Building Critical Talent Pipelines

When the labor market is weak and job-seekers are desperate for work, overwhelmed recruiters sometimes default to treating applicants like cattle – an undifferentiated mass of mostly unqualified individuals firing off resumes wherever they can.

You know that dream where you throw a party and nobody shows up?
Well, that happened to us—only it wasn't a party, it was a Facebook contest. It was last fall, and we were so excited about Altruette's first big social media push. We make a line of charms that each benefits a different non-profit and we work with more than 30 charities, so we have a community of involved, committed people just waiting to be engaged.

Candidate selection and assessment is one of the most conservative processes in all of talent management. Many think the topic is not worth a detailed examination, but a weak assessment or interview process can be the primary cause for not hiring top candidates. For decades, the majority of firms have relied heavily on the basic trio of resume screening, interviewing, and reference checks to choose the best candidates. Fortunately, the growth of metrics, the Internet, and technology in HR is now challenging these traditional approaches.

You'd think it would be easier to hire in a bad economy, but it's not. Here's why, and what to do about it.

It’s a tipping point of sorts: smartphones are not (yet) being used by the majority of U.S. residents, but among mobile users, it looks like they have now outnumbered those on lower-end devices — or so consumers think — according to research out today from Pew.

Could your Facebook profile be a predictor of job performance?
A new study from Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University suggests it can.
In an experiment, three "raters"—comprising one university professor and two students—were presented with the Facebook profiles of 56 college students with jobs.

There are a lot of difficult areas that companies are starving for great talent. One is definitely software engineering and web development because right now there's such a critical void for all of the tech companies as finding great engineers. Second is analytics. So, analytics is becoming a big piece for all companies because data is such a critical piece of making decisions. So, finding people that are very data-driven, analytical type of people is very difficult. Third is marketing. So, marketing has changed a lot over the past couple of years, five years, especially 10 years where no longer is it okay to just to do a press release. You need to have a very aggressive inbound marketing strategy, and that involves using social media channels as well as lots of other online channels to drive people to you versus having a sales force that's primarily focused on getting traffic.

In recent weeks we’ve seen a lot of outpouring of grief over the now dead SOPA legislation. The law’s critics claim that, if passed, the law would end the Internet as we know it, threaten our way of life, and confirm the Mayans were right. We periodically experience this type of mass hysteria, whenever something seems to threaten the “promise of the Internet” — the last time was over net neutrality. That so-called promise has to do with the perceived “free” flow of information: articles, stories, videos, songs, or content. What’s gotten lost in this noise is that that nothing is free. The current business model of the Internet has simply shifted dollars from content creators to content aggregators. Advertisers sponsor content so users can pretend it is “free.”

With YouTube recently announcing a milestone of 4 billion views per day (including mobile video views), there’s no question that mobile and online video consumption isn’t slowing down. In fact, recent stats show that over 50% of the U.S. population watch online video at least once per month, and over 14% of the population watch video via mobile phone. The question is, how can you use online video to enhance your recruitment marketing strategy?

In 2011, several studies revealed both job seekers and employers moving into the social space. In fact, one survey reported 16% of job seekers found their most recent position through a social network. To capitalize on this trend, you can implement a social referral program that encourages current employees to reach out to their personal networks online.

In an effort to create the "best/worst recruiting video of all time," Twitter employees Ian Padgham and Jeremy Briggs made "At Twitter, The Future Is You," a spoof on the corny corporate recruitment video of yore, reports Mashable. In it, they poke fun at such classic corporate tropes as employees being really enthusiastic about coffee, employees sitting up very straight at their desks and employees pointing at flying words like "product management!"

Many job seekers have long suspected their online employment applications disappear into a black hole, never to be seen again. Their fears may not be far off the mark, as more companies rely on technology to winnow out less-qualified candidates.
photo courtesy of ToobyDoo

How do you go from zero to six senior-level e-commerce pros in six weeks?
That would be a tall order in Silicon Valley or Research Triangle. How about if you were in Hong Kong, the hiring executive is in San Francisco, the job is in China, and the req asks for Chinese-speaking, retail-savvy, online experienced, e-commerce marketers?