I recently had the privilege of hosting #HFChat – the HireFriday Tweet-fest organized by @HRMargo and @CyndyTrivella.  HireFriday is all about helping job seekers find work. Recruiters, HR professionals, and the occasional job board doctor pose and answer common questions about the job hunt. It’s a wonderful event for all involved.

My subject – surprisingly enough! – was “Making job boards work for you”. The conversation ranged from the basics (setting up job alerts, using job boards…

Almost every week I see another blog post or story about a trend, product, or development that will doom job boards. Let’s be honest – writing about the death of any institution, especially one used by millions of people worldwide, is a great way to gather eyeballs and readers.

But as I was considering my latest snarky…

In a recent presentation with Dr. Charles Handler, I discovered that although both he and I focused on the ‘quality of candidates’ – as does anyone involved in recruiting – we weren’t able to find much data on exactly which recruiting techniques delivered the best quality candidates, according to HR and recruiting professionals. As I was preparing the annual Online Recruiting…

As I mentioned last week, the results are in from the 2012 Job Board Industry Survey. With over 190 responses from every category of site, including aggregators, general sites, niche boards, and networks, I believe that there is  useful information for all. If you participated, you should…

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…

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…

Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler have been conducting the landmark CareerXRoads Source of Hire survey for over a decade. In my mind, that’s useful data. They’ve just come out with the 2012 edition, and it’s absolutely worth a look. The top four sources of hire include referrals (28%), job…

If you hire people, at some point you will have to hire for a position about which you know absolutely nothing.  Perhaps you’re hiring a chief technology officer, but your background is marketing and sales. Or you’re hiring a new accountant, and you only understand coding.

What do you do? Perhaps you turn to friends and colleagues who are more knowledgeable than you about a particular skill set. Or you figure out which certifications a ‘perfect’…

It’s that time of the month – time to glance back and see if anything really happened in the past 4 weeks. Surprisingly enough, it did. Here’s what I noticed:

• Monster partners with Ogden Newspapers: Monster adds to its bevy…

Another week, another ‘job boards are dying’ blog post. If I had a dollar for every post like this, I’d be a (moderately) rich man. Truly.

I try to avoid the ‘job boards are dying’ discussion because (a) it’s a flamer’s game (not unlike arguing with those who disbelieve climate change), and (b) those of us in the biz know it…

Last week I read a post about how social media killed job boards (yes, again!). Whether or not you agree with the argument (and as you can surmise, I don’t), the piece inadvertently brings up a larger issue: are job boards still relevant to job seekers? After all, this is all about the job seeker, right? Many social media evangelists would have you…

Per this week’s survey results from job boards, we’ve seen some changes over the past 12 months – not the least of which is increased optimism. Perhaps part of that is based on what HR and recruiting professionals are actually doing to find candidates. This installment of the …

I’ve worked with dozens of job boards over the years, and I often take a look at what the job seekers are saying to them. Since the onset of the recession (and honestly, before), it goes something like this:

“Why don’t you have any jobs in my area?”

“I’ve had my resume posted on your site for months and you haven’t called me.”

“I’ve been working in my field for twenty years but you don’t have a single job for me??”

There are lots…

It’s that time of the year – leaves are falling, frost is threatening our gardens….and I’m knocking on your door about the online recruiting survey. I'm trying to include everyone in the online recruiting industry: HR and recruiting pros, job…

What exactly is happening in the job board and online recruiting world? Well, to paraphrase Neil Young, ‘job boards never sleep’ (okay, yes, that was awful!), so here’s a quick roundup of some industry tidbits:

• JobTarget continues growing: The software company is adding a satellite sales location in Windsor, bringing its total employee count to 90 or…

“You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we’re all doing what we can.” – The Beatles

“We’re pinheads all, jocko homo.” -DEVO

These lyrics really get to the two extremes of what recruiters, employers, and job seekers think might happen with job boards. On the one hand, there are those who think job boards are on the way out, ‘devolving’ into lowest common denominator sites that carry fake jobs and offer little…

One problem with the internet in general and social media in particular is that you have fewer reasons to leave the office. After all, if I’m swapping Tweets with @Animal or @HRMargo all day, do I really want to spend ‘real’ time with them?

Well, actually, yes. It’s fun to meet the living, breathing version of these virtual friends. And what’s even more fun is to learn new stuff and hear interesting news and gossip.

That’s where the …

Note to recruiters: I wrote this for job seekers, but I think you'll find it interesting.

If you’re part of the 97% of the US population with a cell phone, you most likely use it for more than phoning. And if you’re part of the burgeoning subset with an iPhone, Android, or other smartphone, I can guarantee that you use it for all sorts of serious (and silly) stuff.

Looking for work (or keeping your fingers on your neck of the employment market) is possible on a smart…

My favorite weather site is WeatherUnderground. For some obscure, probably cookie-driven reason, I tend to see a lot of HR-related ads there. A few SHRM and iCIMS ads, for example.

The other day I noticed a corporate blue banner that said “Job Boards Are Broken”. It led to TheLadders.

This had me scratching my head, because: a) TheLadders is a job board. Really.; and b) I…

The more things change, the more they stay the same – except when they don’t. Now how’s that for equivocation?

The results are in for the 2011 Online Recruiting Survey, and they are intriguing. We had a record 323 completed responses (a 15% increase from Fall 2010!), from three categories: HR and recruitment professionals, job board operators and employees, and job seekers.  We used many…