You’d think that with all the talk about a Talent War, about the shortage of incoming workers and Boomers suddenly becoming even more desirable, it’d be easy for candidates to find great jobs. Figure out what you can do; find an opening - BANG! Job.

But what if there are so many jobs (or at least advertisements for jobs) out there that candidates spend all their time wading through nonsensical offers to “Work From Home!” and “Be YoUr own BosS.” What if, in the War on Talent, job seekers aren’t even sure where to send their resumes? It’s no wonder so many talented candidates tell us they’ve had difficulty finding worthwhile opportunities.

A post today on The Hire Sense offers some interesting (or terrifying, if you’re a candidate) information about the sheer volume of online job ads. Citing a recent study by The Conference Board, the post claims that “the total online job ads were 4,374,400 in May,” up 9,000 from a month ago and a whopping 29% from the same time last year. California led the pack with 705,200 job ads, and our own Texas came in at around 368,400. The report itself (PDF) states that around 412,500 ads were for healthcare and over 1/3 were for Management and Business/Financial positions.

Not so long ago, tzbig’s Jim Hammock wrote here that the volume of resumes and contacts sourcers and recruiters receive often makes it difficult to do their best work. Those sourcers and recruiters are experienced HR professionals whose main job is to find and place talent. If their job is made difficult by volume, imagine how insurmountable that volume must seem to candidates who are essentially amateur job seekers.

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In the collection of tubes that comprise The Interwebs, there’s a lot of talk about SEO and keywords precision. Why is it then that generalities so often dominate the HR world - on both the employer and potential employee sides? Think, for instance, about some of the job postings you’re seen, whether your a recruiter, a candidate or part of an internal HR team. Think about some of the bullet-points you’ve seen on resumes or (gasp) that you’ve got on your own. Specificity doesn’t often seem to be the rule in job descriptions or personal histories.

A post over on The Hire Sense, laments one particular job post that includes under its “Required Qualifications”

“A bachelor’s degree in business or marketing and a minimum of 5 yrs of related experience; or, in lieu of the degree, a minimum of 9 yrs of related experience with ____________ and/or consulting is required.”

Blogger “The Velvet Hammer” argues that the post for a sales position “screams HR dept. instead of the sales dept,” and that the lack of precision is going to scare off most talented candidates. He goes on to says that the last bullet-point, which says only “Leadership skills,” is basically “a throw-away item.” There are any number of talented leaders out there with nothing in common and very different varieties of “leadership skills.”

On the talent side of things, candidates often feel so limited by the traditional “rules” of resumes that they sacrifice specificity for brevity. That’s a fancy way of saying, “They use bullet-points in place of meaningful content.” Unfortunately, that has great potential for landing their resume in the frequently-criticized Black Hole.

In a post over on My Global Career, the author contends that his resume has landed in that Black Hole because it “lacked the requisite keywords such as graduate degrees.” The post suggests that leaving a match up to that corporate career site (or HR’s sourcers) put too much emphasis on inaccurate (or missing) keywords.

Our network aims at bringing the precision back to the hiring world. As Joel Cheesman wrote yesterday the detailed screening process is simply geared for creating accurate matches. He points out that as

“users filter toward the desired job or candidate, a grade of up to 100 reveals the best fit. On the employer side, this grading system can even be utilized to keep out those who fail to reach a certain threshold.”

Then users - candidates and recruiters - get “content on-the-fly with each new search filter chosen.” It helps create the accuracy that we think is sometimes lacking in the employment world.

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“Ubiquitous” is one of those great words that doesn’t see a lot of action. As you probably know, it means “ever-present” or sort of “being everywhere all the time,” and its recent usage is often to describe the internet. In fact, companies like search engine behemoth Google bank on the internet’s ubiquity (see, it’s just fun to say) to generate revenue through volume.

That’s one of the reasons smart folks like Andrew Chen see the worth in comparing Google to volume retailers like Wal-Mart. In a post a while back, Chen did a thorough side-by-side of Wal-Mart and Google, looking closely at their massive scales and business development, and came up with the fact that Google is - in his words - superior to Wal-Mart for two reasons:

• Cost-per-click auction system
• Goods and services, not just goods

He does a better job explaining the two, so you should go read the post if you want to get a bigger picture.

What both of those factors have in common is volume, and that’s how they relate to online recruiting. In a mostly-successful effort to get the biggest market share (which they clearly have as the Chad points out), search engines like Google and some of the traditional job boards - which function in very similar ways - allow vast, but not always relevant, search results.

