Candidate Experience is becoming a major focus for recruiting organizations.  They are overhauling their career sites and launching new customer service and employer branding campaigns designed to improve every candidate’s experience.  To measure if these initiatives are working many are turning to their website data, recruitment metrics and candidate surveys to determine what’s working…

Most people in recruitment expect that when the economy recovers from a recession, there will be a spike in the use of contractors.  But is contract staffing's current growth just a knee-jerk reaction to the recession, or is it something more?

Well, a recent Washington Post article suggests that it could actually…

Social Recruiting Training and Boolean Search Training has taken up a lot of Jim's time. So much so, that he has to take a quick break from his show. As such, this episode marks the end of Season 4 of The Jim Stroud Show. Look for Jim to return in April 2012 with new episodes. Subscribe now so that you do not miss out on all of the fun. …

Volunteering in the community benefits us all…not just our communities but also enhances our recruiting brand, whether an organization or a 1 or 2 person firm.  The result is good will and making the world a better place.  In fact, we as recruiters are not much different form the general population of volunteers.  Most of the characteristics of volunteers are*:

 1. Highly educated with professional backgrounds

 2. Goal-oriented with highly organized career, family, and…

Your career website presents a gateway to a world of potential candidates. By providing visitors with a complete representation of your company in an interesting and user-friendly format, your site acts as a branding magnet. A successfully implemented career site appeals to more visitors, broadening the possibility for a greater number of applicants from a wider pool of browsers. Your site should maximize a potential candidate’s browsing time, provide them with a way to directly engage and…

I don’t know if it’s inevitable that age and experience brings cynicism, but theongoing discussion about social recruiting certainly brings out the skeptic in me. Social recruitment is about the…

In life you continue learning new skills and there is always something you can learn to make an everyday life task simpler/easier, so why not transfer this in to your professional life. As we all work in ever changing markets and the competition for jobs is continually heating up, most people ask themselves what can they do to stay relevant and how can they get that new job or pay rise.…

Within our current economic outlook, there are those companies, including Staffing Companies, which have forgotten what it means to be an employer of choice.  These days, some managers act as though the employee is a widget, a piece of machinery, whose "intellectual property" is a company asset, and whose very existence is to drive the profit.  Fair enough.  But as the…

“MOST”-Part 4!!!

Getting the “MOST” out of yourself,

Speed!!

So this is part #4, pillar 3 on the “MOST” technique.

Pillar 3 Speed, not just fast but warped speed fast, the ability to perform at warped speed is essential to the pillars.

So this is a biggy, speed can be god given, or gained over time and effort or both. For our purposes we…

I often get asked for some quick and easy advice on ‘how to interview’ by clients or professional connections that do not have a lot of experience with the process. While I do have a system that I use, I should be clear in saying that there is not one perfect approach nor is there a clear industry standard. I believe that the key is to be organized and to put yourself in a position to make useful comparisons so you can come away the information that you need.

Everyone understands that…

If you’ve been in recruiting for the last 10 years or 20 years, the chart below will be real interesting.  You should see a tremendous correlation between the levels of job growth per year and how business was during that period.  The chart is in hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The great take away here is not that job growth is good for business.  We all know that.  But look how big the numbers were in the 90s.  Check out the slow down when the tech bubble burst in…

Whether working for a small, mid-size or large business, you know like everyone else at the office that you need to stand out from the rest and not in a negative manner.



Each and every day you set foot in the office or telecommute from your residence, be it a small business start-up or a company that has been around for some time, how do you go about making sure that the boss notices you?



Having worked for several companies now over a 23-year span, I have always gone into a…

The high cost of client acquisition necessitates that the service side of your business do outstanding work not just in delivery, but in retaining and expanding accounts. When the service team takes the lead in keeping and growing current customers, sales is given the freedom to add more new business at brand new clients. Companies that do this grow faster as they retain their core customers while enjoying an influx of new business at new and existing accounts.

In almost every case…

Some of my customers, who are jobseekers, for the most part think recruiters—internal and third-party alike—are unfair and the reason for their failure to get a job. They think recruiters are only concerned with two things: 1) determining if my customers meet 10 out of 10 requirements and 2) want them to work for peanuts. I know this is not necessarily true, I know that recruiters have a job to do, which is to find what the employer wants. This is how recruiters get paid.

I’ve read…

What’s more important – having a good CV or a good cover letter…? The answer? Both! Cover letters are just as important as CVs because a good cover letter gets your CV through the door and a good CV then goes on to qualify you for an interview!

If you know anything about my background, you’ll know I fell into CV writing, cover letters and so on by accident while working in the media as the assistant editor of a magazine. Back then I had to recruit people (as well as everything else)…

Unless you’ve had your head firmly stuck in the sand over the past three months or so, you would have noticed that everyone is going on about the latest social network that is set to “take the world by storm”. We’re not talking about Facebook, Twitter, and no, not even the still relatively new Google Plus – the latest boy/girl wonder site in question is none other than Pinterest.…

Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about sources of hire, talent matters, social recruiting, job creation & destruction, HR influencers and candidate experience.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular…

In September 2007 Canada reached the lowest employment rate in over the last 35 years at 5.9%.  By mid-year 2009 the national unemployment figure rose to over 8.5%.  To put this in perspective, every percentage point change is approximately 180,000 people who no longer have a position.  Today the national rate is 7.4%, lower than the national average for the last 36 years (8.5%) – and that should encourage us, however it is not because the unemployment rate is actually trending in the wrong…

With psychometric assessment (aka psych testing) steadily establishing itself as one of the most reliable selection weapons in a HR professional’s arsenal, organisations around the country are implementing them as a standard part of their selection process, especially in bulk recruitment exercises like graduate intakes and vacation programs. 

Unfortunately, the growing popularity of psychometric testing has also led to the introduction of some ‘undesirable…