Serendipity, in addition to actual qualifications and experience, plays a major role in a job search. Indeed, scoring an interview increases one’s chances of impressing (or not) a potential employer. But how do you win that face time? Candidates struggle to distinguish themselves, while recruiting managers wade through the hundreds of cut-and-dried resumes they receive each day.

In the interest of “giving serendipity a nudge,” JobProx is a novel smartphone app that connects recruiters and employers with job seekers when they are near each other physically—putting a face on the endless stream of digital resumes. Using the app’s proximity feature, job seekers and recruiters or hiring managers are alerted when they’re nearby one another. Read the rest of this entry »

A phone interview is one of the most effective ways of assessing an applicant’s communication skills early in the hiring process. It’s often better than the in-person interview because the candidate tends to be more at ease than with a face-to-face interview. However, phone interviews can be time-consuming and costly for the hiring company. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few months, analysts at Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) have been working on a new research space for talent management. I’m happy to announce that the Talent Management research space for talent management systems is now online and available to the public.

Talent Management: What’s In It?

TEC’s new Talent Management research space is geared toward end users looking for solutions to manage their business workforce—their most valuable asset! This research space for talent management systems includes vendor-related information such as white papers, case studies, articles, and reports, and contains a talent management model that you can use as a request for information (RFI).

This RFI can help you determine the talent management activities that you perform within your organization, and how important specific functionalities are to your selection of talent management software. The Talent Management model addresses the following software functionality:

• Recruitment and Staffing
• Personnel Management
• Career Development & Succession Planning
• Learning Management
• Performance & Compensation Management
• Workforce Planning
• Product Technology

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with the folks at BIS as part of TEC’s Certification process. For BIS, the value-add of TEC Certification was clear—and all they had to do was complete a detailed questionnaire/request for information (RFI) and demonstrate certain solution-specific features and functions that I outlined for them in a demo script. I sat down for the three-hour session with Kivanç Sahin, from BIS’s Sales and Marketing Department and Dilek Eksi’s, BIS’S Senior Business Analyst. The following are my thoughts about BIS and the ProStaff solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Boy, we have come a long way in the search for talent. Long gone are the days where company’s would place an advertisement in the classified ad section of their local newspaper’s and wait for the perfect candidate to call and request an interview—although some organizations today feel this is still a very effective recruiting method and often use it in conjunction with other channels.

Today, it’s more about what I like to call “cyber recruiting”—using social media tools for attracting and finding the right person to fill a job. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter are some of the main social media tools used by today’s forward-thinking organizations and allow recruiters to target the exact skill sets required for often difficult-to- fill positions. Candidates that were once far beyond the recruiter’s reach are now right there at their fingertips. Read the rest of this entry »