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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To put it frankly, the days of lifetime employment may be behind us. That means that absent a really incredible set of incentives - meaning the whole dream-job package: compensation, work culture, etc. - it’s likely that top talent will change jobs repeatedly during their career. Just a few years back, job-changing might not have been quite so common, but nowadays, it’s the rule of thumb.

However, that fact isn’t necessarily evidence that jobs are getting worse, nor does it prove that the upcoming generations of candidates are overly demanding or whiny. In fact, what it shows is that top employers are adapting their human resources models to fit the human needs of their top talent, and that puts talent in a great position. At the same time, it’s why Quiet Working Professionals are so desirable: they’ve got OK jobs now, and they’re talented and loyal but they can be enticed if given the right conditions. And that’s not a bad thing.

Of course, if you’re a QWP, that doesn’t mean you should haphazardly look for a way out of your job. We’ve recommended against it, and Penelope Trunk posted recently about it too. She addresses one of the big reasons for a job-change: The Bad Boss. However, she recommends that employees evaluate their own interpersonal skills before denouncing a boss who - granted - may leave a bit to be desired in terms of “managing skills.” She tells a personal story about a job in which

“I could have spent my time complaining. There was a lot to complain about. Instead I always approached [my boss] with empathy and knew when to put my two cents in and when to shut up. Aside from cutting a deal, he didn’t have a lot of management skills, and this gap left more room for me to shine.”

She learned not merely how to grin and bear it but how to excel by taking advantage of the “gaps” bad management created.

Of course she doesn’t work there any more, and that’s important. Maybe it was because she just couldn’t put up with it any more, or maybe it was because she pulled the trigger on her Plan B. Regardless, one way or another, she moved from being a QWP to an active candidate. Sometimes, that’s a talented employee’s best option.

In a post on his blog, Bryan Johanson says that that transformation is becoming more and more common as businesses and recruiters figure out ways to graciously attract top talent.

“If your current recruiting process doesn’t take these things into account, you’re likely to be losing some real top talent. Sleeping Giants [QWPs] won’t remain passive for long. Once awakened, you have to quickly change your process to accommodate their needs.”

Employees know these truths in growing numbers. There’s less and less remorse about a job change. It’s not seen as being disloyal or “jumping ship.” As more employers become savvy about what it is that top talent wants out of a job, QWPs are becoming more willing to activate Plan B or otherwise shift into active candidate mode.

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It’s too bad that The Box exists. “What box?” you ask. The one that organizations pat themselves on the back for thinking outside of. Now, that’s not to say that outside-the-box thinking is bad; quite the opposite. It’s just an unfortunate truism of business that The Box is where lots of businesses find a comfort zone for what they do, and then they “think outside” of it once every blue moon.

Sourcers, recruiters and HR departments often find a nice comfy spot in The Box and set up camp, and candidates regularly follow suit. As we touched on a couple days ago, candidates often generate resumes, maintain their networks and approach interviews in the old familiar ways. Maybe you’d respond, “Yeah, but I place candidates” or “Yeah, but I found a job.” Granted, but what about the ones you missed because you couldn’t get out of The Box?

Think, for instance, about the video resumes we mentioned in a previous post. Shocking? Maybe. A little ridiculous? Sure. Getting TONS of exposure for the candidate, his MySpace page, the blogs that post the video? You bet. It may seem like it lacks focus at this point, but that kind of novel approach coupled with an online network that can create fast, accurate matching has the potential to be the future of job discovery.

Similarly, some organizations are trying novel approaches to attract top talent. A couple recruiting videos that recently made the rounds through the blogosphere show that effort. One, by Ernst & Young is a creative attempt, if nothing else. The other, by online video start-up Vimeo is zany and engaging and has the potential to attract some high-quality creative talent.

Of course “outside-the-box” doesn’t necessarily mean “indulgent.” It doesn’t necesarily mean taking candidates “snow rafting” or offering free tickets to “baseball games and wine tastings” (from a Lucas Group Article). Then again…

However, it may mean establishing contact creatively, especially if you want to lure Quiet Working Professionals. That’s what videogame developers Red 5 did when they tried to recruit world-class designers by sending a recruitment package nested like Russian dolls with an iPod in the center. On the iPod was a message from Red 5 President and CEO Mark Kern about why the cadidate should come work at Red 5. They hired some of the top QWPs they approached, and their “resume flow is about 10 times what it was before the campaign,” according to Kern (from an article on WSJ.com.

Even among the niche job markets popping up out there, you can see a lot of innovation and creativity, and that has the potential to be a good thing. Still, none can offer what our network will be able to: the fine-tuned threshholding, privacy protection, plus accurate ranking and matching. With it, we’re offering candidates and HR professionals an outside-the-box solution. Here’s your ticket.

