Recruiter's Essential Tips

Wishing the Recruiters Community a very Happy New Year!

You need to keep track of the resume details after screening the resumes. You can save the contact information of the candidate in ACT! database and copy the resume text in the Notes tab of ACT!. This helps you to keep track of the details like candidate follow-ups and other activities. The recurring problem is to manually enter the details of the candidate and resume into ACT! Normally, it takes 2-3 minutes to enter the contact details and the resume details in the appropriate fields of ACT!. So, typically if you are entering 20 resumes, this will consume atleast one hour for you. ResumeGrabber Pro automates this tedious data entry process possible within seconds. ResumeGrabber extracts the individual contact details from resumes and transfers them into appropriate fields in ACT! database automatically. Apart from this, you have the option of saving the resume file in a local folder and then link the resume file to the corresponding contact in ACT!. You can also save the resume t

ResumeGrabber Pro is one of the popular screening software that comes handy for recruiters. The initial recruiting process involves searching and screening the resumes. This consumes plenty of manual hours. ResumeGrabber makes this boredom work into a breeze. If you search for resumes online, the search engine throws out millions of results. It is a tedious process to go through all the results and find out the resumes. ResumeGrabber contains Resume Validator that can filter resumes from the search engine results and display the resume details in a tabular form. This table, termed as ResumeGrabber Grid extracts the contact information, experience, keywords you have searched for and displays all the details in a spreadsheet format. Each row of the grid displays details of a candidate. The bottom panel of the grid displays the preview of resume of the selected row. This helps you to filter and sort the candidates and then the filtered information can be easily transfer

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Staffing Industry Analysts is a premier research and analysis firm covering the contingent workforce. Known for its independent and objective insights, its proprietary research, data, support tools, publications, and executive conferences provide a competitive edge to decision makers who supply and buy temporary staffing. You can get more information from Staffing Industry Analysts website.

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Use contact manager's filters and groups, and print mass mail to selected candidates in your ACT!, GoldMine, Outlook. These contact managers also integrate with common faxing software through your word processor and allow you to send mass or single fax messages. You can even set options to automatically record the time, date and name of any document you send in your candidate record’s history field.

Source: eGrabber Newsletters When you run a search in Google, you will notice the “Cached” and “Similar Pages” links at the end of each search result. Google is always saving copies of new pages it visits so if that page disappears, you will still be able to view it in the “Cached” link. You may not see this link for some search results and that is because the owner of the web site may have requested Google not to cache the page or the page was not indexed in the first place. The “Similar Pages” link will give you links to other web sites that are relevant to your search. Say, you are looking for engineers in the Bay Area with a Memory Flash background and living in the 408 area code. Your search string would look like this: (intitle:resume | inurl:resume) "flash memory" 408 You will see a number of search results and when you click the “Similar Pages” link, it will give you additional names, websites and associations of potential candidates. Give it a try to increase your pr

Resume screening is a time-consuming process that involves a lot of manual effort. Using software for screening resumes reduces the time and effort. This can also save money, as extra manpower required is cut down. When resume screening is done by a software, the personal bias is avoided. The software treats all the resumes the same while searching for given information. The automatic filtering, sorting and saving resumes provides the competitive edge of quick retrieval of required information. On the other hand, there is a chance of missing a potential candidate just because the given keyword is not found in the person’s resume. The software is limited to do in the way it has been programmed. A personal approach to the style of the resume will be missing in this system. Moreover, a computer savvy person, who knows how exactly the software searches for information, can provide all the keywords appropriately in the resume and easily get it screened by the software.

