The past few years have seen the social web truly take off. Activity streams are replacing email and conversations are happening all the time, all across the internet. People are now more connected, more informed, more knowledgeable and more adaptable than ever before. What this means for the online recruiting world is that for every recruiter who has a job posting with a list of pre-qualifications; there are hundreds or thousands of people who would be a perfect fit, whether their resume says so or not.

Until the birth of Linkedin in 2003, the online recruiting and job board industry was dominated by a few key players; namely, Monster and Career Builder. Recruiters posted jobs, candidates applied for jobs, and sometimes a match was made. That’s it, there was no interaction, no getting to know each other, just a job posting and a resume.

Linkedin recognized that this model was not going to work much longer, so they introduced premium services that let recruiters search for, contact and learn more about candidates. Since then, the smartest organizations have slowly realized that a generic job posting will, at best, get them a generic employee. Today, if a company is only recruiting through the major job boards, they’re probably a company you don’t want to work for.

Today, the online recruiting world is officially going social, whether recruiters are ready or not. My company, Brazen Careerist, is providing recruiters the tools to see past a traditional resume to create real relationships with tomorrow’s leaders through conversations, and to get a glimpse at our members thoughts and ideas that can

16% growth in profits
87% reduction in staff turnover
20% improvement in performance

Right now the Australian online recruitment community have started some very health debate/discussion about the concept of using the content from social media as part of background checking. All started by Riges Younan from Peerlo*.

Most of the discussion from the agency perspective is focusing around the ethics of using what is in the public domain to access candidates. There is a sub-discussion on disclosure and relevance.

In my recent post on

Question: What would you say is the first key skill of a leader who hopes to balance over-assertive and under-assertive in order to  lead from between their two extremes?

That was posed by Dr. Ellen Weber some time ago in a  Brain-Based Business post. Ellen pointed to some research by Ames and Flynn who observed that when leaders walked somewhere between the lines of too much and two little assertiveness… they managed better … according to workers.

The same issue popped up again in a "talent" discussion with a client group this week, which

For two days every March, offices around the nation find themselves clutched in the grip of the annual fervor of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament.  Frankly, it’s easy to see why, as even people who carry a general malaise toward undergraduate roundball get inevitably sucked in to the bevy of Cinderella stories and emotionally charged moments that the tourney consistently brings.  Of course, since the opening (and most exciting) round of the tournament occur during business days, stories lamenting productivity loss and compromised job standards during that time is about as routine as a pre-game layup drill.  Now, these tales are either the gospel truth or downright hokum depending on where you source your media, but whether or not you believe that a severe decline in work occurs during the tourney or not merely scratches the surface of a potentially larger issue.  That is, if your company feels the need to ban the creation of the in-house office pool that has long been associated with March Madness, how can you implement the policy without looking like an utter killjoy?

The secret behind putting the kibosh on an in-house tournament lies in the realization that a healthy chunk of your employees are still going to be invested in the tournament in one way or another.  If you forbid the creation of a tourney pool, do not be naïve to the fact that some of your staff will be involved with a tournament or two in their own personal life.  And with the proliferation of the internet and social media, expect a hoop-centric buzz to emanate throughout the office anyway.  In fact, even if you have stringent anti-surfing computer technology loaded into your

Like sales.

Segue to the ERE Expo this week. So many quality speakers and sessions that it was enough to make my head pop like a hot corn kernel.

One theme that kept coming up time and again was "talent community". How to build, sustain, adapt, thrive, engage, nurture, hire from said talent community. Many companies are creating them for the greater recruitment and hiring effort good.

Susan Burns, chief talent strategist at Talent Synchronicity, presented on just that and it got me thinking how that relates to your prospect community.

Yeah, I’m hoping the title is click bait.  I’m hoping that I get a astronomical number of hits today just because of the title.

Everyone thinks there some secret to motivation and engagement.  There isn’t.  If you clicked on the link hoping to learn some super-double-secret motivation technique that will make your life easier and get you promoted to Sr. VP of Not-Really-Valuable-Department – fuggetaboutit…

I see so many charlatans out there selling their “secret sauce” for motivation.  At best their secrets are repackaged clichés and at worst they are unproven and damaging opinions.

Manifest Motivation

Motivation (for the 100th time now) isn’t something you give someone. It’s something that is allowed to manifest given the appropriate environment.

Want to know the secret?

Okay – but don’t share this with a single person.  Share it with EVERYBODY!

1.

And a good HR manager recognizes that employees are assets, not liabilities, but we all know that the general perception of HR is not one of sunshine, sweetness, and light.