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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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Of course it’s true that we put on different faces for different situations. You’re a different person talking to your spouse than you would be in front of a police officer, for instance. You speak one way to a VP of Sales and another way to a third-party recruiter. However, in a world increasingly defined by the ubiquity (a word we’ve now gotten to use twice in just a few posts) of information on the internet, the distances between some of those identities are shrinking fast. Candidates are realizing that an employer can have fast access to various versions of their identity, and for some that could mean lost opportunities… or could it mean access to the coolest jobs?

Think about all the recent buzz on video resumes. Lots of people are talking about how video resumes can show a “real” you, about how they can go viral and grow your network exponentially, about how hip and fun and cool they are. A video resume (of sorts) by a guy named Matt Bennett has become pretty popular in the blogosphere because of its zany approach. Joel Cheesman admits here that it’s “clever” but wonders, “Is this stuff getting people jobs?”

On the other hand, Kristi Young argues here that video resumes can accurately target the right kind of audiences for candidates seeking a specific work culture:

“Sure it’s a little over the top, but if one hiring manger out there digs it then I guarantee you this guy just landed his dream job with his dream boss. Matt will certainly get the last laugh!”

However, in a comment on her post, Tom Schmidt argues that “video resume does not integrate into present hiring processes especially at the top of the candidate selection funnel.” In other words, don’t expect a video resume from the next C-level candidate you try to place.

Similarly, many candidates may have a professional blog or website in addition to more revealing personal ones. Ryan Healy of Employee Evolution, in a post on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist, points out that websites and social networks “are blurring the lines between personal and professional life” and “there is no reason these lines should not be blurred.” He goes on to say that

“If the world already knows what we do in our spare time and we are all able to be completely open about our interests, thoughts and ideas without fear of retribution or not being hired then we can bring our whole being to work everyday.”

John Sumser also argues that “helping people understand your biases and loyalties makes all of the difference in the world” and that “transparency” and “reliability of the information” are becoming the most critical business factors. He reminds us that, in our own Recruitosphere, we create alter egos for ourselves like The Recruiting Animal, Cheezhead, Mr. Moustache and The Chad. Can we really claim surprise then when we find out that our candidates have various personas as well? If they exhibit characteristics of a real person (meaning less-than-professional for some of their 24 daily hours), are we less likely to hire them?

Arguably not, especially when “89% of employers asked, said they would watch a video resume” (according to a Vault survey via Human Capital Considerations). While, according to the study, only 17% had actually watched video resumes, many more have scoured MySpace and/or the blogosphere for mentions of candidates. We’d like to know: are you finding information that slams the door on candidates, or are you rewarding outside-the-box creativity and honesty? Leave us a comment with your take on candidates’ multiple personas.

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[Daily post from itzbig] The Definitive Future of Human Resources. . . sort of

While all of this is, at its most basic, great advice, that fragmentation and globalization seems like it can open you up to a lot of unnecessary exposure. While lots of people just accept that exposure as part of the penalty for doing business in a global economy, here at itzbig we think it doesn’t have to be that way.

SHRM:: Poll: Most Orientation Programs Lack Real Impact

“While all of this is, at its most basic, great advice, that fragmentation and globalization seems like it can open you up to a lot of unnecessary exposure. While lots of people just accept that exposure as part of the penalty for doing business in a global economy, here at itzbig we think it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Slashdot: Shutting Down Annoying Recruiters?

“My company is under attack by the leeches and bottom-feeders of the IT recruiting world. They call into our company phone directory constantly — hundreds of calls per day — trolling for names, hawking their job candidates, and refusing to hang up or stop calling, even if we curse their mothers.”

About.com: HR Practices Do Impact Business Profitability

“You guessed it. The more certain factors exist in an organization, such as hiring people who truly fit the culture, and not necessarily the position, the more profitable the business.”

Brazen Careerist: New financial data highlights generational rifts

“The shift is in the definition of the American Dream. Our dream is about time, not money. No generation wants to live with financial instability. And we are no exception. But finances alone do not define someone’s American Dream. Especially when our dream is about how we spend our time.”

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Two major shifts are underway in the hiring world (and arguably in the larger “real world” as well). The world is becoming smaller, meaning it’s easier to conduct business over vast distances. Partially because of that shrinkage, the world is also becoming more fragmented. Opportunities spring up from a variety of places as opposed to from larger, more centralized locations, and taking advantage of those opportunities means being agile and mobile (figuratively or literally).

Joel Cheesman just posted a short-but-great interview with Matt Adams of NAS, in which this fragmentation comes up. Matt says that organizations have to devote a lot of attention to their HR branding, to the message they put out there about working for an organization. He points out that a company’s website is “the single greatest touchpoint that an applicant has with their organization,” and that to attract quality talent in a fragmenting market, the sites have to be increasingly interactive and experiential in order to really brand their culture.