Resume screening is the first step in recruiting process. The resume information gives you the idea about candidate’s work experience, skills and abilities. The initial assessment of resumes has to be done based on your organization standards. The best method is to prepare a checklist that covers the essential skills, knowledge, experience and other desired qualities relevant to the job. You can evaluate a resume against this checklist. The screening standards help you to identify, filter and eliminate the resumes. However, reviewing the resumes manually may consume more time and money. Nowadays millions of resumes are available online. In the advancement, lots of screening software are also available. Many organizations take advantage of the resume screening software that saves time and money. Such programs search the resumes for given information like skills, experience and other details. The resume screening software is fast, economical and reduces hassle. Anyway, t

Source: eGrabber Newsletters You can set up contact managers such as ACT! and GoldMine to automatically send email responses to your candidates. If you want to send a ‘Thank you ’ email to every new candidate added to your database, you can set up an email template with an appropriate message. You can also set up a series of email responses to be sent at different points of time. For instance, when a new candidate is added, you can set up different email templates – one to acknowledge the candidate’s resume, one to schedule a call after 5 days, etc. This helps you save time and recruit more.

Nowadays many interview questions are available in the Internet to help candidates. Most of them check the popular questions and are well prepared with ready-made answers. Think innovative. Asking mere questions that are already made popular through Internet may not reveal the candidate’s true personality. Instead, you can provide a problematic situation and ask the candidate to resolve the problem. This should be on the spot. You can even slightly tweak a current issue in the organization and make the question as "How to handle this situation?" The candidate’s reaction to the unexpected question, approach towards the problem, time taken to resolve it – these things will provide you a lot of information about the candidate.

This is the latest strategy followed by HR professionals. What is attitude? Attitude is the emotional view towards a subject or person. This can be positive, negative or neutral. An employee should have a positive attitude towards the job, work environment, co-workers and the company. How important is attitude? Well, 100% attitude is essential for a potential employee. Knowledge comes second followed by skill. Look for candidates with good attitude. This will reduce 50% of your recruiting pressure. Even if a candidate with good attitude lacks skills, the person can be trained easily. But you cannot teach attitude! How to identify the person with proper attitude? Attitude can be recognized from the behavior of the person. The body language and way of communication explain the behavior. The personality comes into the scene here. Watching the behavior of the candidate and asking appropriate questions help you to decide the person’s attitude. We’ll discuss questions related to attitude and

Today, finding passive candidates on Google requires recruiters to master and apply advanced search commands and techniques that require time, effort and expertise that many may not have. But being able to quickly zero in on relevant passive resumes on Google, without being a search expert, will be a tremendous competitive advantage for busy recruiters. This free webinar will introduce you to 1) automated tools to quickly find passive resumes on Google 2) automated tools to import, organize, screen and transfer resumes 3) recruiting best practices that will raise the value you provide to your clients Spending just 45 minutes on this webinar will open your eyes to simple solutions that will help you source and manage resumes in 1/5th of the time you normally spend. Webinar attendees will receive an exclusive discount on eGrabber's power tool for finding passive candidates on the Internet - ResumeFinder . System Requirements - PC-based attendees Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP

One of the frequently asked questions in interviews is “ Tell me about yourself ”. You can begin your conversation with this question. While it seems to be a very simple and common question, the answer gives you an idea about the candidate's personality. You can identify the communication skills, the attitude and other qualities of the candidate from the answer. If the person starts talking about the personal life, hobbies and interest, the attitude towards job is not good. If the person narrates whatever is already in the resume, then there is a lack of communication. You need to have a second thought. Well, the smart answer may contain three parts: (1) The candidate’s past experience (2) current position (3) future goal. Example: “I have got 7 years experience in the Customer Support domain. I am currently working as Asst. Manager, Customer Support with . I always like to manage the support team, streamline the process and look for challenging opportunities

In the selection process, interview questions help you to decide the best candidate. While you are screening the resumes, you can understand the qualification and technical skills of a candidate. In addition, there are other skills required for a job. Based on the job position, there may be specific requirements like Leadership, Communication, and other inter-personal skills. These qualities can be identified during the interview process only. The interview may be conducted through telephone or face-to-face. While communicating with the candidate, your interview questions will bring out the candidate’s real skills. We will discuss the smart interview questions in later sessions.

