Are all the candidates on Facebook?

If you are a corporate recruiter or hiring manager are you using Facebook at all in your recruiting strategy?

Because based on my very unscientific and limited data set, it appears like pretty much everyone you might be targeting is either already on Facebook, or will be soon.

This is a chart showing the number of registered Facebook users from my high school, the incredibly typical, average, run-of-the-mill public school, John F. Kennedy Memorial High School in Iselin, NJ USA.  The Jul-08 line shows the data as of the first time I prepared the chart, and the Feb-09 line shows the data as of today.

In just about 7 months, Facebook use by my high school cohort for the graduation years I selected (a total of 12 graduating classes), has increased from 229 to 1,068.  That is a 366% growth rate from just my high school in the last 7 months!  Is there anyone not on Facebook these days?

In the last couple of years more and more organizations have embraced Facebook as a platform for recruiting, usually from the 'branding' and communication perspective.  If the adoption trends displayed by the good folks from my high school are at all indicative of larger trends in the US, expect to see more and more organizations dive in to the Facebook pool.

So to ask the question again:

Are all the candidates on Facebook?

HR Technology for the Small Business - The Resumator

Small businesses that need to hire traditionally have had limited technology resources available to help Flickr - Nonsequiturlassmanage the flow of applicants and resumes that come in for any of their openings.  For most, they remain stuck on the last 'big breakthrough', that is applications and resumes sent through e-mail, rather than in snail mail or submitted in person on paper.

Once e-mailed resumes start pouring in to the unfortunate HR rep or hiring manager, then starts the tedious process of opening, downloading, forwarding, saving locally, printing, and copying resumes, cover letters and anything else the candidate e-mailed you.  Big companies with staffs of recruiters and (at least once upon a time) hundreds or even thousands of openings long ago implemented full-featured Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), that provide wide-ranging functions like job posting, online applications and resumes, screening and assessment, interview scheduling, and finally offer management. These systems greatly improve the productivity and effectiveness of the recruiting function, but have traditionally only been implemented by, and accessible to the larger organizations.

The problem for the small business that needs to hire is that they need to complete all the same processes as the large company, but usually with no tools (other than e-mail) to assist them.  They spend comparatively way more time that the large organization manually processing paper and resumes.

A new entrant into the HR Technology market The Resumator, recognizes this problem and delivers a simple, inexpensive, yet elegant solution.  The Resumator is a basic ATS in 10 screens.  It allows a company to enter job openings, collect applicants and resumes, engage multiple staff members in the hiring process, and overall streamline and remove so much of the tedious, manual paper-pushing that most small organizations have to endure.

Nothing really remarkable yet, but where the Resumator distinguishes itself from its competition, is the ability, with a single line of code, to embed and include up to date job listings and a form to accept resumes directly on a company's website.  So in a flash, candidates who find your corporate website and see and submit for your open positions.  Very few, if any, 'enterprise' ATS's offer this kind of simple website integration without quite a bit of custom code.

Other beneficial features of the Resumator include aggregated ratings. The tool allows unlimited people to participate in the candidate evaluation, enter their indiividual candidate ratings on a 5-star system, and the Resumator produces an aggregated ranking.  Space is available to enter team comments, and communications with the candidate are also visible to all team members.

Finally, the Resumator offers help to the small business that may not be terribly tech-savvy by recommending local, industry specific, or niche web job boards that may be a good fit for posting the job opening.  And finally, it automates the process of actually posting the job opening to many of these boards and keeping track of the candidate activity that gets generated.  Again, this is a feature I have seen enterprise class ATS's struggle to pull off.

As for the cost, The Resumator is priced at a flat fee of $59 per month for unlimited jobs, applicants, and users. A 30-day free trial period is offered with registration. Even the smallest shop hiring one person a month easily spends 59 bucks of labor passing around paper.

I really like the Resumator, and I would encourage any small organization that is lucky enough to be in position to be hiring to give them a look.

Facebook and LinkedIn for Recruiting - The students speak out

So if you are a breathing, upright HR Professional in 2009 I know you have read countless blog posts, articles, or attended webinars exhorting you that you need to be mining social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for recruiting purposes.  Whether it is to network with and uncover passive candidates, (the primary use of LinekdIn) or research and background check prospects (primarily what recruiters are doing on Facebook), you have been told over and again that you need to be leveraging these tools in your recruiting efforts.

This post isn't another one of those 'How to recruit on Facebook' pieces.  If you are interested in that sort of thing, check out the HR Tech News blog which ran a fine series of 'Recruiting on Facebook' posts early in 2008.