He also says that the online employment space is “too competitive” and “too fluid” for anyone to focus their efforts on any one source of opportunities. He explains that in the same way that talent doesn’t look exclusively at newspaper job sections any more, they can’t (and aren’t) just looking at single, traditional job boards that haven’t really grown to meet their needs.

Similarly, Rusty Weston of My Global Career argues that “Social Networking” is the past and “Career Networking” is the future. Since the fancy interwebs lets you make intercontinental connections as easily as local ones, candidates and HR professionals should maintain a local, regional and global network.

While all of this is, at its most basic, great advice, that fragmentation and globalization seems like it can open you up to a lot of unnecessary exposure. While lots of people just accept that exposure as part of the penalty for doing business in a global economy, here at itzbig we think it doesn’t have to be that way.

We’ve tailored our system to offer the benefits of a more focussed, vertical search and the broad access of a more general job search. The matching system helps create fast, accurate connections while (and this part is very important) protecting the anonymity of both parties involved. Will it be the Definitive Future of Human Resources? Well, time will have the final word on that. Will it be a really big deal to anyone looking to match quality talent with business needs? Well, yeah. That’s why we chose our name.

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[Daily post from itzbig] Recruiters are going the way of the mammals, not the dinosaurs

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.

Secrets of the Job Hunt: How to Approach HR

“Approaching an HR manager out of the blue about a job you heard about can be a tricky thing. I recently surveyed some Human Resource folks about this very tactic. I think you’ll find their answers interesting and insightful.”

EXCELER8ion: There is such a thing as a free lunch when it’s on you

“Recently, a trend started called Lunch 2.0, where friends, connections and interlopers make themselves at home at another companies [sic] free cafeteria. You know, the gourmet ones that we’ve either happily noshed at as guests, drooled over, or perhaps are even lucky enough to call home (yes we covet your cafeteria). It’s old tech social media.”

My Global Career: So Long Daimler and Thanks For All the Gas

“Should we add globalization to the burgeoning list of possible career hazards? Consider this: Daimler-Chrysler management and investors may have overreached but as multinational stories go, it is the exception rather than the rule.”

The Sourcing Corner: Tackling Sourcers’ Challenges

“Sourcers face many obstacles that recruiters don’t have to deal with. For instance regardless of how strong your sourcing skills are in some circles you’re still considered jr. level or even worse entry level. So what’s the solution? Are sourcers fighting a losing battle? Not necessarily.”

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[Daily post from itzbig] Focussing in on Plan B

The Plan B search should be a targeted one. Candidates should be able to gather information and receive job opening notifications from companies they’re truly interested in. They shouldn’t have to waste their time looking through countless openings or getting hassled by businesses that they want nothing to do with.

The Adler Group: The Elements of Applicant Control

“Someone can always pay more. You’ll never have enough money in the budget to pay top dollar. Instead, you must sell on the idea that your job represents the best long-term career move and the one that can make the biggest near-term impact.”

CareerJourna:: Not Your Father’s Income: Why Wages Today Are Weaker

“American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers’ generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds.”

HR Daily Advisor: 3 Surveys Take a Novel View of HR

“Did you ever wonder whether other human resources pros are spending their days on the same issues that you do, and whether the same concerns are foremost in their minds? Answers to these questions come from a study of 1,400 HR professionals by the British magazine, Personnel Today.

ere.net: No Hire is Better Than a Bad Hire

“Relaxing hiring standards can make good business sense, provided it’s done the right way. The problem is that companies often lower hiring standards in a way that creates unreasonable and unnecessary risk to the organization.”

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[Daily post from itzbig] What Recruiters and HR can learn from Marketing

Odds are, whatever it is you do online has a lot in common with what bunches of other folks are doing too, so you’ve got to take steps that distinguish you from the herd. It seems like a no-brainer, but unfortunately one of the most important arms of the business world - human resources (including recruiters and sourcers) - doesn’t always seem to take branding to heart.

My Global Career: Talent War Spreads to China

“India, Brazil and Eastern Europe are among the destinations that would also impress a global-minded recruiter or hiring manager. But China has unique advantages for “westerners” to consider such as the world’s fastest growing economy, and an acute shortage of experienced managers…”

Guerrilla Job Hunting: Get Hired Faster — Become a Matchmaker

“What does this mean for you? If you introduce the professionals in your network to each other, you can leverage the resulting good will to find new job leads.”

8 hours & a lunch: results-oriented work and the pareto principle

“Covey goes on to discuss four disciplines to introduce to the workplace to change this, including making use of the pareto principle. you know the one. the principle that says 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results.”

systematicHR: Happiness vs. Engagement

“What is tricky is that if work does not provide this level of personal happiness, and work is becoming less important for a growing portion of the population, what does that mean for productivity, innovation, and professional growth? Or is this just the evolution of society that we get so far, and then people pursue more important goal through other means because they can?”

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