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Contact managers like ACT! and GoldMine allow you to manage and share information with your co-workers through the Advanced Synchronization feature. You can share candidate information as well as scheduled activities, notes and resumes.

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Many recruiters use Google to search for resumes, and there are a few “Google extras” that could come handy. date: is used with keywords searches for related documents within a recent date range. date: hurricanes 3 searches for documents on hurricanes posted within the last three months Safesearch: is used with keywords searches for documents, but excludes adult sites. safesearch: movies returns results about movies but leaves out the adult movie sites. Q&A - Type your question into the search box and your answer will be at the top of the box. Typing Population of USA returns the answer 295,734,134. To get the weather in St. Louis, MO, type Weather St. Louis, MO Currency Conversions - ­Type in 5 USD in GBP and you get the answer, 5 U.S. dollars = 2.83221933 British pounds.

You may wonder what company policies do with job satisfaction. The policies are framed to communicate the strategy of the management to the employees. The way of communication matters a lot. In most of the organizations, the company policies are provided as thick employee manual that may overkill the employees. Sometimes, they may not go through the entire contents. Instead of making them read the legal information and rules, conduct the orientation to make them understand the guidelines. Ensure that every employee understands the policies and procedures rather than enforcing them as rules. Explain the key rules to be followed clearly. This includes maintaining confidential information, use of email and telephone, standards of conduct etc. You may convey the message that these guidelines are to be strictly followed. However, be prepared to have exception to the rules in unforeseen conditions. This will create a positive environment and attachment to the job.

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Over a period of time, recruiters end up with a large repository of resumes and looking up for candidates becomes a little bit difficult and time consuming. Contact managers are useful to handle such situations. With ACT!, GoldMine or Outlook, you can categorize your candidate database with various fields. Resumes can be categorized based on criteria such as industry, skills, education and more. This narrows down your search to a smaller collection of records based on your specified criteria.

Recruiters and hiring managers' responsibilities include everything from knowing job requirements, writing job ads, sourcing and screening candidates, conducting interviews, selection and induction, training, etc. All these fundamentally affect the productivity and success of the organization. However, in reality, most recruiters' time and resource is constantly taken up with screening quality candidates - up to 5 hours every eight-hour day. Today, software solutions are emerging that can provide a practical answer to recruiters. The problem now is how to choose a solution that will be the best fit for their requirements; affordable and flexible too. What should you look for automated resume screening system? For Recruiters and Hiring Managers, the questions are largely organizational and more focused on operational matters: Is the system affordable and within the budget of an organization? Is the system user-friendly enough for people with different skill levels? Will it autom

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Jobsinthemoney.com , a Dice company, is a leading career site for jobs and career management in accounting, finance, retail banking and wealth management. It provides premier job opportunities, a resume database, and useful editorial content such as hiring news, industry trends and salary surveys Visit Jobsinthemoney.com web site for more information.

I manually go through hundreds of resumes daily to screen the best ones for open job positions. This takes up a lot of my time and I sometimes miss out good resumes. Is there a way by which I can quickly screen resumes, so that I can spend more time interviewing and short-listing the best candidates? With the all-new ResumeGrabber Professional , you can screen resumes in no time. Just enter the resume keywords in a search box and click the ‘Grab’ button on ResumeGrabber toolbar. It will screen all resumes in your Outlook, system folders, Google and show up only those that matched your keywords. You no longer have to open each resume to find out whether it meets your requirement. You can now screen hundreds of resumes in minutes, which would have otherwise taken you hours to do. Download your 10-day trial version of ResumeGrabber at no cost and sprint your way to recruiting success.

