Upper middle-management and out of a job.

Too qualified,

Too set in your ways

Not right for the job

Too old fashion for our hip new company

And too many other things you aren’t allowed to say.

How many really talented people are out there looking (and looking) for work who can’t find a job because the 30 (or 40) something that is in charge of hiring has a pre-conceived notion that the person they are looking for is “younger.” How many automated…

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If I were to SEO

What would be the way to go?

Would I blog or would I write

A mighty pen to make me bright?

Key word phrases all strung out

Makes my writing all flung out.

Search for hires

High and low

Better with my SEO

20 key words I must sell

Will you promise not to tell?

My marketing Director does insist

That all my writing should consist

Of random words

Thrown to and fro

Just so Google loves me…

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With apologies for my miss-use of the French word form, a lot of the recruiting technology that is out there today really is “Les Misérables”. If Fantine was a recruiter and left alone, unemployed and destitute – I could…

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OK, I have been buried up to (and over) my head for the last couple of months getting our new product ready for development. I finally looked up from my desk and realized it was almost Christmas and I am way behind. Since we have been following the basic principles of the Lean Start Up I have visions of MVP’s dancing through my head, so what choice do I have but to try…

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When people talk about HR trends they tend to look at what we do today and discuss ways it can be done better in the future. Applications and tools for recruiting, training, on-boarding, etc. are being developed at dizzying rates. Problem is – these new HR innovations are going to have a short half life.

Another way to look at HR trends is to look at the way business is changing.

The changes in technology, employee motivation, globalism, and resource mobility, just to name a…

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After the movie Moneyball came out there were lots of blog posts about how Moneyball had lessons for HR. Essentially this was a Big Data argument. The essence of what the Moneyball process was all about was taking vast amounts of information about your people and your potential recruits and applying data analytics to see that information from new angles. The new angles allowed them to see productivity and efficiency differently than conventional wisdom had always said it should be…

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Over the course of several years – be it 10 or 40 – you leave a wake behind you that represents the impact you've made. Recruiters traditionally relied on your resume to tell them about your career arc, but today a lot is being written about how your electronic footprint may be a better, more complete representation of your professional mark.

I have fully embraced social media as a grand, open marketplace of resource communication, coordination and exchange. I saw early on that this…

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In several blog posts over the last year or so I have referred to “The New Employee Economy.” So what is it? In a nutshell – it is the future.

Anybody over the age of 35 has grown up in a world where they mostly understand work as a commitment to some organization or company that lasts for 8 to 10 years (maybe more) and you move on one or two more times before you retire. The company takes care of your insurance (increasingly less so) provides you with a career path, some on-the-job…

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The Presidential Debates are almost over. I wish they would talk more about how exciting and dynamic the new employee economy can be. I wish they would tell us what they are going to do to make sure we have an economy where individuals can thrive (as opposed to stale old structures). Sure there are jobs be created again in manufacturing - but that is just plugging holes. 

They will talk back and forth about a myriad of ideas. And certainly they will talk about jobs. They will talk…

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In a world where seemingly everyone has gotten involved in Social Media (still hate that term), is it odd when you run across someone who is not? I am not talking about someone in their 80s, but someone in today’s work-a-day world. Certainly there are many people who do not feel they have time, or who may feel that their personal involvement in social or professional networks adds little value to either their professional standing or their company’s performance. But isn't this a dying breed?…

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Stop worrying about a candidate’s career path. For certain types of positions it is all about Skill Path, not Career Path.

What is Skill Path? Skill Path is the development of an increasing set of capabilities and/or a deepening level of expertise: regardless of where you worked. How have you advanced as a software developer, a health care provider, a manager or leader? Are those skills relevant to the challenge your company faces? Skill Path, especially for specialized skill…

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A common misconception is that social media searches are only used to find negative information for screening out candidates. However, businesses using social media searches recognize these searches can be very beneficial in verifying positive affiliations, associations and activities. For example, a social media search can identify if the candidate is active in…

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My son recently graduated from college. As with so many young people just out of school, there were not a lot of job opportunities that awaited him. Rather than move back home (whew, we avoided that bullet), he and a group of friends piled into his car and took off to Boston to find their fortunes. My son is extremely energetic and is a bull dog when he sets his sights on something, so I knew he would find some sort of job to tide him over. I figured he would call me to say he’d found a job…

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I just got back from a long flight. It was your typical business trip. Head to the airport – jump on a plane (after suffering the crush of too many people trying to avoid “Bag Check”), get off the plane, rent the car, find the hotel, sleep poorly, get up early to work out (this for maintaining sanity) then spend the day working with a client. Then off to the airport (30 minutes later than you intended to leave, which puts you in a heated rush) and do all the same in reverse. When I get on that… Continue

There are several dimensions to the question of privacy and how it plays into background checking (and I may talk about some of them in future blog posts) but here I want to address the issue of what I call the “always there” trend. The trend itself is not all that new. Since the invention of email and laptops employees and managers have felt an increasing obligation to always be available for work: Nothing new there. The new part comes when you start to look at the opposite side of the…

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Tandem Select has been assessing the value that might be provided to both candidates and hiring managers with a social media background check. We think it is promising and have written several articles and blogs on this topic. A recent blog post addressed…

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Face it, more and more hiring managers are admitting that they will look at a candidate’s social media profile at some point during the hiring process. And why shouldn’t they. There is a lot of valuable information to be gleamed from a candidate’s electronic footprint. A lot has been written about some of the pitfalls and problems with using this data, so I won’t hash over it here. My focus is on 9 things you should consider if you are going to adopt a strategy of using social media (social…

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