The Pepsi Challenge Approach to Recruiting
"More than 50% of Coke drinkers prefer Pepsi to Coke" — Pepsi's trumpeted results of the now-classic "Pepsi Challenge" What if one of the most successful soft-drink marketing campaigns of all time could be replicated in the realm of recruiting to promote clients, recruiting firms, individual candidates or recruiters? The well-known, long-running "Pepsi Challenge" to...
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Recruiting Employees with Disabilities
"All too often, people with disabilities are pressured to feel gratitude for things that are their basic human rights – subsidized housing, support services, inclusion in the community, basic acceptance and respect," writes the poet and activist Laura Hershey in "The Good and Bad of Gratitude." Among the 'basic acceptance and respect' must be the opportunity to work. "We can't succumb to...
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Drilling Deeper
How do you gauge when a society has moved out of one mindset and into another? One way might be to look at what generates public outcry and what is quietly accepted. The public interest research group, Public Citizen, announced that change is afoot. According to Public Citizen's press release by Tyson Slocum, for the first time since 2010's oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Department...
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Employment Rises in February
Do you remember February? Only 28 days, and yet a lot seemed to happen! Maybe you are only just getting around to understanding what happening in Egypt and Wisconsin because you've been busy trying to place people in the right positions for them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it seems that employment was significantly up in February. Are recruiters noticing this upswing in...
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Smart Choices: Hiring the Right People
Need an office manager or a front-desk person? Pay and benefits are important but a successful search may depend more on patience. Physicians — most of whom are accustomed to making quick decisions — often don't put enough time or thought into hiring, says Elizabeth Woodcock, an Atlanta-based practice management expert. "Until physicians come to realize that they are leading...
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Elance as a Sourcing Tool for Creative Recruiters
Elance has become the single most popular place for freelancers, or Elancers as they may call themselves, of all types to search for gigs. The design of the site is easy to use and the jobs are plentiful. Companies of all sizes are turning to Elance to tap a pool of creative people: writers, designers, voice actors, coders, photographers... and the list goes on and on. Creative recruiters can...
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Got a Hollywood Job for Me?
"The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money."—Marlon Brando "Well, you know what they say in Hollywood - the most important thing is being sincere, even if you have to fake it."—Cesar Romero A very ordinary-looking fellow walks into a Hollywood employment agency, is invited to sit and quickly makes it clear exactly what he is...
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Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Possibilities for Workers Retiring Early
What does it mean for recruiters if more American workers are able to retire early? How does early retirement shake up the current model of a working life? Would an increase in early retirement lead to job growth within any sectors of the economy? For many older workers, a key contributor to their confidence in retiring is their employer's health care policy. As part of broader talks about...
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Manufacturers Must Stay Competitive in Global Markets
The heat is on for the U.S. manufacturing industry to grow and stimulate the overall economy. Many economists insist that some kind of public-private partnerships will be key to encouraging this struggling sector of the economy. Many recruiters know that manufacturing assumes many different forms in this technological, digital age, but many manufacturing companies are having a hard time...
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Productive Times Call For Human Measures
"When a firm makes a profit this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied," wrote Pope John Paul II in 1991. The Pope definition of profit opens up an onslaught of questions. What will it look like when productivity is at its height? What will satisfy humans' needs? What roles do technology and the environment play in...
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Reference Check 2.0: Time Saver for Recruiting Firms
How do you assess a sizable stack of resumes and cover letters? What are some of the best shortcuts you've created to discern the best candidate for a job? As this process is so challenging, plenty of people have tried to come up with some sanity-preserving time savers. By leveraging the connectivity of social networking, Reference Check 2.0 has emerged as a popular option for...
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Housing Projects No Home for Fraud
As any project manager knows, a project is never really yours and yours alone. Its success depends on the decisions of all the people you work with. A manager's personal integrity doesn't really mean anything to the worker denied of his or her rights by a subcontractor. Consider your own practice and think about whose needs you are most in touch with on a daily basis. Is pressure to save...
