Continuing the monthly tradition, here are some follow-ups and add-ons for March posts, plus anything that was too small for a post, but too interesting to pass up.
Yet More about Social Media Recruiting!
There’s nothing radical or surprising in CareerBuilder’s new eBook—but it’s so charming that I recommend a download. Plus it has my favorite title of the month: Will Tweet for Work. (The subtitle, A User’s Guide to Talent Recruitment through Social Media, is less amusing but more informative . . . )
Highlights include: A page on “Niche Sites” like Bebo, Ning, and Slideshare, and one on “Best Practices for Using Social Media to Recruit.” Clearly organized, and filled with tips, this eBook offers a lot of information in just 22 pages.
While thinking about social media–visit/revisit our March post on Corporate Blogging.
The Art of the Turndown
A continuing theme at Corporate Eye on Careers is improvement of the candidate experience. The basic idea of being nice to candidates gets repeated a lot, along with reasons why it’s good business and reminders for best practice. But obviously this topic can’t be covered too often, since so many HRs still aren’t managing their candidates effectively.
Turndowns and Great Recruiters, a post by Jason Lauritson over at the Human Capital Institute blog, offers some helpful tips for one of the hardest tasks in the hiring process: rejecting applicants.
Further Adventures of the Undercover Employee
As explained in an earlier post, I’ve been spending a few weeks disguised as a worker bee inside a really big company. So how’s that working out . . . ?
Aaaarrrgh! I’m still in the hive, so won’t go into a lot of detail—but here are a couple of thoughts that have occurred to me so far:
- From the hiring perspective: Many job descriptions include the phrase “fast-paced environment.” And that could mean anything from “uncontrolled chaos” to “never boring.” Candidates should ask what flavor of “fast-paced” the environment really is—and interviewers should be prepared to answer honestly. A real discussion on this point could help improve hiring fit, since the skills required for a fast-paced environment could be excellent multi-tasking on one hand, nerves of titanium on another.
- From the onboarding perspective: One of the challenges for new employees is finding themselves in a lot of meetings where they don’t know the other people and don’t have any background on the topic. That’s hard enough in person. So as more and more meetings become virtual, meeting leaders need to seriously master the appropriate skills. For example . . . Remember that people on the phone can’t see you!! Remember that people on the phone probably can’t hear questions asked by people in the room. And learn how to use the conferencing tool (whatever it is) BEFORE the meeting.
More from the Undercover Employee in future posts. Meanwhile–Hello, April!
(Many thanks to prakhar for this month’s “something beautiful.”)
Cynthia Giles has followed a serpentine career path from academia to publishing to marketing and design to information technology and corporate communications. There’s plenty of detail about this journey at www.cynthiagiles.com, but briefly--the common theme has been ideas, and how to present them effectively. Along the way, she became an accidental expert on data warehousing and business intelligence, and for the past ten years she has combined corporate contracting with an independent consulting practice that focuses on marketing strategy for smaller businesses and non-profits.
Having spent quite a bit of time looking for work, and anywhere from two weeks to two years inside a wide variety of American companies—she has given much thought to what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to creating a great employment fit.