Archive for the ‘Intelligence’ Category
Monday, November 15th, 2010
With unemployment still high because of two years of austerity, it’s safe to assume that the talent working for the competition is pretty high-caliber. Also, they’ve endured difficult working conditions – as everyone has – because of recession-driven cuts. As you begin to hire, each open req represents a new, better opportunity to pick up a high-powered employee who is currently working against your company. Lure this talent away, and you double the competitive advantage of a great hire relative to a particular competitor.
It isn’t easy. Even those who want greener pastures are risk-averse and may be reluctant to give up what they know. So, bringing these passive candidates into your organization will require some savvy recruiting. Let’s take a look at five ways you can win them over:
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Tags: candidates, market research, ROI, STREAM, talent, talent market, talent pool, talent pools, unemployment
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Monday, November 1st, 2010
When you enter a new market or geographic region, you need to ready yourself for differences. The corporate recruiting practices that have served you well may not translate to the new challenges before you. Instead of trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole, plan ahead. Understand the unique recruiting environment you’re about to enter, and you’ll drive much better results.
Not all recruiting environments are the same. Industries, regions and lines of business have their own norms, and failing to become aware of them can frustrate the efforts of even the most experienced and effective corporate recruiters. When you need high-impact talent quickly, early missteps can have enduring consequences. Competitive advantage, future revenues and long-term market share are at stake. Are you ready to sacrifice them because you’re planning to recruit the way you always have?
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Tags: Corporate Recruiting, market research, new market entry, talent market, TMR
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Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
Have you ever had an enthusiastic candidate lose interest quickly? Seen an offer letter turned down after a positive hiring process? These mid- and late-stage candidate losses are frustrating enough, but when you don’t know why it happens, the temptation to pull your hair out can be overwhelming. If it seems like your candidate knows something you don’t, it’s smart to assume there’s a reason why. The clues may be littered all over the internet.
The days when you could control your company’s brand and message confidently are over. A wide range of message boards, job sites and blogs allows users to post content directly – without a filter. Current and former employees have almost complete freedom to publish what they want about your company, sometimes in very highly trafficked environments. While you can’t do much to stop it, you can certainly take action to rehabilitate your company’s image with the prospective employees – you just need the right tools.
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Tags: brand, BYTE, candidates
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Monday, October 4th, 2010
With plenty of people still looking for jobs, traditional sources aren’t as productive as they used to be. The channels are being stuffed with prospective candidates using all means available to get in front of recruiters (and, they hope, hiring managers), which is essentially making one source about as effective as another. When the usual approaches to finding high-quality candidates have been rendered ineffective by high demand for few positions, it’s time to find a new way to conduct corporate recruiting business.
New sources are necessary, especially if you’re interested in moving past the pool of traditional candidates and mining the market for the passive job-seekers who your hiring managers may find more desirable. For the average corporate recruiter job boards, career fairs and even social media outlets tend to be time-consuming and value relative to the required investment is suspect. High-impact candidates may be out there, but it can take a lot of work to find them … all of which can drag down corporate recruiting ROI.
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Tags: BYTE, candidates, Corporate Recruiting, hiring managers, HR outsourcing, HRO, ROI
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Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Since the financial crisis of September 2008, much has changed. Entire industries have changed, likely for decades, and the notion that a recovery can absorb all the employees dislocated by the recession holds no credibility. Many are being forced into career changes, and unemployment and under-employment remain rampant. As a result, all the rules of corporate recruiting are changing, whether we like it or not.
What constitutes a good candidate, how passive job-seekers are best approached and whether your recruiting expectations are even reasonable … all of this has to be revisited. In general, it’s time to take a fresh look at the talent markets in which you operate to understand how they have changed and to determine which approaches will be most effective going forward. In order to gain this level of insight, you’ll need to conduct some rigorous talent market research … which few companies have the time, resources or inclination to do on their own.
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Tags: economy, financial crisis, market research, recession, talent acquisition, talent market, TMR
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Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
Hiring managers need an education, and it’s your job to deliver it. The ebbs and flows of the talent market – along with the economy as a whole – don’t always have what you would consider to be a predictable impact on their expectations. In today’s market, in fact, hiring managers look to high rates of unemployment and a relatively small number of open reqs and draw, what for them, is the obvious conclusion: it’s pretty easy to hire right now.
Unless you’re in the corporate recruiting field, this is an understandable line of thought. There aren’t many positions, and there are a lot of people jockeying for them. This must mean that a company has its choice of candidates and that hiring managers can expect that those you bring in for interviews will be the best of the best.
If only it were that easy …
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Tags: candidates, hiring managers, job market, STREAM, talent market, unemployment
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Monday, July 26th, 2010
From time to time, it’s a good idea to benchmark talent management and see how your organization is doing. Even if you’ve invested aggressively in performance improvement, you might not be keeping pace with the rest of the market. Simply doing better isn’t enough: you need to make sure you’re doing better than everyone else.
Benchmarking often gets set aside when the corporate agenda is full, a tendency that finds its way to the recruiting department. Instead of trying to gauge your competitive performance by feel, take the time for real insights of the sort available only from a rigorous process. There’s no substitute for truly knowing what’s happening in your market, and in an increasingly challenging marketplace, market research and competitive intelligence are more important than ever.
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Tags: benchmark, market research, talent management, talent market, TMR
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Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Now that we’re feeling the economy start to turn, it’s all too tempting to try to undo the staff and budget cuts of the past two years. The squeeze from the market isn’t as potent, and companies are again thinking about investing for the future. With this shift comes many, many requests for a few extra budget dollars – especially for headcount. Before you start asking for corporate recruiting bodies, though, evaluate your options. You’ll find you can get the desired result, but at a far lower cost.
The staffing rush that’s bound to begin soon (if it hasn’t already) is principally the result of confidence in the recovery. Even though we still have a long way to go, the light at the end of the tunnel is visible, if not yet bright. To prepare, and because confidence has a tendency to loosen budgets, companies are beginning to reassess their talent needs.
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Tags: Corporate Recruiting, ROI, STREAM
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Monday, July 5th, 2010
Employees are becoming more comfortable with the idea of switching jobs. At the peak of the recession, workforce aversion to personal risk was high, especially as unemployment pierced the double-digit threshold. Now that conditions have calmed, and many believe a recovery is in progress, many employees are likely to seek greener pastures, especially if they can secure more income, flexibility or other perks in the process.
This presents both risk and opportunity. Talent availability is poised to spike, as top players look for ways to recoup missed promotions and raises that were rendered impossible by the after-effects of the financial crisis. At the same time, there’s increased likelihood that your own company’s talent will head for the door.
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Tags: candidates, financial crisis, HR, human resources, recession, STREAM, talent, talent market, talent pools, unemployment
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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
The candidate’s pre-interview routine is utterly predictable: research the company. Traditionally, this has included checking out your organization’s website, scanning the news for mentions and sifting through recent press releases. Through social media, the information about a company that candidates can find has proliferated. If you plan to keep up with the people sitting across the table from you, you should know what they’re looking at when they prepare for the meeting.
Expect LinkedIn to be among a prospective employee’s first destinations. In addition to finding basic company information, the candidate will see who works for your organization and possibly be able to find the hiring managers involved in the coming round of talks.
Lesson: Go to your company’s LinkedIn company profile and see where it takes you. This will give you a sense of what your candidates will see when researching your company.
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Tags: Blog, blogs, BYTE, candidates, employees, Facebook, LinkedIn, social media, social networking, Twitter
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