human resources

The Salary Tutor Answers Your Questions

Last month, Jim Hopkinson taught a Hired Guns Academy class about negotiating your salary effectively. He’ll be teaching for us again, but until then, you can still learn from his ample experience. Below, he answers questions from the Hired Community about dealing with counteroffers and other potential salary complications.


I have an exciting new job offer and am in a bit of a quandary. I want the new job very badly but wish that the base were a little higher. Even though I desperately want out of my current company, I was thinking about going back and asking for a counteroffer so that I can get a bump from my new company. Good idea?    Read More →

Bullet Points: Your Resume Has Six Seconds to Impress

NPR’s #PubJobs: A Case Study in Recruiting with Twitter

Writing for MediaShift, NPR’s director of talent acquisition, Lars Schmidt, lays out a successful Twitter strategy he used to publicize and fill openings at the company.

First, he promoted the use of the hashtag #PubJobs for any jobs in public media — wherever they were. By also getting American Public Media and local public-radio and -TV stations on board, Lars not only helped fill NPR’s own openings but also helped get “great talent in the system” in general.

Since the launch of #PubJobs last June, the hashtag has appeared in over 700 tweets by 130 unique contributors. Roughly 60% of them were retweets, which Lars believes points up the “virility” and “visibility” of the campaign. And as far as ways to use social media to get the right people to keep your company in mind, it definitely beats asking applicants for their Facebook passwords ….

Bullet Points: Where the Recruiters Are

  • For a recent study, the social-recruiting company Bullhorn Reach analyzed the way the 35,000 recruiters on its network use the “big three” of social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook). It’s probably no surprise that LinkedIn is the runaway favorite, used by 98% of the recruiters who have connected their Bullhorn account with any social-media account at all. Twitter and Facebook are used by only 42% and 33% of the recruiters, respectively. Whether or not this means that recruiters are hunting in the wrong place remains to be seen, but we bet that you’ll see more and more recruiters at least trying to prospect more on Facebook and Twitter in the future.
  • The Daily Herald of Everett, WA, considers a job interview on Skype a real downer: “Because of the awkward nature of the on-screen interaction and lack of flow in the conversation, Skype is a good tool for employers who want a cost-saving way to rule out candidates. However, the job candidate is almost always at a disadvantage.”
  • “There is only one thing you need to measure when it comes to being a perm or search recruiter… How many of your candidates are sitting opposite your clients.” [Greg Savage]
  • Ex-Goldman man Greg Smith may have made “muppets” famous, but the New York Times points out that lots of businesses have less-than-kind terms for their customers.

LinkedIn’s Recruiting Revenues May Soon Eclipse Monster’s

It’s been a banner year so far for LinkedIn, with its stock up an amazing 46% since January 1 — a big jump in its revenue accounts for much of this new sexiness to investors.

For the Forbes contributor Josh Bersin, though, the “real story” is the fact that LinkedIn is now the “fastest growing public provider of corporate recruiting solutions.” So if there’s anyone out there who still thinks that LinkedIn is just a more-boring Facebook for suits, it’s time to get with the program.    Read More →

Bullet Points: Oracle’s Play for Taleo

  • In a deal worth nearly $2 billion, Oracle intends to buy Taleo, which makes cloud-based “Talent Management” software used by HR departments in 5,000 companies worldwide. The purchase is seen as a move against SAP, which recently bought a Taleo competitor.
  • The bad first impressions that new employees get during onboarding may linger for a long, long time. [Ere.net]
  • Helicopter parents are keeping a close eye on their little darlings’ entry into the workplace. But how are companies supposed to deal with it? One consultant goes deep: “You don’t want to block the energy of the parent…. It’s like jujitsu. You just want to channel it in a certain direction.”
  • In what’s starting to feel a lot like the first dot-com bubble, there are simply not enough great programmers to satisfy Bay Area startups: “Top programmers are like a race car,” says one developer. “Once you get them you don’t want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can.” That’s caused headaches for the talent agency GitHire, which is a startup itself.

Product Management, User Experience, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability Testing

Project Management, Program Management, Production, Content Production

Animation, Art Direction, Creative Direction, Corporate Identity, Flash Design/Dev, Graphic Design, Web Design

Content Strategy, Editorial, Copywriting, Copy Editing, Research, Blog Outreach

Brand Management, Business Development, Sales, Product Marketing, Event/Conference Planning, Promotions, Marcomms, Corporate Comms, Direct Marketing, E-Marketing, Public Relations, Market Research

Account Management, Account/Brand Planning, Media Strategy, Communications Planning, Media Planning/Buying, Social Media, Search (SEM, SEO), Web Metrics & Analytics

Web Development, Front End Development

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