance candidates:

Myth: Candidates Won’t Relocate keep reading…