Archive

Why Your Workday Needs a Visual Soundtrack: The internet and TV seem to go together. Call it the work habit of the twenty-first century, but more people are using both at the same time. Add to that a mash-up of work and life, which has many of us plucking away at Blackberries and iPhones to keep pace with the office while on vacation or at the dinner table, and it’s clear that the television is becoming an essential component of our workforce.

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Financial Firms Get Hiring Bump: As the employment market flirts with recovery, look for entry-level positions in the financial services industry to show plenty of potential. This summer, new hires for these junior positions are expected to surge between 20 percent and 50 percent relative to the same period last year. Even if this is based on the depressed employment levels of 2009, it is nonetheless an impressive growth rate – and one that will put a considerable strain on corporate recruiters in the financial business.

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A New Recruiting Opportunity with LinkedIn: Competition in the social media space benefits everyone in the talent supply chain – candidates, hiring managers and corporate recruiters. As the major platforms compete for users and look for ways to increase their traffic, they’ve been rolling out new features. LinkedIn, in particular, has been pursuing this agenda rather aggressively, and its latest enhancement speaks directly to increasing action on its network for the talent market in a tough employment market.

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Scarce Talent: Learn Your Alternatives: Unemployment doesn’t always equate to available talent. For highly specialized positions, an economic downturn does little to alleviate the pressure on corporate recruiters to source candidates with unique, coveted skills. The only solution is to have what amounts to a succession plan for key roles in your company, not just for the executive suite. Fundamental to this effort, of course, is to know every corner of your market. If you know the intricacies of the talent market for scarce skills, you’ll have an advantage when it’s time to fill open reqs.

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What Motivates Job-Seekers?: There’s a lot of talk about social media and the job hunt these days. A combination of new channels and a still high rate of unemployment have made job-seekers more resourceful and hyper-sensitive to any opportunity to catch a corporate recruiter’s attention – however small it may be. For recruiters and candidates alike, this creates as much challenge as it does opportunity. I’ve covered the increase in application volume at length already, so this week, let’s take a look at perception – and the candidate techniques that recruiters will have to learn to see through.

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Three Wrong Assumptions About Candidates: Social media-savvy job-seekers don’t come in only one size, shape or color. They can have any number of demographic or lifestyle characteristics. So, don’t think that because you connected with a candidate on Facebook or Twitter that he or she is of Generation Y. According to Mashable, a small focus group yielded social media super-users ranging from their 20s to their 40s and sporting varied educations.

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Sniff Out Reality: Social media users who have a specific objective in mind – from selling a product to landing a new job – are often exhorted to be “authentic.” The goal is to convey “the real you,” which often becomes a synthetic task, ironically. So, your job is to (a) identify real authenticity, particularly in regards to relationships, and (b) sift through faux authenticity to get a real sense of the prospective candidate.

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Plugged in or One-Trick Pony?: Social media is still so new that the meaning of “savvy” still hasn’t emerged. Even absent generally accepted principles, there are still ways you can gauge whether your social media-savvy prospective candidate is truly plugged into the social media space or is just a single-platform power user. Instead of looking at numbers of friends, fans, followers or connections, you need to think about content.

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