ERE community

I'm gonna be real honest here. For the 10+ years that I was a corporate recruiter, I ran lousy staffing meetings.

If you're anything like me, you'd rather be talking to people about jobs, fixing problems, or best yet, filling jobs rather than playing with spreadsheets. I loathed entering data on Friday afternoons just so I could get a report to my boss. The data was accurate, right? Sigh.

Staffing meetings were the bane of my existence (other than "turn downs" of course). I always felt a little defensive during staffing meetings. The quality of my work ...

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I'll be in your area tomorrow. I could see you at 10 or 11. Which would you prefer?

If I could show you a way to increase your salary by 50%, would you be interested?

I was given your name by someone who highly recommended that we speak.

I've been working a confidential search for a direct competitor of yours.

We've all either used or been on the receiving end of these ancient and hackneyed lines. Back in the bad old days, when aluminum siding was new, pretty much every sales person used lines like these. Sales ...

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Mark and I have completed our numbers crunching for about 180,000 hires we collected from 40+ firms last month and we will publish our 9th Source Of Hire whitepaper probably by the end of next week- we're writing it now.

An early peek at the data will be discussed privately in an "open mike" webinar with survey respondents and CareerXroads colloquium members before the end of the month but an ERE webinar next week (2/17) will be the first public look at the current SOH data.

In addition to collecting data about how firm's hire, we ...

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The other day, Melanie Benwell of Poly Placements tweeted:

What do you think of candidates who take 6-12 months off to travel or re-energize before starting their job search?  Does it question drive?

and 

1 or 2 months I can understand but anything over 6 months I see as a red flag = lack of focus/drive etc.

I was surprised by Mel's take on work gaps, and since I know her to be a successful, experienced recruiter, it got me thinking.

Are resume gaps a red flag?

A couple of years ago I read an article which said that ...

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Read more about the Urban Recruiter.

Postmortem 2009 – Like most of us, we can act as if 2009 did not happen and that last year was just a bad dream. We would like to believe that we were hibernating in 2009 like Han Solo in the movie Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and we had just been recently thawed out from our nightmares. Sounds like a sci-fi movie, hardly.

A few days ago, I was sitting in my living room watching one of my usual TV stations (ESPN, Travel Channel, Discovery, Food Network, & CNN) when anAllstate Commercial came ...

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A controversy is brewing between one recruiting consultant, Jeremy Eskenazi, and another, H. Martin de’Campo, who Eskenazi says took his work on a significant corporate recruiting project and passed it off as his own. De’Campo says this was merely a mistake by an intern.

First, a rundown of who’s who here. De’Campo is the endearing executive searcher, passionate diversity speaker, and consultant whose company is called Humanatek. He has written and spoken for ERE and commented on the ERE.net site. On LinkedIn, he is “connected” to many of the big names in the recruiting field ...

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Read more about the Urban Recruiter.

Tired and burnt out? Trying to keep your drive and always reminding yourself to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, always seeing the light in the distant future can feel like you are running on a hamster wheel and getting nowhere. As many of you know, the nature of recruiting is like a roller coaster. It has its highs and lows, twist and turns, and you sacrifice your blood, sweat and tears.  And if you give a damn, there will be tears.

Trying to overcome disappointment, challenges and even boredom ...

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by Nanci Lamborn - Writer/Blogger/HR Practitioner - BrightMove Recruiting Software

The forbidding yellow file lurked in my chair as I walked into my office, a file made all the more daunting by the Pink Form of Woe just visible from the corners within the folder.

Bob’s personnel file. I knew it sat on my chair for one reason only. Bob’s manager had given up. Today would be Bob’s separation day, and could feel myself beginning to grow defensive as I sat down and read over the notes written on the Pink Form of Woe from Bob’s ...

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Listen to podcast here.

In this installment of The Proactive Employer, Stephanie R. Thomas, Ph.D., Director of the Equal Employment Advisory and Litigation Support Division (EEA/LS) of Minimax Consulting, outlines ten tips for examining the question of whether your employees are ‘fairly' compensated. While these tips cannot replace a comprehensive self-audit of compensation, they provide a launching point for collecting the information required for the audit, and open the dialogue of compensation equity.

About Minimax Consulting:

Minimax Consulting is a full service consulting firm providing quantitative services across a wide variety of industries. The Equal Employment Advisory and ...