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Background Screening Methodology Critical for the Whole Team
If the goal of finding a perfect job candidate is to find a new coworker, then be attentive to the way you check candidates' qualifications. It can really rub a job candidate the wrong way if she finds out after the fact that you were chatting at length with an obscure, previous coworker. Similarly, it might perturb someone to know that one manner of background check was promised, but quite...
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"Max" vs. "Min" vs. "MaxEx"—Which Recruitment Strategy for You?
"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."—George Bernard Shaw, Act IV, "Man and Superman" In making your decisions about which candidate to push most aggressively, and even which employment sector to specialize in, about which client to engage, and, in general, how to utilize and allocate your resources of time, energy, money...
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Insulting Recruiters? It Just Might Work
You gotta love recruiting... No, I mean, you really have to love recruiting to be in it. You get it from all sides: candidates, internal and external clients and hiring managers, and even other recruiting firms. I came across Hackruiter and just had to mention them. In hip-plain black text on a white background, they proudly proclaim, "Most recruiters are hacks. We're hackers." What do they...
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Will Facebook Become a Job Board?
Recruiters have long fantasized (or worried, depending on your opinion) about using Facebook as the ultimate job board. Recruiting with Facebook, however, is notoriously difficult and confusing. Navigating the complexities of privacy settings and friends vs. fans vs. likes vs. shares leaves recruiters with little to work with. The end result is that right now Facebook is much more of a personal...
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Placing and Trading Staff: Go Long, or Short?
"I made my money by selling too soon."—Bernard Baruch, financier and presidential advisor Reflecting on a recent conversation with an old friend and financial whiz about "short-selling" stock—something I've never tried, I realized that the Wall Street stock market concepts of "going long", "going short" and "shorting a stock" have interesting implications for...
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U.S. Supreme Court Rules that Corporations Don't Get to Have Privacy
As a recruiter, you may help meet the talent demands of one or many client corporations. It may prove helpful to understand what rights corporations do and do not have under the U.S. legal system. As the push for government transparency grows, will corporations be required to make public more of their documents? This week, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a previous decision to curtail...
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After a Military Base Closes, Who is Responsible for Dislocated Workers?
Sometimes, a large company with multiple locations reorganizes its employment structure, closing shop in one place to open doors in another. While there are plenty of reasons to switch operations around, it is not without its abandoned workers. Oftentimes, these worker have already settled in a place and are not able to easily travel with the company. When a private company moves, what is...
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Hedge Fund Employment Branding
Hedge funds have been viewed in a quite negative light over the past few years. What's to like about hedge funds? They make billions for a relatively small number of people, appear to have a different tax method than the rest of us, and may have played a part in the financial collapse. But they do at least one thing right: employment branding. Of course, many of our companies live in the...
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Popcorn and Child Labor Don't Mix
What comes to mind when you think of child labor? Do you picture children working in sweatshops in distant countries? Or do you imagine a long-lost chapter in American history in which kids toiled at sewing machines on the Lower East Side? The definitions of child labor are more specific than you might have imagined, but it is the obligation of employers to understand the entirety of child...
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YouthBuild's New Recipients Off and Running
Who is the U.S. recruiting? Do your recruiting practices mirror the government's? Or are they quite different? In an attempt to help young people have more possibilities at a young age, the U.S. department has announced a list of recipients for grants to help employ and train young workers. The Department of Labor announced an award of $30,696,643 for its YouthBuild programs. Funds will...
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The Jobless Diaspora
Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud, and one the stars. --Frederick Langbridge (1849–1923), A Cluster of Quiet Thoughts What optimism is there to see beyond the mud of rising unemployment rates? Although the recruiter would rather hear about job growth, on a day when one is peculiarly given to feeling optimistic, one might see beyond the economic decline. Looking past...
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Dogs, Sticks and Recruiters
—How an old dog can teach you new recruitment tricks "Walk softly and carry a big stick"—Teddy Roosevelt What does or should a recruiter have in common with a dog chomping down on and loping along with a stick in its mouth? More to the point, what can a recruiter learn from a stick-fetching and wood-toting dog? SOFT WALK, BIG STICK/Photo: Michael Moffa To answer that, it...
