Category Archives: All

091209 In The Know v1.05

  • Computers Don’t Save Hospitals Money
    A Harvard Study looked at investment and returns for Hospital IT Systems. The net? The installed tools serve administrators not medical practitioners. Send this piece to the person helping to define your nexy HRMS.
  • Why a Lack of Talent Cannot Be Blamed On Genes
    Conversation starter. Talent is pattern recognition that can be learned.
    Scan this and ask yourself if you’re really looking for a specific way of learning when you say ‘talent’
  • The President’s Jobs Initiative Just Doesn’t Measure Up.
    According to Robert Reich, there is a hole as large as the proposed initiative as large as the deficits in State and local governemnts. So, the jobs plan keeps us barely treading water. He says an unemployment rate of 10% means 18% out of work or underemployed.
  • Should I Become a Project Manager?
    More career advice should feel like this. You can’t walk out of school to become a project manager. The ropes invlove earning influence, authority and power. That takes time. The role is different from industry to industry and company to company. More and more work is like this.
  • Job Boards Have To Work Inside and Outside
    This is every bit as true for corporate employment sites and commercial job boards. In order to be successful, you have to build traffic and be usable. You have to make it easy to post and easy to search. You also need to be visible in the places where your niche congregates. The trick is to balance the two

Posted in All | Leave a comment

091207 Jobvite

Jobvite

There are a ton of companies moving into the use of social media for recruiting. None are as advanced and focused as Jobvite. The Burlingame, CA startup, is the industry leader in the development of innovation and functionality in Social Recruiting.

The company began its life as a referral driven Applicant Tracking System. As it began to catch the social media wave, its market presence began to include social media features from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Ultimately, the market wanted to be able to have just the social recruiting functions.

While Jobvite will easily perform various job board placement functions, the core idea of the service is to build solid referral networks using social media. In other words, Jobvite competes easily with traditional job placement services and the new emerging social media recruiting tools. But it has an astonishing difference.

Where most of the other tools are built on a series of scripts, Jobvite is a standalone software application. The development team is a polished Silicon Valley startup crew with deep industry experience. The application is data savvy and uses the client’s recruiting experience to make the client smarter.

It’s easier to think of Jobvite as great referral recruiting than as a social media dashboard (although it certainly offers the social media dashboard functionality). The real value of the system comes from using it.

Every member of a client organization gets a Jobvite account. The idea is that employees use their referral networks to generate hires. Jobvite provides widgets and tracking tools. Employees evaluate (with some very smart Jobvite automated matching support) which of their friends and connections might be interested in a job. The invitation (a jobvite) gets sent and the system tracks and follows the recommendation.

Over time, you get a picture of who’s connected to whom; which connections are most productive and how hiring works in your particular ecosystem. Jobvite does what I’d call ‘on the fly job matching in the social media ecosystem’. It’s not just a job publishing tool. It gives intelligent guidance and collects data that improves its guidance.

There’s also a great widget that allows a user to have an app from their company on their facebook page. The app offers jobs from the company, edited as appropriate by the user. One of the goals at Jobvite is to make real the idea that every employee is a recruiter.

At Jobvite, the vision is that the Internet is the Job Board. While the tool capably optimizes traditional job posting, its core intent is to harness the power of social networks; not by brand name but as an emerging reality. The platform operates on the assumption that any job is better filled by a trackable recommendation and that clear metrics are essential elements of knowing whether or not your efforts are effective.

Where others provide publishing tools, Jobvite provides an integrated recruiting framework and toolset rooted in the power of referrals.

There are two basic packages you can by from Jobvite: Jobvite Hire and Jobvite Source. JHire is an ATS with social media recruiting capabilities. JSource is a fully functional social media recruiting campaign execution tool.

Since the firm itself resides in Silicon Valley, it has an easy time building smart integrations with various local vendors. The team is composed of seasoned Valley technologists who are well connected in the emerging army of Valley based social media empires. As a result, the company is a good corporate citizen in the areas of privacy and Terms of Use compliance. You’ll never see Jobvite’s accounts at data providers getting pulled for the overenthusiastic use of spidering.

Regular readers will certainly have heard about Jobvite before this piece. My recommendation, though, is that you get a demo sometime soon. The Jobvite toolkit will improve your recruiting effectiveness.

Also posted in Applicant Tracking Systems, HR Tech, HR Technology, HR Trends, Industry Analysis, Job Boards, Networking, Recruiting Strategy, Social Software, Talent Management | Leave a comment

091130 Tungle

Tungle

For the past six months, I’ve been using Tungle to schedule and coordinate meetings. The logistics associated with trying to work out schedule details are a time sink. It’s hard, when you do things manually, to guarantee that everyone ends up on the same page.

Tungle works well as either a plugin for Outlook or a web based interface with Google calendar integration. The service lets you propose multiple blocks of times for meetings with people, and it lets the recipients select the times that work best for them.

Instead of relentless back and forth emails and phone calls, the Tungle setup makes meeting coordination a one step, effortless event. In my setup, Tungle is integrated with Google’s calendar and my iPhone. A schedule item goes in one place and is seamlessly updated on all the others.

I also use the Tungle.me service which lets people see my availability and request meetings based on my availability. Every day, the amount of time I spend coordinating details is waning.

I have learned a surprising thing. Executive assistants hate Tungle. There’s something about the fact that the tool makes the work so simple that is threatening. I’ve had a large number of assistants refuse to use the tool to schedule a meeting for their boss.

So, while Tungle may be just the thing if you’re trying to schedule meetings for candidates with hiring managers, you might test it when you’re making executive sales calls. Inside an organization, it may be impolitic to have your CEOs assistant scheduling meetings on your Tungle. The rules of engagement vary widely.

Tungle is fantastic and getting better. The one hiccup I have found is that when I schedule multiple meetings at the same time, I don’t always end up having them in my calendar. Tungle generates a meeting invitation which you have to accept. It seems a little counter-intuitive. I have lsot about 5% of my meetings to the flaw.

But, as it is with most Web 2.0 things, Tungle is a work in progress. In the short time I’ve been an active user, the service has rubbed off a number of rough edges.

This is a fantastic way to deal with one of the HR world’s single greatest hassles.

Also posted in Daily Links, HR Tech, HR Technology, HR Trends | 1 Comment