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As an HR professional, you have a good grasp of the basic rules surrounding compliance for your new hire paperwork collected during the onboarding process. You have many different deadlines to meet depending on the form in question (I-9, W4, etc). Each document has to be checked for errors and omissions before you submit it to the appropriate agency or file it in case of a future audit.

The question you may not have asked yourself is (or may not have asked yourself recently): "What happens if my organization doesn't get these steps right?"  In this blog, we'll ...

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Business success in the 2009 economy?   Yes...and here's why.

By Paul Austermuehle

What drives business prosperity?  Is it new ideas?  Better ideas?  Customer-centric ideas? 

And what kind of culture works best as a springboard for new ideas?  Especially in a business climate that is both volatile and dynamic?

In a broad-based research study conducted by Bernard Hodes Group during the latter half of 2009, we heard loud and clear that companies see employee engagement as a key driver of new market solutions. 

The survey data is remarkable in that more than 30% of the organizations responding were actually ...

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The year was 1994 and something called a job board was being launched- specifically CareerMosaic, named after the web browser credited for popularizing an old thing called the Internet.

In a meeting with top executives, Bernard Hodes, a brilliant marketeer  and the CEO of the agency that bore his name, shared his rationale for  creating the pricing structure for his  new  category of recruitment  advertising.

"We’ll price the postings as a $100 add-on with any newspaper ad” he said. (At the time a 1” by 3” classified ad in the NY Times on Sunday was probably about $1,500 ...

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Wendell Williams loves to talk about how expensive the wrong hire can be, but this article from the New York Times points out a real, direct, measuarable cost that is a multiple of a person's salary or wage.   

I was reviewing my job search log for the past 12 months and could not believe that I had applied to over 150 jobs in that period.  It then occurred to me that very few recruiters actually followed up with me other than sending the Thanks for your Resume e-mail.  My frustration grew. "How could recruiters be so inconsiderate?"

It seemed to me that recruiters should, at a minimum, let a candidate if the company was interested.  After all, it's common courtesy.  Companies say that employees are their greatest asset, often making job seekers complete exhaustive job applications and ...

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If you are looking for a role or a promotion in today's economy you must understand how to make yourself stand out.Developing a personal brand could be the key to making yourself more marketable. Noone is more brand conscious than celebrities,just like corporate brands recruiters must leverage themselves and their names.

Creating a signature brand that is recognizable and uniquely yours can put you on the map.So,if you are not Trump,Oprah or Diddy how do you establish your personal brand?

Establish a personal brand by:

• Define who you are and who you aren't ...

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I find that a lot of professionals don't necessarily guide every facet of their careers. Often, when a generalist becomes a specialist or we take on a specific project, we by default become "experts" while learning and implementing our expertise on the project.

Why do I say this? Well, in the course of my career, I have been heavily involved in the technology sector, and as such, I adopt new technology pretty quickly. Not always an early adopter (usually timing is the factor), but effective. Last year I started using Twitter as a professional tool. And I've been ...

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A leader is a tone-setter, responsible for bringing people together and setting a model of attitude and behavior. It’s the reason social movements form around charismatic luminaries, and the greatest football teams always have headstrong quarterbacks. Without a CEO who lives and embodies the brand, customers will not buy into it.

So if a CEO is the figurehead of a company’s brand, who is the figurehead of a company’s employer brand? You might guess HR or Marketing, when in fact it is again, the CEO.

Whether you subscribe to BRANDEMiX “1 brand” theory of corporate strategy or ...

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For those of you that missed our recent webinar - 7 Deadly Sins of Waste in Recruiting - -one 'deadly sin' always seems to drive a lot of feedback/discussion - Overproduction / Inventory!

In the Lean Six Sigma world, the word "Overproduction" is defined as "Production ahead of demand". The word, "Inventory" is defined as all components, work in process and finished product not being processed.

Arguably these are the biggest offenders to creating waste and . . . the time/cost required to eliminate them.

Examples of these areas of waste in talent management and solutions:

• Overproduction/inventory in postings. Most organizations, as part of ...

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Welcome to 2010.  If anybody is interested, we have published an article discussing our views on near term changes in the RPO space.

http://www.talentfusion.com/pdfs/What_is_next_for_Recruitment_Process_Outsourcing1.pdf

Would love to hear comments.