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Finding A Job In Today's Market
Less than 4 years ago, a job candidate with a decent resume and little or no experience could walk into virtually any interview knowing that an offer was inevitable. Candidates would send out 10 resumes hoping to get 2 or 3 responses, but they would instead get 20 responses, many from head-hunters, whose business was booming like never before. Back then, it was almost impossible to find a...
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Resume Presentation is Key
Key words are important when a résumé is being scanned, particularly when being scanned by software which a very few companies are doing now. However, when a human being is reviewing resumes, which is 98% of the time, resume presentation also plays an important role in winning an interview over the other candidates who are applying for the same position as you. When a resume looks almost...
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Is Your Resume Hurting or Helping You Get That Interview?
You spend hours finding just the right words for your resume. You struggle over which font to select and what "action" words work best. But, do you know the way you format your resume and the information you include can undo all your time and energy? NEVER – I mean NEVER – use columns or tables. Most companies and many recruiters use databases to keep track of applicants. When...
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Linkedin Year in Review and Profile Stats
With Linkedin's IPO scheduled, they are apparently in the dual mode of increasing profits and delivering new product innovations. Their product development appears to have kicked into overdrive - recently, there have been new tools and services announced regularly. Two relatively new services useful to recruiters are the new "Year in Review" tool and the new profile stats tool. Recruiters...
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Split Considerations
Agency recruiters, especially those in smaller recruiting firms or working for themselves, often "split" fees with other companies or external recruiters. The aim is to improve recruiting bandwidth and coverage on a requisition, especially when it is a position outside your core competency. Conversely, by recruiting on splits, a recruiter can immediately have business to work on without spending...
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The World's First Recruiter
THE ANCIENT ART OF RECRUITING/Image: Michael Moffa "And the woman said, 'The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."—Genesis, 3:13 Quick: Who was the world's first recruiter? Don't think, just answer—in terms of a specific real, legendary or mythological individual and/or a specific category. Your fast answer may reveal something about how you see your own profession, about how your...
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New Jobs in Banking and Possibly Beyond
Recruiters know that hiring practices are complicated things to predict. A company may continue hiring new employees even when facing great pressure from public media or private investors. A curious, contemporary example of this potentially incongruous-seeming influx of hiring is currently seen in the actions of financial institutions. Although the crash of the housing market disrupted...
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Where Work is Sparse and Getting Sparser
"Well, it's a great time to stay in school," said a brave mother to her child. She tried to put a positive spin on the job market her college graduate child is about enter into. As unemployment continues to impact every community in the United States, many people are trying to avoid the job market by various creative or risky measures. These people's choices are not necessarily reflected...
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Racist Hiring Practices Reprimanded
Have you ever recommended a job candidate and suspected that racism was the reason that the applicant was not offered the job? Proving such discrimination is another story. It often takes years to prove that a company has systematically practiced discrimination in its hiring practices. When the government identifies and condemns such behavior, one can be certain that hundreds of hours of...
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Consumers Face Changing Prices
Here's the good news... It's a good time to buy some curtain rods. A terrific time to quit smoking cigarettes. A lovely time to explore your neighborhood instead of going anywhere exotic. A fine time to join a tennis club and a decent time to buy some new underwear. Unfortunately, we all need to eat, and those prices are going up, alongside the price of gasoline and medical care. The...
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Wisconsin Workers Rally for their Rights
What lessons can be learned from the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Wisconsin? Men and women are rallying to try stop a bill in which unions would lose their right to collective bargaining. Some of the workers spend their days helping children learn U.S. history and algebra. Others climb twenty sets of stairs to put out fires. Other demonstrators work nights in hospitals caring for...
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Women Workers Push for More Flexibility
One way to think about improving the condition of every worker is to begin by improving the quality of the workday for traditionally oppressed groups. If life got better for these workers, the changes would trickle up to people with more access to hegemonic power. These week the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau hosted a conference on best flexibility practices for hourly-wage...