Searching for all type of keywords may lead to the following! http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20071127&mode=classic

The work environment plays an important role to make the employee to be emotionally involved in the job. The ISO definition for Work Environment is as follows: (Reference: http://www.praxiom.com/iso-definition.htm ) The term work environment refers to all the factors that influence work. In general, these include social, cultural, psychological, physical, and environmental conditions. The term work environment includes lighting, temperature, and noise factors, as well as the whole range of ergonomic influences. It also includes things like supervisory practices as well as reward and recognition programs. All of these things influence how work is performed. This does not mean to have a luxurious infrastructure, but a convenient workspace. Ensure a healthy and safe environment. Allocate some personal space for each employee with desk, lockers etc. This makes a psychological difference. Create an encouraging and friendly environment. Provide enough freedom to exp

Source: eGrabber Newsletters CareerWomen.com is a leading online career center by and for women. Tailored to the needs of today’s working women, CareerWomen.com provides an easy access to top employers and recruiters who are actively looking to recruit women. Visit CareerWomen.com website for more information.

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Entersect offers a series of online services based on proprietary technology covering various markets. Their goal is to put critical information in the hands of those who need to make decisions related to an individual's background and/or current location. Their services include validating the SSN#, education verification, employment references, etc. that are required as a part of normal candidate screening process. Visit the Entersect website for more information.

Research Bit from Jobsite. clipped from ukrecruiter.typepad.com This is a great bit of research from Jobsite . What better way to get people to use their site than to assess their happiness and then suggest they look for another job that will make them happier. I suggest headhunters keep this bit of research to hand when trying to entice execs from one company to another! The Jobsite “Happy Days” research examined the impact of being happy at work and the immediate effect of a good and bad work-day on an evening at home. They surveyed 421 workers at 20 commuter train stations across the country and collected saliva samples (I wonder if the saliva samplers are happy in their work!) on both a work day and a leisure day to compare stress and immune levels to determine the changes in behaviour after a day at work. For the full report you'll need to email (the very helpful) Vicky at vicky.taylor@jobsite.co.uk

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Workforce Management website contains a host of information on HR related topics including compensation, benefits and awards, and recruiting and staffing. It focuses on providing management information and marketing services to HR professionals. Check out the Workforce Management website for more information.

Positive inter-personal relationship has multiple impacts on job satisfaction. When an employee has good relationship with the manager, co-workers and customers, the performance automatically increases and results in high job satisfaction. Like job satisfaction, inter-personal relationship is also an emotional feeling and cannot be measured. However, an employer can organize programs that encourage teamwork. Arranging for frequent meetings and resolving conflicts immediately strengthen the relationship. Ensure that a positive friendship is shaped between the co-workers so that they enjoy working with each other. Start with building relationship among people with similarities instead of differences. Later the same kind of relationship can be established among people having differences. Effective inter-personal relationship leads to job satisfaction, high performance and success.

CareerTV the leading provider of recruitment videos launched a "Celebrities'Job News" series. clipped from www.hrmarketer.com CareerTV's target audience is young professionals. To ensure that the tone and content meet their expectations, CareerTV recently launched the "Celebrities' Job News" series which includes interviews with well-known celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld. "Our goal in interviewing celebrities is simple – young people generally look up to these people and want more information about them. Our audience wants to know how famous people started their careers and what they did before their careers took off. Many of these celebs were very creative in what type of work would allow them to pursue their goals," says David Wheeler, President and Executive Producer at CareerTV.

Free Webinar: Recruiting Metrics - Quality of Hire November 29, 2007 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM ET

Having a good manager is the key motivating factor for an employee. When a manager can motivate employees and increase the productivity, the same person can also demotivate the employees and lead to frustration. Job satisfaction is the personal emotional feeling of the employee. When the employee is not receiving recognition for the performance, this emotional feeling is blown up. Especially when there is lack of communication between the manager and employees, it certainly affects the job satisfaction. A manager may easily affect the employee’s job satisfaction by ignoring the ideas, not recognizing the achievements, or by not having proper relationship. Many employees do not tend to leave the company, but their managers. The top management can consider the managers’ performance by obtaining feedback from the employees reporting to them. This may be a good start to have good managers and in turn to retain employees.