It’s why industry veterans like Joel Cheesman post about the mertis of vertical search, and it’s why we’ve warned about the poor results of high-volume recruiting.Successful recruiting, especially of Quiet Working Professionals, just isn’t going to happen with big-volume searches or job-postings. Getting the best candidates demands a focussed network through accurate matching, one-on-one connections and a preservation of privacy. Those are things giant search engines and traditional job boards just aren’t designed to offer.

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So there the dinosaurs were, thinking with their reptilian brains, “Feed. Reproduce. Life is perfect. Nothing will ever change.” Meanwhile, crafty little mammals were scurrying around under the feet of the thunder lizards. In their tiny (but well-developed) brains they thought, “Man, is it cooling off around here?” and/or “What’s that big fireball in the sky?” either of which lead to them thinking, “I better figure out a way to adapt, or I’m gonna be dead meat.”

What brings us to this little anecdote is a series of posts out there in the blogosphere about the effects improved recruiting software will have on sourcers and recruiters. Specifically, Shally Steckerl posted recently in response to another series of posts and comments about how, rather than “going the way of the dinosaurs,” recruiters are developing specializations and adapting to online recruiting. Steckerl suggests that:

If hiring managers one day had access to tools like Jason Goldberg envisions will be built then its possible that hiring managers may be able to meet a certain percentage of their hiring objectives via self service “candidate vending machines.” But ultimately tools can not replace all hiring.

First, how great would a “candidate vending machine” be? Hmm, a design executive with killer ActionScript skills and a great attitude? C-7. Secondly, as is so often the case, Steckerl is right on target.

It’s incredibly unlikely that technology automation will reach a point where every aspect of recruiting is done without human interaction. Most recruiters and sourcers are in the process of adapting to changes in technology that make them even more efficient. They’re learning how to make the most of tools like online job-boards and networking tools.

As those tools become even more efficient - sourcing ahead of demand, protecting anonymity on both sides, creating accurate matches based on detailed profiling - the best recruiters are going to learn how effective they can be by adopting (and adapting to) the right tools.

In the very near future when our network goes live we think a lot of recruiters and sourcers, like pre-historic mammals, are going to adapt and thrive as a species. Those who don’t change? Well, remember what happened to the dinosaurs.

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There are so many great metaphors for a “high-volume” approach to doing things: The Shotgun approach, throw it at the wall and see what sticks, casting a wide net. However, they all kind of suggest a shrugging acceptance of whatever results you happen to get, as if “Well, at least I got some response” is a good way to be successful.

Consider high-volume applications, for instance. We’ve written here before about how the efficiency of the interwebs creates job discovery headaches for recruiters/employers and candidates alike. The sheer speed and volume with which resumes can be sent, applications filled out and contacts - well - contacted means that quality talent sometimes got lost in the crowd. A recent post on Jason Warner’s excellent blog, Meritocracy, reminded us that the problem needs to be brought back under the scrutiny of candidates if they ever want to find a great job.

Warner, a head of staffing in one of Google’s many branches, laments the fact that the “old ways” of applying for jobs aren’t necessarily any better than the “new ways” since the new ways have created their own set of unique challenges. Instead of mailing a few, targeted resumes; making a handful of cold calls or dropping in on a specific contact (as they once might have), candidates now flood the digital inboxes of everyone and anyone out there who might have an opportunity for them. Warner says that:

it is now so easy to apply for a job that more people apply for many more jobs, which means that recruiting teams at companies across the world now have to review a significantly increased volume of unsuitable resumes, which creates monumental inefficiency in the overall system.

Without a method for accurately matching truly qualified candidates with opportunities, recruiters, HR groups and traditional job boards are letting lots of talent slip through the cracks. It’s not their fault, exactly; they’re just at the mercy of an incredible volume of applications.

Since candidates send out so many resumes and applications, they rarely have the time to tailor those documents to the specific needs of the business, do in-depth research or follow up as well as they should. Basically, they’re unable to construct what Harry Joiner calls a central selling theme, “one simple, relevant theme surrounding WHY a candidate is the best fit for the organization” (from Marketing Headhunter). Without that focus (which can’t happen if a candidate is just blasting resumes out there by the handful), there’s very little chance that any accurate matching between talent and need, or what we call quality career connections, will occur.

