Recruiter News Line

Continuum Consulting Services, LLC and Inspirus Consulting have teamed up to develop The Power of Inclusion, a new line of services to help organizations grow beyond the “holding pattern” of traditional diversity training and EEOC compliance fulfillment to optimizing the energy of a truly engaged workforce. Founding partners Al Sullivan of Inspirus and Wendy B. White of Continuum, along with third consulting partner Laura J. Nigro, launched their new service line on Friday, May 16 at “Beyond Face Value,” the third annual Changing Faces Diversity Conference.

With just one day’s notice, Sullivan and White stepped in to fill a planned workshop slot after the originally scheduled speaker suddenly cancelled. For this purpose they created “Seven Steps to Building a Sustainable Culture of Inclusion,” and co-presented it to a full room. Their session combined interactive exercises with informational content that covered executive level commitment (vs. support), assessment and diagnosis, inclusion councils, training, system changes, measurement and evaluation, and integration.

Later in the day, the Inspirus-Continuum team gave away prizes they had brought, including free consultations by them, and led a physical group game that energized participants for the remaining sessions. Approximately 90 human resource professionals from the North Carolina Piedmont attended this year’s Changing Faces Conference, a collaboration between Raleigh-Wake Human Resources Management Association, Wake County Human Services and Capital Area JobLink Career Center at Swineburne. Attendees praised the event’s overall content and presentation in their written comments, including “my experience today certainly surpassed my expectations.”

White, Sullivan and Nigro each infuse their partnership with a strikingly different set of individual life experience, professional skills and field practice. What brought them together was a joint desire to combine forces around engagement and inclusion needs, along with a deeply shared commitment to transforming cultures for real and lasting improvement. Their multi-modal and complementary approaches range from systematized, quantitative techniques like Six Sigma process improvement, to improvisational, qualitative techniques like experiential exercises, Open Space Technology, and Appreciative Inquiry. Their combined expertise also spans interracial/interfaith dialogue facilitation, inter-cultural conflict resolution, cross-cultural team- and trust-building, and one-on-one leadership coaching.

Source: PRLog.org

Companies and HR departments now have a new resource to help diversify their employment efforts. Disaboom (OTCBB: DSBO; www.disaboom.com), the largest online community designed for people with disabilities, as well as friends, family and caregivers, today announced the launch of its new employer section at Disaboomjobs.com. In addition to a searchable job database populated by leading organizations such as Prudential, T-Mobile, Deloitte & Touche and Walgreens, the site also focuses on fighting an unemployment epidemic and educating companies on the vast benefits of hiring employees with disabilities.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, people with disabilities make up the largest minority in America, consisting of more than 54 million people; however, more than 65% of this labor pool is unemployed.

“With the millions of people with disabilities unemployed, this population represents the single greatest hiring opportunity in our country today,” said Dr. Glen House, founder of Disaboom. “This hiring opportunity combined with the need among companies to meet their diversity objectives, make the Disaboomjobs.com employer section a highly valuable resource for HR professionals.”

In the new Disaboom employer section, employers can:
• Evaluate their company’s current recruiting and hiring practices and identify the risks;
• Determine if they are eligible for the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which according to The Government Accounting Office, has a surplus of more than $4.2 billion in tax credits unclaimed each year;
• Dispel the most common myths about employees with disabilities;
• Submit a company profile that specifically delineates the corporate hiring objectives and practices that is seen by nearly 200,000 visitors each month;
• Search a growing resume bank to identify qualified candidates.

“Unfortunately, stereotypes about people with disabilities are still prevalent in the workplace, making it extremely challenging to find employment,” continued Dr. House. “But companies that don’t embrace this community are missing out.” Studies by DuPont indicate that hiring a person with a disability often results in increased productivity, decreased turnover and reduced absenteeism. With disaboomjobs.com, HR professionals now have a place to sort out their practices and meet their company’s hiring objectives.”

To join leading organizations and list jobs in your organization, visit the Disaboom employer section at disaboomjobs.com and select “For Employers.”

About Disaboom
Disaboom, Inc. was founded to develop the first interactive online community dedicated to constantly improving the way people with disabilities or functional limitations live their lives. It will also serve as a comprehensive online resource not only for people living with such conditions, but also their immediate families and friends, caregivers, recreation and rehabilitation providers, and employers. There are more than 54 million American adults living with disabilities or functional limitations today in the United States alone. Founded and designed by doctors and fellow disaboomers to meet this community’s specific needs, disaboom.com brings together content and tools ranging from specialized health information to social networking to daily living resources, in a single interactive site.