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Prices of Both Imports and Exports Rise
Next time you meet someone from another country, and you are looking for common ground for a conversation, try kvetching about the price of imports. The price of imported products went up all over the world during the past fiscal year. Shopkeepers struggling to stay in business surely aren't the cause for these high prices. Most of the hikes in cost are attributed to the spiking costs of ...
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Recruiting Software: Six Questions to Ask Vendors
Selecting a new recruiting software system for your company doesn't happen very often. Additionally, recruiting software can be expensive, difficult to implement, and (most egregiously) force a high learning curve on already time-strapped recruiters. When you do have the chance to change up your technology, it's important to do it right. It is easy to have your selection process mired in...
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I'm Like...Not Getting the Job?
"Like, oh my God!..Like—totally.. Encino is like so bitchin' .. There's like the galleria.. And like all these like really great shoe stores.. I love going into like clothing stores and stuff... I like to buy the neatest mini-skirts and stuff ..Its like so bitchin' cuz like everybody's like super-super nice... Its like so bitchin'..."—Frank Zappa's song "Valley Girl",...
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Hush-Hush Trade Agreements
As representatives of the U.S. government compete to gain voters' confidence that they are in favor of governmental transparency, it seems that the government does not think the public need to know the ins and outs of international trade agreements. Recruiters, whose business practices may be affected by these agreements, may want to know the details of these proposed agreements before they...
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The 12 Commandments of Job Search
I was asked today after making a comment on salary negotiations, "How do you answer the money question?" I thought it funny at first as I reflected on the question and took a moment to think about the current state of the employment sector and a lot of talk that I have been hearing as of late. After taking time to sit and ponder, this is what I came up with in the big picture... First,...
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Sizing Up Recruiter Commission Plans
The complexity of recruiter commission plans tends to rival both ontological arguments and mortgage refinancing documents. Recruiting commission plans even work their way into corporate talent acquisition, as there are often performance based bonuses and required metrics. Compounding the difficulty of compensating recruiters is that there is no agreed upon vernacular. Every recruiting agency,...
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The Secret to Job References
When you're looking for a new job, most employers want to get job references from your current position. However, it is (obviously) almost impossible to get references from your current management. Obtaining professional references for a new job becomes a catch-22 that can complicate a job search. If you've been with your current employer for quite a long time, it makes it all the more...
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OSHA Envisions a Country where Safety Creates Jobs
The buzz about the creation of new American jobs often involves "sacrifice." But in the hustle to better the economy, some law-makers and advocates are making sure that workers' safety is not sacrificed in order to quickly form new jobs. Naturally, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is among the most powerful voices urging that safety for workers be a top priority. Dr....
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The Wisdom of Using the "3-Rule" in Recruiting
"Three on a match is bad luck"—infantryman's and sniper's wisdom "Three strikes and y'er out."—baseball rule "Under Islamic law, a man may repudiate his wife simply by saying 'I divorce thee' three times. Islamic religious scholars have now decreed that a text message is a valid way of ending a marriage."—Dubai news report, the Telegraph, June 27, 2001 "On...
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Cold Weather Accounts for Mass Layoffs
When winter blew in this year, snow wasn't the only thing that fell. The country's employment figures suffered from the mass layoffs in the fourth quarter of 2010. Employers informed nearly 300,000 workers that they were out of work. Hopefully, many of these jobs will be revitalized in the near future, as many of these layoffs are attributed to the weather. Construction firms recorded 673...
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Men's Wages Dwarf Women's Across All Areas of Labor
Although it's common knowledge that women continue to bring home paychecks much smaller than men, the details of this breakdown are lesser known to many of us. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released illuminating statistics about women's pay. The information portrays not only what professions women work in, but within those, how women are compared in comparison to males within the same...
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Finding the Right Career
Are you ready to use your passions, skills, and knowledge to invest in finding your dream career? Are you ready to embark upon a journey of finding the right career for both you and your family? If so, you need to understand our changing world and how technology, the economy and finding a career has quickly changed. There are amazing tools that will allow you to peer into new fields and...
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