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[Daily post from itzbig] How to discover a better job (Now in two easy steps!)

The truth is that, for talented candidates, finding a better job - or even the best job, a dream job - is often simply a matter of starting off correctly. Step one: forget a lot of what you think you know about job discovery. Step two: make sure you know what you actually want. See? Two easy steps.

cheezhead : vertical search = better roi?

“Vertical search is beginning to hit a critical mass in terms of traffic numbers and awareness (although revenue numbers to support such businesses are still be in question). As much as it should be celebrated, it’s also cause for concern.”

ON THE JOB:The mystery of the daytime idle: Why aren’t you working?

“There are helpful statistics to shed light on the out-and-about. In 2005, 14 percent of San Franciscans 5 and older reported a disability — nearly 100,000 people. Over 40,000 people were self-employed. Almost 70,000 were in college or grad school. Stereotypes about the contemporary human condition aside, a great many people don’t inhabit cubicles.”

RecruiterMagazine: Referral Schemes

“Businesses throw away millions on recruitment by not encouraging their employees to refer people they know, according to new research by Capital Consulting. The research shows that only 18% of employees work in organisations which encourage them to recommend friends or acquaintances, despite 24% knowing someone they could refer straight away.”

JobMob: Yoda’s 5 Tips to Kill Job Search Stress

“This is a no-brainer. The longer a sore goes untreated, the more painful it will become. Think of being stressed as having a mental sore. If you follow these tips as early as possible in your job search, you may even avoid that mental sore completely but it’s never too late to start.”

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Why beat around the bush on social networks when you can safely discover career opportunities on a career network? What that means is that you should have high visibility (or at least some visibility) no matter how secure you feel in your current job. It could mean growing your network at work or outside of it. It could mean beginning a network if you haven’t yet. Whatever the case, if you’ve ever had the sense that some better job might be waiting out there, if you’ve ever thought, “Eh, maybe if the right offer came along…,” then you have to put yourself “out there” to some degree and let the world see what you’re capable of.

A post this week on The Recruiting Edge gives an in-depth description of what we at itzbig call a Quiet Working Professional and what trying to source those candidates is like. According to the post, the QWP’s first response to the phone-call is usually “How did you get my name?” That one question sums up why it’s so difficult to source a QWP. They have rarely done anything to increase the recruiting world’s knowledge of them. The post admonishes an “typical” QWP by saying to them,

“you get too busy to even think that there may be other ‘opportunities’ out there beyond your own four walls […] You forget to polish your resume as the days turn into months that turn into years […] You avoid public speaking engagements or writing an article or even making a suggestion […] You never think about where you want to be in five years or even in six months.”

Candidates should let management hear their ideas, and log their own successes, literally writing down and dating them. They should also maximize inter-office networks: strike up conversations with co-workers and make connections. As HR-esources points out, it begins as simply as encouraging co-qorkers and trying to communicate with them. “Everybody knows somebody,” a saying goes…

The low, internal visibility of these talented professionals is usually echoed outside of their office. Statistically, they rarely contribute to blogs, forums or online networks, which is where many sourcers and recruiters try make initial contact with talented candidates. Unfortunately, some candidates are hesitant to really make a big splash in online networks for fear of inter-office blowback. Our recent research at itzbig found that candidates were leery of the fact that traditional networks and job-boards can rarely offer any real level of privacy. The professionals we questioned worried about what they perceived as a lack of identity control in posting their resumes online. That’s why we developed our network to offer maximum exposure while preserving anonymity, right up to the point when only a one-on-one conversation can make things progress. We think it’s going to revolutionize online job discovery, and we think you’re going to agree.

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As we wrote about yesterday, there are several ways we wanted to improve the function of job-boards. Take the fabled Black Hole effect for instance: where a candidate submits all the right information but never gets any feedback. There’s a lot of talent out there falling into that black hole. Conversely, some job boards are so big that they overwhelm candidates with contacts – some worthwhile, some bogus. About this flood of information through technology, Howard Adamsky, President of HR Innovators says “the downside to this will be that a candidate can only get so many e-mails and phone calls before they become totally non-responsive” (from his post on ERE). Without major technological shifts, there’s just no way to guarantee accuracy and validity in the opportunities posted on traditional job boards.

