Social Networking

Best Tweet Gets the Job? Not so Fast.

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

A kooky recruiting story has been getting pretty big play this summer, but the punchline isn’t necessarily what it seems. Mike McKay of media giant Saatchi was looking to hire a copywriter, and told the Atlantic Monthly that he was going to select his next employee based on a clever tweet. Unlike some bloggers proclaiming that the winner now has a $70k-a-year job, it actually appears that the winner simply did that: Won a contest.

Presumably, the Chosen One (Jonathan Pelleg of Austin, TX) will get interviewed at the very least, with the possibility of getting the job only emerging after some sort of selection procedure and conversations with management…right?

But as a sourcing strategy, it’s certainly clever and likely being duplicated already. It certainly is by job seekers, it seems.

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Posted in Assessment Trends, Social Networking | No Comments »

What Are Employees Saying About Your Company?

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Anything good? Everything bad? On the heels of the long-celebrated – and notorious – F***edCompany.com, several workplace critique sites have popped up in the last few years. The latest to catch on are Glassdoor.com, and JobVent, both of which attempt to quantify ratings of the work environment. Like others, these sites rely on the comments and attitude ratings of current and former employees. JobVent actually makes an attempt at scoring the organization’s desirability as a workplace, whereas Glassdoor cultivates its registered users to cull more accurate ratings. Recently in the news, Jobs of the Damned is focused on collecting material for a book on bad bosses.

Like the ubiquitous RateMyProfessors.com and the broader issues associated with merchants and service providers profiled on Yelp, some question the reality behind the ratings, thinking that isolated and overly irritated employees will dominate postings and unfairly characterize a firm as a bad place to work. On the other hand, each of the sites named above contains glowing reviews of many employers.

So will the new transparency affect recruiting efforts at less-than-positive workplaces, or will this trend fade away like F’ed Company? And does your organization deserve its online profile?

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Posted in Assessment Trends, Social Networking, Work Values/Fit | No Comments »

Twitter and Facebook Recruitment Hazards

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

by Mark C. Healy

According to a recent Workforce Management piece, recruiting on the likes of Twitter and Facebook could lead to allegations of discrimination and get you into legal trouble. Quoting various attorneys, author Fay Hansen suggests that the social networking world is both too young and White, leading to a risky recruiting process; moreover, she suggests that recruiters are relying too much on their Tweets.

The logic is a little suspect. Unless hiring under the terms of a consent decree, most organizations aren’t under any specific limitations in their sourcing efforts. Moreover, discrimination claims come from applicants, who presumably responded to a posting or advertisement. As such, it would be hard to sue a company on the grounds of discriminatory sourcing if you, in fact, applied at that company.

Few recruiters report that they recruit exclusively through social networking sites. However, plaintiffs could possibly use the strategy as evidence of intentional discrimination in a disparate treatment claim. At the very least, spending time sourcing on such sites but ignoring traditional candidate pools is simply limiting your strategy.

A more relevant concern not mentioned is using Facebook and MySpace profiles to make decisions about candidates. It seems that this is a widespread practice, though no rigorous studies can pinpoint its prevalence or how fast it’s growing. Nonetheless, this is often an undocumented process, something a recruiter does in the margins of a hiring initiative, though many candidates don’t maintain much of a social networking presence.

Judge for yourself by clicking over to Workforce Management here and be sure to check out the rather opinionated comments.

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Posted in Diversity/Fairness, Legal Issues, Screening, Social Networking | No Comments »

Welcome To Our New Website

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Rocket-Hire is excited to announce the launch of our revamped website!

Besides providing the usual stuff about who we are and what we do, our new site maintains our mission of providing useful information and expert commentary about the use of pre-employment assessment tools within the modern recruitment and hiring process.

Our new site offers several easy ways for readers to share our views and opinions:

Blog-
First and foremost is our new blog feature.  Our blog supports our core mission of providing expert, unbiased information about everything related to pre-employment assessment tools.  It will also help support our mission to bridge the gap between the science behind assessments and their practical application.  To these ends, we plan to use our blog as a forum to share our thoughts and opinions about news and trends that are shaping the future of technology-based hiring and pre-employment assessments.  We are excited about sharing our opinions on news and hot topics from our field, and we invite others who are interested in these things to join in the discussion.
Make sure to try the RSS feature, which will allow you to sign up to automatically receive our blog posts.

Twitter-
Rocket-Hire is now on Twitter, so be sure to sign up to follow us.  We will be tweeting news and information we want to share, including notification of new blog postings.  We are excited about keeping in touch with you!

Articles and research-
The new site will continue to provide us with a way to share our latest articles, research and whitepapers. Over the past 8 years, we have been writing articles for the Electronic Recruiting Exchange and other media outlets, cranking out lots of useful whitepapers, and publishing our own research.  Our new site provides an easy way for you to access all of our various writings.

We look forward to keeping in touch with you. Enjoy the new site!

Posted in Assessment Technology, Social Networking | No Comments »