They say timing is everything. Nothing illustrated this more than when I entered a hall full of networkers today, and a woman I had never met approached me before I even put my dollar in the contribution jar. It was as if she came out of nowhere like a dive-bombing sparrow from the sky.

Honestly, I can’t remember what this woman said. Something about how one of her…

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 what a CRM is, ERE Expo 2012, ways to piss off candidates, common sourcing mistakes, candidate experience and what’s new with LinkedIn.

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

This post originally appeared on the SkillStorm blog: www.skillstorm.com/blog

Image courtesy of photologue_np and Flickr.com

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I had an interesting exchange via email with a VP level candidate while working to coordinate a meeting/ interview with a client. And I quote:

“Kant do it thurz? can Friday?”

My recruitment work is done primarily in the mobile and digital tech space, I’m a texter, a twitter junkie and into Social Media and totally get the language of microblogging.

There has to be a line drawn and adhered to that separates the quick…

This is an article that Neil Lebovits of Dynamic Scale recently had published in The Fordyce Letter.  Neil is the former president of Ajilon Finance, one of the nations largest Accounting/Finance recruitment firms.

LinkedIn is a dream tool (for now).  Having the ability to view up to date resumes (or profiles), being automatically notified of job changes, being connected through contacts/groups, etc. is a recruiters Nirvana.  But like anything that works, you have to work it.  However, being a public company can often times cloud decisions making them based on quarterly numbers rather then core.  Where are they going and what will they look like in 12 months? 

Any candidate in transition or working professional has most likely bumped into a recruiter at some point. Many executive recruiters often actively headhunt passive job candidates whom are currently employed. And if you are in the process of conducting an active job search, you have probably responded to an advertisement for a job opening placed on a jobs board by a recruiting firm. However, a well-thought-out, effective job search that covers all of the bases intentionally includes…

I was silently hoping that someone had finally sprayed enough insecticide on the pests that continue to propagate terrible job search advice. Alas, plenty of evidence of their insidious and obnoxious existence still emerges regularly.

There are a number of sources in my local area that sponsor workshops, seminars and other events directed at job seekers. From what I can tell, the vast majority of the sponsors and presenters have literally zero relevant background to justify providing…

I need your help. I'm surveying recruiting and HR professionals (like you) to learn what they're using in online recruiting these days - and how they use it. This survey is short - only 4 minutes - and I will happily send you the complete results when they're done.

So how about it? Click…

The other night I saw The Hunger Games with my daughter and one of her friends. When we got into a discussion about the various scenes in the movie, we all agreed that Rue’s death was the saddest…oh, I hope I’m not giving away too much of the movie.

There’s another scene I would classify as more bloody and kick-you-in-the-gut than sad. It’s when the tributes…

According to a report from ABC News, 80% of today’s jobs are landed through networking. This percentage of networkers represents smart jobseekers who understand that looking for and finding work takes...work.

They understand that personal networking coupled with online networking will yield better results than spending the majority of their time on…

Don't get me wrong. I use LinkedIn a lot, and of course so do all the recruiters at Firebrand.

But there are issues with LinkedIn. Flaws.

One of the most obvious is that LinkedIn appears to have no system to monitor accuracy of data on their network. Indeed, they freely admit that many profiles are bogus, and that many people have several LinkedIn profiles.

Only last week I was at a the…

While conducting our research in time for our Facebook Pages Timeline: Essential Workshop for Recruiters event last Friday, we came across a number of Facebook pages of recruitment companies that had rather lovely Timeline covers. We also came across the 99% of company pages that haven't yet migrated to Timeline before the March 30th deadline (if your company page is one of them and you're in Dublin on Friday morning, then…

It’s no surprise that when you read articles like Nine Tips for Networking for Business Success they apply nicely to the job search—as in nine tips for networking for job search success. This is because the job search is like running a business…namely yours. That’s right, you have a marketing campaign which heavily relies on your ability to network your way to…

It seems that just about everything is moving to an online medium, and this is no different in the field of recruiting. LinkedIn is a great electronic resume, and other social networks can really add a new dimension to the hiring process. What could be better? As it turns out, video can be better.

More and more companies are asking for video resumes from candidates if…

That was the basic premise of a talk I recently gave at the Minnesota Recruiters' Conference earlier this month.  The presentation was titled, "Winning The Talent War With Effective Job Posts."

I thought I would share the main point of the talk...

Typical job posts do not affect a potential candidate's desire to apply.

Our job posts are all about our companies and what we want - they are totally focused on us.  We need…

We’ll admit right out of the gate that this is one blog post that directly relates to the type of business we run at ShinyNeedle. In order to write this post we had to mention our website, and we had to discuss challenge based hiring. There are hundreds of job posting websites available today. We just recently posted an article on how to manage the extremely large world of job posting websites. There are some that provide zero value, and some that have a bigger brand and have found ways to…

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…

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…