That’s where itzbig’s network comes in. We’ve done the research and seen the missed connections between candidates and employment opportunities. We’ve designed it so that recruiters and employers share their needs, both current and ideal. The “current” needs get quickly and accurately matched with candidates, while the “ideal” needs put you in a position to source ahead of demand. In other words, when the end-all, be-all superstar for your ideal needs comes along, you get connected just to see if it is, in fact, too good to pass up.

And the talented candidates out there get the same quality exposure. They share what they’re looking for, and give us information about skills, experience and education, while we protect their anonymity. It will eliminate tons of compliance exposures, as candidates get accurately matched with needs, and begin a one-on-one relationship with employers who need someone with exactly their talent. There are definitely good and bad aspects to traditional job boards. We think we can make them more effective for discerning recruiters. Whether you’re looking for a candidate for a great opportunity or a talented worker ready to land the dream job, we think you owe it to yourself to come check us out.

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If you’re a candidate, the answer to the title question is “When it accurately places me in the right job opportunity.” If you’re a recruiter it’s “When it accurately places me in touch with the right talent.” Here at itzbig, what keeps us up at night is developing the best means to create those accurate connections and then get out of the way. We’ve done tons of research into what various job boards do right and what they do wrong and discovered some interesting things. But don’t take our word on it. Yet.

A recent article on the Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal reports some of what we’ve been saying for a while now. Recruiters and candidates alike have been increasingly happy with so-called niche job-boards because of the increased focus and accuracy. According to the post, corporate hiring managers report that they’re turning to “niche job sites more because the big boards produce too many unqualified applicants.”

That’s what we found in researching our new network too, and we wrote about it here a while ago. In one phase of the research, a whopping 82% of the recruiters who beta-tested our network said they wanted higher quality candidates than what traditional job boards were providing. 47% listed candidate quality as the thing they liked least about job boards. Traditionally, the sheer volume of users on job boards makes accurate quality screening difficult. That’s probably why from February 2006 to 2007, “Monster saw a 20% decline in traffic,” according the Journal article.

And there are other aspects we think we can improve on, too. In tomorrow’s continuation of our look at job boards, we’ll write all about them. Check back then!

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In recruiting these days, it seems that a lot of emphasis is placed on candidates’ resumes, as though a few bullet points of information forced onto a single page of bond paper could give an accurate sense of a candidate’s talent or worth. Sure, that’s the proclaimed goal of the interview process (to scope out talent’s fit with work culture), but how many high-quality candidates never even make it that far because of some concern on their one-page resume?

Top talent, especially Quiet Working Professionals, may not even have an accurate resume. One of our own executives here at itzbig, tells a story about being courted some years ago by a major organization. At the time, he had no resume and had to get a book on writing one. When he flew out to interview, he forgot to even bring his new resume along. The interviewer couldn’t have cared less because they were trying to recruit him. Lots of recruiters describe similar situations, where a candidate’s obvious talent outweighs (or can’t even be accurately represented on) their resume. Yet lots of old-school job-boards rely solely on submitted resumes to match candidates and job opportunities.

Obviously frustrated with the resume-drop-off method common to many traditional job boards, Moises Lopez on The Sourcing Corner voices his concerns about the inaccuracy of the process: “If half of the employees get their jobs through networking, why does America spend 80% of its recruiting budget on [traditional] job boards?” Candidates with adequate resumes but stellar potential are likely to get overlooked in that environment. Conversely, candidates with “good-looking” resumes (but who may not actually match an organization’s needs) are likely to get an interview and maybe even hired, a process that can very costly.

A recent post on The Hire Sense describes how one of their clients hired “a salesperson with a glowing resume who absolutely won [HR] over in the interview.” However, her inability to fit into workplace-culture led to her dismissal a few months later, at which point the costly hiring process began all over again. The post makes the argument that “pre-qualifying […] candidates based on their resume is a high-risk proposition” and that “the subjective decision [of hiring] occurs without enough data.” Because the interview process can be costly (in terms of time and money), the “hiring manager [often] reviews resumes with the intent of disqualifying candidates from consideration.” This leads to inaccurate matching and missed candidate opportunities.

A better system would be able to combine the initial screening of sourcing with the analysis of the interview process. It would use in-depth profiling to accurately match, score, and rank candidates against your job opportunities, without relying merely on their resumes or - worse - just displaying their resumes for anyone to browse through. That’s been our thinking throughout the development of our new network. It’s going to be a system for more accurately gauging your needs and matching qualified candidates (not merely their resumes) to those needs. It’ll even help you source ahead of demand. Itz going to revolutionize the hiring process.

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