Guide to Top Specialty Boards Where Top Candidates Seek Career Oppurtunities clipped from www.interbiznet.com TopUSAJobs.com: Guide to Top Specialty Boards Where Top Candidates Seek Career Opportunites Accounting / Finance JobsintheMoney.com Accounting / Finance CareerBank.com Call Center CallCenterJobs.com Consulting ConsultingCareerQuest.com Diversity DiversityJobs.com Drivers / Trucking JobsInTrucks.com Employee Benefits EmployeeBenefitsJobs.com Enviro/Occup. Health & Safety EHSCareers.com Executive RiteSite.com Executive NETSHARE.com Health / Medical HealthJobsUSA.com Hispanic / Bilingual LatPro.com Hotels / Hospitality HOTELScareers.com Logistics JobsInLogistics.com Manufacturing JobsInManufacturing.com Retail AllRetailJobs.com Security Clearance ClearanceJobs.com Tax Specialists TaxTalent.com Telecom / Wireless TelecomCareers.net For more Specialty Boards, visit: The Empl

Source: eGrabber Newsletter Over a period of time, recruiters end up with a large repository of resumes and looking up for candidates becomes a little bit difficult and time consuming. Contact managers are useful to handle such situations. With ACT!, GoldMine or Outlook, you can categorize your candidate database with various fields. Resumes can be categorized based on criteria such as industry, skills, education and more. This narrows down your search to a smaller collection of records based on your specified criteria.

Source: eGrabber Newsletters Diversity recruiting is becoming increasingly important, as companies are turning global. Companies have learnt that if they want to operate around the world, they must be able to recruit and retain individuals from diverse backgrounds. Recruiting diverse individuals help in operating facilities at multiple offshore locations better. Diverse recruiting and thinking also help in designing products suitable for different countries. In a global economy, having a diverse workforce is no longer an option. It has become an absolute requirement for success.

The previous session was concluded as Job satisfaction plays a vital role in Employee Retention. Sometimes, employers have the impression that highly-paid employees would stay with them for a long period. Even the highest paid employees may leave the company if they feel frustrated. Job satisfaction is the emotional state-of-mind that makes employees to be attached to the job. The factors that attract employees include good manager, inter-personal relationship, work environment, recognition, company policies, and of course Salary. We’ll discuss these factors in detail in the forthcoming sessions.

Employees are motivated when they find involvement in their job. Explain the vision of the company to the employees clearly. Provide details of the outcome expected from them. Simply setting a target would not make the employee to get involved in the job. Make the job interesting to them by explaining the results of their performance. Once employees find the job interesting and get involved in it, they gain the job satisfaction. Job satisfaction plays key role in the career of employees and makes them to continue with the company.

When a new employee comes into an organization, training the person consumes lot of time and money. In spite of recruiting an experienced employee with required skills, the initial induction takes its own time. Instead of involving existing employees to train the newbies, you can develop an internal portal that provides information about company’s products, services, and culture. The employees can access this portal to get information and they can be provided access to update the latest information about products. This type of sharing knowledge makes learning interesting and reduces the cost & time involved.

With the advent of Google, sourcing people and resume has become much more convenient and faster. "Googling" for passive and active candidates has become one of the primary responsibility of any recruiter. A recruiter must be able to identify the right keywords to source active and passive candidates. To identify the right keywords the recruiters has to master the art of understanding the Client's requirements to identify the right keywords. Let's analyze about the tool that helps the recruiter to google efficiently in the next session.

Awards and rewards are excellent methods to motivate employees. But be careful while rewarding them. Sometimes this may lead others who don’t receive the rewards to think that you are showing ‘favoritism’ to certain employees. When employees feel that they are being ignored while the co-worker gets a reward, it results in frustration. Make the reason clear to every one when an individual is rewarded, like “outstanding performance”. Favoritism has a great impact on the performance and may lead to conflicts. Avoid this in a work place to ensure consistent productivity.