Source: PRLog.org

Two new internet sites claim to revolutionize the online job board market — NotchUp and Applicant Tree. Their basic pitch is that they forgo the standard subscription fee recruiters and businesses typically pay to read through the resumes offered on major players Monster and Career Builder, and instead only charge for the specific applicant that interests the hiring company.

This is indicative of the pay per click ad model pioneered by Google many years ago. That company saved the sagging internet advertising market by solving the issue of gauging how effective ads are on the internet. Advertisers were wary to continue pumping ad dollars to a medium where hard numbers on their effectiveness were not available. Google began charging advertisers only for the number of times a user actually clicked on the ad, i.e. pay per click.

That’s the same concept being brought to job boards by NotchUp and Applicant Tree. These sites deliver only so much information about the job candidate, just enough for a recruiter or HR manager to make the preliminary decision of whether or not they want to interview that person , and then only pay for that one.

Each site goes about the process in their unique way, but the concept is very similar. Instead of paying thousands for a subscription to be able to mine the databases, you only pay a fraction of that amount for the exact person you need. Then, in turn, the actual applicant is paid a percentage of that fee to entice more members to join the club.

Will this new business model revolutionize the online job board market?

Probably , but just not yet. There’ s still too much of a stigma associated with earning money from the internet. The first thought on anyone’s mind is that if it sounds too good to be true, than it must be. And the idea of being paid for your job seeking efforts definitely sound too good to be true. For recruiters, this is a great way to save money. But how many applicants are we going to get to choose from if everyone’s scared to try it out?

For these ideas to really revolutionize the internet, some severe paradigm shifts in the mass consciousness will need to take place. People will have to offer the internet more trust than they currently are. It’s still too much of a novelty for people to take it that seriously.

However much I think the online job market is in need of a revolution, I don’t think we’ll get one until there’s a worldwide web revolution first. Then, and only then, will these new business models really take off.

If you’re looking to recruit the best and the brightest, it is important to start earlier than you think.

Joel Spolsky recently wrote a piece for Inc.com about his unique recruiting techniques. I found it interesting because he focuses his piece on college students. Not college graduates, mind you, but college students, particularly those looking for summer internships.

Mr. Spolsky recruits computer programmers for Fog Creek Software in New York City. Fog Creek’s internship program easily trumps any internship experience I ever had. He begins with a hand written letter to the top 300 IT students in the country, followed by an informal phone interview with those that are interested. After asking them a couple of mid-to-complicated programming questions, the ones that they are most interested in get an all expenses paid trip to Manhattan for an interview at their offices.

The chosen few are then put up in a dorm for the summer and paid a weekly stipend. Here’s the clutch: Fog Creek’s interns actually get to do programming! In fact, they sometimes get better assignments than the actual employees. Why, you ask, would a company put so much faith and power in the hands of lowly interns? Because they are being tested and although they may not know it, they are also being recruited. The entire summer is one long recruiting process with the interns never being the wiser.

Those interns that excel are offered jobs following their college graduation. And Spolsky can be confident that he is hiring the best and the brightest — before they even start looking.

Career Network (http://www.careernetwork.us.com) offers employers the opportunity to expand their job postings and increase the number of applicants for their open positions by reposting the openings on their network of employment sites at no cost.

Recruiting typically focuses its energies on jobs with higher salaries that nets higher commissions for the recruiters. With the U.S. economy souring, more Americans that fall in the middle to lower income brackets are seeking assistance in shoring up their employment prospects. However, with lower salaries come lower commissions and therefore less interest by recruiters in placing those candidates.

Career Network devised a strategy to bridge this disconnect by boosting recruitment in this sector and offer services to employers that not only costs them nothing, but effectively doubles their recruitment efforts.

Once a job opening is listed on either a job board or in a newspaper, Career Network will repost that position on its network of employment sites to actively reach hundreds of potential applicants who had not previously been introduced to the opportunity. Those interested in that job will fill out an application which will then be forwarded to the company to consider that applicant for employment. The revenue to support this model will be generated through advertising on the network of employment sites.

The company is confident that their methods will benefit a large portion of Americans actively seeking new jobs, as well as smaller businesses who lack the resources to mount a large campaign to find a new employee.

Source: PRLog