Perhaps that's because most people's experience (as you're seeing here), either direct or vicarious, is that if/once HR gets involved with *any* situation concerning you, things are *not* going to be resolved in your favor.

Do you have any suggestions for educating HR professionals to avoid the behaviors which reinforce this perception, perhaps even going so far as to spur HR into thinking of "mere" employees as people instead of replaceable cogs?

Through thick and thin, these ERE kids know how to put on a recruiting show with streaming video even. Sweet. (Lou Adler in the video pic below.)

The charity poker game Monday night was a huge success -- raising over $7,000 for Haiti relief via the ERE Foundation.

Besides having fun playing Texas hold 'em for a social cause, my biggest takeaway was losing it all.

Yep, losing it all by going all in. That's what kept happening over and over again -- the minimum bets went higher and higher and the night got later and later and everybody kept going all in, busting some and making others rich.

And you'll never win unless you go all in.

And that's what's happening at the ERE Expo in San Diego. From the buzz about more hiring coming, recruiting folk

I got nothin'. 

I've been in labor at the keyboard since 5:00 this morning trying to push out a post on incentives and motivation. Not happening. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been trying. 

Anyone who has a blog knows that you can’t just pop out a post on demand. You need some sort of starting point. I’ve been looking for that kernel of an idea that I can warm up and watch explode into a puffy, delicious full-fledged post. 

At the high school baseball game I attended last evening I listened in on the other parent’s conversations to see if they had any insights I could steal. I almost (almost) watched the last episode of Undercover Boss in my DVR but came to my senses and just banged my head on the table till I was dizzy. I read everything in my google reader. I checked twitter a bunch of times. Read old posts, did yoga (nah), checked the liquor cabinet (luckily it was empty), basically did everything I could to find an idea. 

You see… it’s not an issue of

I recently heard an economist on the radio talking about gift-giving, which he called an “inefficient” practice. People constantly buy gifts that have “low utility” for recipients. Conclusion: The most efficient solution is to just give money.

My wife would see that as a total cop-out, proof that I don’t care enough to find her a meaningful gift. Spousal gift-giving clearly isn’t about efficiency.

But what about employee recognition? Surely you can’t go wrong giving employees money for a job well done, right? Actually, if your goal is to motivate your people, most employee recognition experts agree that the high-efficiency reward of cash is not the best way. You’ll get more mileage from nonmonetary rewards.

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So if you’re a manager and you want to motivate an employee, you face pretty much the same problem I have with my wife. If I get exactly the right gift, I’m golden. But if I get the wrong gift, I’m worse off than if I’d given nothing at all.

Managers can’t take the easy route and reward employees with one-size-fits-all rewards like tickets to sporting events. Sure, the tickets will delight employees who love sports. But they’ll lay an egg with those who don’t. Even worse, they send exactly the wrong message. The non-sports lover thinks, “My boss just doesn’t get

Yes, the Sandy Blunt case has reached a new peak of incomprehensibility. Here's the latest.

Blunt appealed his conviction to the State Supreme Court a year ago, and the case was argued five months ago. One would think that would be plenty of time for the judges to issue a ruling. After all, the Court issued seven opinions so far this year for cases argued in 2010 - two months after Blunt's hearing.

And while logical minds would think that speedy justice, a right of all citizens conferred in the US Constitution would apply in the frozen north, apparently that is not the case.

In fact, of the twelve opinions rendered by the North Dakota Supreme Court, not one was argued before Blunt's - all were argued a month or more after his, yet the Court has not seen fit to issue a ruling in Blunt's case.

Which leads to the next fascinating bit of NoDak current events.

Reports indicate the attorney who prosecuted Blunt is under investigation by the State Police for potential crimes including conspiracy. What makes this so interesting is that no other media outlet reported this until well after Steve Cates did in his

reallymoving.com has found that proximity to work is the top priority for house hunters, with 58% giving this as the key factor in choosing where they live.

Oddly - as we don't subscribe to gender stereotyping on Work Clinic - the survey also found that men are more likely than women to say an easy commute is the most important factor when house-hunting. Make of that what you will.

Rosemary Rogers of reallymoving.com says "The UK has the longest working hours in Europe, and being able to get to their workplace easily is increasingly becoming a priority for the nation's home movers."

Hmmm - I guess the authors of the survey haven't seen the packed trains heading in and out of London's stations recently ...

I ran across an interesting post from the LinkedIn blog, via Steve Barham from LinkedIn, entitled Where did all the people go from the collapsed financial institutions?. The post was looking at the flow of employees between five major financial services companies:

• Barclays
• Credit Suisse
• Citigroup
• Bank Of America
• JP Morgan Chase

This image shows the amazing amount of data that is