Retaining talents plays a major role in the long-term success of any business. The bottom line of employee retention is recognition . Good recognition of the performance motivates an employee rather than any other factor. Being nice and friendly to an employee is not recognition . Try to provide a frequent feedback about the employee’s performance. Make the employees feel that they are contributing highly to the success of the organization. This acknowledgement inspires any employee to stay for a long period.

ERE.net reported that Ladders.com has made a transition from free system - Effective November 1, Ladders.com will be offering two different services: Premium and RecruitLadder Enterprise - both offer unlimited job posting and candidate database searching. clipped from www.ere.net Months after TheLadders.com first announced that it was moving away from a free system for recruiters, the $100K jobs website has officially made the transition to an exclusively fee-based suite of online recruiting solutions. Effective November 1, the company says all new recruiters will choose from two service options: RecruitLadder Premium and RecruitLadder Enterprise, both of which offer unlimited job posting and candidate database searching.

Free Webinar on Sourcing and Recruiting 2007 - Key Issues and Lessons for Success clipped from www.ere.net Join HR executives and other technology-decision makers for a one-of-a-kind webinar, "Sourcing and Recruiting 2007: Key Issues and Lessons for Success." There is no cost to attend this event. Simply complete the registration form in full* and you'll be provided with the call-in details and URL for this online presentation. This program has been approved for up to one (1) recertification credit hours toward PHR and SPHR recertification through the Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI). For more information about certification and recertification, please visit the HRCI homepage at www.hrci.org .

MySpace is the hottest social networking site. HitWise reports that MySpace has surpassed Yahoo Mail as the most visited site. MySpace is currently registering more than 150,000 new users each day and the average time a user stays on the site is close to 30 minutes each day. Recruiters can benifit a lot from MySpace because more than 80% of the site's registered member fall into the age category of 16-32. Recruiters can use MySpace to recruit entry level employees, employees for the service industry and employees for middle level management.

This is a must read for anyone who changes jobs often, or wants to have their resume viewed by many recruiters. Using these techniques you can ensure that you will be found on your next job search. read more

what are they looking for...autonomy, flexibility, input and influence in decision making, opportunity for leveraging their skills or for career advancement, work life balance, options for improving both technical and business skills read more |

Nowadays, employees hop jobs frequently. Not only hunting for talents, but retaining talents has also become one of the responsibilities of HR Professionals. Not all people work for money. Every employee has a different reason to stay in a job. Some may like to face challenges, some to achieve personal goals and others may be interested in specific activities. Find out the activity that inspires an employee by conducting an internal survey. Motivate the employees by organizing different programs that may attract them. This may be a soft-skill training session, games or some fun-filled activities. Such exciting events help you to retain your best talents.

Author: Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work,but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. We can relate this poem closely with " What make you a good boss " It was just a thought

Back again to "Employee retention" - Analyzing the reasons as to why employee quits job . The post below discusses on the impact of employer branding on recruiting and retaining right candidates. The Accenture's latest survey of CEOs shows, 60% of them are worried about the need to attract and retain the best people. The organizations can no more aim to be all things to all people. They should focus more on what it takes to build and sustain employer retention that binds and attracts the right talent.Employer branding is not just recruitment and resourcing. It's a complete organizational responsibility and opportunity. It is definitely something that CEO needs to care about. Employers should understand what engages people and should be clear about what an organization offers and does not. This means you are more likely to recruit and retain right candidates.

CareerWomen.com is a leading online career center by and for women. Tailored to the needs of today’s working women, CareerWomen.com provides an easy access to top employers and recruiters who are actively looking to recruit women. Visit CareerWomen.com website for more information.

Here is a lesser known and under utilized search method you can use when searching for resumes using Google. You can even narrow down your search to zip codes. Let’s say you want to search for resumes in the St. Louis, Missouri area. Type the following string in Google. (resume | homepage) 63000..63199 You can provide a zip code range separated by 2 dots and no spaces in between the two numbers. This technique is not entirely foolproof, as many people do not put their home addresses on their Internet resumes. You would normally try this search, but run a second search using a combination of State and area code information. Source: eGrabber Newsletters