In my HR Tech Class for this week's discussion assignment I asked the class to offer comments and observations on this new trend in recruiting.  These students are quite likely in the target demographic for many recruiters, mostly young, educated professionals working on an advanced degree.  And they are almost all on Facebook and LinkedIn.  So what do they think about recruiters and employers 'snooping' around their social networking profiles?  Here are a few of the best comments from the class:

The general consensus was 'beware what you post online':

 Even though we might not like it, we have to realize that employers are going to be googling our names and we have to be careful about the type of information we put online, because if we put it there it is fair game for anyone to see. - 'S

On the usefulness of Social Networking in onboarding and relationship building:

If employees can be 'friends' with their manager on facebook then that could help them to have a mentor. It's a safe and informal way for the employees to interact with their managers on a social level where they can learn from each other. - 'A'

One student astutely observes ways in which the progressive organization is starting to leverage these social networks in a more positive manner:

For example, companies and organizations have taken up these social networking sites to create their own business networks as a motivation to maximize interaction and networking among their own employees, even with the CEO. It not only limits to the networking connections, but to more job opportunities. For example, I have noted one CEO posting on Twitter about job opportunities. - 'V'

There were many other comments and observations in the discussion, some students really wishing that their Facebook information would remain strictly personal and never be used in a professional situation. But realistically, they realize that the horse is out of the barn, and anything they post on any site is likely ot one day be scrutinized by employers and recruiters.

A really good discussion, any one have a recommendation for the next HR Tech issue we should discuss?

Corporate Recruiting Site Shootout

This week in my HR Technology class we conducted the extremely subjective and un-scientific First Annual Corporate Recruiting Site shootout.

The contestants were:

Hyatt Hotels - Explore Hyatt

ConAgra Foods - Careers

Kraft - Jobs

Neiman Marcus - Careers

The class was split up into groups of three or four, and asked to find, then evaluate the company's job site on several criteria:

1. Ease of use

2. Ability to find information on company values and culture

3. Presence of real employee testimonials

4. Interactivity and 'connection'

5. Overall experience

Each group took about 20 minutes or so to find, then dive in to their assigned company to get a feel for the job site and make some observations.  Each group then presented their company's site to the class, highlighting the good and bad points they found.

Some key observations:

Three of the four sites presented the prospective candidate some difficulty in either finding open jobs, navigating various aspects of the site, or learning about the company culture.

Two of the sites presented fairly serious errors, some 'Page not found' or some instability in the browser as a result of way too much Flash content trying to execute.

One of the sites revealed a jarring distinction from a fairly well-done and slick 'corporate info' section, to a stark, ugly 'Applicant Tracking System' front page.  Honestly, if not for one tiny logo on the page, the 'job search' page could have been from any random company.

Of the four corporate sites reviewed, ConAgra Foods was the clear winner.  The navigation was clean, the information was easily found, there was content in all the key areas, job families, employee testimonials, etc.  In addition, other aspects of the ConAgra site were informative and entertaining, likely inceasing the time spent by prospects with the site.

The job seach process was simple and error free.

Great job ConAgra Foods.

Perhaps companies should do more 'real user' testing of their corporate job sites, I would imagine the folks from Hyatt, Neiman Marcus, and Kraft may be surprised to find out what real candidates may think.

Technology and Recruiting in 2 hours

I have been thinking about what should be the main points to emphasize for a class module on the impact and effect of technology on corporate recruiting. 

Flickr - Thewmatt

Do the 'old-school' jobs sites like Monster and Careerbuilder still really matter?  This week I listened to Penelope Trunk from Brazen Careerist state the Gen 'Y' candidate/prospect will never get interested in your job from a Monster job posting.  So how to attract those candidates?

So is it really all about mining LinkedIn for passive candidates and setting up shop in Facebook and maybe placing a few well-connected tweets on TwitHire?  I think I have heard the 'Ernst & Young Facebook page' story about a dozen times now, is that really the only good example of effective corporate recruiting on Facebook there is?

And from the internal processing perspective, is Taleo still to be considered the market leader, considering all the bad news lately? Do the other Talent Management vendors have any chance of growing in the Recruting space?  Is it worth spending class time on the some of the newer solutions like JobVite or VoiceScreener?

If you had two hours or so to enlighten a (mostly) captive audience on the impact, current state, and trends in technology for recruiting what would you focus on?

Aside - thanks Alltop for adding me to HR.alltop.com!